I speak with Amy Porterfield about marketing and promoting courses. Amy has extensive experience with creating and promoting successful online courses. We discuss her full funnel from growing an email list all the way through to generating course subscriptions and supporting students. We discuss paid marketing, webinars, marketing automation, social media and a ton more. If you’re interested in creating your own course you can’t miss this episode.

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Last 5 questions:

What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
If you have an online course, you should be promoting your online course with live and evergreen webinars. I think that they work like gangbusters. They are not going away. Don’t let anyone tell you they are. A well-done webinar can make you money over and over again.

Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
I love the book, Rework. It’s a simple read but so many great strategies. I’m a tactical kind of girl. If you, too, are tactical girl or guy, Rework.

What software tool couldn’t you live without?
Asana. It’s my project management tool. I have an integrator on my team. An integrator is basically like a project manager but elevated. She lives in Asana. She owns it. She owns that software in terms of making sure it runs smoothly, but we have the saying in our business, “If it’s not in Asana, it’s definitely not happening.” Everyone puts their action items and projects in there.

What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
I already said it. It would have to be one that includes a mix of Facebook lives that lead into a webinar. The webinar, of course, leads into a really strong post webinar email marketing series with deadlines and urgencies and then of course, selling into an online course. I don’t have much more to share because literally, that’s how I run my business. That’s what we do. We are unique in the sense that we don’t try a lot of new things. We don’t chase bells and whistles. We find out what works and we stick to it over and over again. That’s basically my favorite marketing campaign. One that you’ve done that you know works and you actually do it again. I find so many marketers switching things up before they’ve even seen the magic of what’s possible with something that works but it could work like gangbusters if they tried it again. That’s essentially my favorite strategy.

Which other podcasts do you listen to?
I listen to Michael Hyatt’s podcast. It’s all about leadership. I think it’s fantastic. I listen to Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn. I listen to The Life Coach School with Brooke Castillo. I highly recommend that one. If you listen to a lot of marketing podcast, but you also need to make sure that your mental game is strong. The Life Coach School with Brooke Castillo is one of the best to get that mindset in check. I highly recommend that one.

Transcription:

Matt Byrom:
Hello and welcome to this episode of The Marketing Strategies podcast. Today, I’m joined by Amy Porterfield who, for the last nine and a half years, has been training and educating people about marketing though her namesake brand. Before this, Amy worked for a social media examiner, Tony Robbins, among many others. She’s also authored the Dummies, Guide to Facebook Marketing and has conducted more webinars than you could count. Amy is also the host of a weekly podcast called, Online Marketing Made Easy. Today, I’m excited to learn more about how Amy markets her own business and the tactics she’s found to be most successful. Let’s dive right in. How are you today, Amy?

Amy Porterfield:
I’m wonderful. Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.

Matt Byrom:
It’s an absolute pleasure to have you on. I know before this, we were talking about how we’ve been trying to schedule this in for a long time now.

Amy Porterfield:
Oh gosh.

Matt Byrom:
Finally, I’m so glad that we have managed to get this into our schedules.

Amy Porterfield:
Me too. It was almost embarrassing how hard it was for us to get together, but here we are.

Matt Byrom:
Here we are. Fantastic. To kick us off, please tell us a little bit more about your business, Amy Porterfield, what you do, and who you help.

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. I create online training courses for newbie entrepreneurs and those who have been at it for a while. I have a product suite where I specifically focus on growing an email list, creating an online course, and promoting that online course with a webinar, whether it’d be a live webinar or an automated webinar. I talk, all things online marketing, but those are the three areas I focus on most. The bulk of my revenue, I’d say, 90% of the revenue comes from selling my online courses. I don’t do one-on-one coaching. I don’t have a service-based business. My dream was always to create a business around online courses. It took me a few years to finally get there, but that’s what we do now.

Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. It sounds like you’ve built an ideal brand around online courses and educational content around marketing.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. For sure.

Matt Byrom:
How many people work with you in your business?

Amy Porterfield:
I have six full-time employees. We use contractors for some of the other things like programming and design and copywriting.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. That makes total sense. It’s surprising how much work goes into creating different content pieces even just a single blog post requires design, copywriting to a high level, reviewing, and all sorts …

Amy Porterfield:
Yes.

Matt Byrom:
… and putting all these content together is no mean feat.

Amy Porterfield:
No, so many moving parts. Sometimes, I think, this should be easier, but then when I break it all down, I think, well, we needed it this way, so here we are.

Matt Byrom:
We need people like you and in some parts, may I hope, to help people understand how marketing works in small niche areas so that people can improve as well. I hope we’ll do a little bit of that today.

Amy Porterfield:
Definitely.

Matt Byrom:
I guess, today, what I’d like to do, really, is touch on a few of the strategies that you use in your business and then dive into detail about what’s been most successful. I guess a good place to start, really, would be your website. I notice that when people come to your site, they have three prominent options. It’s what you’ve just mentioned. Some high value E-books and cheat sheets, really, around the three core topics; list building, courses, and webinars. I presume this is really a way for you to provide instant value and then also, on the other hand, get people into your email list. What’s your process from there once somebody downloads those pieces?

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. Front and center on my website, you will see these three options. Typically, when I teach my students how to do marketing, I’ll say, “Don’t give them three different options to sign up for something.” However, because I do have this product suite and because I’m attracting people from all different levels of growing their business, it makes sense for what I do. Let’s say, somebody comes to my website and they’re just getting started and they need to grow their email list, they’ll see a cheat sheet for list building where I have 20 plus examples of how to list build on your website. They download the cheat sheet by opting in and then from there, I’ll send them an email right away with, “Here’s what I promised you.” In that email, I send something called a What This Says About You email. I learned this from my copywriter, Ry Schwartz.

The What This Says About You email is that first email they receive after an opt-in. It basically tells them that, “I get you. I know where you’re coming from. I know why you downloaded this cheat sheet. I know what you’re struggling with and where you want to go.” I give specifics about how they’re feeling and thinking and what their next step is likely going to be. I just make that connection with them right away. I give them the download, of course, that they could download and start diving into. Then I use a PS, which is my micro conversion in terms of, you already got the PDF. You can download that, but your next real step is to get on a webinar with me all about list building. I invite them in the PS to come check out a free webinar I have about the same topic they just downloaded the worksheet for.

Then from there, if they sign up for the webinar, they are instantly put into my webinar funnel where I’ll get them on a webinar and then follow up the webinar with some post webinar emails, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit later. If they don’t sign up for that webinar right away, which the majority don’t, it’s just like the first way for me to say, “I’ve got something of great value for you. Check it out, but we know Marketing 101,” you likely have to get in front of them a few times with the same offer.

Matt Byrom:
A few touchpoints.

Amy Porterfield:
A few touchpoints. I will follow up with two more emails inviting them to the actual webinar with details about what they’re going to learn and what it means for them, maybe a story of a case study or possibly something around the story of list building in my own experiences. I’ll invite them a few more times. If they don’t sign up, then I send them into the general bucket where they’re going to just start receiving a weekly email from me where I link them to my weekly podcast. Now, they’re just going to get weekly value from me until, down the road, I’ll market to them again.

Matt Byrom:
You’re really just trying to keep in touch even if people aren’t engaging at that stage. They really just did want that cheat sheet. You’re engaging with them a long the way, building, building, building brand, building awareness until at some point, you might get them on the hook to actually join you on that webinar or do something else with you, really.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. For sure.

Matt Byrom:
I guess that’s what marketing automation is about. That’s what it’s all about, I guess.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes.

Matt Byrom:
I’d quite like to come back to the email. What this says about you is really interesting. I actually have downloaded your list building cheat sheets, which is very, very good. I recommend anybody who is on this podcast who is listening to actually go and have a look at that. It’s really, really cool.

Amy Porterfield:
Oh, thank you.

Matt Byrom:
Well, I was really interested by the email, actually. Literally as you say, it says, I know what you’ve downloaded this for. You want to build your email list. You’re excited by all the opportunities that your email list could do for you and you just want to know how to put that into action. It’s almost like you’re putting yourself on the same level as that person and saying, “Look, I know what the situation you’re in and I’m here to help.” It’s so much supportive in a way.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes, very. I want them to know that I’m on their side. I get how they feel and I’m here to help. That’s my brand. I’m the person that’s going to be patient with them and hold their hand through the process. I’m glad that you got that vibe from that email because that’s 100% the goal.

Matt Byrom:
The goal, really, there that you’ve mentioned throughout the middle of the conversation throughout the middle of the funnel, really, is to get people onto the webinar. That’s what you call a masterclass. Is that right?

Amy Porterfield:
Yes.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah.

Amy Porterfield:
My masterclass is, yeah, you’re right, the next step.

Matt Byrom:
Tell me if I’m wrong, but is that an on-demand webinar?

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. I’m so glad you asked. Recently, we changed things up. Webinars are my thing. It’s the number one way that we promote all of our courses. For a while, we were sending people to a registration page. They’re all automated, so that you could choose. The very next day, we had three different times; morning, afternoon, and night for the very next day. We recently upgraded our system. We use a tool called, Easy Webinar. We decided to try on-demand, exactly what you said. Now, we have an on-demand option where they could watch it within the next few minutes or they could choose a date and time that’s just like in the next 24 hours. The on-demand is doing really well. I’m pleasantly surprised.

Matt Byrom:
I guess that has the pros because it’s super convenient. When I click through, it start to watch the masterclass webinar within five minutes which is super convenient. I think, actually, I’m totally in that zone right now. I can do this in five minutes. I’ll go and grab a coffee or whatever and watch it. That is a total pro, but then, does it have the con of not having as much engagement or what do you see from that?

Amy Porterfield:
Another friend of mine in the industry said the exact same thing. We’re noticing that the on-demand is getting people to watch it right away, but they’re not getting through the whole thing. Because if you think about it, they’re busy. They probably shouldn’t be stopping what they’re doing and watching a webinar right in the moment. It’s not something I would teach my students to do in terms of staying productive, but it happens. They’ll start to watch it. They might watch the first 20, 30 minutes of it. Now, it’s not ideal that I don’t get them to the end. However, more people are watching it versus if they do a date and time and they say they’re going to get to it but they never really get to it.

Our sales have increased. We think it’s because once they start getting the post webinar emails where I’m talking about the product and giving them details, they recall a lot of the stuff they learned. They might not have gotten to the end of it, but they have a connection with what I taught. Whereas, if you choose a date and time and you don’t show up, you have zero connections. My emails aren’t as powerful. We’re just noticing even if they’re not watching the whole thing, they’re getting it in and they’re making a deeper connection with me through the post webinar emails. Our sales have increased.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. That’s really, really interesting, actually, that people don’t watch the full webinar.

Amy Porterfield:
Right. It’s so frustrating.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah, but it makes sense, actually. People visit in the moment. That’s interesting.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes.

Matt Byrom:
Very cool. Actually, you said, Easy Webinar. That’s one to check out for the listeners. An interesting tool that’s working for Amy here, Easy Webinar. Sounds cool. I’ve seen a few other people doing on-demand webinars. I think Neil Patel has an on-demand webinar as well. That’s quite interesting.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes.

Matt Byrom:
The next goal, almost like you’re building things up really. Somebody gets the cheat sheet, which is, I wouldn’t like to say small but it’s a smaller piece of content and then the webinar. Then the next bigger piece of content that comes through after the webinar is the course, I guess. Is that the next direction that you point people towards?

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. Once we have them get on the webinar or if they miss it, we use … It’s so important to us, just to back up a really quick second, that it’s not enough to promote a webinar and encourage people to get on but follow up with that webinar with what I’ve been talking about, the post webinar emails, so incredibly important. We see just as many sales come through with the post webinar emails, if not more, that we see with them watching the webinar. That whole process is really important. That we follow up the webinar with the series of four, five emails promoting what we sold in the webinar. Once they buy, yes, we get them into our course. From there, speaking of a marketing strategy, we do a pretty big focus on a new member onboarding sequence.

Matt Byrom:
Okay.

Amy Porterfield:
If you join any of my online courses, I’ve written three different new member onboarding sequence emails for each of the courses where, basically, we welcome you, we get you started, and then we encourage you for about 10 emails, the length of when we spread them out depends on what course, but there’s 10 emails in each of the nurture sequence for new members. There’s a lot of motivation and encouragement and inspiration because as you know, people get started with online courses, life gets busy, they get confused, whatever it might be, and they don’t keep coming back. That’s going to serve nobody, me or my students. Those new member onboarding sequence emails are incredibly important.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Because I guess that the prime customers are the big payers, really, aren’t they? You want to nurture those people, support them, look after them. In what way do you do that? What would be included in your onboarding emails?

Amy Porterfield:
The first email is just reminding them that they made the right decision. You’re signed up. You’re ready to go. Here’s how to get started. Basically, literally give them their marching orders; login, watch the introductory video, get a feel for the membership site, whatever it might be. Then there’s always something about, “Listen, you made the right decision. You’re right where you need to be” kind of thing. The next email is likely going to encourage them, “Hey, have you logged in yet? Have you watched that introductory video? Have you marked your calendar to make sure that you login every single week for a few hours each week?” That kind of thing. We also have another email where we give them a challenge. We tell them to do something.

Now, I have a private Facebook group for all of my students. In the webinar, new member emails, I might say, “Okay, you need to choose your game-on song. Every time you’re going to do a webinar before you go live, you need a song that’s going to get you in state and get you excited. What’s your game-on song? Go into the Facebook group and tell us what it is right now.”

Matt Byrom:
That’s cool.

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. We give them some action items to get engaged with us, meet us in the Facebook group, anything to make sure they know, “We’re here for you and we want to hear from you.” We do that throughout all these emails. We might point out a certain lesson because my programs are lifetime access and you could go through them at your own pace, the emails don’t pace where you should be in the program. They won’t say, “Okay, it’s week five, so you should be on week five,” because that stresses people out. I’m always saying, “No matter where you are in the program, you’re exactly where you need to be as long as you keep showing up.” I might tell a story. I might give an example of something that they’re going to learn that in one of the modules. We’re always tying it back to the course.

Matt Byrom:
That’s really cool. It’s nice just to get that engagement, I guess, for people just to contribute because what I found is, we’ve done a few courses and the communities and the groups that you actually join, the private groups, are actually a big benefit. They’re a big part of that. People in the same interest group, the same point in their learning or their career or their interests. You can actually connect with those people on the same level. It’s really cool.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. Fantastic. I just love the engagement. It means so much to someone going through an online course.

Matt Byrom:
What do you find as the conversion rate from somebody actually downloading the cheat sheets at the start of your process to somebody actually signing up for the course towards the end of your funnel?

Amy Porterfield:
I will tell you, from the cheat sheet into signing up to the webinar and signing up to my course, that one would be a lower conversion rate. We might see anywhere from 2% to sometimes as high as 6%. That conversion is a lot lower than the other way we do it, which is our whole other marketing strategy that we really bank on where we run our business the most, is through Facebook ads. Where we have a Facebook ad to a webinar registration page and then from there, getting them on the webinar. There, if it’s a warm audience, we can see anywhere up from … Actually, I take it back. If we are emailing our list inviting them to the webinar and then getting on the webinar and buying our course, we can see anywhere from 10 to 15% conversion.

If we’re running a Facebook ad to a cold audience, from there, we might see four, five, 6%. That one, because we’re doing that every single day and we’re being intentional and deliberate with getting in front of people, that’s where we make our money because having a freebie on a homepage will only do so much. That’s definitely a secondary strategy. It’s not anything we bank on. We really bank on the Facebook ad strategy.

Matt Byrom:
If I roughly got that right, I’ve made a few notes. For somebody who downloads the E-book from your website, it’s around 2% to, actually, signing up for the course. Social media Facebook ads would be around four to 6%. Then if you email your list, you’re looking at 10, 15% because obviously, that’s an engaged audience who are well aware of what you do. To me, email 10 to 15% engaged audience. Well, actually, to get people to buy from downloading a free piece of content, premium course, that’s a high conversion rate, I think. That’s an excellent achievement. That’s high as I would have ever expected.

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. We have perfected this. We work on it. It’s literally our main focus in our business. It’s got to be good because it is our money maker. We’ve worked on it and worked on it and worked on it for sure.

Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. I’m really glad that you’ve taken this to the next step, which is actually your Facebook, social media ads aside. Please tell us a bit more about that.

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. What we do is, we have an ads team. We hired Dominate Web Media to run our Facebook ads. We get on the phone with them every single Monday. We review what’s working, what’s not working. We look at all of our numbers. We keep a lot of reporting around this. They’re running ads for all three of my funnels, which is all three of my courses. We do different ads. We have different phases of that. Here’s what we do. Phase one would be ads to get people on the webinar. Of course, that’s where the bulk of our money is spent because we’re going after our cold audience now. We’ve been doing this for a while. We’ve exhausted a warm audience. We’re going after a cold audience. We put the bulk of our revenue there. Then after we get somebody on a webinar, we do run phases two, three, and four after a webinar.

The second phase is, “Hey, you just got off the webinar or your webinar just happened. They might have missed it, but did you hear all about what you get inside the course?” The ad is going to speak to the course. The next one is going to speak to the bonuses that you get. The final one is going to speak to times running out. Everyone is in their own deadline. Deadline Funnel is a tool. It’s not the tool we use for this, but it’s the tool I recommend to my students. We use Infusion Soft and we use another tool called, Plus This. Infusion Soft and Plus This work together so that everybody who enters my funnel is on their own deadline. If they don’t purchase my program by the date that I’ve designated for them, they click a link and all the bonuses have gone away. It will say, “So sorry, you missed out on all the bonuses.” That’s the way I could stay with an integrity of saying, “This, really, is a limited time offer for you.”

Everyone is in their own funnels. We run these different phases of ads to encourage people to buy before the deadline. That works really well. Now, to give you a little piece of how we track all of this, basically, we have an ROI rule. That is that we cannot spend more money on ads in one single week than the money we collect with the first payment plan. Here’s a breakdown of that. I sell programs that are $1,000, but I have people pay monthly for 12 months. They pay $97 a month. We make it easier for them with the payment plan. Let’s say, I got 10 sales this week. Everyone paid a payment plan, the majority people do. If I got 10 sales, I made $1,000 like money in hand. I wouldn’t spend more than $1,000 this week on Facebook ads. I would just want to cover that first payment with my ad and then everything after that is gravy.

Matt Byrom:
Well, yeah. Absolutely. You’ve got 9,000 coming, I guess or how long is the payment plan? Is it-

Amy Porterfield:
12 months.

Matt Byrom:
Oh, 12 months or more than that as well.

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Well, that’s good math. That’s what you’re looking for in a funnel. To break that down, you advertise to a cold audience, get them into a webinar, follow them up with a timely email campaign to actually instill a bit of, “Time is running out,” effectively as you call it. Then you charge them $97 a month or $1,000 upfront and then they’re in your course effectively.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. Exactly.

Matt Byrom:
What you’re saying there is, you’re getting people on at 10% of their course value.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. That’s where our focus is. Yeah.

Matt Byrom:
Which is fantastic. I guess, Facebook is a big area for you. Is Facebook becoming more competitive, more highly priced? Are you becoming more specialized in what you do so you can actually improve in certain areas? Is it getting more expensive or is it getting cheaper, the better you get?

Amy Porterfield:
I think it’s gotten more expensive, definitely over the years. I’ve been doing this for a while. We see ebbs and flows. That’s why we monitor these numbers so closely. We have our ads team. We actually created a report for them. That’s one thing. When you’re working with, let’s say, an ad agency, you don’t have to just use their reports. You don’t have to just use how they plan to communicate with you on their progress. You can be proactive and put together your own reports and say, “These are the numbers that I want to see.” Our ad agency is amazing in the sense that they’ll accommodate anything we need like that. We put together this report. We’ve noticed, they’ll say, “Okay, ads were more expensive this week and so here’s what we’re going to try to do next. We need to change that.”

We’ve seen our conversion rate. One week will be 3% and we’re like “What did the heck happen?” The next week, we can get it up to 6%. Sometimes, there’s no rhyme or reason for it. The exact same ad runs on week two and it doesn’t do as well as we want. We targeted the same people. Sometimes that happens, but other times, we’re constantly looking for new ways to add video or add new images or I just did a photo shoot to get more photos of me because I have my personal brand in there. I will tell you this. I’m glad you asked this question. Ads definitely have gotten expensive over the years. That’s my short answer. My longer answer is, running a business where everything is automated and on evergreen, you would think would be a lot easier than doing live launches. However, there’s a lot of maintenance that goes into evergreen.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah.

Amy Porterfield:
I never knew that until over the last few years. We are constantly monitoring this and fixing things so that the sales continue to come through because we have really big revenue goals. We want to make at least $23,000 a week with my courses program, another $23,000 a week with my webinars program, and then $13,000 with my list building program because it’s the cheaper program. Those are our revenue goals. Not money collected but our revenue goals for each week. At the end of the year, then we’re going to meet all of our goals because it’s a 12 pay. We’ve got a pretty aggressive goal. We’ve got pretty aggressive goals for each of those.

Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. Thanks very much for sharing such a detailed information with us as well. What’s the limit to scale there then? Let’s say, for example, you’re creating efforts, you’re getting people on a 10% of the cost, the cost of getting people on this 10% of the value. What’s the limit to scale? Because you would think that was just … You’ve hit the jackpot there. It’s just scale, scale, scale. Is that the case or I presume, things are not just as clear-cut as that 100% of the time?

Amy Porterfield:
I wish. I wish it was scale, scale, scale. No, we’ve definitely … We hit a wall where we just no matter how much money you’re going to throw to it, we’re not seeing better conversions or less cost per lead. We, pretty much, have found that place where if we spend just as much as we collect that week, that’s pretty much where our sweet spot is.

Matt Byrom:
Is that because you think the audience size is limited? Are you in-

Amy Porterfield:
I do. A few things. With me, these are three programs I’ve had out for a few years. I’m going to need to create something new and freshen things up. I update my programs, but I’m not new on the market. When webinars that convert and courses that convert, first came out on the market, they did better. Especially because I did live launches. I believe that live launches are more lucrative than evergreen, but the plus of evergreen is, you’re making money every single day. Like every single day, I make money in my business, which is not necessarily the thing that is happening for most people creating online courses and selling them online because they’re doing live launches. You get a big wind fall and then for a while, you’re no making hardly anything. When I did a live launch for courses that convert, it was brand new, first on the scene, $2.2 million launch in two weeks. It worked like gangbusters, but then from there, it’s been on the market for years. It’s not as popular anymore.

Matt Byrom:
That makes total sense. I guess you’re constantly now looking for different areas that you can create the next course or the next valuable piece of information to share with people.

Amy Porterfield:
Definitely. We’ve been thinking about that a lot lately.

Matt Byrom:
Just to bring us slightly to Facebook ads as well. I just have another interesting question, I think, would bring value to the users which is around ads. As you mentioned, you’re testing and experimenting all the time, different types of ads, text, video, images. You’ve had a photo shoot done. What are you really finding works most successfully to get people into your conversion point which is an online webinar about marketing in those three different areas?

Amy Porterfield:
What type of ads are working the best?

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. That’s the short way to say that.

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. I would have thought it was me, direct to camera on video, talking about the different programs and such. Those convert well, but we’ve also noticed that if we put together some videos, which is graphics, in words, and really good music, those convert really well. I think either that type of video, I don’t know what you call that. I want to call it an animated video, but that sounds weird. I’m not on screen or when I am direct to camera saying, “Hey, I’ve got a webinar, let me tell you what it’s about.” Or “Hey, I saw that you were on my webinar, you haven’t yet purchased. Time is running out. Let me give you some reasons why this is really important.” Me direct to camera or those animated type videos tend to convert the best for us.

Matt Byrom:
That was really interesting. I guess that two very different types of videos because you’re direct to camera video is almost like you previewing, introing the course was, I guess, the animated text, kinetic typography videos, are they more educational about, maybe, less building or about webinars?

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. They give some value there. I think that’s why those converts so well.

Matt Byrom:
Very interesting. Then on the other side of things, you’re targeting, what have you done and what have you found is this sweet spot for you in terms of targeting? Are you using very niche targeting and look alike audiences as well and building various different complex things out? Actually, I’ll just ask, how are you targeting? What are you finding most successful there?

Amy Porterfield:
Retargeting is really big for us. One of the strategies that works really well is, if I do Facebook lives on my Facebook page. I don’t do this enough and I really need to, but two things. One, when I am doing Facebook lives on my Facebook page consistently, the cost of our ads tend to go down. We’ve seen Facebook come out and say that, “We will be rewarded.” They don’t say it like this, but “We will be rewarded.” If we have engagement on our Facebook page and then running ads, and everyone is running ads from their page, Facebook likes to see that engagement. They’re going to reward us with cheaper ads. We definitely have seen that connection there, but I don’t do a lot of Facebook live every single week, only during promotions do I do so. This is when we’ve seen it when I’ve done a promotion and I’ve done a Facebook live, let’s say, for five weeks in a row, our ads tend to be cheaper.

Now, another thing with that is that when I do a Facebook live and two things, I have a call-to-action for the webinar and we retarget all those video views with an invite to the webinar if they didn’t sign up directly from the Facebook live, those tend to be our cheapest ads and our highest conversions. I need to do more Facebook lives.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. I think that’s the answer there, isn’t it?

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. I recently did a Facebook live with one of my students. She was a teacher for 23 years to seven year olds. She didn’t know anything about marketing, took my courses, and over time, with me and a few other experts she followed, she built a million dollar business. I got her on a Facebook live. I called it, The Million Dollar Club. I just talked to Ana and we were split screen. I said, “Tell me about your journey and what course did you use of mine and how did it help you?” It was, maybe, a 25-minute video. Then at the end, I said, “If you’re interested in taking the course that Ana took, I have a free webinar. You go check it out.”

We ran this. We did it as a Facebook live and then we boosted it. We ran it as an ad. Within a few days, I had already gotten five or six sales. Now, that’s $6,000 for me. Then we turned it into an ad where it’s become even more profitable, but something like that, I think, it’s easy to do and often overlook. If you’ve got someone that will give you a testimonial but you just get to have the conversation with them on a Facebook live and then boost it, I highly recommend it.

Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. It’s just like you’re creating a piece of content but then repurposing it in all its different variants, really. It makes total sense to do it that way. It’s actually interesting that you say almost Facebook rewarding you for using this and doing it that way, but I guess when you’ve got to an organic audience, a large number of followers who then watch your Facebook lives, you’re retargeting those people. It does make total sense. They would be some of your cheapest possessions as well. I’d also like to talk a little bit about your podcast as well. I know the podcast is a very big part of what you do. As I kick off here, please tell us a little bit more about your podcast for anybody who’s not listened.

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. I created it back in 2013. It’s called, The Online Marketing Made Easy podcast where I tried to be a little bit different than other marketing podcast is that, two things. One, I do get into this step by step in a lot of the episodes. First, do this then do that. I’m known for my handholding and walking people through the process. Some of my episodes are pretty heavy, but with that, I often create freebies for my podcast episodes. I might walk you through a process of how to pre-sell an online course. “Mostly, okay, there are seven steps to do so. Here’s how you do it. By the way, you might be on a subway or driving somewhere. Don’t worry about taking notes. I’ve created a step by step plan that you can download.” If they go to my show notes, they opt-in, and they can download my freebie.

Now, it’s great for list building. I’ve grown my list rapidly because I have a lot of freebies throughout my podcast. The beauty of a podcast episode is, it lives on beyond just the first week it goes live. People are opting to things I’ve created two years ago. What I will say though is, I use to do this with almost every episode. Then I realized, this is taking way too long because I like to do really good work. We put a lot of time in these freebies. It was just a bandwidth issue. Now, we do it every few episodes. We might create a freebie in there and give it away as an opt in, but I’ve been known for that. When I get interviewed or when I’m on stage, people ask me, “Tell me about your podcast list building strategy you use.” That’s something that a lot of people are aware of that I do.

Matt Byrom:
How do you find the connect or disconnect from people? Maybe like you say, listening to it on the subway or on the car and then they actually have to go somewhere different, perhaps on the website to actually download those pieces of content. I guess you’ve had a lot of success with it. Then maybe it doesn’t feel like there is a disconnect.

Amy Porterfield:
It doesn’t feel like a disconnect. Actually, for a long time, we were having people also use a text option. “Text me at this number and I’ll send it to you.” People weren’t using it though. We actually stopped using it. Interesting, huh?

Matt Byrom:
Yeah, that is interesting. You’d think that, maybe, that would be easier and closer, actually, to do that than go to the website.

Amy Porterfield:
I agree. I was very surprised.

Matt Byrom:
What I noticed about your podcast as well is, it seems that you go, apart from the podcast episodes which are great, you go really above and beyond with the content that you’re creating for each episode. I’m sure there’s more to it than this as well, but what I’ve noticed is that you have a write-up, almost like a blog post for each episode that also has the audio link in there and some links to other things that I mentioned in the post. That’s almost like a write-up. You also then have a separate page on a different page of your website with a full transcript, a PDF version of the transcript as well. I’m just wondering why you keep those things separate and why you do it that way.

Amy Porterfield:
A lot of it was trial and error because I recently did a podcast with Neil Patel about SEO. He was saying that you don’t really need really long show notes. It’s not going to help with SEO because people don’t treat podcast show notes like they do a typical blog post where they’ll read all the way through. Actually, once we heard that, we’ve recently changed it. This next batch of podcast episodes coming out, I have content manager on my team and I said, “Go ahead and do a condensed version of the show notes so that we’re not spending so much time writing it all out because we don’t actually think people are reading all of that.” We do put the transcript in a PDF that you could download it or on its own page. We were told that helps with the SEO as well, but I don’t think Neil agrees that it does, but another SEO expert told me it does. I thought, “We’re just going to keep this. I don’t know the right answer.”

Sometimes we just do stuff hoping it works. We’re not always exactly sure. SEO is not a strong suit of my business. Just the last few months, we have made a commitment to dial in our SEO. Here’s the reason why it’s never been a big deal for me. Being in business, almost 10 years and never having an SEO strategy is because I’ve relied heavily on paid advertising. Paid advertising has worked for me. You don’t need SEO when you do paid advertising, but Neil Patel pointed out, why not have the best of both worlds, why not spend money on ads to get the traffic but then have your SEO drive traffic to get sales and reinvest that money in more paid traffic. I just thought, “That makes perfect sense.” Now, we’re going to go for a play on both.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. That’s exactly the way that we do it in our business. We’re always trying to maximize our search results. It’s a constant thing. It takes time. It’s also something that you have to work over the long term, but while you’re doing that, you’re getting some gratification, in a way, from the paid search as well. Search Paid and Organic makes up a big part of our business and that’s how we do it. The instant along with the long term as well.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. I totally agree. I think you’ve got it right, for sure.

Matt Byrom:
What strategies do you use to promote your podcast?

Amy Porterfield:
For our podcast, we do a few things. One, we use Facebook chatbots. We let people know that we have a brand new podcast that just came out. We ask them if they want to listen to it. If they say yes, we send them a link. We do run paid advertising for each of the episodes. I also have a private Facebook group for just my podcast listeners. It’s a free community of podcast listeners. What I started to do over the last few months is that, I will make a two-minute video talking about my latest podcast. I’m direct to camera. I typically will tell a quick story or tell why I created this podcast or what’s in it for them. We post the video the day it goes live with a link to the show notes. We re just starting to track and we’re noticing that those videos are definitely converting into downloads. I like the idea of mixing up video with something that you’re promoting that as audio. Mixing up the media, I think, is always a really cool way to capture people’s attention in different ways.

We do a little bit of paid advertising. Not a lot. We do the videos in the private Facebook group and then, of course, on Instagram stories. Every time a new episode comes out, we have a vignette of different stories pieced together encouraging people. We use something called, Wavve.co and it allows us to turn a snippet in my audio from my podcast into a social media post. We use that tool to do so.

Matt Byrom:
That sounds very cool. That’s certainly something I’m going to check out. I’ll also link that along with a few of the things that Amy has mentioned into the show notes that paid for this podcast episode. Check that out at mattbyrom.com as well. I’m quite interested by a couple of things you mentioned there as well, which is video, obviously is massive. All the main social networks who are really pushing videos. It’s quite cool like you say to mix up the media types. As you say, groups, this is something I’ve also found a lot of success with lately as not really the big groups that you go and join on, let’s say, LinkedIn or other groups. They’re useful for connecting with people, but small groups around certain interest type who you could just say, “I’ve got a new piece of content ready. Do you want to go and check it out or could you share this with your fans, followers or connections as well?” That sort of really gets the traction go and gets the ball rolling on social media for me and helps out to me, really, and get our social media post to a reasonable level on likes and comments and things like that as well.

Amy Porterfield:
Yeah. I don’t do a lot of that. I really should take advantage of it. That, I think, has been one of my downfalls. I rely so heavily on paid advertising and it works for me. The ROI is good that it almost allowed me to ignore some of the keeper or free organic ways of marketing that I could do more of. That’s a great, great idea.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. You’ve got a very good social media followings as well. You’ve got these groups as well. No brainer is just what leverage those and just get people to share that with newsfeed or comment. Let’s say, on LinkedIn, for example, when you comment on somebody else’s post, that puts that into your newsfeed for certain viewers of your newsfeed as well. You’re getting a bigger reach by getting people to comment and like as well. Really, the more people that do that, it really amplifies the reach that you get.

Amy Porterfield:
For sure. Definitely. I’m going to try it.

Matt Byrom:
See if it’s cool. What I’d like to do is, we’re unfortunately coming closer to the end of our recording session here. What I’d really like to do is take this back to a really high level and say, you’ve been running your courses and your business for nearly 10 years, what have been the most successful things that you’ve done in terms of marketing strategies that have just far exceeded your expectations in terms of the revenue that you’ve done or the number of new users you’ve got onboard? What have been like the one, two, three things that you’ve done over the 10 years that, really, have just shot away with your expectations?

Amy Porterfield:
I’m going to give you a strategy that is, one, just a concept and then explain the strategy in detail with all the stuff that people love to hear about. What I mean by that is, what we did early on that worked for us is, we created one online training program. We stuck with just creating one for at least 18 months, if not, longer. Meaning, I live launched my first really successful program over and over and over again. It was called the Facebook Marketing Profit Lab. The first time we launched it, we made about $300,000. The last time we launched it, almost $1 million. It grew over 18 to 24 months. I just focused on that one thing and made it better and better and better. I think it’s so easy for online marketers to do something once and then they’re excited about something else and they want to jump to this or jump to that.

We really stuck with one thing and made it better. We got better in our marketing. We made the course better. By the end, it was called just The Profit Lab. We had dropped the Facebook Marketing part of the title. We made it more specific to how to make money online. We attracted an audience that was just creating online courses. We specified our niche by the end. We dropped the Facebook Marketing and just called it the Profit Lab and appealed to a lot more people that we’re creating online courses. We got better and we knew to do that because we listened to our audience. We have the time and the space to do so because we weren’t adding a bunch of new projects. That worked well for us. How we marketed it is how I market everything. We do live launches, typically from 10 to 12 days. During those live launches, we do a series of live webinars. It’s the same webinar, but we do it over and over again. Sometimes up to five, six times over, let’s say, a 10-day period.

Each time I do the webinar during the live launch, I get better and better. I get my jitters out and I settle in. By the end, I’m converting that a much higher rate. From there, we really dial in our email marketing. Every live launch we do, it’s a series of live webinars followed by some pretty aggressive email marketing. Aggressive sounds like such a terrible word sometimes, but what I mean by that is, we email more than probably feels totally comfortable to me, if during launch you’re not feeling a little uncomfortable by the number of emails you’re sending, you’re not sending enough. You got to get a little bit uncomfortable. By the end of this, before we retired this program, on the final day of the launch, we were sending three emails. I had started by just sending one. By the end of the launch, we sent three. We saw our revenue triple throughout this 18 months. We saw the revenue triple on the final day by adding extra emails.

We just became better marketers because we kept marketing the same thing. It was comparing apples to apples versus apples to oranges when you’re not really sure if what you’re doing is working. We had it very clear, “Yes, this is working or no, this is not working.” That’s basically what we did early on in building the business.

Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting. It’s almost like people listening might see that you’ve got three courses and be like “I’ve gotten quite a bunch of different things. Stick them on the website and then promote all these different things,” but this is the best advice, really, isn’t it? It’s focused on one thing and become better and better and better and better at it. Then perhaps, then branch out to other things once you’ve actually mastered that one area.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. Exactly. That’s exactly my advice.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Amazing. That’s perfect. Okay. I guess looking into the future in that case, what are the strategies that you’re going to be focusing on for the rest of 2018 and 2019?

Amy Porterfield:
I am starting to explore what else do I want to do. I’ve created online courses from the get-go once my business started to really come together. I’ve been doing that for a long time. I think I’m ready for something new, but I’m not sure exactly what that is. My process, right now, is to do a lot of research. I’m looking at what other people are doing, what feels good to me. I believe in the sweet spot. For me, and I teach this to my students, the sweet spot is where you want to live in your online business. It’s where you absolutely love creating the content you’re creating and you love the audience you’re working with. That audience is willing and wanting to pay you over and over again. Once you find that sweet spot, you’re golden.

I’m looking for a new sweet spot where I get to do something different, create something whether it’d be a membership site or a mastermind or a small group coaching or live event or whatever it might be, I want to get excited about something new but make sure my audience wants it and will pay for it. I’m in that research phase right now.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah, research phase. You’re actually contacting all the different people who have bought from you in the past and the groups that you’ve gotten, your audiences and then you’re almost doing consumer research to find out what is the common thread between those people, what are their challenges, and what would they want to buy from your next almost.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. Exactly. In addition to that, I’m contacting my peers. Maybe I have a friend who has a mastermind. Okay. His name is James. I’ll say, “James, what do you think is your mastermind? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it?” Or a friend that has a membership site, “What’s your favorite thing? What do you hate about it?” I’m going at it from both angles to make sure I enjoy creating what I’m going to create. I find what my students want as well. That’s how I find that sweet spot.

Matt Byrom:
Excellent. It’s luxury to be in that position where you’ve got things going far in at the moment but you’ve got time almost to find that next thing that is going to be big for you.

Amy Porterfield:
So true. I’m so glad you said that. It is a luxury. I will tell you, six, seven years ago, I didn’t get to do it this way. I just had to figure out in trial and error and figure out what would work and pray sometimes that this would stick. Then as you get going and you’ve been at it for a while, it becomes a little bit easier as you create when you build your brand and you build your name. Just know, it does come together. It just takes some time.

Matt Byrom:
In a way, you look back and that’s the fun bit, really, as well, isn’t it?

Amy Porterfield:
Right.

Matt Byrom:
Because I’ve had my business and coming up to 10 years as well and the early days are the fun days as well. These days are good but the earlier days, that’s when things went really scrappy and you are just seeing what worked and trying lots of different things. It’s quite interesting.

Amy Porterfield:
Very, very true.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. You also said earlier today that SEO was also going to be a focus for you moving forward as well. That would be an interesting change you’d have as well.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. I’m excited to start getting into that more and more. My content manager on my team, that’s her initiative right now. She’s made a goal to really dial that all in. She reports back and lets me know how it’s going. I’m excited about that one.

Matt Byrom:
Fantastic. I’m going to wrap this up. I’d love to take this to our last five questions, which is quick five questions I ask each guest who comes on this podcast. (1) What’s your best piece of marketing advice?

Amy Porterfield:
My best piece marketing advice. I am bias, but I would say, if you have an online course, you should be promoting your online course with live and evergreen webinars. I think that they work like gangbusters. They are not going away. Don’t let anyone tell you they are. A well-done webinar can make you money over and over again.

Matt Byrom:
Excellent. That’s great advice. Thanks very much. It’s actually quite different advice that we get from a lot of people. That’s really, really interesting.

Amy Porterfield:
Wait, I got to ask you really, really fast, what’s the typical advice you get?

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Typical advice is like don’t follow the crowd, don’t do what other people are doing. A lot of people say this, don’t do what other are doing. Do things your way. Be unique to yourself. It’s actually just-

Amy Porterfield:
That’s good advice too.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. I’ll ask-

Amy Porterfield:
I went a little bit more specific.

Matt Byrom:
It’s cool though. This is something that you can actually action. What you said there is, this type of webinar is not going away. You should be doing it. Anybody who is listening now should actually take that onboard and give that a go.

Amy Porterfield:
I hope so.

Matt Byrom:
I’m certainly going to give it a go for us. (2) Can you recommend a book to our listeners?

Amy Porterfield:
I love the book, Rework. It’s a simple read but so many great strategies. I’m a tactical kind of girl. If you, too, are tactical girl or guy, Rework.

Matt Byrom:
That’s by the guys from 26 Signals?

Amy Porterfield:
Yes.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah.

Amy Porterfield:
Yes. I don’t remember the number but something Signals.

Matt Byrom:
Yes. Very cool. I’ve got that book and I’d highly recommend it as well. I’ll also link to it in the show notes as well so every body can just grab that from the top of the page as well.

Amy Porterfield:
Perfect.

Matt Byrom:
What software tool could you not live without?

Amy Porterfield:
Asana. It’s my project management tool. I have an integrator on my team. An integrator is basically like a project manager but elevated. She lives in Asana. She owns it. She owns that software in terms of making sure it runs smoothly, but we have the saying in our business, “If it’s not in Asana, it’s definitely not happening.” Everyone puts their action items and projects in there.

Matt Byrom:
That’s cool. It’s really good project management system as well. We don’t use it ourselves, but I know lots of people who do. I’ll also link that in the show notes as well. Go and check that out. (4) What’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?

Amy Porterfield:
I already said it. It would have to be one that includes a mix of Facebook lives that lead into a webinar. The webinar, of course, leads into a really strong post webinar email marketing series with deadlines and urgencies and then of course, selling into an online course. I don’t have much more to share because literally, that’s how I run my business. That’s what we do. We are unique in the sense that we don’t try a lot of new things. We don’t chase bells and whistles. We find out what works and we stick to it over and over again. That’s basically my favorite marketing campaign. One that you’ve done that you know works and you actually do it again. I find so many marketers switching things up before they’ve even seen the magic of what’s possible with something that works but it could work like gangbusters if they tried it again. That’s essentially my favorite strategy.

Matt Byrom:
Again, great advice. Thanks very much. Finally, what other podcast do you listen to?

Amy Porterfield:
I listen to Michael Hyatt’s podcast. It’s all about leadership. I think it’s fantastic. I listen to Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn. I listen to The Life Coach School with Brooke Castillo. I highly recommend that one. If you listen to a lot of marketing podcast, but you also need to make sure that your mental game is strong. The Life Coach School with Brooke Castillo is one of the best to get that mindset in check. I highly recommend that one.

Matt Byrom:
Thanks very much. I’m going to link to all those as well. There’s plenty of links for everybody who has been listening today on the show notes page at mattbyrom.com. Well, Amy, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you today. It really has. I felt like we could’ve doubled the length of this episode. I had lots more questions to ask that we didn’t get to, but I really enjoyed speaking to you today. I hope everybody has got a lot of takeaways from this episode. Thank you very much.

Amy Porterfield:
Well, thank you so much for having me. You are a great interviewer. It was really fun to dive into all the specifics. Thanks again.