Courses That Are Making 7 Digits with Amy Porterfield

i have this student her name is d and she lives in la single mom three kids really small house not enough rooms for everybody like she is definitely doing it her herself she was working two jobs and she was baking and people would come to her house they'd pick up a birthday cake or a celebration cake or whatever and that's how one way she was making money long story short cut to creating a digital course and she became really good at caramel candy apple so how to create caramel candy apples and the thing is the caramel with store bought it wasn't like her special recipe just people didn't know what store to go to or what to buy and so she started to create these and sell a digital course now a lot of my students many of them have made seven figures in beyond but i wanna talk about her because she's a woman who made never made over a hundred thousand dollars a year and now in one digital course launch she made two hundred and sixty thousand dollars selling how to create caramel candy apples and she literally was just doing live videos in a private facebook group and i always tell that story because a lot of people listening have never created anything in their life online and they would never even they're like my idea can't be good enough for it's not original enough or whatever and then i think a d single mom living in la making two hundred and sixty thousand dollars on the first time she launched anything now she's making way more money than that but that's the kind of stuff that i live for because it has to start someone so amy what's going on so amy porter you you're part of the hubspot podcast network you're a new ish edition right once you join right yeah just about two months and so what would you say do i mean you do a i've read your blog for years and years and years but we had john du on the other day and i was like i actually don't know how to describe him and he's was like is he do i just call him a podcast is he he he he's a blogger i i'm not actually sure what how i would like because you kinda do a bunch of stuff how would you decide sound like my mom and dad who have no clue what i do thirteen years in so i totally get it i always say that i am an internet marketing expert and i help entrepreneurs still build businesses online and my expertise is to take your knowledge and know how and turn that into a profitable digital course so digital courses are my area of expertise online okay amazing and what kind of digital courses do you have your own course about courses i do which is so meta i know so basically here's the thing thirteen years ago i worked in corporate i worked for tony robbins and i was the director of content development and got to travel the world and work on content that tony did on stage at like unleash the power within and date with destiny and all those cool events and i was in a meeting and i was called so humbling i was called into this meeting to take notes and i walk into this meeting in this big san diego corporate office and i walk in and it's a bunch of internet marketers now in my world these are like the grandfather of internet marketers although that sounds very rude to to call them grandfather but they're like the mac dad like so with like frank ke brendan bro evan pagan jeff walker like big name internet marketers that are still doing really big things but they were the leaders in the industry i had no idea who these guys were and here i am at a side table taking notes tony's going around asking them about their businesses and what do they do and how are they making money online and all i heard was freedom like these guys were running their own businesses creating digital courses about tons of different topics and i wanted a piece of that so that was like my first entry into this world i knew nothing about and about six months later or so i had left my corporate job and started creating my own digital courses so yeah i've got digital courses teaching people how to grow email list how to create digital courses but ultimately my my my mission is to help people leave their nine to five jobs start their own online businesses and i believe digital courses is a way to do that so that's their vehicle sean you have something to say because i i gotta so i was just say forget courses let's talk about tony robbins i was gonna see that exactly thing i was gonna i was gonna say was gonna ask you about a couple of the people you mentioned including tony and i was like how much is his empire b do you think it's does this guy just knock it out the park or what i mean it's seriously what i always say about tony is how if have you guys ever been to one of his events before have you ever seen in on stage so i've been to two actually i've been to yeah i've been to two unleash the power within okay cool and i'm i'm a cool drinker i love tony robbins absolutely yeah so i'm i'm a fan but i'm also super curious that i don't know the guy or know much about them so i'm still a band after all these years and how he is on stage like that huge person personality all the energy super intense like how he is on stage is exactly how he is behind stage as well i often joke that i might have lost a few years off my life because that was the most intense job i ever had but i wouldn't change it for the world because i learn on the master give me an intensity story tony rob is intense how what so the thing is when before twenty build the beans wait what you gotta spill the beans you got it well the story here's why it's intense before he goes on stage he literally prep for unleash the power within like it's the first time he ever stepped on stage i've never seen anyone prep for anything and be prepared more in my entire life and so we have to write these like stage signs of everything that like he's gonna talk about in the stories he's gonna touch on and they're all handwritten i don't know why we would hand right these things every time but they're handwritten and he goes over all of them and then he gets on this rebound and he's jumping on the rebound behind stage getting all the energy in his body the what's a like three bundles like tram tram like yeah yeah and it kinda gets the energy going in your body and he's reading your stage sign and making sure he's got everything going and then he just throws the stage sign and he runs on stage and he does his thing but the intense part is when he gets off he looks at ever in his proximity and he's like alright let's download he downloads every single time he comes off stage what worked what didn't what we can make better what he liked what he didn't like he wants feedback for everyone it is like you are on the entire team i still i'm nervous talking about it yeah it sound like so he's been doing this for like forty years that's crazy to me because i went to the two things he does the same exact thing right he he does pretty much the same script so i i would assume he's like you know knows it by the back it was you know like the like the back of his hand or whatever by now so it's not it's probably not the material that he's like trying to remember it's like he's just getting himself into that state what about zach what about besides the performance because i performing is definitely like a high intensity thing what about just like work like the office or we or are you not around for that part meaning tony in the office yeah just like on a normal day beyond performance so on a normal day non performance tony's not in the office he was when i was there he was at his house he did all the stuff from his own house but he's always on so i think where one thing i took what i learned from tony and i brought into my own business is that one always be prepared over prepared care deeply about what you're creating he cares deeply about his content so that's why he's always getting it in his body even though we've done it a hundred times and when he's not in the office he's still always always learning always meeting with people learning new things like that meeting that we had he just wanted to know how they were selling their digital courses online because he was gonna start doing that in a bigger way so he's always pulling from different places it was an incredible experience what about so sean i've told you about this guy before his name's ebb pagan and we talked we are sean and i amy are good friends with craig cl and he was a copywriter and when we had john lee du on the other day i was like john tell me about some of these marketers are so fascinating to me and you just named a bunch of them and i wanna ask you i wanna ask you but evan pagan the most interesting so basically for listeners evan pagan i knew him as david dean when i was fourteen years old i was a nerd i wanted to learn how to meet girls he had an ebook called double your dating and what he would do if i remember correctly and and you could correct me i think he would if he would send these really long emails like it felt like ten thousand word text based emails about how to meet women and at the end you could buy like a fourteen dollar book and i think craig told us that he was selling like thirty million dollars a year of this book on called double dating have you heard about this y absolutely have heard about it and i know he's a legend in in that area and when he came to the table i i think he had moved on from that part of his business but that's how he was put on the map and the one thing that i learned from evan really early on is he teaches the strategy that you've gotta coin your own content like you've gotta name it you've gotta put title to it you've gotta to own it so one of the things that i've always done when i've created content in my own business is like i've got the porter process for outlining your digital course and the sweet spot for finding what topic to create for your your course i name everything and own it and it sets you up as an expert and that absolutely came from epic it's like so me and sam both teach courses on m and the west who runs the the the course platform for m she she has one that she calls she's like you need your spiky point of view it's like what what's your spiky point of view and she's like i guess your point of view that stands out that not everybody would agree with it like it it'll poke some people the wrong way because it's different than you know everything that they've heard before and so you know that that's like the core of which is like if you're gonna teach a course you gotta have a spiky point view otherwise you like your course doesn't really have a a sort of angle to it or a hook to it that that other people are gonna attach with yeah i love that do you the other day sean and i were talking about this guy named sam evans because he he had this youtube video called cons consult he has a business called the consulting dot com and he revealed all of his numbers and he was like we got to thirty million in revenue and then we decided to just be really profitable and we do ten million in sales with five million in profit with like a team of four people and we are just fascinated because that's just like a that's great great business to to own that what are some other people who who you've worked with or that you know of that are like shockingly that that you would tell people and you're like i can you not believe what this person does you would not believe how much revenue they make or that they sell a course in this space are there any shocking ones like that so one of the ones that always has shocked me i have this student her name is den and she lives in la single mom three kids really small house and not enough rooms for everybody like she is definitely doing it her herself she was working two jobs and she was baking and people would come to her house they'd pick up a birthday cake or a celebration cake or whatever and that's how one way she was making money long story short cut to creating a digital course and she became real really good at caramel candy apples so how to create caramel candy apples and the thing is the caramel was store bought it wasn't like her special recipe just people didn't know what store to go to or what to buy and so she started to create these and sell a digital course now a lot of my students many of them have made seven figures and beyond but i wanna talk about her because she's a woman who made never made over a hundred thousand dollars a year and now in one digital course launch she made two hundred and sixty thousand dollars selling how to create caramel candy apples and she literally was just doing live videos in a private facebook group and i always tell that story because a lot of people listening have never created anything in their life online and they would never even they're like my idea can't be good enough it's not original enough or whatever and then i think a d single mom living in la making two hundred and sixty thousand dollars on the first time she launched anything now she's making way more money than that but that's the kind of stuff that i live for because it has to start someone what's her core name how do google her let's see if you google den n caramel candy apples you will absolutely find it are you spoke to n d a n i r a we call her the caramel candy apple queen she's got tons of press written up about her like she's a she's a big deal how did she get her customers so who bought this course how did she go sell how much is the course i can't remember a couple hundred dollars okay and the way got her customers this is what's cool she made a lot of video she did a lot of social media where she'd show in her tiny little kitchen with not a fancy camera lighting like what she was doing and the thing is so if you own a bakery a caramel candy apples like ten bucks or more to sell which is really good profit for a bakery and these bakers wanted to find more ways to make more money so she she appealed to the small business owners who had bakeries or sweets to sell but she also appealed to a lot of hobby a lot of people are like i just wanna do that that's cool so she had a a mesh of two different audiences but her she she basically just made free content and then tons of content lots of videos yep wow and then the way i teach people how to sell courses is with webinars so she she started to do webinars and webinars were a away a new vehicle to sell more so she's gone on to do even more launches you would do a webinar for a three or two hundred dollar thing absolutely so back in the day my very first successful course was called f b influence i did it with lewis howe and together we created this course and launched it it was ninety seven dollars and i probably did two hundred webinars to sell a ninety seven dollar course and it was a huge success because we had tons of affiliates but would do a webinar even for a ninety seven dollar course amongst these internet marketers who what what's the largest course i don't know a course info product what's the largest business you've ever heard of i oh jeez the largest business i've ever heard of i don't know i feel like the yeah who crush it the most that's a that's a that's a different way to add well my girl marie for leo do you no marie for she has a program called b school she's been crushing it for ten years here's what's unique about her course she's had the same course obviously she makes it a little bit better every year makes the marketing better but it's literally the same course that she is sold for i think third teen years now once a year she sells this course two thousand dollars now it's twenty five hundred but she's in the get been in the game for thirteen years with the same course that to me is badass because she's probably made like three million dollars a year in profit for like ten years would you you think that's crazy yes i do she's very quiet about her dollar so i don't know exactly but seeing the numbers the affiliates i've been an affiliate for a really long time absolutely she's crushing it and the thing is and what i learned from tony robbins is you do not always wanna reinvent the will find something that works double down on it and stop starting from scratch all the time and that's literally what maria is mastered so she's someone that i've always followed from the get go is there anyone else i'm trying to think it's just that here's the thing sometimes i don't think people are totally forthcoming with their numbers i've been in the internet marketing space for a long time and sometimes i trust you know what i hear and sometimes i don't and sometimes people throw out at numbers and i'm like yeah what's the profit margin on that so i always am a little bit unsure about what the numbers really the affiliate strategy so what because i think most people if they're like oh i'm gonna create my myself on first my first course they wouldn't think that oh i should be using affiliate strategy so explain what that works and how big of a tool that is for for you and your like marketing mix do you use that even do you even use that on to use affiliates at least now so i have made millions in my own business being an affiliate for other people but i've also had affiliates sell my own courses and to me i think it's one of the most powerful ways to build a business at least supplement implement your income if you have courses and memberships of your own so for i think number one i think fifty fifty is what people should be offering i've seen a trend recently that it's gone down to like thirty percent maybe forty percent forty sixty i'm old school so i really do believe the fifty fifty model is the way to go and i think that if you find a course that either you've taken or you know your students will get massive value from it but you don't offer something like that i think absolutely adding an affiliate offer to the mix can supplement your revenue like i have different streams of revenue one of my second biggest streams of revenue is being an affiliate for other people who's your biggest affiliate so i the the money i the most money i've made in as an affiliate is through marie four b school that's why i'm really close to it and then jenna k couture and gabby bernstein are huge in stu mc clara all three are huge affiliates for my program digital course academy they do really really really well i think we needed to do that sean it makes a huge difference it's like a whole other streamer of revenue how many people work at your company so we've got twenty full time employees and then some contractors on the side everyone's virtual we do a four day work week and so we work monday through thursday and is i feels like a big team like i feel like that's a lot of people but i know it's such a small business still yeah i think that's a lot why do you know do you need so many people so we do so i have three digital courses one membership and then we do a lot of affiliate marketing and so everybody is just stays in their lane and like i've got one person that's one hundred percent focused on my podcast so that's all she does podcast producer kylie you might talk to her your team talk to her and so we have a lot of people in specialized roles are you running the company and being the front person or do you have someone help them run the company while you're focusing content great question so for seven years i've had a side kick helping me run the company she's a cmo and recently transitioned out as a contractor so i'm running it more than i normally do when she's running marketing i don't have my hands in all of that that's a lot of work god dan it's still right now it feels like a lot of work but it won't it doesn't always feel that way what's the name of your podcast so people who are listening can go check it out my podcast online marketing made easy how big are you guys we've been we've been we're getting in a pissing contest contest with john du miss i'm a little like i'm jealous a little bit with jenna jenna totally magic like she's got an amazing podcast how many downloads total do you guys have i think in december on the podcast platform we had one point three or one point three maybe million on the podcast platform and then like another four hundred on youtube four hundred thousand on youtube just for the month yeah yeah okay well that's huge we had a million in january that was our recent was a million in january so wow we've had old just on podcast players or like yes yeah that's huge that's huge so we feel good about it we've had thirty five million downloads i used to not download twice a week changing to twice a week has changed things for us for sure i do a fifteen minute one on tuesday and a longer one on thursday and that changed the game for us oh glad we did that once was that once a week before that or once a week before december i think it was that we made the change so then you have way more downloads per prep so we get between fifty to a hundred thousand probably average we we we we have three episodes a week sometimes so we're doing more think cow that's awesome i think we even we have four sometimes so our out so our episodes i'd like the the episode the downloads per episode is the more important metric i think that's the real metric it's not the one here you brag up but still if you if you actually wanna that's one you care about it sounds like yours is really big that's how you are also moving up in the charts i mean i know that there's like you can't know everything about that algorithm but one thing i've studied enough and i'm competitive enough to know that i'm not moving up in the charts unless my week of downloads are strong and so you guys are doing better than i am because you're always above me in the charts i my attention to those things you've you so anyone who said they don't i think they're oh we we totally do i take a lot of pride in char numbers but it sounds like you you you get more downloads per episode than us for sure yeah maybe my back catalog we do we do a lot of promoting to our own community about our podcast like we embedded it in a lot of things so we did something really cool in january where we had a quiz and basically you take a quiz to figure out where you are in your entrepreneurial journey and then we gave you ten episodes that are gonna help you along that journey and that blew up you and you're smart and you do smart things and then you get good results i understand now this is the secret yeah we the the and we'll wrap up for a second the best promotion we did recently was we've just announced that we're gonna give five thousand dollars to some person who takes our clips and terms them into tiktok videos and gets popular on tiktok and we got i think thirty million impressions on tiktok and like two days that is incredible that is super smart that was the only smart thing we've ever done whose idea is that one not far ben yeah in fact i literally called it a dumbass idea and on air wait did the depends yeah that's ben just this this is my chance to come back into the episode yes it was my idea shout out to m mfa cuts who is killing it and and there's many other i follow them ball now on my tiktok me is now just clips of myself and sam you know over and over again it's great that's awesome i'm gonna check that out we how do i find it like i just look so here's what we did but we screwed up or i screwed up so it's what was the hashtag band m shorts m alright so if you go in tiktok and you search m m clips that with an s you'll find it but you'll also find because i read the what when we were announcing it i accidentally one time i said clips with an s and then i said clip without an s so if you if you search both of those works you'll you'll buy you'll find different ones and also if you just google m m clip you're gonna get porn because it stands for male female male until you'll get a whole different set of clips if you go to google so that you know it's ryan there's something for everybody over here we're very inclusive oh and i was just starting out my name i think it was my maiden name now that i think about it it was a porn star but you're starting now a ballard so i think it was at someone named amy ballard was a porn start when i like thirteen years ago or something and i was like mortified every time i search my name there she was that's yeah i know you've been does that ring your bell yeah no comment then say no comment i see yeah that's crazy the yeah that sucks yeah definitely sucks because it doesn't issue anymore i'm i got a new last name i used to file this guy in twitter named jeff f sign and so it could be worse no i tweeted at that guy i was like brutal name and then he got so mad at me i was like you can't be i can't be the first person to point this out to you like don't about at me i didn't do it to you oh my gosh well thanks for coming on amy this is this is awesome yeah thanks guys so much it's nice to talk to you and i know you guys are coming on to my podcast so i'm looking forward to chatting with you too sounds good take care alright hi guys