AMY PORTERFIELD: “So many people freak out that they won't make enough, it won't be a big-enough success that they don't even put themselves out there. I always tell my students, ‘The first launch is as much for you as it is for those you're going to serve,’ because once you do a full launch of a digital course, put yourself out there, you sell it online, once you do that, you are able to learn so much about what you're capable of, what you like, what you don't like, what your audience wants, what they don't like or don't want, and it makes you a better entrepreneur. You are smarter. You're more strategic. You're more confident. That's the kind of stuff that I can't talk about in dollar amount, per se, but I can talk about in growth as an entrepreneur.”
INTRO: I’m Amy Porterfield, ex-corporate girl turned CEO of a multi-seven-figure business. But it wasn't all that long ago that I lacked the confidence, the budget, and the time to focus on growing my small-but-mighty business. Fast forward past many failed attempts and lessons learned, and you'll see the business I have today, one that changes lives and gives me more freedom than I ever thought possible, one that used to only exist as a daydream. I created the Online Marketing Made Easy podcast to give you simple, actionable, step-by-step strategies to help you do the same. If you're an ambitious entrepreneur, or one in the making, who's looking to create a business that makes an impact and a life you love, you're in the right place, friend. Let's get started.
AMY: Well, hey, there, friend. Welcome back to Online Marketing Made Easy.
I wanted to check in on you. How are you feeling today? I hope that you are plugging through. I hope that you feel in the flow and that you are thriving. However, I know that's not always the case. Listen, I've been in the trenches with you for many, many years. I know how hard it can be to grow a business and figure it all out. So no matter where you're at, you are meant to be there. Don't forget that. And I am cheering you on every step of the way.
If you caught last Tuesday's podcast episode, you already know that we've embarked on a fun short series. It's called the Myth Busters Series. And the reason I'm doing this series is that I'm determined to shatter the misconceptions surrounding digital courses and prove that anyone can create one if they put their mind to it.
Now, let me be totally candid. I firmly believe that digital courses have the power to transform lives and businesses, just as they've transformed mine and thousands of my students. But I get it. Creating a digital course can feel intimidating. To find the most honest answers I can, as always I turned to my students. It's one thing for me to tell you my own journey. And if you're an OG here, you've heard my story a million times. But I think it's way more powerful when I tell you stories of my students, those who have gone before you, but they're not that far ahead of you. If you're just starting out, they're not fourteen years ahead of you like I have been in my business. They might just be a couple months ahead of you or a year ahead of you. And I think you can relate to them very much, in many different ways.
So in talking to my students, I've discovered that there are five common reasons why people hesitate to create a digital course, which ultimately causes them to delay the process and later—now, this is important. If you're multitasking, come back to me—later they regret not starting sooner.
So those reasons, those common excuses—but they don't feel like excuses. They feel real—are these. Number one, “I don't have enough time.” Two, “It's too expensive, and I don't have the money to either invest in a course to learn how to do it or just pay for some of the software or the things I need to get it off the ground.” “My audience is way too small to make money from a digital course.” Or “I don't have enough content to put into a digital course.” And then one that comes up a lot, “I’m not credible enough,” or “I don't have enough expertise,” or “I don't have enough experience yet,” which is what we're diving into today with a story from my student, Radhika Lucas.
If you want to hear me share stories from my students overcoming the most-common reasons I mentioned, look back over the last couple of Tuesday episodes, where I've covered many of them. And keep an eye out for more in the coming weeks. And today, we're focused on the common misconception that you don't have enough experience or expertise, or you're not credible enough to create a digital course.
So after battling cancer, Radhika had a newfound determination to make a positive impact on people's lives. She set out on a mission to help others become more confident by sharing their own experiences, specifically on social media. She wanted to help introverts like herself get past the fear of putting themselves out there and go from feeling judged, insecure, and scared to feeling confident in attracting the right audience. And that's when fate brought her to my program Digital Course Academy and into just the world of digital courses.
Now, Radhika had a full-time job, but she did Digital Course Academy in her spare time, determined to bring her dream to life. Despite the approaching holiday season and a busy work schedule, she set a course-launch deadline and committed wholeheartedly to making it happen. Throughout the process, Radhika faced so many moments of doubt. She was worried that her slides weren't good enough, and she was embarrassed that she only had a laptop and not a bunch of fancy equipment. She didn't have, like, the fancy camera, the fancy lighting, the fancy different pieces of technology that you can use to create anything online. She didn't have any of that. And perhaps her biggest fear was that she wasn't enough of an expert in this area to be teaching other people about it. Like, that thought, “Who am I to be doing this?” came into her head over and over again.
And I can tell you from my own personal experience, that feeling like this is a very real concern for a lot of people. I absolutely felt this in my first few years of creating digital courses. But here's the thing that I learned over the years. You don't have to be the expert of all experts. You don't have to have a fancy certification or have a college degree or an MBA in whatever it is that you're teaching. Your value, the thing that sets you apart from others, is you and your unique experiences.
Now, of course, before you teach anything, you need that 10 percent edge. I've talked about it again and again on the podcast. A 10 percent edge means that you've gotten results for yourself or for someone else, like a client or customer, and you're willing to build out the roadmap and teach someone from start to finish how to get those same results. So you’ve gotten those results, and now you're going to teach other people how to get those results. That means you're 10 percent ahead or more of those that you want to serve. That is necessary. But notice, never did I say college-degree certification, ten years’ experience, none of that.
And I will tell you this. It is so relatable and comfortable learning from somebody who has gotten the results that you want, but they're not out of reach. So the more relatable you are to your students, the more they can see themselves in you, the better. So use that as a huge advantage versus looking at it as though you have a disadvantage.
And that’s what Radhika did. So she persevered, pushing forward while embracing her imperfections, scared that she wouldn't be expert enough, but knew she had results that she could teach her students. So she ignored the pesky impostor syndrome, which never goes away. But she learned to silence it and move forward anyway. And she stayed true to the vision she had for this course.
Now, remember, she was taking from her own experience of being an introvert and struggling to figure out what to post and putting herself out there. So she came up with the perfect title that meant something to her as well, and the title was Cringe to Confident. And I love that because she felt that way when she was trying to post and learn to put herself out there so she knew what her students would feel as well. What I find so beautiful about this story is that while she wasn't a by-the-book expert in what she was teaching, she was able to leverage her own experiences to help others in a really big way. I also love that after consulting with my team, Radhika made the decision to use her course, which she offered at a very affordable price point—so two ninety-seven—she used that as a qualifying lead magnet to upsell into her private coaching program. And it really paid off.
So hear me out here because some of you will do your very first launch, and it won't be as big as you want. In fact, hers was one thousand five hundred dollars on her very first course launch. So she didn't sell a lot of units. But stay with me here. She only had seventy-five people on her email list. When you join Digital Course Academy, one of the things I encourage you to do is get to five hundred people on your email list. So while you're building your course with me, I'm also going to teach you how to build your email list so you could do both at the same time, which is very doable, so that when you're ready to launch, you've got five hundred people on your list, which makes a difference.
But I've got rule breakers all the time in DCA, and Radhika was one of them. And she said, “I'm just going to launch with seventy-five people.” You can't expect huge results with seventy-five people on your list. However, you can still expect some amazing results because this is what she did. She sold that course, and she didn't sell as many as she wanted. However, she had a coaching program on the back end of this course, and her coaching program was three thousand dollars. And so for the people that bought her introductory course, she upsold four of them into her coaching program, which is almost twelve thousand dollars. And if she didn't have this low-price-point course, that really helped people get into her community, she wouldn't have been able to sell those high-ticket coaching programs. So she cracked the code with her first launch and upsells into her coaching program.
Imagine if you do have a coaching program or one-on-one consulting, coaching, group coaching, whatever it might be, using a lower-price-point course to get people into your world, low barrier, easy decision. And then, once they start going through your course and they know they can trust you and they like your teaching style, offering them a bigger coaching program, way easier to get them to say yes. There's so many different ways you can use digital courses, and it's not all about making six figures with just one digital course. You can use the course as a lead generator into bigger opportunities you have in your business.
And one more thing about Radhika’s story. Sure, she may not have made a hundred thousand dollars with her first digital-course launch, but here's where she differs from you right now. And I say this with all the love and hope that it inspires you. She did it. She created the course, and she launched it.
And so many people freak out that they won't make enough, it won't be a big-enough success that they don't even put themselves out there. I always tell my students, “The first launch is as much for you as it is for those you're going to serve,” because once you do a full launch of a digital course, put yourself out there, you sell it online, once you do that, you are able to learn so much about what you're capable of, what you like, what you don't like, what your audience wants, what they don't like or don't want, and it makes you a better entrepreneur. You are smarter. You're more strategic. You're more confident. That's the kind of stuff that I can't talk about in dollar amount, per se, but I can talk about in growth as an entrepreneur. It’s not all about the money.
And I talk a lot about the money because I know many of you want to know, “How much did she make? How much did she charge? What did it look like?” That's important. I get it. We need to make money. These are our businesses. But there's also a lot of benefits of putting yourself out there, doing the work, launching the thing. The growth is far beyond any money you will have in the bank, and that is powerful. So I just wanted to add that before we wrap up.
So this incredible newbie is proof that with dedication and passion and the right guidance, which she found in Digital Course Academy, success is absolutely within reach. And if you can get that first launch under your belt, you can start to triple and quadruple your results as you get better and better.
So I want you to hear directly from Radhika. So here's a little clip.
RADHIKA LUCAS: I want to talk about overcoming the belief of not having enough expertise or about the excuses that we might come up with or procrastinate about, to talk ourselves out of taking action and following our dreams. And for the past thirteen years, I personally silenced that whisper in my ear to take action towards building this thing I'd imagined. I'd always wanted to help people unlock their confidence to be seen and heard, especially those who might have gone through some challenging circumstances in their life and that it might have knocked their confidence to be seen or heard or be visible, or for people who somehow think that despite their life experience and expertise, whether that be in the school of life or in their professional voice, their voice has been locked away, but they somehow want to make a bigger impact and build something that's going to be bigger than themselves.
Well, for a long time, that person was me. And by helping others, I've been able to help myself with my own digital course. So when I decided to start my online-business journey, it was a few months before I came across Amy. I'd been looking at how I could create a course about my then struggles, which was about getting comfortable with creating Reels, which had just launched around about 2020. And in 2021 I was looking at ways in which to articulate everything that I'd learned as a marketer with over twenty years of experience, as well as the life experience of having been through some pretty hard health challenges that had knocked my confidence. So I knew what I wanted to do, but my only big issue at the time was projecting my voice and sounding good on camera, and I was having major issues with getting started.
In my previous corporate career, I was exposed to the importance of supportive messaging as a behavior-change marketer when I was launching mass-scale campaigns to encourage health screening. And I'd also spent two decades in ad agencies and auditing some really large ad accounts. But I still didn't see how I could lean on that experience or expertise to come up with something meaningful that would actually help people.
So I started to work on my voice projections, and through that process I found that I was doing these takes over and over and over again. My kids—at the time they’re both teenagers—they were rolling their eyes every time they saw me, and I remember just being called “cringe.” And one morning, I simply woke up, and I had a thought that popped up in my head and eyes that said, “Cringe to Confident.” To heck with it. I was going to not only embrace my cringe, but I was also going to help others get okay with being cringe.
And so I decided I was going to use my theater experience as a child and then combine it with my behavior-change experience to come up with this hybrid program that helped people unlock their voice and go from feeling judged, insecure, or scared to feeling confident with their visibility and messaging, but in a safe space. And so I launched Cringe to Confident in January of 2023.
And when I think about all the doors that have opened up for me in the last six months since Digital Course Academy, I know wholeheartedly that it would have been impossible for me to have had the traction as fast as I did had it not been for the fact that Amy's course unlocked the door to getting my first clients. So for that, I cannot be more grateful. And there are actually no words to describe that. It's beyond grateful, really.
So the one thing that I would say to someone listening is that if you feel like you don't have the expertise, just know that you don't have to level up and do anything extra. You can create a course based on exactly where you're at and think about the struggles that you've had leading up to where you are now and lean into that for inspiration on what your next course or idea could be about. So the takeaway, really, is to commit to saying yes to yourself, because the only one to bet on you is yourself.
AMY: I'm so proud of what Radhika has achieved, and I can't wait to see the amazing impact she'll continue to make. This is only the beginning. I wanted to share a story of someone who's just starting out, just like you, and what she's been able to do. And I can promise you, I'm going to be talking about her on my podcast again as her launch results become bigger and bigger.
So I hope this story has ignited a spark within you. And I want you to take a page from Radhika’s book and know that you, too, can turn your dreams into reality with the power of digital courses. Even if you fully don't believe you are capable, you can get started, and you can continue to tell yourself that you can figure this out.
So now it's your turn. Have you ever had that thought, “I don't know enough. I don't have enough experience. I'm not expert enough to teach it”? Maybe you make macrame masterpieces or have perfected grooming your guinea pigs or swaddling your baby or using AI for food prepping—these are all ideas for digital courses, let me just tell you—things that don't require a degree or certification or anything fancy like that. You can teach what you know in a digital course, and there are people waiting to not only learn what you know, but learn in your style, in your teaching style, and learn from you. So do not forget that.
All right. So that's a wrap for today's episode of Online Marketing Made Easy. I hope this story has filled you with a hope and excitement for what is possible. We're only going up from here.
As always, thank you for hanging out with me here. And if you know somebody who could use a little inspiration to be inspired to create their first digital course and just go for it, please grab the link to this episode, send them a text, and share it with them.
I'll be back on Thursday with more valuable insights to help you on your entrepreneurial journey, same time, same place. I can't wait.
