AMY PORTERFIELD: Hey there, Amy Porterfield here. Welcome to another episode of The Online Marketing Made Easy Podcast. Thanks, so much, for tuning in.
Today’s episode is an Ask Amy session. That means I’ve collected four of the smartest questions I’ve received over the last month and I’m going to jump into each one of them separately here on the show. The four questions aren’t necessarily related but I do think you’ll find them extremely valuable as you build your business online.
Before we get there, at the time of this recording I just moved into my home studio. I decided to turn a spare bedroom into a studio where I could do podcasting and I could do all of my video work. That way I don’t have to have a home office with technology all over the place, which drives me nuts.
When I moved my podcasting equipment in here last night it was all ready to go. I don’t really have a lot in here yet. We’re not totally done with this home studio. So, when I decided to record this morning I can hear myself in my earphones and I sound a little bit like I’m in a tunnel. The acoustics aren’t set up properly just yet in here. I might have to do some padding. I need a big rug in here or something, but it doesn’t sound so great in my ears.
I thought maybe I shouldn’t record this week. But today is the only day I have to record this week. We’re on a schedule and are trying to get ahead of these podcasts so we’re not doing them at the last minute. I knew it was important to keep moving forward with these for the sake of my sanity and my team’s. I don’t want to be stressed out and trying to record a show that’s due the next day. I don’t do my best work.
I could have easily used the excuse that this didn’t sound really good and I should probably wait until next week when the room is ready to go ahead and record. But I knew that would get me behind. I knew it was an obvious excuse. I had to weigh the options.
Does my audience really care if the audio isn’t perfect? And, how valuable is the content that I’ve created? IS it worth it? Do I need to get it out? I spent some good time on these questions figuring out how I wanted to respond to them for you. So I decided I had done the work and knew I had some good stuff to put out there and am going to make that the most important thing versus using the excuse that the audio is not going to be perfect and not doing it.
Plus, you might not even hear a difference because my audio editor might be able to whip this into shape so that you’ll never even know. I might not have even had to bring it up. But, I brought it up because I kind of want to challenge you. I want you to think about an area in your business that you’re not moving forward or you feel stuck or have stalled because something else has to happen before you move forward; or, something’s not working properly and you have to figure it out first, or you’re just not comfortable moving forward and you’re not sure why.
Let’s look at some of those areas in your business. I want you to be really honest with yourself and ask yourself whether you are using excuses that really don’t warrant stopping, stalling, or not moving forward. A lot of times those excuses are deep rooted into bigger fears or lack of confidence we have in our business or our message or moving forward.
Maybe it’s a new project and you’ve never done it before so you use excuses like, “I can’t figure out Facebook ads. They aren’t going to work for me. I just need to sit here for the next two weeks and just work on Facebook ads. Then I’ll get my first Facebook ad up and running and maybe two months down the road I’ll try some ads for webinars.”
That’s not the conversation I want you to have. A lot of the time, and I don’t know about you but this definitely works for me, if I do it and I mess up I usually only have to mess up once, I figure out what went wrong, and then I never do that same mistake twice. This happens a lot. I do a lot of mistakes.
I would rather be making those little mistakes along the way but still be moving forward because I am still inching forward. When you get the confidence to not really care about those little mistakes you will usually fix them and keep moving forward. You see a big blast and, BOOM, you are way ahead of yourself, more so than you thought you would be.
It is all of the little steps that start to add up. So I want to challenge you to look at some of the excuses you’ve been making about not moving forward in different areas of your business. Be honest with yourself and ask whether it is an excuse. Is it a valid excuse or one that is more deep rooted in fear or, quite honestly, maybe just being lazy right now and not wanting to do something? Or, is it a confidence issue or something that, if you think about it, there is a solution?
I always say that the more resourceful you get the more money you are going to make. So look at your business, look at those excuses and those obstacles and see if you might find one that you can just move forward with today. Believe me you will be so very, very happy you did.
Before we dive in I want to thank our sponsor today, 99Designs. I am such a huge fan of this company because they can take care of all of your graphic needs. We are talking logos, social media cover images, website graphics, and so much more. So visit www.99Designs.com/amy and get a $99 upgrade for free.
Let’s go ahead and do this. Like I said, the first question is about affiliates.
How early do you contact affiliates if you want them to work with you to promote your course?
I will say that I am not an expert on affiliates. I’ve never done a big affiliate push in my business. However, I have worked with affiliates over the last few years. I’m a little bit more selective. I have a smaller affiliate base. However, there are definite guidelines that you want to follow in order to get optimal results from those you partner with.
The first thing is, I like to get in front of an affiliate at least three months in advance, if not more. If that affiliate is really good at what they do they’ve already planned out their year. Gosh, if you’re really good at planning, and I always talk about this at the end of the year, if you could tell your favorite partners that you want to work with, “Hey, this year I’ve already planned out my promo schedule and I’m going to be promoting this month and this month and this month, if any of those will work for you, please do mark your calendar and I’ll get you information as we get closer.” That would be ideal.
A lot of us aren’t necessarily there yet, or we’re creating things as we’re going. So if you can get in front of something at least three months in advance, if a partner really does want to work with you, they will be able to kind of move around their schedule sometimes in order to make it work. It’s to your advantage to get in front of them as early as possible.
Sometimes things come up. Recently, we decided to do an affiliate program for my new course, Webinars That Convert. What happened was that we launched it without any affiliates in September. It was surprisingly successful. I knew it would do well but I just had no idea it would do that well.
Because the response has been so good and because the Facebook private group is more active than I’ve ever seen a group in my entire business life, I thought we might be on to something here. I figured there were other partners that I know of with similar lists that would find this really valuable.
I went out to some of my friends that I knew would find this promo valuable and I showed them the results that we received from our own list and what they could expect based on their list size and the fact that we have very similar lists. I gave them all of the details.
I got a few top-level affiliates, I call them top level because they have really strong lists, on my calendar to promote. I’m going to actually be doing live webinars with those affiliates. But I also saw something that happened with Webinars That Convert where a lot of people that purchased it loved it instantly and wanted to promote the program to their own list.
But they had really small lists so they couldn’t really do a live webinar with me and promise that a few hundred people would show up. What they want to do is promote it, but they know it’s not going to be at the level of some of the top marketers. They are just not there yet.
There is something really valuable about selling a course when over 1,000 people join that course. And now you’ve got all of these people, hundreds of people, saying they would love to tell their followers about the course they are in and that they are really enjoying.
We have decided to do two live webinars in early November. We sent an email out to anybody that was in our course that expressed interest in promoting it. We told them we had a survey for them to fill out so that we could get to know them a little more. Once they complete the survey, if we approve them as an affiliate, we will get them ready to promote the live webinars we will be doing in early November.
You will get a special link to send all of your traffic to the live webinar. Then, if any of those people purchase while on the live webinar you, of course, will receive an affiliate commission. And if they purchase after the webinar you will receive an affiliate commission.
We worked it using Infusionsoft. We set up affiliate links that could go to a live webinar. That way I could have (let’s say) ten different affiliates sending traffic to one live webinar and each of them will be tracked properly. This is something we are going to do in early November and what I love about this is that now people without huge lists that want to get in the game are able to and I don’t have to do a live webinar for them with just a few people showing up.
This way we are going to have a really great live audience, which increases the energy, it increases my energy, for sure. I do better on live webinars versus if I was just recording it from scratch. And it gives them an opportunity to sell.
Suppose I had 100 affiliates do this and they all had really small lists. But let’s say each of them sold two. That’s pretty good, right? I have 200 new buyers in the program that I never would have had before because I didn’t have access to their audience. They are in different niches, they run in different circles, so they are attracting people I never would have attracted in the first place and I love that.
Another thing we did is actually create a really simple backend affiliate partnership WordPress site. That’s the freebie for today. For any of you looking to work with affiliates, the best way to make that partnership extremely lucrative is to give them all of the information they need in advance. I’m talking about email swipe file, social media images, social media text, all the dates they need, and then, of course, details for them to check in to get their affiliate links and all that good stuff.
We decided to create a really simple affiliate system where they could go in and get all of their swipe file and they would see all of the dates we are promoting and get all of the social media images. They would get everything in one place. For today’s freebie, I’m going to walk you through the backend of that system. It was really simple.
I want to make it better in the future and I want to make it really fancy where, at the top of the system they log into, they will see how much commissions they have earned, how many clicks they have gotten, and all of that. That’s not what we’ve done this time. This is a good lesson for anybody kind of struggling in business where you feel pulled in a million directions.
If I had done something more elaborate right now it would have been silly because
- I’m not really in the affiliate game yet so I don’t want to put a lot of money or time in creating a system before I’m really comfortable working with affiliates, and
- For the sake of time, I would never have been able to launch something fantastic from the time I decided to work with affiliates to the time we are actually launching.
It was only a few weeks ago that we decided we would invite some affiliates to the game to see if they want to promote. It sure as heck wasn’t three months in advance so I didn’t get to give them the time. I thought I would just start out with what I call Phase I, something really small but extremely valuable and organized. It needs to look good.
I’m going to take you behind the scenes and show you what my WordPress affiliate membership site looks like and I’ll show you where the swipe file goes and the images and all that. If you want to model something like that you can show a programmer and ask them to build something like it for you. Again, it’s super simple.
If you go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/80download you can opt in and you’ll get a video from me showing you what the affiliate system that we just built in WordPress looks like. If you like to text you can text the phrase 80download to 33444.
For question #1, How early do you get in front of affiliates, I answered it with “at least three months, if not more,” and when you can’t do that, just know you can’t expect huge results because people have to clear their calendar. If you are going to work with affiliates, creating some kind of really simple backend membership site for them to get all of the stuff is a really good idea.
I could have done something really similar inside Infusionsoft, it just wouldn’t have worked as seamlessly and it wouldn’t have been as easy for my team to update and get in there. They can still go into Infusionsoft and get all of their stats but the membership site is more for the content to support their promotion, which is so very valuable.
Just to wrap up, I told you about the live webinar that we’re going to be doing in early November and it’s for all of those that want to promote but don’t have huge lists so they can just send to one live webinar. It’s live, I’m there, I’m answering questions, I’m fully engaged, and they can send all of their traffic there so they know it’s going to be a really great experience.
One more thing, I mentioned that people have to fill out a survey before they actually get chosen to be an affiliate with me. We do that because you are responsible for your affiliates. If they start spamming people and you use a system like Infusionsoft, because they are using your links to spam people, Infusionsoft can shut down your affiliate system. So you as the marketer, who is actually asking partners to promote for you, could get in big trouble if you’re letting just anybody promote for you.
Plus, this is my brand, I don’t want people using my picture and talking about my product if I don’t really respect who they are and the kind of marketing they are doing. So we have a survey as well.
If you are interested in being an affiliate for this program or if you kind of want to see what the survey looks like, I’ll link to that in my show notes at http:// amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/80 to see the questionnaire. It’s really simple but I just want to know if you’ve been an affiliate before and whether you understand how the whole affiliate thing works, what kind of results you’ve gotten, what your list looks like.
You don’t have to have a huge list and you don’t have to be extremely experienced, but I do want you to kind of have a really good sense of how promoting works. If you’ve promoted in the past it is always a plus. You can see the kind of questionnaire I’ve put together on my show notes as well.
Remembering back to the first product you created, what would you tell us now that you wish you would have done differently back then?
I thought this was a really great question. The first thing I would tell you if I could go back and kind of fix some things is that I wish I would have spent a little bit more time on developing a concept around my product suite.
Hindsight is 20/20. I don’t even know if I would have had enough knowledge back then to do this properly, but it was something I didn’t even try. For those of you who have been in business maybe a year or two and you are working on your first online training program or you have one now but would love to add to it, this is something to pay close attention to: When we have a really solid product suite we are able to help people in our niche that are at different phases inside of our niche. Let me break it
down. I like to use real examples and the one I know right now is the one that’s inside my business and what I’m dealing with.
I teach entrepreneurs how to build their businesses online. I typically teach people that are in their first or second year of business, just starting out, and they’ve got some things going but things aren’t really clicking for them yet. List building, Facebook ads, and webinars are usually my areas of focus in terms of helping people to start building the foundation.
I talk a lot about social media sales funnels because social media is a great place to start. But when I started teaching all of this stuff I realized there are some people that have zero list and there are other people that still need my help but they have a list, a few thousand people on their list, but they want to learn how to do webinars.
They are at different phases but they are still in my ideal customer avatar area. They are still my audience but they are at different phases of their business. When I realized that I started to think that I really needed a product suite to help people in different phases of their business.
Sometimes I share stuff with you that I’m just rolling out or working on now but I like you to see the thought process behind it because I know this would have helped me earlier on in my business if I had done it. So, something that is not yet in full effect, but that I have decided to do, is start to look at the product suite and find the holes in my ability to helping my audience.
One of the holes has always been a question that I probably get asked daily, “What is your advice for creating an online training program?” For years I have recommended David Siteman Garland because he has an awesome program. It is funny that I use the word awesome because he program is called Create Awesome Online Courses.
He has a program out there and I’ve promoted it for years. It’s really good and I absolutely love David. Because this question comes up so much, I constantly push all of that traffic over to David. I do get an affiliate cut for most of it so it’s not about the money, really. It came back to realizing my audience was coming to me to get advice about something I don’t offer. However, I know a whole heck of a lot about it.
I’ve probably created six or seven online training programs. Some of them have been million dollar successes. I realized I have a lot to share in this area. So I’ve decided, in order to add to my product suite, I would create a course about creating online courses. Yes, my good friend, David, has this and David and I are good friends no matter what we create.
But it’s not about David and it’s not about me. It’s about the fact that my audience wants something and they keep asking but I keep pushing them away to somebody else. The lesson for you is that if that is happening to you, or if you don’t know who to push them off to, maybe it’s time for you to create that program.
If this is something that your audience really, really wants, maybe you’re the one that should be delivering it to them. If my audience kept asking me about Google ads and I kept sending them to someone, I don’t even know who I would send them to but this is starting to come up because I’m starting to use Google ads but someone is doing them for me so I am getting a lot questions. I have no desire in the near future to teach Google ads as a program so I am comfortable continuing to send people there.
I don’t know enough about Google ads to be able to teach it just yet and I don’t know if I ever want to. However, when that question keeps coming up about online courses, something I know a whole heck of a lot about, and I have my own opinions and strategies and systems and principles I would love to talk about, I thought this was the time.
For you, I want you to look at your business. Is there something that keeps coming up that you think you could actually totally support the need, it’s where you really should put your focus and time.
Another thing I want to share with you, because you all know me and my products pretty well, I have the Profit Lab. I started to think that the Profit Lab students love it. I get so much feedback, it’s been my most popular program up until this webinar course, and at the same time I want to see my students get bigger results. I am noticing there is not as much of a focus that needs to be there about list building.
I want to talk more about list building to those in my audience that are in the phase that they can’t sell anything because they don’t have a list yet. I feel list building needs to be a really big piece of the puzzle for my audience to know where they need to start. I’ve always said it from the get go, you don’t really have a viable business without a list. I have an experience with Hobie, my husband, lately.
I have to take a minute to tell you guys a funny story. This is totally a side note and I typically don’t do this but it’s worth it. I am going to have to remember where I was in the podcast. I’m going to tell you about Hobie’s list growth. But before I get there, in my webinars group I have this private Facebook group.
When I answer questions I usually record a video. I was all ready to record a video for this guy but he first sent me a video that I needed to watch. He asked me if I could watch a video, it was something he created for his webinar registration page. I was sitting alone and it was really early this morning in my family room and I played the video.
The first thing the guy, Dan, said on his video was, “If you’re watching this video now you’re likely thinking about getting a divorce”. He’s in the divorce niche (that sounds like a weird niche but that is what he does, he helps people transition through divorces).
That is what came out of the speakers of my computer. Right then my husband walked in the room. He looked at me like, “What is going on” and I burst out laughing. I told him it was just a client. But it was the most perfect timing for something like that. That is just a little Hobie story. I had some explaining to do to say the least.
Anyway, let’s get back. Hobie launched an eBook. He actually now has two eBooks all about getting hired as a firefighter. I’ve talked about it on some of the older episodes. One thing that I just realized if we have been running $10-a-day ads to a free giveaway and then people buy the book.
His sales haven’t actually been phenomenal. I like to be totally transparent. They are good. He gets sales weekly, but he would really like to get more sales so he is working on the sales part of it. That is where a lot of people struggle so I totally get it. However, he’s grown his list since earlier this year to over 3,500 people. That is a lot of people for someone who has never had a list.
Now he needs to figure out how he can best communicate with these people. What do they really need? If they are not buying the eBook, what’s the reason? He needs to survey them more, get into their head more, find out about their buying patterns, where they are in terms of getting hired as a firefighter. Are they total newbies? Have they been interviewing?
He needs to learn more about them. But he attracted the right audience. These are guys that 100% want to get hired as a firefighter. He did really smart targeting because he has a wife that helped him (sorry, I’ve got to take a little credit there) find the different groups that were actively looking to get hired.
The fact that he has a list of 3,500 people is phenomenal. But a lot of my students are starting out with tiny lists. They have been in business for a year or two and they have less than 1,000. That’s a long time to be in business and have less than 1,000 people on your list. It really comes down to cultivating a list-building mindset.
I am actually going to talk about that in Episode #82. When I get to Episode #82 you will get to hear all about cultivating a list-building mindset. Before we get into some more strategies about list building, which I will talk about in Episode #83, I want to back it up a little bit and talk about what it takes in terms of how you think about your business and how that dramatically increases your list size.
I’m totally going off on tangents here, but let’s get back to the question at hand. What I would do different if I were to start over is to look at my product suite earlier. I should have already had a program that really focused on list building: What to do, how to use it, the tools, technology, software, social media sites and how to use them for list building, lead generation with a lead magnet, and whether you use video or just images. All of this stuff goes into building a freebie and growing your email list.
That’s kind of what Profit Lab is but I want to add more of that to my Profit Lab program so that’s a really great place to start. Then you’ve got this program about creating online training programs once you have a list. When you have a list and a program I have a program to tell how to sell it online with webinars. Do you see how that product suite comes together with list building, product creations, and webinars?
That is basically how I want to create everything. Then to back up a little bit more, I have the Facebook 101 program. This is a lesson for all of you that are looking at your product suite now. Do you have an entry point for people, something that is maybe $100 in order to come into your fold and learn more about you and from you? But it’s not a huge commitment.
My Facebook 101 does just that. I am meeting people where they are. They want to know more about Facebook. They might not even be thinking about list building yet or creating an online program. They are just thinking that they have a business. Maybe they sell a physical product or services or maybe they are thinking about creating an online program. They want to get more of an audience and they are going to start with Facebook because it is hot.
It is a perfect place for them to start. I help set their foundation around social media with that. Then it’s an easy transition. After they know how Facebook works and they can start growing their audience there, it is time to talk about growing an email list. That is basically my product suite and how I am putting it together. Everything will really start to come out later this year and early next year.
I share that with you with full transparency. It’s not all done yet. We’re still working on it. I hate to share things a little bit too early. However, I thought that would be a great thing for you to think about right now in your business. No matter where you are, what might that product suite look like?
There’s a question coming up about focus inside your business. When you have a product suite you have a roadmap to where you want to go and how you are going to get there. So I know for the next few months I am focusing on creating more content around those topics. I don’t get sucked into different things because I’ve got a really good plan and a goal in place.
We’ll talk about that in the final question, #4, because that will come up again. There is one more thing I want to give you in terms of advice when you are creating an online training program. This is something I’ve never done but I really need it. I’m going to share it with you because this is something I want to start doing ASAP and that is to create a product index.
I would really love a Google.doc that outlines each of my programs and lists in bullets what is in each of the modules and each of the lessons. I typically do four modules and four or five lessons in each module. I wish I had something that lists the name of the module and outlines the lessons and the titles of each lesson with a blurb explaining what the lesson is about and the main things that are taught.
When you have a product suite it is really nice to go back to look over everything and see where you taught certain things or where there are holes with a need for something. That is easy when you have it all spelled out. The easiest way is to create this right after you create your program.
Once your program is created go ahead and spend some time to create an index. You could do it while you are creating the program but make sure, if you change anything or tweak something as you are creating it, that you update the index. An index would be amazing.
Here’s an example: I’ve got the Jumpstart Your Facebook Marketing program, the Facebook 101 program, and it needs to be updated. I have to have somebody go through the entire program and create that index for me and then point out some areas that need to be updated so I can go back in there quickly and update things.
That’s going to take some time and money and I wish I already had that index to get me through some of those changes really quickly. Plus, again, you start to really see some opportunities in your business when each of your online training programs have been outlined properly so you know exactly what’s in them and where you might want to expand or where you might have a good idea for a bonus or an upsell, which I talked about in Episode #78 and #79. Episode #78 was all about creating an upsell and #79 was about creating bonuses in your online training programs.
That is just one little device I wish I had done and now am kind of paying for it because I hadn’t.
What do you do when you see another site steal your content and sell it
This question came up a lot because this has recently happened to me. It’s happened with all of my programs. With the Facebook program, the Profit Lab program, and now the Webinars That Convert course. Someone’s ripped off all of my content and is selling it on a site for $97.
Why the heck would I ever say that nationally on a podcast so that all of you would hear me say that it is somewhere out there? Here’s why, anyone who would go to a really shady-looking site, it’s very obvious this site is not legit? Why would you go to a shady-looking site and see my product there and buy it? That would never, ever be anyone I would ever want to work with.
I don’t ever want that customer. I think it’s bad karma and I think it says a lot about someone’s integrity to buy a program they know is fully ripped off. It is very obvious. And, when you think about it that way, you don’t have to worry about it anymore. All of these sites that have done that, I see all of my friends’ programs on those sites as well, and most all of us have sent the cease and desist letter from our lawyers.
We’ve done the backend work that needs to get done. They (the shady sites) will likely never do anything about it. It’s really hard to get in touch online with anybody so we’ve done what we can in terms of using a lawyer. At the same time, I’m not going to worry about them doing that because if I can’t get the site down those are not customers I ever want.
We’ve really got to remember, in this case, it’s not about the money, it’s about the quality of people we’re attracting to our businesses. I can’t live in a mindset that I am getting ripped off. If I thought that everyday I would never get any work done. I can’t kill myself trying to figure out how to get a site down. When I realized this I decided this wasn’t something I was going to worry about. I am just going to let it go and put more positive energy into the stuff I am creating and am most excited about.
I decided to answer this question for you, all about someone stealing your stuff, because many of you asked about it and are worried about. You want to copyright this and protect that. It’s never going to be fully protected and you have to be totally okay with that if you want to create online training programs. Sure there are some things you can do. You might go the extra mile beyond what I’ve ever done to protect my content and you would be in a better place. I don’t know.
But I do think you should give a tiny sliver of your attention to it and just start attracting people that would pay you what you’re worth and they would never want to rip you off. Those are the people I want you to attract and focus on and put all of your positive energy into.
As an entrepreneur, how do you stay focused on what is at hand and not get distracted with wanting to start new projects, create new things, try a new form of social media? How do you stay focused?
This is one of my favorite questions. The first way I can answer this question is that I do scrum my projects. I talked about this in Episode #75. A lot of time when I do an Ask Amy I can refer back to other shows because a lot of the questions relate to things I’ve already talked about.
I use a project management process called scrum. I talk about it in Episode #75. If you want to see how I stay focused, that is ultimately the #1 process I use. You can learn all about it in Episode #75. But if you don’t want to go check out that episode right now I still want to give you some value.
There are a million things that I’m not strong at, like consistency. Consistency is going to kill me one day because I really struggle with it. However, one this I do well is keep moving forward and taking action and stay focused. I think that counterbalances my issue with consistency. It’s funny how that works.
One way I stay focused is always create deadlines. I always identify the players and I always identify the tasks. That is kind of what scrum looks like but let’s just take it out of the context of scrum and look at it more as a big picture.
When you start applying deadlines to your projects and you get players involved, (your VA will work on one thing, you have a graphic designer for a two-week period and they have to do something, you have a programmer doing something, and you start paying their project fees up front) you have skin in the game with the money and you’ve pretty much put your deadlines out there.
It’s almost like if you want to stick to a goal of running a marathon and you make a shout out to all of your friends, “I’m running a marathon, this is the date I’m doing it, don’t let me back out of this. I’m committed and I just wanted to be held accountable so I’m telling you all I am running a marathon.” When you do something like that you are more compelled to actually get it done.
That’s a little bit how I run my business. I don’t shout out my deadlines to the whole world but I do let people on my team know what we are shooting for. As a good leader I need to stick with those dates. Everyone knows when we are launching something, everybody knows who the players are because I use Asana as my tool of choice for managing my projects.
In Asana, we create the tasks, we put deadlines to each task, and we identify the players. Now I can’t be changing things around and focusing on new stuff or starting new projects because my entire team is going in a whole different direction than I would be going in. That’s something I wish I did even sooner in my business. I wish I had gotten more organized with projects.
I’ve never been one to jump from project to project because I learned early on working with Tony Robbins that there is no need to reinvent the wheel. In a business, a really smart entrepreneur will find out what’s working and then either model that (if somebody else is getting success) or will continue to do it (if it is in your own business) like a rinse and repeat until it doesn’t work.
I think that’s one of the biggest lessons I learned from working with Tony Robbins. I don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I don’t need to be on every single social media site or try every new thing that comes out there. I just need to continue to do what works right for my business. It’s funny because a few episodes back I talked about Periscope. I remember when I asked Darren Rowse, a pro blogger, what Periscope was. I didn’t understand what people were doing with it.
Now I’ve been using Periscope more and more but I don’t use it a whole heck of a lot. Do I wish I used it more? Yes. But right now I’m focused on getting this affiliate thing up and running for my Webinars That Convert program and if I try to do Periscopes, because I take them more seriously than I should, I get derailed. I’m just not comfortable jumping on Periscope whenever.
My mind doesn’t work well if you’re putting five or six different tasks on me every single day. I try to put my head down and just stay focused and get it done. Once I get all of my own tasks done for this affiliate thing I can focus on other things. If I want to bring in more Periscopes or if I want to explore a new project I can. But I’ve got to plan for it.
This is for all of you listening who feel you are not getting the results you want in your business and are trying to do too many things at once but everything you try is not really working the way you want it to work, I want you to think about breaking your projects down into phases. I am sorry I keep talking about Webinars That Convert but I every time I teach something I take it right from the heart and consider everything that is working in my business and everything that’s not working or things that are happening.
Everything I teach you is in very real time so Webinars That Convert is top of mind because I am in it right now. I want to use it as an example because there are some people in the program that have rushed through my program. They have rushed through what I call the Webinar System. Some of them have a really good reason, they were already on the books and had a deadline to do a webinar so they were going to get it done. I admire that.
But other people just want to test it out. They want to see if it really works. So they rushed through it, didn’t put a lot of good time into something I call the Fill-Up Formula (I teach it in the program), and didn’t learn how to build their email list before they were ready to promote the webinar. They didn’t put a lot of time there and didn’t experiment with ads enough. They didn’t split test anything. They quickly wrote some emails and launched it. They didn’t get really good results.
Because I like to be the good cop and don’t like to point out where people are doing things wrong because it makes me feel bad, I’m sensitive in that way, I did have to kind of put on the bad cop hat and ask if they had done “this” or ask how much time they focused on “this” or where there focus was in “this respect”. I have had to point some of those things out.
My advice to you to make it more actionable for you, let’s stop rushing through things and, instead, start smaller. Stop rushing – start smaller. By that I mean to break your project into phases. Instead of a few of those students rushing through my entire program to get it done, if taking a good full 30 days to learn the program another 30 days to launch it was too much, I would have loved to see them do is learn how to do a really well executed webinar presentation and learn what needs to go on each slide and how to transition from content to selling and how to build the images and how much text should be on a slide.
I’d love to see them get really good at a webinar presentation and then maybe just invite their Facebook fans to that webinar, just start out small. Get through it. Do all of that right. Do the part where you are inviting people to a webinar, get them on the webinar with a pre-webinar email phase, and then while they are on the webinar do a stellar presentation with a seamless transition into selling…and that’s all.
Once you start out small you can see things you can fix and can get feedback from people that already trust you, your Facebook fans. You can go in phases and once you have that phase really locked in you can add to it. You can add an email follow-up sequence and you can start running ads to it and stuff like that. I would rather see you build out projects in phases versus rush something to try to get it up and running.
I do live events for my B-School students, anyone who joined B-School in 2015 was invited to two different live events and I just finished one. A woman got on stage and said, “Last night I had a great idea. I know exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going to promote my book in this way and we are at an anniversary stage with my book so I’m going to do this, this, and this. I saw Dale Partridge do a really good book launch where he had an awesome bonus page so I am going to match something like that. Then I’m going to do this and that and that. And I just need to do it all within the next two weeks.”
Right away I looked at her and thought, “You’re never going to do it with your whole heart and full focus.” Two weeks is too short to put a whole book launch together in order for you to celebrate an anniversary of your book.
I asked her if it was really doable, whether she would do a really good job, whether it was important that you do all of the steps by that date or can the date be extended or can it be done in phases. She was moving out of her house so she felt she could only focus on this for a short time and was then going to move. She was going to take the rest of the year off and move her whole family from one house to another place.
It was not a good time for her. I would rather see her do baby steps where she does a little bit of the book promotion, whatever she could do well in the next two weeks, and then plan something amazing for the fifth anniversary of the book where she would go full out and have all of the components and create a strategy, or a book funnel.
If we can start thinking in funnels and slowing down and not rushing things as much we can start creating pretty amazing funnels in our business. But sometimes you’ve got to do phases until you are ready for those bigger funnels. I’d like to see us do more smaller phases in our business until we feel really good.
Let’s all slow down just a little bit because I can promise you this, those internet marketers that you respect and trust and love to hear from, people like Melanie Duncan, Pat Flynn, Derek Halpern, and so many others (I shouldn’t even name some because there are a million I’m not talking about) did not rush every project they started to create when they started their business.
They took time. I know they have because I’ve talked to them about this. They took the time to do it right the first time. If they couldn’t do it right the first time they did smaller phases to get it right still. Remember, I know I’m on a soap box right now so I will step off in just a moment, I’m not asking for you to do small phases so you can get it perfect for the other phases. I’m just saying do small phases so it will get your full attention and focus with your whole heart while you are working on it.
It is never going to be perfect, even when you do small phases. Let’s just kind of throw that out right away. There is no way any of those people that I just mentioned, or any of those that you respect, are going for perfection. I can promise you that.
I am stepping off of that soap box. That was not meant to be. I feel this is a real and raw episode. I’m just kind of laying it all out there for you. But it was important for me to share this idea to stop rushing and instead start smaller to work in phases in your business so that you will start to see some amazing momentum. It all catches up. I can promise you that.
If you’ve been feeling impatient or frustrated in your business but you are taking the time to do it right and go in phases, you are right where you need to be, my friend. Trust in the process.
There you go. I went through a lot. We have our four questions. Hopefully you found them all valuable. I just want to remind you, in question #1 we talked about affiliates. I promised you I would take you behind the scenes with a mini training video of my new WordPress affiliate membership site. It’s super simple so don’t expect anything extravagant. But it’s perfect for anyone that’s never had a really good hub to house their swipe file and ad images and social media images and social media text and all of the stuff they want to give their partners.
This is a really great solution that you can show a programmer and tell them you want “this”. They can do that for you. So I will take you behind the scenes if you go to http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/80download and you can see exactly what we just created.
I mentioned a lot of links and resources. All of that can be found on the show notes at http://amyporterdev.wpenginepowered.com/80. There you will find the link to the Webinars That Convert affiliate survey we created and a few links to other things I mentioned in this episode.
Finally, I want to thank our sponsor, 99Designs. You know when you market online it is really difficult to stand out from all of that online noise clutter. How do you do it? I think you do it through impeccable branding. That includes your logo, your social media cover images, your website, and everything in between. At 99Designs you can get anything designed in just a week for a startup-friendly price.
To give you a little something extra, when you go to www.99designs.com/amy you will get a $99 upgrade for free. That upgrade makes your design contest stand out from all of the others and bumps you to the top of the list so more designers can see your contest. So make sure to check out www.99designs.com/amy.
There you have it. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’ve got some great episodes to come. Episode #82 is going to be all about the mindset you need to cultivate around list building. If you’ve every struggled with list building do not miss Episode #82. And Episode #83 is all about the steps you want to take in order to get list building set up as a foundational piece inside your business. We’re talking list building really soon.
I can’t wait to share those trainings with you. Actually, before we get there, in Episode #81 with my good friend, Lewis Howes, we will be talking about the eight principles of greatness. I want you to tune into Episode #81 next week and find out which of these principles you are totally kicking butt on and which of the principles you need a little tune up with. We will actually dive into all eight principles and you can figure out where you are in that mix.
I’ll see you again next week. Until then, make it a fabulous week. Bye for now.
