Steve: You are listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. And if you are new here, it’s a show where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now I don’t bring on these famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success. Instead I have them take us back to the very beginning and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses.

Now if you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes, and if you want to learn how to start your own online business be sure to sign up for my free six-day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com sign up right on the front page, and I’ll send you the free mini course right away via email.

Now before I begin I want to give a quick shout out to my sponsor Bigcommerce. Now Bigcommerce is a fully hosted shopping cart platform that allows you to set up your own online store in minutes. And as most of you probably know, I teach a class on how to start a profitable online store, and Bigcommerce is actually one of the shopping carts that I highly recommend in my class. Now here’s what I like about Bigcommerce. Unlike other competing platforms, Bigcommerce does not nickel and dime you with every little shopping cart feature. And when you sign up, you immediately have a fully featured and extremely powerful shopping cart at your disposal.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. Today I’m thrilled to have Amy Porterfield on the show. Now Amy is one of the most successful mediapreneurs that I know. And she started up by working Harley Davidson as a cool biker girl. Then she worked for the D. Tony Robbins as a director of content marketing. And then she branched out on her own and has build a seven figure empire selling products and training focused along the Facebook marketing platform. Now she’s the proud author of Facebook “All in One for Dummies,” and to top it all off, she also has a top ten business podcast on iTunes.

Now here’s the thing about Amy and her podcast, first of all, when my wife found out that I was having her on the podcast, she went nuts. And second of all, I don’t normally listen to podcasts, but Amy’s podcast is actually one that I check out from time to time especially when I’m stressed out. And why is that, she’s got this soothing voice that tends to calm me down. So bad day at work, bad day at sales of an ecommerce store, I hit up Amy for some stress relief. And with that, welcome to the show Amy. How are you doing?

Amy: Well thank you so much for having me. That just makes my day.

Steve: I hope that didn’t come across as creepy.

Amy: It’s so sweet. I love it.

Steve: So you know what’s hilarious is that when I was emailing with your assistants to get you on the show, they stressed multiple times that this interview was going to be audio only, so it kind of gave me this impression that you like to do these interviews in your pajamas and underwear, or something like that.

Amy: I have had so many instances where I didn’t know it was video and I’m literally like not ready for camera, meaning I don’t do a lot to get ready when I’m working from home, and maybe I’m just vain and that’s maybe the girl in me. But come on, I got to do my hair, makeup and stuff. So I like to be prepared.

Steve: Yeah I mean just for good measure, I mean my pajamas right now too. So it’s all good.

Amy: Okay, right. So you get it.

Steve: So Amy gives us a quick background story, tell us about your background and how you went from working for Tony Robbins to being an online entrepreneur.

Amy: Well it was a really cool situation where when I was with Tony, I was—what is that?

Steve: I have no idea. You are playing music?

Amy: Oh no, have I? I don’t know what that is. I thought it was you. Okay I am so sorry. That was something on my phone. I don’t know why it kind of went off. I’m not even touching it. I’m sorry; do you want to repeat the question?

Steve: Yeah just start over from what you were going to respond.

Amy: Hear me out. Okay, no brainer. So it was kind of a really cool situation. And what happened was I was the director of content development over at Tony Robbins. And at the time, he was getting into more online marketing, and wanted to do some online marketing launches with his programs. And so we ended up bringing in a bunch of online marketers that were doing amazing things in the space, and a lot of them lived Brooklyn San Diego which was where the headquarters was, but others flew in for the little meeting we had. And a bunch of these guys sat around the table, Frank Kern, Eben Pagan, Jeff Walker, Brendon Burchard, some names you might know, they are just these big guys in the internet marketing world.

I literally kind of was like a fly on the wall. I didn’t realize what I was getting to witness at the time, but these guys went around and Tony said, “Tell me a little bit about your business, what it looks like, what you do?” And instead of talking about their exact products or their exact business, they were talking about their lifestyle, what they loved about what they did, the time they spent with their families, the vacations, where they lived, the downtime, and they did talk about the hard work, but in a way that was just full of passion. And my years popped up like, “Wait a second, this is like a whole new world I’ve never known.”

I was in corporate since I was really young right out of college. So having a business of my own was never even on my radar. And so when these guys were going around and talking, and I just started listening a little bit more, and I instantly got that entrepreneurial bug. I wanted to be a part of it. So for the next year I asked him to move me to the marketing department and work on the launches that these guys were teaching us. So I literally was in the trenches working on online launches, loved every minute of it like couldn’t get enough of it.

And so about a year from then, I also started dabbling with social media, helped Tony with his Facebook page, he took off on Twitter, it was amazing. Tony fell in love with social media. So I thought, “Okay, that’s what I can do.” So taking a lot of baby steps, I ended up going out on my own and doing consulting for social media. My business looks a whole lot different today than it did five years ago, but that’s basically how I got my start.

Steve: I’m pretty big Tony Robbins fan. So if you can give me a quick example of kind of what you did for him before you left, and what you learned from it, that would be great.

Amy: So when I was there, I was in the content development department which meant anything that Tony would think of or create, it would go through our department. And we had a lot of writers, a lot of designers, creators, and we would turn it into his audio programs or live event content or work books, books, anything like that. So all the content went through our department.

Now Tony is a genius in the sense that he always has ideas. He’s very much involved in the content creation, and so there are many, many meetings up to like two or three in the morning working with just, I call it riffing [ph], but he was riffing on all these ideas. We would take tons and tons of notes, and we take all of that together and try to put it into something that made more sense for the audience. And so were really into that content. So I got to travel the world with him, and worked on the content that he would do on stage so e.g. in the Philippines, in Australia. It was a pretty amazing experience.

Steve: Yeah that’s amazing. Did you actually start your own stuff while you were working for Tony, or like was there any overlap?

Amy: Great question. There was overlap. So what I did is I started waking up at 5:00 am every morning, and from about five to seven I would just start learning everything I could learn about internet marketing and starting my own business. So I did that for a good three months. And then I asked to go part time. So I had just gotten married at the time, and I was travelling way too much anyway, so it was a really good segway. And I asked, “Can I work part time on this specific project I was doing.” With some reluctance they said yes, and then I continued to work on my own business, got my first client on the side and built that up a little bit. And then finally I had to take baby steps and big decisions.

So I finally got the nerve to then jump off and go out on my own. It was hard not to look back because it’s funny, when you go out on your own after being in corporate for so long, I feel like all these crazy opportunities come your way, like “Do you want to work for our business, or come work for us, or be our VP or whatever.” And I had to say no to all of it, because it would have totally derailed me which is really hard. But I took that leap and I didn’t look back.

Steve: You know what’s funny Amy is I’m kind of in a similar situation. So I’ve got three online businesses that each make six figures. And I have this job which I recently just went down to four days, and I’m still playing that game. The difference is I’m in the tech sector with my fulltime job. So it’s a little harder to leave, because I don’t want to give that part of my life up.

Amy: That’s really tough. And the fact though that you’ve built three businesses, six figure businesses, while having a full time job, that’s insane. Like that is—I hope you talk about that a lot, because that’s crazy.

Steve: I hope like we can — I’m curious to compare some notes once we get to that point, but one thing I’m always curious about actually was did you leverage any of the audience of Tony Robins, or was your audience completely on your own, nothing related to it at all?

Amy: So I had to completely break off ties in a sense that I couldn’t really leverage that audience, I didn’t really have access to it. However, I definitely took advantage of adding the Tony Robins in my bio. I always talk about him because he is a huge part of my life, and so that is always part of my story which I know helps, I definitely know it helps always.

Steve: Absolutely, so you quit without any incoming place at all, is that…

Amy: Yeah, which I don’t necessarily suggest to everybody. So I did end up quitting. I kind of got to that point that is like bubbling up inside me that I just had to either do it or not do it at all. It just got to that emotional point for me, and I was probably scared I would never do it if didn’t just finally take a leap. So I had a few clients and we had a little bit of savings, but truly nothing that was going to sustain us. So when I went out on my own, I was a hustler, I had to definitely make money. Luckily my husband was making money as well, but not enough that that was just going to completely support the lifestyle we had created. So yeah, that was the most stressful year in my life.

Steve: Okay, and so but you did have some consulting gigs, and then you knew you didn’t want scale that because it’s not — in here it’s not scalable right?

Amy: Exactly.

Steve: So one thing I admire about you Amy is that you are awesome at building a large and loyal audience of followers. And so by the time you started selling online training you probably had a large audience, right?

Amy: By the time I got really serious about it yes. So there were some attempts in the beginning with not a large audience and they were huge failures.

Steve: So let’s talk about back in early days when you had nothing. So how did you get traffic early on, and how did you build up your name?

Amy: So webinars were my tool of choice, I had done some webinars while at Tony Robins kind of behind the scenes, and I knew that I felt comfortable on these webinars, so I ran with that. So I learned early on that if I could create a really good webinar and get really good at the presentation, I was going to be able to sell on that webinar. And so I just studied everything I could about webinars, and I started using Facebook ads early on as well. So I would fill up my webinars with Facebook ads and Lead Pages a company that I love, they say this all the time that webinars are great to sell, but really where they are powerful is growing your email list. And I think that’s how my list grew so quickly.

Steve: So you would go on these webinars without having a product to sell just for the purposes of building up an email list?

Amy: No I wish I had that smart; I didn’t start webinars till I actually had something to sell. Now in early days, I didn’t sell that much, but I did get kind of the experience I was transitioning into a seller on a webinar, I had like a $97 program.

Steve: Okay, and so before you — actually in the early days before you had anything, did you kind of build up an audience part of the Facebook ads?

Amy: Oh, gotcha, okay, so not really and here is why. I had a mentor that would tell me every time we met Amy focus on growing your email list; focus on growing your email list. In that first year and a half I did not focus on growing my email list probably because it scared me, I didn’t know exactly what I needed to do to make that happen.

It seemed very confusing to me and overwhelming, so instead I focused on growing my website. Meaning like writing my blogs every day, and working on my logo and my business card and all of the things I shouldn’t have really been focusing on. Now at the same time I had clients I was consulting, so I had to care of all of those clients which pretty much derailed me from focusing on the things I should have been focusing on.

And so for a year and a half I did not, so I had about 600 people on my list after a year in the business. And then when I tried to launch my first online training program it was a huge failure, just because I didn’t really have anybody that was listening yet. So that’s when I felt the sting and I thought all right, I get it, now I know what I need to do.

Steve: So what was your first product?

Amy: My first product — I’m embarrassed to say this, my first product was how to — I think it was something like how to launch your book online now. I had never launched a book online in my life, however, I had worked with a lot of authors whether it would be Tony Robins or at the time I had worked with the [inaudible] [00:14:20] group, not him individually but his group. So I had worked with a lot of authors, so I though this is perfect, I know social media, I work with authors, I’m going to do have—launch a book online. I should have never done that, I didn’t know enough and I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. So I thought I was going out with something great, but looking back it’s kind of embarrassing.

Steve: So was that launch from your list, or did you use Facebook ads for that?

Amy: So that actually was from my list, so I had maybe 20 people on my first — actually I didn’t even start with the webinar, I started with a tele-summit kind of thing. And I had probably 20 people on that first one I remember, and no sales came through. And then I graduated to webinars.

Steve: Okay, well, let’s talk about your first successful product, how’s that?

Amy: That would be much better, you are trying to get to cry, are you Oprah or something, what’s going on?

Steve: Your first successful product obviously isn’t your gigantic membership course right, it’s probably something…

Amy: What happened was this is actually a good story and a good lesson for those just kind of started now, or trying to get out there and do something. I had started to go to a lot of networking events, good and bad. It took away from me creating my first real successful online training program, but I wanted to get my name out there, and I was working with Mike Stelzner a social media examiner. He had just started his website and he invited me to a few events one being BlogWorld, or at least it was called BlogWorld at the time and [inaudible 00:15:42]. And I would help him carrel people to an interview, he was interviewing a bunch of people for his own show. So I was again like taking a back seat which is what I did at Tony Robins as well, it’s really easy for me to play that role, because I had done it so long.

So I did this with my Mike, he was amazingly wonderful to me and a great mentor, but still I was behind the scenes which I had to be really careful with. So I did that for about two years while I was building up my business, and I met a lot of amazing people. So the good thing about it is that these awesome-awesome people in social media, and online marketing were at these events and one that you find out was Lewis Howes. Lewis Howes and his partner Sean Malarkey, and we became friends — and yeah, so we became friends, and at the next event that we saw those guys again, they had seen some of my webinars and asked me if I wanted to partner with them on a Facebook product. I would create the product, it would be on my content and they had the machine to market it, I still didn’t really have a list.

And so I created this product, super scared to do it, I had never really created a big product like this before. They helped me out a little bit, and we did tons and tons of webinars for it. And it became a huge hit, and it literally is what I felt propelled my business into the Facebook marketing. I got the book deal after that, and I started to create more online training programs. But I definitely got lucky in the sense that someone asked me to partner, now if I hadn’t done the work beforehand, if I didn’t go to the events, if I didn’t constantly blog and put myself out there and create the content, they would have never found me. So I don’t feel like it’s luck, but I think it’s good that I hustled a little bit in those early years.

Steve: So let’s back up a little bit; was Stelzner huge back then when you were working with him?

Amy: He was well known because he had this white paper business, but nowhere near what he is now. And here is the funny thing though, it all kind of comes together, your life experiences, there are some parts I would like to erase, but then I look back and think it all like just is happening for a reason. And when I was working at Tony Robbins, Mike Stelzner — so weird, Morris Smith and I met to talk about…

Steve: Molly Smith, Jesus okay, go on.

Amy: I know, I got really lucky working with Tony, because there was these cool people I got access to. So Molly and I had lunch or coffee to be exact, and we asked her to look over the Facebook page we had just created for Tony. So she had lunch with us and looked over the Facebook page. And then she said, “You should really talk to Mike Stelzner, he’s created creative white papers if you need one for Tony, and we happened to need one. So Mike and I started working together while I was still with Tony, and he wrote this incredible white paper, and I was the middle man between Tony’s edits and Mike’s work that he did. Mike and I became great friends and one day he is like, hey I have got this idea that I’m doing, it’s called social media examiner.

And I remember he showed me the art work and I’m like that’s a little weird, it’s kind of [continuation], and I didn’t know this guy that much, but I really liked him. So he said “Hey, if you do go out on your own, let me know, I could hire you for starts.” So he was literally the first guy that hired me for anything. And it turns out he became this huge success with that, I mean the website is amazing, and what he’s gone on to create is pretty cool. So he wasn’t ads big of a deal then.

Steve: And Lewis Howes and Sean Malarkey, same thing?

Amy: Lewis kind of was a big deal, I think he was born a big deal, so he knew everybody; he was already doing his LinkedIn programs, so he was definitely a big shot. I didn’t know enough about Sean Malarkey to know what he was up to just yet.

Steve: So why did they choose you, like how did you stand out early on like — because you didn’t have an audience, what was their incentive yeah?

Amy: Yeah, so that’s such a great question. So here is a good lesson in that, Lewis had asked me to do a free training for them, like record a video about Facebook for a whole different program they were doing. And because I liked the guys, and I wanted to get my name out there I said yes, and so I recorded something for them. And Sean was watching it, and he just loved my style, and the lesson here is do what you know how to do best. I knew that I was going to do this webinar while I had this training in my blood, I loved to do it. So I knew I would come across one, and so I said yes to it.

So Sean saw it, he is like this girl knows how to teach, like this is really good, come watch this Lewis. And then Lewis watched it, and so when the opportunity came up that, hey we want to publish online for the Facebook product, I was top on mind, because I had done a good job. Now if they told me to write a book, they probably would have not really paid attention. I’m not the best writer, so I put myself forward on what I did do well, and I came across well to other people.

Steve: So that implies you were doing a bunch of webinars before you met these guys, is that…?

Amy: I’m trying to think, I did way more webinars with them than I had ever done, but yes I had started to do my own webinars before I met them.

Steve: Okay, I hate to break this to you too, but I think it was your soothing voice that got them too.

Amy: It was the voice? I’ll take it, whatever works.

Steve: All right, so you got these two — did you have your book deal, like I can’t remember?

Amy: I did not.

Steve: Did not okay, so how did that come about?

Amy: So what happened, it was literally, it was a good year for me. It came about the same time where I was blogging regularly on the social media examiner blog. So they finally had invited me, I kind of moved up the chain over there, they invited me to guest blog, post ads, I was doing it a lot. And this is another way of things, so I was at a networking event, I did way too many networking events in those early years, I don’t think I should have done that many but I did.

And one that I did it was like how to get your mojo on business, or something like that, it was a silly name. And I went to Colorado, it was a great event though, it was just like ten of us girls and we were talking about building a business. I sat next to a woman named Andrea Wall, we hit it off, and we just exchanged like stories about Facebook, because she taught Facebook as well, and I was just getting into Facebook.

And two years later, someone came to her and said we are looking for a co-author of Facebook marketing online for dummies, do you know anybody, and she remembered me and suggested me. They went on social media examiner, saw that I wrote a bunch of blogs on the topic, and invited me into the book, which was huge for me because it really solidified. I became a Facebook expert when that book came out.

Steve: Okay, so I’m getting a lot of key takeaways here, it sounds like networking events was a huge part of your early success okay?

Amy: Right and I find a tease like oh my God I went to way too many, but then when I look back, they did kind of shape some big things that happened to me in those early years.

Steve: So doing these webinars with Lewis and Sean, they probably had huge lists at the time, right?

Amy: They did, they had huge lists, huge affiliate partnerships, and they made me do like, it feels like 100 of them. So when you do that many, you get pretty good at it.

Steve: So when you had one of these webinars, were you adding to your list members of their list?

Amy: I was, so I worked up this deal with them that anybody who bought and anybody who opted in for a webinar, I also got that list.

Steve: Okay.

Amy: So that was huge.

Steve: So that sounds like a pretty big jump start into just your own properties, right?

Amy: It was yeah.

Steve: Okay, and did you use a lot of paid advertising then, or was that something that happened later on?

Amy: I’m trying to think when the paid out advertising really took a big jump. It was probably right around the time that this program FB influence came out. Sean and Lewis used a lot of ads for it, so I was featured in the ads and this is something funny with Facebook ads, especially more so back then, but it still works in similar ways now. My face was everywhere in those ads, and it’s funny how ads were, because if you are own personal brand or if they just hear your business name everywhere in ads, people automatically think you are doing amazing.

So I heard this all the time, your business must be boiling up, I see you everywhere on Facebook, in my head I’m thinking yeah, because I’m paying for it. But it’s just like a perception, and then luckily our perception actually became real, but at the time it wasn’t necessarily real. So something kind of funny happens with those Facebook ads.

Steve: So someone starting out today, would you recommend that they kind of try to take your path, put out good stuff, go to networking events, and try to take advantage of people who are bigger than you and partner with them.

Amy: Not necessarily, so here is why. I think that if I — if someone already told me– if I could do it all over again, the one thing I’d change is, from day one I would start building an email list. I would create some great free giveaways whether it would be a webinar, PDF or cheat sheet or whatever. I have a few of them out there, and I take advantage of Facebook ads 100%, and I build my own list. And I don’t like the idea of having to have a partner like I love Sean and Lewis, they were wonderful to me, but it’s always — I just don’t want to give up any of my content and have to partner with somebody.

So I would go that route first, and then if you do have these opportunities just be really careful what you say yes to and no to, because I said yes to hundred other things that never turned out to anything, which probably took away from me really focusing on my business. So I wish I was a little bit smarter with the yeses, but the yeses that I did say yes to, obviously panned out for me.

Steve: Well, some of these yeses that were bad idea, were they partnerships or were they just products that you kind of developed in — okay?

Amy: They were people asking me to create content for them. So not necessarily partnerships, but hey will you put a free session to my program. I said, yes, to a million of those, and then nothing ever came out of it. When you are new though, you’ve got to kind of experiment to see what’s a good idea or not, and then everything seems like a huge wonderful big idea or opportunity, so it’s hard to say no.

Steve: So any tips on selecting the right opportunities?

Amy: Yes, and we hear some very big tip that I have, and I do this now and I could have done it then if I was smarter at the time. And that is plan out let’s even say your next six months, I like planning out a year, but if that’s too daunting efforts, plan out your next six months. What do you want to promote, what affiliate deals do you maybe want to do, what do you want to create, all that good stuff. And have it very clear, like I literally get into my digital calendar and plan out the space for me to create, and get things done and promote, and it’s all in the digital calendar right now.

So when someone comes to me now and says can you do this? If it doesn’t fit into my six months goal, it’s a no. And so I can put in the banner and say “Hey, let me kind of think about that for the future, right now it’s not going to work.” And if I ever want to come back to it I can, but it’s so much easier to say no when you know what your next six months looks like.

Steve: Okay, I’m glad that coming on this podcast was a little piece of that next six months, awesome.

Amy: It was a yes.

Steve: All right, so I’m just trying to get the chronology correct here, when did you launch your membership site? So you did a bunch of smaller products with Lewis and Sean, right?

Amy: I just did one, the FB influence yeah.

Steve: Oh just one, okay and then that wasn’t a membership site there, right?

Amy: It wasn’t and — so when I think of membership sites, I always think of like you pay a monthly fee to stay in it, and then if you stop paying the monthly fee you are out of it. And I haven’t really ever done it like that, but still I could see where a lot of people think my programs are membership sites for specific reasons will get into that I’m sure. But when I did FB influence I got the confidence, I had this $97 program that was doing well. So that’s when I branched out for the first time and created my most successful program which is the profit lab, and that started in 2012 which is right around the time about six months after FB influence launched.

Steve: Okay and how did you know it was time? So you did that one product with a partner and then you had the confidence, so you decided to do your own thing where you had complete ownership of the product, right?

Amy: Yeah, there was a big part of me, I don’t know where this comes from, but there was a big part of me that wanted my own thing, and I wanted it to be really careful that my revenue was not controlled by other people as well. And I wanted to make it really clear, they were amazing to me, it’s the mindset in my head that I had a partnership and it worried me sometimes.

So that’s when I thought okay, I got into FB influence, it was doing well and then I started to listen to people, we had a private Facebook group. And I saw where they were struggling, what they wanted more of, where they wanted to dive in deeper, and that’s exactly what I created. At the time it was called the Facebook marketing profit lab. Now I just call it the profit lab, because it’s more than just Facebook, but that’s how it was created.

Steve: And by this time when you launched that how big was your list at the time?

Amy: Great question, I’m going to guess, this is so hard to remember, and I have to be careful because I know I have answered this question before. So I don’t want to throw a different numbers, but I think at that time it might have been around like 30,000.

Steve: Okay, so in general do you have any recommendations on what your list size can be before you launch a course or?

Amy: I don’t actually, but I have some recommendations related to this. So Davis [inaudible 00:28:13] a great friend of mine, I love that man. And he when we got into a mastermind together a few years back and I remember him telling me how much money he made, and how big his list was. And he was making — he was just starting, just as much as I was making when I was just starting, but his list was like half the size of mine. So I do feel like I could have definitely done a better job of connecting with my audience, it’s like when you can show your personal side, when you can be yourself, take people behind the scenes, let them in, you are going to have the stride, and I know it sounds like a cliché because we hear it all the time.

But you truly will have this audience that just loves everything about you. And when that happens it doesn’t matter if you have 10,000, 20,000, 30,000, on your list. So I believe that you can have a small list and still make really good money, but you can’t have a small list and make good money if you don’t nurture them and constantly be putting up great content, connecting with them, inviting them in, it really does make a huge difference.

Steve: Hi everyone, I just want to take a quick moment to thank FameBit.com for being a sponsor of the show. Now Fame Bit is the number one market place for You Tube influencer marketing. With over 15,000 you tubers looking to promote brands from beauty, tech, gaming, pets and more. Now video starts as low as $50, and it’s completely free to post a campaign and receive proposals from you tubers. Now if you’ve listened to my podcast before, one of my guests Emmanuel Eleyae used FameBit.com to make over $65,000 in four months with YouTube influencer marketing. And the best part is if you use coupon code mywifequit@famebit.com you will automatically get $10 off. So go to FameBit.com right now and get famous you tubers to promote your products, now back to the show.

Steve: Absolutely, so anyway I have an online course myself which has got about 1200 members at this point. So I thought it would be kind of interesting to compare some notes.

Amy: Yeah let’s do it.

Steve: Kind of like how you structure your classes. So first of all, is your course structured like a library of videos, or do you kind of drip stuff out and just give them little pieces at a time.

Amy: So I used to drip it out for years and then just last year I started to give it to them all at once. So I like both models. Tell me real quick, what is your membership site about?

Steve: It’s called profitableonlinestore.com where it’s a training course that teaches people how to start ecommerce stores.

Amy: Nice. Okay great. So that’s what I do. How about with yours? Do you drip?

Steve: No I don’t drip and I was just curious because what the pros and cons work, because I have never dripped. I have like a library of videos where I have a certain number of videos that you should watch as soon as you sign up, but then the rest of it is just kind of watch what applies to you.

Amy: Okay so that makes sense then not to drip for sure. I was dripping. I actually like dripping better and here’s why. I guess your audience would know what that means, dripping. It’s like–

Steve: We should probably define it real quick.

Amy: So it’s like a module each week. So you are dripping the campaign, like open and a module opens up, and then you wait another week and another module opens up till everything is there. And the reason I like to do that is because I do have a live component to my event on my program where I do live Q&A sessions. And my program is put together in a way that is very specific. Like you need to start with video one and there’s 20 videos, and you shouldn’t be on video 20 till you’ve watched all the ones before it. It builds on each other. So it just makes sense to drip it.

But the thing is we stopped dripping it, because people like to learn at different paces and there’s all of these different types of learners inside my program. Some are more advanced, some are more beginners, and so those that were more advanced they hated waiting and it was frustrating to them. And as soon as I stopped dripping and I actually saw my refund rate go down a little bit as well, because people were getting impatient. They are like, “This isn’t for me,” and then they’d live. Well that totally stopped.

However, I have to be really careful now that I don’t drip. I send out a series of emails and call them, “My on boarding sequence.” For the first 30 days in my program, you are going to hear from me a lot, but I have to be careful. I can’t say, so by now you should be on module II video 1, because then it stresses everyone out because they are not there. So it’s more inspiration and like before and after pictures of some of my students of what they’ve done. But I think those emails have immensely helped as well.

Steve: That’s funny because my return rate was higher than I wanted it to be until I started an email auto-responder sequence too, so I send out emails either everyday or every other day for that first 30 days as well.

Amy: So smart. It dramatically changes your refund rate. I never believed it until this recently.

Steve: So how do you keep people engaged and actually making progress? Like you obviously want them to be successful, right? So what are some tricks that you use for that?

Amy: Okay, so one of the things that I have seen that really works well for me is a private Facebook group. Now because – so this is what I do and this is not for everybody, but it works for me. When you get into my program, I do have a time where the cart is open, we get everyone into the program, and then the cart is closed. So it’s not an Evergreen program. So when you start, if you join at the mastery level, there’s two levels, self-study and mastery. If you join at the mastery level, the first 90 days in that private Facebook group and only mastery are in the private Facebook group, the first 90 days I’m in there every single day Monday through Friday answering questions.

Now it is completely overwhelming in the beginning, because it’s a few hundred people and they have a million questions. And then when they see other people asking questions they are like, “Oh well I got this one, and what about this one, what about that?” So I have to kind of calm myself down in the beginning knowing that it’s going to even add a little bit and it has already which is great. But the questions are so smart, and they allow me to correct their journey when they are going through like, “Don’t take that route. Go here.” Or “I would fix this or that.” Like I’m looking at their opt-in pages and their emails and everything they are doing, and I just feel like this is allowing them to hit success so must faster. So I love the private Facebook group interaction.

Steve: Okay, and what was your motivation for doing this on Facebook as opposed to having your own private forum?

Amy: So I actually have my own private forum for self study. So for self-study I have my own private forum and here’s – it’s just really a personal thing. I don’t love forum functionality. We look through so many forums, we’ve tried to find something that I’m comfortable with, maybe it’s just because I’ve been on Facebook for so long, and I’ve done groups for so long that it’s comfortable for me. But I like the flow of the conversation better inside a Facebook group.

And one thing – this is totally a side not – but when I do, because I have so many people on that group I answer question for, I use Snagit and create quick videos of my voice while I’m looking at let’s say their opt-in page. And instead of typing out my entire answer to them, all they are doing is hearing my voice while I look at their stuff, and it’s so quick for me. And they like that personal touch. So that’s another thing.

Steve: That’s a good tip.

Amy: It really helps me.

Steve: Yeah. Probably doesn’t hurt that you have the Dorset voice going on for you.

Amy: Listen, I’m going to work that voice now, oh yeah.

Steve: So one thing I do at my class I just started a show real quick is I had this point system. So if you are like post in the forums, if you attend office hours you get points that you can redeem for free stuff like a one on one consult and that sort of thing.

Amy: Nice. That’s a great idea, so it keeps them more engaged?

Steve: Yeah it encourages them to kind of post more often and share more stuff.

Amy: That’s actually brilliant. I love it. It’s like the game on [inaudible] [00:35:42] people love. That’s great.

Steve: So I’m just curious also. It sounds like you do launches and then you close it down, launch and then close it down. What was your motivation for doing it that way as opposed to an Evergreen type of sequence?

Amy: So I actually have both. I have one Evergreen program. It’s like a Facebook one on one program. We run ads to it daily and it’s there’s a whole sales funnel. I love that. And then the real truth of it is we started doing these launches like I said back in 2012, and I’ve never made it Evergreen. Now I’m a little nervous to do so, because they’ve been wildly successful for my business, like we almost hit a million dollar launch this last one we did. And we really haven’t dialed in.

And so my fear to be really transparent is if I turn that into an evergreen program, are we able going—are we going to be able to generate that, because there’s such a live aspect. I’m doing live webinars. There’s a countdown timer. The cart’s closing soon. All that urgency like our biggest days during my live launches are the days that the early bird price is going to go up by $100, and the final day that the cart closes, are huge days for us, so that all goes away in Evergreen.

Now I will tell you. This is a mistaken magic on my part and I know it’s a mindset block. And I know like I read Russell Brunson’s book DotCom Secrets and I know if he was sitting here with me he’d be like, “You are crazy, and you should turn that into Evergreen.” And I am open to it. So if you could– I say, if you are starting your business, the more Evergreen automated business you can create, to me the happier you are going to be, because what’s scary– luckily, my launches have always been successful, but let’s say the next one isn’t so successful. I was relying on a certain amount of income, it didn’t come in, and now the launch is over. That to me is a little bit scary. So I don’t like the whole launch model, so I only do two a year because of that.

Steve: So let me ask you this, for your Evergreen product, how do you create incentive scarcity?

Amy: So what we do is, one we are playing with Deadline Funnel right now. And so Deadline Funnel’s tool is a little bit more techie than my taste, but I have some people on the team helping me. But everybody is on their own deadline depending on when you sign up for the webinar, your deadline starts. So you are seeing a countdown timer that no one else is, and so that’s your own deadline.

The other thing is that’s not the only way we are doing it. We are just experimenting with that to see if it’s something we would like for our business. But what I’ve done in the past is we do a 50% discount in email. And so we’ll say okay, you get a 50% discount, here’s the secret code and then we email two more times and we say, okay this is it. This is your last email. Well the code they are getting is to the 50% page, but if you went to my jump start sales page, it’s actually a two hundred dollar product. So it’s the discount code that creates the scarcity.

Steve: I see. I see. Actually this is stuff that David Siteman Garland does.

Amy: Yeah, we’ve talked a lot about that at mastermind. So I got a lot of help from him.

Steve: I use a similar tool called page exploration robot. Same thing I think.

Amy: Page exploration robot.

Steve: The difference is it’s not a hosted solution, so it’s just a word press plug in, there’s no monthly fees, you just pay for it once and it’s…

Amy: Well I like that. Okay, I’ll have to check it out.

Steve: Okay, can we talk a little bit about your launches. I know in the past and I’ve kind of followed you for a little while. You have these really long launches, right. Sometimes they are like weeks and weeks.

Amy: 20 days.

Steve: Yes 20 days. So how do you structure your launch to maximize sales?

Amy: So what we do, there’s a few different things. The way our launch starts is that, we start promoting webinars. I do about five live webinars during those 20 days not including the new affiliates. I don’t do a big affiliates place, or maybe like five or six affiliates will do live webinars with me, but not [inaudible] [0:39:20] them. We do about five to our own list and we spread it out over let’s say the first week and a half, two weeks of the launch. And so what happens is we start running ads about a week in advance, maybe five days in advance of that first webinar.

The day the webinar– the first webinar, is the day the cart opens. So the first webinar I do is the first day the cart opens, and that’s when we do the 20-day countdown. 20 days is arbitrary, it’s just kind of it’s what works for us. From there, we are constantly filling up these webinars to kind of we are using Facebook ads like $40,000, $50,000 worth of Facebook ads over 20 days. And we are filing up my webinars and then a lot of the money also for ads is going to retargeting. Anybody that hits the registration page from my webinar or the sales page, they are going to get retargeted with Facebook ads encouraging them to come back, either check up the sales page or sign up the webinar.

Steve: Okay, before you go on can I just ask how much you pay for you to sign up for a webinar?

Amy: Yes, on average between three to five dollars. So that’s basically…

Steve: It’s in line with what I’m getting too.

Amy: Okay, cool. So that’s basically where we are at. And this last launch I will say, we were closer to the five dollar range and sometimes we couldn’t even get it under five dollars. So we actually stopped some of our ads. So you just never know with Facebook, because we targeted all of the same people again as we did back the last launch, but you just never know. So we run these ads. So that is part of the way we kind of keep this launch going is that we have these live webinars.

In addition, a big play is the early bird special. So I come out with the price. It’s $497 for self-study or $1000 for VIP or mastery. And what happens is about five days before the cart closes; the price goes up to full price. So we are constantly talking about the early bird pricing in ads and in emails. So there’s a huge email play as well. And so we are constantly talking about the email, I mean the early bird special going away. And I close mastery on the day that the price goes up. Because usually—I probably should close it a little bit before, once it gets to around $200 is when I want to close it out. And so once we get close to that we say like we’ve got ten spots left and it’s really true. We really have ten spots left and once they are full we close it. And that’s creates some urgency as well.

So there’s a lot of things going on. One other thing we added for this first time, this last launch we just finished that we’ve never done before are what we call timely bonuses, where I got the bonuses on my sales page. And in addition to that, we emailed twice with the special bonus people didn’t know about. So it gave us an excuse to email one of our words like my swipe file for my emails. You’ve got a packed swipe files. So we ran an ad about it, we emailed about it, and anybody who had already purchased got this bonus, and then we added it to the sales page as a new bonus. So it created some hype around that as well.

Steve: That’s clever. So you bring back people and giving them something for them to come back to your sales funnel.

Amy: Yes.

Steve: Okay. How do you—when you run your webinars, how do you ensure that people actually attend, because I would imagine the conversion rate is much better when it’s live.

Amy: Great question. This is kind of like something I’m super passionate about, because it’s a big deal. So for a while my attendance rate on webinars went down. They were on 20% maybe 25%. But it was low and it was freaking me out, because you are right. If people show up and they are live on that webinar, they are more likely to either buy live on the webinar, or they are more likely to pay attention to the my email funnel after the webinar. So it’s a really big deal that I get people on live.

So what we do now is that we send a series of about four emails and these emails are encouraging you to get on live. “Hey you signed up. We are so excited about it.” And then one of my emails is like, “Let me tell you a story about those who show up live and those who don’t. And this is what I’ve seen.” So I actually just talk about it inside the emails. I might give a case study. I give on three questions to think about before they show up live. So that’s another thing I want them to do again. Show up live, show up live. And I give them a work book to get them kind of excited about what’s to come. So we do a really big push to get people on live.

Steve: It sounds like you give away special treats for people who come on.

Amy: Yes.

Steve: Okay. And so what did that do to your attendance rate?

Amy: So we at least got up to sometimes 32% which is pretty average. I know some people have more than that. But if I’m at 30% show up rate, I feel really good especially because if we’re using go to webinar, each of my webinars I can get about 3000 people to sign up and then I cut it off. So if I get 3,000 people to show up or to sign up for a webinar then I know I’m at least going to get 30 of that a 1,000.

Steve: That is not—so what’s funny is for my class, I have done like the low energy method. So someone just signs up for my list and I have this 30-email sequence that just goes out over time.

Amy: I love that.

Steve: Because I just don’t have the time. I mean I have two kids and then a full time job actually, so I don’t have the time to do this stuff. But it’s really cool to hear, I mean it’s crazy the amount of people that you are getting on these webinars. So what is a typical conversion rate on a webinar that you feel good about when it happens?

Amy: That one’s really tough for me, because I feel like we’ve seen it all over the place. Sometimes 10%, sometimes 20%, it really truly depends on where that audience came from. My list versus an affiliate, versus cold traffic, but one thing we do pay attention to is cost per registrant. And so if we can get that around $20, even higher, we are feeling really good. So that’s the number we started to pay attention to. How much money are we ultimately going to make per everybody that registers for a webinar?

Steve: I see. So you mentioned earlier that $5 per Facebook regist—is that a registrant or someone who actually attends?

Amy: A lead. Just for a lead.

Steve: Okay. I see.

Amy: So if we are paying $5 for a lead for a lead and then we are making $30 per registrant, we are doing good.

Steve: Oh yes, absolutely. I see where you are getting at now. So can you talk a little bit about– and we are running out of time, but can you talk a little bit about like how you actually structure the actual live webinar?

Amy: Yes. So with the live webinar, what I do is, in the very beginning, and I’m very much similar to David Siteman Garland, where I tell people if you are here for this reason or this reason you are in the right place. So I just right away, if you are here to do XYZ I’m so glad you are here, because you are on the right place. And then from there, I often talk about objections and for me it’s usually Facebook no longer works, Facebook ads are too expensive all those things I know my audience is staying right off the cuff. So I address those right away.

And I spend very little time talking about myself. One thing I’ve seen in webinars a lot of people are spending like five slides telling people all about themselves, and most people don’t care. They are there, they want to learn the content, and what I’ve done even more so is I’ve started telling the story about myself through some more information. So I will talk about how my email list has grown. So that’s what people want to hear. They want to know how you did that. And I will say “When I started, this is what it looked like.”

So I’m telling stories through some success that I’ve had. And then I get into the content. I always like to gear my content directly to the product I’m going to sell, and I always like to do steps. So usually it’s seven steps to XYZ. And here’s how much they are related. My last—my profit ad program is “Seven steps to create a social media sales funnel.” Well that’s exactly what I talk in the webinar. The seven steps that are included to create social media sales funnel. But no way would I ever be able to teach so much that they are like, “I got it. I’m good. I don’t need your product.”

I get them so excited about the possibilities of what they could do that by the time I’m ready to sell, it is the most seamless thing, like hey you got two options here, you can try to figure out these seven steps on your own, who the heck has time for that. Or if you like my teaching style, and you think you’ve learned a lot today and you want to dive in deeper with me, then I want to invite you to the profit lab, and here is what we are going to do.

So it’s just a really easy transition, and that’s where most people get stuck is the content in the sell. And usually you hear a pause which I have so done this in the past. And then in a little bit of a cranky voice, and then you go into selling it, you kind of lose out, so it takes some time.

Steve: So do you offer any incentives at the end to encourage in the sign up right now?

Amy: I do, I always do a fast action bonus which is just one special bonus that I only give away if you are live on a webinar. And so that is a really big, we actually recently did this with Lead Pages, I did a big webinar — three webinars with them the last three days, ten paged in the webinars to be exact, to my list.

And we tried two different ways and one of the ways was, hey if you are on this webinar now you get this special bonus, but if you buy in the next few days we’ve got these five different things you get. But you have to buy now and we had a bigger cost per conversion, because of that, so or we had more buyers just to say, yeah.

Steve: More revenue. So that implies that you prefer to give a ways as opposed to giving coupons, right?

Amy: You are right, now you and I are in different worlds, so if I was in ecommerce I would probably do more discounts.

Steve: Interesting, why is that?

Amy: I feel like people — okay, so one of the things, do you know James Wentworth [ph]? Okay, so, James and I were talking and we were talking about what people need to actually join your email list. And I always see this; people come to your website for two reasons one, they need more information, they are looking for details to see if they ready to buy. Two, they are ready to buy, but they want to see how easy you are going to make it for them to buy.

And so this is not always true across the board, but in many cases. So when I’m ready to buy a physical product let’s say I’m interested in [inaudible 00:48:54] I need a new hair dryer. So I know I need a hair dryer, I’m looking online, Amazon is offering it for this, this site is offering it for this, but it gives me free shipping, I’m 100% going with the free shipping.

So I like when I’m going to buy a physical and I’m looking for that product, if you make it easy for me to buy, I’m more likely to do something. So discounts, free shipping, maybe a little extra zing in there, I don’t know what it would be, but if I buy this I also get that. I’m ready to buy now, so I want that, versus you again be told about my Facebook program, you might not think you even need it yet, so let me give you a free webinar cheat sheet to kind of ease you into it.

Steve: Yes, sorry I misunderstood you. I thought we were talking about my digital product here not the physical product yeah, for physical product for sure yeah.

Amy: Okay good, I thought maybe you totally disagreed with me, I’m like whoa, I’m not an expert on products, so you are so…

Steve: I don’t dare disagree with you because you are clearly — you got a book and everything so. So just curios and we are running out of time once again, but how would your structure be different if you were promoting a physical product, which doesn’t have the crazy margins that a digital product would on Facebook?

Amy: It’s so true, so I would still definitely make it play for growing my email list, but what I would do is I probably would do more of the weekly newsletter kind of things that I get from Crate & Barrel and [inaudible 00:50:12] and all that good stuff where I’m interested, tell me what you got, what’s going on. So I definitely would do a different email play every single week.

And then I would personally do more discounts and free shipping in those opportunities. I would also would probably, now this doesn’t make sense, because I should be using more video now. But I probably would even use more video if I had a physical products that I could show people what it is, what it does, what it looks like, all that good stuff. So video would probably be a bigger play for me as well.

Steve: Amy incidentally, that’s the only way I have been able to get Facebook ads profitable.

Amy: Really, that’s so good to know actually.

Steve: I send them to a content page and it’s very heavy on the email sign up forms. And it’s just a piece of content like that uses our products, like demonstrate uses of our products. Get them on the email list and there’s links to actual products that they can buy if they want, but then I market to them on the backend with an auto responder sequence.

Amy: Nice.

Steve: But when I was sending them straight to a product page, it was not well at all.

Amy: Okay, that’s really good to know, so the video really does work well for you.

Steve: Not video, just content, just text based content. We are in the wedding industry, so there’s lots of wedding ideas to get around. But we get them on the email list and then we market to them there.

Amy: Gotcha, okay, I love it that’s great to know, that’s really great to know.

Steve: So Amy I have kept you on for quite a while, thanks a lot for coming on. If anyone wants to check you out and check out your programs, listen to your dulcet voice, where can they find you?

Amy: You can find me at Amyporterfied.com, and I want to tell you this is truly been a pleasure, you definitely have a skill for interviewing, you made it a lot of fun, I can’t believe we’ve been on for an hour.

Steve: I know time flies?

Amy: Really good.

Steve: All right thanks a lot for coming on the show Amy, I really appreciate it.

Amy: Thanks a lot, you take care.

Steve: All right, take care.

What an awesome episode, it still blows my mind how Amy made almost seven figures in a single launch, that is incredible. And in fact after talking to her, I decided to do a webinar of my own and managed to make over $60,000, so her strategies really work. For more information about this episode go to mywifequitherjob.com/episode84, and if you enjoyed this episode, please go to iTunes and leave me a review.

It’s by far the best way to support the show, and please tell your friends because the greatest compliment that you can give me is to write a referral to someone else, either in person or to share it on the web. Now if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100K in profit in our first years business. Go to mywifequitherjob.com for more information, sign up on the front page and I’ll send it to you right away.

Once again I also want to thank HostGator for sponsoring this episode. HostGator is one of the best webhost out there that I recommend if you want to start a blog. And in fact I hosted mywifequitherjob.com on there in the very beginning and loved it. You get 24/7 life support via chat, phone, and email. You can install WordPress in just a single click, and they have an easy to use website builder design services. And the best part is that I’m offering a 30% discount for all podcast listeners. So please go to HostGator.com/mywifequit to redeem the discount, once again that’s HostGator.com/mywifequit.

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Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog www.mywifequitherjob.com.

You are listening to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast, and if you are new here, it’s a show where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners, to teach us what strategies are working, and what strategies are not. Now I don’t bring on these famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success, instead I have them take us back to the beginning, and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses. Now if you enjoy this podcast, please leave me a review on iTunes.

And please join me for a free live workshop on e-commerce which I give on a regular basis. For more information about the workshop, go to mywifequitherjob.com/workshop. And if you want to get a jump on starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100K in profit in our first year of business. Go to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up right on the front page, now onto the show.

Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love, here is your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit Her Job Podcast. In this episode I’m going to be talking to Grant Baldwin. Now Grant is someone who I have known for quite a while, but we didn’t actually meet face to face until recently at NMX. In fact I was actually featured on his podcast, ‘How did you get into that,’ several months ago, where he interviews unique business owners. And not only does he run a popular podcast, but he is also a professional motivational speaker for students. And the man is actually very prolific, I think last year he spoke at over 60 events throughout the year travelling all over the country.

But here is what’s cool about Grant, now giving incredible speeches all across the country is lucrative, but it’s not scalable because you have to physically be there. And after having kids Grant realized that he wants to scale back to travelling to spend more time with his family, so he sat down and he figured out a way to turn his talents and passion into a much more scalable business, and he’s had a lot of success in a very short period of time. So how do you turn motivational speaking into an online business, now let’s find out, and with that welcome to the show Grant, how are you doing today man?

Grant: I’m doing awesome dude, that’s a good intro, I like that that was nice. I’m just going to steal that and take it with me everywhere I go.

Steve: I’ll send you the slides afterwards.

Grant: Please do.

Steve: And so give us a quick background story, tell us about your business, your speaking business at first, and then how you got started with everything.

Grant: Yeah, I have been a speaker, a full time speaker, for about eight years or so and travel like you said all over the — primarily the US, speaking in a lot of different conferences, conventions, a lot of what I did early on was with students, still do out with students, high school, college students. Today we also do a lot with entrepreneurs and small business owners. And so yeah, a lot of it — a lot of what of what we talk about is kind of along the lines of motivation, we also talk a lot about careers and work in general.

So it’s been a really cool gig, and even cool like you eluded to there. It’s fun, but it’s not very scalable. So it’s a very — I had a friend say one time, it’s a very high paying manual labor job, meaning when you go get on stage and you get to run your mouth for few minutes, they are going to give you a good check for it, but you have to actually go there.

So we’ve been in this process of trying to figure out, how do we cut back on travel. Because travel and speaking it’s so a lot of fun, but again it doesn’t scale and you kind of hit that ceiling, how much you can charge, the number of events that you might want to do, as well as like you said, I’m a husband, I’m a father, I have got three little girls. And so as much as I enjoy speaking, it’s way more important to me to be a good husband, to be a good father. So trying to just figure out different ways that we cut back, and we got an online course that we’ve been utilizing to help with that, that’s been going pretty well as well. I think will get into it a little bit today.

Steve: You know real quick, I actually didn’t know this about you, but are you doing this full time — the speaking thing is full time right? You obviously wouldn’t have time to hold down a day job in addition to the speaking gigs, right?

Grant: Correct, yeah, we’ve been self employed for I think — self employed for seven years now, eight years full time. So yeah, when it’s good, it’s really good, and when it’s bad, it’s really bad, and that just kind of the highs and lows of entrepreneurship.

Steve: And I’m just curious about this too, did you ever have a day job, like a corporate job at any point?

Grant: Well yes and no, not like a traditional corporate job. I worked as a youth pastor actually for a little bit in my church. So I did that full time and that was kind of — it was kind of like my first like, real I guess career. And once I decided I want to do the speaking thing, I worked at a security company doing sales work for them. And it was just a 100% commission deal, which was nice because it provided a lot of a flexibility to go out and to travel, and to do booking, and speaking engagements. So that’s kind of — I would say the ball — more of my career has been self employed or not, so that’s been pretty fun so far.

Steve: So I’m just trying — so I actually went through your site today, and I was just curious how everything kind of ties together. I know you have a website and you also have a podcast, are all those things kind of tied together, like how does grantbaldwin.com generate income?

Grant: Yeah, good question, so the bulk of my revenue up until this point has been primarily through speaking. And we’ve got some products that go along with that for a lot of the student audiences that we speak to. So we’ve got a book, we have curriculum that’s used in about 400 high schools right now. And so that — between the product and the speaking, that has been the bulk of our revenue, and again that’s fun, but a lot of the product revenue which scales a little better than the speaking, a lot of the product revenue is driven from the speaking. So meaning I go speak, and I can turn around and sell product there as a result of the speaking.

So again that’s all well and good, but it still kind of comes back to this challenge of scale, and you just — you hit the ceiling that there’s only so much you can do there. So a little over a year ago we started a podcast called ‘How did you get into that’, and part of it kind of came from — a lot of people were asking me that question as a speaker.

People would come up to me after an event and say, “Hey, I’m curious, how did you get into that?” And I found that people always fell into one or two groups, either people wanted to become a speaker, and they are like I’m just curious, like what would be the next steps I would need to take. Or people would be like I have zero interest in speaking, that’s just fascinating that you make a living from that.

And so I found myself asking this similar question to other people that I would meet too, just have something like unique, random type of career. It’s like that’s just — I don’t necessarily want to do that, that’s just fascinating that you do that. So if you can make a living doing that thing, then surely I can figure out my thing.

And so we started the podcast, just interviewing people that were just doing something interesting, things that just caught my attention, things that I was like how do you go by getting into something like that. You are a great example, we had you on Episode 89, and we were talking about that like, how do you create a business selling handkerchiefs, like I didn’t even know like that seems like a very small niche thing, how do you go about getting into that.

And so we’ve had over 100 episodes now just talking with people about this. So naturally as a speaker there are a lot of people who would say, hey, one of the things I’m interested in, in terms of a career and how to get into something is, how to become a speaker. And so a couple of months ago we started a course called ‘booked and paid to speak,’ where we are teaching people about that process of going from I have zero engagements, I just know that I want to speak, I have no idea how to get started. And teaching them how to go about and get that going. So that’s been going really well, that’s been a fun project, and it’s definitely an opportunity to help more people, and to scale both impact and income.

Steve: So let’s talk about your class real quick, so how is it structured and when it comes to public speaking I would think that it’s kind of a hands on sort of teaching requirement, right? Like if I’m going to learn about speaking, I’d probably want someone right next to me kind of looking at me and just telling me what I’m doing wrong and that sort of thing. So how do you kind of turn that into a digital course?

Grant: Yeah, a good question, well there’s basically two sides of the coin. You have the art of speaking, which is the actual speaking itself and being on stage and presenting that, and then you have the business side of it. And so I don’t — within the course we talk a little bit about the art of speaking, but the bulk of it is on the business of speaking.

And so that doesn’t require as much of the personal — the one on one interaction. And so that’s a part I personally enjoy, I really like speaking, but I don’t — all the hand movements, and I walked this side of stage to make this point, and then I do this thing, and then I have this voice inflection, and like all that stuff like I just — like I understand it, but I just I don’t gig out on it, that doesn’t do a lot for me.

And to be honest with you and I guess it’s been a bit difficult for me to kind of reverse engineer. Like people ask me like, why are you a good speaker, how do you become a good speaker? Like you just do it a lot, like I don’t know that there’s any like magic seeker recipe of — if you are speaking in this way, and if you talk like this, and you have a deep breath, and then you get really quiet.

Steve: So like lesson number one, just go on and do it a lot, all right.

Grant: Well, honestly like that’s kind of how I felt, like I think am a really good speaker, but how did I become a good speaker? Because I have done it hundreds and hundreds of times in a lot of different situations, so you just kind of figure out what works and what doesn’t. So how I would reverse engineer that, I don’t know that I have a great answer for it. But what I’m interested in and what I do feel like I have a good grasp on is how you actually get bookings, because whenever I got started as a speaker, I didn’t have a podcast, I didn’t have a blog, I didn’t have a platform, I didn’t have any social media, nobody knew who I was, yet for my very first speaking engagement they paid me $1000 to go give a 45 minute talk.

And so that was just mind boggling to me that — here I’m with no platform, no prior experience, but I went out and I found them, found an existing event that had a need with — and I offered a solution for, and so it was a great fit. And so from that we’ve been able to build a very successful business, we’ve been able to teach other people, here is how you would go about – actually let’s assume that you are a decent speaker, let’s assume you know what you — you have some idea of what you want to talk about, now what? Do you just sit back and wait for the phone to ring which is what a lot of people assume like, hey I’ve built my website or I have a video, I have got it up online. If I build it they will come and they are not coming and I don’t know what to do now.

So instead we’ve told people no here is how you actually find events, here is how you find bookings, here is how reach out to them, here is how you find decision makers, here is how much to charge. And all of those type of pieces that when you are just getting started, you just don’t know. And so that’s a lot more of what we focus on within the course.

Steve: How did you know that there was demand for this?

Grant: Well, partly it was just paying attention to the people that are asking me questions. And I think that’s a great thing for anybody and any type of industry is what are the things that people are regularly asking you questions about? So Steve in your case, I assume people are coming up and going like, okay you built this business on handkerchiefs, and I’m interested in — My wife wants to quit her job and come home, and we’re thinking about doing– even if we made like 500 bucks a month, that would be game changing for us. How would we go about starting an online e-commerce store?

And so when you pay attention to what it is that people are regularly asking you for, then you can start to kind of piece together and say, okay clearly people are viewing me as an expert, I may not be the best in the world in this, but obviously I have some basic knowledge from my experience, and now I can start to put that into work. And so that was part of it for us, was you just over years, you just have enough people that are interested in this subject or topic, and you’re like I think there’s something there, I think we can give this a shot.

Steve: So here’s the piece that I’m missing here, so you mainly give speeches to motivate students, right, and so this audience that you’re talking about, are these people that just follow Grantbaldwin.com, or these priority students that you’re speaking to?

Grant: Correct, yeah. And really on a lot of our business was for students, and today we do a descent amount of adult stuff as well where parents, teachers, educators, business owners, entrepreneurs. This year I’ll be keynoting Fincon, speaking at NMX, those types of events that are also in our space and in our niche.

So there’s plenty of people that are wanting to become speakers that want to speak to students, and they recognize that I have a lot of experience in that, but there is also people who are saying, hey I would love to talk to busy mums, I would love to speak to people about fitness, I would love to talk to people about overcoming divorce.

So there’s a lot of different people in a lot of different niches and industries that are part of the course, who just say hey there is this thing I want to talk about. Here is this life experience maybe that I have had. Here is this group that I really resonate with. I just don’t even know how to begin to find them.

And so the– although a lot of my experience this far has been with students and high schools and conferences and colleges, the process for getting booked in and paid to speak is relatively universal. There is going to be a little nuance differences here and there, but for the most part, the way that you go about getting booked for something whether– for me the way I went about getting booked for Fincon is going to be probably the same way I would go by getting booked for let’s say a college.

So there is a lot of overlap there. It‘s not like you have to do it this way in that industry, you have to do a different way in a different industry. Yeah there may again maybe a couple little subtle things there, but for the most part there is a lot of overlap there.

Steve: So you are getting questions from people who you are giving speeches to, so what’s the next step, like how do you know that all the– all your efforts in creating a class, whether it’s actually going to sell or not, did you do preorders, like how did you kind of launch it, once you had the feedback?

Grant: Yes. So we did the– we did a validation process which is what I would highly-highly recommend and basically what that means is you kind of get a rough idea of what this is going to be. And so for me I wrote out on Evernote, I wrote out a long description almost like what the sales page could be, and just like hey this is a rough idea of what this is going to be, here is what I think are some of the modules we’re going to include, here’s an outline.

And so basically what I’ve done is I had started kind of collecting some emails of people who would had expressed interest in this subject or topic, and then this is in January, this couple of months ago, I emailed– I don’t know maybe 100, 150 of these people and just said– just sent them the link to this Evernote like note that I created and just saying like, hey here is this idea I’m playing with, it’s not built, I don’t have anything, I don’t have anything to show you, but here’s what I’m playing with.

And so I’m thinking about building this and it’s probably going to cost a few hundred bucks, but I tell you what, if you are interested in it, I’m going to take some preorders here and determine even this is even worth of building. And so we had, I think it was 22 or 23 people that paid 197 for basically and in reality as bizarre as it seems they’re paying thin air, they are paying for an idea at that point. Because I don’t have anything, there is not– I have nothing to give them.

But by doing that, now I have some revenue, now I have some– I have people that are interested, people that are bought in, because you’re going to have plenty of people that are like yeah, I’d love that, that’s a great idea, you should totally make that, but people will validate it by actually paying for something. So by having 20, 25 people that would pay for something, now not only has it validated it for me, but also I get their feedback as I create the product.

So what I would do is I would give them an outline and say hey here’s the lessons, here’s kind of what we’re going to be covering, what are the gaps? What are the things that you see that you wish I would be talking about or what are particular lessons that you are really looking forward to or you really hope I go deep, or you really want me to answer these questions.

And so I’m able to get this feedback and I’m creating not what I just think that people want, but I’m also creating something that people actually want in getting their feedback. And so there’s that kind of balance there, because when you are getting started on something like speaking or building an e-commerce site, like you don’t know what you don’t know. But there is also some pieces that like they are really interesting, man I really– this is this something I’ve been wondering a lot about, and so I hope that he covers this within the course.

And so it’s good to get that feedback from actual customers and clients and students that are in the– that are planning on going through the material. So it took me about 60 days or so to create the entire course, and the whole thing is digital, it’s all online, it’s eight modules, 26 video lessons, each lesson is anywhere from 10 to 30 minute or so. And they can– I would say it’s– there are some courses that are built where you have to go through module one in order to get module two, through two to get to three, and they all kind of build on each other. And there’s some of that, but in the same way there’s– it’s a bit of an encyclopedia where if you want to start at G, you can go to G and then you can skip to R and do that.

So you can kind of bounce around of what you need some help with as it relates to speaking, and everybody is going to come into the course in a different place as well, there is going to be some people that have spoken 100 times and some people that have spoken zero. So you have to kind of account for that. So whenever we launched the course in March, we knew we had a– we were getting good feedback from the students that were going through it, it seemed like we had a good product.

The challenge then for I think most people was like, okay how do I– I’ve sold to a handful people who reached out, but do I just sit back and wait for those other people to continually ask me questions on email and then I say oh by the way I’ve got this thing, how do I continue to pitch it?

Steve: Yeah, that was my next question actually Grant.

Grant: Yeah, [inaudible] [0:17:29] and so for us one of the things I was interested in was doing webinars and running Facebook ads to webinars, and I know whenever you and I hang out in Vegas we spend a ton of time chatting about this, because it was something I’d seen some people do and I was intrigued by the concept. And again it seemed like there is a lot of people out there interested in this subject topic of speaking, and so that was kind of the path of travel we’re planning on taking.

Steve: Okay. So let’s dig deeper into that. So you mentioned driving Facebook to a webinar, so can we talk about like who you targeted, how much you spent, how did you structure ads, that sort of thing.

Grant: Yap. So I’m pulling up here just numbers, we got a spreadsheet that we keep on all of this stuff. So our very first Webinar was march 3rd, we spent $535 in Facebook ads. So I think it worked out to about 100 bucks that day or so, from that we had 341 people register which worked out to $1.57 per person registering for the webinar.

And that’s a key number to look at there is how much does it cost to actually get someone to register, not just someone to click on the page or the registration page, but someone to actually register. So that’s a key metric that we watch and we look at. So the ads themselves, we– I went through– I think I used Rick Mulready’s Facebook ads course. And so went through that, just to kind of get a basic understanding, because it shouldn’t be as complicated as it seems. And so you have campaigns and ads and ads all of that jazz, and so I just wanted to get like a descent overview of how like how does this work.

So we created like a really basic ad, a picture of me on stage speaking, I don’t even remember what the hell was with that, but literally just kind of like going through existing ads of other people and just kind of following the template that kind of existed there. And so that went to a lead page where people could actually register for the webinar itself. We tried to do– I think we started promoting it basically five days out, because the further out you promote it, the easier it is for people to lose interest and to just forget about it, or things to come up and life to happen.

So we would try to do five days, is usually what we tried to do, and we tried to have some emails in between there, because if someone registers at day five and it doesn’t happen for five days, then there is a lot, again even an app here where they could go– it could happen that people just lose interest on. So on the retargeting itself, I tried to target people that I knew were speakers, there I targeted interests like public speaking, motivational speaking, toast masters, speaker’s bureaus, speaker’s associations, like those type like speaker related subjects and topics.

As well as again you can target Tony Robbins or Zig Ziglar, or people that are big name motivational speakers, or just speakers in general that maybe people would be following. So I think that’s…

Steve: But those people might not necessarily be interested in learning how to book speeches, right?

Grant: Oh, they are 100% like there is plenty of people who are like I just like Tony Robbins, I have zero desire to do that. So that’s where a lot of it on Facebook is it requires a lot of testing and it requires a lot of just playing around. So one thing that I learnt early on was within ad sets and I’ll try to make this as simple as possible, within ad sets a lot of times what people will do with ads is they will just pick like 10 different enters [ph], and look and lump those all together within one ad set, meaning like you can’t really tell which ads or which interest groups are converted.

I can’t tell if Tony Robbins interest is converting better than public speaking interest, versus motivational speaking interest. So what you would do is you create individual ad sets for each of those interests. So now I can look at just Tony Robbins and I can see how much is it costing me per register of people that clicked from that interest? And I can compare that to just motivational speaking or just public speaking, or just [inaudible] [0:21:35] whatever the other things are.

Steve: How big are there audiences typically for the given amount of ad spend that you’ve been spending?

Grant: They are all going to be– the ones that we’re kind of looking at are usually a couple of 100,000 and how good or bad it is, I don’t know.

Steve: So, for a hundred bucks a day, how much of that audience do you reach in five days– you do it for five days, right?

Grant: Yeah, typically five days, I mean we started at around a hundred bucks a day, now we spend anywhere from like three to four thousand per campaign, which is going to be again like kind of three to five day type period.

Steve: Okay.

Grant: And so it’s – and again a lot of it is testing, just trying different options, trying different ads, different titles, different headlines, different copies, all those different variables there.

Steve: So what’s the process? I mean it sounds like there’s so many different variables there, so what is the process that you guys kind of went through to kind of narrow things down? Obviously you can’t be targeting all these variables all at once, right?

Grant: Correct, yeah, the process I went through is I hired a guy.

Steve: Okay.

Grant: Basically to sum that up, because I did it a couple of weeks on my own just to get a feel for it. Just to figure out like okay, I just need like a basic understanding of Facebook ads, and Power Editor and that kind of stuff, and then hired a guy, and I’m happy to give you his name for the show notes and all that jazz, but…

Steve: Okay.

Grant: So I work with him at just a contract basis. He is doing a lot more testing than I could. So where I might target you know people that are interested in Tony Robbins, and that’s my whole interest, he might look at okay, we’re going to specifically target women who are 35 to 55, on mobile phones in Canada who are interested in Tony Robbins.

Steve: Okay.

Grant: It’s like Jeez, okay, I didn’t know you could — you — like that’s crazy granular, but– so he’s doing a lot more of that, and he can get a better feel for it. So I did it the first few weeks on my own just to get an understanding, and then turned it over to him, and…

Steve: How did it work when you were doing it yourself, just curious?

Grant: Honestly, I didn’t really change much, like I basically just used the same ad, and the same interest. And then if an interest like — if like for example on that first week of my average cost per customer per webinar registering, was a $1.57, again that’s kind of an average between all of the different ad sets there. So some may be a little lower, some may be a little higher.

Steve: Okay.

Grant: But the ones that may be really, really high, let’s say that there was some that were like five, six, seven bucks per register, I could just turn those off. And that way I’m spending more on the ones that are converting better. Or I could just, I could put more money towards those, whether I’m turning the other ads on or off anyway.

Steve: So do you find that the conversion rate is the same across all the different interest groups once they opt in for the webinar? Does that make sense? What the question I’m asking is?

Grant: Say that again.

Steve: So is the convert — like once they sign to the webinar, a percentage of them will convert naturally, buy your class, right?

Grant: Right.

Steve: Is that conversion rate similar across all the different audiences that you’re targeting on Facebook?

Grant: Not really. And so, then you need different tracking pixel for that. So it’s one thing to track what they — what interests people have that they clicked on that they would then register, but then you can also put a tracking pixel on the thank you page of the actual checkout card. So that when someone — that way, you can go back in later into Facebook on the back end and see that okay we had – let’s just, you know, for just round numbers here, let’s say it costs two dollars to get these people on a webinar.

And it costs five dollars to get these people, but the five dollar people converted better so in fact it made us more revenue even though it cost us more upfront. And so that’s why it’s important to have some of those have that tracking pixel on the thank you page. And again I’m not smart enough to figure out how to actually do that, but that’s why — but you do need to have that, so you can figure out not only what — just because it’s cheap to get someone on the webinar doesn’t mean that they’re going to actually buy.

Steve: Okay, okay.

Grant: And so that where you have to also play with the targeting a bit.

Steve: Just curious, what’s an example of audience that’s been converting well for you?

Grant: Women have been converting well. Women interest in…

Steve: It’s because you are a ladies’ man, Grant. Sorry go on.

Grant: I don’t know about that, I don’t know, maybe because I have a wife and three daughters, and so that resonates with the women. But in fact that’s an example of where it has typically we’ve found it costs us slightly more to get a middle aged woman on the — to register for the webinar, but they convert better. So even though it may cost me a little more upfront, I can also generate more revenue on the back end from there, so.

Steve: Okay.

Grant: Again, like, there is — I’m with you, there’s a ridiculous amount of little nuance to variables that you have to play with, so you know we’ve played with variables on what day of the week should the webinar be? Should it be an afternoon or an evening one, should you show a replay. How long should you leave the replay up? Should you do a promo? How many days should that promo run? So there’s just a lot of different variables, but one of the things that I really, really like about this webinar model is that every week you’re doing a new webinar. So every week you have a new opportunity to try something.

Steve: Right.

Grant: Whereas let’s just say you’re doing a big quarterly open close launch. And let’s say you know, parts of it work and parts of it didn’t, but you don’t really get to play with any of it, any of those variables you want to test for another let’s say 90 days or so, but with this — with the webinar stuff, if you’re doing it on a regular weekly or bi-weekly process, then every time you do another one — okay let’s try it this way. Okay let’s do it on a Tuesday night, let’s do it on a Thursday afternoon. Okay let’s try ending it on a Sunday, the promo. Let’s try ending the promo on a Friday. Let’s try this fast action bonus, let’s try…

Steve: Can you share some of your results, like I’m sure it’s going to be different for everybody, but when is the best time that you can run a — you run webinars?

Grant: Well, typically we do either a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I try to do them in the middle of the week, and we do either three o’clock or seven o’clock central time. And so part of the thought on that, and part of the reason why we kind of go back and forth is we have a lot of people in Australia, a lot of people in Europe that are interested, but if you’re doing a seven o’clock, let’s say central time webinar, that’s in the middle of the night in Europe, but it’s first thing the next morning in Australia. But if you do let’s say three o’clock in the afternoon, you’re catching the Europe crowd, because it’s at night there, but it’s the middle of the night in Australia.

So you have just – again like just because weird little nuances that you have to think through, and it’s not like we have massive amounts of business that come from Europe or Australia, but those are little things that you have to keep in mind as well as you just have to consider people’s schedules. Like just within the US, you’ve got four different time zones, and those are always going to fall at different times. You know, you’re catching people around lunch time, or dinner time, or their commute time home. Or they are putting their kids to bed, or — like you just got to think through some of those different types of nuances, and that’s where I think it’s good to test. And so we haven’t seen like a dramatic difference between the two.

Steve: Okay.

Grant: And so some ones we go back and forth. So one week we may do a night time one on a Thursday, and then the next week we may do a Tuesday afternoon one. So…

Steve: Interesting, okay.

Grant: It is just kind of playing with them. So one of the next things we want to try is — and I can’t speak a lot to this, but we’ll just be doing more of an automated evergreen thing, so people can join our webinar when it makes sense for them, or when it’s most convenient for them and time zone becomes less and less of a factor at that point, but that’s some more we’re interested in, but I haven’t gotten…

Steve: Does that mean it’s just a recording then at that point?

Grant: Yeah, so it would be a recorded webinar, so it’s — you know there’s huge, huge value in doing it live, and there’s a lot of people that I’ve — you know I’ve kind of explained what we do to, and they said, oh you should totally do a recording. And I was like yeah, but A, I like doing the live one, and I think by doing a product about speaking, it helps to do a live one.

Steve: Okay.

Grant: And then I think there’s huge value in making that connection. You know as silly, and as simple as it may seem, you know answering someone’s questions live, or giving someone a shout out or saying their name on a live webinar is a huge deal to them, you know.

Steve: Right, yeah.

Grant: And so by doing that live, it builds that connection, and it builds that rapport with people that you just don’t get from a recording.

Steve: How many people typically attend and what’s your conversion rate look like typically?

Grant: Yup, so we have typically right now about a 15 to 20% show up rate, which you’ve got to — which is a low show-up rate, but keep in mind this is a — it’s not bad for cold traffic. Because remember when they sign up from Facebook, they have no idea who I am. This isn’t people that are already on my list, they have no idea who I am, so usually around 15% will show up. So if you have 1000 people register, then we’ll have about 150 that will actually show up. Now from that group, we’ve had anywhere from like 6, 7%, up to — we’ve had a few that are like 15 to 17% that will actually then buy.

Steve: Okay.

Grant: And again there’s a lot of variables that go into that, because we’ve had the course out for three months, but we’ve also been — we’ve raised the price numerous, numerous times. And so the– how a $200 product converts is going to be different from how a $1200 product converts. And so that’s — and again the web bonuses you include or what — how — like if the promo is just up for that night, or it’s up for a couple of days, and what day of the week it ends on, so that’s where some of those different variables come into play.

Steve: And in terms of just your return on Ad spend, what is that typically?

Grant: Yeah, right now — I’m just scrolling over here on my spreadsheet. Right now on average for every dollar we spend in Facebook ads, we’re getting anywhere from like $3.50 to $5 back.

Steve: Okay, wow.

Grant: So…

Steve: That’s excellent, okay.

Grant: Yeah, so it’s pretty good, and it’s, you know, it’s going well, so it’s…

Steve: What’s stopping you from just scaling this even higher?

Grant: Yeah, that’s how we’re playing with is you know if this works at 4000 per campaign, would it work at 10,000 per campaign? But one of the big variables there is the — something about the — and again the guy that I’m working with could explain it better than I could, but just the — like if all of a sudden, you throw a ton of money, then it makes your cost per acquisition higher, and so the algorithm within Facebook kind of messes it up.

So you almost have to start small, and kind of incrementally creep your way up, and Facebook adjusts accordingly, but if you throw a ton of money at it all of a sudden, you’re also going to — like let’s say we’re targeting Tony Robbins, okay? And there’s going to be a — and if he has you know, several hundred thousand, or a couple million likes and people that follow him on Facebook, there’s going to be a percentage of those people that are going to — that will be interested in seeing our ad, and then clicking on it and registering and actually showing up for a webinar.

So early on you can — you’re almost kind of like skimming the cream off the top, but then the longer you keep targeting that, and the more you spend that cost per register will grow, because you’ve already cherry picked the people that were really, really interested in it. And now you have to do a bit more…

Steve: I would imagine you have to constantly find new audiences, because you’re going to exhaust the existing ones, right?

Grant: Exactly.

Steve: They’re going to start see — okay.

Grant: Yeah, exactly, and so if you, like if you continue to just market to just– again just going back to just Tony Robbins, and we are just marketing every single week. Because Facebook algorithm from what I understand is set up where it’s going to initially when you first target a group, it’s going to target the people within that group that are most likely to click and most likely to actually register.

And so overtime, those people are– again you’ve kind of cherry picked those people. They’ve been on the webinar, they’ve registered, they bought, or they didn’t buy or whatever, but then you start getting in to more and more people who historically they don’t click on ads and they don’t register for webinars, but that’s who are you targeting at this point. So you are– the few that you do pick up means that you are spending more to get that person. So that’s where we are kind of at, trying to figuring out before we start spending even more, then we want to make sure that that’s dialed in so that we don’t double it, but then our conversion stays the same, but our cost is much higher.

Steve: Okay. And so just to kind of summarize everything that I’ve learnt from you so far, so you typically do a five day campaign on Facebook. And people who even sign up the day before, if the webinar is tomorrow, that’s fine too, right?

Grant: Totally, yap.

Steve: Okay. And then you are getting like a 10 to 15% show up rate. How many people do you typically like to be speaking in front of at a webinar?

Grant: Well when you are doing a live one, some of it depends on the software you are using. We use LeadPage and its all– and then we use Google Hangouts and Chatroll and that all works out together. It’s a cost effective solution, you pay a couple of bucks for Chatroll and a little bit for Leadpages, but Google Hangouts is free, there’s no limit to the number of people that can be there.

But with Chatroll, one of the things that we’ve noticed at least is that the more people that are on the webinar, the more energy there is. There’s more questions, people feel like it’s an event, whereas let’s say we get 100 people to register for a webinar and we only have ten people on it, like if most people would show up to a webinar and you can clearly see that there’s only ten other people there, you kind of feel like, “I guess this isn’t that big a deal.”

So there is kind of that social proof that goes along with a bigger webinar where there’s a ton of questions coming in, and you can tell that there’s people from literally all over the world. It kind of validates your decision to be there. So I’ve noticed that some webinars we do that have smaller numbers of attendants don’t convert as well as some of the other ones where people feel like they are a part of something that is bigger than themselves.

Steve: Okay so what’s the size that you like to have at least?

Grant: We like to have 100 people. It’s great but you know that’s always the number I kind of shoot for, but even if you have– I think even if you have 50 to 100 people, that’s still a good amount on a webinar. That’s enough conversation and chatter. And a lot of that you can read from– you can kind of get a sense from the how active the chat room is. But if you just have ten people there and you ask, “All right, anybody have any question?” You are going to be sitting in silence for a while.

But just the kind of the law of numbers is that if you got 100 people on there, you are going to get a bunch of questions will start coming in. And again it kind of creates that energy and buzz there. I guess some of this maybe different depending on someone’s particular niche or industry, but for me I like to have 50, 75, 100 people on. So I think that– and again I don’t know if I have as much data to back up it back as much as just kind of gut feel.

Steve: No that’s cool. Just curious, so some people you said 85% of people don’t come, do you guys hit them up again since you have their emails?

Grant: Yeah we are trying to figure out that right now. And that’s something we’ve been playing with some different variables on– they opted in, they expressed interest, so what do we do at that point? Do we just– we are doing our webinar next week. Do we invite them to that one, and then the one after that one? And then do we just keep hammering them? And so right now what we are kind of landing on is we are going to create basically like a 30 day email sequence. I don’t know maybe a couple of emails a week. There’s just more consent and maybe like some soft cells around. And then maybe after 30 days maybe invite them back to another one.

And so we are going to kind of play with that, because that is a huge factor of going like let’s say you have a thousand people register for a webinar. Let’s say you spent $3,000, and let’s say you had ten or fifteen people buy. That’s great but you still had 900 plus there who didn’t buy. So they expressed interest in that subject or topic, so you want to continue to reach out to them without stalking them and without bothering them or harassing them.

And you want to continue to add value to what it is that they came for and what they are trying to learn. And I think you do a phenomenal, a phenomenal job at that of someone signs up for your email list– people need to get on your list just to like see your sequence. That’s what I did. It’s because like you’ve got, what is it like 30 different emails that go out?

Steve: I got 30 right now, but I’m missing the webinar component which is why we are talking Grant.

Grant: Yeah, very well. I’m missing the email part then, so we need to notes for sure, but you do a great job of that like continuing to stay top of mind with someone. And so some of it is they are interested in the subject and topic, but the timing is not right, or the money is not there. But if you stay top of mind and you continue to provide content, then when the timing is right, then they will come back and then buy.

I assume for you, that you can probably speak to this better than I could, there’s probably some people that have been on your list for months and months and months, but they finally buy. I don’t know what the tipping point was, but finally they decided to make that decision to jump in.

Steve: I mean sometimes it takes almost a year really. It’s weird.

Grant: And again some of it depends on where the traffic comes from. Again like right now we have two tiers on the course. The top tier is $1,200 which is a huge, huge financial ask for someone who doesn’t know who I am. Now you have to build– so some of it is just like building that connection and building that rapport and building the credibility and building all that up and sometimes you can do that on a webinar. And we convert fairly well for $1,200 product on a webinar from cold traffic.

But there is plenty of people who are like, “This seems legit but I don’t know who this guy is. I just saw a Facebook ad.” So that’s where having like an email sequence and series beyond the webinar, even if somebody was on the webinar, they really liked it, but they didn’t buy, you know being able to continually just say, “Hey, here’s some other stuff that I think will help you, here’s some stuff to check out. Let me continue to usher you some free stuff. I will send you some free stuff. And then I’ll try and ask again later and see if I’ll catch you at a better time.”

Steve: Can we talk a little bit about the actual webinar itself. How do you structure that?

Grant: So I spend about ten minutes at the beginning talking about some house-keeping stuff and then building some credibility. I’m just telling people, “Hey, we are going to go for one hour. We are going to start right up at the top of the hour. And then I’m going to do Q&A after that.” So kind of establish some of that, “Hey, here’s the chat room. Here’s how this works. I want you to be engaged in that, ask me questions, introduce yourselves, say hi to each other.” I give people an overview of “Here’s what we are going to be covering. Here’s what we are going to be learning.”

Those bullet points that we talk about and the introductions should be the same as what they saw on the Leadpage registration page. So that it doesn’t feel like, “I signed up for this one thing thinking I was going to get that, but then the webinar seems to be about something different.” So it’s basically a lot of the same bullet points that are on the registration page. I’m just using that introduction. So I’m just kind of setting it up. I’m just reminding them, “Hey, here’s what we are covering. Here’s what I’m going to give you.”

Another thing that we do is that we give them a reason to stick around. And so right now what we’ve been playing with is, “Stick around to the end, I’m going to give you just a link to download the slides.” So some people will find huge value in that. So they are like, “I’ll just stick around just until I get that damn link.” And we don’t send them that out in an email. We just wait for– we just give that out at the end of the webinar.

So I spend a lot of time in the beginning, building that credibility and the connection. I show a bunch of pictures. Like if it’s a speaker, I can show a bunch of pictures of “Here’s me on stage, here’s me in front of big audiences. Here’s some numbers. Here’s like the equivalent numbers, the number of times I’ve spoken, number of audiences,” that kind of stuff that just builds some of that credibility.

Steve: So you basically give a background of what you’ve done in the past.

Grant: Yeah you have to. You have to do that otherwise people will, “Why should I listen to you?” You have to give them some context of here’s why you should listen to me. And here’s why I’m knowledgeable on this subject or topic. So from there [inaudible] [0:41:15] meat of the webinar. So we’ll spend 30 to 35 minutes on that or so like really, giving very-very actionable practical stuff.

And so the goal should be that if someone doesn’t buy, even if they click off by the time you get to a pitch or transition to an offer there, they still feel like “That was a really good webinar.” Like it shouldn’t feel like a sales pitch the whole time. It shouldn’t be like, “Okay, I have nine steps to becoming successful as a copyrighter. But I’m going to give you two of them and if you want the other seven you got to buy this.” No. I’m not holding anything back. And I feel like I’m really, really giving a lot of good value in content. So the transition piece then is…

Steve: Hold on in your case, what do you teach them, just as an example?

Grant: Yes, I will teach them how to find decision-makers who are booking events. We talk about how to figure out what to talk about, and who you want to talk to. We talk about your website, your demo videos. Some of those like basic marketing tools that you want to have in place. We talk about contacting the decision maker, like what do you need to ask them, how do you build that rapport with them? How do you send them an email without turning them off?

So like stuff like you could take all, so the transition piece then is, I would say, “At this point you have basically two options, you can take everything I’ve shown you and you can go get booked and paid to speak. It’s exactly what I did in my career to get booked and paid to speak. So you could take that, utilize it and it’s going to win for you.” Or– like there’s still much we haven’t even talked about. Like there’s still so much.

So I’ll get a slide that shows, “Here’s like 10 or 12 bullet points. We haven’t talked about this. We haven’t talked about that. We haven’t talked about– like all these other pieces of speaking we haven’t even covered, we just scratched the surface. And it was so valuable, but there’s still a lot that we haven’t talked about. So like in your case Steve, you can talk about just choosing your product.

And you could spend a whole webinar on that, but we haven’t talked about fulfillment. We haven’t talked about listing on Amazon or eBay or customer service issues, or payment processing. All these other things, like you just can’t just cover all of that. And so that’s where a webinar does good at saying, “I want to give you a bunch of information and some really helpful stuff,” but the reality is that there’s only so much that you can talk about in 45 minutes or an hour.

So then at that point you’ll kind of transition into say, “Hey if you want more, we’ve put together a short cut. There’s a solution for you. And this is a course. I’ll kind of walk through the course and explain what else is in it.

I’ll do some screen showing of the actual course itself which I think has been really helpful for people. And sometimes when you are buying a course, you know like the sales page looks good. It all sounds great. I feel like they are talking to me, but I don’t want to feel like I got been switched,” where on the other side of the curtain it’s like “Oh! I bought a lemon.” You it’s like “I don’t want to feel like this.”

So I think it’s helpful to show like, “Okay, well, here’s where you log in, and once you log in here’s exactly what you’re going to see, and you click here to get this, and if you want this module you’re going to go here.” And so all of that we show here’s the private Facebook group and you can see, like there’s actually people in it, and people are talking, and people are asking and answering questions and getting feedback and advice. So just showing that I think just makes it a little simpler for people to feel like, “Okay, so this is an actual thing and other people have done this, and people are in this, and here’s what I’m going to– here’s exactly what I’m going to get.”

So we kind of layer that on top of each other, build that up, show kind of what the value of this would be. Here’s what the total price would be, here’s what our– here’s what some of the different options are of what you can get it for. And then one of the other things we do is we try to offer some type of fast action bonus. Meaning if people don’t buy then they generally won’t buy, because we– like right then they’re interested, they’re hot, they’re ready to make a buying decision, they’re ready to take a step. And so sometimes they just need that little extra push to go over the ledge and to make a leap and to jump and join.

So we’ve tried this a couple of different ways. So we have done times words like, “Okay, we’re going to a fast action bonus, but you have to buy within the next 15 minutes. And then there’s other times where it’s like we’re going to give you until midnight tonight. And so in terms of the fast action bonus itself sometimes we’ve included, “I’m going to give you a bonus interview you know.” I did an interview with another speaker, and so they’re going some of their best tips and strategies, it’s not within the course, but we’re going give that for people who buy within the next X period of time.

We’ve also– we’ve done I’m going to include a 15 minutes one-on-one Skype call with me or I’ll answer any questions that you’ve got. So that’s a big value add. Another thing we’ve done is because the course is digital we give them something physical and say, “Here are three of my favorite books that I recommend for speakers, and we’re going to ship them all to you.” Not a Kindle, they’re not on PDF but an actual– like the books themselves, we’re going to just send to you. So and that’s easy for fellow members…

Steve: Do you avoid coupons?

Grant: We do, we do them on the webinar and then for whatever that like the promo is, meaning so let’s say just hypothetically let’s say we do a webinar on a Wednesday night, then what we might do is say, “Hi, we’re going to do this fast action bonus that expires at midnight tonight. So they’ve got a couple of hours to make that buying decision.” And then we’ll say, “Now we also have this discount code, this promo code and it expires on Friday.”

So Thursday morning we would send out the replay to everybody because again 85% weren’t there. So we send that to everybody and remind them, “Hey, here is this promo code that you can use.” Then maybe on Friday we’d send like a morning one, “Hey, don’t forget we’re closing tonight,” and then Friday night just a reminder one saying, “Hey, don’t forget this promo code is expiring.”

So you want to have a couple like different points there where they cause people to like to take action, so the closing of the cart, some of the fast action bonus, a discount going away. And I know people are like back and forth on discounts and all that jazz, so one of the things that we’ve been really consistent with is to let people know that whatever price we’re offering right now this is the lowest price you will ever see this. Meaning I don’t want to buy something and then, like if I go to Best Buy and I buy something and then a week later I see that it’s marked down 20% I’m going to be ticked.

So we let people know like, “Hey, we’re not doing some Black Friday deal, there’s not going some half off deal. Like this is the lowest price. And the next time you see this it will– if anything it will be higher.” And so letting people know like you’re not– there’s no magic coupon anywhere else. So I have to always keep that in my mind myself of going like, “We cannot discount it any further than what we’ve given to previous people. So that everybody from here on they’re not going to get a better deal than what anybody before has already gotten.”

Steve: Do you send out the replay?

Grant: We do, and again we’ve tried both. We’ve tried sometimes like over the top expressing in emails leading up to the webinar, and then on the registration page itself like ‘This is going to be live only, there will be no replay, you must show up live.’ Because if people know there’s going to be a replay, then like I don’t have any need to show up live, like why would I, you know.

Steve: Okay, yeah.

Grant: And so we’ve tried both, right now we do a replay, but when people ask beforehand we’re just kind of vague about it and just– because again if they know there’s going to be a replay there’s not a lot of incentive for them to show up live. So I want people there live. I think whenever we– I have to look it up here, I think whenever we– when we did it without a replay, I think we had like a maybe a slight increase in show ups. But then you got again that 85% or whatever the percent is that are definitely not going to buy, because they didn’t even get the chance to see the replay.

So now we do the replay, but where we’re kind of leaning right now is just to leave the replay up or just to leave it shorter. If it’s something or it’s like, “Okay the replay is up and you got seven days to watch it.” Seven days is a longtime. So right now depending on the day of the week that we do it and when we want the cart to close, we try to do like three to five days at the most.

Steve: Okay, Ed I know you run payment plans, do you kind of encourage them to pay in full with these promotions or no?

Grant: Either or. Now with the– a couple of things that we’ve tried is saying, “Hey, we’re going to offer some type of bonus, but it’s only if you pay in full.” Like the discount is for people that pay in full, like for example I’ll give you the exact numbers. We– on the top tier it’s regularly, let me think here, 1397 and then on the webinar we discount at $200 to 1197. And then we have a payment plan of 197 for eight months. So if you want to– if you do the pay in full you can get that $200 discount, if you do the monthly plan there’s no discount, there’s no you know we’re going to take a month off, there’s no $200 deal.

So we definitely try to push people towards the pay in full option. But the reality is also the higher the price point the more difficult– like most people don’t have $1200 lying around ready to pull the trigger on something. So the payment plan maybe more realistic for them in their financial situation.

Steve: Okay, so let’s try to just sum everything up now. Let’s say I’m a new person who wants to start doing this webinar stuff and getting people on Facebook, what would you recommend as an initial budget in my goal for just my first webinar?

Grant: Yeah, well, definitely like all this assuming that you got a product that you know exactly who it’s for, that you’re real clear on the solving a pain, solving a need there. So what I did again is I spend 100 bucks a day on that first webinar with the idea of if I can at that point if I’m selling it for I don’t remember like 300/400 bucks. Meaning like if I can sell basically two, I’m at least break even, and so that was kind of the goal was.

I just wanted at least break even and I don’t want to just to cause me massive amounts. And in fact we have done up to this point– let me see here, we’ve done 15 webinars and we’ve only lost money on one of them. And so I think that was just kind an anomaly, just a little fluke there not that there’s anything that we did or didn’t do wrong. I like our odds right now, and I think that this works, and I think that this can work for other people too. So what I would recommend doing is…

Steve: So you use 500 bucks using your strategy right now for ads right?

Grant: Yeah, $500 and again some of it also depends on the price point for your products. So let’s say that it cost you a couple of bucks to get someone on the list. Let’s say it actually– let’s say you got $100 product, but and even though it only cost you a couple of bucks to get someone on the webinar, let’s say the cost for an actual buyer is let’s say $90, that leaves you only 10 bucks of margin there. So at that point you got to kind of decide like, you know, I did this webinar, I spent all this money, and I had 10 buyers, but I netted $100, is that worth it?

And again everybody is going to be different on that. Again I would say that you take 100 bucks a day, try those Facebook ads, try to get a feel for just how it works, how the webinar process works. A lot of people are very-very intimidated by it. As a public speaker it can be weird, but the same time you’re just you’re talking to people, and they signed up because they were interested in what you have to teach them. They’re interested in what you have to show them.

So put that webinar together in a way where you’re– like put yourself in their shoes, when you were just starting what were the things that you would want to know, what would be things that would give them quick wins, and help them feel like, “Okay, this person, this guy, this girl, really knows what they’re talking about.” And again we made a lot of tweaks along the way, but just starting somewhere and say, “Hey, I’m just going to do this webinar and if we have five people, if we have 50 people, let’s do this webinar and then let’s see what happens from there.”

Steve: Cool man, so I had another question. So have you ever had a webinar where just like 10 people showed up?

Grant: We have done, kind of looking through my numbers here, we have had some that have been like slightly lower attended. The one that we had that like nobody bought was way low attended, I‘m kind of going through a percentage, our show up rates here. I’m looking at 11%, 13%, 20% and then it dips to 7%, and then after that it’s 14, 12, 15, 16, 11.

Steve: What did you do differently, was it just the nature of the ad?

Grant: I don’t know yeah. So in fact we’re like the Facebook ads guys talking to some other people on our team we were talking to and we were all just like just kind of scratching my head like, “I don’t know what happened.” So again like I think you can always in anything with statistics you can kind of throw out the bottom, throw out the top, and kind of get a better idea. So out of 16 if we have one that just we have an abnormally low amount of people show up for whatever reason who knows, you know.

Steve: Yeah, yeah throw that out.

Grant: Yeah, let’s go figure.

Steve: Cool, Grant I actually leant a whole lot just talking to you today, and I want to be respectful for your time because I know you got another appointment after this, but thanks for coming on Grant. And if anyone out there has any questions about this or is interested in public speaking where can they find you.

Grant: Yeah, you can catch me over at Grantbaldwin.com, and if you got any questions feel free to email me grant@grantbaldwin.com. And then if you’re interested in the speaking stuff, all of that is going to be at bookedandpaidtospeak.com.

Steve: Awesome thanks a lot Grant, thanks a lot for coming on the show man.

Grant: Steve really enjoyed it buddy, catch you next time.

Steve: All right take care.

I hope you enjoyed that episode. After talking with Grant I got super excited about doing my own live workshops. In fact I’ve decided to do them on a regular basis now. So instead of offering a free one-on-one consult which is something that I did in the past, I‘m now going to offer free ecommerce classes on a regular basis.

So if you’re interested in learning more about selling online, please sign up at Mywifequitherjob.com/workshop. For more information about this episode go to Mywifequitherjob.com/episode79, and if you enjoyed this episode please and iTunes and leave a review, because when you write me a review it not only makes me feel proud, but it helps keep this podcast up in the ranks, so other people can use this info and find the show more easily and get awesome business advice from my guests.

It’s also the best to support the show, and please tell your friends, because the greatest compliment that you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else, either in person to share it on the web. If you’re interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six-day-mini course where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to mywifequitherjob.com and sign up right on the front page, thanks for listening.

Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog and www.mywifequitherjob.com.

Steve: You are listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast, where I bring in successful bootstrapped business owners to teach us what strategies are working and what strategies are not. Now this isn’t one of those podcast where we bring on famous entrepreneurs simply to celebrate their success. Instead I have them take us back to the very beginning and delve deeply into the exact strategies they used early on to gain traction for their businesses.

Now if you enjoy this podcast please leave me a review on iTunes and enter my podcast contest where I’m giving away free one on one business consults every single month. For more information go to Mywifequitherjob.com/contest. And if you are interested in starting your own online business, be sure to sign up for my free six day mini course, where I show you how my wife and I managed to make over 100k in profit in our first year of business. Go to www.mywifequitherjob.com for more information.

Now before I begin I just want to give a quick a shout out to this episode’s sponsor Bigcommerce. Now Bigcommerce is a fully hosted shopping cart platform that allows you to set up your own online store in minutes. And as most of you probably know, I teach a class on how to start a profitable online store. And Bigcommerce is actually one of the shopping carts that I highly recommend in my class. Now here is what I like about Bigcommerce. Unlike other competing platforms, Bigcommerce doesn’t really nickel and dime you with every little shopping cart feature. And when you sign up, you immediately have a fully featured and extremely powerful shopping cart at your disposal.

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Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast. We will teach you how to create a business that suits your lifestyle, so you can spend more time with your family and focus on doing the things that you love. Here is your host Steve Chou.

Steve: Welcome to the My Wife Quit her Job podcast. Today I have an old time buddy with me on the show, David Siteman Garland. Now just the other day I was looking through my emails to find the first time that we actually corresponded, and it is actually way back in December of 2008, back when David run a local television show in St. Louis.

Anyway today David runs popular blogs/video blogs/teaches other people how to create courses at the risetothetop.com, and he also teaches other people how to create awesome interviews, all of that’s– I think that’s one of your older products, and most recently he launched his own piece of software designed to help people easily put up their own membership sites. Now David is probably one of the more successful online mediapreneurs that I know, and with that welcome to the show David. How are you doing today?

David: I am awesome Steve, that’s so funny that it goes back to December 2008. I remember that, that’s– it’s amazing how time flies, but thank you so much for allowing this email blast.

Steve: Now, yeah, crazy, right, what is that like seven, eight years? That’s crazy.

David: I still– there’s no math, but sure, we’ll call back.

Steve: Well, just a quick aside before we begin, just before the show your assistant asked me whether it was an audio or video interview, and when I replied audio only I got this email saying sweet, no video, I’m not going to shower or wear pants. So…

David: Right and I am wearing shorts, but I did shower because I did cross fit today, so I had to that, but that was more for the sake of my wife and other people, versus obviously this interview.

Steve: Excellent. So give us a quick background story and tell us about– because I know you’ve moved a lot of times, or the course of your career, tell us about the Rise to the Top, how you went from running a local television show, actually even before that, I think you did something related to hokey, right?

David: Yeah, that’s right, so I’m– when we’re doing this interview I just turned 31, about a month ago, I started kind of entrepreneurial journey right out of college, worked for a local– this could sound so crazy because it was, a local professional inline hockey league for a couple of years out of college, and I was– I kind of got broad in there, I kind of do everything all the older people didn’t want to do, and sort of became– I kind of took it over a little bit, over those two years. So I ended up basically running the league, and the sponsorships, doing different things, I ended up talking on the radio like those– it was just as like crazy real world MBA, if you will for a few years after college.

And then I started a television show/website here, I’m from St. Louis Missouri, and I came up with this idea, and it really actually happened I think at a coffee shop, I was sitting with a friend of mine, and I said, you know, it’s just so funny, looking back it’s so ridiculous. I was just like wow what have– how do you create a TV show? Like what if I did a TV show where I interviewed different types of entrepreneurs, and kind of make it—I made it like a talk show into this– but I want to put it on the local TV and I want to put it on the internet.

And I started way back in 2008 because I had sort of generated an interest with entrepreneurship, and that’s kind of where it began, I began– I took all my permits for money basically, and started this local TV show. I went around and sold local adds, and no clue what I was doing, really no long-term plan, or anything like that, and that’s how I got going essentially with my business which has changed a lot up to today now.

Steve: Yeah. So this television show, why did you decide to shut it down in order to go online?

David: Well yeah…

Steve: Was it not getting any traction or?

David: No, no. it got plenty– it was really just an evolution, because what happened was, I interviewed local entrepreneurs, I’d buy some studio space like I would rent studio space, and I would get videographers and stuff like that, and I would interview a lot of local entrepreneurs. And it was a blast, right, people in St. Louis, then I actually traveled around a little bit, I went out to Los Angeles, I went to New York. For example, [Jerry Vinokurov] [ph] was a very early interview on the rise to the top, went actually to Los Angeles, said if you did a million match maker party [inaudible] [00:06:54] like really-really interesting people.

But a shift for me came, and there’s been many shifts sort of throughout my career so far, a big shift for me came actually when I met my wife Mercy, because I realized I didn’t love that model at that time, I mean I said, you know what I don’t really want to travel around everywhere. I don’t really want to be kind of be slapping all over the place, I want to come up with something that’s more– I don’t want to say automated because it wasn’t into that yet, it was more like– well I could shoot this from home.

And that’s when I started doing interviews online basically via Skype, and I remember the very first one I did was with Peter Shankman, who since he sold the company was called Help a Reporter. And I remember we did it, and this by the way before it was super easy to do stuff on Skype. This was video interviews on Skype before everyone was doing video interviews on Skype, right?

Steve: Okay, yeah.

David: So we had really like Jimmy rig this thing up and I don’t– I’m not a techie by the way. So we had people in here trying to help do this stuff, and I remember we did the first interview, and we got– I got like look at it, and edit it, and we realized that we interview– we recorded all of him, and missed all of me, right awesome. So he was super understanding, and we ended up shooting it again, and stuff like that.

But then for the next few years, that’s what I did. I interviewed entrepreneurs– all different types of entrepreneurs online, and that allowed us to also leverage, go from kind of local, kind of ads and sponsors to more internet based ad and sponsors like HubSpot, CITRIC, were some of my sponsors, and we did that for several years until kind of the major shift that happened.

Steve: Okay, and then you had a kid, did something change again after that or?

David: Well that was just– that was recently.

Steve: That was recently, yeah.

David: So, shifts came a few years ago, I mean what happened was first of all, did 500 sport shows, and at one point I was showing five days a week. It was a blur– it was crazy looking back again to as far as these stories, like I said in retrospect are really crazy. But let’s– we got to do it sometimes, you know, and so I was doing this and this is where the shift started to happen. First of all, I started to realize, and this is kind of [inaudible] [0:09:04] obvious speaking here, but when you have something that’s 100% sponsor based, you have very little if any control of your revenue.

Steve: Okay.

David: Right, is that fair to say, because the sponsor could wake up on the wrong side of the bed, someone could get fired, someone could shift jobs, and boom. What if 80% of your revenue is gone over night, you don’t control it, you don’t take control of it. And for me, I started to get more and more worried about that, because people come to me, and start saying David you need to have your own products and programs, right.

And I started interviewing these people, which I have now the mediapreneurs are people that were creating their own online courses and products and programs and selling them, the Andy Porterfields of the world, the Ryan Lees, the Marie Forleos. I interviewed these people and like you know how that CV– it’s probably happen in your life before too where you kind of like have this light bulb of like Oh my God, this is what I’m supposed to be doing, like this is like Oh my God, I can totally resonate with these people, because I started– everything they were saying, I was nodding my head and I was like they were talking about, that they were making amazing revenue.

They were helping people, how cool is that, you’re helping people get results whether it’s in business, fitness, life, whatever it might be, right. They were not tied to a computer doing one-on-one work or working with sponsors 24/7 or anything like that; they had very much that elusive, freedom-based lifestyle we talk about. Not that there’s no work, there’s plenty of work, but you got to do it on your own terms, right.

And also they were– they just had these killer lifestyle, they can just spend time, they could do what they want, they can spend time with kids or family or going out or traveling or sports. Whatever they wanted to do and they just didn’t seem as stressed and as ridiculously bogged down as a lot of the other types of entrepreneurs that I interviewed. You know, they were raising money, they had very high margins in their business, how cool is that, right.

It’s not like I’ve been watching, I don’t know if– have you come to the show Steve it’s called The Profit on MSN base A?

Steve: Yes I love that show, yeah.

David: Amazing show, I love it like I got my wife and we watch it all the time, and it’s really a good show and I always fascinate when someone’s like it’d be great if you made 25% on what you bring in, I mean or 20%. If I bring in a million dollars, let’s just say and I make 200,000 they were saying that’s amazing. I look at this business, and I’m like Oh my God, the numbers are almost reversed.

Steve: Yeah, I know totally.

David: It’s almost reversed, it’s such a high profit margin, and it’s so much fun. So that’s when I started obsessing over online courses and what ended up happening is I launched my first online course, I did hundreds of interviews, thousands of hours of research in about– it was about four or five years or so. I launched my first course called Create Awesome Interviews [inaudible] [0:11:51] introduction, which is teaching people to do what I was doing, right online interviews. So it’s all about that, and I remember the very first launch that I closed, did $19,800 to 400 people, just 400 people on that, that raised their hands and I said, you know that I might be interested in this, right.

And for me, it wasn’t the amount of money, but it was just a life changing shift, to say Oh my God, there’s a tremendous opportunity here to be teaching and to be sharing knowledge with people, and walking them along a path to get them results, and that’s when my business made the shift into online courses.

Steve: Dude, I think we have like the same story, so I started out with my blog with just affiliate advertising revenue?

David: I remember that absolutely.

Steve: And then one of my affiliates, my top affiliates decide to cancel the affiliate program.

David: Yes.

Steve: And so I was like crap. And then I decide to create my own online course too, but your course wasn’t around, so I was sitting there and having to figure everything out from scratch as well.

David: Right, which is a pain in the butt, right, I remember it, right.

Steve: Pain in the butt, yeah. But now you know that revenue just kind of comes in and like you said the margins are like 99% right, so-

David: Right, it’s cool, and a great point that you made there, that’s a scary amount like I’m a big believer in entrepreneurship that you want to have control of your revenue, right you want to have control of it. And for me, that was just crazy, we’re able to build it up, we did 90,000, then 100 and the next launch we did 75,000, then it got over in to six figures. And it grew it grew and then we did more products and more programs over time and kind of perfected the process, and that’s when I really kind of turned the ears and I said, okay, what do people want to know that are following me?

And my subscribers, what do they want to know, what do they want to know more about, and what happened was the dialogue had changed over the years from, hey David how do I do interviews, to hey David how do I create, promote and profit from my own online course, how did you do it, like teach me how to do that, and that’s when we came up create awesome online courses, because we really perfected it over the years, I mean exactly what to do to walk someone through the process of doing this and being successful with it.

And so that’s when we launched that course and that’s when I hate to say the world changed, that’s exactly what happened with us. We– it was our biggest launches to date, out biggest success stories, people come in and say hey, I remember a girl in– Nikki Brown, she’s one of our earlier customers of create awesome online courses. She’s an army wife, she lives in Hawaii, she’s amazing, and she was a part time park ranger and college professor, and a killer copywriter, just absolutely amazing.

Steve: Okay.

David: Watched the course about copy, and did 50,000 dollars on her first launch, you know…

Steve: That’s crazy.

David: And it started propelling and it’s not just about stories like Nikki and I’ve got a thousand stories like that, right, but it’s also the people that make the 2,000 and the 3,000, that could be life changing, right?

Steve: Oh Yeah.

David: And so for us, I’ve done the podcast for five-plus years, and I looked at it and said this is the way we’re going with our business. So I actually– and I was a little burned out too after doing interviews almost five days a week for a long-long time. And so we shifted our whole business to be solely focused on how big people, create and promote and profit online courses, and helping them with that. And that was software and now different things that we are doing, but it’s all based around that very specific niche and need. And we become one of the world leaders at it which I’m super proud of.

Steve: Yeah, I mean, I always recommended your products on my blog and they kind of sell themselves in fact so…

David: Yeah, and I think that was cool is the dialogue kind of changes over time with products and programs right. Because when I started it you did too, same as I think, a lot of it in the beginning is you say, “Hey, here is what I have done and I have gotten my results. And now I want to teach you how to do it, right?” That’s how it starts, it says, “Hey, I have done this, now I’m going to teach you how to do this right?” But over time as you get success in it and testimonials, now it’s like, “Hey, I learned how to do this, I taught myself how to do this, and did it. Now I taught these people how to do it, they did it. And boom you are off to the races, you know what I’m saying is it snowballs over time; you gain a lot of momentum.

Steve: Yeah, hey, Dave one thing that I kind of admire about you is that you’ve always been really great at building kind of large and loyal audiences, followers. And so I was just thinking by the time you started selling online courses you already had a pretty large following, right? And so I was hoping that you could actually take us back the old days of The Rise to the Top first. In the very beginning, how did you kind of get traffic around, how did you build up your name so that when you did some of these launches they had immediate effects?

David: Yeah, that’s a great point and FYI even my first launch I didn’t really even focus as much on email list building back in the days I should have. And now that’s really the crux of the business is your email list and your relationship with said email list, right? With the people on the email list, and so back in the day I didn’t even have all that big of an email list, but the way I got started — and again this is just the way I did it. There’s probably a lot simpler ways, back there, first of all I didn’t know what direction we are going to end up going right? All I knew is we’re doing interviews about entrepreneurs.

So early on, a few things would happen. Number one, I literally started — when I first putting my show up I just– like my own Facebook page, like personal facebook page. That was one of my first kind of little audiences or people just — big people I knew from college, stuff like that or family. Like that’s how it kind of started a little bit. Well I just — my first probably 50 people were people that were probably from my private Facebook page. Or people that I had met — one former fashioner, I would literally send out individual emails Steve, back in 2008 and say, “Hey, I’m starting the show, if you want to know [inaudible 00:17:51], this guy you want to spam anyway. And then I would be like add them all to an email list or something evil.

So I said, “Hey, I’m starting this show and interview people, here is what’s going on with that,” like — kind of like a little like personal PR, like type thing there. And I said, “Hey, if you are interested, let me know and I’ll add you to our email list, I’ll let you know when new episodes come out right, like that kind of stuff. And we started to kind of roll it a little bit that way.

Then what happened is — and again the climate is a little bit different now than it was in 2008 right? Like there was not as many with shows as there are now, it was very kind of new — most of people who had shows were like super techie people, which is not me by any means. Or just kind of people that happen to be on the bleeding edge like myself. And so what ended up happening was people were going — ended up sharing their episodes when they got interviewed. And this was critical, and the thing was, here is the thing that’s important Steve.

I did 500 plus interviews, I never once asked someone to promote, ever, not one time. Because I think that gives a bad feeling in peoples’ mouth when and it was like, “Oh, you just interviewed me so I can promote it.” Do you know what I mean type thing? And so for me I always just said, I sent them a link and I said, “Listen, thank you so much for coming on, I just want to share this with you.” And my thought process behind that was also, hey, if they like it and they watch it, they are like “Oh, this is really cool and well done, and I liked the questions and I liked how I sounded.” Like all that kind of stuff, then they would share it.

And if they share it with let’s say — let’s just use a random example, a thousand people Steve. What I have noticed is let’s say 200 come and watch it and 50 people say, “You know what I liked it so I’m going to subscribe, right?” Well, compound that over time, I mean that happened with almost every interview. We had a lot people share them and that started to grow the list early on. And that was how really I started to build those relationships. And also I think the key that I have always tried to do Steve is talk and type like I’m in real life.

Steve: Yeah, you definitely talk — I mean talking to you, you definitely act like you are doing real life for sure.

David: Yeah, and I think that was the greatest compliment you could ever get. Like I remember when I was speaking at events, I don’t do events and stuff anymore. But when I was out kind of speaking and stuff like that, that was like always the greatest compliment I could get, if someone is saying, “Hey, you are just like you are online, right?” And I think that’s a good teaching moment there because it’s not the case with everyone, let’s just put it that way. So I think that — you hear this, it’s almost cliché, you would agree, but I talk to people like they are friends of mine, and we are having fun, like that’s why I talk to people.

I don’t talk like a marketer or an infomercial, or a CEO or anything like I’ll talk down to people, anything horrible like that, that you wouldn’t want to do. I treat people just like we are friends and it’s a family. And I think that’s helped really kind of grow it over time, because at the end of the day getting traffic and bringing people in is one thing, but it’s really about building the relationship with those people that’s critical.

And now, honesty the relationship a lot of time is built through commerce with us. Do you know what I mean? Like the relationship is built through great content if you will, like meaning a free webinar or a free video series, or some kind of free teaching element. And then really the relationship is solidified by some kind of commitment, meaning purchasing a product or program and then it goes from there. So it’s definitely been an interesting journey for sure.

Steve: As you were doing these interviews, you mentioned that the landscape has changed right? And so I remember you hosted everything on your own site, and you used to collect subscribers that way. So how would that have changed today, like given that there’s podcasting, there’s YouTube, there’s all these other avenues. How would you proceed today if you were to get started?

David: That’s a really good question, what I would do today. It would be similar; there wouldn’t be a ton of changes. For me – it’s [inaudible 00:21:54] with my brand, I could get away with a broader show like I did then. You know what I mean; a lot of times if you were to start today you are going to need something much more specific, because there’s so many broad shows out there, right? Like on entrepreneurship right, like — for example doing a show about people that have online stores right? Like that would be a type of specific thing that would be pretty cool.

But in terms of the marketing, I would definitely obviously be on iTunes again, maybe on YouTube; I have to think that through. But here is the thing that I think would be the biggest thing, Steve is that I would have plenty of calls to action in my podcast, basically doing ads for myself.

Steve: Okay, would you take on sponsors then?

David: Maybe, but I would say that my first — I would say my primary goal though of a podcast besides create content obviously and having fun, would be that I want to get leads and people towards my products and programs, right. So I would want them to walk them down a path towards create awesome online courses, maybe towards Course Cats that you mentioned earlier, which is helping — it’s a theme and a closed website to help people create their own course website on word press without needing an insider to develop or write. So might be walking them down a path to that.

So I think a lot of times I would be promoting free stuff that you would have enter your email address for during the podcast, does that makes sense? So like I would say, ‘Hey, check out this free video series on creating awesome online courses. And send them over there and whatever that link is and they could enter their email and start down a path to get free videos, and then eventually the invitation to join the program. Maybe for cost cut, it might be something that I’m working on now, it could be like a tutorial on how to set up a course from start to finish. Whatever it might be, I would be my own advertiser.

That would be my number one thing I would do, maybe later on I would consider other ads, but I would make sure that I didn’t cannibalize my own sales. Because that’s really at the end of the day what the crux of a business is.

Steve: You know what’s hilarious about all this David is that I had the same struggles with my podcast also. So in my podcast in the beginning and the end I pushed my own stuff, my free mini course, and starting your own online store. And just recently I have been getting offers for sponsorships. And I debated to myself for a long time whether to take this, because the money actually isn’t that great and so right now I’m just trying with a sponsor right now, with the podcast and want to see how it goes.

David: Sure I mean running is fair, and that’s what’s cool about this business and that’s what I love about retreats. If you want to kind of lamp it all together in the media entrepreneurship, is that you could do these experiments. And either it’s not going to be — it’s not like you are building a hotel, and you are taking on like $20 million in a day, and it might not work, right? Like this is not that big of a deal, you give it a shot and you are like okay, it’s either good or not.

And I think in my opinion it’s going to be a numbers thing whether you feel like it’s taking away from your own sales, is it making sense or not, it might, it might not. I mean, a great example Steve is John Lee Dumas entrepreneur on fire. He does a good job of kind of walking in the line with sponsors and his own products and programs.

And I also know for a fact, that his products and programs by far outsell. I mean in terms of his—I mean not even close, but he still does sponsors as well, so there’s not a perfect answer to that, I think you really want to keep your goals in mind. Because the last thing I would want though is cannibalizing my own revenue of my products and programs, because I’m promoting Snookies Cookies or whatever, whatever it might be.

Steve: You always come up with these whacked out names for stuff that I don’t know where you pull that stuff from.

David: I don’t know, neither do I.

Steve: So you know I got an online course myself, which is got about 1,200 members at this point. So I thought it could be kind of interesting to compare some notes on the entire process. So let’s say someone in the audience wants to create their own digital course and this is right up your allay. Walk me through the steps. What is step one and what is the logical progression in doing so?

David: Yeah, there’s really seven steps to creating an online course for sure. And the first step there’s a little bit by depending on where you at right? So the first step that I recommend is that people either know what topic they want to create a course on or they are not 100% sure on what topic they want to create the course on, right? So they either know or they don’t know if you will, when you started yours where were you?

Steve: I knew exactly what I was going to do, just because my whole blog had just one theme to it.

David: Right, which is so awesome, and that’s why you are a genius and the rest of us struggle Steve, right?

Steve: All by accident my friend.

David: Right, but it’s funny because I was actually more in the number two. And a lot of people I talk to, people I have done webinars with and things like that; they are often in number one like you are. They kind know what exactly what it is, I’m like well aren’t you just lucky. But regardless of whether you are number one or number two, here is a couple of tips. If you are not sure exactly what you want to do your course on, I call this the paying attention principle okay. Start thinking about what questions have you been getting online? I had coffee at cocktail hours at — wherever you go via email, on your website, like anything like that start paying attention.

That’s how I started back in the days I said, “Oh my god, people are asking about interviews, it’s been right under my nose the whole time and I had no clue right?” So I would start with that. Another way to look at that is if you have a podcast or blog. If you don’t and you know how to post, someone walks people through stuff that’s gotten really good attraction, I think that’s another good thing to look at there as well.

But regardless whether you are at one or at two, if you have an idea come up with some kind of idea you want to test, right? And what I would recommend doing is actually sending out a quick little survey. And use whatever assets that you have to promote said surveys. What I mean by that is, if you have an email list or a Facebook page, a blog, a podcast, some combination of all those things, if you’ve got none at all you could start with your personal Facebook friends, something like that right?

And I ask them one open ended question, and that question is, what do you want to know more about blank? And blank is obviously don’t type blank, you want to type in the topic. What do you want to know more about opening your online store? Or you could even tailor it Steve, what do you want to know more about growing your online store, it’s very different right, starting versus growing, very-very different. You could start to tailor these things, right?

And what ends up happening, it’s not about getting a thousand responses or anything like that right? It’s just about kind of testing the waters a little bit to get some feedback, get some ideas, get the language used, build some confidence up. Because a lot of times what I realized, is people don’t realize how much they know until some people to fill out their survey.

They are like wait a minute; I thought everyone knew how to set up an online store right, or whatever it might be. And you realize that you have — a lot of people get trapped in this, well, who am I to be an expert, right? Why– I’m not an expert, and I always tell people you don’t — the expert fairy doesn’t come flying in the window at night, and come in and like tap you and like sprinkle you with expert dust and fly away, right? If you done something where you’ve got results and you can share this with other people, you are good to go. This is not like you have to have 50 books and live on a mountain, have you noticed that Steve?

Steve: You know what’s hilarious about what you are saying just now, I remember like when I first created my sales page for my course, and it wasn’t converting that great. I sent out this survey, and then people started telling me what they want to hear. And then I would use their exact language on the sales page and it started to convert better.

David: Right, and you know what’s also interesting about that is a lot of times you will pick up stuff that you didn’t even think about, right? Like for example I’m making this up or let’s just say it’s about an online store and oh my god, like the number one question is which shopping cart should I use, right? Well, now boom, lights should be going off in your head. This could be a great leading point on my sales pages. This could be a free video that I could do, like, “Hey, here’s the best shopping cart to use, I am going to show you exactly how to do it right now, if you want information on the course go here.”

You know what I mean, like there’s a lot of different things you can do with that, because the foundation of this kind of stuff is critical. And I think that’s one of the key things. People want to skip, and just kind of go start recording stuff, let’s focus on the foundation first, and it’s going to make the rest of this process very easy, in all honesty. If we know what to do with, it’s very easy.

Steve: Sure, so what – let’s say you have your idea already. What’s the next step?

David: Do the survey, right.

Steve: Okay.

David: And then the next thing is like to kind of get the core stuff out of the way. So that means; naming, pricing, all that kind of good stuff, right. Like kind of that foundational thing about your course, before you even record it. And I’m a big believer — I love recording stuff first, I mean recording stuff before I sell it, versus, you know kind of doing the hey I’m going to release it as I create it type of thing, because I’ve noticed that actually adds a lot of stress on top of people. Meaning that now they have to worry about marketing and promoting, and they have to shoot module four, and like this and that. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on, so I’m actually a believer that you want to record early on, but…

Steve: Interesting, I actually went the opposite stance, just because I needed a kick in the butt to get working.

David: Yeah, some people do. And that’s why I always encourage people regardless of which way you’re going to do it, and this is important Steve, that you want to get a date on the calendar, right?

Steve: Okay.

David: I don’t give a crap what you need to do, put a date on the calendar. It will be this is it, like it will be done. You know what I mean? And you’ve got to do that, and you’re right. Some people do need that actual kind of pressure and that’s totally fine. But in terms of naming your course, this is something people get hang up on, and it’s a lot easier that they think because at the end of the day, the name doesn’t matter. And this is so important — like the name doesn’t matter.

At the end of the day, it’s going to be about the result you’re getting people and the hook. What’s the promise? What’s the result, you know. How can you — it’s the sexy part of it, if you will. Like what’s the promise of doing your online course? So for example Steve what’s your promise?

Steve: My promise is that you will have an online store up and running and you will be profitable.

David: There you go. And our promise for example, is that you will have an online course, right?

Steve: Right.

David: And you will do a launch, and you will bring in sales. So you want to have something that’s specific, that is if they follow exactly what you do to a T, what’s the result? And if you can’t get that, you don’t have a good topic, you know. And so, the key here is not worrying about the name. I would just grab a .com, you know, and this is — I think it’s important. I don’t — you could have your core website, and put a bunch of courses up on it, I like to have each course being its own little mini-branch.

So — because when you’re — I’m a big believer in charging premium prices, and getting premium customers, and creating premium products, Steve. And the thing is, I love having little mini-brands. So I would love if people grabbed the .com that they want for that course. You know supersexycourse.com.

Steve: Yup.

David: Steveistheman.com course, whatever [Inaudible] [00:33:04]

Steve: I totally agree with you Dave. We like took the exact same path here, go on. Sorry.

David: Yeah, so — yeah exactly, so, right on. So you want to grab a .com, it’s great for branding. It makes things a lot easier. And then in terms of pricing your course, you know people have different philosophies here, and I’ve learnt a lot of this over time and tested it, and there’s really no reason to not be in the top 10% of your market. And I think this is so critical because people say; well I want to try to undercut people, or I want to do a special ridiculous discount, no.

The top 10% of your market is going to attract the very best people, the least problem people, in all honesty, and also people that are much more likely to get results because they are invested in it, right? We’ve always heard, I going to get what you pay for. Right or you’re going to get what you pay for. [Inaudible] [00:33:51] someone over there, so we went to Las Vegas, and we went to the most expensive buffet in Las Vegas, Steve, I don’t know, $200 or so. I don’t know how much, the most expensive one. So I’ll say it’s $200, I’m going to eat a wheel barrel full of lobster if we do that. And the reason for that is I want to get my money’s worth, you know what I’m saying. You want to get your money’s worth.

Steve: Right.

David: And so, I think that’s where you want to think about pricing is towards the top end of the market. Now people calling me and say, David wait a minute, how am I going to stick out from the competition? There’s another course out there on my subject. I can’t believe it. What am I going to do? Should I pack my ball and go home? And the answer is of course not. Other courses on your subject is a good thing, is a good thing. If there’s other courses out there on your subject, that is showing you that you have a hot market, and it’s something that people are willing to invest in, right?

Yet someone in my Create Awesome Online Courses program even [ph] private Facebook group just for customers, and we had someone coming in there and say you know, I want to do a podcasting course, but I’m really nervous about it because I see so many out there. I see this one, is great. I see this one, it’s great.

And so there’s many, many ways that you can stick out from the pack, and one of those ways, besides your own experience and your own teaching style which is going to be unique to anyone else, which is important, but also the fact that you can come up with some kind of gap or specific niche, that you can serve. So for example, this customer we realized that he works really well with people that sell services. Okay, so sell service based businesses. He had more specific terms for that, but I’m just basically blank.

Steve: That’s fine, yeah.

David: Service people, and he wants to teach them how to podcast with also the specific end result of using the podcast to drive to a funnel that will help generate more business.

Steve: Okay.

David: And that’s very, very different than teaching people how to podcast and get sponsors. Or teaching people how to podcast, and just have some fun, and not have a business to associate with it, or this or that. So there’s always ways that you can niche down. And I think that’s one of the key things to think about during these foundational periods of your course is you know can I niche down on topic? Can I niche down on people?

So for example on topic would be something like that, and on people, right? Maybe another one, instead of doing a course on how to generate leads on social media, which is very broad and ridiculous, you might want to do one on how to generate leads for attorneys on LinkedIn. So the more specific you can go with something, and not just have a broad process, the better off you’re going to be when it comes to your course.

Steve: So to summarize what you’re saying, basically you want to get fewer customers, but those customers will be higher paying. So you want to create a premium course to a very tailored audience, right?

David: You want people who will make comment and see your great free content, and when they see a great course, they say; heck, yeah, that is me, or that’s not me at all. You want one or the other, you don’t want that middle ground, it’s kind of for me, I don’t know, maybe, maybe not, right?

Steve: Right.

David: That’s not good. You want people to be like; oh my God. He’s — he or she is talking directly to me, that’s me, that’s me, I’m totally on that. And that’s when you’re eliciting that emotion, where people are going to invest because they want that, they want what you’re offering, versus like; it’s kind of for me and my neighbor, and the puppy down the street, right? And that’s where people start to get themselves in a little trouble.

Steve: Yeah, so one thing that a lot of people get concerned about is if they have a course or something, how do you going to get people to sign up if you don’t have a big audience or a big list already built in. Like you had that luxury when you launched, but your students obviously won’t, right?

David: Well, I got across the board and I always tell people that — and this is the way I design this Steve, I designed it for people that have an email list of some kind. I design my programs– because another lesson here — let this be a lesson is that a course for everyone is really a course for nobody, at the end of the day. So we draw a little line, the same way we say; hey, you might have 50 people, you’ve got to have some people.

Well probably 10X the amount of people that you have after you do a launch of your course, because a lot of people don’t know this, but a launch of your course is one of the best email builders itself, by going through a launch and doing that whole process. But we have had people come in, that have had less of an audience, we just don’t — we don’t — I don’t specifically teach list building. I can give advice and do different things there, because everyone comes at it from a different stage. We want to look for people that have an audience of some kind, and they’re ready to create a course and promote it to that audience, and also grow that audience, you know.

Steve: I see, I got it.

David: But that being said, you know, there’s plenty of ways you can start out with that, and one of the greatest things that you can do is start with a give-away. Start with a give-away. A give-away that you in return, someone gives their email address, you give them something free. A free video series, a free cheat sheet, a free resource guide, a free infographic, whatever it might be, and that can be one of the greatest basis for list building is having this great free give-away, that then — you then promote your butt off on the internet.

There’s a lot of different ways you can do that, right? You can start with again a personal Facebook page. You can start by doing Facebook ads so that seeing if people sign up, right. You could do — you could go out and try to get on podcasts and say, hey I’ve got this unique angle on this topic, I would love to come on and teach it, and then at the end, you get to plug yourself, on the podcast, or whatever it might be, you say, hey check out now my free resource guide, my free cheat sheet, my free video, at this link, right? Same thing with guest blogging, if you could get out there and do it. So there’s definitely a massive hustle element that comes with building a list, Steve. Would you agree with that?

Steve: Absolutely, and so just curious, you have a bunch of students. Have any of them one with really small lists have been successful selling their courses?

David: Absolutely, absolutely. And the funny thing is, I tell people it’s designed for people that have a list of some kind, and people won’t listen to me, all right. They’ll say oh I know, I’m going to give it a shot, and then it’s funny; we’ve created this kind of fourth category of people that buy our course. Like our categories a lot of times are; a blogger, a podcaster that wants to create a course.

Someone that has a course right now and maybe it’s not going so well, or maybe they want to do even better, so they want to come in and learn the process, or someone that does like one-on-one work or some kind of other work and wants to scale it. You know, they speak, they are an author, whatever it might be, and they want to scale it. They come in, but our fourth category has been what I would call the committed beginner.

Committed beginner is the person that comes in and says you know what, I don’t have a list, but I’m going to listen to everything you say, and I’m going to learn a little list building on my own, you know a little bit, and I’m going to go out there and get it. Maybe I might grab an ads program, maybe I’ll do whatever. So, there’s a guy named Brian who just launched a course — this took him less than a month. I’ve got to double check on it, I don’t want to completely quote that, it might be five weeks, you know shoot me. But he started with nothing, Steve. Nothing and we’re talking nothing. And he came in — he came out of the great opt-in, it’s — he actually didn’t want me to talk about his topic all that much, because it’s pretty competitive…

Steve: Yeah, that’s fine.

David: But here’s what I can say about the topic, the topic is teaching people how to pass a specific exam. Does that help?

Steve: Okay, yes.

David: So its teaching people how to pass a specific exam, he literally came up with some free videos, put up an opt-in page, used LeadPages or whatever he did for that, sort of driving some ads traffic, and he actually started a little blog where he’d get some articles, and get some things out there, that are all pointed towards this free object, okay. He got just a few people, now. I want to say it was like 80 people, 70 people. Something like that, walked them then through where they got this free piece of content that made — walked them down a line towards the course, and said; hey, you like this free stuff? Great here’s the course, right. He ended up doing about $3600 already in the sales from this.

Steve: Nice.

David: And realize this is from nothing. I mean what else could you say about what other type of business would allow you to do that so quickly, and so, now he can build on it. He’s built his credibility. He can use those people for testimonials, and he can grow from there. So you know, if you want to start and your assets are relatively low as to who you can reach online, I think a great way of starting, if you know exactly what you’re going to do, and I think that’s important Steve. The problem is when you have someone that comes in that has no audience and no clue what they want to do.

Steve: True.

David: That’s not really who I serve, and I think those types of people just need to get out there and get more experience, in all honesty. But if you know, you’ve got this great thing you want to teach, but you don’t have an audience yet for it, that could be very doable, because that’s when you can start testing offers. Testing ads, hustling your butt off to get on to podcast, and doing guest blogging, that’s where all that stuff can happen. So I don’t want to deter people and say oh my God, I have no lesson out of here, it’s just if you’re clear on your topic, and what you have to offer, there’s a lot of ways you can do that as well.

Steve: Cool, hey David. I wanted to spend at least a couple of minutes talking about standard platforms and kind of throw you a little soft ball here. So let’s say someone wants to create a course, what platform do you recommend, and does there happen to be some sort of plug-in that makes the whole process easier?

David: Yes. Well four — actually four steps is not a plug-in, so we’ll talk about this. This is…

Steve: Okay.

David: This is interesting, so let me back up the story on this, is that when I first started doing courses and teaching courses, it was a massive pain in the butt to get your course website up, right? Because you had two options, essentially, option one is that you get a third party site. So somewhere you pay a subscription or something like that, and you put your course up on there, and you pay every month, but I don’t mind paying every month for something, but there was also a lot of other weird stuff that would happen. Like transaction fees or you couldn’t customize anything.

So it didn’t look really good. Or their sites were not reliable, or they would take your customers and start marketing them other stuff, right. All kinds of stuff, because at the end of the day, remember we talked about control of revenue, it’s the same thing with your course website. You want to have 100% control of your course website. Not 98, you want 100%, right?

Steve: Right.

David: So the best option, what I’ve always used is WordPress. WordPress because then you can build something that’s really cool. But here’s the problem, until now with WordPress has been– I’ve always told people listen, WordPress is great, but to get it looking, you know amazing, and working perfectly, you’re going to have to hire a designer or a developer. Unless you’re a super techie person, which not so many people are. I mean, if you are, and you’ve got great design ability and great tech ability, you are in the very small percentage, okay.

And so what we realized — and you know what, a lot of people do go out and hire people [Inaudible] [00:44:40] and it’s great, but there was never a solution where you could build something that looked like a six figure designer and developer did it, but you did it yourself. Or you could even pass it off to a virtual assistant. That — it’s that easy. So I got to gather with my developer Brad, who I’ve been working with for five years, and I said “Listen, in all honesty, I’m sick of answering the WordPress question.” I get it 50,000 times a week, people say, hey what theme should I use? Like what’s this?

And we’ve tested everything out there, and we just didn’t like a lot of stuff that was out there. It’s either it didn’t look good, or it didn’t work well. And we said we want to make something that is very easy, that people can customize and make stuff look a million bucks, get their course up online, move on with their day. So that’s where we created coursecats.com.

I mean Brad really did all the heavy lifting on this, because he took what he normally charges $5000 to $6000 for and made it into a very affordable piece of software that people can get, where they get this template, they get this theme and template and sales page for their course, and then a guide with videos and everything to walk them through, okay, now you do this, now you get your hosting, now you do that, now here is how we are going to put our videos up. Here is how we are going to do this; here is how you make the colors. And we did a kind of soft private launch for this to my customers, and it sold out in 50 minutes.

And then we opened up another 100 sponsors, sold out less than in two days. And we’ve had people on and this is coolest thing that were procrastinating and there was stock, they said — one guy actually said, he had been waiting for five years which is a little scary for everyone. But they were able to get their courses up over a weekend, over a day, over three days by doing – you know however time they wanted to put into it. They were able to get it up, but not only up but up where it works and it looks good.

So that’s of Course Cats this [ph], so the way that we do it, think of it as a framework Steve. And then we actually have just a few, very-very few, recommended plug-ins, because we didn’t want to reinvent the plug-in game, because there’s actually amazing plug-ins out there now. I mean plug-ins for those who don’t know, what I’m really referring to is what we call membership site plug-in, or a course plug-in.

And what essentially that does is protect your content, so just your customers can see it and it integrates with your payment processor and your email service source kind of things. So we have four that we recommend inside the Course Cats to help people. But you can think of Course Cats as basically as if you would hire a big time developer or designer to create your site and make it look awesome, that’s what it is.

And I’m very-very proud of this because we’ve never done anything big like this before, and it just came from years of people asking for something like this. And we said, “Well, we can’t find a solution that we want to recommend, so we are going to go create our own, and that’s where it’s gone from there.

Steve: So would say it’s a WordPress theme then?

David: Yeah, I would say it’s a theme on steroids because it’s much more I think, because you get a theme, but you also get a full guide to walk you through everything. Not just a theme but also other stuff, like how do you get this plug-in and put in there right, for example. And also– and this was Brad’s idea in all honesty, is that we kind of came up with this thing called the perfect sales page for just for online courses. And you get the sale page as well, all that integrates there at least. So it’s yeah, so that’s a good way of looking at it.

Steve: Okay, and then you recommend membership plug-ins that kind of work with the theme seemlesly.

David: Exactly, we walk you– and at the end of the day you don’t need that many pieces to create a really successful course website. Like we were talk about this the other day, you need hosting and a fresh WordPress installing, we recommend Bluehost for that. Then you get Course Cats and that takes care of like 98% of the rest of it. Meaning now you have got okay, a place to put your marginals, a place to put your bonuses, your downloads, your full website, right? Your sales page, okay, then you simply integrate it with one of the four plug-ins that we recommend, and we are going to add more over time. We are really– we are really specific on that stuff because we don’t want people adding stuff that’s crappy, right? Like we want to make sure that they are like okay, we don’t want to add something that breaks.

We want something that works really well, so we got our recommend plug-ins like WishList and PowerPress and a couple of other ones in there. So that will then protect your content and also integrates with your email provider and stuff like that. And then we talk about your payment processor which could be something like Stripe or authorized.net, and that’s it.

Then you are off to the races and I think that, for me watching my students and myself with this, this could be one of those thing that people waste so much time, not only on, but thinking about right? They are like, what I’m going to use? What’s plug-in? What’s this? What’s that? They drive themselves crazy and it causes what we call techno stress, right? And the thing is we just wanted to alleviate that, we wanted to be like let’s not worry about this. Let’s get it up and get it done.

And now we can worry about the fun stuff like promoting and marketing and creating great testimonials and really helping people. Let’s get past the tech stuff and move on. And that’s really why I want to get pass it because I got — frankly sick of hearing people say well, this plug-in or that plug-in? You know what I mean? This theme or that theme or like well, we are just going to lay it out for you and do a step by step system on what to do.

Steve: I mean this piece of software seems like a very logical progression to what you’ve been going towards, right?

David: Yeah, for sure because it’s simply listening and understanding what people’s problem and ambitions are in my niche and going with it, and making sure that it makes sense. So I think to me, people, one of the mistakes I see out there is people say, “Well, I’ve got my course on creating teddy bears. Now I’m going to create a piece of software on kettle bell swinging.” And you are like, “This doesn’t make any sense my friend. This is like two completely different universes.” So I think the more you can bring things together and make it into a really integrated thing, makes a lot of sense and it’s also a lot of fun.

Steve: Cool man. Hey, we’ve already been chatting for 50 minutes Dave. Where can people find you if they have questions for you either about creating courses or your theme.

David: Yeah, so and I’m sure you’ll have some links you can put whatever you want.

Steve: Yes, absolutely.

David: There are some special wants. One is www.createawesomeonlinecourses.com which you can be, you start with that and Steve I might have a special link for you for all that kind of good stuff. My main site is the www.risetothetop.com which links to everything. So it links to Create Awesome Online Courses, it links to Course Cats. And then of course you can check out Course Cats at www.coursecats.com meow, you don’t have to put in the meow. You don’t have to put in the meow.

Steve: Are you taking new customers for that right now.

David: Yes. So we are actually officially– we are actually in the– well this will be up for a Russian or—yes we are open and customers can come in absolutely right now.

Steve: Awesome dude. Hey, well thanks Dave for coming on the show. I learned a whole lot about online courses and I hope this kind of pushes some people who are sitting on the sidelines over the edge.

David: Awesome Steve. Thanks for having me. It’s been a blessing and a pleasure.

Steve: All right man, take care.

I hope you enjoyed that episode. I have known David for seven years now and it’s been really cool to watch him become a media mogul, and find his calling teaching others how to start online digital courses.

For more information about this episode go to www.mywifequitherjob.com/episode75, and if you enjoyed listening to this episode, please got to iTunes and leave me a review, because when you write me a review, it not only makes me feel proud, but it helps keep this podcast up in the ranks, so other people can use this information, find the show more easily and get awesome business advice from my guests. It’s also the best way to support the show. And please tell your friends because the greatest compliment that you can give me is to provide a referral to someone else either in person or to share it on the web.

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Outro: Thanks for listening to the My Wife Quit her Job Podcast, where we are giving the courage people need to start their own online business. For more information visit Steve’s blog at www.mywifequitherjob.com.