Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en i have this uh student her name is denira and she lives in la single mom three kids really small house not enough rooms for everybody like she is definitely doing it her herself she was working two jobs and she was baking and people would come to her house they’d pick up a birthday cake or a celebration cake or whatever and that’s how one way she was making money long story short cut to creating a digital course and she became really good at caramel candy apples so how to create caramel candy apples and the thing is the caramel was store-bought it wasn’t like her special recipe just people didn’t know what store to go to or what to buy and so she started to create these and sell a digital course now a lot of my students many of them have made seven figures and beyond but i want to talk about her because she’s a woman who made um never made over a hundred thousand dollars a year and now in one digital course launch she made 260 000 selling how to create uh caramel candy apples and she literally was just doing live videos in a private facebook group and i always tell that story because a lot of people listening have never created anything in their life online and they would never even they’re like my idea can’t be good enough or it’s not original enough or whatever and then i think of daenerys single mom living in la making 260 000 on the first time she launched anything now she’s making way more money than that but that’s the kind of stuff that i live for because it has to start somewhere [Music] so amy what’s going on so amy porterfield you’re you’re part of the hubspot podcast network you’re a newish addition right once you join right uh yeah just about two months um and so what would you say you do i mean you do a i’ve read your blog for years and years and years but we had john lee dumas on the other day and i was like i actually don’t know how to describe him and he’s like is he do i just call him a podcaster is he he’s a blogger i’m not actually sure what how i would like because you kind of do a bunch of stuff how would you describe i sound like my mom and dad who have no clue what i do 13 years in so i totally get it i always say that i am an internet marketing expert and i help entrepreneurs still build businesses online and my expertise is to take your knowledge and know-how and turn that into a profitable digital course so digital courses are my area of expertise online okay amazing what kind of digital courses do you have your own course about courses i do which is so meta i know so basically here’s the thing uh 13 years ago i worked in corporate i worked for tony robbins and i was the director of content development got to travel the world and work on content that tony did on stage at like unleash the power within and date with destiny and all those cool events and i was in a meeting and i was called so humbling i was called into this meeting to take notes and i walk into this meeting in this big san diego corporate office and i walk in and it’s a bunch of internet marketers now in my world these are like the grandfather of internet marketers although that sounds very rude to to call them grandfathers but they’re like the mack daddies so it’s like frank kern brendan bouchard evan pagan jeff walker like big name internet marketers that are still doing really big things but they were the leaders in the industry i had no idea who these guys were and here i am at a side table taking notes and tony’s going around asking them about their businesses and what do they do and how are they making money online and all i heard was freedom like these guys were running their own businesses creating digital courses about tons of different topics and i wanted a piece of that so that was like my first entry into this world i knew nothing about and about six months later or so i had left my corporate job and started creating my own digital courses so yeah i’ve got digital courses teaching people how to grow email lists how to create digital courses but ultimately my my mission is to help people leave their nine to five jobs start their own online businesses and i believe digital courses is a way to do that so that’s their vehicle sean you have something to say because i i i just i just say forget courses let’s talk about tony robbins i was gonna say that exact same thing i was gonna i was gonna say uh i was gonna ask you about a couple of the people you mentioned including tony and i was like how much does this empire bring in you think is does this guy just knock it out the park or what i mean it’s seriously what i always say about tony is how if have you guys ever been to one of his events before have you ever seen him on stage i’ve been to two actually i’ve been to yeah i’ve been to two unleash the power within uh okay cool and i’m a kool-aid drinker i love tony robbins absolutely yeah so i’m a fan but i’m also super curious i don’t know the guy or know much about him so i’m still a fan after all these years and how he is on stage like that huge personality all the energy super intense like how he is on stage is exactly how he is behind stage as well i often joke that i might have lost a few years off my life because that was the most intense job i ever had but i wouldn’t change it for the world because i literally got to learn from the master give me an intensity story tony robbins intensity i love what you got so the thing is when before tony the beans wait what you gotta spill the beans you gotta tell us the stories here’s why it’s intense before he goes on stage he literally preps for uh unleash the power within like it’s the first time he ever stepped on stage i’ve never seen anyone prep for anything and be prepared more in my entire life and so we have to write these like stage signs of everything that like he’s going to talk about and the stories he’s gonna touch on and they’re all um handwritten i don’t know why we would hand write these things every time but they’re handwritten and he goes over all of them and then he gets on this rebounder and he’s jumping on the rebounder behind stage getting all the energy in his body the moment what’s a rebounder it’s like a trampoline trampoline like a trampoline yeah yeah and it kind of gets the energy going in your body and he’s reading your stage sign and making sure he’s got everything going and then he just throws the stage sign and he runs on stage and he does his thing but the intense part is when he gets off he looks at who’s ever in his proximity and he’s like all right let’s download he downloads every single time he comes off stage what worked what didn’t it what we could make better what he liked what he didn’t like he wants feedback from everyone and it’s like you are on the entire time i still i’m nervous talking about it yeah you sound like it so he’s been doing this for like 40 years that’s crazy to me because i went to the two things and he does the same exact thing right he does pretty much the same script so i i would assume he’s like you know knows it by the back of his you know like like the back of his hand or whatever by now um so it’s not it’s probably not the material that he’s like trying to remember it’s like he’s just getting himself into that state what about exactly what about besides the performances i think performing is definitely like a high intensity thing what about just like work like the office or were you not around for that part uh meaning tony in the office yeah just like on a normal day non-performance so on a normal day non-performance tony’s not in the office he was when i was there he was at his house he did all the stuff from his own house but he’s always on so i think one thing i took what i learned from tony and i brought into my own business is that one always be prepared over prepare care deeply about what you’re creating he cares deeply about his content so that’s why he’s always getting it in his body even though we’ve done it a hundred times and when he’s not in the office he’s still always always learning always meeting with people learning new things like that meeting that we had he just wanted to know how they were selling their digital courses online because he was gonna start doing that in a bigger way so he’s always pulling from different places it was an incredible experience what about uh so sean i’ve told you about this guy before his name’s eben pagan and we talked we’re sean and i amy are good friends with um craig clemons and he was a copywriter and when we had john lee dumas on the other day i was like john tell me about some of these marketers they’re so fascinating to me and you just named a bunch of them and i’m going to ask you i want to ask you about them but evan pagan’s the most interesting so basically for the listeners edmond pagan i knew him as david d’angelo when i was 14 years old i was a nerd i wanted to learn how to meet girls he had an e-book called double your dating and what he would do if i remember correctly and amy you could correct me i think he would if he would send these really long emails like it felt like 10 000 word text based emails about how to meet women and at the end you could buy like a 14 book and i think craig told us that he was selling like 30 million dollars a year of this book on called double your dating have you heard about this yo absolutely i’ve heard about it and i know he’s a legend in in that area and when he came to the table i think he had moved on from um that part of his business but that’s how he was put on the map and the one thing that i learned from evan really early on is he teaches the strategy that you’ve got to coin your own content like you’ve got to name it you’ve got to put a title to it you’ve got to own it so one of the things that i’ve always done when i’ve created content in my own business is like i’ve got the portafilled process for outlining your digital course and the sweet spot for finding what topic to create for your your course i name everything and own it and it sets you up as an expert and that absolutely came from ebay it’s like so me and sam both teach courses on maven and wes who runs the the course platform for maven she she has one that she calls she’s like you need your spiky point of view it’s like what what’s your spiky point of view and she’s like it’s a point of view that stands out that not everybody would agree with it’s like it’ll poke some people the wrong way uh because it’s different than you know everything that they’ve heard before and so you know that was like the core of when she’s like if you’re gonna teach a course you’ve got to have a spiky point of view otherwise like your course doesn’t really have a a sort of angle to it or a hook to it um that you that other people are going to attach with yeah i love that do you um the other day sean and i were talking about this guy named sam evans because he he had this youtube video called consul uh he has a business called consulting.com and he revealed all of his numbers and he was like we got to 30 million in revenue and then we decided to just be really profitable and we do 10 million in sales with five million in profit with like a team of four people and we were just fascinated because that’s just like a that’s a great great business to own that um what are some other people who who you’ve worked with or that you know of that are like shockingly that you would tell people and you’re like i can you not believe what this person does you would not believe how much revenue they make or that they sell a course uh in this space are there any shocking ones like that so one of the ones that always has shocked me i have this uh student her name is denira and she lives in la single mom three kids really small house not enough rooms for everybody like she is definitely doing it her herself she was working two jobs and she um was baking and people would come to her house they’d pick up a birthday cake or a celebration cake or whatever and that’s how one way she was making money long story short cut to creating a digital course and she became really good at caramel candy apples so how to create caramel candy apples and the thing is the caramel was store-bought it wasn’t like her special recipe just people didn’t know what store to go to or what to buy and so she started to create these and think of denira single mom living in la making 260 000 on the first time she to start somewhere what’s her course name how do i google her um let’s see if you did google de nira caramel candy apples you will absolutely find her i spelled daenerys d-a-n-i-r-a we call her the caramel candy apple queen she’s got tons of press written up about her like she’s she’s a big deal how did she get her customers so who bought this course how did she go sell how much is the course uh i can’t remember a couple hundred dollars okay and the way she got her customers this is what’s cool she made a lot of videos she did a lot of social media where she’d show in her tiny little kitchen with not a fancy camera or lighting like what she was doing and the thing is so if you own a bakery a caramel candy apple is like 10 bucks or more to sell which is really good profit for a bakery and these bakers wanted to find more ways to make more money so she app she appealed to the small business owners who had bakeries or sweets to sell but she also appealed to a lot of hobbyists a lot of people are like i just want to do that that’s cool so she had a mesh of two different audiences but her she basically just made free content and then tons of content lots of videos yep wow and then the way i teach people how to sell courses is with webinars so she she started to do webinars and webinars were away a new vehicle to sell more so she’s gone on to do even more launches you would do a webinar for a three or two hundred dollar thing absolutely so back in the day my very first successful course was called fb influence i did it with lewis howes and together we created this course and launched it was 97 and i probably did 200 webinars to sell a 97 course and it was a huge success because we had tons of affiliates but i would do a webinar even for a 97 course amongst these internet marketers who what’s the largest course i don’t know a course info product what’s the largest business you’ve ever heard of oh geez the largest business i’ve ever heard of i don’t know i feel like people yeah who crushes it the most that’s a that’s a that’s a different way to vote well my girl marie forleo do you guys know marie forleo she has a program called b-school she’s been crushing it for 10 years here’s what’s unique about her course she’s had the same course obviously she makes it a little bit better every year makes the marketing better but it’s literally the same course that she has sold for i think 13 years now once a year she sells this course two thousand dollars now it’s 2500. um but she’s in the game been in the game for 13 years with the same course that to me is badass because she’s probably made like three million dollars a year in profit for like 10 years would you you think that’s crazy yes i do she’s very quiet about her dollars so i don’t know exactly but i’ve seen the numbers the affiliates i’ve been an affiliate for a really long time absolutely she’s crushing it and the thing is and what i learned from tony robbins is you do not always want to reinvent the wheel find something that works double down on it and stop starting from scratch all the time and that’s literally what marie has mastered so she’s someone that i’ve always followed from the get-go is there anyone else um i’m trying to think it’s just that here’s the thing sometimes i don’t think people are totally forthcoming with their numbers i’ve been in the internet marketing space for a long time and sometimes i trust you know what i hear and sometimes i don’t and sometimes people throw out numbers and i’m like yeah but what’s the profit margin on that so i always am a little bit uh unsure about what the numbers really are the affiliate strategy so uh what because i think most people if they’re like oh i’m gonna create my own first my first course they wouldn’t think that oh i should be using affiliate strategy so explain what that works and how big of a tool that is for for you and your like marketing magics do you use that even do you even use that sean do you use affiliates no so i have made millions in my own business be an affiliate for other people but i’ve also had affiliates sell my own courses and to me i think it’s one of the most powerful ways to build a business at least supplement your income if you have courses and memberships of your own so um for i think number one i think 50 50 is what people should be offering i’ve seen a trend recently that it’s gone down to like 30 percent maybe 40 percent 40 60. i’m old school so i really do believe the 50 50 model is the way to go and i think that if you find a course that either you’ve taken or you know your students will get massive value from it but you don’t offer something like that i think absolutely adding an affiliate offer to the mix can supplement your revenue like i have different streams of revenue one of my second biggest streams of revenue is being an affiliate for other people who’s your biggest affiliate um so i the most the money i the most money i’ve made as an affiliate is through marie forleo’s b-school that’s why i’m really close to it and then um jenna kutcher and gabby bernstein are huge and stu mclaren all three are huge affiliates for my program digital course academy they do really really really i think we need to do that sean huh it makes a huge difference it’s like a whole other stream of revenue how many people work at your company so we’ve got 20 full-time employees and then some contractors on the side everyone’s virtual we do a four-day work week and so we work monday through thursday and um it feels like a big team like i feel like that’s a lot of people but i know it’s such a small business still yeah i think that’s a lot why do you why do you need so many people so we do so i have three digital courses one membership and then we do a lot of affiliate marketing and so everybody is just stays in their lane and like i’ve got one person that’s 100 focused on my podcast so that’s all she does she’s podcast producer kylie you might talk to her your team talk to her and so we have a lot of people in specialized roles are you running the company and being the front person or do you have someone help them run the company while you’re focused on content great question so for seven years i’ve had a sidekick helping me run the company she’s a cmo and uh recently transitioned out as a contractor so i’m running it more than i normally do when she’s running marketing i don’t have my hands in all of that that’s a lot of work god damn right now it feels like a lot of work but it won’t it doesn’t always feel that way what’s the name of your podcast so people who are listening can go check it out my podcast is online marketing made easy how big are you guys we’ve been we’ve been we’re getting in um a pissing contest contest with john lee dumas uh i’m a little like i’m jealous a little bit with uh jenna uh jenna kutcher’s totally magic like she’s got an amazing podcast how many downloads total do you guys have um i think in december on the podcast platform uh we had 1.3 or 1.3 maybe million on the podcast platform and then like another 400 on youtube 400 000 on youtube just for the month yeah yeah okay well that’s huge we had a million in january that was our recent was a million in january so wow um we’ve had just just on podcast players or like uh yes yes that’s huge that’s huge so we feel good about it we’ve had 35 million downloads um i used to not download twice a week changing to twice a week has changed things for us for sure i do a 15 minute one on tuesday and a longer one on thursday and that changed the game for us so i’m glad we did that so your epis once was that was once a week before that or once a week before uh december i think it was that we made the change so then you have way more downloads prep so we get between 50 to 100 000 probably average we we we we have three episodes a week sometimes so we’re doing well that’s awesome i think we even we have four sometimes but so our so our episodes like that the episode the downloads per episode is the more important metric i think uh that’s the real metric it’s not the one you you brag about but it’s still new if you actually want to grow that’s the one you care about it sounds like yours is really big that’s how you’re also moving up in the charts i mean i know that there’s like you can’t know everything about that algorithm but one thing i’ve studied enough and i’m competitive enough to know that i’m not moving up in the charts unless my week of downloads are strong and so you guys are doing better than i am because you’re always above me in the charts i pay attention to those things anyone who says they don’t i think they’re live oh we i we totally do i take a lot of pride in charitable numbers but it sounds like you get more downloads per episode than us for sure maybe in my back catalog we do we do a lot of um promoting to our own community about our podcast like we embed it in a lot of things so um we did something really cool in january where we had a quiz and basically you take a quiz to figure out where you are in your entrepreneurial journey and then we gave you 10 episodes that are going to help you along that journey and that blew up so you’re smart okay gotcha you’re smart and you do smart things and then you get good results i understand now this is the secret we uh the the we’ll wrap up a second the best promotion we did recently was we just announced that we’re gonna give five thousand dollars to some person who takes our clips and turns them into tick-tock videos and gets popular and tick-tock and we got i think 30 million impressions on tick-tock in uh like 20 days that is incredible that is super smart that was the only smart thing we’ve ever done whose idea was that one neither of us in fact i literally called it a dumbass idea and on air wait does it fall ben just popped up this is my chance to come back into the episode yes it was my idea shout out to mfm cuts who is uh killing it and and there’s many others i follow them all now on tick tock my tick tock feet is now just clips of myself and sam uh you know over and over again it’s great that’s awesome i’m going to check that out wait how do i find it yeah so here’s what we did but we screwed up or i screwed up so it’s uh what was the hashtag ben mfm shorts and ms all right so if you go on tick-tock and you search mfm clips with an s you’ll find it but you’ll also find because i read the what we were announcing it i accidentally one time i said clips with an s and then i said clip without an s so you if you if you search both of those words you’ll find different ones and also if you just google mfm clip you’re going to get porn because it stands for male female male and so you’ll get a whole different set of clips if you go to google so that you know it’s right there’s something for everybody over here we’re very inclusive when i was just starting out my name i think it was my maiden name now that i think about it it was a porn star a ballard so i think it was someone named amy ballard was a porn star when i uh like 13 years ago or something and i was like mortified every time i searched my name there she was does this sound familiar ben does that ring a bell no comment ben saying no comment i see yeah that’s crazy the yeah that sucks that definitely sucks it’s not an issue anymore i’ve got a new last name i used to file this guy on twitter named jeff f stein um and so it could be worse no i tweeted at that guy i was like ah brutal name and then he got so mad at me i was like you can’t be i can’t be the first person to point this out to you like don’t be mad at me i didn’t do it to you oh my gosh well thanks for coming on amy this is this is awesome yeah thanks guys so much it’s nice to talk to you and i know you guys are coming on to my podcast so i’m looking forward to chatting with you too sounds good take care all right bye guys you