How she built a $100 million biz with webinars
Amy Porterfield has become the queen of online marketing. She’s the host of one of the top marketing podcasts, Online Marketing Made Easy, and has made over $100 million in total revenue since starting her business in 2009.
I had the privilege of seeing Amy speak at ConvertKit’s Craft & Commerce event in 2023 and was given her new book, Two Weeks Notice. When I picked it up, I just took it as “Oh, another business book” and after reading it, that just wasn’t true. It was part motivational but also highly tactical for aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs.
It also led me to this deep dive. How did Amy Porterfield get her first $250k in annual revenue?
She discusses it briefly in her book, but not as much as I was hoping for.
Thankfully, I was able to read, watch, and listen to a lot of Amy’s content and interviews to learn how she earned her first $250k in annual revenue.
Without further ado, let’s jump into the story of Amy Porterfield:
The Story of Amy Porterfield
Before starting her own business
Amy Porterfield started her career by studying communications at UC Santa Barbara. From there, she followed a career pathway that made sense for marketing and sales.
Her first job was as an event planner for a non-profit. She then transitioned to a sales role selling textbooks, found herself eventually doing marketing at Harley Davidson, and eventually was leading content and marketing efforts for the motivational speaker Tony Robbins.
All of these roles span about 14 years.
She may have been moving up the corporate ladder, but all she was doing was work. There’s a big difference between being a hard worker and having work consume your life. For Amy, work was consuming her life which was most evident at her best friend’s wedding.
In Amy’s book Two Weeks Notice, she mentions that she “couldn’t unplug.” Her plan was to dash around this coastal town with limited cell service, looking for Wi-Fi in cafes between wedding events because she needed to work.
As Amy put it, “At the wedding reception, my best friend turned to me and said, ‘All you do is work.’ The look of total disappointment on her face is still burned into my memory”.
She didn’t end up quitting her job right then and there, but she started to realize more seriously that she had “ a desire for a different kind of life,” one where work didn’t have to consume her entire life.
The aha moment came when Amy was in a conference room with a group of top online entrepreneurs talking with Tony Robbins about their stories.
For Amy, this was enlightening because it showed her how she could have the different kind of life she was looking for. They were all building online businesses and she wanted that type of life too.
The start of Online Marketing Made Easy
In 2009, at the age of 31, Amy quit her job working for Tony Robbins and started her own online business. She didn’t have a big idea or some giant nest egg of cash.
She just had her experiences, knowledge, and network to build a new business.
The first version of her business started as creating social media content for businesses. She had a half-dozen or so clients for whom she created content and helped manage their social media marketing. One example was writing content for Social Media Examiner, someone she met through working with Tony Robbins.
This work was similar to that she was doing for Tony Robbins, but this time, clients paid her, not an employer.
At the end of her first year in business, she made about the same amount of money she did in her corporate job, about $150,000 in revenue. Not bad at all for a first year in business.
In year 2, she took a step back in revenue. I don’t have the exact figure she made in year 2, but let’s assume it was about $100,000ish.
She took this stepback in revenue because she wanted to build a business that gave her the kind of life she wanted. Her current business model of selling her time to do social media marketing wasn’t drastically different from her corporate job. Instead of having just one boss, Tony Robbins, she had 7 or 8 bosses (her clients).
In year 2, she let go of some clients to focus on what she knew she wanted to sell: online courses.
She attended events and conferences and decided to create and sell her first course on launching a book.
One major problem: she had never done a book launch before.
She met two women at an event who thought it would be a good idea to build a course on launching a book, and Amy went with it without much thought. According to Amy, the two women never even bought the course.
Amy still launched the course and made a whopping $267 from it. The course sold for $299.
To say it didn’t go well was an understatement.
In Amy’s book, she mentions that she threw herself “a pity party” and “moped around” for days.
Thankfully, Amy had great supporters around her.
She married her partner, Hobie, in year 2 of her business and was part of a mastermind group where she could be vulnerable and supported even when her course launch didn’t go so well.
After their encouragement, she kept going.
She learned from her mistakes in her first course launch and returned to what Amy calls her “10% edge”. This concept comes from Jill and Josh Stanton. It’s realizing what you’re 10% better at now. Another way to think about it: what’s something you can teach to someone who is a step behind you in the journey?
For Amy, this was Facebook marketing.
She had done some Facebook marketing for Tony Robbins and had a good idea of how to use Facebook to market something.
This is when Amy’s business started to take off.
She created her course on Facebook marketing, started posting more regularly on Facebook, and eventually made $30,000 in sales from this course.
Amy continued to grow and iterate on this playbook of using Facebook, Webinars, and Email Marketing to sell courses on how to build an online business and market on Facebook.
By 2013, Amy had generated $915,000 in revenue, mostly from selling courses. Today, Amy and her business have generated over $100 million in total revenue since starting.
The Growth Strategies of Amy Porterfield
One of the factors that Amy teaches the entrepreneurs she works with is that you must keep your business simple to succeed. Now, Amy does have a pretty simple business. It’s primarily a funnel of social media to email newsletter to buying her course.
However, there are many little tidbits in her simple business that I love, so let’s dive into the three primary growth strategies she used at the beginning of her business and still uses today.
Facebook and Facebook Ads
As mentioned earlier, Amy’s initial course was teaching others how to market their business on Facebook. Amy taught others how to market on Facebook and grew her business in the early days primarily off of Facebook.
In 2011, Amy had only about 3,000 followers on Facebook. The next year, it was about 18,000, and by 2015, she had over 155,000 followers.
A lot of this was due to Amy starting to post content on Facebook. At that time, you could have a lot more organic reach by just posting compared to today.
Buffer wrote a great blog post about the “Law of the Double-Peak.”
Long story short, when a social media platform launches, the organic reach of the early adopters is significant. However, you typically need to pay for ads on these platforms to have considerable reach over time.
If you want recent examples of significant organic reach, look at TikTok and now Threads. You don’t have to buy ads on those platforms to get a lot of views and engagement on your posts at the moment. These two platforms will test the Law of the Double-Peak.
When Amy started posting on Facebook in 2011, Amy had the advantage of being an early adopter and her posts would be shared more widely than they would be today.
However, Amy didn’t rely on this organic reach on Facebook. As her business grew, she started spending money on Facebook Ads to speed up her growth.
With this, she ends up creating a flywheel of growth on Facebook. She posts content on Facebook, people see that content and follow her, and they build trust as they continue to see her content. Eventually, she turns them into customers, and then she re-invests part of that revenue into Facebook ads so more people see her content and follow her.
In the middle of that flywheel is one clever part that has helped her build trust with her audience: live events and webinars.
Webinars
It’s one thing to see someone’s written post on Facebook. It’s another to spend an hour with someone on video.
Amy says webinars are the “number one way that we promote all our courses”.
That’s been the primary way she sold courses at the beginning of her business and still is today.
When Amy launches a course over a 10-12 day period, she does not just post a sales page on all of her posts and ads. Instead, she invites everyone to a live event or a webinar.
This way, she gives her potential students a sneak peek of what it would be like to be part of the course because she shares a little bit of what’s in it, and those potential students gain a lot of trust with her in those webinars.
At the end of the day, we all buy items from people we trust.
When you spend an hour with someone, your trust with that person typically increases significantly.
In an interview with Matt Byrom, Amy mentioned that they typically see a conversion rate from participating in a webinar to purchasing the course in the range of 10-15%.
For comparison, the average conversion rate for e-commerce is 2.5-3%.
Even if someone participates in a webinar and doesn’t buy, she still tends to keep them around as potential students with her email newsletter.
Email Marketing
In Amy’s book, she says, “The biggest mistake I ever made in my business was waiting almost two years to focus on growing my email list.”
Throughout her book, Amy talked about how she made a $20,000 mistake early on and even talked about how she brought on a partner who would receive 50% of the business even though she was close to $1 million in revenue that year. For waiting to build her email list to be the biggest mistake is quite the statement.
That’s because email marketing has the greatest return on investment (ROI) compared to other online marketing channels. For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average ROI is $38.
Amy builds her email list primarily with lead magnets. She’ll have workbooks, guides, and quizzes throughout all of her content. To receive the workbook, guide, or quiz, you have to give her your email and sign up for her newsletter.
What I like about Amy’s approach here is that she personalizes how you join her email list. Depending on how you join, Amy sends a couple of emails to help you solve the problem you’re trying to solve.
If you’re looking to learn more about creating your own course, for example, and come in through a lead magnet about course creation, Amy has systems set up so you receive content specifically about course creation.
Email screenshot from Amy Porterfield delivering a Course Creation Starter Kit, encouraging the recipient to take action on their course-building journey.
There’s a lot of content out there about what types of lead magnets to create, but in my mind, there’s one lead magnet that is the best for Amy and we’ve already talked about it: her webinars.
Even if someone participates in the webinar and doesn’t buy, she typically asks them to download a workbook during the webinar and have them join her email list.
This allows that person to continue building trust with Amy’s email newsletter. Amy is setting up her next launch to be successful because she’s growing her email list with people who are interested in Amy’s work.
Amy’s workbooks, guides, and quizzes can be great lead magnets for someone to join her email list, but in my mind, the webinars that Amy does are the best lead magnet she has because of the ease of signing up and because of how much trust she’s going to build quickly with a potential student.
To date, Amy Porterfield has earned over $100 million in total revenue from her business and the primary driver of her revenue has been these courses. Her growth has stayed simple from the beginning and still is quite simple.
Sure, she has many more channels (like her podcast) than she did when she first started, but at the end of the day, Amy Porterfield’s growth from the beginning to now is quite simple.
It’s social media awareness, engagement via a webinar, and a sale through her courses. Everything comes back to this simple funnel for Amy Porterfield.
If you want to learn more about Amy Porterfield, check out her website at amyporterfield.com and read her book Two Weeks Notice. She’s right that her book isn’t just another business book. It’s a great starting point for aspiring entrepreneurs.
If you’ve read this far, you may have noticed I didn’t mention one significant channel Amy has: her podcast, Online Marketing Made Easy, which has over 60 million downloads.
Her podcast could be a deep dive just by itself, but ultimately, it wasn’t a main driver of revenue in the first couple of years. It didn’t exist.
Proof you don’t need a podcast with millions of downloads to have a $250k business.