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To kick us off. I want to talk to the founder whose business runs entirely through her. The strategy comes from your head. The copy comes from your hands. You're the one rewriting your sales page at 11pm and here's the part that's so unfair. You're working harder than almost anyone you know and the revenue still isn't matching the effort. Some months are amazing, some months fall flat and you can't figure out why. I have so been there. And here's what I learned the hard way. You don't have a revenue problem. You're actually sitting on a gold mine. You've got a bottleneck, one thing holding everything else back. And here's why you haven't found it yet. It's not that you need more strategies or more ideas. You're just too close to it. Every founder is. It's not a weakness. It's just the truth. In my free live training for multiple six figure female founders, I'm going to help you find it. So save your seat@amyporterfield.com freetraining now, on to today's episode. About 70% of the search activity for Black Friday happens in October, before the day itself even arrives. And the people doing the searching aren't impulse buyers, they're deliberate. So your buyers are already getting ready in the fall. They the question is whether you'll be ready when they are. You won't have to build anything new for this. You already have everything you need. Make it easy. Black Friday isn't the time to test a brand new concept on a cold audience. You want the confidence of knowing this thing is going to work. My guest today is a dear friend of mine. One of them goes, that one over there. She's big money. And it was my guest today. Her name is Amy Porterfield. Amy Porterfield, the ever amazing best selling author of two weeks notice. Ms. Amy Porterfield. It's August and I'm about to talk to you about Black Friday. We are months out, you've got summer on the mind, and a holiday promo is nowhere near the top of your list. And that's the whole reason that I want to talk to you about it today. The Black Friday promos that work need a Runway over weeks with time to do them. Well. The ones thrown together the week of tend to feel like exactly that. A last minute grab for cash. The difference between those two outcomes is mostly time. So if you hear me out, even though we're only in August, if you give yourself the one thing that makes this easy later, it is Going to be lead time. Black Friday is a whole holiday shopping period now, and it starts way earlier every year. We still tend to picture it as the single day after Thanksgiving, but the shopping behavior spreads out and it has been for a long time. So. So the data backs this up. About 70% of the search activity for Black Friday happens in October, before the day itself even arrives. And the people doing the searching aren't impulse buyers. They're deliberate. They research early, they keep tabs open, and they wait for the right offer to land. So your buyers are already getting ready in the fall. The question is whether you'll be ready when they are. Now, last year my team ran a Black Friday promo and we made some very deliberate calls about what we sold and when we ran it. One of those calls is the thing I'd change if I could do it again. And it's the reason I want this on your radar now instead of in November. I'm going to tell you that story in just a little bit, including the part I do differently. But right now, I want to start with the best news of all. You won't have to build anything new for this. You already have everything you need. So we're going to take something that you've already created and give it a reason to sell during the holidays. And you get to shape the whole thing around your business, so around your business, your audience and your goals. So today I'm walking you through how to choose the right offer to put in your promo, three simple ways to package it, how to decide who it's for and how you'll sell it, and how to keep this from pulling you off the work that matters most between next now and the end of the year. If you haven't subscribed yet, hit subscribe on YouTube or follow on Apple podcasts or Spotify. That's how you can be sure that you get every episode every week. Okay, let's get into it. So let's start with the offer itself because this is where people over complicate things before they've even begun. So you don't need to invent a new product for Black Friday. You're going to look at what you already have and choose one thing to feature. Now, there are a few things that make an offer a good fit for this. First, choose something that's already proven, an offer that your audience has bought before, that's gotten people results that you know how to deliver. Make it easy. Black Friday isn't the time to test a brand new concept on a cold audience. You Want the confidence of knowing this thing is going to work. Second, look for something that's timely or that you can easily tie to a fresh start. The end of the year naturally has people thinking about what's next. So think about a course that you can open with the January cohort or a coaching package that can become a new year Jumpstart. The offer doesn't change. The framing meets the season that your buyer is already living in. And then third, choose something that you can deliver without burning out your team or yourself during one of the busiest times of the year. Simplicity is your friend here. So when you line those up a proven offer with a timely angle that's easy to deliver, you've got something that meets your audience right where they are already in the buying frame of mind. And here's good evidence for it. Even when the discount itself is modest, offers still see a lift in the window. The buying mindset is already there. People are primed to say yes in November and December in a way that they just aren't in February. So you're meeting demand that already exists with something you've already built. And I know it's fun to think of something new, shiny and put it together and test it out on Black Friday, but here's why you do not want to do that right now. You should start focusing on planning for the new year. So if you get really involved in a brand new promo, something you've never done before, you are literally taking your eyes off what's going to happen soon. The sooner you plan for the new year. So let's say in September, October, the better. And if you're planning some big elaborate launch for Black Friday, you're taking your eye off the most important thing you should be doing in that quarter. Okay, so once you've chosen your offer, the next decision is is how you package it. There are three simple ways to do this, and you only need one. Keep it simple. Number one, you can add a discount to something that you already sell. Now, I'm not a big discounter in general, but Black Friday is one of the few times of year I'm completely on board with it. Because your audience is actively looking for deals, they're in that mode, so give it to them. Maybe that's your signature course at a holiday price or your membership with a couple months taken off. Or maybe it's a service package at a rate you only offer once a year. The offer stays the same. The reason to buy now just gets stronger. Okay, number two, you can bundle two offers that complement Each other bundles are the other thing I'm not usually a big fan of. I'm kind of cautious here because they can overwhelm people. But during this window, when someone's hunting for a deal, a smart bundle of two things that naturally go together, like lands even better. The key word is compliment. The two pieces should make each other stronger. Like a course paired with a template kit that helps people finish it. Or a coaching round paired with the workbook that supports it. Something like that. Okay, I need to interrupt. Just really quick. I want you to think back to one of your holy cow, revenue months. Maybe it was 15k, maybe it was 30. Now there's a chance that month comes with the thought never again. I wore myself to the bone for six weeks to get there fair. But look at the facts. Your offer converted, your list bought. You've proven you can do this. You just can't do it on demand. Yet. Some months click, some months don't. And you can't see the one thing that decides which kind of month you're going to have. So hear me on this. You do not have a revenue problem. You're sitting on a gold mine. You've got a bottleneck. Something specific, something findable standing between you and revenue you can actually count on. And here's why you haven't found it yet. It's not that you need more strategies or more ideas. You're just too close to it. Every founder is. It's not a weakness, it's just the truth. In my free live training for multiple six figure female founders, I'm going to show you how to spot yours. So the good months stop being a mystery and start being part of the plan. Head to amyporterfield.com free training to save your seat. Now let's jump back into today's episode. And then number three, you can add a live element to something you already have. Maybe that's a short live experience layered on top of like an existing offer. Or maybe it's a shorter coaching package that gives people a taste of working with you and and can extend into something bigger after the promo ends. So a live piece adds energy and a reason to buy now, because being in a room with you is something a sales page can never replicate. So there is one exception to what I said earlier about don't create something new. And that is, let's say you had a tiny offer, like something that was really easy to create. Maybe it's $27 and you just want to try it out. And I'm actually okay with that, and here's why there is it is proven that if someone spends money with you, they're more likely to spend more money with you. So getting them in at a really easy, low cost option and then moving them into your world, nurturing them and let's say moving them to your signature offer, I'm all for that. So the goal is to keep it simple. But if you want to create a tiny offer and test it during this time, you just to get new people in your world who have never bought from you, I'm all for it. Okay, before you run with any of this, you've got to answer two questions because they shape everything about how you talk about your promo. The first question is who is this for? Decide up front whether this promo is for your warm audience, the people already on your list and already following you, or whether you're using it to bring in a cooler audience who's newer to you. That single decision changes your messaging, your pricing and where you show up. A warm audience needs less convincing and a simple heads up. A cooler audience needs more context about who you are and why this audience or why this offer matters. Now the second question is are you running ads or not? If your goal is to reach new people, ads might make sense. If you're selling to your existing audience, you may not need them at all. Knowing this now lets you plan for your budget and your assets instead of scrambling later. So whatever you decide, build in urgency and scarcity because that's what moves people from interested to bought. A tight selling window. It does this well. So does capping the quantity. So like only selling 50 spots or a hundred and actually meaning it, scarcity works during this season because the fear of missing out is already heightened. So when something feels limited, people act. Give them a genuine reason to decide now instead of later. Okay, I promised you the story of what my team did, so let's get into it because it brings all of this together, including the part that I would change. So last year we ran a planning session called master your year. It was built to help people map out their next year, which made it a perfect fit for the season because everyone's thinking about the year ahead. That's the timely offer idea in action. We didn't build something new. We took a session that fit the moment people were already in and we priced it at 197 and we offered a two payment option to make it easier to say yes. Alongside it, we offered A year at a glance promo Planner as a $47 upsell. So a Simple add on that complemented the main offer. So that pairing, it's a model that you can borrow a core offer at one price with a small related upsell that that makes the whole thing more valuable without adding much work to deliver it. Now, the timing, which is where we made our most deliberate call, and you might be surprised, we ran the promo the week before Black Friday and we turned it off the Wednesday before the day itself. We made that call on purpose for two reasons. First, the ad costs from the big retailers go through the roof during the true Black Friday window. So they're very expensive and everyone's bidding prices spike. And we didn't want to compete in that auction, so we took ourselves out of it running earlier, kept our costs very reasonable. Second, we didn't want our team working through the holiday, so that just mattered to us. So those were the right calls for our business. They might not be the right calls for yours. So go with your gut and do what works best. You might decide to run yours right on Black Friday and you might run it for a whole week. Again, do what works best for you. You get to look at your audience, your team, your goals, and make the choice that fits your business. There's no single correct way to do this. There's a lot of options. But if there's one thing I'd change, it's this. I wish we'd given ourselves more lead time. We could have actually done more with it and we could have warmed people up even sooner and prepared more thoughtfully and made. Made the whole thing stronger. That's the lesson that turned into this episode. The promo worked and it would have worked better with more Runway. That's exactly why you're hearing this from me in August instead of three weeks before you'd need to launch it. And one last thing, and it's the one thing I feel very strongly about. A Black Friday promo should support your end of year goal. It should never replace it or. Or pull away from it. You likely have one main thing that's going to get you to your goal in December and set you up for a strong year next year. If a Black Friday promo takes too much time and energy away from that one thing, then it's not worth running this year. And I mean that. It's completely okay to skip Black Friday if running it would derail the work that moves your business forward. And if you do decide to run it, keep it simple and do it well. A focused, well run promo on something you already have will always beat a sprawling, complicated one that leaves you depleted going into the new year. And if my calibre or Milli club members are listening to this, I want you to remember your one thing is your focus. And if you're not in one of my programs, hear me out. Everyone should have one thing that they're insanely focused on. Like 80% of their focus is on this one thing to get them to their December goal. I usually have my coaching clients set it from July to the end of the year. So if we're in that timeframe, which when I'm recording this, we are, then I want you to keep your eye on the prize. What is that one thing that's going to allow you to hit your revenue goals by December 31st? I know I've said this, but I really have to hit it home. If your Black Friday is going to get you off track, don't do it. But here's where a Black Friday really works. If you're behind in your revenue goal right now and running a simple Black Friday can close the gap, I think that's the best type or the best use of a Black Friday. So if it's going to take too much work, throw you off of your plan, don't do it. If it could close the gap and you keep it simple, I'm all for it. But at the end of the day, that one thing you're focused on, that big launch, that project, that new funnel, whatever it is, get it done, stick with your goals, and then a Black Friday only comes after that. Okay, to wrap things up, here's what I want you to remember. If you're going to do a Black Friday promo, make sure that you take something you already have already existing. And with that, if you want to add a discount, bundle it, add a live component to make it special and and add some urgency. I'm all for it. And also maybe tie it to the season, end of year, New year. If you can make that tie, it's always valuable. But don't do it if it's going to derail you from what really matters most, setting yourself up for an incredible next year. All right, my friend, if you haven't yet subscribed on YouTube, do so. Or follow along on Apple podcasts or Spotify so you don't miss what's coming next. I'll talk to you soon.