← Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
Strategy Hour | Online Marketing for Business Growth
922: I’m Growing by 1,000 Students a Month—Here’s What I Do That You Might Not
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Ultimately, this is a combination of mindset, strategy, and systems that I’ve refined over many years and these are the things I think are actually moving the needle.
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Abigail Pumphrey
People think, oh, I got all of these sales. That is the thing I did was working and it made me successful. No, what made you successful was your enthusiasm. The results came because you did the work and you did it with an energy that's attractive. Welcome to the Strategy Hour podcast brought to you by Boss Project. I'm your host, Abigail Pumphrey and I'm dedicated to supporting online businesses. I don't believe in one right way to build a business. I'm here to help you build business your way. One that supports not only the life you have, but the life you want. I'm on a personal mission to help you become financially free. I'm taking all the lessons learned as I turned a layoff into a seven figure online business. I'm here to help you prioritize your life every step of the way. Whether you're creating your first digital product, growing an email list, or scaling an already profitable business. Business settle in. It's time to talk strategy. Looking for a way to make a difference with your morning coffee? Grab a bag of talitha coffee@bossproject.com Coffee Every purchase helps support survivors of human trafficking. Make every cup count@bossproject.com Coffee so this isn't a number I look at all of the time, but it is one that I was coming up on a milestone and so I was definitely paying attention to. We recently passed 40,000 students, which is incredible. I say we, I mean me and my team, but truly to have educated that many small business owners over the last decade has been such a gift and we're growing faster than we ever have before. At the beginning of last year I was doing the math and we were adding about 250 students a month, which is absolutely respectable. And I thought that was a big number then. But by the end of the year we were averaging adding 1000 students a month. And today I'm sharing what I've been doing that you might not be that I think is making all of the difference. Now this isn't some magic formula that if you implement exactly and copy paste what I'm doing that you're going to get the same results. Ultimately this is a combination of mindset, strategy and systems that I've refined over a lot of years. And these are the things that I think are actually moving the needle and ones I would be pouring and investing time into. The first one is a little bit wild to me because in my life I tend to be the kind of person that is really, really, really good at keeping commitments to other people. And not so great at keeping commitments for myself, the things that I solely want to accomplish. So the trick that has worked for me in my business is turning the things that I believe are truly important into things that I think are about me, into things I think are actually about others, which has helped me become crazy consistent, like, so consistent. And I think more than anything, people assume that, you know, it's either all quantity or it's all quality and you have to give one or the other. But really, building a business is a combination of both. Quantity does help. Quantity is going to give you more reach, it's going to give you more opportunities, it's going to give you more ways to experiment and get in more data. And sure, yes, quality matters. You don't want the things you're putting out into the world to suck. But there is an element of both that's important. And so I have been very diligent about keeping up with the things that I have deemed important in my business. So while I might not be crazy consistent on social media, that hasn't been the primary driver of sales in my business. Instead, I've been focusing more primarily on long form content and email marketing. When I first started this business, I was blogging five times a week, which, looking back now, sounds wild and like a ton of time and a ton of work. And it was. I mean, this was multiple hours of my day, every single day for years. But it was worth it. It helped me build traffic, it helped me give myself an audience where people were finding me organically. And the thing I think people forget in comparison to what you might be putting out elsewhere in the world is your long form content tends to live a much longer shelf life. So. So because I blogged as much as I have and because I've been podcasting for so long, do you guys realize this is episode 922? When's the last time you did 922 of anything? Ultimately, I have show notes for every single one of those episodes, which is essentially acting as another blog post. All of those things live on my website, which means if you were to add everything up, there are several thousand pages, which are all opportunities for Google and other search engines to send me free inorganic traffic. You're not going to be consistent in everything you do. You're just not. I want you to pick and choose the things, especially when you're spread too thin. What is bringing you the most traffic to your offers, generating the most leads and converting into the most sales? Those are the habits that you are going to Find the most impact in. And those are the habits that you need to just keep going even when you don't feel like it. Because, trust me, there have been many days I have woken up and said, I don't want to record a podcast. And maybe I didn't do it that day, but I stayed on schedule for the commitment of rolling it out twice a week for weeks on end. I want to challenge you to pick one thing. What one thing can you commit to being crazy consistent at for 90 days? Because ultimately, building a habit takes far longer than that. I think most people assume if they do it every day for a week or every day for two weeks that it'll stick. But the majority of Americans give up on their resolution 19 days into the new year. That's a lot of days of potentially being consistent before you just fall off. I think the last I looked. Don't quote me on this, but the last I looked. I'm pretty sure you have to do something 270 times before it becomes a habit. Now, this next piece, I think, is far more about a mindset for how I go about and go into stuff, but it impacts the results far more than I think you would realize. So what do I mean by that? I am so willing to fail. Failure does not scare me. Like, not even a little bit. Did it when I first started. Absolutely. I didn't want to look stupid. I wanted to be successful. I didn't want to fall down. I didn't want to lose it. All right? But failure is really fear in disguise. And ultimately, what drives results isn't success itself, because, you know, people think, oh, I got all of these sales, I. E. The thing I did was working, and it made me successful. No, what made you successful was your enthusiasm. The results came because you did the work, and you did it with an energy that's attractive. And so instead of being fueled by the things that you're, quote, doing well because they, quote, worked, I want you to be driven by your own creativity and your own excitement and the abundance that you're looking for. I heard this quote the other day. I wish I knew where it originated, because it literally rocked my world. But someone was saying that. I suppose I should back up for a second. I am the kind of person who is always searching for abundance. I want abundant life. I want an abundant mindset. I want to feel like there's this world of opportunity always in front of me. But I often find myself overwhelmed. And what this person said is that overwhelm is abundance. You just don't know how to handle it or process it. And when that clicked for me, I was like, I'm overwhelmed all the time. Does that mean I'm abundant all the time? And I just need a new perspective? So I think perspective is truly everything. And being willing to fail gives you so much freedom to just try things. When I'm focused on serving my audience, failure becomes far less intimidating. I am not worried if a launch is going to go well or if I'm going to make a ton of sales or if I'm going to hit some number or some metric. I'm worried about making a difference. And that's what keeps me going. My question to you, in a way for I think you to really evaluate your relationship with failure is ask yourself, what would you do if you weren't afraid it might not work? What would you do if you weren't afraid it might not work? Just that sentence alone has allowed me to tap into things that in the past I would have stayed away from. But at the end of the day, like, you don't know if something's going to work unless you try it. So assuming it's going to fail before you've even put it out there, you are doing yourself such a disservice. Now, this next one. I try, I try, I try, I try, I try to really hone this in for y'all. And I mention it as often as I can and yet I still see people shy away from this or even not try it at all. But when I tell you this single handedly has been one of my biggest opportunities for accelerating growth, I am not exaggerating. It has been absolutely essential. Would not have it any other way. So what do I mean by that? I leverage collaborations. Collaborations are going to accelerate your growth. It is an opportunity to meet new people, open more doors, build trust, go out into the world and share things. I think a lot of people approach collaborations thinking, what can I get out of this? And instead I want you to think, what can I share? What can I give? What will make a difference for these people? And the more generous you are with your time and your expertise. I promise, I promise, I promise it will come back to you. It is like the ultimate karma in the business world. You caring about other people's audiences and doing things for them that make all the difference. Like it is night or day. Now, I'm not the only one that knows this is true. Okay? I'm not the only one sitting on this bandwagon saying, y'all are missing out. So my friend Jordan Gill, I don't know if you guys know who she is, but she has a company called System Saved Me. And she did this post about wanting to leverage more speaking opportunities, which is really just another form of collaboration, a specific form of collaboration. And she applied to speak at a variety of different things this year. And she has landed every single speaking opportunity. But the reason why is because when she went to pitch herself, when she went to, you know, put herself in the hat, she wasn't thinking about what is going to give me the most benefit, what is going to drive the most leads for me or the most sales for me. She was thinking about what is this person missing? What is this skill set that they don't have that I do? What does their audience need that I can give them? And she brings those ideas to the table and presents them as opportunities to take a weight off of the person hosting the event. And people see that. They see how genuine it is, they see how willing she is to help. Like, and I am not surprised it has been working, not surprised at all. In a very similar way, I am doing this with my brand partnerships. Now, these are typically much bigger relationships over a much longer period of time than say a speaking event would be, but they have put me in front of thousands and thousands and thousands of small businesses that are my ideal clients. But you don't have to start big with some huge pitch or by putting your hat in the ring for a speaking engagement. I just want you to think about one peer in this industry, one connection that you know, that you feel like you could genuinely give without worrying about how it's coming back to you and come to that person with this idea. I just think you would be so gifted by what this can do. And I don't know, it's just a good reminder because I'm even thinking about a pitch I sent in an email last week and I didn't do a good job talking about what it would do for them. What I talked about is what it would do for me. Now, it was a close enough relationship that sometimes asking is appropriate. But looking back, I even realize how I need to change and adjust some of my delivery because it's really easy. It's so easy to get stuck in the other mindset and it's not that that mindset bad. You obviously need to know that the places you are spending your time and energy are worth the effort on the back end. Because I have absolutely given of my time and expertise and been disappointed with the return on investment. But not every single collaboration is going to be your big win and that's okay. My hope is that you learn how to better bring up this opportunity for people, serve people well, and even if someone doesn't convert today, you genuinely helping them. You never know what introduction they're going to make, you never know who they're going to send your way, you never know who they're going to run into. I promise you. Having friends across your industry that you don't see as competition, but rather your peers, it will make all the difference. Hiring with Indeed, your search is over. When it comes to hiring, don't go searching for the 1. Just meet your match with Indeed. Get unparalleled access to job seekers with over 350 million unique monthly visitors globally according to Indeed data and an extended reach through Glassdoor. I love that Indeed makes it easy to hire. When we've hired in the past, the process was full of unqualified applicants. With Indeed, we can target the right candidates for the right position, leveraging over 140 million qualifications and preferences every day. Indeed's matching engine is constantly learning from your preferences, so the more you use Indeed, the better it gets and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility at indeed.comstrategy hour, just go to indeed.comstrategy hour right now and support our by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com strategy hour terms and conditions apply. Need to hire. You need Indeed. I think all of us need more of this. We need more and we don't ask for it or we don't prioritize it. This thing that I think you might not be taking advantage of is support. I cannot stress enough how much support has meant to my business, to me personally, and having help allows me to do more. So I know many of you do not have a team and I'm not sitting here telling you that you have to stretch yourself too thin and hire an employee before you're ready and all that stuff. Nope, not what I'm saying. What I am saying is I need you to understand that because I have support, because I have people on my side, I do have more time to focus on the things that move my business forward. So having less support does not necessarily mean you're going to be less successful. It just might take longer. And I think that perspective is really helpful when you're feeling like other people are doing more, doing better, getting further, faster. Really look in the mirror and ask yourself, what support do you have right now? And if you need to, you can look at them and ask yourself, what kind of support did they have in their corner already? And I would venture to guess, nine times out of 10, they have more support than you do, whether it's paid or not. Because I don't necessarily think it's about employees. This really is a holistic thing. I remember early on in my business, the way I went about doing this was really setting clear boundaries with my spouse. We would sit down and we talk about who owns what in the household, who is in charge of thinking about groceries or planning birthdays or mowing the grass or doing the laundry. These were things that were discussed. Now, for the first few years, they weren't, which led to a very unhappy marriage and a lot of frustrating conversations. But the more we realized that we needed to communicate our expectations and share our needs with each other, it made not only a massive difference in our personal relationship, but it allowed us to really get the time and space we needed to do the kinds of things we wanted to do. And so in my marriage, I definitely have a different balance than what you would typically call, like, you know, that, like, 1950s picture of what a family looks like. We're not the nuclear family. I spend more time working than my husband does, period. But he supports me in all of these other ways that allow me the time, space, and creativity to work on the things that I want to be working on. So for you, start small. Maybe it is a conversation with your spouse about what you need more help with. But if it's you and only, you come up with more opportunities in your community, whatever that looks like. Maybe you do like a babysitter swap, where, like, you and another mom each offer to watch kids one night a week. So you just have the night off. And it's less of a big deal to go from two to four kids than it is to, you know, have yours around constantly. And I'm not saying that you're trying to get rid of your children. That's not what I'm saying. You're obviously going to have quality time with your kids, but getting that space back, even if you're not working on the business, that's the thing I really want to hone in here. You having support doesn't always mean it has to be in the place that you want to grow, but you having support in the place where you're just busy, where you're just taking up time, it will give you even potentially just the rest. You need to be more creative and get more done on all the other time. And don't feel like this has to always be something that you're bartering for or asking for from other people. There has been so many moments in my life that I have paid for the support I needed. I paid to have meals delivered to my house so I didn't have to think about what I needed to buy at the grocery store. I pay to have someone come clean my house on a regular basis so I don't have to think about it. Those are the kinds of things that give me space. And I want you to be able to free up some of your resources so you have more time to spend your life how you want to spend it. If I'm looking at what are things that I think other people might not be doing, one that comes up for me may seem obvious, but I promise is something that people are skipping a lot and it is such a huge time saver. You have to repeat yourself. I know this is gonna drive some of you bonkers, but I promise you it's required. You're not a broken record. You're not just saying the same thing over and over and over again for no reason. You're doing it because 1% of your audience is actually seeing your content. So you repeating your message isn't redundant. It's smart. You need to continue to put out your best work. But your best work doesn't have to be brand new every single day. The reason you're feeling stressed about marketing your business is because you think you have to always be inventing new ideas. I promise you, the thing you did six months ago, three months ago, two weeks ago, that worked. Do it again and do not be afraid to copy paste it. I know you're sitting here looking at me like listening, saying, you're joking. Like you want me to copy paste and post the exact same thing. Yep, I do. I was looking at a Instagram account last night and this person had clearly previously had an Instagram account and they were growing a new one, which to each their own. I don't think it's necessary, but story for another day. And I was looking at what posts were getting traction and the posts with the most views were the same format, so the cook had a slight adjustment every single time. Mostly just a change of numbers, but the caption literally copy paste and she was posting this every single day. It'd be really easy to say, oh, but I posted it yesterday and what if my followers already saw it? Who cares if they already saw it? They're gonna scroll by it and be reminded that you're a badass and if they haven't seen it, then it's such a huge opportunity for you to put back in front of them what's already working. Now, I'm not necessarily saying just post the same post every single day for the next three months. Like, come on. I'm not saying be lazy, but I am saying take the things that are working and allow yourself to repeat the same success. For example, every time I used to launch a course, I would feel this pressure to rewrite emails. Why? My rule of thumb is, if I can't remember what I wrote, I damn near know that they don't either. Now, will some things look familiar or be like, oh, I kind of remember that story? Yeah, for sure. But it's only reinforcing the kinds of things you're saying, which is a good thing, not a bad thing. Now, another trick to this is taking a high performing piece of content and then repurposing it for another type of content. So, for example, say you had a social post that had incredibly high engagement. Reuse that and repurpose it into an email, or expand upon it and make it a blog post. You already put time and effort into building the thing. You can take it and expand upon it in a whole bunch of different ways. Like for example, this podcast. I outline the episode. The episode outline gets turned into an email to promote the episode. The email to promote the episode gets turned into a real or post on social where I'm reusing 95% of the same copy from the email I sent the exact same day. Do people notice? Not a single person, not a single person has said anything to me about it. I have 4.5 million downloads and not a single person has said, oh, why are you posting the same thing on social that you're sending on email? People don't care. Okay, so you are just taking up so much more of your time and so much more of your brain space when sometimes you just need to hit copy paste. I feel like I should put a huge asterisk here and say, I don't think social media stats matter. And before you come at me and you're like, you just said redo the stuff. That's working. I did. But I need you to understand that it's not just about engagement or the number of views something got. It is so much more than that. Because you could have a post that has 5 likes but made $500 in sales and that is still more valuable than a viral post that got a million views but zero leads. Which one would you redo? It's so easy to say you'd redo the one that got all of the attention, but attention is not what keeps your business in business. Money does. And so I worry so much less about how successful I look and instead am worried about what metrics matter. And so the ones I'm focused on and you know, are there others I look at from time to time? Yes. But if I were to boil it down and say these are the things that matter to me, it's only three traffic. And I'm talking about traffic to my sales pages primarily, but definitely traffic to my whole website. Traffic leads, the number of people that I'm getting on my email list and conversions, the percent of traffic that converted to sale, but also how many sales and also the dollar amount of those sales. That's what is telling me what to do more of. I want to challenge you to look beyond the vanity metrics and measure what's actually driving results. What is actually driving sales. And I'll tell you, it does take more effort because Instagram is not going to tell you what worked and what converted. Now, maybe if you're running a paid ad on Instagram and have a conversion pixel set up, it would. But for the majority of you, we're talking about organic content. You're going to have to pay attention. It requires a little bit more effort to notice these kinds of things, but it makes a huge difference. We're both in business. I imagine a lot of what we do is the same. I do think some of the things I talked about today may be some things you understand, but I'm not sure you've really embraced. And I know, I know, like in my gut that these are the things that are making massive differences in my business. We talked about being consistent. Consistent in the places that are bringing the most results into your business. I talked about looking at failure in a new way and not having what I put out into the world be based on fear, but instead be fueled by enthusiasm and excitement. I encourage you to collaborate more, to put yourself out there and find new opportunities. I want to see you be supported and whatever that looks like in this season. And I want you to repeat your successes because those are your secret weapons. Even if you only walk away from today committing to one thing. What did we talk about? That you would be willing to try for at least the next month. Now, would I love to see you do it for the next 90 days or the next year? Yeah, I would. But what's one thing you're willing to do right now? I want to know which of these strategies resonated most with you. So head on over to Instagram, head to Boss Project, find my personal profile, Abigail says, and send me a dm. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to know more of what you're trying now if you're looking more for the nuts and bolts, the like. But what did you actually say? How did you actually do it? What were the manners in which you went all about this? How did you get a thousand students a month? I understand you want more details and so I'm not holding back. I just couldn't possibly cover them in 30 minutes. So if you want to steal my two week live launch, this is how I put every new product out into the world. You can go to bossproject.com box box bossproject.com box to check out Launch in a box. It has everything you need. It has emails and social posts. The entire launch strategy. It's so juicy and so good. Now if you're curious on the back end of that, how am I maintaining my marketing? How am I putting myself out consistently on Instagram to drive sales? You can find out more@bossproject.com playbook inside my Instagram Profit Playbook I'm walking you through the daily things I'm doing in my business, the things I am really seeing traction on and what's working right now. Not what worked five years ago, what's working today. Bossproject.com playbook thanks so much for listening. I can't wait until next time. In the next episode, I'm going to be talking about backwards launching, which I think is super interesting, so make sure you're subscribed. I cannot wait to share more and I'll see you next time. Hey, a few quick favors before you leave. I'd love if you'd share today's episode, send it to a friend who needs to hear it and post on social. You can show us where you're listening from, your favorite takeaway, or why someone else should listen. Be sure to tag me at Abigail says and ossproject so we can share it. Okay. Second favor to get podcast updates and all the behind the scenes news from bossproject. I'd love if you'd join my VIP list. Just head to bossproject.com signup to make sure I have all your contact details. Really love this show. It would mean so much to me if you'd leave a rating and review. It not only helps more listeners find the show, but allows us to bring on quality sponsors so we can keep bringing you this valuable content for free. Thanks so much for listening. Until next time.