Do you really want a business like Amy Porterfield’s?

Let's talk for a moment about the Amy Porterfield myth that sooooo many online business owners buy into at some point in their career.

You know the one: where you create an online course and huge mailing list and basically never have to work again. (I know, I know, I exaggerate a little bit here! But also, I would argue - not grossly...)

In this video I get a few things off my chest about the challenges of the online business world which not a lot of industry leaders honestly talk about.

Does this resonate with you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, everybody. I'm coming on today because I just wanted to talk about a few things that came up recently in relation to content marketing. And for some reason, Amy Porterfield is very high on my target list of things to talk about / push back again today. 

Basically, in case you don't know, hi, I'm Suzy. I'm a messaging and copywriting expert, and I have two little kids, age one and four. And so I follow probably like all parents with kids who are the same age as my kids, that's what I'm trying to say, the parenting account, Big Little Feelings about being parents to toddlers and how wild it can be. And those women have a course about toddler emotions and toddler behavior. It's like $97, and they have a huge Instagram following. It's like 3 million people or something.

And I read the other day an article that one of them had written about that. It's two women who run the account, and one of them had her third baby a few months ago, and she wrote an article about going back to work when the baby was three months old and how, even though she works for herself, she couldn't take a long maternity leave because the business needed her. They have ten employees, and they spend 25 to 30 hours a week creating content for their Instagram account.

And I just thought, wow, because I've been following them for a while, and the way they run the account makes it look very much as if it's just the two of them. I mean, it's very nicely curated, the content is excellent, and they post daily. But I was thinking, oh, this is like a relatively simple business model. They have two courses altogether, I think, the $97 one and a $20 one. And they've got really big on Instagram, and it's the two of them, and they're just kind of selling this course the way Amy Porterfield teaches us all that we can be selling courses.

And just to hear, actually, how demanding that business still is for them as parents and the number of people that they employ to run it, the way they run it. And, yeah, it was like an eye opener for me.

And I felt so bad for her because it was a really upsetting article about how she didn't want to go back to work, basically, and leave her son when he was so little. Such a little baby. My baby was born just over a year ago, so it's all quite fresh for me, too, thinking about this stuff. I took a long maternity leave because I wanted to, and I wasn't ready to go back to work so early, but the business took a hit because I took the long maternity leave.

And I think, just reading that article really made me feel like, there goes the Amy Porterfield myth, because I feel like when I came into the online space, which is probably five years ago now, more than five years ago. I was really taken in by the glitter and the glamour of Amy Porterfield and Marie Forleo. And they're, like, create a course and sell it and never work or do anything. So they say, have a four day work week, or don't work or whatever. Barely work, and life will be so easy. Yeah, I guess neither of them have kids. And I'm not saying that's the only thing. People have caring responsibilities. Lots of people have caring responsibilities, which, from what I know, doesn't look like they have. But also, I feel like there's just this encouragement to do stuff to scale.

Amy Porterfield still comes up on my Facebook feed all the time and is like, "imagine having a list of ready to buy, a list of 1000 ready to buy subscribers", and it's just never that simple. I think that's what I wanted to say. Reading that article was like, it's not that simple, is it? It's not that simple. Even with 3 million Instagram followers, it's not that simple for you guys. And growing your email list, even then, it's not that simple.

The work isn't done. And I think so many of us, including myself, we sort of fall prey to this Amy Porterfield vision of how our businesses need to be with all these courses and a big audience and this huge list. And just from what I've seen, the bigger the list, it doesn't necessarily guarantee that much.

Like, they have to be engaged. You have to nurture them so they're ready to buy. Do you know how to write messaging? How to create messaging that does that? Because Amy Porterfield does have a team of conversion copywriters, and you probably don't. This was something I was actually talking about a lot in my Web Copy Bootcamp, which I ran last month and is now on Evergreen. An evergreen course. Oh, my God, I sound like Amy Porterfield, but it is. Anyway.

But in that Bootcamp, when I ran it live, I was getting the women in it to think about the goals of their website. And it was just really interesting how many of them were like, number one goal. Get people to listen to my podcast, get them to subscribe to my mailing list. And then they watched one of the trainings I did, and they were like, oh, yeah, maybe it should be to get clients or to have them to reach out, to contact me about my services. And I was like, yes, exactly. Because we are not running businesses like Amy Porterfield. Most of us. Most of us aren't.

And even if we are, even like those Big Little Feelings women who I'm sure have a massive email list, it's still not that simple. You still need the buyers. It's not just about the list. It's about the buyers. The revenue has to be generated somewhere, right? Yeah. So that was kind of what I just wanted to say, it was just to be careful not to, with your evergreen copy assets, which is what I help my clients specialize in creating through this blend of energy, intuition, inspired intuition and strategy, because I think you have to have both. You can't have the strategy without the energy or the energy without the strategy, in my view.

But to create really powerful copy assets for yourself, you have to be crystal clear on your goals and on how this is going to be generating revenue for the business. Because a lot of the time I feel like we get sucked into the Amy Porterfield way of doing business and it doesn't necessarily create the life we want and it doesn't necessarily create the revenue we want. And it actually leads to an awful lot more pressure. And yeah, many of us, I think, pursue this mirage of the list of thousands of ready to buy email subscribers that we could just email anytime and they will buy our stuff whatever we say. And it's not that easy. It's not that easy.

And even as someone who nurtures that list, it isn't that easy. There's more to it. You have to show up, you have to deliver value, you have to keep engaging your people, and they have to want to buy, at the end of the day, not just open your emails, but also buy from you. So there's a lot that goes into it. 

And I think I just wanted to say that today and to kind of give us all permission to not be Amy Porterfields about the way we do our copy assets, about the way we do our welcome sequences, our website copy, our content. You're not the same as Amy Porterfield if you don't have a team of 25 people. And while some of us might like to get there, even then it can still be stressful, especially if you have caring responsibilities.

So I guess this is me saying, how do you want to do it? How do you want to do it? Asking you to remember to tune into your own desires because that's so important. Tune into the message you want to say, because that's so important. And maybe you also need a little bit of nurturing and taking care of yourself to get to reconnect to what it is you want to say and what you want to do and who you want to be selling to, because this online business world can wear you down, I think.

And I'm seeing a lot of people feeling very worn down and very disheartened at the moment. And what I want to say keep going. I also want to honor that. It is difficult, especially if you're not someone really established, and even if you are established, it might be difficult for you, like the Big Little Feelings woman who did not want to be going back to work in her own business. It was her own business. But she was still doing it, still working 9 hours a day. So there we are. I just felt like I needed to get off my chest, so I'd love to know what you think in the comments and stuff. And yeah, I'll be back soon. Okay, bye.