Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. All right. First, thanks for having me. Thank you guys for listening. Like you said, my name is Amanda Goldman-Petri. My friends call me AGP though so you’re welcome to call me AGP.

Like you said, I started out as an entrepreneur very, very young at the age of 21. I’ll take you back a little bit before that because it really impacted the way that I grew my business. Like you said, I had to overcome a lot as a child. I grew up in poverty in a blue light district of BloodyMore, Murderland AKA Baltimore, Maryland.Because I grew up in such a crazy household … I mean, I love my mom to death but terrible choice in men. I do love her but, man. Because of that, growing up with a drug addict for a father and an abuser for a stepfather, I buried my head in books.

I became a type A overachieving nerd who really believed that working hard and hustling was going to make me successful. I was successful by society’s standards. I got into a top 15 university in the entire world. I was valedictorian of every school I ever went to.

When I got to that university, Johns Hopkins, I was like, “Awesome. Now, I’m going to be successful and be able to create a different life for myself.” Well, it didn’t really work out that way.

When I was 18, well, 17, I walked out of the dentist office. I had just gotten my braces off, and I was about to go back home to have one last hurrah with some of my friends before we went off to college. While I was walking across the street, there was an 80-year-old man driving his minivan going 50 miles an hour and he hit me.

He collided with my leg. My head shattered his windshield and then he finally realized he hit me. He slammed on his breaks but my body flew into the intersection. My head was about a foot away from being crushed by a passing 18-wheeler.

That was the moment that changed it all. That was when I realized, crap, I’m mortal. I’m going to die eventually. I lived this time. If I had died, I would have spent so much of my short life not really being happy. I would have been doing everything that was expected of me by society. I didn’t have a childhood. I didn’t really enjoy myself.

That’s when I started going on this journey to figure out what’s going to make me happy, what’s going to make my life meaningful.

Long story short because I had to … It was a lot of trial and error. I found marketing. When I found marketing, it was like … You know when you hear those stories about when you meet your lover, and your eyes meet, and it was like love at first sight? That’s what marketing was like for me.

I fell in love. I quit grad school. I quit all of my jobs. I went out at the age of 21, started my first business. It was rough. First one, not so hot. The second one is when I got it. Again, like you said, four months, I had hit my first $10,000 a month at the age of 22 and I’ve learned lots of webinar tips and tricks and had bigger and bigger successes and faster and faster time frames since then.

Now, I’m really focusing on the next stage of my journey, scaling the business to multi-millions.

I did. I graduated from Johns Hopkins in four years with seven different honors and three different majors because I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, and so I just ended up taking everything.

Yeah, exactly.

Originally, I just learned how to present a webinar because that’s what everyone else was doing. Now, knowing what I know now, it’s for a much more strategic reason. What I discovered throughout … This is my fourth business. Through all of that trial and error and developing webinar tips, what I’ve discovered is that people really over complicate marketing. They make it so complicated.You hear all these different things about list building, and giveaways, and social media marketing, and Facebook advertising, and telesummits. There’s all these different things that people tell you have to do to market. What I wanted to do was I wanted to simplify it and say, “There’s got to be a way that all these things work together.”

I discovered there’s a system. There’s a three-step system that you use to make money online. Everything you see out there that people are teaching you falls into one of these three steps of the system. The system is attract, nurture, convert.

The first step is you have to attract leads into your business, get people to become aware of who you are. Typically this means they’re on your mailing list or they’re in your Facebook group. They’re on some type of list where you can market to them later. You’ve attracted the lead into your business. They know who you are.

The next step is you have to nurture the relationship because it’s not enough for them to know who you are; they have to actually like who you are and trust you enough to buy from you. You nurture the relationship. Once they’re at that stage where they’re not just members of your community, but they’re evangelist for your brand, that’s when you put an offer in front of them and that’s when stage three comes, which is convert. You convert them from an evangelist into a paying client.

Everything that you see out there falls into one of these three categories. When people talk about list building, that’s the attraction system. When they talk about telesummits, that’s the attraction system. When we talk about Facebook groups and social media, that’s your nurture system. When they talk about sales, that’s your conversion system. It all falls into one of these three.

The reason I love webinars and have learned so many tips for webinars is because it actually does all three of these at once. It makes the sales process incredibly fast, plus they’re automatable. When I talk about scaling a business, I always say, “You need three things. You need leverage, automation, delegation.”

On a webinar, with the right webinar tips, you can sell a leveraged offer. You can automate the entire process, and you can delegate the process of sending ads to the webinar. It’s incredibly scalable. Webinars, you build your list. That’s your attraction system by sending Facebook ads to the webinar. That’s how you mail the first step, the attraction system.

While they’re on the webinar, you’re giving them so much value. You nurture the relationship. Then, at the end of the webinar, you pitch something and they buy. That’s the conversion. It’s a really fast way to go through the process. It’s why it’s totally worth learning tips for webinars.

Well, once they’re automated. Let’s take a step back. Once they’re automated, they are faster. The live versions do take a while because the live versions, you have to promote it. Then you have to do the webinar live and everything. Once it’s automated, typically, the way that I’m running them are the webinars are running every hour on the hour.If someone, like for example, opted in to one of my webinars on demand right now … It’s 2:18 where I’m at, and the next webinar would start at three. The webinar would finish at four. Within less than two hours, they would have already bought. That’s a really, really quick time frame from someone to go from not knowing me to buying from me.

It is automated, which is one of the best webinar tips. I have a tool, a software, that’s doing it for me. At one point or another, I did do the webinar live. I do tell people you should do your webinar live first to make sure it’s ready to be automated, and I can walk you through that process a little bit later.You do it live first. Thence once it’s automated, I usually use something like Stealth Seminar. It’s a piece of software where it basically sets it up so that every hour the video file of you presenting the webinar actually reruns every single solitary hour without you.

They’re amazing.

The automated ones, yes. When I’m doing them live, I do it a little bit differently. Generally, this is what I tell people. If you want to fill a webinar, you literally just pop the registration up and then you send traffic to it.There are three ways to send traffic. There’s free traffic, which is usually your email list, or if you have a Facebook group, it’s your Facebook group. It’s usually traffic you own. There’s paid traffic, which is things like Facebook advertising, Twitter advertising, LinkedIn advertising. Then there’s affiliate traffic where you get someone else to promote it for you.

When I’m running it live, I try to do a mixture of free, paid and affiliate traffic. When it’s automated, I usually just let the Facebook ads do the work.

It’s slow.

I think that the big problem there, and not just with Facebook ads either or paid advertising, but also with webinars and with automated marketing funnels is people get impatient and they give up too soon. It does take set up work and it takes time, and testing, and tweaking to get it right.Once it is right, it works like crazy and you don’t have to put in any effort to make the sales anymore. For example, my Facebook ads, it took like five … My automated webinar funnel, it took like five iterations for me to get it just right, but it’s right now. We have cold audiences, people who have never met us before, going to our landing pages. 71% of them are opting in to our webinars.

I love this. I have a very, how do you say, interesting brand? I’ve actually noticed that the crazier my images are, the better the click-through rate is. My branding is actually perfect for Facebook ads because it really, really pops.I wear really weird clothes in my ads, and I have really bold color schemes for the images so crazy images of me in weird clothing with some sort of quick text about what the webinar is. I have a long name for the webinar, but then I also have a really short name for the webinar.

One of them, for example, is Discover How I Repeatedly Welcome 50 New Ideal Clients Every 90 Days And The 3 Leverage Launch Strategies You Can Use To Do It Too. It’s really, really long but that can’t all fit on the ad. The text on the ad image is 50 Clients in 90 Days, Yes. Something like that. That’s the image.

Then the copy, I actually usually write at least the positioning of the copy myself or the idea of it and then I give it to my ads manager to go and finish. Normally, what I’m doing is I’m breaking down each webinar or offer into a couple different angles or positions.

For example, we just launched a new funnel going to a video program. With the video program, there’s a few benefits of it. You’re going to increase your confidence, not just on camera, but in your business in general. You’re going to be able to increase your impact. You’re going to be able to really stake your claim as an authority and you’re going to be able to increase your income.

Those are four different benefits of this webinar and this offer. I actually created an ad for each messaging. Then I put it out there to see which message is going to resonate best. That way, when I’m tweaking my funnel later on, I can make sure to really laser in on the message that converts the best.

The first time I did this, I had to spend $1,500 before I ever made a cent back.

That’s hard. That’s hard to split test, too.

Have fun with them.

If you’re doing it live, typically what I’m doing is I actually have two landing pages. One for a warm audience who already knows me and then one for a cold audience who doesn’t know me yet.I know it sounds a little complicated but honestly once you’ve set up those two templates for every single solitary webinar, you never have to set it up again. You literally just duplicate the two pages and then change the text. It might sound like a lot of work but it’s really not.

The reason why I do this is I’ve actually tested this a whole lot, and I’ve noticed if I send my warm traffic to a page that had a ton of text and persuasive copy, it actually only converted at standard. Industry standard is 20% of the people who go to the page will opt in.

For a warm audience, I think that’s really low. I aim a lot higher. I want 40, 50, 60% of people who know me opting into my stuff. I actually took away a lot of the copy. I noticed if my page just had a picture of me, the headline and a countdown timer, if they knew me, that’s all they needed. They are just going to opt in from there. It’s 40 to 70% of people are opting in to those warm pages.

If I sent cold traffic, people who didn’t know me to that type of page, it bombed because it wasn’t enough information. They didn’t know me. My face doesn’t matter to them. I created a different page with more persuasive copy.

I have my headshot on there to start that facial recognition from there, but it’s not at all the focus of it for people who don’t know me. The focus of the page is persuasive copy so it’s usually the headline, a button, three bullet points of benefits for what they’re going to get out of the webinar, a warning about what my capacity is for the software for the webinar and then another button. The cold one has a little bit more copy.

I use both of those when it’s the live webinar because I’m usually promoting with my email list and affiliate traffic with the live webinars. Once it’s automated, I’m usually just using the cold landing page because I’m just sending cold traffic from Facebook ads.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Just so that you can see how crazy it is. When the webinar is live … Actually, honestly, if you don’t really have a list, your show up rate is usually only 18%. The average is around 30% for a live webinar. When you automate it, it’s usually at minimum 50%, but I’m usually seeing over 70%.

Well, I do. I do. I do because it depends upon how early they … If they sign up 45 minutes beforehand, I want to remind them when it’s about five minutes before it’s about to happen. If they sign like three minutes beforehand, they’re not going to get anything.I have one auto-responder that goes out immediately no matter what time they sign up. That is just like the generic auto-responder that says, “Here’s what it’s about. Here’s why you should show up. Here’s the link to show up.”

Then for people who show up who opt in anytime before five minutes before the webinar starts, if it starts at three and they opt in at 2:40, wait, 2:54, then they’re going to get one more at the five minute mark. It’s just a really quick one because I don’t want them reading. I want them heading over. It’s a really, really quick one just with the dial-in information or the link that they can join and it sends them to the webinar.

If you have an email list, I actually … Actually, before I say this, a quick little nugget. The shorter your promotional period, the higher the show up rate. If you promote 24 hours in advance, you’ll probably have a higher show up rate than if you promote it two weeks in advance because people will have less time to forget.Usually, for my mailing list, because that’s not really something I have to test or have to gather over time, usually for my mailing list, I’m sending an email out 24 to 72 hours in advance and that’s it. I don’t promote any further out than that, 24 to 72 hours max.

Then for Facebook ads, if I’m using Facebook ads for the live webinar, that’s usually going to be like a seven to 10-day time frame. That way I have time to test things and get the traffic working.

Well, for the automated ones … I really build my business based on integrity. I rant about integrity and business ethics all of the freaking time. I actually purposely never call it a live webinar. If it’s automated, I’ll call it webinar on demand.If someone asks me, “Do I have a webinar?” I’ll say, “Yeah, I have a webinar on demand right here.” In the Facebook ads, I don’t say it’s live. Actually on the landing page, I don’t say it’s live either. I’ll either say it’s a webinar on demand or I’ll just call it a webinar, but I never say it’s live because I don’t want to lie.

Well, you know what? I did this when I first started automating so I’ve learned this over time. When I first started automating webinars, I got that. I got people putting in the chat box saying, “Is this live? This isn’t live. This is such a lie.”It really hurt me because I didn’t want to be deceiving people. That wasn’t my intention. What I realised is it was the way that I was presenting on the webinar that made them feel gypped.

If you just placed a completely replayed version of the live one, you’re going to be answering questions to people who aren’t actually asking questions. In the live version, you’re asking questions or you’re answering questions. You’re going to be communicating back and forth with people. You’re going to be telling people to ask questions.

If you place just the replay of that in an automated way, people are going to feel deceived because they’re like, “People aren’t actually live asking these questions.” What I did is every time I do a webinar live and I see that it’s converted, I actually re-record it on my computer, and I take out anything that could be misconstrued as me potentially answering people’s questions, anything like that.

If I ask an engagement question, I’ll just say, “Put it in the chat box.” Then I’ll say, “Typically, when I ask this question, people are saying blank.” I’ll just summarize what my answer would be if people asked. When they’re watching my automated webinars, they’re actually not really asking questions which is good. I don’t want people asking questions on an automated webinar and me not answering.

I actually do things very different and weird in comparison to the way that most people do them. You’ll probably learn a lot here. 60 minutes, that’s not weird. That’s pretty normal. It’s a 60-minute webinar.When people do live webinars, they might wait for people to hop on if they’re late and they might take just such a long time explaining what they’re going to be talking about and they welcome people.

I don’t do that on my webinars. I just say, “All right. I really want to honor your time. I said we’re going to start at three, we’re going to start right at three. Let’s dive in.” On each slide, maybe for not even a minute, I have about a 120 to 180 slides for every single webinar and it’s only 60 minutes, so I’m going through them very, very quickly which keeps the visual interest.

Then a lot of people also go on and on and on about who they are and their own story. I only have three slides about me. I weave them into the story so that it’s almost like it’s a part of the content. It’s a teaching point. This that you’re about to learn is what allowed for me to boom, boom, boom. Then I give three points about successes I’ve had in my business or my life as a result of this.

It’s more like it’s part of a story. I’m not saying, “Who am I and why you should listen to me.” That’s boring.
Then the other thing that I do that I don’t know that I’ve seen anyone else do this. I’m not sure. I get people to give me a promise in the beginning that keeps them until the end.

A lot of webinar gurus will talk about webinar tips for having a stick strategy, something that gets them to stick until the end. You will say, “Hey, if you stick with me until the end, I’ll give you this gift.”

One of the things I realize is if I do that, it detracts from the pitch at the end because people are like, “I got this free thing. I don’t need the paid thing.” I tried the normal guru stick strategy and it didn’t really work.

What I do now is I get people to make a promise, and they have to fulfill the promise at the end of the webinar. I actually say, “Can you pinky promise me this? Go ahead and say yes or no in the chat box.” They’ll say yes. They just made me a promise. They’re not going to break their promise. They’re going to stick around to the end now.

A great example of this would be in my 50 Clients in 90 Days webinar. I say, “After I walk you through these three launch strategies, I need you to pinky promise me that you’re going to choose one strategy to focus on for the next 90 days in an effort to get 50 clients. You don’t need to choose the strategy now. You haven’t even learned them yet. After you learn the three strategies, promise me you’re going to choose one and focus on it for 90 days. Go ahead and say yes or no in the chat box. The faster that you answer, the faster we can move on.”

Yeah.

Eating cockroaches, was that the thing? If they’ve got paid to eat the cockroaches, they reported that they had very, very negative feedback. If they volunteered to do it, they had very …

Actually, I talked about how in every stage of my webinar I’m getting micro commitments. The more times you can train them to say yes to you, the more likely they’d say yes to your paid offer.

All right. Then the other big thing about my webinar, after I have introduced the topic, introduced my story and gotten the promises, then I get into the content. What a lot of people do on their webinars is they give tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of content because people think content is value. I know that’s not true. Transformation is value.

One of the webinar tips I’ve learned is I design my webinars to provide a transformation. What I found provides a transformation on a webinar is really honestly just getting people to make a decision. You get people to make one decision on their webinar and that’s incredibly transformational because most webinars just give info.

What I do is I actually only give one little how. That’s it. I talk about what the step is, why it’s really important, what the pros and cons are like the bad stuff, the good stuff. I give one tiny, little how like how you can implement this step and that’s really it.

Then at the end, I get people to make a decision, which is usually what the promise is. Remember when I gave the example you have to choose one to focus on for 90 days? That’s me getting them to make a decision by the end of the webinar. I’m giving them only the information that they need to be able to make that decision.

Yeah. Well, they think they’re over delivering. They’re actually under delivering by doing that because if you want to give value to people, you have to recognize that information is not value. When you’re overwhelming people, they can’t take action and action is where the transformation happens.

It has to do with the pitch and the follow-ups. Once I’ve gotten them to make that decision, if the decision is not in alignment with my offer, they can go. They can leave the webinar.If the decision is in alignment with my offer … For example, if the decision is, yes, I want to use Facebook ads to grow my business and make money from it this year, awesome. I’ve got an offer for that.

If the decision is I want to use launch strategy number one to grow my business, awesome. I’ve got an offer for that. If the decision is in alignment with my offer, they keep listening to the pitch.

I essentially walk people through what the features are for … Well, actually first I do the benefit. First I say, “Here’s the offer and here’s the desired outcome for it.” I always have an explicitly stated, clear desired outcome for all of my offers. Here’s what we’re working towards in this offer.

Then I’ll say, “That’s what’s really important but I know that some people like to know what you’re going to get, so here are the vessels by which I’m going to bestow that outcome onto you.”

Then when I list out all of the stuff that they get, the calls, the Facebook group, the modules and all of that – I’ll list all of that out – then I’ll say, “Here’s what the value of it is.” I always do this very differently.

To most people, I say, “The value of this is based on the real results me and my clients have achieved from this, so I legit had clients make this amount of money using this. That’s what the value is because I’ve tested and proven that’s what this creates. Here’s what the usual investment is and that’s what I sold it for in the past. Here’s what the investment is today.” That’s usually a webinar special.

Then I’ll go through objections. One of the objections is usually money. This is another thing I do that’s very, very different. I’d actually never seen anyone else do this before. I’ll say, “If money is a concern, here’s another option for you.” I’ll give a payment plan option. Here’s what I do differently. My payment plans have no financing fees.

You know how people will tack on an extra amount and you end up paying extra because you’re choosing a payment plan?

I say, “There’s no financing fee with this payment plan and here’s why. If you are not able to afford the pay in full right now, it is a responsible decision on your part as an entrepreneur, as a business owner to choose this payment plan because you’re preserving your cash flow. Who am I as a coach to punish you for making the responsible decision as a business owner? For me, I actually love preserving cash flow. Even if I can afford something as a pay in full, I choose the payment plan all the time anyway. How can I expect you to do any differently? I’m not going to punish you. If you can’t afford the pay in full, just go with the payment plan. Here’s what it is.”

Almost everyone chooses the payment plan.

You know what else is cool, too? A lot of people get worried that they’re going to … If they do payment plans, it’s risky for them because people won’t finish paying. I have a less than 1% rate of people not finishing their payments or asking for refunds. I don’t even remember the last time someone has asked for a refund.

Yes. I say there’s a 48-hour time limit. One of my webinar tips is the way that I do this is when they click over to the sales page, there’s a countdown timer that’s set up to be evergreen through a piece of software.There’s a lot of different ways to do it. I personally use Timerlay so you go to timerlay.com. I think there’s a yearly fee for it but pretty much every funnel I use uses Timerlay. It’s set up to register people’s IP address.

When you go to the page, I know you just visited the page at this time. It’s going to start counting down. If you pass 48 hours, the page redirects somewhere else. I usually redirect them either to a sales page with what I said the usual investment is or to a page that says, “Sorry. You’re out of time. Click over here to join my Facebook group,” or to a downsell. I’ll say, “I’m sorry. You’re out of time. You missed this offer but here’s a different one so you don’t leave empty-handed.”

You know what? It’s interesting. I used to think that the lower price points would work better because they’re lower. Well, it was like a few months ago, I relaunched one of my funnels everything being exactly the same except I changed the price point from $99 to $297. Actually, the conversion went up, which I thought was kind of interesting. We have funnels at a lot of different price ranges and they’re all pretty successful.

Actually, my business is very atypical in that I completely rebel against the idea that you can only teach one type of entrepreneur. I know that there is wealth pyramid. There’s a ladder of stages of business where some people are in debt. Some people are not in debt but they’re broke. Some people are looking to scale, et cetera.

I actually have an offer for every single stage of business. I have price points as low as a $197. Even that one makes profit on the front end. You would think I would break-even but no, no, I make profit on that one.

I’ve got a bunch done at $297. I found that that’s a pretty good price point for some entry-level buyers. Then you upsell them from there into higher ticket offers. Then $497, $997.

If I want to get over that … Technically, you can sell anything up to $2-3,000 on a webinar. Personally, if I’m going to sell over $997 – I don’t know why that was so hard for me to get out – I am just sending people into a phone call. Then they’re getting on the phone and then I’m selling to them from there.

I love sales funnels. I’ve tried a bunch like a ton of different types of sales funnels. I have to rein my creativity and my serial “entrepreneur-ness” down to just focus on webinars and webinar tips because they really are the most successful ones that I’ve seen.

Well, all of my webinars and lots of webinar tips are listed on marketlikeanerd.com along with all of my blogs and my podcast.However, like I said, I have a different resource for each stage of business, and I’m really big on giving you the most appropriate resource and webinar tips for your stage of business. What you’re going to need if you’re a new business owner is going to be a lot different than what you’re going to need if you’re making $10, $20, $30,000 and you want to scale it from there.

If you go to marketlikeanerd.com/quiz, all you have to do is put in your name, your email address and then just tell me what stage of business you’re in. If you don’t know, it’s okay. I’ll give you descriptions on that page, and you just pick the one that sounds most appropriate for you.

After you press submit, I will actually email you what I believe is the most appropriate action step for you to take based on your stage of business and a webinar on demand that makes sense for you from there.

I love rebelling against convention.

You’re free to model me. That’s okay.

Absolutely. Thank you for having me and thank you guys for listening.