THE PODCAST FOR ONLINE COURSE CREATORS GOING
BIG!
Step into the world of business & personal development with Tina Tower, a powerhouse strategist and seasoned entrepreneur with over 20 years of experience.
Join Tina as she unlocks the secrets to building your empire by transforming your expertise into thriving online courses, captivating content, and what it really takes to build a sustainable and profitable thought leadership business.
As a globe-trotting speaker, dedicated teacher, and proud wife & mama, Tina is unapologetically committed to intentionally living a big, beautiful life. If you're ready to embrace your own unique version of an extraordinary life, this podcast is your ultimate guide to exploring endless possibilities and gaining clarity on what truly makes your heart sing, and how to make a lot of money while you create positive impact in the world.
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
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Avoiding the Feast and Famine of Live Launches
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Three Key Revenue Streams
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Building Effective Evergreen Funnels
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The Power of Consistent Lead Generation
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Selling Softly in Weekly Content
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Creating Urgency with Strategic Bonuses and Flash Sales
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Tracking and Optimizing for Success
In this episode, Tina Tower dives deep into strategies for achieving consistent sales in your online business without falling into the launch-only trap. She shares her own experience, highlighting the importance of combining evergreen funnels with live launching to avoid burnout and feast-or-famine cycles. Tina provides actionable advice on building evergreen offers, optimizing funnels, leveraging content, and maintaining authentic selling, all designed to help listeners create sustainable, scalable revenue year-round.
✨ You’ll learn:
- How to combine evergreen funnels with live launches to create consistent sales.
- Ways to grow your email list and convert leads through optimized sequences.
- Strategies for using weekly content to sell authentically and sustainably.
- How to track key metrics to refine your funnels and scale with ease.
By using evergreen funnels, high-value content, and strategic live touchpoints, you can create consistent, year-round revenue without the stress of launch-only sales. Track your metrics, optimize your systems, and nurture your leads to build a predictable, scalable business that grows sustainably.
Resources:
Deadline Funnel software for creating urgency with evergreen offers
https://www.deadlinefunnel.com/?via=tina-tower
Her Empire Builder free resources: herempirebuilder.com/free
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CHECK OUT HER EMPIRE BUILDERShow transcription
Intro
Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Hello. Welcome to her Empire Builder Show. I am your host, Tina Tower. Thank you so much for joining me. Today we are going to be talking about how to make sales every week without launching all the time. Now this is the dream online business, right, is to every day, every week be having those sales coming through. And don't get me wrong, I am a massive, massive fan of live launching. Love it.
Main Episode
Tina Tower [00:00:27]:
I have built my business on live launching, but my business would be dead if all I did was live launch a course. And so what I'm going to go through today is how we can avoid that feast or famine that happens when you're relying on that endless launch roller coaster and how to pad it out in between. Because when you're going launch only, it can be really exhausting and it can also be a huge, huge amount of pressure. And when you're under too much pressure, unfortunately, business doesn't thrive. So we want to be consistent, we want to have consistent sales. And so I'm going to walk you through the systems, I'm going to walk you through the mindset shifts and the practical strategies to bring in revenue every single week. Let's do it. Okay.
Tina Tower [00:01:18]:
So how I bring in revenue every single week is through three different ways. One is evergreen and so we're going to be talking about evergreen systems. One is monthly recurring revenue through memberships. And not for everybody. But I also love high touch point masterminds. I love intimate masterminds. They're my favorite thing to be able to run with those. Usually people are paying monthly, some people will pay annually.
Tina Tower [00:01:46]:
But it means that you've got that consistent recurring revenue and often people will stay for years and years. So you're not having to resell people all the time. The problem with launch only models is it's just not sustainable. Financial stress will always happen between launches because say you're doing a course and you are launching and you're like, okay, we've sold $60,000 worth in this course. If you're not launching again for another 12 weeks, or if you're doing two launches a year, another six months, then that's a long time in between. So you kind of got that feast or famine, you also get a big energy crash. So I know that after live launching, like to me, I still love launching, I would not. So when I said my business would be dead if I only did live launching, it would also be dead if I didn't live launch.
Tina Tower [00:02:35]:
So I just want to make that very clear, is in, especially in my business model, we have the combination of both. And that's what makes it work so well. But what I will say is when I'm coming into launch, there's so much that goes into it. Like for the two months beforehand, I'm writing email copy, we're creating social media, I'm creating landing pages and funnels and the advertising and all the different things that go into it. And then the launch week itself is massive. If you launch properly, you're going to be communicating with a lot of people. Like it's bonjorows every day, it's having discovery calls, it's day DMs, you are on it and that's what you want in a launch. Like the alternative is it's crickets and that's not what you want.
Tina Tower [00:03:20]:
You want a lot of high energy and you want a whole lot of action. But what it means is at the end your energy will be very depleted. Even the most extroverted people I know are tired at the end of a launch and take like a week or two to recover. And so with that, for me, because of that, I launched twice a year. There was one year that I launched four times a year and it damn near killed me because with the like four times a year is every 12 weeks. And because I didn't want to launch over December, January was kind of like every 10 weeks throughout the year. And so it meant that after launch I would take like a week recovery and go straight into planning the next launch and we go into prelaunch, like six weeks out. So it's just a very quick, tight cycle.
Tina Tower [00:04:05]:
And I felt like it was operating at a level that, yes, is great for business growth, sensational for business growth, but not for the lifestyle that I wanted to lead. And so this is where like, like we found this sweet spot with combining Evergreen with the live launching. So we don't want to have such high stakes, we don't want to have this all or nothing pressure because it can lead to burnout. And if you've got, you know, say you're launching twice a year and you know that you can't launch again for another six months, then it's a lot of pressure to go. I have to make everything right now or I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage. Huge amount of pressure and giving yourself pressure on top of pressure on top of pressure. We know that leads to burnout, so we want to be able to avoid that. It also will give you limited capacity because when you are marketing and you're on such a big outward face it does take some of the energy away from creating and serving your existing clients.
Tina Tower [00:05:03]:
And so that was something that I was very cognizant of in the year that we did four launches was I knew who deserves my energy the most is my paying clients. And so it took away from being able to give everything to the launch. And so you want to make sure that you're able to divide yourself equally amongst the two. So what you want to be able to do is create a really good Evergreen funnel. It's one of the most important things that we can do inside our business to avoid all of this feast and famine. So what you need is that season signature offer that's always available. Ideally it is the thing just before what you live launch. So to me, a really great Evergreen offer is something that say someone sees you speak on a live stage or they hear you on a podcast and they're like, oh my God, I want to get started with that right now.
Tina Tower [00:05:53]:
Picking up what she's putting down. You want to have something that they can immediately log on while they're hot and they're into you and buy something that will help them get closer and get ready for for your signature program that you live launch. That way when the launch comes around, they're like, all right, I'm ready to go. Let's do this. So when you're doing Evergreen, there's a couple of different ways to do it really well, depending on if you're doing ads or not. So ads do work very well for Evergreen offers. The best one to use is Deadline Funnel. So Deadline Funnel is like a software that will put timers on people like a deadline, so that when someone opens it, maybe they get a discount, maybe they get bonuses.
Tina Tower [00:06:36]:
But it's timed however long you want to time it. So say it's 72 hours or it's a week or however long you want to do it for, then what you're able to do is they come in through a webinar or something like that. So either a webinar or an ad, depending on your price point, and then they're able to buy that straight off the back of it. So Deadline Funnel is the easiest way. But if you're looking to not add on another software, because I know that software creep is a thing. So say you're using just pure Kajabi, for example. The other way to do it is with a really good quality VSL. So with like a 10 minute video sales letter that you've got on your sales page that people can hear what you're all about.
Tina Tower [00:07:15]:
So like a very mini, mini webinar, but more sales orientated rather than education orientated. And then from that people are able to make a good, educated decision on whether or not they want to buy. The downside with just doing pure Kajabi or whatever normal website that you're running is you can't put those deadlines on there. So it's something that people can see and it's not so much with the scarcity and going like propelling people to buy now. So you want to get people to those pages with great lead magnets. Test up your lead magnets until you find the winner. Once you find a winner, you can stick with the same lead magnet for months, if not years, if you know it's working in that funnel. But to get there, what you want to do is just switch them up as much as you can, like every month, sometimes every two weeks.
Tina Tower [00:08:02]:
If you know that your conversion rates are not where they should be, I'd keep switching it up until you up that conversion. The other thing that you need to make sure you've got really dialed in is your automated email sequence. So a lot of the sales with Evergreen happen in the follow up. A lot of them don't happen immediately. A lot of them happen on that email sequence that's coming afterwards. So you've got to have that super, super dialed in. If you're finding there's a lot of people coming to your page but they're not buying, I would be looking at that email sequence because that is probably going to be the culprit in why you're not getting those conversions. Now.
Tina Tower [00:08:39]:
Deadline Funnel I think is very worth it if you're running ads. So if you're running Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Instagram ads, any sort of ads to it. I would be investing in Deadline Funnel because it's going to be worth it for that funnel. And you'll usually have a bit of a prerecorded webinar. You'll have like a min workshop all as part of that funnel. And you can have people coming into it from all different ways. Some will come just from the lead magnet, some will come from your vsl, some will come in through the webinar and you'll test them against each other all the time and be running them all the time. The other thing is consistently generation your evergreen funnel.
Tina Tower [00:09:15]:
Well, I mean any of your business, whether it's evergreen or live launch, it won't grow if you don't have a really good consistent lead generation engine in your Business. So I was talking to someone the other day about this and they're like, you know, my list has grown about 2% this year. I'm like, well, that's not helpful. But she wants to grow by 20% her profit. And that's actually very unlikely because what you're looking at with your list, like every time we run a launch, every time we run a sale, we want to see what percentage of our list is going to buy. And if we're sitting at about 6 or 7% of our list purchasing something, that is a great day. And so what we're looking at is if we want to grow our sales, we need to grow our list. If you are marketing to the same people, you're going to exhaust your list.
Tina Tower [00:10:05]:
You can have really good nurture strategies in there. And yes, some people will be on your list for years before they buy from you. But what you want to do is to have a really healthy, growing business. Is this constant lead generation engine running in the background. And so you want to build your lead machine. How you do that is having weekly content like podcasting. One of my favorites. Hi, friend.
Tina Tower [00:10:28]:
Because it is something that people can listen to each and every week. They can build trust, they can learn, they can figure out, do I want to do business with Tina or not? Do I want to go the next step or not? Some people are just happy listening to the podcast for years and years. But if you're ready to get off the fence and make those moves and actually grow your business, the magic happens on the other side of the curtain, right? And so that's a way to have this constant weekly content coming out to people. It's very leveraged. It doesn't take. I mean, yes, it's effort from me. I mean, right now I'm recording this. We've got the lights set up, we've got the camera set up.
Tina Tower [00:11:06]:
I've got my notes in front of me that I've prepared. And then the recording gets done and then it gets edited by Joey, who's my editor. And then it will go onto YouTube. It will go out onto all of the different platforms for audio. Chris on my team makes the landing page for it creates blogs out of it creates social media. It's a big engine, it's a big machine. That happens. Yes, it is effort, but it is very leveraged effort.
Tina Tower [00:11:33]:
The result that we get is far worth the effort that goes into it because it's this constant machine that keeps on giving. If you're a regular listener of the podcast, one, thank you Two, hope you love it. And three is you'll notice every three or four ish episodes, I have some sort of lead magnet. So I'll tell you. DM me the word shift, and you can get the weekly CEO shift guide. DM me the word Christmas. And you'll get added to our 12 Days of Christmas promotion. DM me the word wait list to get onto her Empire Builders wait list.
Tina Tower [00:12:11]:
There's always different things that I will encourage people to get so that some of those podcast listeners, if you're not on my list already, you can join my list and then take that next step in our relationship. And so you want to have that engine going. You can use Instagram, you can use podcast, you can use email. I think the personal email. Every week, once people are on my email list, I know that people stay on it because of my personal email that I send every week. So I'm always trying to give a story of something that's happened that week that's relatable, that is actionable, that is helpful to people, as well as something cool that I learned this week, like whether it's a book or a piece of software or a podcast or something that I think, hey, I know my people will be interested in this. People are like me and they're gonna like this. And so I'll share that.
Tina Tower [00:13:05]:
I'll share our podcast episode, I'll share a productivity tip. All of that goes in there. So that way, people want to stay subscribed to the newsletter because it's giving people value that they're getting there. So running ads is also a good way to fuel it. I do not run ads. I have dabbled a little bit, and I may dabble a little more in 2026, but ads have not been a strategy that I've used to grow my business. I quite like organic growth. It means it's more effortful, but it means that I have a whole lot less people.
Tina Tower [00:13:38]:
So say on her Empire Builder training, for example, when we're running our live launch, for that I will get, I don't know, maybe 100, 150 people live on the call. If I was using ads. We've done that once before. We had 700 people on the call. Massive. So big, looks so good, so good for my vanity. But we had the exact same amount of people buy. And so what I have found is ads can be really good to attract people.
Tina Tower [00:14:08]:
But I like warm ads. They seem to convert a lot better. But in terms of growing your list, it is slower to do it organically. And that is why I think ads can be good for a lot of people. If I was starting my business from scratch now, I would be using ads. But because I already have enough of a base there, I can do the organic get less people, but higher quality leads. So you want to weigh those two things up. Keep creating different lead magnets for different pain points until you hit the winners.
Tina Tower [00:14:36]:
We have the winners now. If you want to see my top lead magnets that work, go to herempirebuilder.com free in that URL we have at the top there like the six most downloaded lead magnets of the last year. And I'm changing that all the time so that when I'm speaking on stages or I'm meeting people and they're like, I want to get to know what you're doing a little bit more, I can send them straight to our free resources page and they can have a dabble. They can grab those best things, but could be interesting for you to find out, like what are the best ones that are going there. The other thing is using something like ManyChat so that you've got those DM automations that are happening because it means it's an engine that will work without you having to be online. So while you're sleeping or while you are recording your podcast or whatever you're doing, people can be DMing you and it can be sending information back so that it's not so laborious for you. Make sure that you're refreshing your opt in pages every few months. I am guilty of not doing this.
Tina Tower [00:15:34]:
Sometimes I will go to them and go, oh my gosh, how long has that been? Since I went there. Because you can end up with a lot of them. But it's a really good idea if you're changing your messaging slightly to make sure you're going into all of those pages and you're up leveling your copy and your messaging on your opt in pages as well as your email funnels. Because like I said before, so much of the sales and the conversion happens in the follow up email email sequence. So you want to make sure that they are dialed in and know that sales are a byproduct of the visibility of the value and consistent invitations. So if you're not constantly reminding people, hey, come and get my free resource. Hey, come along to the webinar. Hey, listen to my podcast.
Tina Tower [00:16:19]:
Hey, buy my thing. If you're not giving those calls to action, you're not going to get any of those results. So you've got to have that there Number four is to sell in your weekly content softly. But clearly people don't want to feel hard sold to all the time. They will repel if you're hard sell to all the time. There's a podcast that I wanted to like and I listened to it, but they sold so hard on their podcast that I was like ew and couldn't listen to the content in between. The content was great, but it wasn't worth it to me to listen to the frickin infomercial that just seemed to never end or come in like every eight minutes. This three minute infomercial.
Tina Tower [00:16:59]:
I'm like, calm your farm. So you want to be able to sell softly but not have people wonder what it is you do. So regular listeners of the podcast will know how often I mention my programs, how often I'm just weaving in the products that we have, the courses I have the membership for Her Empire Builder, My Masterminds. It's there on. I'm not shying away from it, but I'm not forcing it down people's throats either. We've always got the link in the show notes so that people can go, you know what? Now's my time. I want to get it. And it's always there, it's always easy, it's always clear.
Tina Tower [00:17:35]:
So you want to make sure you're not hiding your offer. Mention it naturally in podcast episodes, especially when you're on other people's podcasts. Mention it in your reels, mention it in your carousels. Mention it in your emails, like just having on your weekly newsletter. How to work with me down the bottom so that you're constantly there reminding people, here's how to work with me. Use your storytelling. One of the best ways to sell is to tell stories. So tell stories of the clients that you're serving, of the transformation that you've been able to achieve that is going to keep that sales engine moving along and making that call to action.
Tina Tower [00:18:11]:
Just a habit, always putting in. If you're thinking of something and you're. You're having a conversation with someone, don't be shy if it's going to be helpful for them in going, hey, I've got a course that can help you with that. Jump on in. I mean, I did it the other day with AI for course creators to a friend of mine who has very little to do with course creation, but she wanted to know how to make custom GPTs for her business and I was like, hey, I've got the course AI for course creators that's good for course creators, but it shows you how to make custom GPTs. You can just adapt it to your business. She was like, awesome. Went straight on and bought it.
Tina Tower [00:18:42]:
That's something that it's always top of my mind whenever someone says anything and I'm like, I've got the solution for you. I am not shy in being able to say, hey, here it is. And people are usually thankful for that because they're going, oh, awesome. I wanted to be able to get the solution to my problem. And there's the solution to the problem. The other thing that you can do is use strategic bonuses to create micro urgency for your evergreen programs throughout the year. So what I mean by that is giving people a reason to act now because if it's always available, it's hard. This is why live launches work so well, is because you've got the scarcity of the deadline, you've got the scarcity of the finish.
Tina Tower [00:19:21]:
And so how you get Evergreen going is yes, with great funnels that just keep going. But then if there's people that are kind of looking and waiting for it and seeing if it goes on sale, you might want to have those flash sales. And so the way you can do that is throughout the year, like having a couple of flash sales. Maybe you've got it at the end of financial year. Maybe you've got one for Black Friday. Maybe you have one for, I don't know, whatever promotion you want to do. I did one for my birthday promotion. You could do them at any different time that you want.
Tina Tower [00:19:52]:
And you've got bonuses that expire in that day or that week. Whatever you want to give in terms of timeline. So it could be things like template that's going to be super helpful. It could be something like a one on one call. If you really want to give it a boost and want to give something irresistible. One on one time with you is always the best thing. You want to be careful with it. One of my private clients I'm working with today, she was like, I really want the wait list to go great guns.
Tina Tower [00:20:16]:
I think I'll have about 50 people come through. I was thinking of doing a one on one call as a bonus. I'm like, whoa, hold up. Repeat what you just said again and really pay attention. And she said it again and she's like, what? I'm like, can you imagine? And the most that she'd ever got was 10 in wait list. So she was thinking goal is 50, but 10 was like the realistic number. But she's grown her list so substantially. And she's improved marketing and she's improved deliverability.
Tina Tower [00:20:47]:
She's really stepped things up that with the numbers that she has on the wait list, 50 is actually quite achievable. I wouldn't be surprised if she gets there. And so I was going think of the reality of launching and then the next week you have 50 people trying to book in one on ones with you, like oh my gosh, that would be awful. And she was like, that would be awful. Why didn't I think of that? Because you're not thinking as if you're going to be super successful. So let's think about that, of what the reality looks. But if you know you're happy, like you could do a flash sale and say the first five people get a one on one call with me. You can do it however you like.
Tina Tower [00:21:22]:
You could do things like you could do it done for you, audit for someone if that's convenient. You could do a planner, like whatever's going to be valuable to people. Think of those bonuses that you could put in for a flash sale. You could do fast action bonuses via email sequence just to your list at different times. You could have different perks that people only on your email list get. So it's not something that you're doing publicly, but just on your email list in there. So urgency. One of the keys is never be fake with it.
Tina Tower [00:21:51]:
So it's always got to be real, it's always got to be authentic. So make sure that you're able to do that thoughtfully and timely. Number six is to add a weekly or a monthly live touch point. So this is a way, I think as AI is getting more prevalent, this is actually going to become more important. So a lot of evergreen programs are like diy, they're not getting any input from you as the creator. And so one of the ways to give that a boost is to say like I'm going to do a live cohort. So it means that the people that buy your course in the next week, they're going to be able to get access to exclusive live Q&As going forward for like the next six weeks or the next 12 weeks, maybe you're going to do three of them every two weeks or whatever cadence it's going to be. But being able to introduce some live components in there so that people can get their questions answered so that you can encourage that momentum so that the people that have the blocks to actually achieving the transformation that they're going for, a lot of the time people won't buy a program because it's not that they don't believe that you have the ability to do what you're doing, but a lot of the time people are looking at it and going, I see what you're doing and I see that there are other people that are getting the same result, but I don't think that I'm going to be able to get that result.
Tina Tower [00:23:14]:
And so putting lives in there gives people a little bit more support. It's able for the people that are going to find it a little bit harder to get that transformation, to be able to get that encouragement and that support in real life, real time from you. And that's super, super valuable. So if that's ever doable, putting that in, like some mini coaching sessions or some live components will definitely give it that boost that you're looking for throughout the year. It also builds that trust, builds that credibility. And all without doing an actual launch. You can do it just from a few email sequences in there as well. Then you want to, once you've got your evergreen all there, you want to track, you want to tweak it, and you want to optimize continually the things to look at weekly.
Tina Tower [00:24:03]:
I mean, in her Empire Builder, we have a big list of weekly metrics. That is the data that we collect to be able to make really informed decisions in our businesses so that we can constantly improve and constantly grow. But the ones that you want to look at that are key for an evergreen funnel is looking at how many new leads you acquired, the cost per lead that it cost you, how many views did you get on your sales page, and what the conversion rate is on your funnel. So there's a few, there's like many others that you can track and measure, but they're the key ones to be able to see how healthy it is and to be able to know, all right, does it need tweaking? What do you need to tweak so that you can test and measure and constantly change each of the cogs in your system? So it's like, all right, we're guessing. Maybe it's the colors of the call to action buttons on the sales page. Let's try that. If that doesn't change the numbers, let's change the headings, let's change the amount of text, let's change the video. Changing one thing at a time.
Tina Tower [00:24:58]:
When you know your numbers, you'll be able to then go, all right, that got us up by like 2%. Let's leave that now. Let's try something else. And then constantly just trying to get 1% better than before is how you get this engine really, really humming. You want to test things like subject lines make a huge difference in your email sequence, landing page, your headlines, huge difference. Call to action buttons, huge difference. For example, we got great heaps better conversion when we changed our call to action buttons. Instead of saying buy now or join here to going I'm in.
Tina Tower [00:25:33]:
I feel so ready. Let's do this baby. Some sort of more colloquial, longer casual call to action upped our page by a few percent. Testing those so that you can keep what's working and improve what's not constantly. So what you want to do is you want to build the machine that sells for you. That's what we're looking for. So that in between your live launches you've got these consistent sales always coming in. And what that is about is creating a system that works in the background so that you can breathe, so that you can live life and so that you can create and you can serve people in your higher end market programs as well.
Tina Tower [00:26:13]:
You don't need to launch every month to make money, you don't need to launch every quarter to make money. But you do need a consistent path from value to offer and that needs to be really, really dialed in. So when you build this, I do think that that's a business that can create you true freedom is the combination of live launching and evergreen is super leveraged. You still have to work at it. Obviously there's still things to tweak every week. You still still running your marketing engine which is going to involve a lot of you. So it's not like it's passive income that you're going to sit back and just collect unfortunately. But what it is is super scalable and super leveraged and that is what we're going for.
Tina Tower [00:26:55]:
So if you want to see how I do this and how I teach this, like I said, here's the soft offer like come and join us inside her empire builder. It is what we have going on. We have all of the email samples, sales page samples, the funnel samples, everything that you need for webinars, for VSLs, all inside her empire builder. So if we're closed, just go to herempirebuilder.com join join the waitlist and that way next time we open you'll be able to be the first in there can grab all the resources and dial up that performance. I'll see you on the inside. Have the best day, my friend.