Tina Tower [00:00:00]:
Hello and welcome to the Hermpire Builder Show. I am your host, Tina Tower and today we are talking about a very special episode and that is what actually works now in online business in 2026. This is such an important one because there's no getting around it. The landscape has changed. Someone even asked me just the other day, is the online course industry dead? And while I think nowhere near what I do think is like I said, the 2K course is dead. You know that like traditional 2020, 2021 course where people would put out like a prerecorded eight week, $2,000 course, run a live launch, sell it, they'd like promote and ghost and then you wouldn't see them again for like until they were launching the next time. That is is no longer viable. That is no longer a strategy that is working for anyone.

Main Episode

Tina Tower [00:01:00]:
Low cost offers are something that is working when you have a bucket ton of Facebook spend that is going there. But there are also things that are working really, really well. And so what I want to go through in this episode is what I have found both within our own business, but also in the hundreds of clients that I work with throughout her empire builder in what is working, what is not. So that you know what to keep, you know what to d, you know what to try and you know what is coming through. So if you are looking for strategies that are actually going to move the needle in 2026, this episode is for you. Let's go. Let's figure out what strategies you need to double down on. So number one is talking about why what worked before isn't working now.

Tina Tower [00:01:51]:
Now if you think of old school, even webinars were even exciting. You go on a webinar, people would be like, oh my gosh, I can learn this for free. This is amazing. Now everyone runs a webinar so it is less exciting. It is less. It's not new anymore. I know when I first started going on webinars like 10 years ago. So if you look at people that were in online courses from early like 2012, 2013, that were really pioneers in it when they were running their first webinars and you'd have like fake deadline timers or you'd have fake chatbots or all of these different things, nobody knew because everybody just assumed that it was real and we enjoyed the show.

Tina Tower [00:02:42]:
And now the bullshit meter is so high that that stuff does not fly. And so doing a lot of high pressure sales tactics, while I do think that you do need some to get people over the line, it's done in a very different way now if you want it to work. So doing a lot of high pressure countdown timers. The scarcity does work in terms of a live launch outperforms in Evergreen every single time. I wish it wasn't so. I wish it wasn't so. I wish I could do Evergreen and just say, you know what, join her empire builder anytime you like, come on in. But we on average when we do a live launch, we will have 30, 35 people join her Empire builder.

Tina Tower [00:03:34]:
If we were doing Evergreen to get those same results, we'd need a consistent like five people a month just jumping in and it just wouldn't happen. I tried Evergreen for six months once. We got like two a month because the finish line is not there. Like that scarcity isn't there to go, hey, this is going to close to encourage people that are on the sidelines to kind of start, step off the sidelines and get in the game. And so you do need a little bit. But I do think what's working is when you're taking it much softer than what we used to. So I think taking out a lot of the high pressure and going into that attitude of it's going to open again. If now is not the right time for you, just come in the next one.

Tina Tower [00:04:15]:
But if this is the result that you're looking for, I would love to help keeping it not this. If you don't get in this now, life is going to pass you by and you're never going to be okay. Okay, that's just. Nah, that's just gross. And so we don't want to do that. The other is having like generic information courses. As we all know, ChatGPT, while it's been around for the last few years, it's really stepped up throughout 2025 and now that we're in 2026, it's kind of mooched into like the consumers. And so where, you know, through 2024, 2025 it was just being used by business people.

Tina Tower [00:04:55]:
Now it is used by consum. There is a lot of people that are not all that tech savvy that are regularly using ChatGPT. And so it has made generic information really easy to come by. Now I don't think the availability of generic information is going to kill the online course industry because if you look at Google and YouTube has been around for such a long time that if information was all people were after, that would have killed the online course industry a really long time ago. But what people are looking for is you as the trusted guide to distill that information. So why people don't want to go to ChatGPT, say, in the replacement for her empire builder. I'm building my online course. I need to do marketing.

Tina Tower [00:05:41]:
What should I do next? Because there's no nuance there. It will give a whole lot of generic information. But you're not sure, is this right for me? Does this align with my values? Is this really what I'm looking for? Is this working for other people? Has it made it up from here? Has it grabbed it from there? You're not really sure why people join her empire builder is a couple of reasons. One, because they know my experience and so they trust me to be able to distill that information into. Let's not absorb 50 bazillion things. You don't need to. Let's just do the thing that you need next. This is all you need to be focusing on to get the result that you're looking for.

Tina Tower [00:06:18]:
The other is community and connection. We are humans doing business with humans. And so that is what people are after. And so if you've got any, like, generic information in there, I would be looking at, how can you enhance that so that you know. Because if you're just selling generic information, you're going to go down like a ton of bricks. So you want to. You want to avoid that. You want to avoid a lot of shallow launches.

Tina Tower [00:06:43]:
So what I mean by shallow launches is just the normal. You know, I went through this myself, I'll be honest. Like, when we were launching last and I was like, how can we make this exciting? Because I love live launching. I like the excitement of it. To me, it's like, it's like game day for football players where you train and you train and you train and finally you get to go to the grand final and you get to see what you're made of. I kind of like that excitement and seeing if we're going to win or lose. But I have tried to keep launches as exciting as possible. I've done destination launches.

Tina Tower [00:07:16]:
I've launched from all over the world. We did launch house. There is a lot of different things that we've experimented with to try and keep it exciting. And with the last launch, I was like, what am I like, Am I just going to throw confetti again? Like, we've all seen this 50,000 times. What can I possibly do that's going to be different and exciting? And so that's what we're working on is going well. How can we talk to people in a way that is different to what we've done before if we know that webinars are still very effective. However, your show up rates are going to be a lot less than they used to be. Your conversion rates are less than they used to be.

Tina Tower [00:07:52]:
So you do need a lot more top of funnel to get the same result. And so where are we going to next? Like what is the next thing that is going to connect with people? And for a lot of it it's going back to old school. Like it's actually going talking to people, speaking on stages, guesting on other people's podcasts. Like actually going and talking to other humans is the thing that's going to make a difference. So audience expectations have definitely evolved over the last few years because people have gotten used to the whole way that it's being ran. So people are looking for that depth, they're looking for that transformation. And AI and automation has definitely changed how content is created and how it's delivered for a lot of people. Now if you're not using some sort of AI support in your courses, you will have to start adding that this year, otherwise it's just not good enough.

Tina Tower [00:08:44]:
It's just not too far of a step ahead of using AI on its own. And so you've got to start putting in those deeper experiences. You've got to start helping people through those courses with that AI. Also, the market is a lot more saturated than it used to be. The barrier to entry for online business is so low. It is so cheap to start an online business, it is so easy to start an online business. And while that is massively beneficial to people wanting to start a business, the downside of that is there's more competitors. And so your value, your positioning need to be crystal clear.

Tina Tower [00:09:20]:
Now the good news in this is with AI, with increased competition, the one thing people can never copy is you. And the one thing people are after is you. And so the more you can show up as you are, the more you can be real, the more you can talk to people, the more you can connect with people, the better you are going to be able to go, the better you're going to be able to perform. And so that is good news. Because I know when I started business I thought I had to be someone I was not. I imagined this is what a business person does and would hold myself differently. And it took a really long time for me to be more comfortable in wearing clothes that I wanted to wear, in talking the way that I wanted to talk, in just all like just dropping the Guard dropping the facade a little bit and just showing up as yourself. And so that is, that is a great thing.

Tina Tower [00:10:15]:
I think the online business world is far from dead. It is definitely not dead. It is growing up. It is evolving. It is very new in the scheme of things. It really only came into play like 10, 15 years ago and it really only started getting saturated throughout Covid. And so it's just evolving. It's just going into its grown up next phase there.

Tina Tower [00:10:33]:
And with that comes the need for deeper strategy and more human connection. So what I see is Working now in 2026, this is what we want to want to work on is very much transformation over information. People don't want another course. What they want is results. They're looking for that desired result that they're going for. So, for example, take a gardening course. If you want to learn how to plant your veggie garden, you can go onto ChatGPT and you can ask it. You can go onto YouTube and you can ask.

Tina Tower [00:11:05]:
It's plenty of information there. However, when I bought a gardening course, what I did was I found Chloe at Been There Doug that and I was like, I like her, I like the way she does things, I like her values, I like her theories, I her presentation style. I like all of it. And so I wanted to learn from her, I wanted to do it her way. I wanted that result that she got inside her garden. Similar climate, similar, different things. And so I was looking for that. And so that's something to keep top of mind is if I was just after the information, all I would have done is just turn on my Voice thing on ChatGPT and just go, what do I buy in the nursery? Where do I plan it? How do I plan it? I got so much more than that because I was after the result.

Tina Tower [00:11:50]:
And so you want to really be focused on that result and that transformation rather than just information on its own. Which means you need to clearly, clearly, clearly, clearly articulate your before and after that you are guiding people on, like saying, this is where we are at the start. This is where you are right now. This is where you want to be. And this is why my program is going to get you there the easiest, quickest way possible, with less stuffing around along the way, which is what you do a lot when you're trying to diy, when you're trying to learn anything. I bought a course on Freepik, like how to create the AI photos. And that was because I could have very easily just started clicking different buttons, experimented myself, watched a couple of YouTube videos figured it out. But I wanted to save time.

Tina Tower [00:12:42]:
I wanted the result. Now what I was going for was expediency of stuffing about on my own. I went to someone that I knew had done this before and had created a course out of it and I was like, great, I'm going to get that one. So then I just go, lesson one, two, three, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's all I need to know. I don't need to fill my brain with any additional information. I just want the result as quickly and as easily as I possibly can. And so they're the courses that are working really, really well.

Tina Tower [00:13:09]:
You also want to put in if you've got a higher price, higher touch point, making sure you have some element of coaching if you've got a lower price point. What I'd recommend is using something like Delphi. So Delphi AI is. I'll link it in the show notes for you. It is something that we built in 2025 for our members so that they could have what we've called Pocket Tina. So Tina, in your pocket to be able to ask any questions all trained on your ip. So instead of going out into the wilderness like and getting answers from everywhere in ChatGPT that you don't know whether is accurate or not, it is using only your ip. So those guardrails are on.

Tina Tower [00:13:52]:
So it means it's a really great coach inside your programs to be able to help your clients get that momentum, get that implementation going. Also providing accountability. I love accountability circles. I think that it helps people a lot. I know in Empress Circle we have accountability circles in my mastermind that I run and every month I'll have people say the couple days before when they saw it in their calendar, they were like, oh crap, I haven't done the thing that I was going to do this month. And so they get their hustle and they get it done. And so what providing that means is that people are actually getting that result. And that is what we want.

Tina Tower [00:14:30]:
We want people that are getting results. We want to have those clear outcomes. The other is having always on sales. So having some Evergreen funnels Now, if you listen to this podcast regularly, you know I am a massive fan of live launching. I think that live launching will always outperform Evergreen funnels. But you want to have both. You want to have the live launches there and then you also want to have an always on system so that you know launches are great for energy, but Evergreen will help create stability. So with live launching, if you have a membership or A mastermind.

Tina Tower [00:15:06]:
Beautiful. I think that is fantastic. You've got monthly recurring revenue. It gives the business a lot more stability than if you're just launching courses alone. But if not, you want to make sure that you've got that evergreen there so that every week you're making sales, every week there is money coming in so that you've got that stability happening in your business. What it will do is like run in the background always. Now, I want to preface this with build it and they will come is not a strategy. It does not work.

Tina Tower [00:15:39]:
Whenever you are creating an evergreen funnel, you want to make sure that you've got systems in place that are going to bring people into that. If you've got an evergreen, it doesn't mean that you don't need to put effort in. Passive income is not a thing. What you want to be able to do is go, how is that best going to build? Are you going to use a fake Facebook ad strategy? Are you going to be running a monthly webinar to fill it up? Are you going to be a keynote speaker? I've got a lot of clients inside her Empire Builder that are keynote speakers. For them, evergreen's no brainer because every week they're speaking in front of a different audience that are going, oh my gosh, I just want to take the next step with Chelsea. How can I get onto that? Then they're in there and they're buying her course in the back end. You want to make sure that when you create the evergreen that there is constant flow of ways to be able to have people coming in. And finding that in there as well is where you can use AI.

Tina Tower [00:16:30]:
Like use AI to create that automation. Use AI to create those nurture sequences that will get people to buy after they opt into your freebies or coming to your webinar. Get AI to enhance your sales pages so that you can pick up that extra 1, 2, 3% of that conversion rate in there. Use AI to segment your leads. So instead of like what I'm seeing working really well is this like hyper personalization. So instead of sending one email out to your mass database, in really personalizing it and going, all right, how can we go? If people attended this training, if they were on the wait list, if they downloaded this lead magnet but not this product, then let's send this email to them. But if they did buy that product as well, let's send this email to them and really getting into some more refined, sophisticated funnels so that you are segmenting those leads and going in for that Hyper personalization. Because the more personalized it is for someone, the more they're going to feel connected, the more likely they are to be seen and then the more likely they are to do business with you as well.

Tina Tower [00:17:38]:
Number three is intimate experiences that scale. I've spoken a lot about this lately. I do think that with the rise of AI, more intimate is definitely the way to go. So scalable definitely doesn't have to mean impersonal. You can still scale an offer and still have it with personal touches. What people are doing, they're craving connection. And this is where I think live events are massive. So say you've got 1,000 members, that doesn't mean that you can never have any connection with them.

Tina Tower [00:18:12]:
You can have live events, you can have virtual networking sessions, you can have those live Q and A calls, making sure that you've got something there that's really going to enhance that connection. You can have pods, you can have mini cohorts. You can do a lot of different things within your network to help people connect with each other and help them rise. And that is going to make a really high roi. Like that effort. It does seem like effort, I know, but what it's going to do is going to increase retention, it's going to increase those results, which means that will keep your business alive and thriving as well. I know for me, my intimate masterminds, they're my most fulfilling and they're my most effective offers. Okay.

Tina Tower [00:18:58]:
Number four is hybrid content. So really using both you as the human and AI. So what I kind of see it happening now is that Pareto's principle, the 8020 rule, like 80% of information is coming from AI, whereas 20% is you as the human. And so what AI allows you to do is way more with way less. You can use it for all your content creation, you can use it for customer support, you can use it to help you with ideation. But personality will win every single time. So this is where you need to. The worst thing is when you see everything happening with AI and it's just very vanilla, very generic, very boring, very same same.

Tina Tower [00:19:45]:
We want to be different, you want to be you. That is what people are going to be attracted to. And so making sure that you are injecting your personality into everything that you are infusing your brand voice into everything. So using tools like ChatGPT is amazing. Creating custom GPTs for all of those regular things that you need to do using Delphi AI, which I have mentioned a couple times, I've linked it for you in the bottom for all of your project management, like using things like Monday boards, project management in there, all of the AI templates to help you run a really lean and a really professional business that can scale while you are freeing up all your time just to connect with other people. Because we don't have to spend so much time anymore on a lot of that admin in the back end. Like I know a lot of my time that used to be spent typing away, reading data, interpreting data, creating marketing plans, creating socials, all of that sort of stuff is now so much less, which has given me a lot more time to connect with people, a lot more time to do coaching, a lot more time to actually do the things that we're good at that AI can't replicate. Number five is lifestyle aligned growth.

Tina Tower [00:21:01]:
So I think that while success does take hard work, I do think we don't need to hustle as much as what we used to because things are way easier. It is way easier to get off the ground. It is way easier to create a website. Oh my gosh, like just even creating a website that used to take so long with like creating your graphic designing, creating your copy, putting everything together, the amount of time that takes now is such a fraction of what it used to be. There are so many different things that are so much easier now than what they used to be. You don't have to be this hustle obsessed all the time. For me, the way that that's kind of coming into play, I'm not expanding my team. What I'm doing is deepening the quality of what we do.

Tina Tower [00:21:51]:
And so we're able to do that. Use a whole lot of AI to be able to do a lot of the repetitive tasks so that all my time can be spent on the deep stuff, which I love. And then of course you've freed up your time so you've got a little bit more travel time, you've got a little bit more freedom and a little bit more creativity. And this is where I think I know in hustle periods in my business in the past, I have got to the end of some weeks and gone. Gosh, I had no time to think, Like I had no time to just stop and really figure out what do I want to do when it comes to this problem that I'm trying to solve or what's this new idea. And so many of the best things I've ever done in business have been when I'm being on holidays or when I'm in the shower or when I'm taking A walk. And it just like drops in this idea that you go, huh, light bulb. Like I need to do this.

Tina Tower [00:22:41]:
And if we are working, working, working, hustling, hustling, hustling all the time, you don't get time for that creativity. So what we want to do with AI is instead of having it come in and just going more, more, more, have it come in and give yourself some space to be able to have the creativity. Because the creativity is your superpower. It is the thing that's going to beat everything else. You can build a wildly successful business in 2026 without doing more. But it's about doing what is working better. A couple of different practical ways that you can apply these strategies is review your offer, look at all of the different offers in your business and look and make sure that it's focused on transformation, that all your marketing messaging is focused on the result. It's not necessarily focused on the information itself.

Tina Tower [00:23:31]:
So an example of this is Jenny Cook, who is a wonderful member of ours in her empire Builder. You can see her@jennycookart.com I think that is her. I will put the correct link in the show notes just in case. But so Jenny is an artist, really good artist, and she was all about painting, all about showing people the technical parts of how to do these different paintings. And when we first met, I was looking at that and going, you know, people want to paint, yes, but more than what they want to paint is they're looking for that connection. And so a really beautiful part of her membership is people being able to come together and sit and paint together, being able to have that like they're online, but they're learning to paint with other people that are like minded, that are also learning to paint there. And so they're going, the result, yes, is learning to paint, but it's not necessarily them wanting to line their walls with their own paintings. It's the actual act of doing it.

Tina Tower [00:24:32]:
It's the actual act of them exercising their creativity, of them connecting with other like minded people and being able to have these chats with people that are at the same stage in life as them. So sometimes your language and your messaging, you need to figure out what are people actually getting out of that program, what are they actually wanting from that and making sure that you're talking to that rather than the mechanics of it. You want to create a really good evergreen funnel for your best selling course, like whatever that is. Have that something that's always on, making sure that your personal brand is very prevalent and that Everything is infused with you. You are the most important asset that your business has. So making sure that everything is coming across with that, using all the tools like Delphi, like Monday, like Kajabi, making sure that everything now, like I'm seeing every month, all the tools that I use are bringing in better and better AI functions and it is hard to keep up with sometimes. But this is your sign to sit down and go, am I using everything to the best of its capability? Are there new functions that that software program has brought in that I haven't even touched yet? I know we record our interviews on Riverside and the other day I was in Riverside looking at that and the AI functions they're brought in now, it makes like editing is a breeze. Getting the little social media clips like it's all done automatically with AI that we used to have to do manually.

Tina Tower [00:26:00]:
And, and so I didn't realize that. And so go into all of your programs and work out. All right, am I utilizing everything that's now there? And then blocking in that deep work, like making sure you're giving yourself that time to think, giving yourself that time to move the needle and not just the busy work. So the way to win this year is not about doing it all. It's about doing the right things and doing them really, really well. So what I'm doubling down on inside my business, just to give you a little indication to that is we're simplifying a lot of our offers. So I've killed off a lot of offers. We had a lot of low cost offers.

Tina Tower [00:26:41]:
We had about seven, eight of them. We've now just got two courses, idea to launch, limited launch formula. Then we go into her Empire Builder membership, Empress Circle Mastermind. That's it, that's the show. And what I was finding was all of those smaller offers would be just taking marketing time and energy away from our core message. And so there's no point in splitting that. I wanted to get real simple, real clear and really refined. With that, we've upgraded a lot of our customer experience.

Tina Tower [00:27:11]:
So using AI, using Delphi in there, using our Monday boards, using a whole lot of things that are helping our customers to get that result quicker and easier. Keeping our A grade team tight and focused. That is a way that I'm trying to get other people to use AI in there as well to make their jobs easier and make it more streamlined, healthier and happier than ever is what I'm focused on right now. We've got more white space, which is leading to less burnout, which I am enjoying, which, of course, is leading to better ideas. It's leading to more clarity about the pathway forward because I'm not sprinting as fast, which is really nice, and then just adapting. So a lot of what I'm going through right now is experiment and adapt. I mean, part of my job as running her empire builder is unfortunately being open to failure publicly, because it's my job to try everything so that I can see what's working and what's not and pass that knowledge on to my members. And so it means I have to try a whole lot of things and some of them work and some of them don't work.

Tina Tower [00:28:18]:
And so I've got like this real, real attitude of agility and adaptability so that we can just see where the market's going, we can just see what's next and give that a try and look at it like this constant, curious experiment that we can play with. So it's not about starting from scratch. I do think that this year for you is all going to be about refining. It's all going to be about enhancing what you've got, stepping into you and what you want to do and the impact that you want to make. And if you stick to those business fundamentals of you being a human who is serving other humans and trying to get them that result the quickest, easy way possible, you're going to be just great. Enjoy.