The 10 Things No One Ever Tells You About Going Evergreen
Episode 245: Show Notes
We have been working our booties off behind the scenes trying to set up something pretty epic in our business – the evergreen machine. So, in this episode, we’re finally ready to tell you about the pros and cons of this soul-destroying process and why it is so worth it! We all talk about financial freedom, we all want it, but you don’t always hear about the nitty-gritty testing, the waiting, the endless funnels inside the funnels and the insurmountable self-doubt it takes pushing through to get there.
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Despite the many cons of evergreening, we managed to maintain our sanity, not kill each other, stick it out and evergreen a $2000 course online. The benefits of this has been more than we ever dreamed, and we want to tell you all about it, and how you can do it too. If you are a six figure business owner and are interested in evergreening one of your courses, then we want you to pay attention to this episode – it could just change your life.
Why We Got Off Selling To Focus On Serving
Launching every two months started to get really draining for us. We were pouring so much time and energy into our launches, so much so that it just wasn’t sustainable and the quality of our output was being compromised. Ultimately, we wanted something way more consistent that wasn’t going to burn us out. We knew that if we could evergreen the selling part, so that we wouldn’t have to be on for that, then we could be on for the serving part. That’s exactly what we wanted to shift.
What Evergreen Is Definitely Not
There is this perception that by evergreening, you are abandoning your business, your audience, your product. There are people who do do this, but this is really not what evergreening is about. For us anyways! We didn’t want to sacrifice the experience of our product for the audience and so again, we wanted to evergreen the selling, so that we could actively serve our people – not ghost them. Evergreening seemed like a really simple process in the beginning but let us tell you, it is a lot more intricate that you imagined! The giant iceberg under the water of evergreening is building a very scalable, profit-monster of an evergreen funnel but you can’t set it and forget it. We are still checking in on this funnel, for now, every single day. You have to monitor it.
Cons Of Evergreening Part 1: It’s Uncomfortable As F*ck
We utilized a certain coach and a certain program (details will be revealed at the end) to model how our evergreen was built and that definitely played a humongous role in our success. However, there are a lot of cons to evergreening that we have come across along the way. The first con, is how flipping uncomfortable this whole process is. It’s uncomfortable as f*ck. Your mind, your soul, your emotions will be pushed to levels that you never thought possible in your journey of going evergreen. It is a journey of breaking yourself down, starting over, acceptance. It is extremely difficult to focus on the end result during this process. When evergreening, you have to focus on nothing but evergreening. Once certain things are set up you have to test them long enough before you can set up something else. This is hard, because it means a lot of patience, sitting and waiting. For us, that is like torture.
Cons Of Evergreening Part 2: It’s Freaking Expensive!
We invested in a coach to help us with this upfront and we invested in ads and testing ads for over a year. It was expensive yes, but this doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be a return. It was just that it pushed us past our comfort zones when it came to investing. The thing is it’s not a giant ATM. Sometimes you put in one dollar and you get one back, sometimes you put in three and you get fifteen. We ended up spending as much as one of our salaries in a whole year previously! Like it was just gone! It was scary. It is scary.
Cons Of Evergreening Part 3: Funnels Are Complicated
Funnels is a giant “If this, then that” game. There are layers upon layers. Funnels inside of funnels. Wrapping your head around that kind of hurts. We personally set the funnels up ourselves with the help of ActiveCampaign. Emylee is currently setting up a funnel that looks at all the funnels you can take, why they work, how they work, the offers they’re given and all the things… Evergreening is not for everyone and it’s not for every type of business and this funnel level is not necessarily required for everyone either. There is a lot of complexity to our funnels, but for you, this may not necessarily be the case.
Cons Of Evergreening Part 4: You Will Want To Quit (All The Time)
Emylee can honestly say that she wanted to quit this process at least once a month. Abbie can’t even quantify the amount of times she wanted to quit. For us to be convinced that we could put a $2000 product on evergreen took a long time. Even when it was up and running we were still not convinced. We were so often filled with doubt and insecurity, but we just knew that we had to keep going forward. Here’s why…
Pros Of Evergreening Part 1: Financial Freedom Baby, Financial Freedom
It was pretty life changing when we started seeing sales come in every day. And it’s not just like a $29.00 sale, it’s like $2000 or $6000 coming in, while we go to the movies and hang out with our husbands and play with our dogs. We were like “What? How is that even possible?” It is a new level of what we built our business to be and that is freedom, financial freedom baby! We all talk about financial freedom all the time, but we never really felt like we could just go away at random and everything would be okay, and the business would stay consistent and we would continue to have sales. But now, Abbie has more dates set for travel than she ever remembers in the history of this business. Don’t you want this kind of life? Evergreening has really enabled us to serve our audience more because now the selling is taken care of. Having this time freedom allows us to say yes to really cool stuff – like a podcast tour, writing a book, a workshop, all those fun things.
Pros Of Evergreening Part 2: The Growth Of Your Business
We were really surprised by the growth of our business when we evergreened. To keep getting the results you want, you have to keep upping the amount of people that you introduce this to. So what does that do? It builds your email list, your social media groups and although we were growing kind of steadily in those places, all of a sudden KABOOM! In the last two months our email list has grown to like 15,000 from about 6,0000, or something crazy! And we have close to a 50% interaction rate, which is really uncommon. So even though we are just focused on one thing, it effects our business as a whole, almost by default. Isn’t that amazing?
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It was pretty life changing when we started seeing sales come in everyday.
Highlights
Why We Got Off Selling To Focus On Serving. [0:06:22.1]
What Evergreen Is Definitely Not. [0:07:44.1]
Cons Of Evergreening Part 1: It’s Uncomfortable As F*ck. [0:12:50.1]
Cons Of Evergreening Part 2: It’s Freaking Expensive! [0:18:50.1]
Cons Of Evergreening Part 3: Funnels Are Complicated. [0:23:32.1]
Cons Of Evergreening Part 4: You Will Want To Quit (All The Time). [0:26:50.1]
Pros Of Evergreening Part 1: Financial Freedom Baby, Financial Freedom. [0:29:45.1]
Pros Of Evergreening Part 2: The Growth Of Your Business. [0:34:10.1]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
KEY TOPICS
Evergreen funnels, Passive income, Financial freedom, Women entrepreneur, Scale your business, Online business
