Well… it’s a wrap! Amplify 2022 has officially come to an end. We hope you walked away from the digital summit feeling just as informed, inspired, and empowered as we do.
We’re beyond happy you seized this incredible opportunity to hear from the brightest minds in the industry. Or, if you missed out on the event you can enjoy it on demand here, and check out the highlights in this blog.
No matter where you are on your entrepreneurial journey, we hope you feel inspired to hit the ground running on whatever goal you’re working towards.
We have so many top moments from the summit, but we’ve narrowed down our highlight reel to help you reflect and absorb the unparalleled learning, sharing, and networking.
Top 3 Most-Attended Sessions
1. Carving your path to success with Thinkific
Aron Tremble, VP of Product at Thinkific
Creating a profitable online business doesn’t have to be complicated. In this session, you’ll learn how to carve your path in the online course industry with ease, have complete creative control over your learning products, and leverage the Thinkific App Store to market and sell your online course.
Key Takeaways:
We are seeing a wave of change happening for creators in education. We now have an established and thriving middle class.
We’re not just a few elite success stories, and this is happening because features and services like Thinkific enable you to own your experience, own your customers, and drive impact like never before. You also have a supportive ecosystem with training networks and investments specific to knowledge commerce. We think this will change the world. In fact, we think you can change the world.
Thinkific works from four simple principles, and we use these to guide our product development.
First, we make it easy. Second, we give you control. Third, we build businesses. Fourth, we build trust. Let’s start with the first ease of use. We believe that building a business is already hard enough and your software shouldn’t be. So we design and build experiences that are approachable for everyone. For example, getting started with Thinkific is easy. We have a rapid content upload feature. We have the industry’s leading lesson design experience and automatically generate pages for your courses. Creators with content can pilot a new idea often within a few minutes.
We give you control of your brand, your content, your customers, and your revenue.
We don’t put algorithms between you and success nor stand between you and your customers. Instead, we provide features and tools to customize your learning experience and achieve your dreams while keeping you firmly in the driver’s seat, and owning your brand and customers.
For those of you who don’t know what you need — perhaps you’re still developing a strategy — Thinkific resources really help. We are the friendliest place on the internet to learn about online education businesses. We have a massive community of creators, online trainers, an education team, and a vibrant ecosystem of experts to help you navigate your course creation journey.
One of our main principles here at Thinkific is helping you build your business.
Building an impactful business isn’t all about selling. When we think about the principle of helping you build your business, we aren’t just thinking about revenue. Many of you start with an audience, but some others just start with an idea.
Either way, we’re here to help you build a livelihood with modern features for selling and converting your audience or building one from scratch. Our platform will guide you through the creation of learning products and then on to launching sites and landing pages to prime your prospects, complete sales, and process payments.
Thinkific’s new features help you engage prospective customers and shifts learning from a one-sided experience to a communal exchange of both knowledge and relationships. Our community’s features now include new profiles and @ mention capabilities for you and your customers. Profiles and mentions make it easier for your customers to see and understand the participants within your community offering, and also to find value within that experience. We’re investing heavily in this area and throughout 2022, you’ll continue to see us advance.
Picking a knowledge commerce platform isn’t a transaction, it’s a long-term partnership.
That’s how we invest to develop fast, reliable, and scalable technologies supported by actual caring humans. No matter how big your business gets, we’re prepared to support you. In fact, we work as if every customer is a long-term partner. In the past year, we’ve doubled our fundamental technology team, our customer success team, and our customer support team. We’re continuing to invest in reliable technology that performs well for all of you, regardless of size.
Questions & Answers:
Does Thinkific connect with MailChimp, Squarespace, and other external tools?
We definitely do. A great thing about Thinkific is it can plug into your existing ecosystem. If you already have an email service provider or an established website, that’s okay. Thinkific can plug right into it and help expand your digital product offering. If you don’t have those things established yet, Thinkific can be where you build your website, landing page, and digital products. It fits right into your business and where you are now.
Can new creators who don’t have the capital to invest in professional equipment still find success at Thinkific?
Yes! Don’t let your equipment or what you have available hold you back from getting started. If you’re watching this on an iPhone or a laptop, you can go ahead and create an online course. Two things I always recommend for somebody who’s just getting with an online course is a good microphone – but it doesn’t have to be very fancy. You can get started using a microphone on Amazon which will make such a big difference in your audio quality as a Thinkific creator.
Read More: Best Equipment & Software for Creating Online Courses
Other than that, start with what you have and where you are now. Your first course is never going to be your best course — you’re going to learn as you launch, and you’re going to want to go back and change things. So don’t worry about not having the best, most professional equipment right now.
What is it like to work with a Thinkific expert?
One of the great things about Thinkific is when you’re getting started, there’s a lot to learn. We have people here who have never created an online course before and people who are running successful six and seven-figure online course businesses. But wherever you’re at in your journey, Thinkific can grow and scale with you. At some point in that journey, some people hire an expert who will work with them to either build the course site they need or build the course content they want. That’s why our Thinkific experts marketplace exists, so you can go check in with experts who have the skills and expertise you need. But if you’re just getting started, Thinkific is also set up with templates that can help you — it’s drag and drop, so it’s very easy to use. If you want to start doing more complex things, you can look at working with an expert.
2. Supercharge your impact: Level up the way you adapt and thrive in 2022
Lisa Nichols, Best-Selling Author, World-Renowned Motivational Speaker
If you’re ready to make 2022 your best year of business, this training’s for you. It’s time to level up your impact by getting clear on your vision and action steps to get there.
Key Takeaways:
The best version of you is being born in this moment.
Recognize that the best version of yourself is waiting and excited to come out. That’s not to minimize the person you’ve been in 2021, but it is to celebrate the person you’re becoming in 2022. Recognize that you have content, you have value, you have contributions that can help someone push past an area that they’re ready to move on from.
You can also be the solution to help someone get the very life that they say they want with what you know. When you put your content out into the world, you’re doing the very thing you were supposed to do. There’s a next level to your own best. There’s a next level to your own greatness. You get to take it to the next level and be better than you were this year.
You need somebody to hold you accountable to the person that you’re becoming.
You need someone who’s going to remind you that this isn’t a time for you to sit down and turn off your brain. This is a time for you to sit down and turn on your brain and turn on your heart. This is the time for you to step up to make that next step of greatness in you. This is that moment.
Know where you stopped in 2021 and make that your starting point for 2022.
You are a unique unrepeatable contribution to this planet and people are waiting on you.
No one has your style. No one has your impact. No one has your personnel. When you stand up and you say, ‘Hold on, I’m built for such a time as this. This is exactly where I should be, this is exactly what I should be doing.’ Then all of a sudden, the world begins to align with you.
When you do that, it’s not about your business in that moment. It’s not about your bank account balance in that moment. It’s not about all the likes and thumbs up that you get on social media in that moment. It’s about that individual who’s normally in darkness. But because you let your light amplify, they’re now in the light. If they didn’t have access to you, they wouldn’t see themselves.
Questions & Answers:
Since there’s never been a better time to be a creator, sometimes the abundance of opportunity can feel a little overwhelming. How do we overcome imposter syndrome?
Number one — picture yourself on the other side of that very same need. So whenever you’re going to produce something, always picture what it looked like when you needed this. When you were having that challenge, what did you need? Who did you need? You’re now the service provider to help meet those needs.
Root in your ‘why’. Your ‘why’ will raise you above your question marks. Ask yourself: ‘What’s the cost if I stay still? What is the cost if I don’t do this? Number two — we keep thinking in the area of major or macro wins, but what are 10 micro wins that lead to that macro win? At every micro win, stop and celebrate. What gets celebrated gets repeated. Let every micro win show you that you’re qualified to keep doing this. We don’t need perfection, we need progress.
How were you able to identify your niche?
I learned how to speak to the pain point and to the desire that I could influence. It took me a long time to figure this out. It took me 6 or 7 years to finally figure out how to communicate what I did. When I was able to shape it into a body of learning and present it regarding the pain it relieved or the desire it brought, all of sudden, my business skyrocketed. Get yourself clear enough so people can self-select and recognize that they’re your customer.
How important is authenticity when starting a business?
There are three reasons why you want authenticity to be the foundation of your business. Firstly, if you’re authentic, then there’s nothing that you have to do differently. You get to move from being a ‘human doing’ to a ‘human being’. Secondly, people become refreshed when they see it isn’t a performance.
Your authenticity is inspiring to others. Thirdly, if you don’t do you, then you will never be done. Don’t spend a moment doing anyone else other than you because it might be the only moment that the person watching you gets.
3. A new era for creators: We’re all in this together
Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific and Miranda Lievers, COO of Thinkific
There’s never been a better time to be a creator. During Amplify 2022, you’ll get access to some of the most successful online course creators who will teach you how to up-level your impact and create a profitable business. Get ready to make this your best year yet.
Key Takeaways:
The first key to creator success is the power of community.
Every successful business has engaged, happy customers. Increasingly we’ve seen that people come for content, but they stay for community. Creating interactive moments and opportunities to build connection and community is one of the biggest opportunities this year. Savvy creators are using this opportunity. Use community features to connect with your students and enable students to connect with their peers via discussions, live events, and peer-to-peer learning opportunities. These features enrich the student experience.
The second key to success is delivering value to your customers.
It’s all about focusing on how you make an impact in their lives. When someone signs up for your course, how are you making an impact in their lives? And how you can turn that into a flywheel for growth? Delivering real value is fundamentally changing the game of how people build businesses online. What we’ve seen in social networks in the past and leading up to today, is that it may take thousands or millions of fans to make any reasonable income. So you have a huge wealth divide between the very few creators who are able to generate millions of views or millions of followers. But when you use this concept of the flywheel, when you introduce learning products into it, we see meaningful revenue with even tens of customers.
The third key to creator success is getting out of your own way.
We can all struggle with imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and limiting beliefs. It was only once I started talking to other entrepreneurs around me that I discovered that not only was I not alone, but that shifting mindset and navigating the limits that we place on ourselves is actually one of the most impactful ways that we can unlock and accelerate our success as creators. This can show up as thinking things must be perfect before launching a new course, or questioning why anyone would buy what you created, or believing that your current success is the upper limit. Today, I invite you to set goals that scare you, create connections that inspire you, and to say yes to making 2022 your best year yet.
Questions & Answers:
What is the new era for creators? What is the creator middle class?
The biggest difference that we’ve seen recently is that all of you can succeed. There are tens of thousands of people here today participating in Amplify 2022, and if we went back a few years, it would only be a select few who have celebrity status. But what we’re seeing with this shift, is you’re able to introduce a platform like Thinkific which allows you to take control of your data, your customers, your relationships, your price points, and the kind of products you offer, you can build a meaningful business with dozens of customers.
What that translates to is instead of needing millions of viewers, you can build something meaningful with fewer customers. That means that all of you can have that opportunity to build a business that can be life-changing for you and have an impact on others.
As regional creators, how can we scale up our businesses to generate global results, clients, and impact?
With the pandemic, we saw business models that were shaken up overnight. Regional businesses in many cases found they had to close their physical doors and dynamically react. Having an online presence and a digital business allows you to take everything that you’re doing and know with your regional business and introduce offerings to reach a wider audience base. It’s about doubling down on what works today and flipping that into, ‘How do I apply the way I’m acquiring customers in my regional areas and apply that globally?’ It may be joining communities further afield or connecting into outside networks, but leverage what you know regionally to reach a larger audience.
Where can I find the answers to my technical Thinkific questions?
The Thinkific Academy covers a lot of these sorts of tactical and technical questions. The Academy walks you through exactly how to set things up and gives you guidance on everything from how to price, to course length, size, and duration. It’s what a lot of our creators are using right now to build and grow their businesses.
Learn More: How to Create an Effective and Engaging Online Course
Top 3 Highest-Rated Sessions
1. The evergreen webinar framework
Caitlin Bacher, Founder of Scale with Success
It’s possible to make $1M per year by selling one course on autopilot. In this fast-paced, value-packed training, you’ll learn exactly how to create a high-converting evergreen webinar. Get ready to increase your revenue, help more people, and grow your audience without ever launching again.
Key Takeaways:
An evergreen course/webinar helps you streamline your resources and increase your revenue.
I had my first million-dollar year in 2017, and I did this just by selling one course with one evergreen webinar. In that process, my revenue increased 500%, and I was also able to double my profit margin. By just focusing on one course and having one sales mechanism, which was the evergreen webinar, I was able to really streamline my team.
I didn’t need a lot of people working for me. I didn’t need to be producing content on all the social media channels. I was able to run things in a really lean way that helped increase my profit margin. You need to stop selling multiple courses and really streamline things so that you’re able to generate predictable revenue by utilizing the evergreen model.
There are multiple steps in transitioning from the launch business model to an evergreen business model.
Firstly, you want to make sure that you are qualifying your prospects because your course is not for everyone. The worst thing that you can do is not qualify people. When you’re running an evergreen business, it’s really important that you get very focused on your messaging and make sure that you are qualifying people upfront. There are three different action items that you need to do inside of that qualified portion of your webinar.
Start off right away by telling people who this training is for, talk about psychographics. Those are the character traits, the beliefs, and the behaviors that your ideal student really embodies. You want to call those out and use those words inside of the beginning portion of your webinar so that people can start to form that connection with you.
The second action item is to position the audience experience. So you want to clarify what it is that your students are about to learn. You’re going to talk about your process, and how you help people. You also want to include something special. Give them a little hint of something that they’re going to want to stick around for.
The third action item is that you want to share your story. Share a portion of your story that would be relevant to them. You want to make sure that in that story you’re really going over some of the ups and downs you’ve experienced.
After you have qualified people, you want to inform them. Now, this is where a lot of people go wrong. What happens to a lot of people is they end up trying to jam too much information into their webinar. This is a huge mistake. If someone is watching your webinar, you may think that you’re doing them a service by putting in as much information as possible. However, this can be overwhelming to the viewer. You should aim to give a high-level picture that is very valuable, but that covers each step of the framework.
This takes us into part three of the webinar, which I call the close. You want to make sure that when you are explaining the modules of your course, they need to be benefit-driven. Stay focused on the benefits that students are going to receive after doing the work in that module or doing the work in that lesson. Make sure that the testimonials are relatable, where people watching can say, ‘Oh, that person started out exactly where I am today.’
Questions & Answers:
Where do you find the best place to promote your webinar? Emails, ads, social media?
If you have a small audience, it’s really important to build relationships with other course creators. Whether you’re meeting course creators inside the Thinkific community or other communities, really build connections with those people and ask, ‘Will you share one of my resources if I share one of yours?’
Other than that, you can promote it absolutely everywhere, whether it’s organic on social media, whether it’s paid traffic, whether it’s writing a blog post and linking to your webinar, or any other channel.
When do you need to update evergreen materials?
There are two different parts to that. As far as your core, evergreen webinar itself, you don’t have to update it — that stays the same. What is updated and what doesn’t stay the same is how you’re driving people to that webinar. For example, if you have an Instagram, it’s not a good idea to post the same graphic every day. You’ve got to be engaging with your audience in different ways, whether it be an Instagram live, a Facebook post, or a YouTube video. That part can change over time depending on the needs of your audience or the time of year.
What is the best way to get attendees to attend your webinar?
Be consistent about building connections with your audience before you send them over to your webinar. You can run paid traffic to your webinar but ideally, you want to be consistent in producing content and connecting with people over time. That way, when they get to your webinar, they’re already ready to buy. They’re already wanting to work with a person they love.
2. Quantum leap your business to success
Elly Molina, International Intuitive Advisor, Amazon Best-Selling Author
The time to quantum leap into your next level of success is now. Learn how simple shifts to your mindset, language and communication can help you grow.
Key Takeaways:
Using language can quantum leap your business to success.
Your thoughts give you language and your language creates a state. So if you’re having a disempowering conversation, ‘Oh, my course is not gonna sell. Oh, I can’t get this done,’ then what happens is your body starts to react. You start to lose momentum. You lose energy.
It’s important to recognize that we have control. We can now direct where our self-talk goes so that we can have a different experience. We can direct our self talk to, ‘Well, I’m gonna be doing this really wonderful course, and it’s gonna be awesome. And people are gonna sign up for it. And I know they’re gonna love it. I have something to offer them.’ So it creates a whole different energy in your body. And this energy then creates a different outpouring as above.
Trusting your intuition can further your human potential.
When we start using intuition and start trusting our gut, and we step away from working out of fear, new things become really important to us. We get to see a new perspective. That is where we start. So we start with trusting our intuition.
Take a look at the last time you made a really big decision. If the decision was a great decision and you did really well, then you probably trusted your gut. If you’ve ever had one of those times in your life where you made a decision and it wasn’t the right decision later on in hindsight, you probably realize that you knew not to do that.
It’s time to start to listen to your intuition. As you make choices, especially on your entrepreneurial journey and even through the rest of your life. When you quantum leap your business and even your life, you’re gonna learn to quantum leap from intuition and not from fear.
We need to start paying extra attention to consciousness.
We need to pay attention to our thoughts and our mind. Now people say, ‘Oh, I’m aware I’m a highly conscious person. I’m highly aware.’ Here’s my unfortunate news to people who claim that they’re very highly aware: If you are not where you say you want to be, then there is a level of awareness that is missing because if people are truly aware of all of the aspects and all of the belief systems that are going on in their subconscious, they have what they want.
When we work with the subconscious mind, we get to override it. In these simple levels of awareness, we start with self-talk. When we learn how to control our self-talk, this is where the beauty and the magic lies, because your thoughts will become your reality. Once you can learn to control your self-talk, then you can also learn to direct it. And that is once you direct yourself talk, that is where the magic starts.
Questions & Answers:
How do you detox yourself from a particular mindset that is holding you back?
You need a mentor to get you through the first loop so that you can create a new language for yourself. Once you have a new language, you can quantum leap that. You need to look at your internal dialogue. Sometimes we can’t see or hear our own internal dialogue — we can’t catch it, so that’s the beauty of having a mentor, someone who is trained in that area so you can turn that around and replace that.
What trends do you predict will be necessary during the pandemic that differ from how businesses thrived before the pandemic?
Before the pandemic, we were going business to business, which we still are, but we were doing it in the physical form. Now with the pandemic, the Internet has become a wealth of opportunity. We can talk to people in foreign countries in a heartbeat. I’m presuming this is going to continue to be the new trend, so it’s important to learn how to do business on the internet.
People need to learn all the time — you need to be a constant learner. Anyone who stops learning becomes a dinosaur — your business will not thrive if you’re not constantly and consistently learning because there are new techniques coming all the time.
How can you move forward from past experiences you’ve had as a course creator? Perhaps low sales of a course?
One of the things I teach people to do with their mindset is rewrite the past. We know through quantum physics that it is possible to change the past. Let’s say you rewrite that conversation in the past and you say to yourself, ‘My course was successful. I did really well in that course.’
You can take that experience and move it to the next course and then you don’t have to think back on it because it’s over and it’s done. You take your thoughts and you leap them to the next course that you’re creating. You can still learn from the past but you can move forward with a new narrative.
3. Breaking down the barriers to an effective sales mindset and boosting course sales
Veerander Chowdary, Founder and CEO of HelloVeeru
Don’t sell courses, sell value. In this training, you’ll learn three simple ways to effectively communicate the value of your online course to your audience and gain the right mindset to do so.
Key Takeaways:
Believing in yourself and your course is enough to make it big.
If you don’t believe in yourself or your course, it doesn’t matter how good you are — you cannot sell it to anyone. So prepare your mind and tell yourself that you and your course are good. This will also help you deal with negative people or a negative mindset. If people are trying to pull you down, if people are commenting negatively on your post, that means you are growing. A positive mindset is very important.
Don’t talk to your customers like you’re selling something.
Have normal conversations with your customers. Students, clients, customers, whomever, it might be, they are very sharp. They will identify whether you are trying to sell something or you’re trying to help them. Don’t prepare a sales script in your mind. Once you start preparing sales pitches, no matter how the conversation is going on with the customer, you will try to put your points right in front of your customer and they will not be impressed by that.
Customers want to buy this solution to a problem, not the product.
Don’t just talk about your product. Remind yourself that you are helping your customer solve their problem. So ask them about the problem they are facing and offer them a solution. Once you give a great solution to that problem, ultimately they will end up purchasing your product. Have the mindset that you’re not trying to sell the product, you’re trying to sell a solution to a problem.
Questions & Answers:
What is the right sales funnel to use to get massive sales?
When you’re going to sell any premium courses, a very important step is creating a beautiful landing page on what you’re exactly offering to your customer first. In that landing page, you should mention what exact problem you’re going to solve.
You will get more sales through an automated process because you can’t talk to 1000s of customers on a daily basis. This will happen when you run an automated webinar. You can record your webinar on a vast number of beautiful tools — I use Webinar Jam. This is how you can make recurring sales on a daily basis.
When do you adjust and update your webinars based on the feedback you receive?
You need to create a system of webinars for your different types of customers. Within those webinars, I establish trust in the first half an hour and in the next 15 minutes, I will instill FOMO (fear of missing out), as well as provide some discounts and bonuses. Then in the last 15 minutes, I will take a Q&A which is where I get the most updates and feedback. I will collect points on what people may have felt like they missed out on. Any feedback, positive or negative, I will take it all and every month, I will rotate those webinars on an automated basis.
Is oversaturation a serious barrier to sales?
Saturation is everywhere. It’s not only in the course content industry, it’s in every industry as well as every business. So when it comes to saturation, remember one thing — it doesn’t matter what other course creators are doing, how they’re selling, how they’re promoting, etc. Focus on what you are providing in terms of a unique solution. If a customer is facing a problem, how are you solving it? There are hundreds of solutions, but what is the best solution you can give your customers so they come back?
Ready to dive deeper? You can still catch Amplify 2022 on demand here to see the full sessions.
