Not just which lead magnets they’ve downloaded – but the very first one. It sounds like a small thing but it makes a huge difference later.

When you match up purchases to subscriber origin, you can see which growth strategies actually bring buyers – not just followers. Summits? Bundles? Pinterest? Ads? You’ll finally know.

Set up a simple automation that checks if someone is already on your list, and if not, adds a “joined via X” tag. Takes about 10 minutes and you’ll thank yourself later.

Instead of delivering your freebie at the point of sign up, deliver it directly inside your welcome email.

This has several benefits including a higher open rate for your welcome email and more clicks – both of which help your deliverability. It does mean creating a new welcome email for each lead magnet but it’s fast enough to do if you duplicate and edit. And it’s worth it – if someone opens and clicks on the first email you send, they are far more likely to see your other emails showing up in their primary inbox!

When someone clicks a link in your email about a specific topic or product, tag them. You now know something valuable – they’re interested.

You can then segment future emails, trigger a relevant sales funnel, or just know who to email when you launch something in that area. It’s one of the most underused features in email marketing and it takes very little time to set up.

Life happens. Ghosting your list for a few weeks or months feels awful but it’s not the disaster it seems.

Don’t send a grovelling apology email. Just come back like you would a friend – with something useful, a relatable story, and a reason to open. Acknowledge it lightly if you want to, then get on with it.

The subscribers who stick around through a quiet patch are your most loyal. They’re worth nurturing.

When you’ve been running a business for a while, the number of automations stacks up fast. Finding the right one starts to feel like searching for something in an untidy drawer.

Simple fix: put a letter at the start of each automation name. “A:” for your most important ones so they float to the top. “Z:” for archived sequences you don’t want to delete but rarely need. It makes a surprisingly big difference.

I cannot overstate how much my ‘Strategy Sunday’ email series has saved me. Currently I’m juggling my business alongside a baby and a toddler and my hours are all over the place – but my subscribers still hear from me every single week.

An evergreen nurture series goes out automatically to everyone on your list. It showcases your expertise, builds trust and gently points toward your offers. All without you being at your laptop.

If you’re only going to implement one thing this year, make it this.

Most people set up funnels as one long sequence: lead magnet, warm-up, sales emails. The problem? You can only enter people into that funnel from one specific starting point.

Instead, build it in two parts. A warm-up automation and a sales automation. The sales automation is triggered by a tag added at the end of warm-up. Now you can trigger that same sales sequence from any starting point – a bundle, a summit, a new lead magnet, or your whole list.

I often use this for testing a new funnel on my existing list first. I add the tag, they go through, and I pick up the stats before ever getting to the stage of running ads. I’ll often use the income generated from the test to fund the ads budget too!

Once you’ve got one evergreen funnel working, there’s nothing stopping you from building another – and linking them together.

The sweet spot is offers that appeal to the same person but at different stages. For example: someone interested in affiliate marketing is also likely to be interested in evergreen funnels. So once someone exits funnel A, you send them through some value emails and then into funnel B.

More funnels = more passive sales. And you’ve already done the hardest bit by building the first one.

Your email funnel doesn’t have to just promote your own offers. There’s no reason you can’t include evergreen affiliate sequences in between your value and sales emails.

My evergreen funnel looks something like this: welcome emails, warm-up, sales funnel, value emails, affiliate promo, value emails, sales funnel, affiliate promo, newsletter. Every section is doing a job.

It’s one of the most underused ways to earn passive affiliate income – because most people only remember to promote affiliates in broadcast emails.

Ebooks feel like the easy route when you’re starting out. But if you have the knowledge to write an ebook, you have the knowledge to create a course. And people will pay significantly more for a course.

Take the same content you were going to write, split it into lessons, and record quick videos using simple Canva slides and your script. Add the videos to a tool like Hello Audio and it’ll convert it to a private podcast. You’ve now got a course with 3 different formats to appeal to all different learner types!

More value, higher price point, similar amount of work. The only extra is creating some slides and recording yourself reading your notes aloud.

Now I know I just said courses are better than ebooks – and they are 1000% – but you do need to know that self-directed courses on their own are harder to sell now than they were a few years ago. It’s just a shift in what people want. People are now more willing to pay for implementation rather than information because information is much easier to come by thanks to AI.

Templates, Airtable tools, Claude skills, AI prompts, interactive calculators, dashboards – anything that does some of the work for them. These sell well and are often quicker to create than a course, or can be packaged together with a course to create a toolkit.

On the other end of the scale, community and accountability are also in high demand – which is why group programmes are becoming more popular than passive courses.

This is one of those quick-to-add changes that makes a bigger difference than you’d expect. When students can listen to your course while they’re driving, walking, or doing the school run, they actually finish it.

More completions = more results = more testimonials = more word-of-mouth referrals. I use Hello Audio for this and it’s incredibly straightforward to set up. You just drop in the video content and it turns it into a podcast episode for you.

Most people treat thank you pages like an afterthought. A quick “thanks for signing up!” and nothing else. But the moment after someone opts in or buys is the highest-engagement moment in your entire funnel.

Use it. A low-ticket tripwire, an invitation to your community, a “watch this next” video to take them deeper into your world, a survey. Any of these will outperform a blank thank you page.

Have you ever spent time building a useful resource list for yourself? A list of affiliate programs with good commissions, a database of podcast shows that accept pitches, a collection of tools for a specific niche?

That’s a product. A well-organised database that saves your audience hours of research time is genuinely valuable – and you can build it in an afternoon. Some of the most useful low-ticket products I’ve seen are just nicely structured Airtable databases.

Not all social proof is created equal. A testimonial that says “I loved this course, it’s amazing!” is nice and good for the confidence. But it doesn’t shift buying decisions for your audience.

The testimonials that actually move the needle do at least one of these three things: they show a specific result, they challenge a common objection (“I was worried it would be too technical but…”), or they back up a specific claim you make in your sales copy.

Collect testimonials with this in mind. Ask better questions, get better answers, make more sales. You can also use the AI custom agents in Airtable to summarise and categorise your testimonials automatically – so you can reach for a results testimonial for your offer-ending email or an objection-busting one for your FAQ.

If you’re ever stuck for an affiliate bonus or a way to reward your audience, offering store credit is one of the simplest and most appreciated options.

I call mine Superstar Bucks. People can redeem them against any of my full priced offers within 12 months. It costs you nothing upfront, it brings buyers back and it’s exciting for your audience to receive.

It also works brilliantly as an incentive for your own affiliates – offer credit to anyone who refers a specific number of sales or tops a leaderboard, on top of their usual commissions, and you’ve got motivated affiliates without paying cash out.

When I dug into my data properly using my Money Metrics Data Engine, I discovered people who found me via a summit spent 30x what people who found me via a lead ad spent. Not a slight difference. Thirty times more.

It makes sense when you think about it. By the time someone joins your list after a summit talk, they’ve listened to you for 20-40 minutes. They already trust you. They’re already sold on the idea that you know your stuff. That’s completely different from someone who saw a Facebook ad for a freebie. Summits bring fewer subscribers but the quality is in a different league entirely.

Bundle subscribers don’t spend as much as summit subscribers on average – but they come in higher volumes. In my own data, bundle subscribers spend roughly a third of what a summit subscriber spends, but I’ll often get three times as many of them from a bundle as from a summit.

The real magic is when an event combines both – a summit within a bundle, or a bundle with speaker interviews or an audio summit alongside. You get volume and quality. Those are genuinely the best growth events to participate in.

If you want affiliates to actually promote you, make it easy for them. One of the most effective things I’ve done is include each affiliate’s personal link directly in the email I send them – no logging in, no hunting for it.

I use a custom field for affiliate ID and sync it via Pabbly Connect (a one-off payment tool, much cheaper than Zapier). Once it’s set up, every email to my affiliates automatically includes their unique link. Over 400 affiliates, and not a single manual link sent.

The standard advice is to offer a tripwire or upsell to bundle subscribers. The problem? They’re already drowning in courses from everything else in the bundle. One more course or training is not exciting.

What does well is something that reduces overwhelm. A product built using a tool like Airtable – a tracker, a planner, a calculator – something that helps them organise what they already have. In one bundle alone, I made over $1,800 from an Airtable product as my upsell.

People rarely buy the first time they see your offer. They need multiple touch points – seeing it mentioned, reading about it, watching someone else use it, spotting it in a PS at the bottom of an email.

One of the most effective ways to build awareness before a sale is a pre-launch scavenger hunt. You give clues, each clue points to a sales page, people find a hidden codeword, and they enter for a chance to win a prize. They explore your offer suite, you warm them up. By the time the sale opens, they’ve already read your sales pages.

Most people use pop-ups for one thing: growing their email list. But that’s barely scratching the surface of what they can do.

Some of my favourite uses include gathering testimonials, recruiting affiliates, promoting one-time offers to buyers on your sales page, showing discount codes during a flash sale and recovering abandoned carts. The tool I use is ConvertBox and I’m obsessed with finding new ways to use it!

I love using pop-ups on my checkout pages to reduce abandoned carts. I set them to exit intent so they show when someone is about to leave my sales page without purchasing. The pop-up then shows some behind-the-scenes content or sometimes even a sample from the offer, with a button to head back to the checkout. It helps to boost purchase confidence.

You can do this with ConvertBox on most checkout tools including ThriveCart.

Text links and buttons are easy to scroll past. A well-timed pop-up promoting an affiliate offer is impossible to miss.

This works especially well when there’s no obvious freebie to promote, when your reader is already subscribed, or when the affiliate commission per sale is high enough to make it worth the effort. Higher visibility = more clicks = more commissions.

Party bags, scavenger hunts, bingo cards, spin-to-wins, leaderboards. People love feeling like they’ve got something unexpected.

I’ve been using the party bag strategy for five years now. It works because the tools, templates and trainings I include inside the party bag showcase snippets of my other offers, create excitement around the sale and make buyers feel like they’re getting something extra – not just a discount.

Creativity almost always outperforms a bigger discount, especially around Black Friday when it’s hard to stand out. And it’s a lot more fun to put together.

After a launch, the most valuable thing you can do is understand why people didn’t buy. But getting that feedback is hard – nobody’s rushing to fill in your survey for free.

Offer a sample of the product you were selling as the incentive: a lesson, a template, a chapter. For people who were sitting on the fence, that sample often plants the seed. Next flash sale? They might buy. But most importantly, you have real data that helps you improve your next launch.

Surveys are only as useful as the questions inside them. Before you send one, ask yourself: “What will I actually do with this answer?”

“What would you spend on this course?” is not a useful question. People underestimate what they’d pay and it’ll just create doubt in your mind. Price based on the transformation you deliver, not on what people say in surveys.

“Describe my brand in 3 words” is useful – I use it to sense-check my positioning and create a trust-building word cloud for my about page. “Which of these offers are you most interested in?” helps you plan your next launches. Know your purpose before you ask.

Instead of one blog post with an affiliate link buried in it, create a whole cluster of posts around the same topic. A review post, a comparison post, a ‘how to use X’ tutorial, a ‘best alternatives’ post.

This does three things at once: it builds your topical authority with Google, it keeps readers clicking through your content rather than heading off to someone else’s site, and it creates multiple opportunities for someone to click your affiliate link at the right moment for them.

Most people know about building evergreen funnels for their own courses. Far fewer realise you can do the exact same thing for affiliate products.

A short sequence of 3-4 emails – a problem email, a solution email, a case study or comparison, and a direct pitch – can generate consistent passive affiliate income for years. Set it up once, add it to your funnel, let it run.

One unexpected benefit of contributing to bundles: you get access to loads of other people’s courses and products. It’s a brilliant way to find affiliate products you can genuinely recommend because you’ve actually used them.

And as a bonus, the person whose course you discovered in the bundle is often more likely to say yes to an affiliate partnership – you’ve already shown up in the same space.

Commission is table stakes. If you want affiliates to actively promote rather than just passively exist in your program, give them an incentive!

A few formats that work well: prizes for outcomes (leaderboard prizes for most referrals), prizes for effort (spotlighting someone who went above and beyond), and prizes for action (enter everyone who sends a specific promotional email into a draw). The last two are great because they’re fair to affiliates with smaller audiences.

Every time you find yourself doing the same task for the second time, pause and ask: how can I make this faster next time? A template, an automation, a reference doc, an AI prompt.

It takes a few extra minutes now. But future-you – who is probably even busier – will be so glad you did it. The goal is a business where you never have to start from scratch on anything you’ve already figured out.

Chasing testimonials manually is awkward, time-consuming, and easy to forget. Set up a feedback form, a trigger email sequence and an Airtable database to collect everything automatically.

Embed the form in strategic places: inside your courses, in your post-purchase sequence, in a 30-day follow-up email. The testimonials will roll in without you lifting a finger.

I was a ChatGPT user for a long time and dragged my feet switching. When I finally moved, I wished I’d done it much sooner.

The difference isn’t just that the output sounds more natural. It’s that Claude actually reasons through things, holds context properly, and can help you build and automate things rather than just chat and copy-paste. It changed how I work.

If you’re not using this yet, add it to your browser today. When you’re stuck on something technical, you turn it on, describe the problem, and it takes over your keyboard and sorts it out.

I used it to fix some long-standing SEO problems on my site that I’d been putting off for months. It would have taken me days to work through alone. It took 15 minutes. Within a week my organic traffic had tripled as a result!

It’s not magic – but it’s pretty close.

AI can help you create ads, plan content, write summit pitches, build lead magnets, analyse data, and do a hundred other things faster than you ever could alone.

But it’s easy to disappear down a rabbit hole and end up exactly where you started – just with a lot of AI-generated noise instead of progress. Use it to amplify your strategy, not replace it. Keep your own voice, your own ideas, your own vision for where you’re going.

This is one of the stats that can be hard to find. You need two spreadsheets – one with subscribers including their sign-up date and one with transactions including the date of transaction – then you link them together. I use Airtable for this.

If you know your number, you’ll stop panicking when new subscribers don’t buy immediately. You’ll know when you’ve allowed enough time to review results from a particular ad or list growth strategy. And if the time is longer than you’d like, you can review your funnels and work out how to improve things – usually by selling a low-ticket offer earlier in your subscriber journey!

“I think this tripwire offer converts the best.” “I don’t feel like bundles are worth it.” “I reckon my best offer is X.”

These guesses are almost always wrong – or at least incomplete. Your data will tell you the actual story, and it’s often surprising. Even basic tracking – where subscribers came from, what they bought, when – can completely change which strategies you double down on and which ones you quietly retire.

Self-directed courses are getting harder to sell because information is everywhere. Community, accountability, and ongoing support are what people are increasingly willing to pay for.

Tools like Thrive Academy or Skool are making it much easier to combine courses with community without needing three different tools and workarounds. Worth keeping on your radar if you’ve been considering a membership or group programme.

I built my whole business in such a way that it can be run on part-time hours so I could be a present parent to Nathan and Grace. Most of my students are juggling similar constraints – a job, young children, a health condition, limited hours, a brain that works differently.

The most useful thing I’ve ever done is design my business to run without me constantly present. Evergreen systems, automations, templates, set-and-forget strategies. Not because I’m lazy – but because freedom was the whole point.

Whatever your version of ‘real life’ looks like, build for that. Not for some imaginary version of yourself who has unlimited time and zero distractions.