Why Most Course Launches Fail (and How to Fix Yours)

The Amy Porterfield Show

Amy Porterfield

Entrepreneurship, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Launch Strategies That Actually Work In Today’s Trust-Recession Market In this episode, I’m joined by Emily Hirsh, CEO of Embodied Marketing, to uncover the strategies that are actually working in today’s digital course landscape. We’re no longer in the early days when a course could succeed just by sharing information. Today’s buyers are overloaded, skeptical, and more selective than ever. What’s winning? Messaging with an emotional connection. And launch strategies that are both smart and sustainable. Emily and I dig into the biggest mistakes course creators are making right now, why launches underperform, and how to shift your strategy to cut through the noise. You’ll walk away with practical, actionable steps you can apply immediately — whether you’re launching for the first time or reworking a course that hasn’t hit its stride yet. HERE ARE THE 3 KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE: 1️⃣ Messaging is your greatest competitive advantage – Most less-than-sucessful launches come down to surface-level copy. When your words reflect the real pain, frustrations, and desires of your audience, you stand out in a crowded market. 2️⃣ Your course doesn’t need more content, it needs a clearer path – Buyers don’t want to sift through hours of information. They want transformation, delivered in the simplest, fastest way possible. 3️⃣ Warm buyers convert best – A lead magnet followed by a low-ticket offer before the webinar builds trust, offsets ad costs, and creates higher-quality leads that are ready to buy. RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: It’s not course creation that eats up your time and money. It’s guessing your way through it. For just $47, I’ll show you exactly how to choose and structure your offer, and how to validate it before you ever spend months building something that may not sell inside of my LIVE Bootcamp, Course Confident. And here’s the best part: you won’t be doing it alone. You’ll have the support of me, my team, a community of other course creators, and an AI assistant I personally trained to guide you step by step, so you’re never stuck wondering what’s next or if you’re doing it right. Think of it as a small investment of time now that saves you months of frustration (and thousands of dollars) later. 👉 Ready to finally create your course with confidence? [Register for Course Confident here.] MORE FROM EMILY Follow Emily on Instagram @emilyhirsh Subscribe to Embodied CEO Learn more about Embodied Marketing MORE FROM ME Follow me on Instagram @amyporterfield SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW If you loved this episode, please take a moment to subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts! Your support helps us reach more entrepreneurs who need these insights. 🎙 Thanks for tuning in to The Amy Porterfield Show! See you next week!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey there. Welcome to the Amy Porterfield Show.
0:11.4	Everybody fails. Like everybody has things that they launched that didn't work. And it would
0:16.8	actually be weird if the first time you launched somebody and just like knocked it out of
0:20.4	the park and was a seven bigger business because that doesn't exist. The best thing you can do is
0:25.5	take action because you're going to learn through that action. You're going to get feedback both from
0:30.7	yourself like you're going to get better at creating content, better at the messaging. And then
0:34.7	you're also going to get feedback from the leads, from the audience,
0:38.2	from the sales that you make. So the best thing you can do is commit to taking action and do
0:44.1	it imperfectly. Sometimes I record the intro for an episode after I interview the guest
0:53.2	because I don't know exactly what I want to say
0:55.3	and I want to make sure that I align the intro with the conversation we just had. So I'm
1:00.4	recording it after I just interviewed my guest. And one of the things I just can't get out of my
1:05.8	mind is that my guest, Emily Hirsch, I'll tell you about her in a moment, she said something that I've probably
1:12.3	heard before, but for some reason, in the season I'm in and the way I help my students right now
1:16.9	and what we're focusing on, it just hit me harder. And she said, you have to remove the expectations.
1:24.2	When you're starting something new, when you're jumping into something big, when you're trying something you've never done before, it's usually the expectations of how it should turn out, which is going to make us either stay stuck or move forward.
1:39.1	And when I think back at my first course, you all have heard it many times that I made $267 with my first
1:46.0	course launch and I cried for a week. But the reason I cried for a week and the reason I beat
1:51.3	myself up and told myself I wasn't cut out to be an entrepreneur, let alone a digital course
1:55.5	creator is because my expectation was I should have made $100,000 on that first launch, not $267, $100,000.
2:05.4	I had seen other people do it.
2:07.5	People were talking about how much money they were making online with their courses.
	...

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