Making 6 figures in 10 hours per week is the kind of hook typically reserved for bad Facebook ads and questionable online courses.
But every now and then you come across someone who is actually a big enough baller to pull it off. 🙂
Laura Lopuch is one of those people.
She is a Growth University alum who has absolutely mastered the art of cold email pitching, and has leveraged that skill into a thriving course and coaching business…
…all while being a full time mom who still has plenty of time to spend with her family.
In this interview, you’ll learn how she’s brought in $230,000+ in revenue by using her cold emailing skills to consistently get in front of massive audiences full of her ideal clients.
It’s a simple blueprint that you can copy to do the same for your business.
Check out the video + breakdown below to see!
Breaking Down Laura’s Bulletproof Approach to Landing Clients Via Partnerships
Real quick — let’s take a bird’s-eye look at Laura’s business so we can understand why partnerships have worked so well for her.
The Business: Laura is a cold email and partnership pitch expert. She helps one-person businesses like freelancers, consultants, and solopreneurs write effective cold emails to get more clients.
Her Product: Laura currently sells an online course and a coaching program:
Her coaching program is a hybrid of bite-sized video training, group coaching, and 1:1 coaching.
The price is currently $7,500 for 6 months of coaching.
How Laura Has Generated $230,000 in Revenue from a Single Marketing Strategy
For the past several years, Laura has focused on one customer acquisition and audience-building strategy above all others: partnerships.
- She identifies an influencer who is popular with her best fit clients.
- She pitches the influencer on teaching their audience about cold email pitching (whoa, meta).
- The teaching can come in the form of a podcast interview, guest blog post, or webinar / online workshop for their audience.
This approach has gotten her in front of massive audiences full of her ideal customers.
You can see a sample of the collaborations she’s pulled off on her home page:
Laura uses these partnerships to attract customers by following 3 simple steps:
Step 1: The Lead Magnet
Laura almost always offers every audience she is featured to a helpful free resource in exchange for joining her email list (AKA a lead magnet).
She puts together a simple landing page for each partnership so she can track its effectiveness.
Here’s an example of one where she offered 2 free pitch email templates:
As you can see, the lead magnet doesn’t need to be complicated — it just needs to be relevant.
Pitch email templates are exactly what someone who just experienced her content for the first time would want.
Sidenote: Even if you don’t have the opportunity to promote a lead magnet, you can still get a meaningful surge of traffic if you nail the partnership content. Make sure people know how to find you, and they will.
Step 2: The Welcome Sequence
Once people are on Laura’s list, they get added to an automated welcome sequence that brings them deeper into her world and continues to warm them up.
The welcome sequence allows new subscribers to see how Laura can help them and introduces them to her various products and services.
Step 3: Conversion
Pretty straightforward. 🙂
Both during and after the welcome sequence, Laura gives subscribers opportunities to buy her course and coaching program.
Since partnerships provide such high-quality leads, a decent chunk of them tend to take her up on it.
Inside Laura’s Step-by-Step Approach to Booking Partnerships
Let’s zoom in on Laura’s latest partnership so you can see how one works.
The Partner: Gemma Bonham-Carter, a course creator / coach who teaches people how to launch and scale online course businesses.
It’s easy to see why Gemma is a great partnership fit for Laura.
Her audience is full of solopreneurs who want to grow their business — the EXACT type of person Laura is trying to reach.
Important: Even though their audiences overlap, Gemma and Laura aren’t competitors.
They’re teaching their audiences very different things and selling them very different products.
Similar audiences. Non-competitive. This is key when identifying partners to pitch.
How Laura Identified Gemma:
Knowing what your ideal partner looks like is one thing. Finding them is another.
Laura identified her through one of my favorite methods: she was already Gemma’s customer.
People / companies you’ve bought stuff from make fantastic partnership targets for 3 reasons:
- You’re already extremely familiar with their content and audience.
- You have a natural “in” to talk to them — it’s hard to ignore one of your customers!
- When you can share an authentic story of how the person helped you, the pitch email practically writes itself.
When brainstorming partners, make “Whose stuff have I bought lately?” one of the first questions you ask yourself.
The Pitch:
Once you’ve identified a good partnership target, you need to know what type of content partnership to pitch them.
- Do they have a podcast that features interviews?
- Do they publish guest posts on their blog?
- Do they host webinars / workshops for their audience?
Pro Tip: It’s much easier to convince a partner to feature you in a content format they’re already doing. So study what they’re doing.
As a member of Gemma’s paid community, The Passive Project, Laura had already noticed that she regularly featured other creators in workshops for the community.
While studying those workshops, Laura identified a gap in Gemma’s content:
“She put on a webinar herself about how she’s used partnerships and collaborations to grow,” Laura said, “but she didn’t address the how — like what do you say in the email? How do you make it not sleazy? And I was like, I can fill that gap for her.”
This is what we call a content gap.
Gemma’s audience could benefit from learning how to write great cold email pitches, but it’s not Gemma’s speciality.
With that in mind, Laura’s pitch became pretty straightforward: she could deliver a free cold email workshop to Gemma’s paid community.
Laura would get promoted to a warm audience of her ideal customers, and Gemma would get quality content to provide her paid subscribers without having to create it herself. Win-win!
Click here to see a full breakdown of Laura’s brilliant pitch email to Gemma.
The best part? Gemma liked the idea so much, she not only said yes — she also invited Laura to be a guest on her podcast:
Want me to create a custom plan to get your offer in front of the right people? Let’s talk.
Before Laura was the seasoned partnership pro she is today, she was a member of our coaching program, Growth University.
That’s where she honed her skills and transformed them into a concrete, step-by-step plan to scale her business.
Here’s what she said:
“It wasn’t until I was part of Growth University that I realized the power and extent of partnerships, and made pitching partnerships a cornerstone of my marketing strategy. Partnerships are a huge factor in how I can work about 10 hrs/wk, be a full time parent and solopreneur.”
Book a Strategy Call with my team and we’ll show you the exact steps you can take to start bringing in high-paying clients with partnerships. Plus, if it’s a good fit, we’ll show you what it would look like for us to coach you like we coached Laura.
Grab a spot on our calendar here to get started.
On the call, we’ll show you:
Growth opportunities you’re currently overlooking in your business.
The step-by-step process you can use to take advantage of those opportunities.
What it would look like to have my team individually coach you through the entire process.