What Makes You Click? Emily Lark - Episode Info
Meet Emily Lark.
The first thing you should know about Emily is that she is one of our leading health and fitness experts at ClickBank. With inspiring passion and endless persistence, this hard working mom turned her entrepreneurial dreams into a reality! By utilizing ClickBank’s features and resources, Emily was empowered to take her career as a Yoga instructor to infinite new heights.
Watch as Emily shares her journey with ClickBank in this episode of Empowering Entrepreneurs.
Here are some of the highlights of what we learned from Emily's story:
1 - How Emily took a personal injury into a thriving business.
2 - When she set goals to push herself.
3 - Emily tells us how she found inspiration for her product line.
4 - The challenges she faced entering a new business in the online space.
5 - The incredible number of new customers she reached in her first year with ClickBank!
Watch the full episode now:
Full Transcript:
When I was a child, when I was 12 years old, I had been baby sitting for a mother's group at my church and I was being driven home from baby sitting and we were t-boned by a truck. That lead to years of chronic back pain for me.
In my twenties, the pain started becoming worse and worse. I had been working in health and fitness and I was very active but I kind of my own little secret that I suffered from chronic pain myself, that I tried to cover up and I tried to keep moving through it.
During that time, I saw a lot of specialists, I saw a lot of doctors and nothing was helping me. It was at that time that I used my knowledge in physical fitness to figure out movements to get out of pain on my own and that was really life changing for me because I had lived all of my life with chronic pain, all of my life thinking that it was only gonna get worse and worse as I got older. And when I was able to stop that, it really shifted my perspective on what was possible.
Over the years when I had worked in clubs and studio across the country, I was always working in real high end boutiques studios and fancy gyms and what I kept thinking to myself is that the people who need these kind of services the most are the people who can't afford them. I thought about my mom often, I was raised by a single mom and we didn't have much money and I thought about how much she could have really benefited from health and wellness and fitness services. And so it was always a huge goal of mine, I wanted to open my own place some day and make it affordable for people.
I had been staying home for a few years with the kids and I knew I wanted to go ... get back to work and start teaching again. And I decided that that was maybe the right time to pursue that passion project of mine and open my own place. That's when I approached a church in my town. My son had actually gone to pre school in their church building and so I knew they had this big beautiful room that was just sitting there empty and so I approached them and asked them if they would let me rent that space.
I told myself, if they say yes, then I have to do it. And I have to do it for at least a year before giving up. That, for me at the time, was probably one of the scariest things I've ever gone through, the amount of fear and self doubt, but I pushed through because I had made this agreement with myself. When the studio finally opened and it became successful, that was what was such a turning point for me, in my life.
Things were going great, I had a great balance in my life. I was teaching at the studio, running the studio and then I also was at home with my two boys who were starting to get older and I had a lot of flexibility in my life.
In 2016, my marriage came to an end pretty unexpectedly and I realized then that while I had built this studio that was my dream and it was what I loved doing, it also was not terribly lucrative either because that was part of the plan, I wanted it to be affordable for people, so it wasn't a big money maker for me.
When I developed my program for healing back pain for myself, obviously I knew I wanted to be able to work with other people to do that as well. The studio enabled me to do that working one on one with people and also in group classes. And then as I started working with more people there, they kept saying, "Emily would you record a video of yourself doing this, I'd like to send this to my sister or my father who also have back pain."
The idea of producing a program and really getting it out there to people felt like something that other people could do, people who were really well connected or who had much larger businesses, but I never, in my wildest dreams thought that that was something I would be able to do. But at this point in my life where I felt like I was about to lose everything, I thought, "Well, it's now or never."
So I started getting online and trying to figure out how I could do that and that's when I first heard about Clickbank. It still seemed really overwhelming at the time and really scary and I saw all of these big names on Clickbank and all of these businesses that were selling their products on Clickbank. And I remember thinking, "Okay, all I need is just a fraction of what those people are doing and then it will be enough for me to keep my house, keep the kids in the house, keep my studio going." And so I decided to dive in.
I knew nothing about building websites or launching an online business and so I started with my growth manager and the platform, to me, at first, was really overwhelming. I didn't know anything about this kind of stuff. And so she was my first point of contact and she was my hand holder. And I would reach out to her and say, "Hey, how do I set up this link?" You know, just the most minor stuff that to most people, they would have a team to help them with this or tech people help them do this. I was trying to figure it out all on my own.
So it's a video of Mommy. She's looking on the computer right now.
She really walked me through the whole process and she was there for me through everything. Clickbank not only took me from the bottom and helped me step by step to figure out the process, but then when it was time, when I had everything set up and I had my program ready to go, then Clickbank basically opened the doors for me into a world of marketers and affiliates that I never would have had contact with or even known about if it weren't for Clickbank.
My first year with Clickbank, just in my very first year, I reached over 100,000 new customers with my product and that is a number that was unimaginable to me, to be able to help that many people in that way and people all over the world in all kinds of countries.
I also see that Clickbank has opened other doors for me as well. I'm now working with people who work in PR to get my name out there more and I'm having opportunities to go into speaking and perhaps write a book some day.
What makes me click is just being able to be an every day mom at home with my kids, being able to keep working with people to help them in a way that's meaningful to me while also building a business that has changed my life beyond my wildest dreams.
