Sign in
Business
Shane Sams
Hi, we're Shane & Jocelyn Sams. Are you looking for something different? You've found it! Welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast! We are a real family who makes our entire living online, and we help other people do the same! Flip Your Life with online business! We built a million dollar online business selling digital products and starting membership sites over the internet (people pay us to email them stuff...seriously). Our Internet business changed our family's future, and it could change your family's too! Imagine making hundreds of extra dollars each month. Would that change your life? Could you use that extra money to pay your mortgage, get out of debt, give your kids a better Christmas, or even take that vacation you've been putting off? You can, and it’s probably easier than you think. We are a real family from Kentucky that makes a living entirely through internet marketing. This podcast is about how we make money online through Internet business, and how it lets us live a lifestyle other people can hardly imagine. Our goal is to help other families create, market, and sell digital products on the internet. Selling digital products helped us earn more money, have breathing room in our budget, and eventually quit our regular jobs. We've seen the power of online business first hand, now we want to help you see it too! If you would like to learn more about selling stuff online, check us out online at FlippedLifestyle.com or learn how you can do what we do at FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife
FL 77 – Turning Your Offline Services Into a Successful Online Business
Today's guest is Flip Your Life member, Pete. Pete has been a teacher and tutor for over 10 years. Currently, he is an expert at helping students raise their ACT/SAT test scores through personalized one on one coaching. Today we are helping Pete learn how to scale this knowledge and expertise by reaching more students online. We walk through why it is important to teach consumers online just like you would in person. We’ll also cover how much Pete should be charging online for his test prep content and the strategies to find out what his target audience will be willing to pay. [Tweet "Just because your business is online, doesn’t mean it’s different than the real world"] You will learn Ways to Structure Your Online Content Importance of having systems Use your market’s feedback How to narrow down your target audience. Strategies to Determine Your Price Point Test Your Content Delivery on Free Platforms ie YouTube [Tweet "If you are trying to focus on everyone, you’re targeting no one"] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community Pete’s Website Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. Being able to stay home with our kids on snow days and help them work on their snow packets! Without having to worry about taking any time off of work and/or miss out on being there for our kids to help them work through their assignments. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Pete take his test-prep business to the next level. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, great to be back with you again this week. Super excited, we’ve got another Flip Your Life community member on today for a consulting call. We are going to go through three questions that they have about their online business and we are going to help them personally take it to the next level. Our guest today is a very active member of the Flip Your Life forums, it is Pete Stajk. Pete, welcome to the show. PETE: Hey guys, how are you? SHANE: And is it ‘Stayjeck’ or ‘Stayjack’? I always mispronounce your name. PETE: Stajk, that’s fine. SHANE: Stayjack, Stayjeck, whatever; in Kentucky we say ‘Stayjack.’ Pete Stajk is on the show today, he’s got a really interesting business where he helps people with test-prep and we are going to tell you a little bit about that here in a few seconds and we are really excited to have Pete on the show today. JOCELYN: All right, Pete, so tell us a little bit about you, what you do online and anything else you’d like our listeners know about you. PETE: Sure, thanks Jocelyn. So, I’ve been basically a teacher and a tutor for nearly 10 years now. I was a high school English teacher for five years until I really wanted to get into busin...
23:1609/02/2016
FL 76 – Helping Marianna launch her membership site for bilingual parents
Marianna moved from Venezuela at 13 with her family eager to learn English. Unfortunately, the school district they moved into didn’t have a great ESOL program, so she spent most of 6th, 7th and 8th grade watching movies and being taught in Spanish instead of learning English. Fortunately, she had great teachers in High School. This made her excel even pursue other languages in her college career. Instead of pursuing her intended path to take law, she went on to teach English and instill the things she would have wanted for herself as a young English learner to her students. Now, she helps other parents raise bilingual and bicultural kids through her business bilingualavenue.com. We talk through some of the struggles of a new membership community -- about not focusing on getting in as many people as possible immediately, but on getting the RIGHT people into the membership. [Tweet "Scarcity is the best way to get people to buy on a webinar"] After spending a lot of time giving away free content there is a point in time that you will need to spend money to get in front of new people with paid advertising. We talk through if this transition is right for Marianna. You will learn What to do when starting a membership community Remember Memberships Grow over the Long Term Ways to Retarget People Great Webinar Strategy Focus on one thing when having a webinar What a webinar Bonus is really there for Difference Between ‘stick’ & ‘scarcity’ Strategy to Promote already created content Batching your content together [Tweet "Focus on getting QUALITY emails, not just on the quantity of emails. Quality emails convert."] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Bilingual Avenue.com Bilingual Avenue Podcast Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. Going to church on Sundays, we volunteer in the nursery and help lead worship for the kids. When we were coaching and teaching we had to miss a lot of Sundays. We have the freedom to do really whatever we want any day of the week. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to help Marianna take her bilingual membership site to the next level. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, great to be back with you again this week. We have another member of our Flip Your Life community coming on the show today and we are going to be helping them on a consulting call to take their business to the next level. Our guest today is Marianna Du Bosq of Bilingualavenue.com. Marianna, welcome to the show. MARIANNA: Thank you, I’m thrilled to be here. JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s really exciting to have you here, we love talking to our members and helping you guys really delve into your busines...
26:2302/02/2016
FL 75 – Helping Ashley make more sales in her ghostwriting business
Today we’re sitting down with freelance writer Ashley, to help her build her business while increasing her hourly rate. Ashley has been a freelance writer since 2007 until 2014 when she started ghostwriting. She does all of the research and writing for articles and posts it on clients websites and blogs. We answer her questions on how to get paid more for her work, create consistent recurring income, and how to always be asking how is my marketing content making a sale for me. [Tweet "You have to charge what you are worth. Stop undervaluing YOU"] Create more time for yourself by creating a system and process to eliminate the clients that aren’t serious about hiring you. You will learn Where to find clients that are willing to pay for your expertise Guarantee Your Income by Offering Recurring Packages The importance of charging more for a one off offer Use Your Customer’s Feedback to market to new clients Create a Plan to raise all of your rates to existing and new customers Keep Your Current Clients Happy by offering an extra bonus to your service. Set Boundaries with Prospective Clients Be Clear on Your Sales Page Convince People they Need to Hire a Ghostwriter through your Sales Page Content [Tweet "Don't give away your time. If you meet with people, charge them for their time."] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. We were able to go down to the surgery of one of our family members down in Nashville, took the kids to a science museum, swim at the hotel, spent time with the family member after their surgery was finished. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Ashley Grant take her ghost writing business to the next level. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Excited to have on a Flip Your Life member today. We ae going to be giving out a free consulting call to one of our members and helping them take their business to the next level. We are super excited as to have a good friend on the show, not only a Flip Your Life member but an attendee at some of our live events and somebody we actually just saw in person a couple of weeks ago. They were passing through. We had got to eat lunch with them. It’s our Flip Your Life member, Ashley Grant. Ashley, Welcome to the show. ASHLEY: Hey guys. I am so happy to be here today. JOCELYN: Yeah it’s awesome. We have enjoyed hanging out with you in person twice now. So Ashley can attest that we are totally normal people for the most part. SHANE: We are not weird. We are not putting up a front. Do you know what I’m saying? ASHLEY: You guys are awesome. JOCELYN: So it’s awesome.
28:0026/01/2016
FL 74 – Helping Todd find the right place to start his membership site
Todd Ferguson is a full-time seller on Amazon. He is looking to take that expertise and teach small business owners how to expand their markets by selling their products on Amazon. He’s already put together the content for the course and is looking to launch his membership site soon. We walk through his questions around the sales funnel, what you should and shouldn’t be doing with ads and landing pages. We cover some key principles about lead magnets and what it takes to actually make a sale from cold traffic. [Tweet "Do SOMETHING every day, even if everything you do isn’t perfect."] One of the most important aspects is identifying the perfect customer. We cover some tactics to go about this and why it’s so critical in the online marketing strategy. You’ll also learn the components of a highly effective sales page once your target audience has been identified. Problem Benefits Solution Testimonials You will learn How to make more money on products you are already selling. The importance of a free offer to get new email subscribers. Can memberships be a stand alone product? How to create an introductory offer from already created content. Why competition in your Niche is a good thing. Do I have the right product for the right person at the right time? What is the benefit for the customers you are targeting. [Tweet "Always test your introductory offers with the funnels you are setting up"] Don’t miss out on the bonus content at the end of the show.... Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. Walking on our new desk treadmill in our office space to avoid sitting while working! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Todd grow his membership program that helps small business owners sell their products online. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, great to be back with you again this week; we got another awesome interview with a Flip Your Life member, we’re going to take them today, down the path of success and we are going to help them take their business to the next level by answering three of their most pressing questions about their online business, and help them figure out what to do next. Our guest today is a good friend of ours, he is not only a Flip Your Life community member, but he has attended our live events and just a great person all around. His name is Todd Ferguson; Todd, welcome to the show man. TODD: Hey guys, thanks for having me. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are really excited that you are here, we have met you in person like a few people we talked to recently, and we are excited to delve in and help you to continue to do what you have already b...
26:5219/01/2016
FL 73 – How We Use Reflection and Goal Setting to Take Our Business to the Next Level
In our first episode of 2016 we’re going to go through some of our favorite Can’t Miss Moments, things that went right, what went wrong, and our goals for 2016. What Went WRONG in 2015 We got hacked - everything, emails, bank accounts. All of it. This proved to be one of the biggest challenged we have ever faced running our online business. Listen in on how this happened and how we dealt with it. Sickness slowed us down. October - January our family has been sick with pneumonia, respiratory issues. The most important person on our team left to go to another job. This was problematic as we didn’t create a good procedure to hand over everything the previous employee was doing. What went RIGHT in 2015. We shifted our business model from launching products periodically to having all of our businesses operate on the recurring membership model. We worked less hours so that we could spend more time with our kids and attend their events. 40- 50 hours a week in 2014 now 10-20 hours of actual work from us. We hosted live events - this was a big goal that we accomplished. Goals for 2016 Goal to grow our Flip Your Life Community (possibly shedding some of our other stuff to focus on this) Hire a high-level business coach that is the level we want to be at. Financial Obligation = Accountability More 1 on 1 work with our Members Podcasts are going to be consulting calls with our members You will learn Importance of what happened in 2015 Creating Plans for 2016 How Can’t Miss Moments will bring Inspiration Get Prepared for the bad things with better systems Have Backups in Place if something happens to one of your team members Procedures of your business is Vital Predictable Growth With Membership Models Build Your Business the Right Way allows you to work less. Be Around Like Minded People Just keep Moving Forward even with little steps [Tweet "Celebrate Your Wins, especially the small ones. Little wins add up to big ones."] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Click here to get the Flipped Lifestyle Goal Setting Guide. How We Got Hacked What You Can do to Prevent Identity Theft What to do when you get Hacked Podcast Episode Screw the 9 to 5 Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. Favorite from 2015: Traveled more in 2015 than ever before - going to Ft. Lauderdale, FL when Kentucky was going to have an ice storm so the only warm place we could find in the US was there. So we hopped onto a plane and left that same day. Ability to Bless others by creating jobs for people - surrounded ourselves with friends and family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we take a look back at 2015 and take a look into the future of Flipped Lifestyle. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week,
43:4812/01/2016
FL 72 – Catching up and celebrating success with former Flipped Podcast guests!
Special Edition This week we have two former guests with us, members of our Flip Your Life Community who have some awesome success stories to share. Listen to these stories of thousands of dollars earned and jobs being quit so you can be inspired by today’s stories and take action on your goals. Brad Barrett Brad has gone all in quitting his day job this year while increasing his online income dramatically. He’s gone from one on one free calls to a course that individuals can sign up whenever they want - basically selling courses on auto-pilot now. By flipping his life he is now able to have lunch with his daughter during the day, greet his older daughter when she gets off the bus, and the opportunity to read books all day if he wanted too. Brad and his wife are looking forward to traveling the world with their children during the summer breaks which wouldn’t be possible if he was still at his full time accounting job. [Tweet "I would pick Flip Your Life over Harvard Business School in a heartbeat"] Shelley Hitz Shelley learned how to launch her beta group from her previous one on one call with us! Without having any content ready she was able to fill 20 spots at $199 during her pre-launch bringing in around 6k in just a few weeks. She is already getting AMAZING success stories and feedback on what students really want which allowed her to make money upfront and save time. One student published her kindle book in the first month after taking the course and became a number one best selling Amazon Author in the very first day! Another has published three books in the first month and is living out a 20 year dream of being a published author. [Tweet "Take the Steps and Take Action"] You will learn Importance of a Digital Product It’s about your mindset Why to Invest into your online business now It is possible to make money online Good to give value; but you need to make money also Video Testimonials are so vital to future sales How to bring new people onto your already large list. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community Brad’s Episode Travel 101 Course Richmond Savers Shiny Objects Episode Shelley’s Episode Shelley’s Website Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all and Merry Christmas! On today’s show, we are going to catch up on some Flip podcast guest to see what’s happening on their online businesses. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Merry Christmas to everybody out there about to celebrate the birth of Jesus and Santa Claus coming to town. We’re only a couple of days away now from Christmas actually happening and we wanted to bring you a special addition of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast this week. We are bringing back two of our former guests on flipped podcast. Those are members of our Flip Your Life Community who we give a free consulting call to and we answer four or five of thei...
37:5123/12/2015
FL 71- Exactly what to prioritize and how to spend your time when building your business
With the new year right around the corner, it’s a great time for everyone to get focused and organized for 2016! In this episode we’re answering questions about managing time and setting priorities. Creating free content, paid content, opt-in freebies, and marketing activities How you divide your time is dependent on where you are in your online business. Before you start your blog, you should be focusing 100% of your time on your lead magnet. Once that’s done, spend 100% of your time on setting up your website. After that, you might spend: 70% on free content 10% on opt-in bonuses 10% on marketing 10% on creating content for other people. These percentages will shift around once you open doors into your website. [Tweet "Prioritize things that serve others & solve problems. Do that, & you'll make money online"] So the key takeaway here is to always start with your lead magnets. Scheduling free content The next thing we discuss is scheduling free content. How often you release content is up to you, but the key is consistency. If you stay consistent, over time you’ll be successful online. The ‘To-Do’ list is something we all struggle with. Start working through it by breaking each ‘To-Do’ into bite-sized pieces and schedule them in your calendar (e.g. Google Calendar). Use any app or piece of technology available to help you block your time and stay on track. Be specific when you break down your tasks, set aside some catch up time every week, and focus on one thing at a time. Prioritizing Goals Next up, we talk about prioritizing goals. Look at all the things that you want to do - see what you can delete, what you can delegate, and what you can do. Prioritize the goals that can make you money the fastest. [Tweet "Calendar everything. To do lists don't work. You have to schedule time for your tasks"] You will learn The best way to divide your time Tips for releasing free content Best practices for delivering opt-in freebies Techniques for nurturing non customers Tips for tackling your ‘To Do’ list How to schedule tasks in your calendar to get more done Tips for setting and prioritizing your goals Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community US History Teachers Elementary Librarians Google Calendar Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us a review on iTunes and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to help you manage your time and set the right priorities in your online business. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you again this week. We are in the middle of a Q&A series where we are answering questions from our Flip Your Life community membe...
27:2816/12/2015
FL 70 – Today we help Lauren make more money on her hair loss blog.
Today’s guest Lauren is a Flip Your Life Community member. She’s got a blog called the Corner of Hope & Mane where she covers topics related to women’s hair loss. Lauren works a 9-to-5 job and right now her blog is just a hobby. In the past year she began working on it a little more seriously and has 50,000 monthly page views along with a 2,500-lead mailing list. She currently makes about $1,000/month through ads and affiliate sales, which is great, but she’s ready to take her online business to the next level! The first topic we tackle is generating leads. Right now Lauren only has one lead magnet - that’s not enough. One of the ideas we gave Lauren is to look at her top 5 blog posts and create a different content-specific opt-in for each. We also discuss the best way for Lauren to monetize her site through a forum. The topic of her blog really lends itself well to a support forum, and we think there is a lot of value in creating a community where she is the leader and support backbone. Even if she only has a 1% conversion rate, Lauren could easily get 25 paying forum members within a month. At $25/member, that’s $500/month! [Tweet "Your product could change someone's life, that is too important not to do"] Another topic we touch on is how to introduce paid content to readers who are accustomed to free content. The key is to provide real additional value to them and make no apologies for it. To wrap things up we go into Facebook and Google ads, and how Lauren can best leverage them to drive people to her site. Even though hair loss is considered a very personal subject, we found hundreds of thousands of users who have liked hair loss support groups and products on Facebook. There are also thousands of different searches on Google Lauren could take advantage of through Google ads. You will learn Ways to generate lead magnets Tips for increasing your lead magnet conversion rate Creating a paid membership site based on community value Techniques for drawing readers to her membership site How to introduce a paid area or paid content to your audience How to leverage ads to drive traffic to your website [Tweet "You will always make more off your own products than ads or affiliates"] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community Corner of Hope and Mane Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Lauren take her online business to the next level. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Great to be back with you again this week. We are feeling so much better. We are finally completely healed from-- JOCELYN: Not completely. SHANE: Almost completely. Jocelyn is still coughing a little bit. JOCELYN: I would say 90%. SHANE: But 90% we are back to normal and things are getting that way around here. Very excited about this week’s episode because we have a flipped podcast for you where we bring on a member of our Flip Your Life Community and we ...
31:4210/12/2015
FL 69 – How to have a positive mindset and stay inspired as an entrepreneur
We are going to go over some mindsets and how to put systems in place for positive habits. Life goals should be a priority over your business goals. Always ensuring that your life is the first priority and what you want to accomplish over your day to day business tasks. If you take care of yourself and your family first, your frame of mind will be better as you know that everything else is taken care of for that day, week or month. It’s important to focus on one strategy at a time. In this episode we share our weekly schedule and how many hours a day we are working on average. [Tweet "It's not all grind & hustle. Life is more important than work!"] You will learn How to stay positive in your business Daily habits to stay motivated Doing the things that matter Focus on one thing at a time Filter out distractions The importance of focusing on your longterm goals Get your stuff done as fast as possible don’t waste your work time Set benchmarks Take the pressure off of yourself You need deadlines Celebrate your successes Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Modern Parent’s Guide to Old-School Parenting Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Success Story:Karen Colt a FL community member, has a podcast: weturnedoutokay.com "Hey everybody I wanted to share this milestone I’ve had 10,000 individual downloads on my podcast watching that number turn over from 4 figures to 5 figures yesterday felt so good, it was just one of the many things I am thankful for and I love that I reached this milestone on Thanksgiving Day. So thankful for Shane and Jocelyn and the Flip Your Life community your support keeps me going." Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to answer your questions about staying positive and inspired when working on your online business. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are very glad to be with you again this week. We have not had a podcast out in a week or two because we have been very, very, very sick. I got pneumonia for a couple of weeks, and Jocelyn just battled through bronchitis. Jocelyn is here and alive. JOCELYN: Yeah, barely and I still am not 100% well so, my voice may sound a little crazy. SHANE: And you may get a little coughing in this episode because we both are still kind of getting over that. The kids have been sick; it’s just been a rough, rough November. We’ve been passing it around the house; all you guys who are parents and have kids, you know what it’s like. Once somebody gets sick in the house, it just passes around for months it seems like. But we are feeling a lot better, we are very happy to be back with you again today, and we’ve got a great topic.
31:5003/12/2015
FL 68 – Today we help Jeff Twiddy improve his sales funnel on a live consulting call
Today's guest Jeff Twiddy, is a member of our Flip Your Life Community. Originally a Football High School coach and Geometry teacher, he started a personal training business helping high school students who wanted to play college football. He has two online businesses -- one for high students wanting to play college football, Game Plan Your Future, and the second which we’re going to focus on today, Geometrycoach.com where he sells teaching plans online and has a membership. Jeff started listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast two years ago, and since then he made over $20,000 in online sales. Now he's ready to take it to the next level! We are going over how to attack holiday sales online - Black Friday, Back to School, Winter Holidays - first thing to identify your avatar and what applies to your audience. One idea we go over is to offer new packages, special annual prices, 6 month prices, and include bonuses that won’t be there later on. You can also have massive benefits is having your email list vote and whichever option they click on they receive the discount they chose and, “Everybody Wins”. We’ll also cover how to organically grow online from market places and bring people back to your own website. And finally, we discuss how Jeff could be using webinars. We talk about converting off of automated webinars, once you do a few live ones how you can create a presentation going through some of the FAQ. [Tweet "When you send an email, is as important as what you send in the email"] You will learn Process Jeff went through Mistakes Jeff made initially Black Friday Online Sales Important to invest your time How to grow organically online Best ways to benefit from a webinar How to convert your emails better Pay attention to the timing of your avatars Splinter out your free offers What is a nurture sequence? Adequate number of people on your list for your niche. Don’t forget to look at things realistically [Tweet "Every niche is different, make every decision with YOUR avatar in mind."] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Jeff’s Game Plan Your Future Jeff’s Geometry Coach Our Interview on Smart Passive Income Elementary Librarian History Website Ever Webinar Software Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Jeff take his online business to the next level. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you again this week. Super excited because we have a Flip Your Life member on the call today and we are going to bring a Flipped podcast to you; this is where we bring in a Flip Your Life community member, and we give them a consulting call, and we let everybody else listen in so we can all learn from the discussion and move our businesses forward and take them to the next level. We got a great guest today, a man after my own heart, guy loves to coach a little football,
38:1515/11/2015
FL 67 – The right way (and the wrong way) to promote products online
In this episode, we discuss some of the myths of online business. We cut through the junk and let you know the truth about how online business can make money. One of the most important places to start is figuring out who your customer is and where you’re going to find them. You truly need to know and understand their problems and be able to effectively deliver solutions that work. Promoting products online means providing value. Spend time investing in others and as you do you’ll receive knowledge and information that others are giving in those same communities. [Tweet "Stop trying to trick your customers into buying. Solve problems. Provide value."] To have a profitable and effective product it honestly has to be good, otherwise it’s simply a waste of time. If your product solves a real problem that people are looking for a solution for then your promotion will be easy. You will learn Promoting Digital Products Who are you selling to? It’s not all about the copyrighting Guest Poster on someone else’s Blog - Be Strategic Be a Guest on a Podcast Join Influencer Communities What does providing value in Social Groups look like? Connect with people in real life What to do and not do on your sales page What is your offer? Honest Solution - Be Ethical [Tweet "Marketing won't save you if your avatar is unknown and your product is awful"] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show FL 34 Episode FL 35 Episode FL 36 Episode FL 37 Episode Sales Funnel Episode Free Email Templates Finding Your Ideal Avatar Football Defense Site US History Teachers Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Tanya, who was on the podcast recently and she is also a member of our Flip Your Life Community. She says, “On Monday, I added the low cost introductory offer and reminder emails to my autoresponder sequence and so far I have 13 sales and one upsale to my membership. I am so excited about this. It is so fun to see that it is working. And the real bonus is that I am hoping these sales will continue since everyone will be getting the autoresponder emails at different times depending on when they came into my list. Of course the ultimate goal is to get more people into my membership so hopefully that’ll pick up a bit but for now I am happy with one since Monday. Shane and Jocelyn the training on sales funnel was excellent! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. This week's can't miss moment was taking our kids trick or treating early! We got to trick or treat from 3 to 5, and then stay home to give out candy! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we talk about the right ways to promote your online business and what not to do. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great t...
34:1908/11/2015
FL 66 – 3 More Habits That Will Make You Successful Online
We are back at the Flipped Lifestyle Headquarters this week! If you didn’t check out last week’s episode we went over the importance of picking a focused direction, finding a group of people to stay accountable and why investing time and money is vital even though there is a risk. The reality we've realized is this: There will always be something in your way - the online world is competitive. We want to help you get better and make your online business get better! Not making excuses has helped us realize that we need to focus on the solutions and not the problems. [Tweet "If online business is important to you, you'll find a way. If not, you'll find excuses."] We've also had to help folks understand that the luxury and freedom isn’t always immediate and will come as you move forward but be content as you go through that process. Being content with where you are at and understand that if you want to move forward with your goals sooner there are decisions that you can make -- like canceling your cable, or moving into a smaller home with a smaller mortgage are some things we did to invest into our online business. Set reasonable goals that are relevant to your life and should be attainable. Get to that first checkpoint before setting new higher goals. Your dreams are made up of dozens and dozens of goals. You will learn What can you do better? We do not make excuses Time can’t be your excuse - there is always a way There are ways to get the money you need for an online service Why they are content Be patient with the process Set Goals that are attainable Keep Taking Action [Tweet "Stop focusing on problems, start focusing on the solutions. There ARE solutions!"] Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Chris and Melanie from our Flip Your Life Community, “Hey guys, just wanted to report we made our second straight 1000$ + month and our email list went over 1000 subscribers and we still have a week left in the month so let’s see what happens! Super Stoked!” Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to share three more habits that made us successful in online business. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; we are back at Flipped Lifestyle world headquarters this week. We are not laying on the beach, there are no seagulls, no ocean waves in the background, the only noises you will hear behind us is the rustling of our laundry in the washing machine. JOCELYN: We keep a luxurious surrounding. SHANE: Yeah, and the dishwasher clanging and banging. So, no helicopters flying over this week, just the sound of wonderful machines doing work for us in the background; that’s kinda like...
32:0230/10/2015
FL 65 – 3 Habits that will Make you Successful in Online Business
We’re recording at the beach today, talking about 3 of the success habits that helped make us successful as online business. One of the things we've done really well is wisely choosing a direction and relentlessly pursuing that direction. Although you might fail you HAVE TO follow through with ideas and start learning and testing ideas, the worse thing you can do is nothing! [Tweet "Online business is scary; you have to be brave & take risks."] Surrounding yourself with great people who will keep you accountable and also compliment your mindset is vital to make sure you continue your growth and don't stall. Invest in yourself and your business, sacrificing time and money now so you can make your life the way you want it to be. If you’re not willing to put in the time to take the RIGHT ACTION, you’ll continue to spend money without seeing the benefits. Online business and entrepreneurship takes courage. Taking action and investing time and money is scary, those that can overcome the fear and take the right action are those that succeed. You will learn Online business is way more than just installing WordPress and understanding software. Do the research and really understand your customer! You have to do the work. Find an accountability person that is the opposite of you. Summary of something important talked about. Don’t be afraid to spend money. Why online business takes COURAGE. Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to share some of the habits that made us successful in online business. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; we have got a very special podcast today for you because we are actually lying out on the beach. We are in the middle of a can't-miss moment. We are down in Clearwater beach near Tampa, Florida, and we just finished up our 'Flip Your Nine To Five' live event with 20 amazing entrepreneurs from all over around the country and the world. We are enjoying a few days by ourselves with the kids; I’m watching Isaac here to my left, he’s digging a sand castle, and Ana is there looking for sea shells in the water, kind of, walking around. We are covered in sunscreen, laying out, getting some rays, and just thought we would bring you guys on the journey. I’ve got the gain up a little bit, so the sound quality might not be what you are used to, but I wanted you guys to maybe catch some of the background noises, the ocean waves, the birds flying by, and helicopter that is about to pass over our head. This is going to be a shorter episode than we normally bring to you on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Over the next few weeks, we are going to go over two to three success habits that we have used that have helped us beco...
19:5322/10/2015
FL 64 – Celebrating our Two Year Anniversary of Quitting our 9 to 5 Jobs
September 27th, 2013 was the very first day that we stayed home working only for ourselves, and today we’re taking time to reflect on the last two years and talk about the most important factors in our success. As full-time teachers, we both were working on average about 50 hours a week, even though we had summers ‘off’ but we were never ‘happy enough’. We're going to share the story of trigger in our lives that drove us to change our lifestyle. [Tweet "Once you quit your job, you can never work a 9 to 5 again.."] We’ll walk through the exact mindset and thought process that we went through that lead us to quitting our jobs and the sacrifices we made to do that. What we wanted out of life was freedom, so that is what we set out to accomplish and then help you do the same. You will learn Success Story The story of where we came from. Some of the struggles we’ve faced over the year. The reasons that we made the shift to working for ourselves. The sacrifices we made to go full time with our online businesses. What this whole journey is really all about. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community Eric & Sally’s Online Music Teaching Resource Elementary Librarian Online Business is for Anyone but Not for Everyone Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Success Story: Eric & Sally are active Flip Your Life Members they wrote: “3 weeks ago we went from selling one off products to selling memberships. After 3 weeks we have 4 monthly members and 16 yearly subscribers = 3,750$ recurring Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to celebrate the two-year anniversary of quitting our jobs. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; got a very special and awesome, fun episode of Flipped Lifestyle podcast for you guys this week. We are taking a departure from kind of our series-based stuff, where we cover you know, huge topics and get into the nuts and bolts of online business, and we wanted to just step back and look at the last two years of our online business since we quit our jobs. We just celebrated our two-year “quit-aversary” that’s what Jocelyn calls it, the quit-aversary where we actually became unemployable, we will never go back to the nine to five ever again, and so I think what, it was September 27th? JOCELYN: Yeah, 2013, that was. SHANE: Two years ago, that was the first day that Jocelyn and I stayed at home and worked for ourselves. So we want to talk a little bit about that journey, we want to get into why we started our online business, why we decided to quit our jobs and kind of go into all the things that have happened since. If you are new to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, this is going to be kind of a great episode for you to catch up...
45:4608/10/2015
FL 63 – A successful case study for membership sites
Today we learn how Jill and Josh went from a cycle of online launches to a predictable business that generates revenue every month - all online. The launch model can be really appealing. Lot’s of potential cash and a rush of adrenaline, but followed by a lack of income and consistency after each launch. You will hear how they tested the subscription model with one of their smaller products - saw an immediate drop in their income yet through mistakes and learning they realized that as the memberships began to increase they are able to predict their income for the next month. It only takes a few months to figure out your retention and value of your lifetime customer when using the membership model. If you are delivering value to your membership they’ll stick around, if not they’ll leave. [Tweet "Memberships create predictable, steady, growing income. Launches do not."] You will learn Why a Launch Model was too complicated for them. Difficult to know your launch model numbers Quick fire products consume a lot of time Find the business model that works for you How to switch from the launch model to the continuity model Income will drastically decrease immediately Membership Sites - a slow process Make more for the lifetime of the customer rather than a one-time buy Customer has more benefits Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Screw the nine to five.com BB Press Forum Profit First Book Flip Your Nine to Five Live Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! Introduction: Hey on today's podcast represent a successful membership case study. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your host, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright, let’s get started. Shane: What's going on guys welcome back to Flipped Lifestyle Podcast great to be back with you again this week. it is membership month here at the Flipped Lifestyle, and in a last three episodes we talked about, Why is deuce the membership model for your online business, how we switched to it and how to sell all that up. And today were going to be bringing you a successful case study of a couple that switched from we called maybe the launch model and other models to make money online to the membership models and were really excited because this are two of our best friends in the world it is Jill and Josh Stanton from screwtheninetofive.com welcome to the show guys. Jill: Ye-hey! Josh: Ye-hey! Jill: Business Besties Shane: Wohoo! Josh: We're here Shane and Josh: Yes! Shane: So the a.. Josh: Uhm, we have the Canadian and an Aussie and to Kentucky and is... Shane: We’re worldwide today on the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast Jocelyn: International baby. Shane: That's right, we're international today on the flipped lifestyle podcast so, what we're gonna talk about today with Jill and Josh is memberships and how they just switched to the membership model,
40:0201/10/2015
FL 62 – Today we help Tanya transition her online business to a membership site
In this episode we take a free consulting call from Tanya Bryant, a mother of three from Minnesota who said goodbye to corporate life 2.5 years ago. Now working from home as a virtual assistant, she wants to develop a website she recently acquired to help fellow virtual assistants into her primary source of income and freedom business. After re-branding and putting a lot of work into different products on her site, Tanya wants to use the membership model to take her site to the next level. Listen in as we guide Tanya through the process of transforming her digital sales business into a successful and sustainable membership model. [Tweet "People buy a membership for the content, but they stay for the leadership & community"] Tanya asked some great questions along the way, and we end up covering A LOT of material, including practical tips on how to drive membership numbers through advertising and free content. We also touch on where the real value lies in the membership model, how offering membership differs from selling individual products, and share our thoughts on selecting a price point, sharing content, and managing Facebook groups versus forums. If you’re like Tanya and have a great idea for a membership model site but aren’t quite sure how to turn it into a sustainable business - this is one episode you DO NOT want to miss! You will learn The advantages of the membership model over offering individual products. What type of free content to include on a membership site. How to use blog posts and other free content to drive membership sales. Tips for increasing membership through Facebook advertising. Strategies for retaining members over time. The pros and cons of maintaining a Facebook group versus a forum. Tips for setting your initial membership price point. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flipped Lifestyle Star VA Elementary Librairan US History Teachers Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast, we’re helping Tanya take her online business to the next level. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; got a great episode for you today, we have a Flipped podcast where we bring on a member from our Flip Your Life community, and we give them a free consulting call, and we put that on the air so that everyone can learn from the answers to the questions asked. Today’s guest is Tanya Bryant; Tanya, welcome to the show. TANYA: Thank you, great to be here. SHANE: We are really excited that you are coming on today because we are going to be talking about membership websites, which is kind of the theme for this month. So it’s going to be an awesome call, it’s going to fit right in and we are going to learn more about how we can use the membership model to create a sustainable and growing income online. JOCELYN: All right Tanya, so before we jump into all of our online business chat, let’s talk a little bit about you and your personal life; tell us about you an...
30:3824/09/2015
FL 61 – How to start a membership site for making money online
Membership sites are the best online business choice for predictable and recurring income. Listen in on today's episode to learn how to build and grow your own! Today we are talking about how to set up a membership site and the tools you need to know about so you can successfully make money online. Exciting News! Jeanette, a member of our FYL Community (and on FL55), messaged us recently sharing how she was making enough money with her WordPress membership site to quit her job! We’ll cover all the tools you need to host your community. A forum is one of the core pieces that really isn’t a complex plugin but gives you a lot of ability and flexibility to organize the conversations, resources and training your members will have access to. With a forum on your website (not a Facebook page or group) the content is under your control not under the control of Facebook. We’ll go over some ways to protect your forum, allow people to pay you and how to manage your forum threads and conversations. Don’t promise new daily, weekly, or monthly content, simply say there will be Regularly Scheduled Content. (this is critical!) [Tweet "People quit memberships because they stop getting value"] Two critical factors for member retention are community and accessibility to the Expert (you). Although they might come for the education or information they’ll stay for the community and ability to get their questions answered. You will learn Why you need a website for your membership The best tools for a membership site Why to Use a Forum Plugin Types of Forum Categories Way to Protect Your Forum Third Party Gateways for Payments Managing Your Forums Content Strategy Procedures for Handling Customer Service Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community Flipped Lifestyle Podcast 60 Jeanette’s website algebra1teachers.com BB Press Paid Membership Pro Imember 360 Paypal Stripe Authorize.net BB Press Notify Canned Responses James Schramko Screw the 9 -5 Flip Your Nine to Five Live Event Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast, we’re going to tell you about how to set up a membership site to make money online. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to this week’s show; it’s special because I get to start it, yay! SHANE: Jocelyn gets to start the show, that’s right. She usually doesn’t like to start the show, but we are trying to push her out of her comfort zone a little bit here today. JOCELYN: Exactly. So, “Go introverts!” is all I can say. All right, today we are talking about membership sites and we started out last week by telling you why we originally did not like membership sites, and what changed our mind.
36:3117/09/2015
QA 87 – Matthew Kimberley Answers “How to Market to a Small Niche?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Olgierd, decide if he should individually contact his market or build a sales funnel to send traffic to. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Build A Relationship on Trust in Your Target Market"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Matthew Kimberley at Matthew Kimberley’s Website Flipped Lifestyle Membership How to Get A Grip Book Yourself Solid School Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Matthew Kimberley at matthewkimberley.com. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; we have got another Expert Q&A on the show today with you, and we are excited to bring back one of our favorite guests; it is Matthew Kimberley of matthewkimberley.com. Matthew welcome back to the show. MATTHEW: Thank you for having me back, Shane and Jocelyn. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are really excited to have you. Today we have a question from, now I’m going to try this, Olgierd, and we actually looked this up online, how to pronounce this and that is the Kentucky pronunciation – SHANE: O-L-G-I-E-R-D [Unclear] or something, I’m not sure. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are so sorry, Olgierd; I think that’s right. Okay, so it says, “I have a question related to markets size. I have a solution for an industry with about 100 or 200 prospects. Should I contact each individual person in my market, or build a sales funnel to attract them, or is this market size even worth it?” SHANE: This was a very interesting question Matthew; Olgierd is actually a member of our Flip Your Life community. If you would like to learn more about that, you can flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and he really has fleshed out this and he is in an industry that is kind of B2B and it’s more like a furniture industry. So we’ve been helping him kind of sort through his avatar and his sales funnel in our forums, and he really only has about 200 companies that he can reach. But I think they are all going to be pretty big contracts if he did follow through with whatever services he is providing. So what do you think about that? Is this worth it? With that few people, should he just go ahead and try and contact them or is there some other form of marketing that might work here? MATTHEW: Okay, so it’s a two-part question. Let’s deal with the last one first, “Is the market size even worth it?” You got to do your math in order to work out whether or not it’s going to be worthwhile. You know, work out what the average lifetime value of a decent customer would be, test it against whether your projections are true or not, perhaps with your first and then second customer, and then move on. But certainly, I would say how many clients do you need? You are in the furniture industry, no other context perhaps you need, five clients, six clients, ten clients in order to have a sustainable business. Perhaps it would be great if you had 200; I don’t know. There are probably only a handful of aircraft engine manufacturers in the world, probably fewer than a hundred, I’d say, but there are going to be some people who are making a full-time living for their families and their employees on the back of just serving two or three of those companies. SHANE: And you said something – let me jump in real quick just for our listeners, the lifetime value of a customer basically boils down to how often they pay you; like frequency. Like if you sell one thing for 300 dollars and you never sell that person anything again, the lifetime value is 300.
12:2015/09/2015
FL 60 – Why you should offer a membership or recurring subscription in your Online Business
Today we’re talking about a shift we’ve made in our online business and we think you should consider in yours, the recurring subscription model. We’re going to cover how to create memberships around your digital products, so you can lower the time you spend yet increase your income. When you really start doing the math comparing the launch model versus a membership model, launches are very unpredictable as human nature is not easy to determine and/or predict. It’s a little more work upfront, but once you begin things do not take as long to maintain the membership site. Membership Sites = Consistent Income We consistently make money everyday for work we have already done while interacting and providing value to the members. You will learn from your customers as you participate with them and what they are looking for. (we aren’t just sitting on a beach somewhere after the membership site goes live) With Membership sites there isn’t the stress of depending on a lot of sales from a launch but planning what you can do to guarantee or test more sign ups. With cash forecasting we're now able to have an idea of the income we'll be making in the future. It is important to make sure you have all of your systems in place before starting the membership or recurring online business so that you don’t have to spend many hours a week working on it. [Tweet "The Launch Model is Broken"] You will learn How to Provide Value to Your Members Major Benefits of a Membership Model Turn Rate is more predictable with a subscription based model Accessible anywhere online Get to know your customers better Build a relationship with your members Common Questions about running recurring business models How many products do you need to start the membership business? Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Tropical Think Tank Chris Ducker The new business podcast James Schramko SuperFast Business.Com Jeff Walker Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast we’re going to tell you about why you should offer a membership or recurring subscription in your online business. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you. We’ve had a great last couple weeks. We are hack-free as far as we know, cross fingers. JOCELYN: Don’t speak too soon. SHANE: Don’t speak too soon, but we’ve finally got our feet back address and we are feeling like everything is back under control, so we are really excited to be able to just focus on you guys and help you take your online business to the next level, deliver some great content and not have to worry about the giant dumpster fire that was the hacking incident, basically. JOCELYN: Again, don’t say that too much. I’m scared. SHANE: Fingers crossed, okay? Today we’re going to be shifting gears a little bit, not just in our podcast content, but we’re going to be shifting gears in our online business. A few months ago,
42:2010/09/2015
QA 86 – Amy Schmittauer Answers “What kind of equipment do I need to record videos?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Kathy figure out how she can create awesome videos for her online business with affordable video equipment (or what she already has). Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Amy from SavvySexySocial.com Amy on Youtube Amy’s Podcast iRig Mic Rhode Lapel Mic Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Expert edition of the Q&A with S&J and today we are bringing back one of our favorite guests to talk about video and how it can improve your brand. It is Amy Schmittauer; Amy, welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. AMY: Shane and Jocelyn are my favorite people in the world, thanks for having me. SHANE: Love it. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are like super pumped when we talked to Amy a little bit ago that she is in the Eastern Time zone. There are very few people in the Eastern Time Zone. SHANE: This is the only podcast we get to record in the Eastern Time zone is when we get to talk to Amy. AMY: It’s so funny because most people don’t even believe me when I say I’m in the Eastern Time zone – SHANE: I know. AMY: – they’re like, “You’re in Ohio, so what does that mean?” SHANE: “Do you even have internet?” AMY: “Is that central time?” I’m like, “Yeah, exactly. I’m on Eastern Time, it’s all good.” SHANE: I always say, we have to like plus or minus four from everything we do because of all the people in California. AMY: Oh no. JOCELYN: East Coast represent – SHANE: East Coast is in the house today. JOCELYN: Let’s jump into today’s question. It’s from Cathy, a Flip Your Life member, and she says, “I cannot afford expensive equipment to make videos; what should I do?” SHANE: If we get any video questions, it’s this one because you know, when people start out affordability on everything, you got to get hosting and domains and blah-blah-blah and you got to spend some money to get started. But then we’re like “Okay, how are you going to use video?” And they’re like, “I can’t afford a camera.” That’s impossible. So what do you say to people when they come to you and they are like “I don’t have anything to record with; what do I do?” AMY: Well, it’s a bunch of crap, is what it is because you do have something to record with – Cathy, no disrespect. So, most of us have a smartphone and there’s no reason to think that if you are going to get serious about video content that you can’t use what you already have. I mean, it’s actually sort of mind-blowing when you think about the abilities of the cameras that are built into smartphones. This is why the flip camera got discontinued and there are so many other hand-held video cameras nobody is buying because you just have it in something you carry around anyway. So, other than maybe a memory issue, there’s no reason for you to say like “I can’t use my phone” and there’s so many accessories out there to enhance even that product alone if you are worried about internal audio being an issue ‘cause you like to do stuff outside a lot. There’s a way of getting a microphone that can just plug into your phone and then you automatically have an upgrade there. So, often times when people are trying to sort of drag their feet on video, they are always talking about equipment and it’s just very hard to wrap your mind on what are all the things we need: lighting, sound, quality everything; but if you just start with what you have at that point in time, you are going to prove to yourself that you need better...
10:2508/09/2015
FL 59 – Helping Deb start an online business teaching mompreneurs how to work from home
Deb made the switch to online business 3 years ago, but has found herself trading time for dollars and wants to shift out of that into an online business without an income cap and strict hours. We’re going to talk about the first steps to getting started so Deb can get her site for mompreneurs off the ground and start building an email list and creating income. We talk about if she should focus on affiliate products or create her own membership site in the beginning. We also talk about the importance of scheduling your time so you know when you should be working on content and when you should be working on products. It’s about coming up with a strategy that let’s you focus and understand where you should be. [Tweet "You should always have a strategy when creating content; think product first"] You will learn How you can leave a time for dollars job in the real world for one online. How to build a great lead magnet to build an audience. How to generate income quickly with a new website. Why we’re not a fan of affiliate programs. How to structure a membership community from the beginning. The value of a great community. How to prioritize between free content and paid products. The importance of scheduling your time. How to get your blog done quickly using transcriptionists. Do you have enough content to start your membership site? The value of having a plan before starting a membership site. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Kate’s Takes Audio Blog Our thoughts on Periscope Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast we help Deb start an online business teaching mompreneurs how to work from home. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you as always this week, to talk about online business and flipping your life upside down. We are super-excited today because we have a Flipped Podcast where bring on one of our Flip Your Life community members, and we give them a free consulting call to help them take their online business to the next level and we share that call with you because a lot of the questions that people ask us will apply to your online business as well. So, we want to make sure that everybody has a chance to learn from today’s consulting call. Today’s call is Deb McGranaghan; did I say that correctly? DEB: Yes. SHANE: I got it right; I practiced before we got on here. That’s pretty big time. Alright, this is Deb McGranaghan, she is a Flip Your Life community member; Deb, welcome to the show. DEB: Thank you so much for having me Shane; nice job with the name. SHANE: We are bad with names and math around here,
32:2203/09/2015
QA 85 – Michael O’Neal answers “How do I get amazing guests on my podcast?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Jonathan figure out how to get guests for his podcast even though he’s just starting out with his podcast and online business. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Don’t underestimate the power of personal connections."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Michael O’Neal from solopreneurhour.com Podcast with Michael O'Neal Pat Flynn Amy Porterfield John Lee Dumas Natalie Sisson Michael’s Show with John Corcoran Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Michael O’Neal of the Solopreneur Hour podcast and solopreneurhour.com Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Happy Thursday to you, welcome back to the Expert Q&A with S&J where we bring on internet marketing experts. We do not have all the answers to some of the questions that you send in; we would never want to tell you wrong, so we decided to start bringing people on who know a little bit more about certain subjects than we do to help you get the exact direction you need in your online business. And we are happy to bring back on the show today, Michael O’Neal from the Solopreneur Hour podcast and solohour.com. Michael, welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. MICHAEL: I am so happy to be here, thank you guys [Crosstalk] SHANE: That’s all right man, we’re gonna talk dude [Crosstalk] got to keep it tight. JOCELYN: Today’s question is from Jonathan Mann, and Jonathan says, “How do I get guests for my podcasts? I want to interview thought-leaders and business people who are successful, but I have no idea how to get them on my show. How do I convince others to take time out of their day to talk to a total stranger, especially when I’m just starting out? ” SHANE: When I read this question, I got this on email, the first person I thought about was Michael O’Neal. I was like, “This is the question we need to ask Michael” because that’s what you do. You interview people from all different walks and you got so many great interviews on your podcast, so how do you do it Michael? Especially when you first started out, how did you go out and get those guests and get people to take time out of their day? MICHAEL: By the way, I apologize in advance, no one has ever accused me of brevity. I know these are quick shows. SHANE: That’s all right, no problem. MICHAEL: So this is kind of a two-parter and this is one of my favorite hacks that I think is a hidden gem in the podcasting world of how to do this. First of all, just like in all business, this all comes down to relationships. So, there has to be a degree of separation between the person you want and sometimes the person you can get. So you have to first do a little research on relationships and find out who knows who and what’s going on. You can do that often on Twitter and find out who is following who and that kind of thing; but initially how I did it was I was very conscious about building a relationship with pat Flynn because I saw him as the center of this universe that I wanted to be in. And to do that, I was very specific and measured on how – and I’m not saying I stalked me but – SHANE: We all do; no, I’m just kidding. MICHAEL: I liked what he had to do, I was listening to him, I was paying attention to his shows, I launched an online social media training product, I wrote to him with a very specific question and it wasn’t like “How do I start a podcast?” which I just got the other day, which was amazing to me, but it was a very specific question to my online business.
11:0801/09/2015
FL 58 – What to do if you get hacked or are the victim of identity theft
Welcome to part 3 of our series on getting hacked and identity theft. If you missed part 1, you can click this link to listen to our story of being hacked and having our identity stolen. Today we're talking about what to actually do after you've been hacked. We'll walk through everything from financial and personal information to safeguards you need on your website and online business. Make sure you have all your data backed up on the cloud, so if you do have to wipe your computer or you have any type of hardware failure your files are safe. One of the things we’ve learned is that external hard drives simply aren’t enough. Although you might think that this is just a minor issue make sure to let the authorities know so you have a paper trail in case you need it in the future. Also, make sure to start talking with the Secret Service, FTC office, FBI, and state police; although it seems like overkill it will help you in the long run. If strange things start coming up on your homepage or ads start appearing on your blog posts, take it seriously. We thought it wasn’t a big deal at first when in reality we should have seen it as a huge red flag. The very first thing to do when noticing your website is hacked is to figure out how the hackers are getting into the back end of your site. Start with updating old plugins and bringing on a developer to look at the code to see if anything looks out of place. [Tweet "If you get hacked, don't panic. Follow these steps to prevent identity theft."] You will learn How do know if you’re the victim of identify theft or if you’ve been hacked. Where you might be at risk. Warning signs to know if someone has tried to log into your account. Actions that could lead to problems on Facebook. How to change passwords when you are hacked. What to do if you see issues with your bank account. Why you need to reach out to credit bureaus. How to recognize when your website has been hacked. Why slow load times might mean your data has been breached. Be backing up your websites at least once per day. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Episode 1 on Identity Theft and Hacking Episode 2 on Identity Theft and Hacking IFTT.com Chalene Johnson on being hacked Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to tell you what to do if you get hacked or become a victim of identity theft. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, you are listening to part three in our series of online security. We are going over our recent hack and identity theft event in our own lives and I thought we would share everything that we learned during this process for you to maybe keep you and your online bu...
43:3227/08/2015
QA 84 – John Lee Dumas Answers “What makes a webinar worth the time?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Kenneth figure out if webinars are worth it and what passive income truly is in comparison to time for dollars. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire Flip Your Life Program Podcasters Paradise Webinar on Fire John's book "Podcast Launch" Leadpages Chatroll Chatwing Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You are listening to an expert Q and A with S and J. Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas of the Entrepreneur On Fire Podcast on entrepreneuronfire.com. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle expert Q and A. Jocelyn and I always stressed there is more than one to skin a cat. We do not have all the answers so sometimes when you send us a question we got to go out and find that answer. We bring in an expert. We make sure you’re getting great information to take your online business to the next level. One of our favorite expert is back on the podcast today. It is none other than John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire. John what is going on man? JOHN: I am just excited to be back and I don’t know the smoke signals have started. SHANE: That’s what I am talking about. Last time you were on there was a bonfire. I thought there might be nuclear bomb dropping on us today man. We are just setting the world on fire with the expert Q and A. Awesome. Okay. Let’s just into our question for today’s podcast. Jocelyn? JOCELYN: Alright. Today’s questions is from Kenneth Harrell and Kenneth says I constantly hear experts like you guys say I should host a webinar but why? Isn’t a webinar live? Why do you want to trade time for dollars? I thought the goal was passive income. What makes a webinar worth my time and effort? SHANE: So we’ve got two great questions here actually, a hidden one and a real one. The first one is why a webinar is worth it. The second one is this mythical passive income and how it works and it’s just you turn it out and you set it and forget it forever. So John you can get the tough love stick back out this week and talk to our guest here about webinars and passive income. JOHN: Yeah I need the tough love stick again so thanks for passing it over the airways I am definitely holding it with two hands. SHANE: Swinging for the fence. JOHN: Yeah swinging for the fence. Kenneth, let me kind of breakdown what time for dollars is first. I think that’s kind of an important thing that you are missing here. Time for dollars is saying, hey listen I am going to do X for X as far as like I am going to spend one hour doing this per $20 in return or I am going to coach you for one hour for $350 in return. That’s trading time for dollars. Webinars are completely different in so many ways but I’ll start with just really the biggest way and that is with the webinar you can scale and leverage infinitely. Now for me, I do webinars every single week and actually in 2014 I did 60 live webinars for Podcasters Paradise alone not to mention about another 20 or 30 for Webinar on Fire. And so what I love about webinars and why it’s just the opposite of trading time for dollars is just you can have an unlimited amount of people on that webinar so what you’re doing is you’re saying I am going to give this presentation. I want as many people as I can drive via organic, maybe it’s your podcast, your blog, maybe it’s your social media post, maybe it’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube advertising. Any number of ways, I am going to drive as many number of people as I ca...
15:4525/08/2015
QA 83 – 3 tips for keeping your WordPress site safe from hackers
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Marnie figure out the top 3 strategies to keep her Wordpress website secure from any hackers or issues. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Don’t just ignore those update icons inside Wordpress"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode The Flip Your Life Community Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. We got a great question today from one of our Flip Your Life community members and it is about security. We were in the middle of a series right now, about keeping your website and your business safe from hackers, how to avoid getting hacked and how to prevent identity theft. We had our members over in the Flip Your Life community submit a bunch of questions and we are going to answer one of those today. JOCELYN: Today’s question is from Marney Ginsberg and Marney says, “For complete newbies, what are your top three, most important recommendations for protecting your website? Thank you for taking this terror and turning it into our good.” SHANE: That is a good description of getting hacked, “Terror” ‘cause man, it was really, really bad. JOCELYN: There was a lot of terror. SHANE: Lot of terror especially over the last few weeks; I would say that first and foremost, the number one thing that you can do today, right now as soon as you turn this podcast off, and we spoke a little bit about this in our podcast this week at fliplifestyle.com/podcast57 is to make yourself have long passwords. Don’t have really short, easy-to-remember passwords that use real words, or names, or names of your kids and their birthdays or anything like that. The longer the password is, the better it is. So, I think the number one thing I would do like on your WordPress login is to make sure that you have a long password. Also, you don’t need to use “Admin” as your username. Your username should also be something that is a little complex and that is hard to figure out; we don’t even use real words in our username anymore. You can make WordPress show you as your name even if your email that you sign up for WordPress or you set up your website with is something like [email protected]. You don’t have to use “Admin” as your login or your name. Don’t make it something easy for someone to figure out. So the first thing I would do is definitely fix that username and password on your WordPress site. When you first set up your website, it may be, you know, “Admin” or you know, mine used to be “Shanesams” as your username and then your password. What you do is you set up, on your WordPress site or whatever it is right now, let’s say you are still using “Admin” as your login or you have a really weak password, go in and actually create a brand new user and make it have administrative privileges, and make it something with an email that nobody knows, a username that nobody knows and then you can just make it show as your name. Set up a completely new user, give it a new password and then delete your old account, delete your old user completely. And what that will do is that will make your site really secure because it’ll be really tough to login. So the first thing you do, the first tip is definitely don’t use admin as your user name, create a really complicated username that nobody else can know but you, and second is having nice, long passwords; length is very important. JOCELYN: When you do create your new user account on WordPress, you do want to make sure that you attribute the content from the old one to th...
08:0123/08/2015
FL 57 – How people get hacked, and what YOU can do to prevent identity theft
Hackers can break into your life in a lot of ways. Protect yourself with today's tips. Welcome to part 2 of our series on getting hacked and identity theft. If you missed part 1, you can click this link to listen to our story of being hacked and having our identity stolen. Recently Hackers broke into everything we had online: our websites, our social media accounts and even made attempts to log directly into our bank. We put ourselves at risk for identity theft in a number of ways, and you probably are too. Do you use the internet? Unfortunately you’re at risk and you should start taking actions to cover some of your vulnerabilities, which we’ll cover in today’s episode. We’ve learned a lot about social hacking and how hackers are now spending time researching their victims (not just running a piece of software). You might not realize how much information people can glean by diving into your social profiles. On top of social hacking, viruses, malware, and your hardware is potentially at risk. In today's show we discuss how hackers attempt to break into your systems, and what you can do to protect yourselves from the bad guys. Help keep people safe! Share this on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. [Tweet "Friends don't let friends get hacked! RT: How to prevent ID theft & NOT get hacked #entrepreneur"] [Tweet "The most important #podcast you'll hear today: exact steps to prevent identity theft #onlinebusiness"] You will learn Learn what social hacking means. Why throwback Thursdays aren’t as fun and innocent as they seem. Why the street you grew up on plus your pet's first name is NOT your superhero name Why your social media accounts are like open windows for online thieves Which email you should use to log in to all your accounts Why you should enable 2 Step Authentication (and why it's safer) How to protect your security questions and secret hints How to protect yourself from malware and viruses. Why you should NEVER skip a software update How hackers use Skype to break into your machine Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Lastpass 1Password snopes.com Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast we’re gonna talk about how people get hacked and what you can do to prevent identity theft. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. For those of you who are listening, who are new to this show, you may not know who we are; we are Shane and Jocelyn Sams of flippedlifestyle.com. We are former teachers who started an online business, we started making money online, and we eventually made more money in a month than we were making in a year at our teaching jobs.
48:2220/08/2015
QA 82 – Rick Mulready Answers “What are the best platforms to buy ads on?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Tony figure out if Facebook is the best paid advertising platform to be spending money on or if there are other good places to be putting ads on. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Learn what ad platform aligns with your business. @rickmulready"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Rick Mulready from RickMulready.com Art of Paid Traffic Podcast Rick’s Facebook Ads Course Perfect Audience Adroll Veeroll - Youtube Targeting Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is paid traffic specialist, Rick Mulready of rickmulready.com. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to this week’s Expert Q&A. We are super excited to have back on the show, one of my favorite online marketers; he is the paid traffic expert, Rick Mulready. Rick, welcome back man. RICK: Thanks guys, good to be back. SHANE: Rick is the expert we pick on the most too and when we bring him on the show, we don’t tell him what we’re going to ask him, we don’t give him any prep time, we’re just like, “Yeah, we’ll talk to you about one o'clock tomorrow.” So Jocelyn, give Rick his question for the first time today. JOCELYN: All right, here we go. This question is from Tony Romala, I hope I said that right Tony. Tony says, “I hear you guys talk a lot about Facebook advertising for paid adverts.” SHANE: He must be from Briton; we got a British guy going on here. JOCELYN: We love our international audience. It says, “Do you ever spend money on other paid traffic and if so, where else can you pay for advertising to get good traffic to your website? Is Facebook always the best?” SHANE: This is a very interesting question; we’ve spent money on Twitter, Facebook and sparingly on Google for keywords. So we’ve been kind of researching this ourselves, testing the waters; I know you’re big into Facebook, I know you started – you basically grew your audience on Facebook ads but I know you talk a lot about other places too. Where should people be spending their money? I mean, everyone talks about Facebook but gosh; there are so many other platforms. Where are good places to spend money on advertising, and like what reason would you go away from Facebook which is such a good profit generator? RICK: I actually would not go away and of course I’m biased, but I really wouldn’t go away from Facebook. Now, when it comes to paid traffic, it’s all about testing. So you just have to be testing different platforms and you know, Facebook, there’s almost 1.4 billion people on Facebook now, almost a billion of which are on there every single day. I mean, your target audience is on there, regardless of what niche you’re in, or if you’re B2B or B2C, your audience is going to be on there in some fashion. It all comes down to targeting and what your offer is, and having what that – having a clear plan of what that strategy is there. So I would recommend definitely if you’re not already checking out Facebook ads, do test there. But for the other platforms, it really comes down to what aligns most with your business. Outside of Facebook ads, I’m probably most excited about two things: number one, retargeting and you mentioned that you guys have done, you know, some Google from a keyword perspective but you can also do really cool retargeting from Google’s perspective. You can do it in a couple of different ways. So for example, if you have a YouTube video and you have your AdWords accounts set up and now if you ask me how to do this,
10:5518/08/2015
FL 56 – How we got hacked and were the victims of identity theft (and you could be next)
Why do bad people want to hurt good people? For the past 3-4 weeks we’ve been fighting hackers who have taken down our sites, attacked our bank accounts, and stolen our identity. Today we’re going to talk about exactly what happened to us, identity theft and steps you need to take to protect yourself, your online business, and your family. [Tweet "47% of American have had their information compromised in the past 12 months."] After guessing this was just a random attack we suddenly realized this was personalized directly at us - our websites, computers, bank accounts and more. This has affected every aspect of our lives and we want to help you avoid that issue. It happened to us, it CAN happen to you too! 47% of Americans had their data compromised in the last 12 months 600,000 unauthorized Facebook logins happen every day Identity theft happens every 2 seconds [Tweet "Identity theft happens every 2 seconds. It happened to us, it can happen to you too"] You will learn Why you are vulnerable to identity theft even if you don’t share everything online like we do. How the hacker brought our entire life to a screeching halt. How we thought we were safe, but didn't understand how to protect ourselves. Why this has affected every aspect of our lives. ONE VERY SIMPLE - call to action you can do today to secure yourself. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Learn about our story Random.org Lastpass Enjoy the podcast; we hope it helps keep your family safe! [Tweet "Complacency led to our hack & identity theft. We thought it couldn't happen to us, until it did"] Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. Even though we just went through an awful experience, we still found time to make some Can't Miss Moments with each other and our kids! Making some core memories Tired from Disney and fighting hackers! Hacker's can't steal can't miss moments! :) You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: And you know a lot of people say, “Well I don’t shop online because that’s dangerous.” Well the funny thing is I shop online very often and I’ve actually had no problems with shopping online at all, but what I have had problems with are people who are attacking my banks, my credit card companies. And time and time again I’ve gotten letters in the mail that said “Hey, your credit card information’s been compromised” or “Our servers have been attacked.” SHANE: Or like Target the other day, what was it, like 30 million credit card numbers from their customers, whether you have online banking or not, were attacked and compromised. So you’re not safe, whatever what you think. JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s the thing is that no one is safe, and the purpose of this podcast and the series of podcasts this month is not to scare you, you know, we don’t want you to move to an abandoned island or to only use cash or, you know – SHANE: Dig a hole to keep your money in. JOCELYN: Exactly, because you know that’s just not realistic in the world that we live in today. But the purpose of all of this is just to help you to be more aware of what you’re doing online, where your information is, how it is secured, and just to help you to know that you are vulnerable and that you need to secure this information. So just remember that if you use credit cards,...
34:5513/08/2015
QA 81 – Amy Schmittauer Answers “How Long Should my Youtube Videos Be?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Brad figure out how long he should make his Youtube videos for maximum impact and effectiveness for his audience. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Just get to the point! @schmittastic"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Amy from SavvySexySocial.com Amy on Youtube Amy’s Podcast Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Expert Q&A with S&J. This is where members of our Flip Your Life community get to submit questions about their online business and we go find answers from the best experts online. Jocelyn and I are always upfront and say we do not have all the answers but, we do know where to go find them. Today’s question is about video and there is nobody else on the planet that I would rather ask a video question to than our guest today; it is Amy Schmittauer. Amy, welcome to the show. AMY: Well hello, what a kind, kind thing to say Shane. SHANE: We have a lot of love for Amy Schmittauer; I’m just saying. AMY: What a stroke for the ego SHANE: That’s right, exactly. Bring the value now, bring the value to us. JOCELYN: And some people, you know, we give them the questions ahead of time but not Amy. SHANE: Not Amy – JOCELYN: She’s such a pro – SHANE: She’s so good, we said, you know what, we’re just gonna drop the bomb on her. AMY: And if people send me questions in advance, I’m like, oh, I feel like I’m studying for a test. SHANE: I know. AMY: I can’t do it. Just on the fly, I’ll have the answers. SHANE: That’s right, organic. Everything is organic right here. AMY: Totally. SHANE: Really we just have no time to prep but that’s beside the point. All right Jocelyn, let’s go with today’s question. JOCELYN: All right, today’s question is from Brad, one of our Flip Your Life members, and Brad says, “How long should my videos be? All the videos I watch on YouTube seem to be long, but a lot of experts say you should keep it short. Which one is it and what works best?” SHANE: This is very confusing because – it is true, when I read this question, I was like you know, that’s true; seems like I’m always trying to learn something that’s like 20-minute videos. But then I always hear, “Three to five minutes, get it out there and get it quick” kinda deal. So what do you think about that? AMY: Well it’s funny – Brad, really, really good question because that’s absolutely right. We are constantly kind of fielding the search results to find the video that’s going to be best for us in that moment and no one is saying, “Man, I really hope I find a solid 25-minute video on this.” SHANE: That’s right. AMY: No one is doing that. Now, it depends on the situation, it depends on the content; I mean, if it’s an intense tutorial, then maybe you do need every minute of that. But I tend to tell people, you know, if you’re creating informational content on YouTube, you really want to be between two and five minutes. If you think about the fact that you can inject so much copy into your headline, your description, your tags and you can rank really well for something; but if you end up on the results page with a video that’s seven minutes and yours is twenty, and you’re supposed to be accomplishing the same thing in that amount of time, you’re just not gonna be the option that people choose. So it’s really sort of a human SEO factor that I like to talk about is you can tell YouTube how to rank you, but according to the human that sees you when sea...
10:3911/08/2015
QA 80 – Kate Erickson Answers “How to sell a seasonal product”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Guy figure out if he should stay in touch with his audience throughout the year or just when he’s selling his product seasonally. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is from Kate Erickson of entrepreneuronfire.com Today’s question is from Guy Hauptman of chemvideotutor.com Kate’s Podcast Free Podcast Course Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Kate Erickson of Kate’s Take, the Entrepreneur on Fire audio blog. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: Hey y’all, welcome back to Flipped Lifestyle podcast; we have another Expert Q&A today, we are bringing back one of our favorite guests, it’s Kate Erickson from Kate’s Take, the Entrepreneur on Fire audio blog and entrepreneuronfire.com. Kate, welcome back to the show. KATE: Thanks S&J, I’m fired; one of your favorites? SHANE: Yes, definitely one of our favorites. 100% JOCELYN: One of our favorites; you came to our live event so that puts you – SHANE: That’s right; when you get on a yacht in San Diego Bay for four hours with somebody, you automatically got to be on the favorite list, know what I mean? JOCELYN: That’s right. Well today, we have a question from Guy Hoppman of kimvideotutor.com and Guy says, “I sell seasonal, two-to-three-times-a-year product, which is an online video series geared to high school students. How do I target their parents, the ones with the credit cards, to buy without bombarding the parents with irrelevant emails? How often should I email my subscribers? Should I send them stuff all year around or only when it’s time to sell my product?” SHANE: This is a really cool question, I’m really interested in your take on this Kate; did you get that? See what I did there? Kate’s Take. KATE: Yeah, I like that. SHANE: But because – you know Jocelyn and I have Flipped Lifestyle but we got a lot of other businesses in the education world and those are very seasonal. Pretty much the beginning of the year is where you hit that and I think that’s what he’s asking here. Does he just email those people those two or three times a year when they’ll buy his product or does he email them every week for 52 weeks out of the year? So what do you think that Guy should do? KATE: Yeah, so that’s a great point and a great comparison Shane ‘cause I think there’s probably a lot of people who come out with launches or products or services that might only be relevant at certain times during the year trainings or whatever they might be. I think it’s really important to keep that touch point throughout the year because that’s when you are going to start building a relationship with your customer, and that’s when you’re going to be top of mind any time they think about any of your trainings or your products. So, I definitely think it’s important to keep that communication over the year. You know, outside of whatever you’re offering in this online video series, there’s certainly relevant tips and advice and things that you can continue talking about all year long. I’m positive of it, and I don’t even know what the topic is other than it serves students. But if you think about what a high school student goes through in an entire year, there are a lot of topics and a lot of value that you could be providing them that’s gonna get to know, like and trust you even more, so that when it does come time for you to pitch your product, it’s not gonna be like ‘Who is this person in my inbox all of a sudden?
09:2306/08/2015
FL 55 – How Jeanette Started her first Membership WordPress Site
Algebra Teacher Online Entrepreneur Jeanette works with Algebra 1 teachers and has struggled to find the best products and strategies to take her site from generating hundreds of dollars to thousands of dollars CONSISTENTLY. She recently restructured her products and created a membership site with WordPress. We’re going to talk about how to build on her momentum (she recently got 55 signups for her new program) and what she needs to do going forward. [Tweet "You don’t want to live launch to launch"] You will learn Success leaves clue. You don’t need everyone to pay you, You just need a few people. Consolidate your products and raise your prices. Are you solving someone problems well enough to retain them as a customer? Some ideas on how to acquire new customers. How to evaluate a sales page. The implications of accurately targeting your ideal customer. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Community Elementary Librarian Jeanette’s website algebra1teachers.com Leadpages We would love to help you write the success story for your online business. At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re helping Janette take her online business to the next level. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, great to be back with you again this week. We are super excited because this is a Flipped podcast where we bring on a member of our Flip Your Life community, who is out there trying to flip their life around, change their life through online business and we help them with a free consulting call, and we air that on the podcast so that everyone can benefit from the knowledge. And today’s guest is an amazing member of our Flip Your Life community, someone who is just knocking it out of the park right now, building a lot of momentum in her online business. Our guest today is Janette Steins. Janette, welcome to the show. JANETTE: Thank you, I’m so excited to be here. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are very excited to have you. You have been just really killing it in our forums, inspiring other people, and doing some great things on your own. So we are really looking forward to talking to you and kinda delving into all that and how we can help you further and just keep doing great things. SHANE: All right, so what is your story Janette? What is your background, where did you come from? Tell us a little bit about maybe how you discovered online business, and kind of how you got into that and what was going on before you found Flip Your Life? JANETTE: Sure. I live in Michigan, I have six children; four are adopted, two are biological and very quickly, love teaching. I’ve been a teacher for 17 years, and but with my children I really want to be at home. So about four years ago – I looked at the date on my first blog post before I came on here, and it was four years ago. I couldn’t believe it, I’m like,
34:4904/08/2015
QA 79 – Matthew Kimberly Answers “How you can get higher paying speaking gigs”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping JJ figure out the path to higher-paying speaking gigs and exactly what you need to focus on to book yourself solid as a speaker. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Most speakers don’t get paid to speak, but they get paid because they speak"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Matthew Kimberly from matthewkimberley.com Matthew on Twitter Heroic Public Speaking Book Yourself Solid Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Matthew Kimberley of matthewkimberley.com. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to our Thursday Expert Q&A. We have Matthew Kimberley back with us again today to answer your questions. Matthew, welcome back to the show. MATTHEW: Thanks for having me, Shane and Jocelyn. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are happy that you’re here. Today’s question is from a Flip Your Life community member, JJ Mayo and JJ says, “I’ve posted before that as a side hustle, I’m a speaker for a continuing education company albeit making a small portion of my total sales. I’ll be interested to know from Matthew, what steps are needed to get higher paid speaking gigs even if I’m not a celebrity. Is it having the right contacts or some system that needs to be followed? Any resources would be excellent.” SHANE: And this is a special planted question just for Matthew Kimberley. Matthew Kimberley is all about booking yourself solid. He’s one of the best, live speakers that we have ever seen, so when we knew you were coming back on this show, we went into our premium Flip Your Life membership community and we said, ‘Hey guys, we’re gonna give you first dibs on our expert question.’ This was one of the first ones that popped up, was just how do I get move live speaking gigs when nobody knows about me. What a perfect question for you. So, how do you do that man? How do you get on stage when maybe nobody knows who you are? MATTHEW: Okay, so I’m gonna presume here and correct me if I’m wrong that when I talk about higher paid speaking gigs, we are talking about getting paid to speak; not getting paid because you are selling from the stage, or because you speak and people book you on the back end; am I right? SHANE: Exactly, JJ wants to speak, like he wants to be a paid speaker, he’s not gonna pitch, he’s gonna deliver valuable content in this space, he just wants to get more of those gigs and get paid more to do them. MATTHEW: Absolutely; well, I know a few things about this, but not least because my business partner Michael Port is the founder of Heroic Public Speaking, and that’s the first resource I think you should check out. Go to heroicpublicspeaking.com and have a look at the stuff that we’ve put together there for you. At the Hero Public Speaking live in Fort Lauderdale last February, we had this question asked of our expert panel, and they were people like Bob Burg and Scott Stratten and Dorie Clark on the panel. And Dorie said, there are various steps to your speaking career, and I can’t remember whether there were three or four, but I’m gonna go through them as I remember them; the first step as a speaker is: 1. When you want to speak but nobody wants to hear you speak, and nobody will pay you to speak. So, first step is no one wants you to speak and nobody will pay you to speak. 2. People are happy to have you speak, but they still don’t want to pay you. 3. People will happily have you speak and they’ll pay you a little bit. 4. Yes, you must speak and yes, we’ll pay you whatever you want.
13:0830/07/2015
FL 54 – 6 steps to improve your email open and click through rates
In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how you can improve your email open and click through rates, so you can grow your online business and build a more engaged audience. The most important and valuable time you get with a new email subscribers is your thank you page and first couple of emails. You need to give them really clear instructions and personalize for your brand. Be clear not clever People want to hear real world stories and case studies that they can relate to. Don’t take all the personality out of your emails and just share facts and figures. We’ll talk about some great examples of how to do this (while also making sure you’re providing tons of value). [Tweet "Don't sell in your emails; provide value, tell stories, give them a reason to open & click"] You will learn How to indoctrinate people who sign up for your email list Be Clear, Not Clever - How to write better subject lines Why you should tell lot’s of stories in your emails Why every email should not be a sales pitch. How to start training people in your autoresponder Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Interview with Pat Flynn Elementary Librarian Aweber Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle Hi everyone, today’s been a good day for us. Our wedding planning eBook has been featured along with our wedding on a large wedding blog. This has led to the first of subscribers to our email list. Woohoo! At last we are starting to build an audience. Thanks to some good advice and encouragement from Shane and Jocelyn, we have gotten our follow up series finished yesterday. So now, we are ready to try to engage with these new subscribers. We can’t wait to report back with our first sales. Dean and Hannah - ownyourwedding.com" Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today's podcast, we're going to share how to improve your email open rates and click through rates. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: what’s up guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you as always this week. You are listening to part three of our series email campaigns autoresponders. Everything about getting people on your email list, getting them to open and click on your emails and going through to hopefully eventually become a great paying customer. In episode 52, our first podcast in this series, we talked about how to setup your email marketing, how to collect emails, all the mechanics the different companies that will service in doing that. In our last episode we talked about five tips for growing your email fast. That was a really fun episode to record. Got a lot of great feedback off of that. Head over and check that out in the show notes today. Make sure you don’t miss that one because you’ve got to get those people on y...
30:1228/07/2015
QA 78 – How often can I email my list?
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Heather figure out how often to email her list and what she should be sending to them when she does. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Contact your niche as often as your audience will allow. Test, every niche is different. "] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Heather Jackson at Potato Sack Diet Project Article on Periscope Live Event Elementary Librarian US History Teachers Flip Your Life Community Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. Got another great question about email marketing for you this week. We have a theme going on this month; we’re talking all about email marketing on all of our podcasts this month. This is how to get a bigger email list and sell to that list better. Today’s question comes from Heather Jackson who is a Flip Your Life community member. You can follow her at Facebook.com/potatosackproject. She’s got a cool little Facebook page there, she’s working on her website, and that will be up soon but you can follow her over on Facebook and check out what she’s up to. Heather writes, “How often should you keep in touch with your email list and is sending just your blog post links when they publish, enough? I am just starting out so I don’t really have a list but as it grows, I want to make sure I’m contacting them consistently. What should I do?” Jocelyn, what do you think about that? JOCELYN: Alright, well, I have not always been the poster child for great email success. SHANE: But we’ve gotten a lot better. JOCELYN: We have improved a lot, and the thing that you have to remember Heather, and everyone else out there who maybe struggling with this question is that people give you their email address because they want you to contact them. That doesn’t mean that you should contact them ten times a day, but don’t feel bad about contacting them about once a week, maybe even twice a week. But don’t feel like you have to have a rigorous schedule and don’t get bent out of shape if you don’t adhere to that schedule that you build up in your mind. I think that’s a problem that a lot of people have, and they think that just sending out links to blog posts for instance like you mentioned is not good enough. But in fact, I think that sending out links to blog posts is totally a great list of – or a great use of your email list, and as long as you are sending them good value, and consistently sending them information that they are interested in, then that is perfectly acceptable to send to your list. SHANE: It’s kinda like baseball; something like – we send out every Wednesday – our podcast comes on Tuesday and I’ve had people ask me before, like why don’t you send me an email out on Tuesday when your podcast releases? Well, I know that so many thousand people are gonna listen to that podcast because they are subscribed. You know, X-thousand people are gonna come in, download it, regardless of if I email him or not. Those people, I just want to go ahead and let them download everything and then I’ll wait till the next day before I schedule our email announcement for our podcast on Tuesdays, until Wednesday. We want that to come in on Wednesday to catch everybody else in our audience that might not be subscribed on iTunes or maybe missed that the podcast had come out, and forgot about it, and I want to remind them. So that’s one email that we send out. I usually also send out an email on Sunday night or Monday morning,
08:4425/07/2015
QA 77 – John Lee Dumas Answers “How do I know when my product is ready to launch?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Amy figure out when her product is good enough to launch and the steps she should take next. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire Today’s question is from Amy at meditatewithamy.com Flip Your Life Program Podcasters Paradise Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas of the Entrepreneur on Fire podcast and Entrepreneuronfire.com Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: Hey guys, welcome back to our Expert Q&A, great to back with you again on this Thursday. We have an awesome guest today, we wanna welcome back to the show, John Lee Dumas. John, welcome back, man! JOHN: Smoldering, smoking, the flame is still there. SHANE: The fire keeps getting bigger; we talked to you a little while ago and every month, it’s just getting bigger dude. You know what I’m saying? This is amazing. I mean, you’re gonna have a bonfire out there on the beach pretty soon. All right, let’s jump right into our question Jocelyn. JOCELYN: Right, today’s question is from Amy Paterson of meditatewithamy.com, and she says, “How do you know when it is time to stop working on a digital product? I’ve written an e-book but I’m too much of a perfectionist to stop fiddling with it, and just start marketing the thing. I have a feeling that as soon as I make it available for sale, that I will find something horribly wrong with it and be mortified, and no one will ever buy anything from me again. Should I just set a deadline and say no more changes after that? When is enough, enough, and how do you know when it is time to launch?” SHANE: I love this question man, because we – you know, we have like dozens and dozens of people and we see it in our Flip Your Life course, and we see this over and over again. You know, people get to that point where they almost get that digital product created, and then they rewrite it where they start over, or they keep working on it and we are like, ‘Oh, what are you doing?’ So what is your perspective on this John, what do you think about when to launch a product? When is enough, enough? When do you put yourself out there to the world? JOHN: Okay, I’m like foaming at the mouth for this question; and I’m glad you guys have like the tough love like Sundays or whatever you do – SHANE: The tough love stick, baby, we bring up the tough love stick right here. JOHN: Yeah, this is like a tough love, like super-bowl right here because this is like such a sticking point for me, because so many entrepreneurs fail and fail and fail because of this very question that they just run in circles around. And my first answer to Amy here is, you’ve waited way too long already. You’ve already wasted a ton of time, in my opinion, in my experience, which I have had experience wasting a ton of time in a similar situation, multiple times before because until people actually pay with their wallet, they actually vote with their wallets for an idea, you don’t even have a clue if your audience is starving enough. They’ll tell you all day long; ‘I want this, I want X, I want a Y, I want a Z’, ‘Oh yeah, if you create this, I will definitely buy this.’ Believe me, I know you have a great relationship with your audience and believe me, I know that you think you are making the right product for them, but you don’t know for certain. And I have had over 950 guests on Entrepreneur on Fire who will verify this fact. You do not know for certain until you actually have somebody ...
09:4623/07/2015
FL 53 – Our 5 Best Tips for Growing Your Email List Fast
In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how you can grow your email list, so you can build a better online business. When growing your email list you have to make sure you’re talking to your target audience and creating amazing lead magnets for that specific avatar. It's not all about selling your digital products from the first interaction, build your email list create a loyal audience over time. [Tweet "The best way to get email opt-ins, is to solve your audience's problems"] You will learn Define your specific audience so you can define their problems. The value of an amazing lead magnet. Why you need to provide solutions for audience more htan anything else Why you shouldn’t rely on your sidebar for email addresses. Pop up or no pop up? Why you should spend money to build a relationship Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip Your Life Program Canva Matthew Kimberly Popup Pro Alley Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle This week, I went live with my website, Facebook and Twitter pages. By the end of the week, I had made my first sale of a ten-dollar product, even though my goal was just to get subscribers. By the end of the week, I have 138 Facebook likes, eight subscribers on my email list, and one product sale. I’m so encouraged overall after this first week, I could not have done it without the Flip Your Life community. Thanks to each of you and ‘thank you’ to Shane and Jocelyn. Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s show, we’re going to five of our best tips for growing your email list, fast. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What is going on guys? Welcome back to the flipped lifestyle podcast. It is awesome, as always, to be with you this week. We are in week two of our series on email marketing. Last week, we talked about how you should set up your emails to where you could actually collect them, getting the services that you need to be able to do that on your website. But now, we’re gonna show you how to actually get people to get on your list. You know, it’s awesome to be able to set up all these systems and buy these tools that let us collect emails and get them on our list, and send them an autoresponder and be able to broadcast emails. But if nobody is on your list, you’re probably not going to make a lot of money through email marketing. So today, we’re gonna tell you how to get people to sign up and how to keep them on your list. But first, Jocelyn is going to share an amazing success story from our Flip Your Life community. JOCELYN: All right, this week’s success story comes from Flip Your Life member Tim Covey. I hope I said that right, Tim. Tim says, “This week, I went live with my website, Facebook and Twitter pages.”
33:1021/07/2015
QA 76 – How Soon Should I Ask my Email Subscribers to Buy Something
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Melissa figure out how quickly she can pitch a product to her email list using an autoresponder. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Use your email list to provide value & drive traffic. Do the selling on your site."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Flip Your Life program Info on our live events Aweber Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. We got a great question today for you from Melissa Harley. Melissa is a member of our Flip Your Life membership community; we get to work with Melissa quite a bit in our forums over at flipyourlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and Melissa’s question today is, “My question is, when do I send my list an ad for my product in the email if they’ve signed up for my blog post or my newsletter? Should there just be a link to it in every single email? How often or when should I sell people something?” And we get this question quite a bit. I think people are scared they are gonna jump in and make that pitch too early, and all of our questions this month are about email marketing, so this is a great and timely question for what we are talking about. Jocelyn, what do you think about that? How soon or often should people sell in their email list? JOCELYN: All right Melissa, I think that there are actually a couple of answers here because there’s selling in an autoresponder, and then there’s selling in like a normal broadcast, which I think is what you are asking about. But as far as an autoresponder goes, I don’t really like to put a sales link in the first couple of emails. I really want to, kind of, overwhelm people with value and what they are getting from me instead of asking for something from them right away. I don’t have a problem with in the email autoresponder, if you maybe put like a PS link and let people know that you have something for sale, in say maybe the third email or the fourth email something like that. Some people even do it in the first couple of emails and if that’s what you choose to do, I mean, you could certainly test that out, see if it’s working for your audience, but I personally just don’t like to do that right away. Now as far as the broadcasts goes, I think that you really could do it a lot of different ways; what do you think? SHANE: Okay, I think with broadcasts, that’s where you probably should be selling. Like Jocelyn was saying, the autoresponder, there’s going to be a pitch that’s for sure, but like she said, the first email is to kinda introduce yourself and deliver that thing you promised them, the second, third, and fourth emails are pretty much just to train them to open your emails. So Jocelyn said earlier that she wants to really overload them with value in those first few emails. If people don’t get used to opening your emails, they’re never going to click the link inside them anyway so you got to make sure they know that opening your email is like a Christmas gift. So make sure you are giving a lot of stuff away in those first couple of emails. Train them to click links though, they got to go to your website to get those, and then maybe in your autoresponder, you could sell something, maybe a quick offer around the fifth or sixth email, is that too early you think or – JOCELYN: No, I think that’s probably reasonable; just depending on your audience and your niche, you just have to test it and see what is working for you. SHANE: But really after that, maybe initial pitch in your autoresponder to make ...
07:0218/07/2015
QA 75 – Rick Mulready Answers “Should I use Facebook Ads to get likes, optins, or sales?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Eric figure out if he should be driving traffic to his products or trying to get more likes from Facebook ads. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Use Facebook ads to generate leads. Pay for emails, not likes. @RickMulready"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Rick Mulready from RickMulready.com Today’s question is from Eric Gale from thechristianjedi.com Art of Paid Traffic Podcast Rick’s Facebook Ads Course Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is paid traffic specialist, Rick Mulready of rickmulready.com. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. We are excited to bring you another Expert Q&A today, and we have one of my absolute favorite online experts. We always say, we don’t have a lot of time to listen to podcasts but I do catch this guy’s podcast, ‘The Art of Paid Traffic’ whenever I can. We are bringing on Rick Mulready, the Facebook and paid traffic legend. Rick, welcome to the show, baby! RICK: I’ve never been intro-ed as a legend – SHANE: You have now. RICK: – but I kinda love that, thanks guys. SHANE: Yeah, you should put that in all of your requirements now to go on anyone’s podcast. RICK: I’m going to. It’s going on my ‘About’ page now. SHANE: I love it. We are totally surprising Rick with all these questions. I told him, I said, we’re not even going to tell you the questions this time, so you’re gonna have to just come out cold and show how much of a legend you are. So that’s how are going to roll today. RICK: I’m up for it. JOCELYN: You got a lot to live up to. SHANE: You got a lot to live up to, I’m telling you. So, let’s get to today’s question, Jocelyn. JOCELYN: All right, today’s question is from Eric Gayle of the christianjedi.com and Eric says, “I’m two months into my online business. I create Bible studies based on the Star Wars movies.” Very interesting. “I use Facebook ads to drive my ‘Likes’ to 225+ on my Facebook page, and I also sell my book on Kindle Direct Publishing. My question is, should I use Facebook ads to get more ‘Likes’ on my page, or should I use Facebook ads to direct my products on Kindle, or drive traffic to my blog or website? What is the best way to spend money on Facebook?” SHANE: This is a huge question we get on a lot Rick; people are like, where do I spend my money because you know, people want that vanity number, they want a lot of ‘Likes’ for social proof, but they also want people going to their websites. So, like what’s the best way to spend your money? Should you go after those ‘Likes’ or just drive that direct traffic? RICK: Yeah, I generally for most people don’t recommend that you spend money on ‘Likes’ and getting more fans. And the reason for that is, most of us have limited budgets when we are, you know, running our Facebook ads. So I’d much rather see somebody – I’m sorry, what was the person’s name again that asked the question? SHANE: Eric Gayle. RICK: Eric, okay; so Eric, I’d much rather see you and anybody else who’s listening, that can relate to this sort of situation, I’d much rather see you run Facebook ads to try to build your email list so that you can develop a relationship with your target customers and your target audience, so you can sell more of your products and services or book, in this case. SHANE: So like, when would you drive the ‘Likes’ on the backend of that? RICK: If you have a really big budget, I mean,
09:5216/07/2015
FL 52 – Email Marketing & the best Email Marketing Services
In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to get started with email marketing and the best email marketing services for your online business. We’re going to cover the quick essentials if you don’t have any experience with email marketing and then dive into the services you need to get started. We break it down and give you practical advice on what services you should be using depending on where you business and email list is at. [Tweet "Every click your visitors take should lead them closer to an opt-in for your email list"] You will learn What is email marketing? How to get started with email marketing. How to setup your first autoresponder. Your first email marketing service - Aweber vs Mailchimp Why you shouldn’t use free programs. Advanced email marketing services - Infusionsoft vs Ontraport When you should switch from one email marketing service to another. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Article on Periscope Aweber Mailchimp Ontraport Infusionsoft Active Campaign Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle I had my first get-out-of-bed-and-find-a-sale moment today. I actually made money while I was sleeping. Thanks so much to everybody in the Flip Your Life community for all your support. You are amazing, I can’t believe this is actually starting to happen. Jeanette Stein Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to talk about email marketing and review the best email marketing services. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What is going on guys? Welcome back to the flipped lifestyle podcast, it is great to be back with you again this week. This is also a very special week because this podcast, or the long podcast number 52, this is exactly one year to the day that we launched our Flipped Lifestyle podcast. I didn’t even notice it because all the Q&As and stuff have added up over time so we’ve got well over a hundred actual shows, but Jocelyn looked over at me right before we started and was like, ‘Have we really been doing this for one year?’ And I was like, ‘How do you know that?’ And she was like, ‘It’s episode 52.’ JOCELYN: Yeah. So, I mean that’s pretty exciting though; we’re just so thankful to still be here, and that we have people listening, and just for all your encouraging words. This morning we got a review from Germany, so we appreciate our worldwide audience. I mean, we are just so appreciative and so thankful for each one of you who are listening every week. SHANE: It’s amazing to us, how much this show has grown and the reach that we have and just all the people from everywhere that listen; it just blows our mind that we’re just in a little, small town in Kentucky,
31:3814/07/2015
QA 74 – Should I have my email marketing autoresponder set up if I’m not selling a product yet?
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Rina figure out what to do with her email autoresponder even though she doesn’t have a product to sell. Here’s a hint - Have your autoresponder set up from the very beginning. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "You should have an autoresponder set up from day 1, even if you don't have a product yet."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Rina at rinaorellanaflamenco.com/ Podcast on Sales Funnel Aweber Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Our question today comes from Flip Your Life community member, Rina Orellana and I cannot pronounce that name, I am not sure what that is. Her website is rinaorellanaflamenco.com; not flamingo like the pink things you put in your front yard but the flamenco dancing. JOCELYN: Sounds like fun. SHANE: Flamenco dancing. And her question is, “I am working on my product right now, dance lesson videos and I have a small email list of less than 500 people. I am working on my lead magnet as well. My question is, should I have an email list and an autoresponder series at all if I don’t have a product to sell yet? What should that look like? I have heard your podcast on sales funnels and I thought it was fantastic, but I’m wondering how to apply it to myself when I don’t even have a product to sell?” JOCELYN: All right, so I think that you should definitely go ahead and have an email autoresponder series even if you don’t have your product quite ready yet. The reason for this is to get people just more acquainted with you, and get them to know you, and when you do have your product ready to sell, you’ll already have your email list there and you would already have been talking to them. In the meantime, what you can do is just introduce yourself and give a summary of what all is included on your website and where people could find it. And then also you can communicate with them and get them to tell you more about themselves; what they are doing in the dance world, what they need help with, what are their pain points that you could possibly solve with a paid product. SHANE: Yeah, one of the very first things that you should do when you are starting an online business is start collecting emails whether you have anything or not. Even if it’s just the old, ‘Sign up for my newsletter’ or email list or anything – and you are going to get an opt-in done fast, we want you to do a lead magnet, we want you to have a product mentality first and get something up there that you can exchange for an email address. But you’ve got to have something on the other end of that email collection that’s going to happen over time. Even if it’s just – this is not a great way to do it, but even if you are just broadcasting every week, ‘Hey, here’s my new blog post’, or like Jocelyn said, if you are just asking them a question like, you know, ‘What is the one dance step you have the most problem with?’ I’m not exactly sure, anything about flamenco dancing, but something where you could open that dialogue, keep people coming back, you definitely don’t want to get people’s emails and then never talk to them again until you have something ready which might be months down the road because if you do, those leads are warm, that’s why they gave you their email address in the first place, but they do cool off over time. So your email autoresponder can also include things like, ‘Hey, here’s my Facebook page, follow me there’ or ‘Hey,
06:4011/07/2015
QA 73 – Josh Bauerle Answers “Can I Write off Health Insurance Costs on my Taxes?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Preston figure out health insurance as an entrepreneur and how it can help him save on taxes. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Learn what to do with health insurance costs on your taxes with @CPAonFire"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Josh Bauerle from CPA on Fire Today’s question is from Preston from Graphic Design Blender Last time Josh was on Flipped Lifestyle Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert, Josh Bauerle of cpaonfire.com Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Q&A with S&J. We have another Expert Q&A for you guys today; we have an awesome guest on, his name is Josh Bauerle, and he is from cpaonfire.com. Josh, welcome to the program. JOSH: Thank you, glad to be back. SHANE: And you may remember Josh, we had him in a long episode talking about running his online business. His wife was on with him, a great episode, we’ll put that on the show notes and today we have him on to answer a tax question because Jocelyn and I are scared to death to answer anything about accounting and taxes. JOCELYN: And for good reason. SHANE: For good reason, okay? So Jocelyn, do you have a question for Josh? JOCELYN: Yes, and it is from Preston, and Preston is from graphicdesignblender.com, and says, “Hey guys, you all are so inspiring. Congratulations on all the success; I have a question for you, one of the biggest fears I have faced from quitting my job is losing our insurance. How did you guys bridge that gap? Also, will buying private health insurance save me anything on taxes? Can I write that off?” SHANE: And this was a huge question that we had too because we were teachers, the State was basically – our jobs were paying for our insurance and we had no clue how this would impact us or the taxes. So josh, why don’t you tell Preston a little bit about that and how switching to private insurance can impact what he pays on taxes. JOSH: Absolutely, and you guys have been much better experts at the part about getting private insurance, but I’ll go over the tax benefits here. So, this is actually one area that is actually a huge benefit to be an entrepreneur. So typically, if you are going to get private insurance, the only way there can be a tax deduction is to write them off in what they call ‘itemized deductions’ and medical expenses are super-hard to take as an itemized deduction. Basically in the simplest terms possible, they are going to reduce it by 10% of your income, and then you can only take the amount over that. So, if you made 100,000 dollars, they would immediately take off 10000 dollars of your insurance costs and then you can only take the amount over top of that. So that’s if you are an employee. As an entrepreneur, if you have a business that makes money, you can write off those insurance costs against the revenue in your business, all right? So, let’s say that you made the same 100,000 dollars, as an entrepreneur you paid 20,000 dollars in insurance, and now it’s gonna look like you made 80,000 dollars instead of 100,000. SHANE: This will save you a fortune really, ain't it? JOSH: It is and one key here to remember though is that’s if you made money in your business. So if you are showing a loss in your business, you are not going to be able to write that off. SHANE: Wow, so you can't just start a random business and not make a dime, and actually claim anything for your health insurance stuff. JOSH: Exactly,
07:5709/07/2015
FL 51 – Helping Karen and John Find Their Target Audience
In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about defining your target audience, so you can properly target your advertising, pricing and positioning your product. A lot people struggle to figure out pricing and product positioning when they first launch their business. We’ve found that a lot of the time it’s because you haven’t properly defined your target audience, and really found the right prospects to go after. In this conversation we help Karen and John really define exactly what they’re selling and who they’re selling it to, making a pivot from what they originally thought. [Tweet "Your product solves a problem. It's your job to find the person with that problem."] You will learn How we leveraged SEO to build our audience. Why we would be buying ads from day 1. How to target a great audience on Facebook. How to set pricing for your product. Should you do memberships or one time payments? How to sell to school districts. (or any government entity) Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Google Adwords Keyword Tool Jocelyn’s website Elementary Librarian. Podcast on Paid Traffic Rick Mulready and Facebook Advertising Course Our Last Live Event Fresh Books Gravity Form Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to help Karen and John take their online business to the next level. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: Hey y’all, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast! We have got another flipped podcast for you today; that is where we bring in an audience member and we give them a free consulting call and help them take their online business to the next level. And we let you guys listen in so that everyone can learn from the information that we share. Today’s guest is Karen Aachen [phonetic] and her brother, John Hodgeden, [phonetic] I hope I said that right. Karen, John, welcome to the show. KAREN: Thank you. JOHN: Thank you for inviting us to the show. SHANE: We have a brother and sister partners in crime here today, so let’s keep the sibling rivalry down a little bit. First of all guys, tell us a little bit about your online business and what you are trying to do to make money online. KAREN: Okay, this started about ten years ago when I had come out of a position where I was teaching social skills for a year and then I went into teaching a regular classroom and realized that teachers really need to incorporate both social skills training in as many lessons in the classrooms so it’s kinda seamless in the way they teach because it has really been my belief that ability may get them to the top, but it takes character to keep them there. So we wanted to train students in character development as well as self-managing skills. SHANE: And what level are you teaching at? KAREN: Well, actually my first year teaching, I was in the high school level which gave me the impression that really you need to prepare them in the elementary level, and that is where I am now. Most of what I do is laying that foundation in ele...
35:2007/07/2015
QA 72 – Do I need a separate autoresponder for every lead magnet / opt-in?
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Ashlyn figure out how to segment her email list and set up her first sales funnel for new and current subscribers. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet ""Keep it simple. Create multiple lead magnets, but feed them into 1 email sequence.""] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Ashlyn Tengan at amomintraining.com Podcast 44 Podcast 45 Aweber Flip Your Life Program Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to this week’s Q&A with S&J. We are here on a very rainy, Kentucky day – SHANE: Which you can probably hear the thunder right now. JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s a little loud so, we are here with you today just hanging out, and thought we would answer some questions. SHANE: Alright today’s question comes from Flip Your Life community member, Ashlyn Tengan, I’m not exactly sure how to say that Ashlyn. I know your first name is Ashlyn so we’ll go with Tengan right now. How do you think you say that? It’s T-E-N-G-A-N. JOCELYN: I am not sure but – SHANE: I don’t know; but either way, her website is amomintraining.com. So if you want to go ask Ashlyn how to pronounce her name and check out her content, head over there. She is a Flip Your Life community member and her question is, “After to listening to the podcast number 44 and 45, I am setting up my email autoresponder series, and my sales funnels for two different lead magnets that I have. I am using AWeber” That’s a good choice, we like people to start out with AWeber. “My plan is to create two separate lists in which their own autoresponder series sales funnels sell each product, then set up an automation rule that will put them on my main list also –” So basically you are trying to create two different email autoresponders, but get them on your main list as well. “–Since I already have about 100 email subscribers on my main list which currently has no sales funnel, but I do know which lead magnet each person subscribed through. How can I put each group of people through the right autoresponder after I create it?” JOCELYN: Alright, this is an interesting question and I think that it actually could have multiple answers. But where I would start with the people that are already on your list is, by sending them an email and trying to get them to choose one or the other. If you have two options, maybe you would have two links there, ‘Which one would you like to learn more about, A or B?’ And then that in turn, would segment then on to another list. Now, if you wanted to start them on your new sales funnel, you probably don’t want to give them a welcome email because they already sort of, know you. So, what I would do for them is just start them out on email number two. SHANE: So that way, you can send out one broadcast email that has the two options and let them kind of jump in to where they want to be at that point. And then you can kind of just work them into the main part of your list. JOCELYN: So it’s a little bit unclear to me if the people who subscribe to each lead magnet are the way that you are wanting them segmented; if that’s true, I mean, you can go ahead and segment them on to your other list and to start them at email number two of those particular sales funnels. But if they are unrelated to the new sales funnels that you have created, I would do it the way I was talking about earlier where you would send them an email, let them respond by clicking one thing or another, and then put them on to that other list.
09:2004/07/2015
QA 71 – Matthew Kimberly Answers “How do I make my blog stand out”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Sam discover how to differentiate herself and understand why someone should listen to her when there is so much content out already out there online. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "This is how you differentiate yourself - you stand for something @mjkimberley"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Matthew Kimberly from matthewkimberley.com Chris Ducker Event Matthew on Twitter Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Matthew Kimberley at matthewkimberley.com. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Expert Q&A with S&J podcast. This is our Thursday edition where we bring on experts to answer your questions. Jocelyn and I always say, we do not have all the answers but boy, we get all the questions. So we like to pass these on to people that know more about certain subjects than we do. And we have an amazing guest for you today, a guy that we met just a couple of weeks ago, in the Philippines, at Chris Ducker’s ‘Tropical Think Tank’ event. One of the best speakers we have ever seen and a real guy that knows how to book yourself solid. It is Matthew Kimberley from Matthewkimberley.com. Matthew welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. MATTHEW: Great to be here, S&J. Thank you for having me. SHANE: Yeah, we are so glad you are here because we are clueless about some of these questions, especially the one we’ve got for you today. So Jocelyn, let’s throw Matthew a question here. JOCELYN: Alright, this question is from Sam and Sam says, “There’s so much information out there that I find it hard to differentiate myself. How do I make my blog stand out in the crowd and make it unique? I’m talking about a subject that is well-covered by many others. Why would anyone listen to me?” SHANE: This is a great question Matthew because, you know, we think about this all the time because really, when you think about it, every issue is pretty well covered on the internet. So how do you make yourself stand out in such a crowded world that we live in these days? MATTHEW: Sure, absolutely great question and the first thing that comes to mind is don’t worry at all about the content. It’s great that there’s information out there, it’s great that other people are talking about what you are talking about because if they weren’t, there’s probably a reason for that. So, if you find that you are the only person talking about something, unless it’s brand new and very, very, very little – is brand spanking new, then that’s validation. That’s external validation. If other people are talking about vacuum repair, then that means that other people are listening to other people talk about vacuum repair. So that’s great, good job, there’s other information out there. Now, how do you differentiate yourself and how do you make your blog stand out? There’s a couple of ways that I would go about doing this and a couple of ways that I would advise my clients that they could go about doing it. The first one is, you. Okay, so the information that you are presenting is standard, it exists elsewhere, but you are the only person who can deliver it the way that you can deliver it. Many of us, when we adopt a public persona, we water down the really interesting parts of our self. SHANE: Right. MATTHEW: We often say this in corporate emails, both from companies to their mailing lists, but also people when they are wearing their professional hats; here where I live in Malta in the Mediterranean,
10:3702/07/2015
FL 50 – Helping Scott and Alyssa Find Work Life Balance and Streamline their Online Business
In today’s podcast we’re going to help Scott and Alyssa figure out how to balance work life while growing their online business - Happen to your Career. Every couple and parent has similar questions to Scott and Alyssa. How do you record a podcast with kids? When do you work on your business vs. play with your kids? (when you’re also working a full-time job) How do you build lasting relationships with other people online? We’re going to cover all of those and more to help them figure out where to focus on in their business to see the greatest returns. [Tweet "When working with your spouse delegate tasks and get out of each other’s way. "] You will learn How to work together as a married couple. The importance of delegation and automation. How to schedule priorities so you know when it’s time to work. (and not) What kind of live events to attend to build better relationships. Where you should be investing your business profits. The importance of batching your content. Why you shouldn’t “Be Everywhere”. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Scott and Alyssa’s website happentoyourcareer.com Jill and Josh Stanton - Screw the Nine to Five Live event we hosted in San Diego Chris Ducker - Tropical Think Tank Flip your Life Program Jocelyn’s Elementary Librarian Website Apply to be on the show If you’re interested in a consulting call with us Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to help Scott and Alyssa take their online business to the next level. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright, let’s get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to another Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are super excited today to bring you a Flipped podcast and today’s guests are Scott and Alyssa Barlow. We are very excited to have you guys today, welcome to the show. SCOTT: Thanks. JOCELYN: And I want to just say that our Flipped podcast is where we bring people on for a consulting call, and they ask us questions, and we help them to either get started in the online business or in this case, with Scott and Alyssa, to really try to work to take that to the next level because they’re already having some success online and we are going to get into that in just a little bit later. But first of all, tell us about yourselves, where you are from, and anything that you want to share with our listeners. ALYSSA: Okay, I’m Alyssa and we are from Moses Lake, Washington, located in Central Washington State; if you don’t know where that is, it’s a pretty small town. We both graduated from high school here, left for a few years and then eventually made our way back. SCOTT: We tried to get away, it didn’t work. SHANE: It always sucks you back. It does. SCOTT: It always sucks you back. ALYSSA: We have three children, our oldest is seven, we have a six-year-old and a four-year-old. So, they are all in a pretty tight span there. SCOTT: Boom, boom, boom. Three in a row, 18 months apart, each one. ALYSSA: And I am a former teacher, I guess, you could say.
39:4130/06/2015
QA 70 – How do you create a unique lead magnet FAST
In today’s Q&A, we are helping David figure out how to create a lead magnet that solves a quick problem so he can grow his email list for his online business. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Treat your lead magnet like a tourniquet rather than a band-aid"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from David Bilbey at homestyle.education Flip Your Life community Guide to using the Google Keyword tool How to Create a Sales Funnel Template for Your Online Business Foodtruckr Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast again this week. We are glad to have you here. Today’s question comes from David Bilbe and David writes in and says, “Shane and Jocelyn, you are so relatable.” Thank you, David, we appreciate that. “I have started a homeschooling blog at homestyle.education. I am struggling to come up with an idea for a lead magnet. I am a software developer, so I have the possibility of writing some sort of software, but I’m still struggling to come up with something. How do you create a lead magnet that is not a topic you plan on covering by blog posts and how do you create something that doesn’t take six months? It would take me a long time to write software. Should I do this or should I do something else?” JOCELYN: Hi David, this is a question that we actually get a lot and I was just talking to somebody yesterday in our Flip Your Life community about this very issue. People make it out to be a lot harder than it really is when really all that you need to do is just solve a problem for your audience. And this is where a lot of people get confused because they want it to sound nice and – SHANE: Huge, and long and epic. JOCELYN: You know, give everybody their hopes and dreams but that’s not what people care about. People want to solve a problem; they want to immediately stop a pain. So, that’s what you really need to think about when you are starting to write your opt-in magnet, or your lead magnet. You need to solve a quick problem for your audience so that they know that your content is good and they’re ready to move on and consume your paid content. SHANE: For your example David, like you got homeschool curriculum, I did a quick Google search in the Google AdWords keyword tool and we have actually a video that teaches our members in our Flip Your Life community how to use that tool, how to go in and find keywords that are specific to your niche. I went into the Google AdWords keyword tool and I typed in ‘homeschool’ and I looked into some of the words and I found some things like ‘homeschool programs’, ‘homeschool curriculum’, ‘how to find homeschool curriculum’, and one of them was ‘how to find accredited homeschool curriculum’. So you could create – you can see that there’s thousands of people, this one has 2400 searches for accredited homeschool curriculum. You can go in and say, ‘Get my free download on the top ten, accredited homeschool curriculums’ and you just create a one-page PDF that is a list that solves that problem. People are out there actually searching for the answer to that question. They want to find homeschool curriculum that is accredited, that meets national standards, that’s going to make sure their kids are learning the things they need to take state and national tests and then bam, you create a ten-page PDF, it’s got a link to all the best curriculums, maybe those are even affiliate links or something like...
08:4627/06/2015
QA 69 – Michael O’Neal answers “How do I validate my idea for an online business? ”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Amanda figure out how to validate her idea before she spends a lot of time and money developing her digital product. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Ideal customer = least amount of work and most amount of money @solohour"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Michael O’Neal from solopreneurhour.com Our episode with Michael O'Neal Evernote Michael’s product called Sololab Tim Ferris Screw the Nine to Five Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Michael O'Neal of The Solopreneur Hour podcast and solopreneurhour.com. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J mini-podcast. Today we have an Expert Q&A and we are super-excited to welcome back Michael O'Neal of The Solopreneur Hour podcast and solohour.com. Michael, welcome back to the show, man! MICHAEL: Hey guys! So good to be back, I appreciate you having me on again. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are excited for you to answer another question – MICHAEL: Appreciate chya! Does that sound better? JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s better. SHANE: I told somebody we were on your show and I said, I swear he had a drawl at the end of that; we sucked him into the south, man. MICHAEL: I’m ready, I’ll do the whole show like this. I don’t mind. JOCELYN: All right well, Amanda of teachsheetz.com says, “How do I validate my idea with my audience? I want to tell teachers about my Teach Sheetz website I'm currently working, on which can be used to create customized board sheets. Instead of sifting through the millions of options online, they can customize their own worksheet in under five minutes, using a site that has a functionality of Canva. I think this is a great idea but how can validate it with my target market? How do I know others can think it’s a good idea before I spent all the time selling it? I don’t have a huge audience, what do I do?” SHANE: This is a huge question we get Michael, and I’m really interested to see what you think about this because most of the time when I hear people get frustrated and quit online marketing, it’s because they spend a month creating a product and nobody bought it. So Mike, how do you look at an idea and validate that in your business before you spend all that time, you know, creating something that nobody may even want? MICHAEL: I have an answer for both scenarios: One being that you have no list, no platform and one being that you have some list and some platform. So, the no-list and no-platform, here’s one misnomer I think people have about online marketing in general is that everything has to be done online. And when you have more time than money, you can afford, time-wise, to actually go talk to people and if she is already immersed in the teaching community – I think a lot of times, when people come out with ideas for very, very niche businesses or products, it’s because they are totally immersed in that – SHANE: They are the market basically. MICHAEL: They are the market. She’s creating something for herself in this case. So, she has to go out and literally go find some of herself which is, don’t do it super-casually, don’t be like, ‘Hey, you want to come to happy hour at six o'clock and we’ll have a chat’. It’s like no, find ten of your friends at least that are in the situation you are in and ask them, ask them what are your challenges here and how would you – I have this idea; however, before I tell you my idea, this is very important like what order you do this in.
11:3325/06/2015
FL 49 – 6 Reasons Why Your Online Business Isn’t Working – part 2
In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about the final 3 things that are stopping you from succeeding in your online business. We’ve seen the problem with the current stereotypes of people who make online business work (working 24/7, going it alone until 4 in the morning) and how they consistently hold people back. That’s why in part 2 of this series we’re going to cover three more roadblocks that are probably holding you back from success in your online business. [Tweet "Money is replaceable, time is not."] You will learn Why it’s necessary to batch content. How the stereotype of an entrepreneur going it alone is wrong. The value of finding a community (even if it’s one person). Need a mastermind? Join our private Flip Your Life Community We help our members succeed every day Learn more: https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife Why you need to invest in yourself. The issues with “free” tools in your online business. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Subscribe to the Podcast on Itunes Flipped Lifestyle on Stitcher Shareaholic Leadpages Podcast with Michael O'Neal The Flip Your Life Community Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle I heard about S&J a month ago and started listening to the podcasts two weeks ago. Since then, I’ve listened to every single one. Why? Because Shane and Jocelyn share information in every episode that is essential to running an online business. This is not your typical podcast for online sellers. They tell you how it is and give you all the information you need to do it and keep you motivated in the process. If you are listening to more than one business podcast and S&J at Flipped Lifestyle isn’t one of them or at the top of the list, then you are missing out and wasting time. Flipped Lifestyle has changed my business and my life. Thank you. “My Uncluttered Life” Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to continue last week’s discussion about the six reasons your online business may not be successful. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are talking about six reasons your online business may not be as successful as you would like and we actually started these back last week in Episode 48. And if you want to catch the first part of this podcast, you can head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast48 and that is where we started talking about three of the reasons that your online business may not be succeeding and those three reasons were: 1. You have not defined your ideal avatar or audience, the person that you are trying to sell to. 2. You are not thinking about your product first; you are doing a lot of other things that may not necessarily be profitable....
25:4023/06/2015
QA 68 – How Do You Explain To Others That You Make Money Online
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Hannah understand how we explain to people what we do and how we make money online. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "First they’ll ask you why, then they’ll ask you how."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Cliff Ravenscraft - Podcast Answerman Flip Your Life Program (teaching how we did it) Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: Hey guys, welcome back to the Q&A with S&J, we are recording our podcast from 30,000 feet above the Philippines right now; we are about to land, we’ve managed to record three or four of these for you guys and we’re gonna roll them out over time. Always batch your content, we always want to stress, if you got the podcast stuff out, record four of five podcasts. If you got the blogging going, do three or four blog posts and we are batching content right now on the airplane. We are sitting up in business class, it’s only a few people around and couple of them are asleep. So we kinda moved seats where nobody can hear us record. We are going to knock out another Q&A today. Today’s question comes from Hannah and she asks – this is a great question; she says, “When people ask you guys what you do, what do you say? How do you explain what you do in your small town? How did you explain when you quit your job, what you were about to get into? Do people even get it?” That is an awesome question because every internet marketer that we talked to, whether it’s from Pat Flynn to the people in our mastermind groups, it’s really hard to explain to people what you do because people are so used to ‘No, I’ll go get a job. I work for someone, I trade time for dollars.’ And it’s a really confusing subject when people start talking about how you make money online. JOCELYN: It’s especially hard where we live because we live in a really small town, and what we do is just far off of most people’s radar screens. I mean, they don’t even know that this world exists. So, a lot of times when we are talking to people, they’ll kinda look at us like we have three heads. So, it’s very interesting and we have to try to put it in terms they’ll understand and so normally I say to people, ‘We sell digital products’ and they look at me again like I’m crazy. Then I’ll say, you know, ‘like e-books, sort of like Kindle’. Usually people will understand what Kindle is so they can sort of, understand what that means when I put it that way. But it is really hard, and being from a small town when people do understand what we are doing, you know, we have a lot of people who want to meet with us all the time and like, you know – SHANE: Show them how basically. JOCELYN: Yeah, everybody wants to know how we do it and can we show them step-by-step. And you know, we love to talk about this stuff as you know, but it’s just really hard because we can't meet everybody for an hour, a week, or a day, or whatever. SHANE: And actually that’s exactly why we created Flip Your Life originally because we helped a couple of people around here when we first started out and they had some success and made some money online with some digital products. The word spread, and just so many people kept asking us and there was just no way that we could meet with everybody. And I kinda felt really bad about that at first and got some – I’ve actually mentioned this before, I got some great advice from Cliff Ravenscraft the Podcast Answer Man, he told me, ‘You know, Shane, you got to do for a few what you wish you could do for many’ or you got to reach more people in a diff...
08:5020/06/2015
QA 67 – Kate Erickson Answers “How to Create a Podcast – Script, or No Script?”
In today’s Q&A, we are helping Warren figure out if he should use a script or not while recording a podcast (and what will sound more natural) Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "I wouldn't be here if I didn't start recording that first episode @katelerickson"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is from Kate Erickson of entrepreneuronfire.com Today’s question is from Warren Cinco of breakingwork.com Kate’s Podcast Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an Expert Q&A with S&J. Today’s expert is Kate Erickson of Kate’s Take: The Entrepreneur on Fire Audio Blog. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, this is our Q&A with S&J and today we have another expert to come on and help answer our question for this episode. We want to welcome back to the show, Kate Erickson of Kate’s Take: The Entrepreneur on Fire Audio Blog and entrepreneuronfire.com. Kate, welcome back to the show. KATE: S&J thanks for having me back. SHANE: Awesome. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are excited to have you. Today’s question is from Warren Cinco of breakingwork.com and Warren says, “Hi Shane and Jocelyn, love your site and podcast; been picking up valuable tips since I first heard about you guys and your stories are very inspiring. I have a question about doing a podcast. I want to start one of my own from my site, but my one hesitation is that I may not sound natural communicating. Do you follow a script or do you just talk normally? Which is better?” SHANE: And this is a great question because we’ve got someone who’s been a part of like almost a thousand podcasts probably on entrepreneuronfire.com and her own podcast, Kate’s Take. So what do you think about this question, like how do you think is the best way to approach doing a podcast? KATE: Well, I love where Warren’s train of thought is at because these are the exact questions you should be asking yourself if you are thinking about starting a podcast and Warren, you are certainly not alone. Feeling like you might sound awkward on the mic is definitely going to happen when you first start. SHANE: That’s right. KATE: Yeah, right, you guys know this as well. JOCELYN: Absolutely. KATE: But the key is to just start. The key is to just start recording because it’s going to be awkward in the beginning, but that’s the thing is that you are never going to find your voice and find what flow works for you until you get on the mic and start recording ‘cause it’s gonna be different for everybody. I know people who get on the mic with absolutely zero preparation and that’s what works best for them. I know other people who literally have entire outlines in front of them while they are recording every single one of their podcast episodes. So, if you just start recording, you are going to find out really, really quickly what’s going to work best for you. JOCELYN: Yeah, I agree with that. For me, podcasting was a little bit difficult because I don’t like to hear myself and in fact, I always tell people that I never listen back to my shows until after they are aired because if I do, they would probably never be released. I’m very critical of myself especially so yeah, that’s definitely a hesitation that a lot of people have. Shane and I do follow a script when we record; it’s not a super – like every word we say is scripted but we do SHANE: It’s more like an outline yeah, and I think we have to do that, we learnt – like I can just talk, I can do that. When I did my football podcast,
06:5618/06/2015