In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about 6 specific things that might be stopping you from actually making your online business work. When talking with hundreds of people trying to start online businesses we’ve definitely seen the same roadblocks coming up again and again. Once you understand these foundational elements you’ll be able to start to take the RIGHT actions toward creating a website (online business) that actually generates revenue. [Tweet "Online business is a series of small things that add up to big things"] You will learn Why you should focus on your audience and not your idea. Strategies for how you can test your digital product ideas. The importance of the product first mentality. Why you shouldn’t “copy” someone else. Embrace the brand of you. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Podcast 41 on the FLIP principle Leadpages Chris Ducker 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 Hey guys! I just finished my first eBook. It felt so good. My plan for tomorrow is to make my lead page and it live before I got to sleep tomorrow. Amy (from our Flip Your Life Course ) 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 tell you six reason why your online business may not be working. 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,. Always great to be back with you again this week. You know we get a lot form messages from people out there going, “oh my gosh how did you guys make it work? I have been trying this online business thing for months and months and I can’t make my 11 cent moment happen. I can’t make my money online. I feel like I am pouring a lot into this and nothing is coming back out of it and my online business is failing or my online isn’t working. What am I doing wrong?” so we wanted to take this opportunity and go through here and first I will give you some encouragement and say listen it takes time. Don’t give up. There is probably a few tweaks you can make and you are going to start experiencing more success. You might not just be hitting the right thing or you’re prioritizing the wrong thing that you are working on. And we are going to focus this podcast on identifying six reasons,. Six things that you might be doing in your online business that may be preventing you from becoming successful, maybe stopping you from going to the next level. It’s always important to point out these road blocks. If you know what they are, if you know what’s holding you back, you can eliminate them from your workflow and maybe start taking that thing and making that successful, making that first money online and start moving towards your dreams. But before we do that, Jocelyn is going to read a success story that come...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Matthew discover a step by step process of going from product idea to implementation, and launching that 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! Resources Mentioned in this Episode The Flip Your Life Community Leadpages 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, thanks for joining us for today’s Q&A with S&J mini podcast. We are still recording from 30,000 feet up in the air. We are on a plane and trying to stay awake. We are batching content today so we are recording several Q&As for you here in the air. Today’s question is from Matthew Dunstone, he is in Australia and he says, “I am a new recruit to online marketing, I have yet to create a website. I’m trying to make good early decisions on technologies and workflow. What I need is a string of practical examples of how individual sales campaigns are put together. I want to see what was for sale, how it was presented, what automated steps and technologies were employed. I guess I’m asking for a diary of a project.” SHANE: All right, first of all, kudos to you Matt, for thinking about the sales process and your product first before creating your website. That’s something we are going to talk about kind of in this episode really quick. You’ve got this going correctly because you’re thinking in the right order. You’re thinking about what am I going to sell, how am I going to sell it, how is that going to work, what should I create and then you’re going to go back and make that website thing. So basically on that note, what happened recently is we just created a project and I’m going to go over that real quick. We’re gonna talk about how we actually put that together. We started Flip Your Life sometime last in 2014, I think it was November, maybe. I think there was actually one session before that, our beta test group and we got everyone through the project, and we don’t talk about building websites and all we do is build my digital product and we get it for sale and we get it marketed and we get it out there, to get those first sales made and to learn the process of selling something online. And in that process, a lot of people asked, ‘How do you build a website? I’ve got this product now, I know how to sell it, now I’m ready to build my website’. So that was an obvious cue to us that there was a market that wanted us to show them how to set up a WordPress website. So, we didn’t just make that product as soon as we saw the need for it because we didn’t know for sure. People will ask for things but sometimes they are not actually willing to pay you for that thing. So what Jocelyn and I did is, we basically outlined how would you make a WordPress website from scratch knowing everything we know over the last three years and we’ve create a bunch of websites in that time. What is the least you need to know, the basic steps to get it started. We created an outline for that project, this is page one in your diary here, and we presented that to the people in Flip Your Life who had already you know, came into our system and said, ‘Is this something you are interested in?’ and we pre-sold that for a hundred dollars. JOCELYN: And we actually do this with a lot of our products basically just to see if there’s interest there and so that we have money there, and we know people want it before we start working on it. And it’s been really good for us; I mean, we’ve had people in there that helped us to make the course and to show how it’s gonna go,

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Ryan understand what microphone and gear he should use for recording a high quality sounding podcast. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Take action with the equipment you can afford right now...don't wait" #podcasting @johnleedumas"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire John’s last expert QA Logitech ClearChat - Starter microphone, 7/10 sound, great value Audiotechinica ATR 2100 - 8.5/10 sound quality, all you need Heil PR40 - 9.5 /10 sound quality, go pro Presonus Firestudio Mixer - John's Mixer Adobe Creative Cloud - Adobe tools including photoshop and illustrator Ecamm Call Recorder - Used to record Skype calls on a MAC Pamela Recorder - Record Skype calls on a PC Scarlett2i2 - Shane & Jocelyn's Mixer (to hook up 2 mics) 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 y’all, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Expert Q&A podcast; excited to bring in another expert to answer your questions about online business. We do not have the only way to be successful online. Love to introduce you to other perspectives from different experts in different fields especially when you send us questions that we have no clue of what the answer is. So we’d like to bring people on and let them know. We would love to welcome back today, the one and only, John Lee Dumas. John was on about a month ago and he is back again today to answer another audience question from the Flipped Lifestyle community. John, welcome back man! JOHN: My friends, I am still on fire. SHANE: You are always on fire. You’re like the everlasting flame; you know what I’m saying? JOHN: I love it. The Olympic torch. SHANE: That’s right, you’re the Olympic torch of online business. All right Jocelyn, what’s our question for John today? JOCELYN: All right, today’s question is from Ryan and I’m not sure how to say his last name, Belolo, maybe, and this is via Twitter. It says, “Hey guys, do you each use your own microphone for your podcast? What does your setup look like and what is the best microphone and in your opinion, the best way to hook up two microphones to one computer? I can't figure it out.” SHANE: And we wanted to bring John on to answer this specific question ‘cause Jocelyn and I have the least knowledge of – we’re barely on the podcast ourselves right now, but John Lee Dumas knows a thing or two about podcasting. So John, how does that work man? What’s your set up look like and how do you get two people talking in the same place? JOHN: Well, whatever you all the doing, the audio sounds amazing. I give it the thumbs up. SHANE: There we go. JOHN: Let me break it down microphone wise. I have three mic recommendations starting at the low, going to a medium and then ending at a high cost. The low cost is the Logitech ClearChat. It’s a 29-dollar headset microphone, USB, plugs into any USB port and you can get it on Amazon. It’ll be free shipping with Prime in two days. 29 dollars. It’ll take your audio from a two, which is what most people do and talk at their computer and let the crappy microphone pick it up to, a seven. So you are actually going from a two to a seven just with 29 dollars. The medium cost is the ATR2100 which is twice the price but still a very affordable, 60 dollars. SHANE: And that’s what we have; we both are talking on the 2100 right now actually....

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to batch content so you can save time and also eliminate a lot of stress from your life. Toward the end of the show we’ll walk you through the exact system we use to not only create content but schedule our promotion and updates. A quote from past guest John Lee Dumas really sums this episode up well “you have to spend time to make time”. [Tweet "If you want to run a real business, you have to start batching your content."] You will learn What batching content means for your online business. Advanced concepts on how to start batching content. What types of content should you be batching? How to set up a calendar for your content. The step by step system we use in our batching process. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Buffer Meet Edgar Interview with John Lee Dumas Pat Flynn’s Podcast 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 The passive income has started to come in and I quit my full-time job and ramped up my freelance clients. I am now fully booked with fantastic projects through November. My husband and I are also moving to Fernandina Beach, Florida, at the end of May. We are so excited to start the life we have always wanted. I appreciate the motivation that you guys give to everyone that is trying to change their lives. It is really, really important. 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 are going to show you how to save time strategies for batching contents. 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, today we are going to be talking about creating content in a very efficient way and if you are creating content in real-time that is not a very good idea. A lot of people start out this way and that they try to do everything as this go along and it just doesn’t work very well. It’s not very efficient, something will come up in inevitably. It’s just like real life. This always happens so today we are going to talk about how to batch content to get ahead in your online business in an efficient way. But before we move into that we are going to tell you about one of our most recent success stories. SHANE: Alright guys today’s audience members success story comes from Andrea and Andrea is a member of our Flip Your Life Community. Andrea sent us an email the other day and said, “The passive income has started to come in and I quit my full-time job and ramped up my freelance clients. I am now fully booked with fantastic projects through November.” Way to go. That’s amazing Andrea. “My husband and I are also moving to”—what is that say?—Fernananda, Fernanina. JOCELYN: Fernadina? SHANE: Fernandina Beach, Florida,

In today’s Q&A, we are talking about what we do in our free time when we’re not working on our 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 let life pass you by while you’re trying to build a better future."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Chris Ducker’s Tropical Think Tank The Flip Your LifeCommunity Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q and A with S and J. 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 another Q and A with S and J. This is a special episode, we are going to have a few of these. We are on an airplane right now at 30,000 feet. JOCELYN: And we are trying to not fall asleep because we need to stay awake until we get to our destination so we thought we would answer some of your questions. SHANE: We are going to the Philippines to Chris Ducker’s tropical think tank, thanking him right now and we have been awake for 24 hours. This has been a long, long trip and we got a couple more hours to go and we’ve got to stay awake so we thought, you know what better start than to answer a bunch of Q and As and how cool is it that we are doing this from an airplane. You can probably hear the engines rolling in the back. So today’s questions comes from Chad and Amy and they write, “Hey S and J, it sounds like you guys work on your online business all the time.” that is true. Pretty much we do a lot of it. “What do you do when you are not ‘flipping lives’ and working together in your online business? What do you each like to do for fun and fun together?” JOCELYN: Hey Chad and Amy, thank you for your question. We have actually been thinking about talking more about than we normally do and so if that’s something you guys want to hear then be sure to ask us more questions about our lives. We don’t mind to share with you. We actually have a lot of different interest. We do work on our online business a lot because that is a very passionate interest of both of ours. SHANE: We both actually have a lot of doing this so is kind of one of the things we do to enjoy. JOCELYN: But we also enjoy other things as well. I like to go jogging. I have a jogging partner that we train for races sometimes and that I something I really enjoy doing. I also, ironically, enjoy cooking so that sort of cancels each other out, right? SHANE: Jocelyn and I really don’t do a lot of individual things together because we like different kinds of movies, different kinds of shows, all of that so we really don’t do stuff like that together. I do like to play video games. I am 37 years old but I play video games. When I play video games I got a core group of guys that I play with, my brother and two of my best friends going way back from when I was a kid and just a way for us to get together. We are all busy, we got kids and we can get on there for about an hour and a half on Monday night and just kind of hang out and chill and have some fun. I also like to watch wrestling. I love professional wrestling. I like to read all the message boards and the news and the rumors. And one of my best friends who is also an online business, he is a huge wrestling fan so we talk about wrestling probably way too much during the day where we should be actually working on our online businesses. But those are some things we like to do. We both love to go to the gym. I love to lift weight. I don’t run. Jocelyn tries to get me to run but I only run when I am being chased. That’s what I would say. But I do love to go lift weights but I love to swim too. JOCELYN: But most of all We really enjoy working ...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Tanya decide if she should use personalization in her email autoresponder or if it just feels fake. Special guest Michael O'Neal of solopreneurhour.com brings his perspective into the conversation and offers some great advice about how to write better emails for your 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 "Write directly to your audience vs the generic route @solohour"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s expert is Michael O’Neal from solopreneurhour.com Today’s question is from Tanya Grant at craftymummy.com Aweber - Email Marketing Software Check out Michael on twitter @solohour Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to an expert Q and A with S and J. Today’s expert is Michael O’Neal of the Solopreneur Hour Podcast in solopreneurhour.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 Podcast. This is another Q and A with S and J. We got a special one for you today. We have another expert Q and A. super excited to invite this guy on for the first time to our expert Q and A podcast. Today we have Michael O’Neal from the Solo Hour and Solopreneur podcast at solohour.com. Michael welcome to the show man, MICHAEL: What’s up you guys? Good morning for me and afternoon for you. JOCELYN: Absolutely. SHANE: That’s right. We got lunch cooking you got some breakfast cooking I think. MICHAEL: I smell it. I just had a protein shake so that counted as breakfast. SHANE: That’s right. That’s all you need brother. That’s all you need. MICHAEL: That’s right. JOCELYN: Alright. Well we have a great question for you today. This is from Tanya Grant of the craftymummy.com. I assume she is in the UK somewhere. Nope, just kidding, it’s Australia. It says, “I am in sunny Queensland Australia and you guys keep me company when I am cooking dinner. That’s when I listen to your podcast of course I am curious whether you use personalization in your emails and how important you think this is. I often see emails which inserts the reader’s first name in the greeting and the subject and I have tried this in my own email newsletter but I am not sure how effective it is. It seems fake, doesn’t everyone already know that is a form letter? What do you think?” SHANE: This is a good question. We have experimented a lot with this and I know you do a lot of marketing yourself so I am very interested on what you think about this Michael. Do you think it’s good to add personalization? Or do you think that I something that most people kind of see through or does it even matter? MICHAEL: I think that it’s funny. I don’t know that everybody sees through it. When I do an email to my list and I say hey I’d love to hear—guest suggestions for instance. People are writing me back. Oh man thanks for writing me. SHANE: Right we get those too. MICHAEL: So you don’t realize that it is sort of response from an auto responder if it will. Also I don’t know if everybody feels like it is not personalized even though all the current modern software allows you to basically when you compose the email—this is just for your listeners—you can compose the email and there is just a little chunk of code that you can put in that will say, “Hey [blank]” and then that blank is first name. Depending on what you captured form them originally, typically it’s name and email now but sometimes you can get more than that, first name, last name, you can get hey what’s your dog’s name and customize your email to that.

In today’s podcast we’re going to help Julie shift her business online and walking through some of the first steps she needs to take in her journey. Julie is a family photographer who wants to take her in person service based business online, teaching people how she built up her customer base using social media as she moved around the country. We’re going to talk about the exact steps she should be taking to create her first digital product, talking through defining her target market and how to get everything set up technically. We’ll walk through some stories and examples that will help anyone get some great ideas on how to get started. [Tweet "Once you narrow down your niche and avatar, your decision paralysis is going to stop! "] You will learn Some of the very best strategies for getting started with your first product. Why Julie should start with one specific industry in mind. How to overcome decision paralysis. The first step on “the list” that you should take action on. Your prices aren’t set in stone - So don’t let it stop you from moving forward. How to know what personal information you should share. (and how much) Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Julie’s current website The Flip Your Life Community AuthorAudience.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! 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 help Julie choose a niche, and find her customer avatar. 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. Today we are excited to have Julie Renner on our Flipped podcast. This is where we give our audience members an opportunity to come on, and have a free consulting call, and we answer their questions about moving to the next level in their online business. Welcome Julie, we are really glad to have you today. JULIE: Thanks so much, glad to be here. SHANE: Julie, your website is Julierennerphotography.com and we just wanted you, before we get started, to tell everyone in the audience about your business, and maybe a little bit about why you want to flip your life, why do you want to dive straight into online business and make something out of that. JULIE: Okay, well, thanks for having me; my business is called Julie Renner Photography and I have been a family photographer for approximately eight to ten years. I primarily focus on photographing families, kids, on vacation and I do that in the evenings and on the weekends when families are available. In addition to that, my husband’s job has moved us all around the country and we’ve moved five times in different states everywhere. So, I’ve had to sort of restart my business each time and I have done that through social media. And so, my transition really is going to be moving from doing photo sessions in photography on evenings and weekends into online business, teaching other small business owners how to use social media to build their business. So, you know, I’m coming from the perspective of a small business owner and kind of,

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Zach figure out how to make a video and landing page for his online course he’s releasing. 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’re not gonna make a dime if you don’t create some kind of sales page"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Leadpages Fiverr 99 Designs Odesk Elance Podcast 21 on Landing pages 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 are on the road traveling right now and we are in a hotel room, and we thought we would go ahead and record some podcasts. We do not have our normal microphones with us, so we’re using the internal microphone on our MacBook Pros. So that is why the audio sounds a little weird in this episode of the Q&A podcast. Today’s question comes from Zach Lazarus and he writes, “How the heck do I make a landing page for my video course? I am on a bootstrapping budget and I need to make a sales page. I don’t have enough money to buy one of the tools like Lead Pages, so what should I do?” JOCELYN: Hey Zach, we really like Lead Pages because they do show you the conversion rates for each type of sales page and I think that that makes it a little bit easier for people who are new at making sales pages because you don’t have to guess and wonder if the sales page actually coverts. However, if you don’t have the budget for Lead Pages right now, you can also have someone make a sales page or a landing page for you and there are a variety of different places that you can have this made. You can do it on Fiverr, you can go to 99Designs I think is one that does that, oDesk, Elance, all of these places, you can probably find somebody to make a sales page for you for less than your monthly cost of Lead Pages. However, just like I said before, you may not be sure about the conversion rates. But don’t stress about it too much because I had, pretty much, the most terrible landing page on Earth on my Elementary Librarian site and it was very successful for a very long time. I have since changed it to a Lead Page and it has increased my sales even more since then. But what I'm trying to say is that don’t stress about having the exact, perfect, landing or sales page on your website. Just get something up there to promote your product and tell people about its benefits. SHANE: We actually did a podcast about everything that you can include in a sales page or a landing page and that was flippedlifestyle.com/podcast21 and that’ll kind of go through all the elements. I’m not gonna get into that right now about what you need for a landing page, for your digital product or any kind of product that you create. But it’s like Jocelyn said, you don’t have to use a tool like Lead Pages. It saves you a ton of time to do that, so the cost may look high but you’re saving so many hours of your life creating things like landing pages that it’s actually really, really worth it and you’re actually, probably saving and making more money in the long run by using a tool to create your landing pages. But if you ever have a WordPress site, all you have to do is create a page and put all of the information about your product on that page and put a button to buy it. It doesn’t have to look perfect like all the gurus say, it doesn’t have to have all these specific, little buttons and bells and whistles and checkpoints and you know, you don’t have to have the three columns that are side-by-side. We have made thousands upon thousands of dollars before we upgraded all of our stuff...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Laura figure out what she needs to create to be successful (even though she’s shy on camera) in her 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 "How can you best deliver value to your perfect customer? @katelerickson"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s Expert is Kate Erickson of EntrepreneurOnFire.com Check out 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 Expert Q&A with S&J. Jocelyn and I always say, we do not have all the answers and you send us so many questions, sometimes we just scratch our heads. So we wanted to start bringing on some experts to really give you guys the best answers to the questions that you send us. We are really excited today, to have a special guest on our show; it is Kate Erickson from Kate’s Take, the Entrepreneur on Fire audio blog and Entrepreneuronfire.com. Kate, welcome to the show. KATE: Shane and Jocelyn, thank you guys so much for inviting me on, I’m stoked to be here. JOCELYN: Yeah, we are very excited to have you and I know that our listeners will love your advice for them. SHANE: That’s right. JOCELYN: So, let’s start out with today’s first question; this is from Laura and Laura says, “I’m so confused about what to create. Everything I hear and read online says I need a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, a webinar to speak live, etcetera to be successful. Where should I start? I’m a little scared because I hate talking and being on camera. Do I need all that to make it? I’m a little overwhelmed and would love some advice.” SHANE: We get this question all the time Kate, because you know, people, I think they see a lot of people doing all these things and so they think they have to too. So what’s your take on that? What do you think about this question? Where do they need to start at? KATE: Well, I can totally relate to Laura and I think this is such a timely question because there’s so much information out there and Shane to your point, there’s a lot of people who are able to do it all, but that’s because they have built their business over years of work and so they are able to dabble in all these different areas. But, my best piece of advice for Laura would be to focus. So, you really wanna start by figuring out what are your biggest strengths, how can you best deliver value to your perfect customer. So is that through a blog, is that through a YouTube channel, is that through a podcast? You wanna just start by figuring out how you can best deliver that content and focus on that one medium and then after you’ve gotten to the point where you are actually delivering consistent, valuable content through that one medium, then you can start to kinda look out at all the other options that are out there for you. SHANE: So let’s look at that, just maybe, as an example; let’s say you were starting out, okay, what medium would you choose to communicate with, and maybe, what’s the one social network that you would focus on, if you were just starting out today? KATE: Yeah, well, I can take it back to the day I joined Entrepreneur on Fire and it was very clear to me that writing was a strength of mine and it’s also something that I was also really passionate about. So the very first thing that I did when I started here at Entrepreneur on Fire was I started writing our blog and that’s how I started out.

We are a husband & wife team that works together at home. Our family makes it’s entire living on the internet, we can show you how your family can too!

We are a husband & wife team that works together at home. Our family makes it’s entire living on the internet, we can show you how your family can too!

We are a husband & wife team that works together at home. Our family makes it’s entire living on the internet, we can show you how your family can too!

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about what sales funnels really are and why everyone should have one in their online business. Sales funnels help you find the people that can buy your product and really get value from your online business. Once you understand exactly what the goal of a sales funnel really is, you'll be able to come up with a clear strategy to grow your business and better serve your customers. You will learn Exactly what a sales funnel is and the big picture reasons of why you need one. What kind of numbers should you be looking for in your sales funnel? How this helps you to narrow down your targeting We talk through a practical example so you can figure out how apply this to your music. The power of “eliminating” people from your database and email list. The true goal of the sales funnel. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Jocelyn’s website Elementary Librarian The Flipped Lifestyle Sales Funnel Template - Free PDF Click Here to Download The Flipped Lifestyle Sales Funnel Template 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 You guys mentioned that you wanted to see a picture of our first, digital income. So I’m attaching it to this email. There’s a special appearance of my cash cow in the photo the little guy inspires me and my online dreams when I think about quitting. Here you can see I made $23.95 off of the sale of my first, digital e-book, ‘The exception of Jesus’. Thanks so much for your encouragement. Had you not helped me to get past my perfectionism, I would have never gotten it out there for people to buy. I probably wouldn’t have even launched. I am now working on my second book, ‘Building blocks for a strong, Christian life’ and I think it is something that can really help a lot of people Ronnie Brown RonnieBrown.net & bivocationalpreacher.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 talk about creating a sales funnel template to grow 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast; today we are going to be talking about sales funnels and you may have heard of the word sales funnel. It’s kind of the latest buzz-words in internet marketing; everyone is talking about the sales funnel. So today we’re gonna be talking about what they are and why every online business should have one. But before we get into all that, we want to share a success story. SHANE: Our success story today comes from email and it’s written by Ronnie Brown of Ronniebrown.net and Bivocationalpreacher.com and Ronnie writes in and says, "You guys mentioned that you wanted to see a picture of our first, digital income. So I’m attaching it to this email.

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Sarah feel comfortable trusting her virtual assistants with usernames and password for different accounts they’ll need access 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 "You have to roll the dice a little bit if you are going to make it in online business."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Tropical Think Tank Event Fiverr Elance Odesk LastPass 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 today's Q&A with S&J. You probably noticed immediately that the audio was a little funky on this episode of the podcast and that is because we are using the internal microphone on my MacBook Pro. We are on the road, we are in a hotel room right now, we are traveling to the Philippines to see Chris Ducker and go to his Tropical Think Tank event. We did not bring our microphones. We do have digital recorders but we do not have that out right now and we had some extra time so we thought that we would go ahead and record a few Q&As to make sure we could keep rolling out the content while we are on the road. JOCELYN: We're actually in a hotel room and I'm sure our neighbors are not too thrilled about this podcast recording but – SHANE: It's 1:00 AM by the way where we are recording this. JOCELYN: Yeah, we're trying to flip our schedule little bit because we are going to the Philippines and it is a 12-hour time difference from us. So, we are staying up all night, or attempting to and recording some Q&A podcast for you guys. SHANE: I thought we can sleep on the airplane on the way there. So, let's jump into today's question; today's question comes in from Sarah and she writes, "I am an attorney working full-time in my own practice and trying to build up my website where I plan on selling digital products to other attorneys. I utilize sites like Fiverr and Elance.com to outsource certain tasks. But I'm a little leery of hiring someone from one of those sites to help me with my website issues. If I provide a freelancer with my username and passwords, so that they can do whatever they want with them, they will also have access to my financial information that I have stored on those accounts. So long story short, what do you do in situations like this? Do you have any recommendations for outsourcing these kinds of projects involving giving someone else either access to your private or financial information, or your username and passwords on WordPress?" JOCELYN: All right Sarah, this is a good question and one that has concerned me as well. But there are ways to give people your information without giving up all of your password information, or your financial information. The first thing you need to do when you are in online business is definitely separate your business and personal financial accounts. That way, in case something does happen, you don't have to worry about all of your personal money being wiped out. SHANE: And you can do this too by setting up just two separate bank accounts or two separate PayPal accounts. Anything like that but what you do is basically anything that anyone would have access to, don't ever keep a lot of money in that. We have accounts where we immediately have money moved every day whenever there's sales made. That way, if someone were to ever get a hold of that information, there's probably only a couple of thousand bucks or a few hundred dollars in that account anyway and everything else is moved by us to an account where they cannot access it so easily.

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Neil and his wife figure out how to get more traffic to their online Etsy store. 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 need your own platform, your own blog, your own website so you get to make the rules. "] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Printablecharm.com teacherspayteachers.com/ Etsy 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 y'all, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J; today's question comes from Neil Miller and Neil writes, "I'm hoping you will not discriminate me since I'm not from the South. I am from the frozen Tundra of Minnesota." We do not discriminate, the war was over many years ago, my friend. JOCELYN: It's cool Neil, we like you. SHANE: It's cool, we're cool at Minnesota; see what I did there, 'frozen Tundra', 'cool' with Minnesota? JOCELYN: That was great. SHANE: All right, maybe not. All right, "My question is regarding physical products and services. My wife has recently opened an Etsy shop and I am wondering of you could give some ideas –" I cannot read today "– on getting traffic to her shop. Also, I run a small janitorial business on the side and would like to get traffic to my website. I get maybe 20 visits or so a month to my website. Thank you very much on answering our question." All right, Neil, there's basically two ways; it doesn’t matter if you are selling physical or digital products first of all. It doesn’t matter if your website sells, you know, widgets, or things, or lawn mowers, or racquetball racquets, or you're selling digital products like e-books or e-courses. Your website exists on the internet, there's only two ways to really get traffic to that site; you can either create a ton of content and let it grow organically or you can pay for it. So what I'm gonna do is talk about how to grow your content organically and then Jocelyn is gonna talk a little bit about paid advertising. Okay, so your wife has an Etsy shop so what she should probably do is maybe start a blog where she can talk about the things that she sells on her website. So, she can create blog posts and have a website where people can come and see and learn about all the things that she creates. Etsy is like an arts and crafts marketplace kind of deal; if you've never heard of Etsy before, where people make things and they sell the things that they make. So I would probably create a blog or something or a website where she can talk about all the things that she makes. We had a client named Sarah over at Printablecharm.com and she sells like printables and things you print out for birthday parties and stuff like that. And she has a website a blog and all those things where she gives people ideas for parties but she sells her stuff over on Etsy. So that would be a great model for you to create content, lots of content where you talk about all the things that you do on Etsy and you are going to grow organically that way and Google is going to find it and you're gonna get search results when people search for those things and you're gonna find blog posts that your wife has written where she talks about those things and she can link over to her Etsy store maybe and sell all that content. There's also a lot of room here where you can share stuff on social media. I know Etsy stuff is very creative; that usually translates very well over to Pinterest; I think Etsy has a greater female audience probably than male audience as well. So that's really going to kind of combine there. You can get on Pinterest,

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about four traps that people fall into when starting out in online business. When first consuming education and getting started you’ll often hear conflicting or focused content that is trying to drive you to a product or course. This has caused a lot of stereotypes that keep far to many people from succeeding simply because they have the wrong expectations. [Tweet "You need to be somewhere... before you’re everywhere "] You will learn You don’t actually have to “be everywhere” Why starting an online business isn’t really free How “free” is actually holding you back from succeeding. The art of working on the right things instead of just working really hard. Why there are no magic bullets for success in online business. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Evan Burse - The Cartoon Block Pat Flynn “be everywhere” Flipped Lifestyle Podcast #14 Myth of the Zero Cost Online Business Jessica and Cliff Larrew - Selling on Amazon 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 One hour after my very first, paid e-book offering went out, I had a 15 dollar sale. Now the whole truth is, 24 hours later, three books have been sold and that is super-awesome too. Just to share the big win and acknowledge the win in process of getting things done and being consistent till things play out. Thanks so much to Shane & Jocelyn and those of you in the Flip Your Life community who inspire me to keep moving forward to flip my life and my service-based business upside down. Jessica 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 the truth about four online business myths. [spoiler title="Click to View Transcript"] SHANE: What's going on guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It's great to be back with you on this Tuesday. There are a lot of myths and false assumptions about starting an online business that we hear every single week. People will write us, and they'll have preconceived notions about what it takes to start an online business. Maybe they've found some "guru" or somebody else that's told them, you can do this, this, this and this and it's all a pie in the sky and it sounds great. But then they get into it and they realize, 'Wait a minute, something's wrong here, I don't think that person told me the truth.' A lot of people say you have to do this or that and a lot of people make it sound really simple to get started online and the truth is, online business is difficult. Online business is time-consuming, and yes, it even takes a little bit of money. So, today we are going to cut through all of the myths that some people put out there to make online business sound so easy-peasy and we are going to tell you the truth about those myths and try to guide you in the right direction to set you up for success, let you know what it really takes to make it online and then we are going to go over some instructions to help you do that. But first,

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Jessica figure out how to find events that will help her as an entrepreneur and her business. Let us know where we should host our live event 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 Our last live event we held NMX Social Media Marketing World Podcast Movement Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all. You’re listening to Q and A with S and J. 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to today’s Q and A mini podcast. Today’s question is from Jessica. And just a reminder if you would like to include your full name and your domain name we will be glad to read it on the air. If you would rather remain your first name that’s totally cool too. SHANE: We also link in our show notes to anyone who writes in. So it’s a great way a link from our website back to yours so you can maybe drive some traffic, so we really highly recommend if you want your staff shared to put it in the notes because if we don’t have it we can’t share it and we love to share all that stuff for you guys and I hope you get some links out there. JOCELYN: Alright, her question is how do you find out about the small live events that you mentioned on your podcast? SHANE: Alright, that’s a great question because Jocelyn and I have talked often about how we vastly prefer small intimate live events. Maybe you can say less than 50 people then we go to the big huge events like NMX or our social media marketing where our podcast movement. We don’t mind those. We think there is value in those. We don’t really like to go to those to see the speakers as much because a lot of that stuff that they talk about in the big, big events is very superficial, top beginner—not like beginner’s stuff but it’s just like they don’t really give away anything in their talks. It’s more for networking and meeting people and seeing friends but the small events where you’re sitting at a table with people, masterminding with people where you get to go up to the expert who is hosting the event and actually talk to them and ask them question about their online business that’s what really going to take you to the next level. The main way that we find out about those probably is we really keep up with the internet marketing industry. We keep an eye out. We search for live events online. We don’t really listen to a lot of podcast regularly. We might catch one or two a week. We randomly sample different people’s podcast while we are at the gym or something like that. But we keep an ear to the ground, ear to the railroad so to speak to hear about little live events when we catch one or we see 10 to 20 people and it’s about a skill that we like, what kind of research, who is hosting it and we’ll go and jump on that event. So you kind of got to keep up on what’s going on in the internet marketing world. You don’t want to be listening to 20 podcast and taking up all your time because you’re not going to take any action but when you do hear about a good small live event, maybe 20 to 50 people. Those are great ones to jump onto and also you have got to actively seek them out. Go to Google and search for, if you want to learn how to record YouTube videos better, go type in learn YouTube videos live or something like that and see if you can find an expert that is actually hosting one of those events. JOCELYN: Yeah a lot of ways that we find out about live events, we follow people on Twitter. We get a lot of Facebook and Twitter ads that are targeted to people who like internet marketing related things which we do.

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Tony discover what he can create a digital product around even though he doesn’t have specific industry expertise. 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 Smartpassiveincome.com Pat’s site for security guards. Pat’s site for food truck owners Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all you are listening to a Q and with S and J. SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome to a Q and A with S and J. got a great question today from Tony Visintin. I hope I said your name right Tony. Tony writes in and he says how can I create a digital product if I don’t have any teachable knowledge or expertise on any specific topic like you guys have football coaching or librarian sources? Or put it in another way what kind of approach will I take in creating a digital product if I try to learn the topic from scratch, I’m not an authority in it but I am going to learn how to do it and teach other people? JOCELYN: Alright Tony, this was a common fear with a lot of people have. We hear this question a lot. People say I am not good at anything, I don’t have any skills, I do a job where I have to follow a certain procedure and I really can’t deviate from it, something like that. But the truth is that everyone has some type of skill or something that they are good at that you can use that translates to an online business. It may be something you do at work, sort of like what we did and maybe some type of a hobby. It maybe that you’re a stay-at-home mom and you have the best stain treating formula ever and that something that translate to an online business. Any type of problem that somebody may have, if you have a solution for it then that could be the start of an online business. Ask your friends and family, go to them and say I would like to start an online business but I am really not sure what to do, what are something that you think that I am really good at that maybe I could teach someone else to solve one of their problems. And I am willing to bet that people will probably tell you something. Ask your mom. Moms love to help out their kids. SHANE: Your mom will brag on you Tony. JOCELYN: Yeah and ask her. Just say, what could I do that I could teach somebody else and I bet a lot that they would probably come back and tell you something that maybe you didn’t even think of. SHANE: Another thing that you can do is you can really inventory this and inventory all the things that you do in a week. Just get a piece of paper, a yellow note pad, whatever, and carry it around with you for an entire week and write down every single thing you do at work, in your free time, when you are just laying at bed at night, like Jocelyn said you are working a hobby or something, you’re looking up information, what do you search for on Google, things that interest you. Try to look for something in that list. You are going to come up with this huge list, two or three pages long by the end of the week if you just chart every single thing you do. Each line is a new thing. And look through there and start taking things off, yeah I do know a lot about that. You know what I know quite a bit about that and always remember you don’t have to be the leading PhD Nobel prize winning expert on something to teach it online. You just have to be expert enough. You just have to be ahead of the people that you’re going to teach. There are people who know a lot about online business more than we do. We follow them but there are a lot of people who are just discovering this world of selling things online and we have decided to help teach those people how to start an online business. So you don’t have to be the authority, you just have to have some kind of expertise and be expert enough. JOCELYN: I have a friend that I met at a live event a few months ago and she does a website about personal organiz...

$10,000 in just 24 hours! In today’s podcast we’re going to hear how two busy parents with full time jobs started and launched their first digital product and made over $10,000 in just 24 hours. Evan started uploading videos to YouTube about 6 years ago, teaching people how to draw cartoons. He struggled for years, just making a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue until he finally did something different and created his own product. Then they found the Flip Your Life community and everything changed.  After joining the Flip Your Life Community, Evan finally started making money online! In this conversation we talk about all the steps Evan and Zeena took to launch their first product and what helped them on their journey of creating a successful online business. And as a bonus you hear our advice for Evan on how to take it to the next level now that his first launch is done. [Tweet "If you’re not getting the results you need. Do something different! "] You will learn how to: Start an online business in the shortest time possible Build a digital product to sell online Launch a product and make sales Choose the perfect niche for you to make money online Figure out the exact product your audience wants to buy Use the right tools and resources to save you money How to set up an evergreen sales funnel that makes money 24/7 Update: Evan ended up making over $30,000 off that first launch and is planning on working online full time! Way to go Evan! 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 to this case study now? Download the transcript!

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Eric understand how we decide what content to charge for, and what we give away in our 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 "When we see the same question again & again, that's a good signal that we could create a product for our audience"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Elementary Librarian Google Adwords Keyword tool 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 today's Q&A mini podcast where we answer your questions about online business. Today's question is from Eric Walker and Eric says, "You give away so much of valuable, free stuff on the Flipped Lifestyle website such as tutorials etcetera, things that a lot of people would charge for. How do you decide what to sell and what to give away? Are there any criteria?" SHANE: We've been on a string of easy names lately; have you noticed that? The last three people have been Joe, Matt and Eric. JOCELYN: I know, thanks for that guys. SHANE: Thank you for that; or people are once again – maybe they are putting in false names now that we actually can read instead of purposefully trying to stumble us over the names or something like that. All right, so let's jump in to Eric's question here. How do we decide what to give away for free and what to sell? Well, there are a couple of principles that guide our thinking on this and also just some more things that we have come up with on our own. The first thing you can always do when you are evaluating what you should charge for is, you can tell people what to do but you charge them to show them how to do it. For example, we can guide you through the process that you have to go through to start an online business. One of those things is, eventually, you're probably going to need to start a website. So, I'll tell you, you need to start a website, you need to have content on it, you need to get a logo made; these are all the things what to do, all the things you should do when you are creating a website. So people get a really good overview and a lot of people might be able to figure that out just from that list of what to do but then we can go back and we can create a product that shows you exactly how to do it. We just created a course that's about to launch, I think, in about a week or two; by the time this podcast comes out, it's probably already out there over at Flippedlifestyle.com and it shows you exactly how to set up a WordPress website. 20 videos, 10-20 minutes a-piece, and we go through every step. How to install WordPress, how to get hosting, how to write your first blog post, what you should be writing about when you start it. We actually charge to show people step-by-step, hold their hand, how to do something. Another rule that a lot of people go by is the '90/10' rule where you give away amazing content. 90% of everything that you create, you just give it away for free and then you hold back maybe 10% of the content. Maybe it's that critical step, that thing that kinda connects all the pieces of the puzzle together. That's what you sell. So you give away as much free value as possible. A lot of people might be able to only need that 90%, they can figure the 10% out but there's always going to be a portion of your audience willing to go ahead and pay you for that 10%. JOCELYN: It's really important that you give people some valuable, free content because if you don’t, why would they be willing to pay you? If your free stuff is not very good, then they're probably not going to jump and say,

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Matt overcome the fear of putting his private life online when starting 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 "There's a million different ways to present your brand online without having to share everything that you do on Facebook."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Elementary Librarian US History Teachers 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 another Q&A with S&J mini podcast. Today's question comes from Matt; and Matt writes, "How do I get over my fear of putting my life out there for others to see? I would have no problem sharing and selling my e-book to random strangers, but to think about my friends and family finding it and reading is horrifying to me. I know this is something I need to get past but your story is so real and I'm just finding it difficult to even think about doing what you guys do." JOCELYN: All right Matt, this is actually a common concern that a lot of people have and it is something that bothered me when we first started our online business. It's not that I was doing anything wrong or had anything to hide necessarily; it's just that I really didn't want to put everything out there for the whole world to see. So, one way that you can do this, is to just use your first name. So, for a long time, on my Elementary Librarian site, I was just 'Jocelyn'. You could be 'Matt', you could be 'Matt B.' or whatever your initial is and that would be one way of getting around everyone knowing exactly who you are. SHANE: You can even use an alias in your brand. Like my name was on a lot of my products on my football coaching site but a lot of people just knew me as 'CoachXO'. I created like a persona on my podcast, the 'CoachXO' show and basically people would write in and be like, "Hey Coach XO, I got a question for you about football." So you could even do something like that where your brand kind of becomes the identity of the website and maybe you are not so front-and-center. Another thing that I think is important to realize too is that this is a fear because we're scared; it's like public speaking. You are scared to get up in front of people especially people you know. You don't want them to understand exactly what you are doing and things like that but you don't have to share this with people in your personal life. We don't put all of our Flipped Lifestyle stuff, we don't share Elementary Librarian, or history or coaching or all of these little businesses that we've got set up. We don't ever share them on our private Facebook walls or our private Twitter accounts. We only talk about them in the space where they exist like on the Flipped Lifestyle Facebook page or actually on our website. Now, a lot of people have figured out what we do and they've found our websites and they've looked at our products and things like that. We do know people that have bought our products from us, we know them in person. So, there is definitely going to be some crossover but it's not going to be this thing where everyone in your life is going to totally go in and read your e-book. They might not even be in your audience. If you've got an e-book about starting a food-truck or something like that, if no one wants to do that, they have no reason to read your book. So, don't really worry about people in your life finding all of your stuff and keep up with all the minute details of your online business because that's probably not going to happen.

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about the 4 things we wish we would have been told when we were just starting out in online business. These are four things you MUST do to succeed online [Tweet "Online business is never about what you want, its what your audience wants"] You will learn How we develop avatars of our ideal customer. Why we want to eliminate people from our potential audience. (not add) The tactics we use to find what kind of digital products to create. Why you shouldn’t rely on social media in your business. The value of asking questions to your audience. (no matter the size) Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Shelly’s podcast episode US History Teacher website we run Google Adwords Keyword Tools video guide Google Adwords Keyword Tool Shane’s site CoachXO Shelley Hitz PDF of the FLIP acronym 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 Wow...in the two weeks after our consulting call with Shane and Jocelyn, we generated over $3000 in income. Going into the call, we had a general idea of what we wanted to accomplish in our business. However, you guys gave us a specific plan to launch a new product we had not yet considered. Your advice was spot-on and exactly what we needed. Thank you Shane and Jocelyn, you're the real deal. We appreciate you! 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 four things you must do to succeed in online business. [spoiler title="Click to View Transcript"] JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Shane and I are glad to be back with you today. We are going to be sharing something with you today that we wish we had been told when we were starting out in online business and we really discovered that this was such an important message for everyone in our audience at our live event in San Diego a few weeks ago. As we talked with all of the people that came to the event, a common theme kept coming up over and over again and that was that people really didn’t understand their audience or who they were targeting. So today, we are going to bring you four things that you must do to succeed online and that even have a handy, little acronym F-L-I-P. And we love acronyms because we used to be teachers so this fits right in with what we used to do and there's a lot of acronyms in education. So, before we get to that, Shane has a success story from one of our consulting clients. SHANE: Our success story this week comes from Shelly Hitz; you may remember Shelly and CJ, they were one of our flipped podcast guests a couple of months ago where we allow audience members to come in and we give them a free consulting call to help them take their online business to the next level and then we share those calls with you guys out in the audience so everyone can learn from the questions and the answers. Not long after the Flipped podcast episode that we recorded with Shelly and CJ, we got this email and it said, "Wow,

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Joe Chang decide when to set up his first business entity. 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 Episode 13 with Josh the CPA Our Accountant - The Bottom Line Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all you are listening to a Q and A with S and J. 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. JOCELYN: Hi guys, welcome to today’s Q and A mini podcast where we have a question from Joe Chang and Joe says, here is my question: in episode 13 Josh, the CPA, explained a little bit about different business entities but should I setup a business entity instead of operating as an individual, should I set it up at the very beginning or when I see some real money coming in? alright Joe, let us preface this answer by saying that we are not legal professionals or accountant so just keep that in mind when you listen to our advice, but honestly it really doesn’t matter especially at the beginning when you operate as an individual or as a business entity. We waited a long time before we applied for our business entity and we actually operate as an LLC now but there are other ones out there that maybe more appropriate for you just depending on your situation. But really until you start making a whole lot of money it really technically from a tax standpoint, doesn’t matter that much if you are an individual or a business. SHANE: And basically it’s pretty easy to setup a business account. You can either in some states they let you do a DBA. You can just say I am doing business as Sams Digital Company and go start a bank account for that business and there your business. Other places, you just apply with your state. It’s usually just a little paperwork, I think it costs like 50 bucks or something to start-- JOCELYN: Yes, it’s not super expensive. It depends on your state. SHANE: Yeah so I mean it’s extremely easy to start a business. There is probably no excuse not to do it. I would say just make it general. Like we have, our business is called Sams Digital LLC and the reason we called it that is because it’s kind of like the umbrella that sits over top of each individual website which is kind of its own business but they all kind of funnel to the same bank account so it’s not a real big deal. So I would just start something that’s kind of general and just whatever business you end up doing you can add to that. The morale of the story is this, it really doesn’t matter unless you are trying to protect yourself from some kin dof a liability. Like if you have an LLC they can sue your company and you can protect some of your personal assets instead of coming straight after you if you’re just an individual. It’s a lot of semantics. It’s really not a big deal. It’s so easy to set it up, there is probably no reason not to do it from the beginning. I wish we had have just so we could have got it out of the way. Don’t you think Joce? JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s a lot easier moving forward if you set up your business from the beginning. I mean it technically doesn’t matter especially if you’re not making a whole lot of money, it doesn’t matter that much. But it may make things easier down the road if you go ahead and set it up from the very beginning and the best thing to do is to talk to somebody who is a professional at this. Especially in your state or somebody who knows about your state and they can tell you all the tax implications and all the liability questions and all of those types of things that we don’t really 100% know the answer to, we can just share out experiences with you.

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Matt and Karen understand how we use Opt-in pages and our autoresponder. 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 Leadpages Google Adwords Keyword Tool How to host a webinar guide 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 up guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J where we answer audience questions every Thursday and Saturday that you have about online business. Today's question comes from Matt and Karen and they write, "In one of your podcasts, you mentioned you were using Lead Pages –" as I do, good job, we're glad you use that. Great product. "– and that you were putting up a ton of opt-in pages etcetera, etcetera and then I got all inspired and I started doing the same thing and I realized, what am I doing? I completely understand that building a list is so important and that that it has to be done and my wife and I certainly are working on that. But if I just keep building a bunch of opt-in pages that are going to create a bunch of different cold lists because I'm too overwhelmed to keep up with each individual auto-responder sequence and each broadcast and every individual funnel, than what good would this do? It's very confusing. What is your secret behind all of that?" JOCELYN: Hey guys, thanks for your question. I think you are actually a little bit confused because that's not exactly the way that we set things up. We do have several different lead boxes but we actually put everything on one list. SHANE: Okay, what we actually do is, like for example, take Flipped Lifestyle. We have one email list. Everybody who comes into our sales funnel, who signs up on our email list, they are going to get the same sequence. Now we might have a branch or two that take them in different directions based on what happens but pretty much everybody is going to get the same, six or seven emails when they sign up for our email list; they are going to get our free product and hopefully they'll get an offer later to one of the paid products that we offer. But we do have different entry points into the list, Karen, and that's what we use the lead boxes for. For example, let's say we write a blog post about keyword research; I might go record a video that shows people how to use the Google AdWords keyword tool and they have to give me their email to watch that video. That's a separate lead box. People give me their email but they are going to the same Flipped Lifestyle list. I know that person is interested in internet marketing because they are looking up something and they found the page on keyword research but I just need to get them into the sales funnel on internet marketing based on what they were looking for at that time. Somebody else may look for 'How to host a webinar?' well, we have a video that shows exactly how to set up a webinar in Lead Pages and host it live but that video, you have to give an email to watch that video but you are still going to go on that same list. So, we're not juggling dozens and hundreds of cold lists; we know our demographic like things about internet marketing. We know that there are things like sales pages, webinars, keyword research, how to build a website – all those fall under the same umbrella for our avatar of what we are trying to teach people. So, we just need to get them what they are looking for at that time and then put them on the same list. So, you can create an opt-in for every single blog post. It could even be – some people just use like a PDF of their transcrip...

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to avoid one of the biggest causes of procrastination in business, shiny object syndrome. Too many people don’t make progress in their online business simply because they never truly finish a project. In this conversation we’re going to talk about 4 critical strategies for prioritizing what to do so you can get more done and avoid the mistakes we made when starting out with our online business. [Tweet "If you have 10 websites and none of them are making money you probably have shiny object syndrome."] You will learn Why shiny object syndrome is a great way to feel busy. (but not make money) The reason you need to finish one project before starting another. How we’re using the AAA strategy to streamline our production. Why you need a mastermind. The importance of systems to decide what you need to be working on. How to use voting and surveys to improve sales and product ideas. Why you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Get in touch with us Pat Flynn’s episode we mention (AAA) Elementary Librarian US History Teacher 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 was listening to your podcast from last week on my run today and it inspired me to share a couple of sacrifices I have made lately to fund my online business. I figured I wouldn't be doing any triathlons for a while so I sold my vintage, 2002 Trek Time trial bike last week. Yesterday, I cancelled my satellite radio subscription, $300; you are so right, in the long run, these won't be missed. I need to invest in the tools to make this online business thing happen. 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 how to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome in your online business. [spoiler title="Click to View Transcript"] 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. Last week, we talked a lot about overcoming perfectionism in your online business, how you cannot use perfectionism as an excuse for procrastination. Jocelyn said that was her big thing that she had to struggle with, she had to fight with; this pursuit of perfectionism and how it holds her back sometimes in online business. This week, we're going to flip the script and we are going to come after one of my biggest struggles and that is, Shiny Object Syndrome. That's where you have so many ideas and so much mud on the wall, you just can't even figure out what to do next and Jocelyn says I'm like a little squirrel chasing all these little ideas around in our online business. So, we're going to talk about how to overcome Shiny Object Syndrome,...

In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how to set up and run a successful affiliate program for you online businesses digital products. 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 Ejunkie Clickbank Gumroad Jocelyn's website Elementary Librarian Shane's website CoachXO Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey ya'll! 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 today's Q&A with S&J where we have a question today from Valerio. We're not sure how to say that. SHANE: V-A-L-E-R-I-O Valerio. JOCELYN: I think people put crazy names in here just so we can – SHANE: I think you guys are using fake names. Jocelyn is right; you guys are putting in fake names just to hear us stumble across them. So, Valerio. JOCELYN: Yeah, it's going to get worse now. Okay it says, "I know that Shane has a friend who also sells e-books for football coaches and they are both affiliates for each other's products. How do you set up these affiliate programs? How do you generate the code, that then you would get to your affiliate person so that he/she can promote your product to his/her audience. Do you do it with E-junkie or ClickBank and are there other methods you recommend?" SHANE: All right, this is a great question and this is another one we get all the time and basically what an affiliate program is, is if I have a friend who is in a similar niche to me, like my buddy sells football playbooks just like I do; well, he might not want to write the same playbook that I do. So I'll just say, 'Hey here's my playbook, you sell it for a hundred dollars and I'll give you forty percent of it.' He's my affiliate. So he's gonna go out and find new people that might not be in my audience, they are going to buy the product, he get's forty bucks, and I get sixty bucks but I make a sale. I don’t get the whole hundred dollars but I do get to make a sale that I might not have made if I was not using an affiliate program. You do do this with E-junkie or ClickBank and really all that happens is, you basically upload your digital product and the service that you use, whether it's a shopping cart, E-junkie, ClickBank or something else, just gives you a link and you give that link to your affiliate partner. This can also be automated like you can put some code on your page and people can sign up for your affiliate program and it will automatically generate them a link that they can use to sell your product and all the link does is it sends them to a landing page and it tracks the customer from their website. So, if they buy, in your data and in your sales reports it'll say, 'Oh, by the way, these ten were sold by your friend as an affiliate so you owe them x percentage or whatever it is.' So any shopping cart you use, anything online you are using like E-junkie, ClickBank, Gumroad probably does this; whatever you are using to take payments for your digital product is probably going to be able to set up an affiliate program where you can go out and find people to sell your products for you. ClickBank is a great one to use starting out no matter what you are using because you can go and set that up and there's like a marketplace on ClickBank.com where people can look for affiliate products. So, if I am a football coach and I am like, I want to see if there's any football playbooks out there, oh look, there's five guys out there that have uploaded these playbooks, they fit my product line, I'll just sell theirs as an affiliate too to kind of bulk up my catalogue of information.

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Steve discover the right path for his online business and how to make that compelling enough to convince his wife it’s possible. 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 The Flip Your Life Community Podcast Episode #6 Elementary Librarian Let’s dive into this week’s question! SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We are your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip you lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright. Let’s get started. What is going on guys? Welcome back to another Q and A with S and J mini podcast. Our question today comes from Steven and he writes in via email. He says: I really want to get started on online business. I have a lot of interests but I am not sure if they would make a good online business. I am trying to figure out whether I have ideas for an eBook or have the writing skill to get the reader even interested in my product. I would also like to really convince my wife this digital product idea can work. What advice would you have on getting people behind this idea? JOCELYN: Alright Steven that is a great question. And one that I have actually gotten several times recently. So I just wanted to let you and everyone else out there know that the thing you want to look for when you are considering making a digital product is what kind of problems are you solving for an audience, or what kind of problems can you solve for an audience? What is keeping up at night and how can you help? How can you solve their problem? That little test is going to help you to evaluate each of your skills and how they might translate into a future online business. So the question is, do you have a skill that might translate well over to an online products like for example, Shane and I, we use our day job skills as teachers to create products that solve problems for teachers. Maybe it is not something that you do like for your job, maybe it’s a hobby that you have or an interest and a lot of people that they can’t make these types of things into a business but you absolutely can as long as you are solving someone’s problems. SHANE: And you font have to be like some rocket science or a PhD or the authority in a field you really only have to know a little bit more than the people behind you. If I know how to set up a website, then theoretically I can create a course to teach people how to make a website that don’t know how I am expert enough, I already know how to do that. I was not the greatest football coach that ever lived but I had a lot of experience over ten years and I created this very specific defense that a lot of people wanted to learn that defense who are either just getting into coaching or maybe they have some experience and they are switching over to my defense. So I was able to take my interest to football, turn that into a digital product and I was able to teach that to other people. I wasn’t the football authority in the country but I did know a lot about that defense and there was a lot of people behind me that didn’t know so much about it. JOCELYN: And you know sometimes there are people out there that say I just don’t really have any skills or any interest and that is just not true, really for anybody. Everybody out there has something they are good at or something they really enjoy and if you are having a hard time coming up with something for yourself ask somebody who is close to you. What is something that I know about that I can maybe teach you how to do or show you how to do or that you think other people might want to learn how to do? That’s probably the best way to get an idea for an online business if you have no clue what you want to work on. SHANE: Another huge mistake that people make when...

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how perfectionism can hold you back from launching your business and start building for the future. People have used perfectionism as an excuse for not getting started for far too long in the world of online business. We love seeing people move forward, and getting over this “excuse” is critical for so many people just to make those first $10 or even $100. You will learn Why the little things might not really matter to your audience. A story of how not being “perfect” can still play out ok. Why you should not make the changes first. Practical ways to overcome perfectionism Why you need to only focus on what you’re the very best at. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Join us LIVE and in person - click to learn more! 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 S&J, I sold three courses at 97 dollars so far and counting. I can't thank you guys enough. This is a complete game changer for me in believing in my product, voice and message. Now I just have to tweak my Facebook ads to get the pearl website click down. I already paid off my coaching call. You guys rule. I'm so stoked right now and I cannot wait to see what's next. Thank you, 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 ya'll! On today's podcast, we're going to help you stop pursuing perfection and move forward in your online business. 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. What's going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you again this week. We are going to tackle a subject today that is kind of a universal struggle for everybody that gets into online business; we hear so many people talk about this topic that we thought it would be great to just go into a full-blown podcast about it and see if we can help people move forward in their online business and that topic is perfectionism. It's trying to make everything just right, getting everything perfect before you launch. Writing the perfect email before you put it into your auto-responder sequence and how perfectionism is actually really, really bad for your online business and you've got to deal with this if you are ever going to be successful online. But before we do that, Jocelyn is going to read a success story from one of our audience members. JOCELYN: And by 'some people' in that little speech, he means me. SHANE: Jocelyn is the perfectionist; I have never struggled with perfectionism but Jocelyn does. We'll talk about that later. JOCELYN: Okay, so today's success story is from Chris and we actually spoke to Chris not too long ago. He was one of our consulting clients and he says, "S&J, I sold three courses at 97 dollars so far and counting. I can't thank you guys enough.

In today’s podcast we’re going to help Janelle start selling her digital products on her website subdays.com. Janelle has a product and a vision for her online business but has some questions to really kickstart her growth so she can stay at home with her son. She has great questions about everything from social media advertising to how to position herself as an expert. You’ll definitely be able to get some value from these common questions we hear about launching your online business. You will learn The actions Janelle needs to take to start generating sales for her products. How to start growing your email list with Facebook ads. How to balance the paid vs free content on her site. The art of pre-selling your product. Why you should always be working on your brand and your content. If you need ISBN numbers or not on your products. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Janelle’s website subdays.com Past episode about Social Media advertising What a LISTSERV is 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 are going to help Janelle take her online business to the next level. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We are your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip you lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright. Let’s get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys welcome to this week’s Flipped podcast. We are very excited this week to have our listener Janelle Afasiab. I hope I said that right Janelle. She has actually asked a question before. I am pretty sure we butchered that name before so we are really excited to have her today. We have a New York to Kentucky connection today so this is going to be an interesting call. We got the north and the south but we are super excited to her. SHANE: And no fighting we are not going to fight. There is no north and south fighting tonight, alright Janelle. JOCELYN: So we are very excited to have you today Janelle you have some great questions and I know that ty will really benefit out listeners out there. So let’s start out and go ahead introduce yourself and tell us about your family and your online business so far. JANELLE: Okay, well my name is Janelle Afrasiab. And I have been married eight years and we have one son. He is about five weeks away from turning three and my husband is currently at home right no babysitting. We don’t have much family here on New York. I am originally from North Dakota. I don’t have much family out here so getting a babysitter is a little bit more difficult. I am a former high school Spanish teacher and what I have done is I have taken my activities that used in class, put them into a book and now I am trying to sell and market them. SHANE: Awesome. And do you work right now? JANELLE: Just a stay at home mom. SHANE: Okay. So tell us a little bit about like why you want to get in to online business. Why do you want to flip your life? What is your husband do for work? And then how do you think that online business would make your life better? JANELLE: My husband currently we have a Bollywood, video slash Western Union slash electronics store here in New York and the reason that I want to flip my life ...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Beth Anne figure out how to simply sell digital products on her Wordpress website. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Best way to sell digital products on your Wordpress blog."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Beth Anne Aretto E-Junkie Gumroad Easy Digital Downloads Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey guys! Welcomes to today’s Q and A mini podcast. I still have no voice so apologies for that. Today’s question is from Beth Anne Aretto. I hope I said that right Beth Anne and she says that: I have some digital products I want to sell but I haven’t figured out the best plug in or way to do it on my WordPress blog, what would you recommend? SHANE: Alright. There are a lot of different ways to sell digital products online. If you are just selling PDF or something like that probably the easiest solution is something like ejunkie.com or gumroad.com. Those are services that basically let you go in and you can log in to your system. They let you upload your product to their servers and they will basically give you a piece of code that you can copy and paste anywhere on your website and when people click that little button or the sales button it will pop up and it will handle the transactions for you. You usually have to link those to your PayPal account but both of those services have really good instructions on how to do that. It’s not really hard. You just go on to PayPal. There is like a big key that you copy and that you paste that in to Gumroad or E-junkie and you are off to the races. I actually use E-junkie with coachxo.com because I don’t have a lot of products on that site. If you have something like 10 to 20, maybe less than 10 let’s say that—if you have 10 to 20 products, something less than that, E-junkie or Gumroad is all you need. All you have to do is go upload the product, set the price, copy and paste the code into your blog post or over in your sidebar and you are ready to sell and deliver those digital products. So if you want to get started as quick as possible that’s what I would do. I would just go and do something simple. Don’t worry about setting up a big plug in and doing all that. That will get your product for sale ASAP. But if you get quite a few products or you know you product vine is going to grow or if you need to track that better and you want to like really look at your sales report and see what’s happening, you might need an onsite solution and Jocelyn actually uses one for her Elementary Librarian site. JOCELYN: Yeah I have a lot of products on that site and so I decided that I was going to get a plug in and the one that I use on Elementary Librarian is called easy digital downloads. There are actually a charge for it. I am not exactly sure of the price. I want to say it’s under $100. There are several different extensions that you can add on to it and basically those are just extra little things that give it different functionality if you want it to do a variety of different tasks. But you can start out the very basic thing. That would be a great place to start. JOCELYN: A plug in like easy digital downloads is good if you want to have just a one-time cost. Products like E-Junkie or Gumroad, the more products you have the more they are going to charge you for their services. I think it’s like a monthly fee. Is that right? SHANE: Yeah it is. Yeah JOCELYN: Yeah so if you know that you are going to have a lot more products or you’re eventually going to have a lot more and you don’t want to pay that monthly fee you may want to go with a plug in type service. I’ve really like easy digital downloads. It’s really easy to use and you basically just upload your files in, you name your products and it will put them in a shopping cart for you. The good thing about the pug in is that there are lots of documentat...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Ashlyn discover if she truly needs a website or can get started without one. 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 get caught up on the little things, focus on the big picture."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Ashlyn Leadpages Let’s dive into this week’s question! SHANE: What’s up everybody? It’s time for another Q and A with S and J. Our question today comes from Ashlyn. And Ashlyn writes: I am about whether or not I should start a website immediately. I know it’s possible to sell products and collect emails through lead pages but I am worried that if I don’t have an email address like [email protected], for example, my emails will get filtered as spam because I am most used likely used Gmail or something like that. What do you recommend? Okay, first we’re going to talk about whether or not you need a website and then we’re going to back and Jocelyn is going to talk about a little bit about how emails work and what Ashlyn is talking about here about getting our emails that she sends to her audiences getting filtered as spam. We do not recommend that you start a website at the very beginning of your online journey because you can really bogged down in getting your website correctly, learning how to use WordPress, writing content for your website, getting everything fixed just the way you want it, trying to find a logo—it can take you three, four months and all of the sudden you look up and you have been doing hours and hours of work every single week. You have been staying up late until midnight every night trying to get your website perfect and after three or four months you don’t have anything to show for it. You have never made a dime, you don’t have any products and your audience is not really growing and you are kind of burned out and people give up and quit. We see that happen over and over and over again. So if we were going back and starting completely from scratch with all the knowledge that we know right now, we would always started creating a digital product first and learning the processes of selling that product to people like setting up a sales page, taking payments, how do I get this thing to be automatically delivered so I don’t have to sit here and email every single person that orders from me? How do I market this on social media? Can I run ads? You can do all of those things without a website. That’s exactly what we teach in Flipped Your Life: How to Create a Digital Product. We go through the process of selling a digital product, creating a digital product, taking payments, automating delivery and marketing it using different channels like social media or advertising. Now, that being said, once you learned how to do that, that’s going to take about a month to learn that process but you actually can sell something. You have your infrastructure built where people who find your content can buy it and give you money for it and you can create those passive income streams. At that point, a month or two end of the process, now you are going to go in and create a website where your actual products are going to live. You can start making content but those first people that get there actually now have something to buy from you. So we believe that the first month, maybe the first two months of online business should be spent totally on research, creating products and building an infrastructure for sales and marketing and then you are going to create a website where your brand is going to live and all that’s going to happen like you are going to have my slip or email address, [email protected] and all those things. JOCELYN: As far as your email goes Ashlyn, you can definitely start out just using a Gmail address or your Yahoo, whatever it is that you have. You know, it is always better to have a domain address eventually but sta...

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about more about how you should be using paid advertising on social media. In our opinion paid advertising is one of the best ways to kick start your growth, you can’t just sit back and hope for organic growth. Honestly, you can’t afford not to be using paid advertising! [Tweet "You can’t afford not to pay for social media advertising "] You will learn Why paid advertising is the best way to boost your launch. A great idea for getting some “seed” money to get started. Invest up front so you can live the way you want in the future. Why you should just get something out there, so you can test results. That you should start with leads not sales. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Last weeks “part 1” episode Start your first digital product 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 Hey guys, I just put my Digital Product I mad in Flip Your Life on sale today...and made my first sell!!!! So excited, thanks S&J. I would have never finished without you guys! Byron 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 ya'll! On today's podcast we're going to finish our chat about how to use paid advertising on social media. [spoiler] 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, thanks for joining us for today's Flipped Lifestyle podcast; we are going to be continuing our discussion on paid social media advertising today. We started out last week telling you our first three tips about paid social media advertising and they are, to know your objective, know your audience and know your ads. So, if you missed that show on last week's broadcast, you can head on over to Flippedlifestyle.com/Podcast36 and you can check those out. But before we get into the other tips on paid advertising, Shane is going to share with you a success story from one of our Flip Your Life students. SHANE: We get a ton of emails each week about people using our tips and tactics that we talk about on our podcast or on our Flip Your Life course to really take their business to the next level, maybe it's kind of like having an a-ha moment or even making sales. So we decided a couple of weeks ago, that we'd be started sharing these with you because they're really motivating to us and we want it to motivate you guys that are out there trying to get started in this online business stuff that there are tons of people out there doing this. It is possible and people are having real success because they are taking action. We always tell people, it's nothing magic about what we say; we just tell you exactly what we think works and if you go and take action on it and make it happen, it will. Online business is all about action. There's a thousand different ways to do this and if you'll just do something,

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Laura figure out what a sales page is and the best tool for creating sales pages. 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 Leadpages Sales page for the Flip your Life Community Sales page for Elementary Librarian Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to today's Q&A mini podcast. I'm a little bit sick so I'm a little bit hoarse and sorry about that. SHANE: My voice is back from the SEC tournament though. So as soon as I got mine back, Jocelyn lost hers. JOCELYN: Yeah, so we are recording while we can. Today's question is from Laura Varner and Laura says, "I've heard you mention a lead page in your podcast. Could you explain exactly what that is? I really don’t understand the concept and the benefits." SHANE: Okay, there's a lot of different pages that people talk about when they talk about online marketing; there are sales pages, landing pages, squeeze pages. Well basically what Lead Pages does – Lead Pages is a company and you can find them at Leadpages.net and Lead Pages created a system where you can go in and use templates to make sales pages very quickly and very easily. It's pretty much just drag and drop, plug and play and when you go in – a sales page is very complicated to create. So Lead Pages makes it where you click a button, you can add a video, you click a button, you can add a picture and they have already created all of the templates for you and they also track data over all of the people who use Lead Pages so they can actually tell what lead pages – they can actually tell which lead pages convert better, which ones produce more money, which once get people to click buttons better, which ones collect emails the best and it's just a powerful tool. Lead Pages is not something like – you don’t create a lead page. Lead Pages is a tool that you use to create sales pages on your website very quickly, very easily and they let you track data to see which of your sales pages are working the best. JOCELYN: I really like to use Lead Pages because they already have everything set up for you. So all of the text is already there and they give you examples of things to type so you don’t have to wrack your brain and think, 'Okay, I'm not a very salesy person, what am I going to write?' It's already there for you. So, all you have to do is delete the benefits of the product that is already on the lead page and put in the features and benefits of your product. So it's really simple to use, it makes you be able to write sales pages really quickly and they work really well. I've been using them on my Elementary Librarian site for about a year now and it's just such a big difference in what I was doing before and what I'm doing now and the conversion is so much better. SHANE: When we used to create sales pages before, we would basically have to go in and create like blog posts or pages and we would have to move all the buttons around and get things to look correctly and have to center them and we were literally spending five days sometimes on getting a lead page or a sales page to look exactly the way we wanted it to. When Lead Pages came out, we realized that this tool was so powerful, we could create the same sales pages that would look a hundred times better in Lead Pages and we could do it in two hours instead of like five days. So, it's really a no-brainer tool. It's especially good for people just starting out because if you don’t know a lot about HTML and you don’t know a lot about CSS and you are trying to make really nice landing pages and sales pages (which are the same thing) on your website, then it's going to be really difficult for you to get it to look the way you want it and Lead Pages has it all set up; kind of automatically done for you. So that's what Lead Pages is; it's a tool to create sales pages for your w...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Michael decide if he should start a new site or continue on with his domain and blog that has grown stagnant. [Tweet "Should I rebrand my site?!?"] 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 question from Michael Taylor at Householdbudgetcoach.com Let’s dive into this week’s question! SHANE: What's going on guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J. Today's question comes from Michael Taylor and Michael writes, "I'd like to restart my stagnant personal finance blog, Householdbudgetcoach.com. I am currently positioned as a personal finance coach but I'm considering rebranding and redoing my site copy, maybe a new URL too and creating an online personal finance course. Trading time for dollars as a coach has lost its appeal in my busy family life and full time job. Where should I start? Should I rebrand my site, start over or jump straight into creating my online course? Thanks. JOCELYN: Hey Michael, thanks for your question. If I were you, I would not start all over again. Your domain name, Householdbudgetcoach.com is still okay for doing a personal finance course. That will work just fine. So what I would do is just work on getting the language about one-on-one coaching off of there and maybe adding in some information that people who were looking for a personal finance course will be looking for. So maybe you can write some blog posts, things like that that would bring you some traffic from the search engines and if you want to have sort of a new look and feel, I think it's still okay on that same domain name that you have. SHANE: I agree. I don’t think there's any reason you should start completely over when you want to change the direction of your website especially since you are going to be talking about the same kind of content that you already are doing. You might as well just use whatever you've got. You can change the look and feel, maybe go hire a designer and just tell him to come in and say, change this, make it look better, put a fresh coat of paint on everything and then while they are doing that, you could just write 10-20 new blog posts on the side and as soon as your new site or your new look goes live on that same domain name, you can just put the new content out, let it roll out just like normal. Put it on a schedule and all of your old stuff is going to disappear into the background anyway. But you really don’t want to mess around with redirects, you don’t want to have to lose all of that search traffic that you have got from stuff that you've written before, you are still going to be getting traffic coming to your website off of your old posts. So instead of starting completely from scratch and having to sit there for a month or two, and get WordPress set back up and redo the entire site, it's probably better if you just kind of come in like you never left and just start back where you left off at. Also, if you do have an audience that already came to your website, that already enjoyed your old content, just send them an email or put something up like, 'Hey, new site, check it out!' and then you might want to drop a hint and say, 'Hey, I'm thinking about making an online course. I'd love for you to click this link and take a survey to tell me if this is something that you would want.' Don’t just start making a course. Never start making a digital product without testing your audience first. If you have had this blog for a while, you can go ahead and ask the people that are already reading it or if you have already got an email list, you can pull them but do some kind of research to real people and ask them if that is what they want. You may think they want one product and they may want another. So, normally we would say yeah, start with your digital product but in this case, since you've already had a blog, it's already there.

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about we’re going to talk about how to use paid advertising on social media. To many people start trying to figure out paid advertising without looking at the bigger picture, so that’s why today we’re going to help you understand the strategy before diving into the tactics. [Tweet "The Game has Changed, Free ride is over, Now what? "] You will learn The social media advertising principles you should. Why “paying to play” is actually an advantage. How to define your objective. How to know your audience. How to design and create your ads. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Facebook Text Measuring Tool 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 Big thanks and shout out to you guys for putting together the Flip Your Life course! I received my email stating I completed the 29 day Flip Your Life course and during that time I've completed 4 ebooks (and all are for sale)! Jr Gautreaux‎ 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 ya'll! On today's podcast, we're going to talk about how to use paid advertising on social media. [spoiler] SHANE: What's going on guys, welcome back to another episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We've got a little case of the giggles going on here because every time we hit 'Record' on this episode, a car keeps backfiring in our neighborhood or something going on. I don’t know, there's a lot of noise outside today for some reason. So, if you hear something crazy, it's either the dishwasher which is also – we got a lot of dishes, we're trying to get caught up here and that's running and we have cars shooting at us or something. JOCELYN: And I'm also sick so I might cough. SHANE: And Jocelyn is sick so she might cough or sneeze and so this might be the worst episode ever of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast by the time we're done or the best. You never know. All right guys, we have a great topic today; we're gonna talk about how to use paid advertising on social media. Our last two podcasts we talked about three kinds of avenues for getting traffic to your website on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, things like that. We're gonna get into today how to use money to buy traffic and that is how the game is played in modern internet marketing. You've got to pay to play so you've got to have some good strategies when you go into your advertising campaigns. We are not going to get into the exact specifics of how to set up Facebook campaigns or how to set up ads on Twitter; we're gonna – what we are actually gonna do is just talk about principles, foundation type stuff that you should be applying to all of your social media ad campaigns. But before we do that, we want to read a success story from one of our students. JOCELYN: All right, today's success story is from J.R. Gautreaux; I hope I said that right JR. He has been a really big advocate of ours and – SHANE: So active in our course; I mean, just one of the best community members you could ever ask for.

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Arlene find a good digital product to create for her 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! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Google Keyword Planner Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: It says, "Hello, I'm from Cincinnati." We are very close to you Arlene. It says, "What steps can I take to find a good digital product to create?" This is a really good question. It's actually one that we get a lot. People always email us and they want to know, 'What should I make?' SHANE: "What do you think I could sell to make money online?" That's a huge thing we get in person a lot too. JOCELYN: Yeah, and that's really a great place to start of course, because you have to know what you are doing before you can figure out how to get there. So, what we did when we were starting our online businesses is, we decided to make something that would help us in our regular jobs. We were still working regular jobs at the time and we didn’t want to spend a lot of time making products that may or may not sell. So my theory was, if I made something that would help me in my day job, at least I would be able to use it if it completely failed. So, that is how I got started making lesson plans and I did all of this in my free time of course and that is what I did. I didn’t have to be the most state-of-the-art librarian. In fact, I had only worked as a librarian for like three years. So, I didn’t know everything there was to know about making lesson plans or about being a great librarian. I just knew that I had a problem that I needed good quality lesson plans and I couldn’t find them online. So I figured that if I had that problem, then someone else probably had that problem too and that is how we got started doing what we were doing. If you have a job where, maybe you can't really make a product that would help you, say if you are a – what would be a good example? If you are, say a cashier maybe and there is nothing that you can really do to improve on that job process, maybe you could do something on a subject that you really love. A great way to know what you should be doing a product on is to ask friends or family members: what am I really good at? What would you say that I could teach someone else to do? Even if you don’t have an idea yourself, you might be able to have someone else come up with a good idea for you. SHANE: And the key thing to remember on what Jocelyn is talking about there is, you don’t have to be you know, a PhD Nobel prizewinner to create a digital project. You just have to be expert enough. Jocelyn had been a librarian for three years but there are thousands of librarians every year that had less experience than her and she is the one who created the product. There might be people more qualified to create lesson plans for a library but they are not doing it. It's the same thing in your field. If you are expert enough in something, you should go out and do it and about the things that you love, whatever hobbies you have, you can create a digital product. Even just to learn the process and to start it online, don’t think your first idea is going to make you millions of dollars. It's not going to but you need something to get started. So if you aren’t really excited about maybe creating something for work, then pick the thing you love to do the most, your greatest hobby and create a digital product for that. I've got a buddy of mine who loves wrestling and he is dying to start a pro-wrestling podcast and he wants to write like a history book about pro-wrestling. [Laughs] So that’s probably not a million-dollar idea but it would be an amazing thing to do just to get started, just to learn the process, how do I deliver this, how do I take payments, how do I do all these things. So those are the first two places that you really need to look at; it's just what do you really kno...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Mandy Taylor figure out the difference between tags and categories in WordPress. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "A good rule of thumb is no more than 10 tags & 2 categories per post"] Let’s dive into this week’s question! SHANE: What's going on guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J mini podcast where we answer your questions. Please excuse my voice today before we get started. We just got back from the SEC Tournament to watch our beloved Kentucky Wildcats win the SEC Championship and I yelled a little too much this weekend. We do batch these Q&A podcasts when we record them and we record six to seven at a time so you will hear my raspy voice for the next few episodes over the next couple of weeks because I kind of blew it out now in Nashville. So let's get on to today's question and it comes from Mandy Taylor and we actually had an easy name to read this week, thank goodness. Mandy writes, "What is the difference between tags and categories in WordPress? When should I use each? It's very confusing. Thank you guys for all you do." JOCELYN: Hey Mandy, thanks for your question. I'm gonna start out by talking about categories. Categories are very broad subjects that you would associate your posts with. So for instance, we might do like podcasts because that's a part of our website. So this Q&A might go in the 'Q&A' category and our longer podcast might go on a 'Podcast' category. So you probably won't have a ton of categories on your website; I mean probably a handful, I'd say no more than 10 depending on what you are doing. On my Elementary Librarian site, I have probably three or four. I don’t do a whole lot of categories but it just groups things according to what people are looking for on your website. It's a good idea to only associate a post with one or possibly two categories when you are writing it because it gets really confusing if you put it in too many. So just make sure that you do that as you write your posts. Categories could also be thought of sort of like sections of a library. I would think, me being a former librarian, I think of that – I would think of it sort of as like Fiction, Non-fiction or Biographies. That's how my library was arranged when I was still working at school and those things are more of the categories and actual subjects of books like insects or animals or famous people, those would be more like tags and Shane is going to tell you more about that. SHANE: Tags are basically specific keywords that go with the article you are writing so that people can search in a search bar on your website and easily find articles about that subject or find out what that article was about. For example, jumping off of what Jocelyn said, you may have a broad category called 'Non-fiction books' or 'Non-fiction articles' and then you wrote maybe an article about insects and that specific article was about, I don’t know, ants or beetles or whatever. So you might write – in your tags, you might put things like ants, what's it called ant-nests, I don’t know, whatever we are talking about; we are talking about ants and bugs okay. JOCELYN: This went downhill quickly. SHANE: This went downhill very quickly but you would not tag that post with, I don’t know 'Grasshoppers' and 'Spiders' because the article itself is about ants so whatever you mentioned about ants, maybe you are an Orchid-man and you got a website about how to kill ants, so you write about four specific things that get rid of ants in your house, you would only mention those things in your tags and they are just identifiers. It's just like kind of like putting a post-it note on a page in a book and you want to turn to that page quickly to find that information. When people use your search bar on your site, then they would be able to find that but the categories is more like a broad,

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about 3 ways to use social media to get more traffic to your website. We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback after last weeks episode and wanted to come back and share 3 more tips on driving traffic with social media. Our last tip revolves around paid advertising which is helping us turn $5 into $25 over and over again, which we’ll be talking about in detail next week. [Tweet "Invest in yourself and invest in your product: we have always won when we invested in ourselves."] You will learn What social media is all about and how to make it a 2 way conversation. Ideas for what to post and how to make it “timely”. What to focus on when trying to create more sales. The value of using paid advertising. Why advertising is an investment in yourself. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Last Weeks Episode Jocelyn’s Facebook feed Elf on the Shelf article 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 Shane and Jocelyn, before Flip Your Life, I was working my 11th year in the same, nine-to-five CPA job. Fast forward a few months later after Flip Your Life and I have quit my job and officially flipped my 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. 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 ya'll! On today's podcast, we're going to give you three more tips for getting more traffic to your website using social media. [spoiler] 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to the podcast; today we are going to get back into our Tips for Using Social Media to Get More Traffic to Your Website. In Podcast 34, we told you about three tips about using social media and those were how to target your audience, how to schedule post on social media and how to always get people to come back to your website and if you missed any of those tips and you'd like to go back and listen, you can check those out at Flippedlifestyle.com/Podcast34 and you can listen to that and find out exactly what we had to say about all those. Today we are going to tell you about three more tips for using social media to get more traffic on your website but before we do that, we are going to share a success story with you. SHANE: All right, today's success story comes from Brad Berry; you may recognize that name because Brad was actually on the podcast on one of our Flipped podcast episodes where we do a live consulting call and play it for you guys so everybody can kind of learn from the answers that we give for people's questions. Brad and Laura were on our podcast in episode 23 and they were also one of our original members for the first ever Flip Your Life e-course. And we got an amazing email from Brad not long ago that said, "Shane and Jocelyn, before Flip Your Life, I was working my 11th year in the same, nine-to-five CPA job. Fast forward a few months later after Flip Your Life and I have qu...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Scott understand how landing or squeeze pages work in the real world of 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 "It's called a landing page is because that's where someone lands on your site. Everyone doesn't find the home page"] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Scott at dentavid.com Leadpages   Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. Today's question is from Scott Denton at dentavid.com and Scott says, "Hey guys, I've been learning for two years now and I've created a few websites. I actually help my friends build websites now but there's one thing I still can't get my head wrapped around. How do landing or squeeze pages work? I guess the better question is, how do I implement them? I know the tools but can you give me a step-by-step instruction using a real example? Do you use subdomains or just the lead pages domains etc. Thanks in advance, if you are able to help out. SHANE: All right, the first thing that we want to do is explain to everybody out there what a landing or squeeze page is. The important thing to remember is that a landing page, squeeze page, sales page, everybody throws around all this jargon to make their trainings and courses look at hi-tech and using specific words that mean something. But a landing page, a sales page, and a squeeze page are pretty much all the same thing. JOCELYN: And you don’t necessarily have to sell something with these pages. A lot of times, people think that if you make this landing page, you are going to sell something but that's not necessarily true. They are specifically made to get people to take an action. It may be to sign up for something that's free like a free course or a free PDF or something like that or it may be to sell something. So there's different purposes that you can have these landing pages for and what you have to remember is, you have to decide which course of action you want someone to take and you can actually make multiple lead pages – I'm sorry, landing pages for your site. SHANE: So basically the reason it's called a landing page is because that's where someone lands. They click on something, go to that page and they land there so you can convince them to take action. It's called a squeeze page – some people use the term 'squeeze page' because you know, you got them to take – maybe you've got them this far and they are on this page and you've got them, you're squeezing them, you want them to do something. Or, if you are selling something, you can use the terminology, a 'sales page' and there'll be some people that argue semantics with us on this but basically for the most part, they are all three of exact same thing. JOCELYN: All right Scott, so if there's something that we want people to do, we will give them a link and that link will take them to a page on our site such as Flippedlifestyle.com/Flipyourlife and that page we want someone to purchase our e-course. So on that page, there will be a button that leads them to what we want them to do which is to find out more information about the course. Once you click on that button, you'll be taken to a list of options we offer for our course and once you click on one of the options, that's going to take you to an order form where you can give us your payment information. SHANE: So basically you give them the information on the landing page, they go to your offer which could be 'Give me your email for a free e-book' or 'Buy something' and then they buy something. So that's kind of how we implement landing pages. We have kind of created a sequence to move people down the chain. Some people call it a sales funnel where you take a lot of people to your landing page and then they go down to the offer page and then a fewer less people go down and actually buy the produc...

In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how an affiliate program can help Kyle sell more of his digital product. [Tweet "What you really want to do with an affiliate program is to build relationships with people who are in your space."] 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 question from Kyle Nelson at Cornerstone Coaching Academy Ejunkie Clickbank Let’s dive into this week’s question JOCELYN: Hey ya'll, you're listening to Q&A with S&J. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We are 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 ya'll? Welcome back to Q&A with S&J, good to be with you to answer your questions about online business today. Our question today comes from Kyle Nelson at Cornerstonecoachingacademy.com. Kyle writes, "I run a membership site for baseball coaches. My members love my content and the feedback I get from them is outstanding. I am struggling with getting my membership in front of enough people to make more money. I'm not in a position to run paid advertising and I'm relatively new in a competitive area. So I don’t get much traffic from Google searches yet. Have you guys ever used an affiliate sales site like ClickBank or have you used any affiliate plug-ins for WordPress to find your own affiliates? Thanks, keep up the great work." JOCELYN: Hey Kyle, thanks for your question. Let's talk first of all about what affiliate programs are. There might be some people out there who don’t really understand the question. What Kyle is asking is if he could possibly get his product in the hands of other people who do similar things or similar coaching sites and have them sell his product for a commission. A lot of people do this and make a lot of money doing it. It's not something that I have a ton of experience with personally but Shane has used it several times. He has a list of products on ClickBank. ClickBank is just a site that has numerous products on it that you can sell for an affiliate commission. You don’t necessarily have to know the person that you are trying to sell the product and that's certainly a viable option. It would not hurt anything for you to put your product on ClickBank but we're not really sure that that is the best option for you at this point. SHANE: What you really want to do with an affiliate program is you want to build relationships with people who are in your space. So, you need to find affiliates. You can throw things up randomly on ClickBank but it's going to take people randomly looking for certain products in your area, randomly finding you, randomly liking that product and randomly selling it. While that's good, you can put things out there and you could even manage your affiliate program through that but you want to go out and find affiliates. You want to go build relationships with people and maybe you can have them go through ClickBank to be able to pay their commissions and things like that but you're going to have a lot more success with affiliate marketing if you actually know the people. I know people in the football space that I sell affiliate products for; there's a youth football coach named Dave Cisar and I actually sell his youth products on my CoachXO site because I'm not a youth football coach. I don’t want to take the time to go out and create youth football products but I have a lot of youth coaches that use Coachxo.com to talk about football. So I want to be able to provide them a product so I have approached Coach Cisar and he made something for me and I gave it to my audience for them to buy. I get 75 bucks off the commission; it's like a $200 product.

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to get more traffic by using social media. Everyone knows they should be on social media, but what sites should be on and how should you be using it? Today we share our experiences from running our online businesses, everything from how to use Pinterest and why Twitter can work so well for driving traffic. [Tweet "Check out just how much traffic you can drive through using social media "] You will learn How to learn what social media channels you should use. Some of the tools we use to manage our social media accounts. The importance of scheduling out your posts. Why you should always bring people back to your site. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Buffer App Edgar Hoote Suite 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 have some exciting news to share. Yesterday I sold my first two copies of my eBook. It was a snow day where I live so I was lounging in my sweatpants at my computer all day and I made my first $14 online. What a cool feeling it is to make money from home and such a boost of confidence too. I am using this excitement to keep the momentum going and make more products and more sales so I can make money while working from home every day. Thank you. It’s a good reflection of how awesome your course is. My husband is doing really well with his product too. He has over 1200 likes on his Facebook page. Thanks 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. 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 show you how to get more traffic to your website using social media. [spoiler] 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? Alright, let’s get started. Shane: What’s up guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Awesome to be back with you again this week. We have a great topic for you today. We are going to be talking traffic but specifically, we are not going to get in to like SEO or anything like that, actually writing your content, we’re going to talk about how everyone can use social media to drive more traffic back to your website, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, whatever you like to use on social media. We’re going to show you how to use that as a vehicle to get people back to your site and of course to your digital products that you can sell to those people. But before we do that we are going to read a success story from a recent member of our Flip Your Life, e-course. Jocelyn: Today’s success story come from Nikita Isle, she is one of our Flip Your Life alumni members and it says: “I have some exciting news to share. Yesterday I sold my first two copies of my eBook. It was a snow day where I live so I was lounging in my sweatpants at my computer all day and I made my first $14 online. What a cool feeling it is to make money from home and such a boost of confidence too.

  In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about the hardware we use in our online business. We get a lot of questions from people asking what are the tools and pieces of technology we use everyday in our business. We're going to cover all of that as we share what we use at home as well as when we're working and traveling. You will learn Why we now recommend use Macs over PCs The type of phone we chose (hint - it’s not an iphone) and why we did The hardware accessories we’ve found most beneficial for our workspace All of the tools we use to record our podcast. Everything we take with us on the road when we’re traveling and working. 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 Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Make sure to check out - Our Facebook Page The stand we use for our laptops Logitech solar powered keyboard The Apple Magic Mouse The Apple Magic Mouse battery chargers The Audio Technica Mic we use USB Hook Up Second Monitor Shane uses The wind filter we use for the microphone The mic stand we use The M-Audio interface we use to connect our microphones to the computer Extra Power Cords for the Macbook Extra Batteries Plus Wall Mounts (That’s why we went with samsung) Car Charger Inverter Power Strip in Backpack Roland digital recorder 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. 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! Share on Facebook Share on Twitter 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, in today's podcast, we're gonna talk about the hardware we use in our online business. [spoiler] JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to today's Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are excited to be back with you; Shane and I are here in the freezing, cold tundra of Kentucky. SHANE: There's like eight inches of snow on the ground; we've been trapped in our house with our kids for three days. Everybody is bouncing off the walls. [Laughs] JOCELYN: Yeah, it's zero degrees Fahrenheit right how which is really, really cold. We are really not used to those types of temperatures here where we live. But we are excited to be here with you and talking to you on the podcast; it gives us something to do, a little break from the monotony of these snow days. We are going to start off today's show by reading a Facebook comment. SHANE: All right guys, we like to start off all of our shows by sharing a comment from you guys either from Twitter or Facebook or iTunes and today's come from Shon Gerber from the Flipped Lifestyle Facebook page. Shon is actually a member of our Flip Your Life e-course and he came over to the Facebook page last week and said, "Oh my gosh! I can't believe how wonderful your Flipped Lifestyle course is. Your topic on keyword research is incredible, the free video podcast that you put out is amazing but the one in the course just saved me way more time and money than what I paid to join Flip Your Life. Just one training in, holy cow, thank you guys so much; feeling excited." He's added a little excited emoticon there. So, it's awesome Shon, thank you for leaving that comment. If you guys would like to leave us a comment on Facebook and m...

  In today's Q&A, we are answering whether or not you really need a shopping cart or should you just rely on Paypal. 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 question comes from Douglas Andrews at JobInterview-Coach.com Ejunkie - for delivering digital products Paypal - for accepting payments online Check out our consulting page to see how we automate this service Acuity Scheduling - our scheduling tool of choice Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J. 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome back to the Q&A with S&J. Today’s question is from Douglas Andrews at JobInterview-Coach.com. SHANE: We’ve got a string of good domain names. People looking up around here, it’s pretty good stuff. JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s pretty good. Douglas says: “I understand how to use E-junkie and PayPal to collect money and deliver an ebook but can I do the same thing with just PayPal to create a link for services rendered? For example, I want to offer one on one interview services.” SHANE: Okay, that’s a great question. Let’s take that into two parts. Let’s look at just the ebook. If you take payments from PayPal for an ebook or some kind of digital product, the problem is, you’ve got to get that file to the person who paid you money for it. Now if you only have PayPal, you can do that. Starting out if you want to save $10 here and there and not set all that up, you could just take payments. You see it come through that someone paid you money. You can email them the file manually. Now, there are a couple of problems there. #1) You’re not creating passive income. You’re having to physically touch every transaction. It’s like you’re having to go to your shelf and get the product off the shelf for the person every time they come in. #2) People are used to downloading things instantly. When they pay with PayPal and they are on the internet, they want their file now. They don’t want to wait for you to have to email it within 24-48 hours. They want to get their product. PayPal doesn’t do that. PayPal is not going to send them a file or anything like that. So you are going to need a shopping cart solution to deliver things like ebooks. PayPal will take the payment. A shopping cart like E-junkie is going to send the file. Both of them are doing what they do. For coaching, you could just set up a button and you could say, “Oh yeah, I want to do a coaching service or interview process.” You could take the payment and then you could do that. But the thing is, there are also other products out there that lets you schedule things automatically. For example, when we take consulting, you can get consulting with us at FlippedLifestyle.com/TalktoUs and if you sign up for our consulting services, you don’t get a file but what you do get is an email with a link to a calendar and then the person can go schedule the consulting call on their own so we never have to touch it. We always want to create systems where we don’t have to touch anything. So even with something like interview services or coaching service, take the payment and then automate your scheduling, and you’ll be much better off. JOCELYN: We use a service called Acuity Scheduling. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. I love that one because you can take a payment for things like consulting and then it will take them actually directly to the calendar right after the time of payment. So that is a pretty cool way to do that. We really like to try to use services for what they are used for,