Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In today’s podcast, we’re showing you how to create more content in less time for your online business.
We know that it can feel overwhelming and daunting to create content when you first get started, but there are some simple strategies you can use to make more in less time and still have it be high quality.
You will learn:
- What “content” really means
- How to plan out your content with an editorial calendar
- Why batching content will be your saving grace
- How to promote your content
- The importance of curating other content
- Optimize your content with images
- FREE BONUS: Canva Tutorial
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
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 episode we’re going to tell you how to create more content in less time for 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.
JOCELYN: Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about content creation. Content creation is a lot of work. For those of you who have already started an online business, it might be a little bit overwhelming for you. It does take a lot of time and there is really nothing worse than working on a blog or in our case, a podcast that needs to come out in a couple of days – not that we’ve ever done that before.
SHANE: A few times here and there.
JOCELYN: So in today’s show, we’re going to be talking about some strategies for creating more content for your blog or website in less time but first, we want to read an iTunes review.
SHANE: And today’s iTunes review comes from Rock and Roll Rider. He says, five-star review, as always, “Finally, a business podcast that’s not about some entrepre-jock jet-setting around the world.” He writes, “I love podcasts and I’m an entrepreneur so you think that I’d have plenty to listen to, but here’s the thing, I’m also a husband and a father. Most business podcasts are all about getting 400 million people on a webinar or travel hacking your way to West Africa to learn SEO secret from exotic jungle cats. I’m a real person with a real family who became an entrepreneur so I could see more of them. I’m working to live not living to work and this podcast honors that and gives me great advice, kudos to you two.”
So anybody that works exotic jungle cats into our iTunes review, you are automatically on the podcast. Thanks for that review. We appreciate it. If you’ve not left us a review yet, go ahead and do that. Head over to iTunes. Leave us a review, tell us what you think of this show, and don’t forget to hit the subscribe button. That way, you’re automatically updated whenever we release a new podcast or a new Q&A. If you do leave us a review, we hopefully will read it on the air.
JOCELYN: And that’s one of the favorite parts of our day so if you have taken the time to leave us a review, we really appreciate it. We read every single one and we just thank you so much. They are just wonderful. We love taking the time to read those. So let’s get into content creation. First of all, we’re going to talk about what is content because you hear that word a lot when people are talking about online business. They are always creating content.
SHANE: Or promoting content.
JOCELYN: Yeah, something about content, so we thought we would start out by just saying, what is content? Well, very simply put, content is anything that you type or say online, so things like blog posts, digital products, even videos, anything that you share on social media. All of those things could be considered content and really, to put it very basically, the only way that you’re going to be successful online is if you create quality content, and in fact, really a lot of it. No matter how you look at it, creating content is a lot of work.
SHANE: And it can be really overwhelming especially when you first start out because you just feel behind the 8 ball. You’re like, “Oh my gosh. I want to start this blog. I want to start this website. I want to start this online business,” and you look around and you see all of your competition or all of these gurus, or all of these other people who have dozens or hundreds of articles, lots of videos on YouTube, and sometimes, it can feel like you just can’t catch up.
Even when you first start out, you’re going to have to create dozens of blog posts before you gain any traction. If you’re starting to make videos and podcasts, you’re going to have to first learn how to do those, plan them and then record them and edit them. There’s just so much to do when it comes to content creation that a lot of people get overwhelmed and stop their online business where they quit before they even get started because they just don’t feel like they can do it or they can’t keep up.
Especially if you have a digital product in mind or something that you want to do or sell online, that’s kind of your passion. That’s your dream is to get that into other people’s hands but then when you realize you’ve got to create all these other content just to support your products or your goals, that can get overwhelming and you can shut it down.
Today we’re going to talk about six content creation tips that will help you speed up your content creation and it’s also going to make it easier for you to produce high-quality content. Now we want to leave a little caveat here. These are things that we have learned over the last 2.5-3 years and we’re still working on some of them. This is not a perfect process for anybody but these are six of the things that we do now to make sure that we can create a lot of high quality content as fast as possible for our audience.
JOCELYN: Alright, so we’re going to start out with number one and it’s very fitting that I do this one because this is my nature. Number one tip for creating and planning quality content in less time is to plan out your content. We’ve talked about this before on the podcast how planning for some people is a little dirty four-letter word that they really don’t like.
SHANE: And by some people, she just looked right over at me across our desks.
JOCELYN: Just saying. So it is very important though that you plan it out. If you don’t have a plan for your content, chances are, you’re not going to get any of it done or it’s not going to be done on time. What you need to do is make a list of things that you want to write about or if it’s a podcast or video, a list of things that you want to talk about. If you don’t have any ideas, ask your audience. That’s the best place to get ideas for things to create.
We do this all the time. If we’re struggling with podcast topics or blog topics, or maybe Q&As, we do those every Sunday, we just ask our audience. We say, “Okay, what do you guys want to hear about?” People will respond. It might not be a whole lot of people, maybe only one or two people at first but even those short little ideas, they can give you maybe other ideas of things that you could write about that people want to hear.
I think a lot of times people think, “Well, somebody has already talked about that” or “So and so online does it better than me.” Well, your audience doesn’t care. Your audience is there to learn and read and consume your content. So just keep that in mind, even if you think it’s already been done to death, if someone asked you to do it, you should do it and that’s something that we kind of struggle with from time to time as well but you just have to keep that in mind.
You need to have a content release schedule and it doesn’t have to be anything tricky. In fact, we just did this a few minutes ago. We just wrote it down on a piece of paper with some dates. You need to have it planned. Make sure that your content coincides with events – maybe it’s holidays, maybe it’s a special sale that you have every year or that you plan to have every year, maybe it’s an event in your niche like for us, we sell a lot of things to education people, to coaches, and they all have certain seasons of the year that they buy things more often than others, so maybe you need to plan your content around those events. But you do need to have some type of calendar and have some kind of plan in mind for your content and when it is going to release.
As I was talking about earlier, if you do write this down, make sure that you save it somewhere. Even if it’s just taking a picture with your phone or if you want to put it into Google Drive, Dropbox, whatever it is that you use. Make sure that you do this because we have a really bad habit of writing things down and then we lose them or our kids cut them up or draw on the back of them or something like that.
SHANE: We tend to lose things around here if we leave them lying around. We have some five finger bandits with Anna and Isaac running around stealing things. And if you don’t have an audience and you’re trying to plan out what you’re going to write about, there’s nothing wrong with going and looking at other boards or other people’s Facebook or Twitter feeds where you can say, “Well, I don’t have an audience to poll but let me just go look at the questions being asked to other people in my niche. Let me go see what’s being searched for on Google” and those are the things you can plan to talk about. Even if you’re just brand new starting out when you’re planning your content and maybe you’re stuck on what to write about, there are plenty of places to go online and look to where you can get those topics for the content that you’re going to create.
JOCELYN: You can even go to Amazon. Look up some books about your topic, see what people are writing about in the chapters of the books, and make that a topic of your content if you don’t have an audience. So those are just some ideas that you can use to help plan out your content.
SHANE: All right, the second tip that we’re going to go over today is called batching. You want to batch your content. When Jocelyn and I first started out, we kind of tried to make content on the fly. We kind of set a schedule like we’re going to release a blog post every Monday or whatever you want that it is, but what happened was Sunday night would always roll around, other things would come up. The kids would break something, spill something, get sick, do whatever, something would always get in the way of creating that content during the week. So it’s a lot like when we were in college or in school, you wait until the last minute to do the term paper.
Well, it’s the same thing with our blog posts. We were pushing it right up to the minute that it would be released to get the stuff finished and we finally just said, “Enough is enough. There is no possible way that we can live like this from date to date, from blog post to blog post.” So we decided that we would start batching content and all we mean is that you set down a single time to do a lot of content. There’s no reason to make content in real time like when it’s due. You can sit down one day a month for three hours and write all of your blog posts for the month and then in WordPress and even on social media, there are ways to schedule those posts into the future.
If you wrote four blog posts on the first day of the month, you can schedule those out every Sunday once a week for the rest of the month and then the content creation is done. You batched all your content into one sitting so that you can just then focus on promoting your content, on making new products that you want to sell and you know it, in the back of your mind, “My content is scheduled. I don’t have to worry about that. I’ve kind of taken that off of our plate.” We do this with our podcasts. Most of the podcast that you listen to are all done in one sitting, especially like our Q&A podcasts.
We usually try to sit down once a month and we take all of the Q&A sessions that we do on our Facebook, we look through them and we pick out good questions, and we record eight of those in a row, and then we just schedule those for every Thursday and Saturday to come out over the month because there’s no possible way that we could take care of all the things we have to do in our online business if we were sitting there every Wednesday night, every Friday night recording those podcasts in real time. We even take our longer form podcasts, the one that you’re listening to right now, and we’ll do like three of these at a time and go ahead and interview someone at the beginning of the month for the Flipped Podcast or maybe we bring on one of our experts, and we go ahead and schedule those out.
We don’t want to go too far in the future. You can overdo this because things change so fast in our business, in our niche, and other niches that if something does change, you don’t want to have a podcast recorded six months in advance and it’s not relevant anymore when it airs, or a blog post, you schedule six months away and then all of sudden that’s not even needed anymore in your niche, but you do want to try to get a little bit ahead and batch all your content for like 4-8 weeks.
That way once it’s done, you can turn your attention to promoting content, writing emails, interacting with your audience, and most importantly, making products or services that are going to make you money. If you spend all your time making content, you’ll never be going to make a dime in online business. Sooner or later, you’ve got to put that away and you’ve got to start making things that you’re going to sell to make money, or all you’re really doing is blogging for a hobby. So the second tip is batch your content, get it all done over a couple of days for the next month so you can turn your attention to more important things in your business.
JOCELYN: All right, the third tip that we have for you is to make announcements that are related to content that basically say, “This content is coming soon.” We do this a lot. I do this a lot on my Elementary Librarian site as well because the fact of the matter is if you’re anything like us, nothing is going to light a fire under you faster to get something finished like letting your audience know that it’s coming.
SHANE: Yup.
JOCELYN: If you say something that “we’re planning on doing this product or this service and it’s coming out around this date, people will hold you to it. They will email you and be like, “Where’s this product or where’s this blog post?” We have it happen pretty often. So this really helps to build anticipation and it also builds expectation. Those two things are really important in an online business, or really any business for that matter.
What I’d like to do is put things on my calendar. There are hard deadlines. Hard deadlines are so important when it comes to creating your online content, publishing it, and getting it out there on time, so just something to keep in mind. Make sure that you’re always kind of giving your audience these little nuggets of “Hey, I’m getting ready to make this. I’m going to create this product, this service, this blog post, this video, whatever it is, maybe it’s a webinar. Just something that is of value that they are interested in that they are going to come back and say, “Hey, by the way, you mentioned that webinar, that podcast, or whatever it is,” and they are going to ask you. They are going to hold you accountable. They are going to say, “Where is this content? I need to see it.”
If you have that down on your calendar then that means that is going to happen. Shane and I, we have really become kind of slaves to our calendar. We use a Google calendar and we share it together. Pretty much, whatever is on the calendar is what’s going to get done. Make sure that you’re using some type of calendar if you’re not doing that already. It’s really important.
SHANE: What we do too is even in some things, we might have a new project and we don’t have an audience built for it yet, well, we will tell other people around us. We’ve got some friends that we talk about business with and if we don’t have that audience to hold us accountable yet, like you might not have a ton of people anticipating your information but you want to let someone know, “Hey, I’m going to make this” so that they will hold you accountable. Jocelyn and I do this all the time together. Jocelyn talks about the calendar, it’s so funny because if I’m putting something off, then Jocelyn will just stick it on the calendar and say, “Okay, you’ve got to get this done and it’s got to be done.”
I’ve got a weightlifting manual that I release for football coaches every year and it’s pretty much got to be done by the end of November. Right now, I’m going to start telling the coaches, “Hey, the 2000 whatever edition is going to be coming out soon. Get ready for this date,” and Jocelyn will stick it on the calendar, and that way, I’ve got the audience, my coaches, waiting for that digital product and I’ve got Jocelyn, my partner, or if you’ve got a mastermind group or a friend in business also holding me accountable so that they can push me to get that thing done.
JOCELYN: Another thing you can do is if you have a blog or website, you can actually stick a countdown on it.
SHANE: Oh yeah, that’s a good point.
JOCELYN: There are widgets that you can do this. We’ll try to find some of those and maybe stick those on the show notes for this episode but you can get on there and put a countdown and just say, “coming soon” whatever product or blog post or whatever it is, and just stick that countdown in there. That’s another way that you can hold yourself accountable. Just make sure that it’s in your calendar and you know when to expect or when your audience can expect that.
SHANE: You can actually do that on LeadPages too. If you use LeadPages to make your sales pages, LeadPages.net, then what you can do is you can say, “Hey guys, I’m going to make this and it’s going to be released in 60 days. Go here and put in your email address and I’ll email you as soon as it’s finished.” What happens is people will click on that, they will see this countdown. It’s like, “Oh, it’s coming,” and they will put their email in. They are excited, they are anticipating it, and now you’ve got a list of people to send things to as soon as you get that content done. You’re looking at that list going, “Man, there are 60 people waiting on this. I’ve got to finish it.”
Alright, the fourth tip that we have for getting content created faster is to curate content. Don’t make all of the content yourself. Curating content means kind of gathering related content or a post or information about a topic in one place. Think of it like a museum. You know, a museum curator is the guy at the museum or the girl at the museum that’s in charge of going around and finding all of the exhibits, finding all of the items that they are going to store in that one museum so that everybody can see them there.
If you’re in any niche, there is going to be a lot of other information out there created by other people that you could go and consume or curate for your website. You could share other people’s blog posts. If you find a video on YouTube, I actually did this on CoachXO.com one time. I found this video of a 400-lb running back. I don’t know how I found it on YouTube one day. He’s up in Seattle, Washington, or Oregon somewhere. Anyway, they’ve got video this kid running the ball and he weighs 400 lbs. He’s like 6’4” and I’ve never seen anything like it before.
What I did was, I didn’t have a blog post that week. I just grabbed that video and I wrote about 100 words of “Man, this is awesome. I wish I had this kid on my team. I’d run the football with him every time. What do you guys think?” And that post on my blog, even though it was a video of someone else who put up on YouTube, I just shared the embed link and I wrote a paragraph about it. That post got like 500 shares on Facebook. It was retweeted a ton of times and lots of people commented on that blog post, and all I did was go curate some content.
I just went and found something interesting in my space that was related to the content I normally create. It took me five minutes to copy the embed, put it down, write a paragraph about it, shared it with my audience. It went crazy and I got a ton of email signups and traffic from that post even though it wasn’t necessarily originally my content.
Now you don’t want to steal other people’s content. You don’t want to go and find a blog post you like and copy and paste it into your thing but you could go and say, “Man, I really like this article. It was about 2,000 words.” You could go write a summary of that article and just say, “Hey, so and so at this website wrote this great article about this. I really agree with this point. I disagree with this point. Click here and go read the full article,” and that way, you’re writing short quick content. You’re building relationships and sending traffic to other people in your space.
They are going to see that you linked to their site so they may link back. You could even go out and if you find good articles or find things that you like that other people have created, then go ask that person, “Hey, would you like to write like a part two of this or just write maybe a short blog post for my site and I’ll link back to you?” Go out and curate content. Find other things, video, audio, products that you could review, anything that you can use as a starter to help you just get some things out, post something regularly. Bring that back and kind of highlight that on your blog post.
JOCELYN: You can also do this on Pinterest. I do this a lot of times with my Elementary Librarian site. I have written posts about, like, Halloween in the Library and what I’ll do is I’ll go on to Pinterest, I’ll find Halloween related things that are relevant to school libraries, and I’ll put those on the Pinterest board. So that’s another way of curating content, and then I’ll share that with my audience. I’ll say, “Hey, I made this Pinterest board. Go check it out. It’s all kinds of things that you could use in the library.” And then on your blog, post about your Pinterest board of curated content, people will share that with other people, and so that, in turn, brings more people to your website.
SHANE: The internet makes it really easy to curate and share content. People want their content shared. They just don’t want their content stolen. Don’t copy, don’t plagiarize, don’t say something is yours but if someone puts a YouTube video up and they allow it to be embedded into other websites, well, don’t just link to the YouTube video. Put the YouTube embed in a blog post, talk a little bit about it, and just say, “Hey, what do you guys think?”
Think about BuzzFeed and Mash and all these sites you see all the time on your Facebook News Feed. You click them, there’s one sentence and it’s just a YouTube video but the traffic went to Buzz Feed. The ads that are being shown are from BuzzFeed. They got the traffic thereby content that was allowed to be shared around the internet. So if you’re really struggling to produce a lot of quality content, go down to one blog post a month and a couple of times, curate content, comment on it, and kind of be the curator of your niche.
JOCELYN: All right, the fifth tip for creating more content in less time is to create relevant artwork and schedule Facebook posts and tweets related to the content. This is actually something you’re going to do after your content is created or curated. Once you get those big tasks done, it’s time to start concentrating on the little tasks and these are things that you don’t need to get hung up on. I feel like a lot of times, people will do these things and they make it sort of a roadblock for publishing their content. Don’t do that but once you do get the bulk of the content finished, you want to do these little things to kind of make your content shine a little bit more.
The first way you can do that is by creating artwork for your post podcast or video. This is really important for sharing on social media or like people, you want them to be able to pin it on Pinterest and if there’s not an image there, it’s a lot harder for them to do that. You can do this by using Canva.com. That is my current favorite online tool for making artwork for posts. It is totally free. There are things that you can buy on Canva if you want to purchase their images or you can upload your own, but it is great. It is super quick. It is a really easy and fast way just to make little pictures, things with words on them that just say something about your content, something that could be shared that would draw people’s eye. You want people to be engaged with your content but also able to share it in a meaningful way because sharing texts is one thing but sharing a nice quality image is another, so just something to think about on that.
I’m actually working on a blog post about using Canva and I’m almost finished with it. You see that I’m making a content announcement so I can hold myself accountable for getting that done for you guys. So hopefully, by the time this podcast airs, well, I’m not even going to say hopefully, I’m going to say by the time this podcast airs, I will have my Canva.com post finished and ready to go so you can see how I use Canva to create images for my various websites and podcasts. I will work on that and I will have it finished, and there will be a link in the show notes.
SHANE: What Jocelyn is saying here too is when she said, “Don’t get hung up on the images and stuff,” like, you can post, we do this all the time, sometimes, we’ll have a post done or a podcast is done and it’s due out but we might not have it exactly perfect yet. We always try to create some kind of pinnable image for every post that we do, whether it’s audio, just a blog post whatever it is, but if that image is not done yet, go ahead and post your content. You can just put up the picture that you’re going to use and maybe you’ve not put words on the picture, you have not manipulated it yet, always remember, you can go back and change things later so don’t let this be a roadblock to you when you’re creating artwork.
Get your post out, get the text out. Get things into Google. Get the information into your audience’s hand. You can always go back and pretty it up and touch it up later and the same thing we said earlier with batching. When you’re doing this art work stuff, if you already have a good plan and you know all of your content is about, you can batch all of your art work together, like say, you know you’ve got four blog posts coming up and you’ve got titles to them all and you know kind of what the images are going to be, make all the pictures at once or get all the articles written, get them posted, get them scheduled, and then batch all that art work together and do it later. Don’t let it be kind of a hang up before you put everything out.
The sixth tip that we have for creating more content in less time is to record, transcribe, and reuse your content. Writing content is extremely time-consuming. I would argue that writing blog posts probably takes the longest amount of time of any other kind of content creation because it’s just so consuming when you’re sitting there in front of the keyboard and there are distractions and all this other stuff. So what we try to do a lot, we try to use a lot of audio and video because we can record it in real time. Jocelyn and I are very DIY. We don’t get into the huge high production value. Our goal is to get the best information in front of people as fast as possible so we love podcasting because we can just record it and we’re done. We love videos, screen captures where we can just get on do something into videos made, we upload it, and we’re ready to go.
The problem with that is Google can’t hear or see yet exactly what you’re doing when you do that. If I post this audio, Google doesn’t exactly know how to index that or can’t index that as quickly as it could a blog post or text, and we want Google to index things as fast as possible so we can get found quickly in the search results. But what we do is everything that we record we transcribe. We pay someone usually it’s a virtual assistant overseas, usually in the Philippines, to transcribe it and you can get this done very cheaply. I’ve had it 30 minutes of audio done for as cheap as $7 before. You can get this done really inexpensively and it’s a great way to make content really, really fast. So here’s kind of how it works.
Let’s say that we have a 45-minute podcast. In 45 minutes, we’re going to say literally thousands of keyword-rich phrases and words, so what we do is we take that text after the transcription is written and we just stick that into the blog post. If you go to this episode of the podcast, if you go to FlippedLifestyle.com/podcast17, you’ll go down and you’ll see where it says, “Can’t listen now, read the transcript” and you can click a button and it will open up and all of the text, every word that we have spoken in this episode will be there and the great thing about that is, if someone can’t listen to the podcast, they can read it. If they are at work or on their lunch break or something like that, they can read it right there and they don’t have to worry about bothering the people around them.
And Google is indexing every single word that we speak as soon as we publish that blog so that we can be found. We get a lot of, we probably get 43-45%, I think, it’s what we looked at the other day, of our traffic actually comes from Google. So Google is seeing and indexing all those words. We rarely blog post. We haven’t actually done a blog post I think in two or three months because we’ve been so focused on our podcast and our consulting and our courses, but we’re still getting indexed, we’re still getting found in Google because we transcribe all of that stuff.
You can also reuse the same content when you kind of have this philosophy and use it for multiple purposes. Remember, not everyone is going to consume your content in the same way. Some will read it, some will listen to it, and some will watch it. So what you could do is you could record like say a video. Say you record a 20-minute video. You could publish that video on YouTube and publish it in a blog post, and now you’ve got a video blog post. Well, you could take the audio off of that video. You could strip it out and then you could release that as a podcast next week and the people that watched the video and the people that listened to the audio from iTunes are not going to be the same people. They are going to be consuming content in different ways.
So now you’ve got two blog posts out of the same 20-minute video recording but then you could have that 20 minutes of audio transcribed and maybe on your video you talked about four different topics for five minute each, you could have those transcribed, add a picture to each one like Jocelyn said earlier, and now you can use that, the text, and that picture, and you have four blog posts. In 20 minutes of video, you created the content for six weeks of blog posts and now you’ve got six different posts on your website talking about the same topic. So Google is going to see that you’re doing a lot of related work and talking about the same thing and different aspects of your website, and it’s going to give you more authority.
Everyone that comes to your site is not going to read every article, so they may only catch the five minutes that matter to them or the 20-minute video they wanted to watch or hear the audio that they wanted to listen to. So for 20 minutes of work, you’ve got six weeks of blog posts done. Whenever you’re always creating content, always think of ways that you can get it done quickly like record audio, use it again like with transcriptions, and create ways that you can share that in multiple places so you’re using a little bit of work to create a whole lot of content.
JOCELYN: Okay, so there are six simple tips for creating more content in less time. Hope those were helpful for you all. Don’t let the content creation scare you. It is a necessary part of this business. Creating content, it can be very time consuming but the systems that we talked about today do make it easier to do and make it a little bit less overwhelming.
Before we go, we want to share our Can’t Miss Moments for this week. Our Can’t Miss Moments are the little things that we are able to do because we started an online business and we flipped our lifestyle so that our family is more important than our work. Okay Shane, let’s talk about our Can’t Miss Moment for this week.
SHANE: Alright, I think our Can’t Miss Moment was the same for both us. It was we got to take our kids to Fall Festival together and this would have never been possible before because I would have always been at football practice or had a game and I’ve never been able to take our kids to Fall Festivals or anything like that during this time of year because I’ve always been working and doing something else.
We took Isaac and Anna to Isaac’s school and we got to meet other friends and each teacher had a different game in each room and we got to play those. It was just cool to be able to hang out together and be like a family and actually do those things in the fall just because I’d never been able to experience those like pretty much for the last 10 years and since our kids have been born, six years ago when Isaac was born. It’s just awesome to be able to go there as a family and do all of those things and actually be able to participate.
JOCELYN: We also volunteered for Isaac’s teacher. Each classroom had a game and so their game was a little bowling game. She just had some ghosts, like little felt ghost eyes and mouths. They were actually on rolls of toilet paper and she got some little pumpkins. I don’t know if they were plastic or what they were and the kids rolled them down and it was like a bowling game. So we set up the toilet paper up on top of each other like a little pyramid and the kids would roll the pumpkins down and try to knock them over.
That’s something we were able to do. I’ve really never been able to volunteer at a Fall Festival first of all because I usually work there and had a game of my own and also because I never had anybody to help me with the kids because Shane was always gone. It was just nice to be able to have us all there together and just going around and playing games and just having a good time at the Fall Festival. That was definitely a Can’t Miss Moment for this week.
SHANE: Another thing is volunteering, even when we had chances to volunteer in the past, we volunteered so that Isaac’s teacher could take her kids around to play games because nobody else had volunteered to help her and we were like, and before, I didn’t even feel like volunteering when I could because I’m like, I work all the time. I’ve got to spend time with my kids when I do it but now, it’s like because we have so much more freedom, we can actually help other people and that’s pretty awesome that we get to do that.
JOCELYN: That’s really what our life is all about now. It’s not just about us. It’s about what can we do to make other people’s lives better and to me, that’s the best kind of life that you can live.
SHANE: Alright guys, that’s it for this week. We have an awesome episode for you next week. We’ve been waiting for this one to come out for a while. We’re going to talk about how to get higher open rates on your email list. We get a lot of questions about building an audience and then getting people to open those emails once you collect them so we’ve finally been able to sit down and put that into a podcast and it doesn’t matter how many emails you collect if nobody opens them. So this is going to be a very valuable podcast for you guys to show you how we get our audience to open our emails.
Jocelyn and I over many different niches get very, very high open rates, way higher than industry standards. You hear all the gurus talk about, “Oh you’re getting 30% open rates? Wow, that’s exceptional.” Well, Jocelyn and I routinely get well over 60 and approaching 70% open rates in different niches and it’s because of some very specific strategies that we have developed that we think are pretty unique. So you don’t want to miss episode 18 when we talk about how you can get higher open rates on your email list and we’re going to go into a little bit on list building in that episode as well. Until next time guys, we will catch you all on the flipside. Thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: See ya, bye.
One more thing guys, if you would like immediate one-on-one help from Jocelyn and myself, all you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/TalkToUs, that’s all one word. You can check out our consulting services. We do not do a lot of consulting but we do block out a few hours a week where we can get on the phone, get on Skype, get on a Google Hangout, and talk to you about your online business where you can work personally with me and Jocelyn to help you go to the next level.
If you need any help, if you need one on one attention and you just can’t wait until maybe we select you for a Flipped Podcast, all you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/TalkToUs and you can check out when our schedule is available for you to get on a consulting call. [/spoiler]
Ronnie Brown says
This was an awesome episode. I have been stuck. I know I need to write 10 posts to get started, but on what? Your show was great inspiration. I got eight sticky notes of ideas for articles and content for my site! Thanks so much!!!
Nathan says
Wow this is super helpful.
Who could you recommend for transcribing podcasts?
And how do you make that link that drops down the transcription?
I would LOVE to have transcriptions of MicroBrewr podcast (for my audience and also for my own reference). I’m not ready for that yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
THANKS!
Roman St. James says
This was a truly brilliant episode! Content creation is definitely the major barrier for most people (including myself) when it comes to creating a successful blog, and I found this EXTREMELY helpful! I do a lot of reading and listen to a lot of podcasts regarding online business and marketing, and the thing that really sets Shane and Jocelyn’s ‘Flipped Lifestyle’ apart from 99% of everyone else teaching online is that they give SO MUCH information on a topic! Most of the time when I listen to other people, I get the impression that they’re holding back some of the information that they possess, almost as though they’re worried about creating too many competitors – or of giving away info that they would like to sell you at some point in the future. With Shane & Jocelyn, I really believe them when they say their main objective is to ‘give back’ by helping others be successful online, and I think it’s clearly evident in podcasts like this one. Thanks so much!
Jocelyn Sams says
Thanks so much, Roman. We truly appreciate your kind words. We truly do want to give back and help others and I’m glad it shines through in our work. 🙂 Thanks for taking your time to leave a comment for us. We personally read every single one.
Julie Rains says
Jocelyn and Shane thank you so much for all the great advice today! At times it seems very overwhelming to have a business online. It’s good to hear a great success story that I can relate to!! My husband and I have been struggling for one year trying to learn the ends and outs only to be disappointed at the end of the day. I am committed to staying focus so we may have the freedom you and Shane now have.
Blessings,
Jackie Johnson says
I’ve listened to every one of your podcast episodes, and have to say they’ve ALL been chock full of great tips and insights! This one was an especially good reminder to me that I don’t have to always write 100% of my own content…using content curation and your other tips, like converting video to transcripts and breaking down even further into multiple posts was pure gold. I’ve just started my new business site and am working to populate content while I work a full-time job. These tips will really help me utilize my limited time to the fullest.
Thanks for the work you do to share this information with your listeners. Keep it coming!
Pauline says
Another great podcast! I love the review you read out, it’s so true. I’ve been telling other parents about your podcast too.
I have a quick question about transcripts. Can Google still index the text of a transcript if it is posted on the website as a PDF download (like Pat Flynn does on his SPI site), or does it only do this if you post the transcript directly onto the site? Thanks!
Nathan says
That’s a great question, Pauline. I’ve also been wondering that.
Pauline says
Actually, I just did a quick Google search just now. Short answer is yes. Longer answer is, there are pros and cons according to a few articles that show up in the search results.
Nathan says
Interesting…
Sonny says
Great show! Very informative.
Do you guys have any suggestions on inexpensive transcription services?
Thanks for your help!
Shane Sams says
Try oDesk.com, you can put jobs out there and get very reasonable prices from freelancers all over the world.
Nathan says
Thanks for the tip! I found a good one on oDesk. Very helpful.
Sonny says
Thanks Shane!