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In today’s podcast we are going to show you how to choose a topic for your digital product!
One of the hardest decisions you make in online business is choosing your niche!
Figuring out what to sell is tough, and can be a major roadblock in getting started online.
In this episode, we share our best 3 tips for choosing the topic of your digital product including:
1) Why you don’t have to be “the expert” in your niche to make money online
2) How to study your competition to figure out exactly what your target market demands
3) How we use keyword research to determine exactly what our audience wants to buy.
Can’t Miss Moments This Week:
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. 🙂
Free Keyword Research Tutorial!
As a special bonus, we have recorded a free tutorial on keyword research to help you identify a niche for your online business and choosing a topic for your digital product!
This isn’t your standard keyword research video, and we are not pushing some affiliate product that helps you look up topics.
This is a free video, full of free tools, that will help you quickly and easily find keywords that people are searching for online.
Your market will tell you what to create, all you have to do is look for what they are searching for online!
Click here to watch the keyword research video right now!
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible 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 how to choose the right topic for your digital product.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your host, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys! We wanted to start today’s show by reading a podcast review from iTunes. We appreciate this so much and we’ve gotten several recently. I wanted to read one today by Shiny Shell, is the person’s username I guess.
SHANE: That is an awesome username.
JOCELYN: It says, “I love this couple’s podcast because they throw out realistic numbers when it comes to making extra income online. They emphasize taking action and giving practical advice on how to get started right away. The podcast is fun and refreshing. Shane and Jocelyn come across as genuinely sincere and you can tell they are the perfect foil for one another.”
SHANE: For my British audience, foil I guess is where they came from. I don’t know.
JOCELYN: I really like that. It’s really true. I mean, we are sort of very opposite in a good way. So, thank you so much for that awesome review and if you would like to review the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, we really appreciate that. Just go on to iTunes and just go to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and you can type us your review.
SHANE: Those are very important for our podcast rankings and iTunes actually figures in iTunes reviews when they see who’s going to be like, you know, the top 10 podcast in various niche or whatever. I’m going to put a link in the show notes. We really appreciate it if you find value in this podcast if you would go to iTunes and leave us a review and help us move up the rankings, okay?
Let’s move on to today’s topic. We’ve been getting a lot of emails lately, hundreds of emails really from all over the world. It’s been mind-blowing to see how our audience has grown so fast. The same question keeps popping up.
Whenever anyone talks to us in email about digital products or starting their online business, they always seem to ask what in the world could I sell? Where do I even start? What could I turn into a digital information product? This question just keeps coming up over and over and over again.
Today, we thought we would help you guys get unstuck. If you are kind of like, paralysis by analysis, you’re frozen kind of how to move forward in your online business, and you can’t even really narrow down a topic that you want a create an e-Book or maybe a video series on.
We came up with three tips that we use when we’re creating a digital product or choosing the next topic for a product that we want to create to help you figure out where to begin, where to start. Let’s get into those right now.
One of the first things that most people say to us is what do I know that someone would pay for? I think that people really underestimate the knowledge that they have acquired to their experiences because everyone knows something that someone else will pay for. You know the solution to someone else’s problem.
A guy named Corbett Bar over at expertenough.com, he says that everyone is expert enough at something. You know something that you may not be like a Nobel Prize winner or scientist, but you know enough to teach someone else that doesn’t know that.
For example, let’s say that your tires flat and you don’t know how to change a tire. Well, you don’t have to go hire a mechanic who works in the engineering department at Toyota who creates engines from scratch to fix your tire. You just got to have someone that can fix a tire. So, you hire them and you give the money and they fix your tire.
You don’t have to know everything about a topic to be an expert and create a product. A funny story that I always love to tell to people is this. If you’re running from a bear in the woods, you got a bear chasing you and you’re with a buddy, you don’t have to be the fastest man on the planet.
You don’t have to be Usain Bolt or whatever the guy’s name is, the one who has gold medals. You just have to be faster than your buddy because if you outrun your buddy, the bear is going to get him and he won’t get you. You don’t have to be the biggest expert on something to start a digital product about it. You just have to know more than the person that you’re trying to sell for, sell to.
JOCELYN: And also, you just have to know more than people who are not willing to make a digital product.
SHANE: Oh, good point.
JOCELYN: If you’re willing to make a digital product and there are other people out there who are more expert in that subject or topic, then you win because you’re the person who’s actually taking action on making that product. That’s just something to consider also.
Anybody is more advanced in certain areas than other people. The other night, I was in here doing a webinar and my son was still awake. He was supposed to be sleeping.
SHANE: At 10 o’clock for some reason. I don’t know.
JOCELYN: He was kind of peeking around the corner and like I saw him watch me, which makes me nervous because I don’t really like people to watch me.
SHANE: Especially when she’s doing something like this. She can’t stand me staring at her right now while we’re recording our podcast.
JOCELYN: That’s right. Get your eyes off me.
SHANE: Sorry.
JOCELYN: Isaac was kind of peeking around the corner. When I got off the webinar, he came in the room with me and he said, “Mommy, I’m going to make a webinar for preschoolers and kindergarteners about playing games on my iPad.”
SHANE: He said, “Because I know more than they do about this. I’m ahead of them.”
JOCELYN: Yeah. I asked Shane, I’m like, “Did you tell him that?” And he was like, “No. He just said that himself.” So, I just thought that was so interesting because even my 5-year-old son can see that he knows more about something than someone else, and really, that’s all that you need.
You just need to be willing to do it and just to have some experience in something.
You’re always ahead of somebody else. You can always teach them something. If your day job is not ideal for creating a digital product… like I got an email the other day from a gentleman who said that he worked in a government office and his day was very routine. He didn’t really see any opportunity in creating a product in what he was doing for his day job.
Well, what about your hobbies or your interest? Just think about some of those things. You will be surprised at what people will be willing to pay for. I don’t know if you’ve been to the bookstore lately but Shane and I were in there the other day, we’re big nerds to really love to go…
SHANE: We love the bookstore.
JOCELYN: Yeah. We go to the bookstore and hang out.
SHANE: It’s terrible, just nerds.
JOCELYN: Previous librarian, you know, can’t get that out of my system. I was standing in there and I was looking at some of the marketing books, imagine that. A guy walks by me and he said, “Look at all these books in here.” He said, “I think every other book is a for dummies book.” And it really is.
SHANE: Beginners guide to.
JOCELYN: Yeah. People are wanting to start from the beginning. They are wanting to learn something new. If you know something that they don’t know, then teach it to them.
SHANE: We always tell people to, people look at us like, “Wow, you really hit this off. You’ve really made a lot of money.” We don’t know everything about online business or even the subjects that we talk about. There are primary source of income comes from our niches and our niches are football coaching and elementary librarians.
I am not the greatest Hall of Fame football coach that ever lived and Jocelyn was not an elementary librarian with 30 years of experience and National Awards when she started her websites. We just were, we knew more than a lot of people did about our subjects because we were passionate about them and we studied them. Like Jocelyn said, we did it. We were willing to do it.
We were willing to put in the time and effort, and make the sacrifices to get our digital products out there and there may be someone who runs my defense better than me but guess what? He didn’t write a playbook. So, he’s not making the money on it.
You can do the same thing. If you know something, all you have to do is get it out there. People will identify you, with you and they will buy your product.
JOCELYN: That takes us to Tip #2. Tip #2 is, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can go out there and see what other people are doing. This is the beauty of the internet. Years ago, when the internet did not exist or at least people weren’t using it widely, there wasn’t much of an opportunity to see what other people were doing. The only thing that you had really was the Yellow Pages or the phone book or…
SHANE: If you’re remembering what a Yellow Pages look like, we’re really dating ourselves here. Some of you millennials in your 20s had a look at this. You might not remember the old phonebook but we do.
JOCELYN: That was pretty much all you had or like you could drive down the street and to see what shops were open. But today on the internet, we can look around and see who’s out there doing what I’m doing, who is doing it well. How could I change it or make it better? What could I do in the same space that would maybe differentiate me from other people?
This is so easy to see online now. You can just type in a search, look it up, and see who is out there and what they are doing. Some other ideas that you can do, you can go to Amazon and look for books. Maybe you’re interested in a particular subject and you want to see who else out there is writing about it. You can get on Amazon, do a quick search for a book.
You can usually even see a chapter list of what those people are writing about. That’s really a great way to sort of outline a product. You don’t have to copy it certainly but it just gives you an idea of what people are including in their products about the same topic. You can also look on YouTube for videos. YouTube is one of the top search engines right now.
SHANE: I think it’s the second one actually behind Google, I think.
JOCELYN: Yeah. People are out there creating videos about everything you can possibly imagine. Go out there and look, see who’s making videos about what you are doing. See if there’s a way that maybe you can make a video and make it different, make it your own, make it unique. You can also go to iTunes and look for podcasts. See if anyone is podcasting about your subject.
I actually was head started an elementary library in podcast about a year ago and I didn’t think at that time there was another librarian podcast, but lo and behold, someone asked me to be on one. I mean, it just goes to show you never know who is out there doing something that is similar to what you’re doing. You can get ideas from each other. You can even collaborate in some way. Shane does that with a friend of his.
Don’t be afraid to do that if that is something that you’re interested in. See what they are doing. Don’t copy them exactly but sort of pattern your product on there’s. See ways that you can make it unique, ways that you can make it better, ways that you can make it your own.
SHANE: Once you pick what you’re going to do, just roll into it and do that research like Jocelyn was saying. I was stuck really what I wanted to make as my first digital product. I kind of have the same fears that all of you probably do. “I’m going to write a playbook but hundreds of other coaches write a playbook.” I’m going to write a play book and, “Oh, these guys are so much more experienced than me writing playbooks.’
I just decided. You know what, I’m going to do it because people are probably going to relate to my voice, my opinions and things like that. That’s really what connects people with products is the person who wrote it. Even though someone else may have written the product already, you’re still going to be able to jump into that space and people are going to identify with you and become your customers because they prefer to deal with you.
I actually did this, Jocelyn said something about researching on Amazon. I was really stuck. I was like, “Man I want to make this playbook but I don’t know what to put in and I don’t know people want to buy.” She basically said, “Shane, go to Amazon and just see what all the other playbooks look like.”
That’s what I did. I went to Amazon and I just typed in Defense Play Books for Football. I started looking at the chapters of all of these books and I said to myself, Okay, all of these different books include all of these things.” They include how to line up your players. They include drills for your football players. They include this. They include that.
When I wrote my first playbook, I just said, “Okay, I’m going to take kind of an average of what everyone included and that’s going to be my chapter list.” I wrote down 10 chapters and that really gave me a good outline of what I needed to put in my book. And then I put my content, the stuff out of my brain went into those chapters and filled in the outline.
But another thing that I did was I said, “Okay, now what do these playbooks not have?” So, I look, same thing, went to Amazon, looked at all these different chapters, all these different books, and I realized nobody included practice plans. Everyone said how to run the defense but no one ever said how to teach your players to learn this defense.
So, that’s what the extension, the second product that I made. That really was a good product for us, made thousands of dollars. We were able to charge over $200 for it. That’s how I came up with that. I looked to whatever everyone else was already doing. I made my own because I wanted to get into the space and I knew that people would identify with me than other people.
Like, a lot of people say, “Well, you’re not Nick Saban,” which is a big-time football coach. They say, “How can you possibly write a playbook that anybody would listen to?” I said, “Well, the last I checked, Nick Saban doesn’t email you back when you ask him a question.” I had an advantage there and I could relate.
Nick Saban’s talking about being the head coach at Alabama, the greatest college football team in America. My kids cannot do what his kids did. I focused on high school coaches because that’s who I related to and they related to me. Once I figured out something that nobody else was doing, nobody else was creating this practice plans, I had a product that sold like gangbusters because I was offering something unique, something different, and you will do the same thing. Just figure out what you have to start with. Get it done and let that product then grow into something else.
JOCELYN: Yeah. Just like Shane was saying, there are billions of people on the earth. People will relate to you, not just to your content. It’s just like the book that I always quote, Start with Why by Simon Sinek, we’ll put a link to that in the Show Notes. It is a fantastic book. But people do not buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Just keep that in mind as you are creating these products and creating these spaces to sell them.
Just think about you’re listening to this podcast. It’s certainly not because we’re making billions of dollars online. It’s not because we have the best websites or the best systems or the best podcast or anything else out there. There are a lot of people who’ve been doing this a lot longer and know a lot more than we do, but it’s because you relate to us in some way that makes you want to listen to this podcast, which we greatly appreciate by the way.
SHANE: That’s the thing is when you relate to someone, not only are you going to learn more from them and be really into what they’re doing, but you’re going to pay them money. We’re not saying that you should send us money, but it would be awesome if you just wanted to send us money. I would totally accept that. If we have a good product that’s going to solve your problem and you like dealing with us, it’s the same thing.
It’s the same reason you go to the same person to cut your hair all the time. You go because they cut your hair good but you go because you want to talk to them. It’s the same reason that you buy insurance from your insurance agent. You just like to deal with those people or your frequent stores. People are going to do the same thing online.
Don’t think just because you’re not the foremost expert on something that people are not going to buy your products or they are not going to look at your stuff. If you put the content out there and you show your personality, people will relate to you and they will become your customer and you can sell stuff online, okay.
All right, the third tip that we have is this. We have a powerful tool at our disposal and that is search engines. Search engines tell you if your product is viable. You can go to Google and see what people are searching for. There’s a tool called the Google AdWords Keyword tool that allows you to actually see search results.
Like, okay, I’ve type in “football” and I see that 39 million people searched through the word “football” or I searched for “football coaching” and 26,000 people this month search for “football coaching.” You can even just go to the Google search and type in something, like type in your topic.
Let’s say you’re a gardener. You want to teach other people how to start, I don’t know, a gardening business or something. Well, go type in “gardening business” and a little list will drop out of the search bar, those are all terms that other people have searched for. That is a great way to research your topic and figure out what you want to make as a topic.
If you have this big general category, like gardening, maybe you want to do some kind of blog about gardening or you want to write a book about gardening tips, or something like that, all you have to do is go to Google and you can search for topics and terms that people are actually looking for about gardening or your topic.
That will help you really narrow down what your digital product is going to be about because if people are looking for it, you know, a lot of online marketers right now talk about, “Oh, you got to be on social media. You’ve got to buy Facebook ads. You’ve got to buy Twitter ads. Social media marketing is where it’s at.” I tell you right now. Jocelyn and I do not spend very much money at all, do we, Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: No. We have very rarely placed ads.
SHANE: Very rarely.
JOCELYN: We do occasionally.
SHANE: Occasionally but not very much.
JOCELYN: Not routinely.
SHANE: We do not spend a lot of money on social media and things like that because I know this. When people are searching for something on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, if you do use another search engine, but if you’re searching for something online, you have a problem and you want it fixed.
If you go YouTube, you’re looking up a video to tell you how to do something. If you go to Google, you’re looking for information to fix something in your life. If you have a broke toilet, you’re going to go to YouTube and you’re going to say “broke toilet” and you’re going to look for a solution or a video…
JOCELYN: Or “broken toilet” if you want to use proper English.
SHANE: Well, sorry. It’s a broke toilet in Kentucky. It’s broken, in probably other parts of country. But, well right here, we’re fixing a broke toilet – I’m just saying. But you’re looking for those solutions. If you want to see if your digital product is even viable, all you have to do is go to Google and do some searches, see what people are looking for in a little box that drops down or you can go use the Google AdWords keywords tool.
You can actually see actual numbers of 1,200 people a month are searching for this. Well, that’s 1,200 potential customers for the topic of your digital product. If you want to narrow down your focus on what you should create as your digital product, the best thing to do is go look and see what people are searching for.
JOCELYN: Don’t spend too much time on this. It is definitely not an exact science and we certainly do not have all this figured out. There are people out there who know tons about this and spend lots of time doing this. It’s really more of a way just to figure out the best keyword for your topic rather than just searching out and finding a particular topic to use. Just think about that as you’re doing this keyword research. It’s really just to guide you to figuring out where you might go next.
SHANE: You can waste a lot of time doing keyword research, like a lot of time. You could sit there for hours and look at all these keywords and try to pick the perfect thing. Keywords are important but they’re not everything. If anybody tells you that they’re the most important thing on earth, I’ll tell you right now that they’re wrong.
We got so into keywords when we first started doing this. We were trying to get our domain names to be this perfect keyword that everybody searched for. You had this, “Oh you got to find something that has 6,000 searches a month.” But that is not true. This is just a guideline to help you kind of narrow down your focus and just to see what in general people are looking for.
Don’t get bogged down into keyword research. What you’re really looking for is just identifying something that someone is looking for in it in a very general sense. Are coaches looking for this playbook? Yes, there’s x some amount of searches, well write a playbook. Don’t try to figure out exactly what the best title for your playbook should be out of your keywords. It’s just a way to kind of, in a very broad overview of seeing what people are looking for to help you focus and narrow your topic down.
I was a football coach so I kind of looked at some different things and I figured out that a lot of coaches are looking for this specific defense playbook. I pick that. I didn’t really stress over it. I didn’t have to create a whole website with that exact keyword as my domain but it’s just a way to help you narrow your focus and choose what you want to write a digital product about.
Don’t spend money on this. This is a huge tip. You do not have to buy some keyword research tool that is going to help you do this because here’s the thing, all of the tools on the market actually just pull the data from Google AdWords tool. It’s the same thing. You just have to learn how to read the data and there are a couple of extensions that you can add in the Google Chrome browser that will kind of give you all the data that those paid products pull out anyway.
If you will go to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast7 once you’re done with this podcast, I’m actually going to do like a 5-10 minute video that shows you exactly how I do keyword research for free. I’m going to show you what we use, how we do it, and if we’re looking for a topic for a blog post or we’re looking for that next digital product that we’re going to create on our product line.
I’m actually going to create a 5-10 minute video where I’ll show you exactly how to do that. What extensions to put into your browser just to give you an idea of what to look for when you’re trying to make that product. Go to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast7 and I will have that video there waiting for you so that you can kind of look at your subject matter and you can narrow that down into what product you want to create.
JOCELYN: Just one more note on doing keyword research, don’t get really discouraged if the keyword that you’re targeting does not have a lot of searches because one of our most successful sites only has like 200 searches per month according to Google.
SHANE: It’s like 480, I think was the keyword of that product or something like that which is not a lot. The gurus say thousands and so.
JOCELYN: Most of the “experts” would tell you that’s probably not the best way to go but that site alone has done well over 6 figures in the past couple months. Don’t listen to that necessarily.
SHANE: The thing is, it might just be a permutation of that keyword that people are actually looking for that you didn’t think of or you didn’t find. They’re going to find your content in other ways. It’s just exciting. Here’s the thing, if there are 500 people out there looking for something, well, what if you could sell a $50 product to 100 of those people, then what is that, math, $5,000? Yeah. That’s like $5,000. That’s just to give you an idea of what product that you’re going to create. It’s not the “end all, be all” of everything. But it does help you kind of narrow your focus.
Another thing too, is this, we’ve kind of ramble a little bit today. I hope this made sense. This is not your only chance. A lot of you are creating your first product. You’re trying to figure out what to do online. This is not the only product you will ever make. This is not the only chance you are ever going to get. The internet is very forgiving. Within the span of like, the first three months, we did this, I bet I tried at least six or seven different small websites.
The internet is very forgiving. If something is not working, all you have to do is make a new digital product. It takes like two weeks, maybe three. You can try that. Don’t get caught up in your first digital product. Don’t get frustrated and paralyzed by that fear of, “Oh, I’m going to screw this up forever.” Just pick something and just do something.
If it doesn’t work, do something else. You have plenty of opportunities to keep trying this until you get it right. Just like we did, eventually, something is going to stick and you’re going to be able to try and make some money online.
Don’t let the fear of messing up stop you from creating a digital product. Just pick something, anything. It doesn’t matter. If it’s even remotely related to what you like or what you’re doing, pick that, make it, get it over with, put it out there, and if somebody likes it, then they will download or buy it.
What were you saying to me about the, you said something about email? We were talking about opt-ins earlier or opt-in strategy and you were like, “If you were creating opt-in…” What were you talking about in the car earlier?
JOCELYN: Basically, you might want to start with your free opt-in. That’s what I did when I started elementary librarian. I made an entire month of lesson plans, sort of as like as a preview. I just put it out there and I thought if people like this and they want to buy it, then I’ll make more. That sort of how I would recommend baby stepping into this.
If you create something and you put it out there and people want to download it for free, then chances are they probably also want to buy it. That’s how I would recommend or we would recommend getting started to you.
SHANE: Those are the three tips for choosing your niche or choosing your digital product topic. The first thing we said was to pick something that you are an expert in. You don’t have to be The Expert in. You just have to know something, know a little more than your customers. You have to be expert enough as Corbett Bar over at expertenough.com would say.
The second tip was: do some quick research on what’s already out there and just kind of pattern your product after that. Go to Amazon, find a book about your topic that you want to write about, write down their chapters and just kind of pattern your book off of that. Don’t copy their material but just kind of see what they put in theirs and that’s where you can get some ideas to put in yours.
The third tip was to get on the search engines and just see what people are looking for and pick something. Find something that you know people are looking for, choose that, and create your digital product.
Every week, we try to put in a few Can’t Miss Moments and these are moments that we experienced like in the last week or two that we might have missed if we had not started our online business, started creating digital products and we were still working for someone else. We have two Can’t Miss Moments this week. They’re a little bit different. I have one and Jocelyn has one.
Mine happened actually just the other day. We were home for a holiday. Isaac was home from school. He just started kindergarten. We were all, actually, Jocelyn and I were working a little bit that morning. When the kids are here, we usually work a little bit in the morning and then we take kind of the afternoons off when we have them at home.
So, Isaac and Anna were here and I was in the backroom that we have turned it into our office. I heard Isaac and Anna making all kinds of noises and I walked in at the dining room and they had lined up every chair in our house. They had lined up all the kitchen chairs, folding chairs. They went and got their chairs from their art desks.
They have lined up these all these chairs on the line and they’ve created a choo-choo train. They said, “We’re going to create choo-choo trains.” Isaac said, “I’m the engine.” I guess he wanted to say that he was the engineer but then Anna was walking up and down the chairs going, “Hello! Can I have your tickets?” And they have like stuffed animals sitting the chairs.
Basically, Jocelyn and I just dropped everything and we took our spots on the chairs and…
JOCELYN: On the train.
SHANE: On the train, I’m sorry. It was a choo-choo train. It was not a bunch of chairs. We played choo-choo trains with Isaac and Anna there for a little while. I just thought to myself, “Oh man! Even though Isaac would have been home from school today, what if we were working and we had jobs or we had to be somewhere.” We didn’t have to do that. We were actually home with them that day and got to have some fun riding choo-choo trains over in the dining room. So that was my Can’t Miss Moment.
JOCELYN: For me, it was last week. Anna and I actually went to the nails salon. She got her very first manicure and pedicure. We did that together.
SHANE: She got purple nails because that’s her favorite color.
JOCELYN: Yeah. She was really excited. There was a little bear chair and she sat down in that. It was pink so she was really excited about that. We went and we just had a girl day and had a great time. That’s something I probably would not have been able to do at this time even a year ago before we quit our full-time jobs because we wouldn’t have been home in time to do that.
Shane wouldn’t have been home at all because he would have still been at football practice. I would have had both kids by myself. There’s no way I could have handled them in the nail salon. It was a lot of fun though and we had a good time. I have a picture of her sitting in the bear chair if you want to check out the notes for podcast 7.
SHANE: All right guys. Well, we hope you enjoyed this. We hope this helps you get some clarity and maybe figure out how to choose that niche and get that first digital product done. Just attack it. Just do it. Pick something. Get it done. Make a 10-page e-book and roll with it and that will get you started in your online journey.
Don’t forget to go to iTunes and leave us a review if you find our podcast or our blog valuable. It helps us get our messages out to more families. That is our goal with the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast and flippedlifestyle.com is to help as many families as possible find the freedom through online business that we have.
Don’t forget to go to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast7 and I will have a free video there showing you exactly how we do keyword research. It’s only 5-10 minutes and it’s not edited, it actually only takes me 5-10 minutes to do any kind of keyword research for new products or for a new blog post over at the blog.
So, until next time. We will catch you all on the flip side and thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: See you later.
SHANE: Bye!
Do you need step by step instruction? Do you need us to help you create your digital product and get your online business started? Well, you can do that. We actually now offer a course called the Flip Your Life e-course where we show you how to create your first digital product in 29 days or less.
All you have to do to get more information on this program is, go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and that’s all one word and you can check out everything that we do in that course to help you get your digital product created for sale online even if you don’t have a website. That’s flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. You can check when our next session is starting at that link.
Glen says
Biggest take away was not spending hours and hours doing keyword research. If I had a ten dollar bill for all the hours I’ve spent looking for keywords! Thanks for a great podcast.
Vito says
Hi Shane & Jocelyn,
You mentioned in your podcast this morning that you do not spend very much on advertising.
How were you able to launch your e-books with so much success with very little advertising dollars spent?
Appreciate your help!
Vito
Shane Sams says
Audience engagement and our email list.
Our audiences are SUPER engaged with our content! We get very very high open rates on our emails.
Jocelyn easily gets hundreds of people talking and engaging with her Facebook posts without paying, and I get a ton of traffic from twitter without ads.
That being said, we DO use ads at times…but very little money is spent and we look at it from a “surgical strike” type strategy…use it at just the right time to drive “time sensitive” traffic.
Also, in the beginning, we went and FOUND our audience, we didn’t go the Kevin Costner route in field of dreams “Build it and they will come”
We joined dozens of Facebook groups, spent hours connecting with people on twitter, and spend night after night creating free content.
We posted on comments, linked our stuff to Wikis. Anywhere our audience congregated, we went there and joined the conversation.
In short, we worked our tails off and went and found our audience instead of waiting for them to find us.
Check out our interview on The Income School Podcast. We talk about this in detail 🙂
http://incomeschool.com/school-teachers-killing-online-one-year/
Thanks again, hope that helps!
Shane
Vito says
Great info Shane!!! Listening to the Income School podcast now. Appreciate your help! TY 🙂
John says
This is a terrific video, very clear and easy to understand. Never heard it explained better. Thanks very much!!
Shane Sams says
I’m a simple man John, I like things simple. haha. Thanks for the comment!
LB says
Hi Shane, Jocelyn and Children: First, thank you so much Shane and Jocelyn for this podcast. Your style of business makes it so simple to both see and do, as a new online entrepreneur. I think you both have Pat Flynn’s style of encouraging and helping other people find financial freedom, using their own talents. Most people wanting to start their own businesses struggle, due to lack of knowledge on “How To” or there is always a cost associated with receiving help. Thank You!
Also, I appreciate how you conduct yourselves as a husband and wife team. Your children obviously have been gifted as well to recognize they are talented, your son and his idea for a kids podcast made me laugh with joy. Your lives are a blessing to see and hear. Continue the great work. Gratefully, LB
Joey says
Great episode once again! I have no technical problem setting up a website and customizing to suit my needs, etc., but I’m the typical person always feeling hesitant to present myself as an “expert” to sell something online. You’ve definitely encouraged me in the last few episodes, and I’m now ready to take an action. 🙂 Thanks heaps!
Arvind says
Solid post and video. I worked on this over the weekend. However for my niche I get quite a bit of “low” competition and high cost per click. Some range from 150 searches to 12000 depending on the key words and phrases. Not sure if that is good or bad. The broader I go, naturally the competition increases to medium.
I think a combination is techniques may be needed. Looks like u did the keyword research and validated the market by finding your audience as u explained above. Going to listen to your interview as well. I know it’s going to be awesome. 🙂 thanks so much.
Shane, u also mentioned talking to people about their niche. Is this still a possibility? Thanks for all u do.
Patrick M Matherne says
Listened to this podcast and really enjoyed it. Still having trouble deciding on what I want to create. I have so many ideas that to me they seem really good, but very few people would want to purchase them. Such as historical re-enactment stuff or pirate stuff
Loved the video as well. I rather just use what you showed to find keywords then going through and renting other software which is likely 90$ a month or so
Shane Sams says
If you like that stuff…chances are others do to. The inet lets you find them! Pick something and go for it, what do you have to lose. 🙂
Shane Sams says
Thanks Glen!
Jerry STumpf says
You generated some great insights about not being paralyzed by inactivity. It is 100% true that if a person does not try they have already missed out.
As I relate most thoughts to marriages since that is my passion to serve others here is what I was thinking as you spoke today.
Your advice about “just pick something and do it” is also what we encourage couples to do for each other. You don’t need to make your marriage perfect all at once, just select some good advice and apply those techniques to your relationship.
You two generate a lot of great clarity for those who will apply your ideas.
Jerry Stumpf says
I just watched the “Keyword research” video. – Very cool.
Thank you for the walk through.
I had heard about this research but was not sure how to do it.
I think I may have a niche – Marriage coaching = 98,780 avg. monthly searches!
Now I just have to see how to use these terms. Do I just write the articles with those key words in the titles and articles as you finished your last few sentences?
Again you give true value for your time.
Derek says
Doh, something happened when I submitted my comment and it was lost…but basically I had said that as I listen to more of your podcast, I am recognizing that I want to do a different type of online business than what you are doing – I am more drawn to selling physical products on Amazon / eBay – but I am still learning a lot of great nuggets from your experiences.
Also, I am recognizing that my first attempt at an online business where I was creating blogs and info products, I feel I was giving up right at the cusp of it being successful to go and build a new site and start a new product. I never followed through and gave something the chance to really succeed, likely to my own hangups on whether I had what it took to be successful.
Thanks for another great podcast!
Rafael says
Thanks for the wonderful podcast. I appreciate the love and passion towards your family and business, as well as the content that you put out to help newbies like me. Humbled.
Shane Sams says
You are EXACTLY who we want to help Rafael 🙂