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We are super pumped to introduce you guys to Lynda & Kevin Malleck, our Flip Your Life community members and wonder couplepreneur behind the healthy lifestyle kitchen website – themalleckfamily.com
Kevin & Lynda live just outside of Washington, DC in northern Virginia. They have been married for over 17 years and are the parents to a sweet teenage boy named Colin. Lynda’s background originally started in education, but she later shifted her interest to business. Kevin, on the other hand, is an awesome Head Chef, who at some point even managed his own restaurant.
Lynda realized that they had to reassess their current lifestyle after her sister had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. They decided that it was time to focus on living a healthier lifestyle and make wiser food choices. This was when Kevin brilliantly created delicious dishes that were way healthier than their traditional counterparts, and they soon found themselves losing weight almost effortlessly.
They documented this transition and had set up a website to host their blog and sell their cookbooks. They had sold paperback versions of their cookbooks and are now looking into generating a steady income stream by offering their digital products as well. They also want to show Colin the limitless possibilities that online business creates, and encourage him to become an entrepreneur too.
Which brings us to the question at hand. What should they focus on to build the business to fit the membership model? We’re going to dive in deep and share insight on how to attract your avatar with your own unique backstory, where to get emails for your email list, how to overcome brand identity problems and a whole lot more.
This is a really fun episode with tons of gold nuggets of online business wisdom, so join us and let us help you take action too.
You Will Learn:
- How your story sets you apart from your business competitors
- Where do you get emails and how to grow your email list
- What you can learn from checking the competition
- How to overcome brand identity problems
- What is the “Challenge Model”
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Kevin & Lynda Malleck’s Healthy Food Website
- US History Teachers
- Elementary Librarian
- Flip Your Life community
- Flipped Lifestyle’s Patreon Page
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!
Patreon question of the week from our Q&A with S&J YouTube series:
This week’s question is from Sheldon, and it is, “What should I do to get more conversions on a Facebook ad with a relevancy score of seven?”
Click here to hear the answer to today’s featured question!
And if you would like to watch all of our Q&A with S&J videos, head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
To ask a question for the Q&A with S&J YouTube show, you can do that over on our Patreon page at flippedlifestyle.com/patreon.
Click on the image to Listen on iTunes:
To learn more about working directly with Shane & Jocelyn in their Flip Your Life community, visit: http://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife
Join HUNDREDS of entrepreneurs from around the world pursuing the Flipped Lifestyle online!
Success Story of the Week:
Today’s success story comes from Kevin, and Kevin’s headline said, “Sales funnel success!”
Kevin says, “Hey guys, I’ve got another annual member. I am so pumped about that. This is the first one that followed the rules.” And what Kevin means is that they went through the actual sales funnel. “He joined the email list in January, watched my Facebook live lessons, and then joined after getting the recently revamped sales pitch. Thanks for all the help and guidance from S&J, and from all the awesome folks in the Flip Your Life community.”
That is awesome, Kevin, man. When you get those first sales, you get excited. But then you realize you have to make it passive, and that is what Kevin has done here. He created a sales funnel that actually converts by using the trainings and the support of the Flip Your Life community. We are so proud of Kevin. He does an amazing job, takes action every single week, and he is having success because of that. Good job, Kevin.
We would love to help you write the success story for your online business.
At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community.
Can’t Miss Moment:
Today’s can’t Miss moment is our flight down to Florida. We had originally intended to drive down to Orlando, however we went on a trip back in January with the kids to Jacksonville, and we did drive on that trip. It was a great. It just took a really long time. As we were driving back, we were like, “Okay, should we drive to Florida in April, or should we fly?” And we decided that we would rather fly. It was really nice just to be able to make that decision, to not have to worry about price being so much of an object. When we were back in school, or like when we worked our corporate jobs, it was a really hard decision to drive or fly. Now, having an online business, and the success that we have been able to have, we don’t have to worry so much about that.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thank you for listening!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On Today’s podcast, we help Lynda and Kevin take their healthy cooking website to the next level.
Shane: Welcome to Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started.
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are pumped to be back with you again today. We are so thankful for everyone who listens and subscribes to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.
For those of you who are new to the show, this is the place where we help you figure out what to do next in your online business. No shiny objects, no gurus, no gimmicks. Just real people, real businesses, and real conversations. We are thrilled to have another member of our Flip Your Life community on the show today.
Jocelyn: But before we welcome today’s guest, we are going to read our Patreon Question of the Week from our Q&A with S&J YouTube series. This week’s question is from Sheldon, and it is, “What should I do to get more conversions on a Facebook ad with a relevancy score of seven?”
Shane: And if you would like to ask a question for the Q&A with S&J YouTube show, you can do that over on our Patreon page at flippedlifestyle.com/patreon.
Alright, guys, let’s jump right into our interview with Lynda and Kevin Malleck.
Lynda and Kevin, welcome to the show!
Lynda: Hi, thanks for having us.
Jocelyn: It’s awesome to have you guys today. We are really excited to jump in and help you with your online business. Before we get started, we always like to ask people to tell us a little bit about you, a little bit about your background and what you’ve been doing so far online.
Lynda: Okay, well, we are a family of three. We live in Northern Virginia just outside of Washington DC. Kevin has a background in food and cooking. He was a chef and manager in Capitol Hill for about 23 years, and owned his own restaurant before that. My career started in education. I was an art teacher for a while, and then I evolved into business. I’ve been doing that for about 20 years. We started our online business a couple of years ago and it was really aimed at our efforts at better health. We started cooking healthier and making online cookbooks.
Shane: That’s awesome. I love the transition there. It’s like, “You know, I was an art teacher, and I transitioned to business.” That is the common path that everybody takes.
Jocelyn: That’s how we roll around here.
Shane: That’s how we roll. It’s like, “You know, I was in art, and then I was in business, and now we’re cooking.” Right? So here we go.
Jocelyn: That is awesome. I’m kind of obsessed with cooking shows, The Food Network, and things like that. Yeah, I like this. This is pretty cool to be talking about. Before we jump into our questions about how to move your business forward, we like to ask people why you are interested in starting or furthering your online business.
Lynda: Well, we sort of came about this through what I like to call a perfect storm of things that happened. My sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and I was her caregiver. This was a couple of years ago. During that time, you know, when you are taking care of someone with cancer, I kind of like had to look in the mirror and say, “What are you doing?” I was feeling good, but I was 50 pounds overweight. I had type II diabetes, and I was like, “What are you doing? Here you are taking care of her, and you are not taking care of yourself either.”
Kevin, being an awesome chef, I came home and told him, “Listen, we have to change.” And he was like, “Yup, we do.” So, he set about making healthier versions of all his recipes and as a result of that, I lost 50 pounds, and he lost 20 pounds.
Shane: Wow, that is awesome. Congratulations. That is absolutely amazing!
Lynda: Thanks. It just changed our lives in so many ways. That is partly we want to share that with other people, and help them realize their weight loss goals as well but during that same time, we also have a son, Colin, and he is 15, and he was diagnosed at a young age with dyslexia. Educating him has just been an Odyssey of schools and teaching techniques and different things and so school is just a hard place for him to be. After fourth grade we made a decision to send him to private school, which, as you can imagine is exorbitant.
Kevin: Especially in this area.
Shane: Oh, for sure it is very expensive where you all are.
Lynda: It’s crazy. We were fortunate to have a little pile of money that we had saved for college for him and we ended up spending it on fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grade. Now he is a freshman in high school and we are like, “Okay.”
Shane: Four years left, what are you going to do?
Lynda: I think we are up against the wall now, right? We do have a financial motivation, but we also want him to be able to see us as entrepreneurs, and see himself as an entrepreneur, and to be able to leave him a business that he could run as he gets older, and that he is not trapped by corporate America, or some other box that people would like to put him in as he transitions from school to work. Perhaps, the dyslexia won’t matter so much if we leave him an online business that he could learn himself.
Shane: Yeah, those are all just absolutely amazing, and inspirational reasons why. I think it is very interesting, and we are going to get into some of the things that you have done online because you do have some success. You’ve put a foothold in, and we’re like, “Okay, we can do this a little bit.” And we’ll talk about that briefly, but some people are scared to get online because they are like, “Oh, well I’m in the health industry. Well, everybody is selling weight loss stuff,” or, “Oh, I’m on the online business coaching stuff, everybody is doing that.” The thing is, your story is what actually makes you unique in any space. There are people who are helping people lose weight through diets or cookbooks or whatever. But are they a married couple? Are they professionals? Was one a chef? Do they have a son, an only child? All those variables make your story unique. There are hundreds of thousands of other people that share commonalities with your story. I just wanted to highlight that because you guys have a unique story. People who are listening, you have a unique story, and even if you are in a competitive space, you can use that story to carve out your spot in it.
Lynda: Yeah, I mean, we were nervous about it from the start because we are not nutritionists. We don’t have that background, but we know what has worked for us, and what has brought us to better health. We figured why not, with that point?
Shane: And that could be a competitive advantage, not being a nutritionist. You are a chef who did it for yourself in your situation, and that might even be something that differentiates you from the nutritionists.
Kevin: She’s losing weight, then all of a sudden she says, “You have to document this because this is crazy. The food is awesome, and we should do this! ”
Jocelyn: Exactly. Well, I like it! I like the angle; I think that you have something that can definitely be marketable. You’ve had sales already, right? Tell us about that. What has happened so far in your online business?
Lynda: Well, we made a cookbook and we sold it both in paperback and online. Our list came from Kevin’s previous job on Capitol Hill. We made a decision for him to leave the job, which is a whole other podcast we could do.
Shane: We will just have to have you back, I’m just saying.
Lynda: As he was leaving that job, he said, “What do I need to do?” And I said, “Gather email from every single person that you know. Get an email address from every single person.” Largely, our email list is built up of people that he physically knows, that there are people we know. So we have 200 and some people on this list. They were very old-school, and they bought all paper books. We didn’t sell really any electronic books at all. We did sell about– but did we sell like $550 worth of books.
Shane: How many copies would that be?
Lynda: We sold them for $19 and some change. I don’t remember. Yeah, we had people that bought groups of them. People we knew that would buy 10 at a time and then give them out to their friends kind of thing.
Shane: Sure, that is awesome though. When you see a book being advertised online by an online expert, or anything else, and they say, “We sold 50,000 copies,” most of those sales are, they sell them in blocks of a hundred, and then people give them away, or things like that.
Jocelyn: Or they do it for an incentive.
Shane: Yeah, they do it for an incentive. That’s actually a really good tactic that you used, and it is awesome that you just basically collected emails from people you knew, and sold these cookbooks because so many people are like, “Well who can I sell to?” Well, you have people in your life that you could probably sell to. You’ve proven that concept that, yay, it is not just about online, it’s by-hook-or-crook, get emails and by-hook-or-crook sell, these things wherever I can because I’m going to hustle and do it. That is pretty awesome.
Lynda: That is pretty much all the sales we had. We’ve got to a point where we ran through the list of people that we knew, and then it was a matter of marketing, and we didn’t have a ton of money to market. I would tell you that there were things like Google ads. We run a Google ad, but I totally did not understand pay-per-click, and money started flying out of our account, and I could not control it and it was freaking me out. We stop the ads because we were just like, “Oh my gosh, our budget is going to be gone in a second.” There were things that we just didn’t understand about advertising, I think. We can’t be out-of-control with it, we have to stop.
Shane: Yeah, you just have to learn how to do it, basically. That is usually what happens, is whenever you get an initial list, you get a couple hundred emails, and you make that “launch”, that is going to run out, and there comes a point in every online business where you are like okay, now, I have to add new people into the top of the funnel. It has to happen.
Jocelyn: Looking at your website, I mean I think there are some low hanging fruit things that you can do for sure to get some more organic reach before you start throwing more money into advertising. The first thing I would say is looking at the recent posts, I noticed that it looks like it hasn’t been updated in a while. I would definitely concentrate on getting some consistent content out, preferably weekly if you can. Remember that that is something you can batch up, meaning that you can write it ahead of time, especially in this space. This is a perfect thing that you could write ahead of time, and schedule them out to be posted. Make sure that you are using some good keyword research, meaning that you go into the Google keyword search. You look up what people are searching for, and you really try to write content around that. I feel like this business is very seasonal, meaning that you cook certain types of food in the summer, you cook certain type of food in the fall, there are special events to cook for. This is a very highly seasonal business, I love that type of business, I think it works really well for marketing.
Shane: That stuff you can do right now to immediately start growing things without spending all that Google adwords money.
Jocelyn: I think you could improve your opt in areas on the side. It says, “Sign up for our monthly newsletter.” Well, newsletters are kind of 2000-ish, people don’t really care about newsletters anymore.
Shane: It’s more like, “Get a healthy recipe every week.” Or something.
Jocelyn: Well, it does say that, too, but I think that needs to be more prominent.
Shane: That needs to be the headline, right.
Jocelyn: You could even do specific opt ins. You make a 4th of July recipe for instance. You could get some more 4th of July recipes, or get more summer recipes. That could be a specific opt in for that type of post. Those are things that you need to be thinking of next.
Shane: Before you go on, and I know you’ve got some questions, I just want to highlight some other strengths that you have right now. You said your list is only 200, right? But you said you started a Facebook page, and you’ve got over 3,000 likes, right?
Lynda: It was instant. I mean, people signed up, the people liked it right away.
Shane: Exactly. What is cool about that is, they immediately resonated with what you were specifically doing. You’ve actually sold things to people you were doing, and this is all validation they you are definitely striking a nerve in the marketplace. Listen, we’ve made tens of thousands of dollars when our pages were at only about 3,000 likes, like our education sites. You’ve got money and low-hanging fruit sitting there. We just have to package it in a way, and then present it to these people for targeting.
Jocelyn: You just have to present them things that they want to see.
Shane: And what they want to see right now. We can talk about that, and I just wanted to say, you’ve got a lot of strengths going on. It is just, how can we move the puzzle pieces around and frame that out? With that in mind, let’s get to your specific first questions, okay?
Lynda: The first time I posted it in the forums, Shane, you had the idea of doing before and after. We never even thought of that. We just knew ours were better. We had nutrition information in all of our recipes. We never thought to compare them and make that a selling point for us. We thought it was a great idea, but we were kind of like, “Okay, how do we make that shift? Where do we start first with making the shift over to that, if that is the direction we want to go?”
Shane: You mean to just presenting everything as like before and after from your physical change, or like the unhealthy versus the healthy recipe?
Lynda: Yeah, the recipes.
Shane: Yeah, usually what we say to anybody in the situation is, do it going forward. This is how we live in our online business. When we change something on our podcast, or when we change maybe a lesson plan and one of our communities that we sell to teachers, we don’t really go back and fix all the old stuff. We just say, “Okay, the next post will reflect this change, and will change it going forward. What you could do is just like what Jocelyn said with this low hanging fruit, you have all these recipes. You could just to go in your article writing, and you could present these recipes good versus bad. Like, “Hey, here is a favorite of everybody. Burger and fries, with a side of baked beans and, I don’t know some kind of ice cream or dessert or whatever.
Jocelyn: That’s what we eat here in Kentucky apparently!
Shane: That sounds delicious right now. I’m just saying, this is totally off base. But what you could do is you could literally present that recipe in the article and then be like, “But we are not going to do that people, because that is the old us. This is the new us. This is how we would create something just as delicious, but half the calories and fat, and whatever.” What you need to do when you are changing style or when you are changing strategy, is just do it going forward. Nobody is going to care about the old stuff, they care about what happens next.
Jocelyn: You can, later, if this thing takes off and people are like, “I really want to see that information for the other ones,” you can do that later. Just go ahead and create it, see if it catches on, see if it is something that your audience likes, and if it is then, do it going forward. If you need to, do it going backward later.
Shane: Yeah, you can even do some neat videos like this with this space in particular. Imagine you are filming your cooking videos or one of your recipes, because huge way to promote this, is you cook it on a video, and then you sell them the recipe and all the instructions, right? You have this little three-minute cut down video that’s just you really quickly cooking everything, but then you sell it. That’s how this space works. What you could do is like, “I’m going to cook the fat burger, I’m going to cook the fries,” and then you’re like pouring out grease, and then be like, “Look at all this grease you’re eating, oh this is disgusting.” But in the back half of the video is you cooking this beautiful clean healthy meal that is going to help them lose 50 pounds. You could easily do that in your presentation going forward, and just do it. The next thing you make is this style of things.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I love the video idea for this. I think that it makes a lot of sense, and it also is very captivating. I don’t know if you’ve seen on Facebook, the ones that people are preparing meals. I love to watch those. I’m just captivated by them. When I am scrolling through, and I see somebody doing that, and I’m like, “Oh, this is cool.” I just stop and watch it. There is even a parody one where they cook air. They put it in a bowl and mix it.
I love those, too.
Shane: I mean, these people can get clicks cooking air, surely you can delicious low-fat burgers.
Jocelyn: How do you feel about the video? You don’t really have to personally appear on these type of videos, that’s the cool thing about it.
Shane: It’s just your hands cooking.
Lynda: Well, we’ve done it a couple of different ways, and you know, we were scared of video for a while.
Jocelyn: I feel you.
Shane: Everybody is.
Lynda: We noticed that on those videos, they used hot plates, portable burners, to get those shots, and so we purchased one of those and it did one that was like a one-pot meal. It was good. We liked that you could speed it up so that it is a fast motion thing like most videos. We did that, and we did one with Kevin making– what did you make? You made fried chicken but it was a fried. And, we figured out, too, in our kitchen there is only so much space. We are going to block out where the camera can possibly go, and what the settings are for it.
Shane: Oh, for sure. It’s going to be on our YouTube channel. By the time this comes out, a part of it already will be. I did a time-lapse video of us putting together Isaac and Anna’s green screen, and all their lighting. They have a studio upstairs now for them to record their YouTube videos. If you get 1 inch left, or 1 inch right, then you just see their giant mess of toys and games and nonsense, right?
Jocelyn: Because this is real life.
Shane: Because this is real life, y’all. But guess what real life don’t make it on the YouTube video. I want to stress here, too, and this is an important tip for anybody listening, when you do instructional stuff, the one thing that people forget to do is they forget to tell their story. You have to tell your story in every piece of content. In every video. That is why Jocelyn and I talk so much about the things in our lives that have changed since we used to have 9 to 5. We try to do it every episode, every video we can because you don’t know when someone is going to come to a video randomly. If a video is just randomly about you cooking a piece of fried chicken, and then telling why it is bad–
Jocelyn: Somebody might watch it, but they are not going to watch anything else that you do.
Shane: Yeah, exactly. Every video needs to follow a structure where you are like, “Hey, this is Lynda and Kevin, we lost a combined 70 pounds by changing the way we eat. Now we are going to show you how we used to eat. This is what the old us look like,” and maybe slide in old pictures at that point right after you cook that bad meal. “We weren’t healthy, we weren’t happy. Now we are going to make something amazing.” “Now, look at us now.” What you have to do in every video is your story is going to be a part of the cooking. It is not just, “I know how to make healthy chicken.”
Jocelyn: Yeah, and you can tell the story while you are doing it. It doesn’t have to be a long drawn out thing at the beginning because you don’t want somebody watching that over and over, but you just tell parts of it as you do the cooking. I think that that is perfect. You just seem to make sure that people are relating to you that they want to follow you in the future.
Shane: It’s like leaving breadcrumbs, too. A lot of the times Jocelyn and I may just throw in, “We just bought a new house, and we have a lot of land. We have a lake behind our house.” Sometimes you will just things like, “I can’t believe that we can even live in a place like this. This would not be possible if we were still teachers.” Even just nuggets like that. They are going to go back, they’re going to look for the Our Story page, the about page. They are going to look for other videos about you to kind of start piecing together your story because they are going to look at you and go, “Man, that could be my story.” And the more that you can create that positive expectancy that they can accomplish what you did if they follow your recipes, then the more successful you are going to be big sales, like on the back of that.
Jocelyn: I love this area of cooking and healthy cooking. I really like it. I think that there is just an ocean of opportunity out there with so many different things that you can do. I think that could sort of be a double-edged sword at times because you can do cooking demonstrations, you can do cookbooks, you can do product reviews like the instant pot. That thing is huge right now. You could do things like that. There are just so many different places you could go. What I would say right now, just in a place where you are, you are trying to grow this thing, I would look at some competition. I would try to figure out, okay, what are they doing well? What can I do well? I would pick for now, one avenue, and go down it. Don’t try to do cookbooks, don’t try to do YouTube videos, don’t try to do product reviews. Don’t do all the things right now. You need to pick one of the thing, and make that really good, and then build an audience, and see what else they want you to do next.
Shane: I know in your on boarding form that you fill out before you came on the podcast, you said we would like to turn this into some kind of membership, I think your strength is definitely, you’ve got a chef cooking the food.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I would watch this.
Shane: You’ve got an amazing story. You’ve got to target people like you. How old were you when you lost weight? How old were your kids when you lost weight? What were you doing? How are you working? That is the person you need to target. Focus everything on, “We will teach you how to cook these amazing custom recipes that Kevin created,” basically. And if you do that, people are going to resonate with you, and like you said, they’re going to start liking everything.
Lynda: Yeah, yeah. Okay.
Shane: So, let’s follow up here. Let’s back up. Based on all that information that we just regurgitated in your general direction, what follow-ups do you have? Where do you think you need to go next, and what pieces of the puzzle can be put together?
Lynda: Just going back to our original questions, we have brand identity problems. Our URL doesn’t necessarily match. We started out as Kevin’s Kitchen. We want to Kevin’s Kitchen to be the name of things, and then there was a guy out there that has kevinskitchen.com, and he wanted $20,000 for it. And we were like, “I don’t think so.” And then we kind of built things over time and then things changed, and it’s just sort of evolved, and nothing matches nobody I’m not sure how our brand identity is getting out.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I actually noticed that when I went to your website. I mean, it could be as simple as Kevin’s Healthy Kitchen.
Shane: Oh my gosh, I was just thinking about that. I looked over at Jocelyn and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I just was thinking ‘Kevin’s Healthy Kitchen’!” Our brains are becoming one every year, my dear.
Jocelyn: I know, that’s scary!
Shane: But, yeah, you could just change it to Kevinshealthykitchen.com
Lynda: I think that one is taken. I think I thought of that one.
Shane: Kevin’s Really Healthy Kitchen.
Jocelyn: No.
Shane: Kevin’s Super Healthy– No, we can’t do that. But, that is the least of your issues.
Lynda: Is it?
Shane: Yes, because we can come up with something that someone doesn’t have.
Jocelyn: Yeah, we can hash that out in the forums.
Shane: Yeah, it could be anything. It could be The Malleck’s Healthy Kitchen or something like that, or something we can come up with that says, “This is ours, this is healthy, and we’re cooking food.” It could be Kevin’s Healthy Cookbook. That’s totally descriptive. Don’t worry about the URL. The messaging is what you have to worry about when you are branding. It is not necessarily the domain name, the logos, and all that. It is, “Hey, this is a website where they show me how to cook healthy food.” That has to scream that.
Jocelyn: We can figure something else, you are not going to pay $20,000 for a domain name. We will figure something out.
Shane: No, no, no. We can figure out a domain name that will say what we want to say, and brand it the way we want to brand it. The more important thing is, if I load your site, and I see the top blog post in your feed, I need to clearly understand that this is cooking a healthy alternative food. I see a video, maybe the screenshot is a fattening piece of fried chicken on one side, and a nice healthy baked chicken, like that is the screen you use for the thumbnail, and it says, “How to Cook Healthy ‘Fried’ Chicken,” it says in quotes, “fried.” That is so much more important because most people aren’t going to look at your brand until after they’ve consumed your content.
Lynda: Okay.
Shane: If someone searches online for how to create a sales funnel, and they see a blog post by us, and the title is, “How to Create a Sales Funnel in Five Easy Steps,” they’re going to click on that and read the article, and then they’re going to be like, “Okay, who are these people?” Flipped Lifestyle. Shane and Jocelyn. What is their story? It is going to be the exact same thing here. If someone is like, “Healthy fried chicken,” they type that into Google. They land on your healthy fried chicken video, on your blog. They’re going to do that, they are going to be like, “Wow, that was a cool video. Who are these people? Oh, this is Kevin and Lynda. They did this, they did that.” That is the progression. Worry more about the content and less about the URLs and the branding. That all, we can develop that easier, okay?
Lynda: Okay great.
Shane: That is step one that we are going to work out in the forums. What else do you need help with on top of that? Let us just take that off the table, branding, we are going to fix in a day or two in the forums. What, after that content-wise, or other things do we want to help you with?
Lynda: Well, you mentioned in a reply to me, that you’ve got challenges were going to be key to the business model? Can you explain what you mean by challenges, and how they would work?
Jocelyn: I love the challenge model. A lot of people are using this right now, especially in, I would say more personal spaces. I’ve seen a lot of people doing it in fashion, I’ve of course seen people doing it in cooking and physical fitness. Challenges are just a really hot thing at the moment. Basically, they are different ways that you could do it. You will pick a number of days that the challenge is for. Typically, it will either be seven, it could be 10, it could be up to 30.
Shane: Usually, the shorter ones are free stuff. You are wanting to get people on your email list to join a free challenge. The longer ones are more like for your community of paying members, or people joining it for a longer period of time because they are already in your audience.
Jocelyn: If you’re doing a free challenge, you want it to be something quick. I usually recommend like seven days for a free challenge. What you are going to do is you are going to get people a really quick result. You want to make sure that it is something that they can definitely accomplish. Maybe it is a seven-day challenge–
Shane: Eat a healthy breakfast.
Jocelyn: Yeah.
Shane: Seven recipes for seven healthy meals you are going to eat. Forget the rest of the day, we are going to teach you how to eat just breakfast, healthy, for seven straight days.
Jocelyn: And then, at the end of the challenge, you would invite them to join something else. Maybe it is a larger challenge that is paid, maybe it is a community, maybe it is a product of some kind. It could be any of those things. But I love the challenge model, especially for this type of business. I think it works really well.
Shane: For example, let me elaborate on that. Here is what you could do. Let’s do it even shorter. It’s a five-day challenge, Monday through Friday, five healthy breakfast challenges or whatever, we’re going to eat breakfast healthy every day. What you do in the challenge is basically, you already have this automated. They are going to get five emails the night before that says, “This is your recipe for tomorrow. Here is a video to watch Kevin cook it in his kitchen.” All right, they go cook it. Then you say, “All right, now, here is your follow up.”
You are in a private Facebook group only for challenge participants. You are going to take a picture of your food when you cook it, and you are going to post it in here.” That is it, that is the whole challenge for five straight days. Basically, people make five really delicious healthy meals for five days, and they say, “Man, I want some more of that. That was delicious.” And now you follow up with an email the next week that is basically like, “Did you like that challenge? I bet you could do it for 30 days. We are going to do a 30-day challenge; it costs nine dollars to come in. We’re going to give you 30 breakfast recipes for the next 30 days,” and a lot of people do this.
They’re going to make like a week, and you rotate on each week. You would do four weeks, and cook the same meals each week. But they are going to take their pictures, they’re going to get better at cooking it each week. It is going to look more delicious, it’s going to look better there, they want to feel good, they pay you to participate in the challenge, and then what you would do maybe is, “Hey, we do these challenges every month in our community. It’s only $19. Quit paying for individual challenges. You could just join, and get access to all these for free. You can get access to all of our old challenges, and you are ready to go.” That keeps people moving, that keeps people accountable. It is just like a diet plan to like Weight Watchers or something else. It gives them something to do, something to accomplish, so that they can lose weight, they can become better cooks–
Jocelyn: And have somebody to talk to while they’re doing it.
Shane: And have somebody to talk to while they’re doing it. That’s pretty much how the challenge model works.
Lynda: Okay.
Jocelyn: I’m not saying that you have to do that. It is just an option.
Shane: That is a template basically. You can change it however you want to.
Lynda: Okay.
Shane: And the challenges are cool, too. Jocelyn said earlier for seasonal. I’m sure Kevin’s got great recipes that he has developed for Christmas. “Here’s my fruitcake.” I don’t know if he’s eating fruitcake, but I’m just saying. Fruitcake. Christmas.
Jocelyn: I don’t that is very healthy.
Shane: That’s stereotypical. It’s got fruit in it, right? It’s like milkshakes. They’ve got milk in them, right? That’s healthy.
Lynda: It’s a good breakfast product.
Shane: Yeah, exactly. There you go. All right, it’s like, if he has a good seasonal recipe, “Hey guys, we’re going to do a free Christmas challenge. I’ve got a recipe here, this is for gingerbread cookies, or houses or whatever. Everybody is going to make this, and post it. It is free.” You get a bunch of emails, and now you can follow up those people who were just cooking at Christmas with “New Year, New You, let’s lose some weight. Here is our New Year’s resolution challenge.” That is how all of these challenges– they’ve got to string together, and link together. And then people can join to get access to all of them.
Lynda: Okay.
Jocelyn: Alright, so I feel like we’ve kind of thrown a lot of stuff out there.
Shane: Yeah, this has been deep.
Jocelyn: That’s the exciting thing about what you are doing though. I feel like that you do have just a very exciting future like the sky is sort of the limit for this. I feel like that you could really do anything that you want to do with that.
Shane: Yeah, you just have to narrow it down to how, in three sentences or less can you say, “We are Lynda and Kevin, we lost a combined 70 pounds by cooking better food with Kevin’s recipes. Now we’re going to share those recipes with you, and hold you accountable while you lose weight, too.” Which that was the three sentences you probably should just use, actually.
Lynda: I have to write this as fast as I can.
Shane: No, this is on tape. This is recorded.
Jocelyn: This is recorded.
Kevin: Okay.
Shane: But that’s basically what your entire brand is becoming. “We lost weight, Kevin makes awesome recipes, let’s share those recipes for money.”
Jocelyn: Now the next thing you have to do is basically have a talk with each other. Figure out exactly what it is that you want. What is your goal for this site? Based on what your answer is, you need to decide on what your tactics and strategies. Of course, we will be there to help you in the community, that is what we are therefore. You can bounce ideas off of us. Our community is awesome, they will jump in and give you their thoughts, and we will just go from there. I feel like you have some good initial momentum, so let’s take it further.
Shane: We always finish our calls, too, with an action step. What do you, based on this conversation, feel like you need to take action on in the next 24 hours? We don’t want to sit on this. We want to start moving. Baby steps add up to marathons, right? What is your next step in your mind that you think you need to do?
Lynda: Well, I think we need to sit down, and work on our blog posts, and get that active again. That is one thing, and schedule those out, like Jocelyn was saying.
Shane: Perfect.
Lynda: And I think we also need to sit down and figure out what we do want to for this site, and come up with our three sentences as well.
Jocelyn: Yup, I think those are perfect action steps. I would do them in the reverse order.
Shane: I would get your goals first.
Jocelyn: Talk about my goals first, and based on that, you need to start thinking about ways. Okay, whatever it is I want to do, how am I going to get people into that funnel? And that is how you are going to write your blog posts or your videos, or whatever it is you are going to do.
Shane: Let’s start a post in the forums for this, and talk about that content, and I want you to focus when you get to that content on using old stuff you’ve already created. Your next 10 blog posts may be 10 recipes from your cookbook, where you just record some videos, and stick them on top of the recipe. Let’s get this made as fast as possible so that we can get that batched out two or three months, and now you can turn your attention to, “Let’s get these challenges rolling and get as many people into this thing as possible.” Okay?
Lynda: Okay.
Shane: Awesome.
Jocelyn: Alright, guys, you’ve got this.
Shane: Alright, yeah, you got this. Listen, thank you so much for sharing your story. You guys are an inspiration. It is no joke losing weight. That is an absolutely amazing story, and if you can get this thing out there, and you can take action, you’re going to help a lot of people. You’ve already helped a lot of people just by sharing your story with the Flipped Lifestyle audience, so thank you guys for that.
Kevin: Thank you.
Lynda: Thank you, thank you for all your help. This is awesome.
Shane: Another awesome call to one of our Flip Your Life community members. To learn more about our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we can help you with your online business today.
Jocelyn: Alright, next, we’re going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment of our show, and these are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our regular 9-to-5 jobs.
Today’s can’t Miss moment is our flight down to Florida. We had originally intended to drive down to Orlando, however we went on a trip back in January with the kids to Jacksonville, and we did drive on that trip. It wasn’t terrible.
Shane: It just took forever.
Jocelyn: Yeah, it was a great. It just took a really long time. As we were driving back, we were like, “Okay, should we drive to Florida in April, or should we fly?” And we decided that we would rather fly. It is really nice just to be able to make that decision, to not have to worry about price being so much of an object. When we were back in school, or like when we worked our corporate jobs, it was a really hard decision to drive or fly. Now, having an online business, and the success that we have been able to have, we don’t have to worry so much about that.
Shane: We always talk about how like there’s only two real resources that you can spend. It’s time and money. Being in a car for 12 hours not only takes a long time off your life to get somewhere, but it is hard on you, and you’ve got to recover from that. Whereas when we go to the airport, we can just relax, we can just sit and play on our computers, on our iPads while we are waiting on the plane. When we get on the plane, we can take a nap. When we get there, we are refreshed, we get there faster, and it is just a better way to travel, and it is awesome to be able to say, “Anywhere we go, we can fly and we can save that time. We can spend the money and have more life.” And that is what we are all about his being able to live life having experiences, and being able to travel on airlines lets us do that.
We love to talk about our Can’t Miss Moments with you guys each week right here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast but there is one thing we like to talk about even more, and that is the success stories from the members of our Flip Your Life community.
Before we go, we wanted to share an actual success story from the success of forums in the Flip Your Life membership. Today’s success story comes from Kevin, and Kevin’s headline said, “Sales funnel success!”
Jocelyn: Kevin says, “Hey guys, I’ve got another annual member. I am so pumped about that. This is the first one that followed the rules.” And what Kevin means is that they went through the actual sales funnel. “He joined the email list in January, watched my Facebook live lessons, and then joined after getting the recently revamped sales pitch. Thanks for all the help and guidance from S&J, and from all the awesome folks in the Flip Your Life community.”
Shane: That is awesome, Kevin, man. When you get those first sales, you get excited. But then you realize you have to make it passive, and that is what Kevin has done here. He created a sales funnel that actually converts by using the trainings and the support of the Flip Your Life community. We are so proud of Kevin. He does an amazing job, takes action every single week, and he is having success because of that. Good job, Kevin!
Before we go today, guys, we want to share a Bible verse with you. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible, and we want to pass that along.
Today’s verse is one of my favorites, and it comes from Ecclesiastes 11:4, and the Bible says, “He who observes the wind and waits for all conditions to be favorable will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap.” Now, what this Bible verse is saying, guys, it’s a very fancy way to say, “It ain’t gotta be perfect.” You can’t wait around in your online business for all conditions to be favorable. You can’t wait for the right opportunity for the clouds in the wind to blow by the perfect chance. You just have to take action. Go out there and sow the seeds, and get ready to reap the harvest.
That’s all the time we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We will see you then.
Jocelyn: Bye.
