Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
We’re recording at the beach today, talking about 3 of the success habits that helped make us successful as online business.
One of the things we’ve done really well is wisely choosing a direction and relentlessly pursuing that direction.
Although you might fail you HAVE TO follow through with ideas and start learning and testing ideas, the worse thing you can do is nothing!
[Tweet “Online business is scary; you have to be brave & take risks.”]
Surrounding yourself with great people who will keep you accountable and also compliment your mindset is vital to make sure you continue your growth and don’t stall.
Invest in yourself and your business, sacrificing time and money now so you can make your life the way you want it to be.
If you’re not willing to put in the time to take the RIGHT ACTION, you’ll continue to spend money without seeing the benefits.
Online business and entrepreneurship takes courage.
Taking action and investing time and money is scary, those that can overcome the fear and take the right action are those that succeed.
You will learn
- Online business is way more than just installing WordPress and understanding software.
- Do the research and really understand your customer!
- You have to do the work.
- Find an accountability person that is the opposite of you.
- Summary of something important talked about.
- Don’t be afraid to spend money.
- Why online business takes COURAGE.
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to share some of the habits that made us successful in online business.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; we have got a very special podcast today for you because we are actually lying out on the beach. We are in the middle of a can’t-miss moment. We are down in Clearwater beach near Tampa, Florida, and we just finished up our ‘Flip Your Nine To Five’ live event with 20 amazing entrepreneurs from all over around the country and the world. We are enjoying a few days by ourselves with the kids; I’m watching Isaac here to my left, he’s digging a sand castle, and Ana is there looking for sea shells in the water, kind of, walking around. We are covered in sunscreen, laying out, getting some rays, and just thought we would bring you guys on the journey. I’ve got the gain up a little bit, so the sound quality might not be what you are used to, but I wanted you guys to maybe catch some of the background noises, the ocean waves, the birds flying by, and helicopter that is about to pass over our head. This is going to be a shorter episode than we normally bring to you on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Over the next few weeks, we are going to go over two to three success habits that we have used that have helped us become successful online. We are going to step back a little bit from the nuts and bolts of the online marketing world. Success in online business is a whole lot more than just knowing how to install WordPress, or knowing how to do keyword research. There’s a lot of things that you have to kind of, let go, and a lot of things that you’ve got to do outside of that if you are going to make this flipped lifestyle possible. So, we’re going to do about two to three weeks, we’re kind of, just going to keep these at around 15 minutes, and we’re going to roll these out through the rest of October and hopefully, you can find maybe a missing link or something that you can add to what you are doing to make you successful online.
JOCELYN: And normally, this is the part of the show where we are bringing you some type of success story or an email that we have received, or maybe a review of our podcasts, but since we are down at the beach and we don’t really have any computers, we can’t do that right now.
SHANE: This is our success story.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so, we’re just hanging out at the beach today, it’s a little bit different kind of, show because usually we have two microphones and now we are sort of like passing back and forth. So, we’re not going to have exactly the same feel as all of our other podcasts but it’s fun, we’re hanging out at the beach so we wanted to share that with you guys. So, let’s get into our success habit number one. As we’ve been down here at our live event, it just reminds me of how we started out and what people really need to know as they are starting out, and even just to be reminded of like as they go along in this online business journey; and I just kept seeing the same themes over and over again with some of the people at our live event, and that’s why we really wanted to get into some of the success habits today so that you can start employing them in your own online business. So, the very first success habit that we want to talk about is such an important one; that is wisely choosing a direction and then relentlessly pursuing that direction. And what we mean by that is instead of having a flavor of the month that you do the keyword research, which audience you are targeting, and you also know what problem you are solving for them. If you can figure out those two things, that is going to take you a lot farther than most of the people who start out on this online business journey.
SHANE: One of the big problems that we see with a lot of the people that we coach is they are always trying to build this perfect plan. They want everything to be laid out and absolutely perfect and they know they are going to succeed and there’s just no way they can fail because they’ve got this excellent plan made and that’s all they are going to do and it’s going to work. And that is not how online business actually plays out. Like Jocelyn said, you got to do research, you’ve got to figure out your avatar, you’ve got to figure out what product you are going to make and what content you are going to talk about, but sooner or later – research only takes you so far. You’ve just got to say, “I think this is going to work” and you have to start taking action and do it to see. We always tell our students, we tell it to everyone in our live event last week, “You know, guys, we can only show you a path, we can kind of, guess to see if this path is the correct one, we can kind of, look at the data and it kind of, looks good but until you start doing stuff and until you do it consistently, regularly and relentlessly, you are never going to know if the path you choose is correct. It’s just not possible until you do it. You can research it, you can listen to a hundred podcasts, you can watch every YouTube video, join every course and every membership community on the planet, but until you go out and see if it works, it’s not going to work because you have to do the work.” So, I think the first thing that we would like to say to you, a habit that really made us successful is, Jocelyn and I are really good at picking a path and attacking it and we go out and see if it works. And many of the paths that we have walked down, we’ve ran into brick walls but you know what we did? We said, “Hey, this is not the right path, let’s step back a little and go try the other path to see if it was the right one.” And once you start doing that, you are going to start making a lot more progress to your goals and being a lot more successful. One of my favorite quotes is from Theodore Roosevelt, and I always say, leave it to the former history teacher to bring dead presidents into online marketing, but Teddy Roosevelt said – he was asked a question by a reporter about making decisions as a president, how do you know if you are making the right decision? And his answer was, I don’t, but I’m just going to try it until I do it. And the actual quote says, “In any situation, the best thing you can do is the right thing. The next best thing you can do is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” So, the point here is, pick a direction, pick a path; all of you that are listening right now and you haven’t started your online business because you are trying to say, “Oh, I don’t want to go in until it works” or “I don’t want to spend money until I know I’m going to make my money back –”
JOCELYN: “I just want to keep learning.”
SHANE: Yeah, “I just want to learn enough to where it’s going to be successful for sure.” I hate to tell you this guys but that is not how it works. So, get out there and take action, do something, see if it works, whether you are staring an online business or you have kind of, plateaued and you are trying to get to that next level, once you choose a direction and relentlessly pursue that direction to see if that is right, you’ll start making it online.
JOCELYN: All right, and that actually brings us to the second success habit, that is sort of along the same lines, and that is that you need to be willing to be held accountable. I think that this is so important and this is what has helped the two of us, because we do have that built in accountability partner, but you need to find someone out there who complements you, not someone who is just like you. If you are ‘shiny object’ person like Shane is, you don’t need to be with another ‘shiny object’ person because you are never going to get anything done. You need to find somebody who is streamlined, who has that laser focus, tunnel vision that is not going to let you jump to the next shiny object. If you are a person like me, who is very methodical and does have that tunnel vision, you need somebody out there who can see the bigger picture because if you are a person like me, you will have trouble doing it. I have a lot of trouble doing that. That is what has really helped us to take it to the next level because we do have that built in accountability partner and we do, for lack of a better word, complete each other. That’s right. So, yeah, I mean, you really do need that and there are a variety of ways to find those types of people, but I recommend that you don’t have someone who is really close to you always and it could be a spouse but it could be somebody else. Maybe it’s a total stranger that you don’t even really know outside of like the online business world. I’ve seen all kinds of different partnerships work. I’ve seen people who are close to one another and then I’ve seen who aren’t. It’s not always easy to hear the things that you need to hear about your online business from someone you live with, and it’s not always a pretty picture. I mean, Shane and I have our fair share of disagreements, to put it nicely; so yeah, just be prepared for that. So, with that in mind, you might want to go with someone who is not your spouse or not your best friend.
SHANE: I like to surround myself in our mastermind groups with people who are not afraid to lay the smack down on me. I want people that will look at me and be so blunt that it hurts my feelings. I want that in our relationships with our mastermind groups, with each other, in a business standpoint. We have to be truthful and honest or it’s not a good mastermind, not a good accountability partnership. So, if you are looking at – if you are at this pie in the sky kind of, environment where everyone is like sunshine and rainbows all the time, and nobody ever tells you, you have a bad idea, and you are not quite making the progress that you are wanting to make, you might not be in the right group. So, really look for some accountability; someone who will tell you – Ana is beside me banging on a bucket trying to make a sand castle, if you heard that giant thumping noise, and it’s a sweet sand castle with that. But make sure you are looking for people who will tell you the truth, who will be honest with you; I have had people look me straight in the eye and say, “You are wrong, you need to be doing it this way” and I didn’t get offended or try to defend my business or defend my great ideas. No, I just said, man, maybe they are right and I’m going to try something different and I’m going to pursue it relentlessly. So, make sure when you are looking for accountability partners that you always find people who will be honest with you.
JOCELYN: And along those lines, sometimes it’s beneficial to be with somebody who is ahead of you in online business and it’s difficult to do that sometimes without actually paying your way into a group or mastermind, so this might be an investment that you consider in yourself because people aren’t just going to partner with you just out of the goodness of their heart to help you. You know, it will be lovely if it worked that way, but their time is valuable, our time is valuable and so, we don’t just jump into mentorships. So, we have people email us this all the time and we love you guys but, you know, we have things that we have to do also. So, just keep that in mind is that you do need to be looking for someone who is a little bit ahead of you, but just be prepared that you may have to make an investment to get yourself a little bit ahead in online business from the beginning.
SHANE: And that is the third success habit that we are going to bring up today; we are going to bring you some of these later this month, we are going to kind of, cut the podcast off a little bit short today so we can get some sun, play with the kids, build some castles and the ocean is calling my name right now. But the third success habit is you got to be willing to spend money and time. I hear so many people say “Well, I just don’t want to buy the ads until I know the ads work.” Well, how are you ever going to know the ads work if you don’t A-for-ads to see if they work or, “Well, I don’t want to invest in a website when I don’t know it’s going to work.” “I don’t want to get hosting yet, I want to make sure it’s going to work.” Well, how do you know it’s going to work until it’s live? You’ve got to be willing to spend time and money. You’ve got to be willing to sacrifice, invest – that’s a scary word that a lot of internet marketing gurus won’t throw around. But you are going to have to give up some things, you are going to have to go out and sacrifice some of your hard earned money, some time up front with the people that you love to go out and make your life the way you want it to be. And that is something that I think Jocelyn and I have always really good at is, you know, what, we’ve looked at each other dead in the eye and said, we got to give some things up or this isn’t going to make it happen. We gave up Cable TV to free up money for hosting, we sold our house to get our expenses down so we could quit earlier. We’ve sacrificed tens of thousands of dollars to fly halfway across the world and be away from our kids for five to six days to spend time with high-level marketers that are going to take us to the next level. It’s like Jocelyn said, those people aren’t going to just like meet us for coffee. I’m sorry people, that doesn’t work. We had to invest the time and money to go get the coaching we needed to take our business to the next level. If you find yourself right now saying oh I just – “I’m not ready yet” or “I want to make sure it’s going to work” you are having the wrong mindset and your online business is not going to be as successful as it should be.
JOCELYN: I find that a lot of times, people are doing one or the other as far as this goes like sacrificing time or money and we do talk a lot about this in our podcast is that you can either spend time or you can spend money, but actually those things are not exclusive to one another; like you actually have to do both, especially at the beginning. If you are not putting in the time, but you are spending money, then it’s probably not going to work, and then the people in your life are probably not going to be too happy about it. Just the other day, we had somebody in our Flip Your Life forums, that – she was upset because her husband was saying, you are spending too much money but my question to her is, okay, you’re spending the money, but are you sacrificing your time? Are you putting in equal amount of time into building the business or are you just continuing to spend money and saying, “I’ll work on it when I have time”? Because we all know how that works. You have to schedule things. You have to get it on the calendar; when are you working on your online business? What strategies are you putting out there? Are you just working on it when you have time, and changing the colors on your website and things like that? That is not working on your online business. So, you really have to look at that. What are you sacrificing? What time are you sacrificing? What money are you sacrificing? If you answer to both of those questions would be none, then probably you are not going to make it.
SHANE: And I think to sum up our three points today, you know, we talked about choosing a direction and going for it relentlessly to see if it works, whether you got – you know, there comes a point where you got to take action. We’ve talked about being willing to let someone hold you accountable and not trying to do everything on your own, like you’ve got all the answers figured out, and we also talked about being willing to sacrifice time and money. A lot of this really comes down to courage. Most people fail online because they are afraid. They are afraid to go out and just do it. They are afraid to fail, they are afraid they won’t succeed. It’s scary to let someone else tell you you’re wrong and hold you accountable. It is scary to let someone come into your life and see what you are doing and tell you if it’s right or wrong. It’s scary to sacrifice money when we don’t know if we’ll get it back. It’s scary to spend time on something when we don’t know for sure if it’s going to work, but eventually, you just got to do a gut check and you got to be brave and you got to go for it because nobody gets to quit their job, nobody gets to create an awesome, online income if they are not willing to be brave. And you know what, another great quote that I love is, “You have to be scared before you can be brave.” People are not just courageous without something to be afraid of. So, if you are afraid right now to sacrifice a little bit or to invest in yourself, if you are afraid to just pick that direction and try, if you are scared to go out and find someone or hire someone to provide the accountability you need, I hate to tell you this, very bluntly, but you are not going to make it online. You will be at your nine-to-five a year from now, and you are not going to be able to change your future and your family’s future. So, you have to get brave, you got to find some courage to go out and do these things. It’s not something that you read in a book, it’s not something you write in a journal, it’s something you do. So, if you are scared right now, you need to go look in the mirror and say, “Sorry, I’m not going to be scared anymore.”
JOCELYN: And we don’t say all these things to scare you or to make you mad or anything like that; we are just trying to tell you how you can be successful. This is how we did it, and this is like real stuff here, and sometimes it’s just like Shane was saying, you just have to do that gut check and “Am I really doing what it takes to make myself successful in online business?” That is the question that we always want you to ask yourselves.
SHANE: So, with that in mind guys, just listen back, this was a short episode, but we really want you to internalize this, we want you to go back and look at the direction you are taking, or if you are just sitting around thinking about starting an online business, you are not an entrepreneur. I have to tell you that. You need to choose a direction and you have to relentlessly pursue it to see if it works, if it doesn’t, no problem, you get more bats; every single swing doesn’t have to be a home run. If you are not sacrificing time or money, or if you think I’ll just throw money at it but I won’t spend my time, or I’m not going to go in and plan time to work on my online business and I’m just going to hope it works out, you need to really reevaluate that and say, “I need to look at that things I am giving up to get the things that I want later.” And if you don’t have an accountability partner, I’ll say it upfront; I don’t want you necessarily to come to Flip Your Life. I want you to go to the place that you can find friends, people who will tell you bluntly and honestly if you are doing something right or wrong, if you are not taking enough risks and will not just be like, “Oh, good job for trying.” You want people that you can really bounce things off of, and if you need someone higher level, and this is talking specifically to the people who are already making a little bit of money online but have plateaued, you need to go out and invest in some kind of, coaching or teaching or someone who is at a higher level; maybe go to a live event, do something to get yourself unstuck. So, right now guys, we are going to cut this one off and we’re going to bring you some more success stories next week; so more success habits but we’re going to get off here right now and enjoy the kids and enjoy the ocean. Just think about that as you go through your week and try to do one of those three things right now. Have some courage, go look yourself eyeball to eyeball in the mirror. Jocelyn and I do not have a magic pill, nobody does. You are the magic pill. You’ve got to go in, look yourself in the face and say, “Am I doing what it really takes to be online or am I kind of, just falling into the trap of the online dream?” It’s either going to be a dream or reality; we’ve made it a reality. I’m looking out at a sail boat and seagulls on the beach, while my kids build sand castles on a Wednesday. It is possible if you go out and do these things.
JOCELYN: And just remember that nothing that is worth doing comes easy. And that goes for pretty much anything on earth.
SHANE: So, that’s going to wrap up this week’s podcast guys; I hope you took that tough love and used it to kind of, motivate you, to get moving in your online business. We don’t say these things to be harsh, we don’t say these things, like Jocelyn said, to make online business scary, but you’ve got to really sometimes go out and get a kick in the pants to get this thing working, and that is hopefully what today’s episode was. We are going to bring you some more success habits next week, we are going to try to bring you about three a week for the next couple of weeks till we wrap up October, and we know that this is going to really motivate you and get you moving in your online business. So, we’re going to go and enjoy some sun, some waves and some sand with the kids and we hope you guys have a great day, get out there and make your online business work so you can have some can’t-miss moments too. Until next time, catch you on the flip side, see you later.
Steve Roll says
I’ve been busy setting up my online business. I’m creating a product to help people pass an actuarial credentialing exam (kinda like Pat Flynn with GreenExamAcademy.com). I’ve been very focused on working on the product and getting the website set up and all this work in the background, but haven’t really put myself out there until recently.
I tried to take your advice to heart and decided things are set up enough and I need to take action and let people know about what resources I’m putting together. I just opened an account with Aweber (thanks!) and I announced on a forum that talks about the actuarial exams that I will be creating resources to help them pass and I put out a pretty cool reading list to help them get started.
Long and short, by this evening (1 day!), I already have 3 subscribers on my email list! Big win!
Jocelyn Sams says
Great work, Steve! Hope you’ll give us an update when you get your first sale!