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With the new year right around the corner, it’s a great time for everyone to get focused and organized for 2016!
In this episode we’re answering questions about managing time and setting priorities.
Creating free content, paid content, opt-in freebies, and marketing activities
How you divide your time is dependent on where you are in your online business.
Before you start your blog, you should be focusing 100% of your time on your lead magnet.
Once that’s done, spend 100% of your time on setting up your website.
After that, you might spend:
- 70% on free content
- 10% on opt-in bonuses
- 10% on marketing
- 10% on creating content for other people.
These percentages will shift around once you open doors into your website.
So the key takeaway here is to always start with your lead magnets.
Scheduling free content
The next thing we discuss is scheduling free content.
How often you release content is up to you, but the key is consistency.
If you stay consistent, over time you’ll be successful online.
The ‘To-Do’ list is something we all struggle with.
Start working through it by breaking each ‘To-Do’ into bite-sized pieces and schedule them in your calendar (e.g. Google Calendar).
Use any app or piece of technology available to help you block your time and stay on track.
Be specific when you break down your tasks, set aside some catch up time every week, and focus on one thing at a time.
Prioritizing Goals
Next up, we talk about prioritizing goals.
Look at all the things that you want to do – see what you can delete, what you can delegate, and what you can do.
Prioritize the goals that can make you money the fastest.
You will learn
- The best way to divide your time
- Tips for releasing free content
- Best practices for delivering opt-in freebies
- Techniques for nurturing non customers
- Tips for tackling your ‘To Do’ list
- How to schedule tasks in your calendar to get more done
- Tips for setting and prioritizing your goals
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us a review on iTunes 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!
Thank you for listening!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to help you manage your time and set the right priorities in your online business.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down, by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you again this week. We are in the middle of a Q&A series where we are answering questions from our Flip Your Life community members and answering all the questions they have about their online business. We are really focusing a lot on mindset, time management and priorities to get us ready for the New Year. The New Year is right around the corner, New Year is a great time to get refocused and get reorganized in your online business. We want to make sure that everyone listening and everyone in our Flip Your Life community is prepared and set up to have a great year, or the best year ever in their online business in 2016. But before we jump into our content and today’s question on time management, we have got an awesome success story to share from one of our Flip Your Life community members.
JOCELYN: All right, today’s success story is from JJ Mayo and JJ says, “After what seems like forever, I finally sold my first course two days after emailing a small list of folks who attended my webinar. I woke up this morning and boom, someone purchased. Then I sold four more. For me, this validates the product. I’m feeling pretty confident that if I get a system down and the right targeting, I can make money selling this course. Thanks to everyone in this community and S&J. I couldn’t have gotten this far without you.” We love stories like these and especially ones from our Flip Your Life community members. JJ has been in our community for quite a while now, and we’ve been working together and he is doing a great job just taking action and making things happen. So, great job.
SHANE: It’s awesome seeing the payoff when you see people that get in the community, they work really hard, they ask a lot of good questions, and then they do the things that we talk about and then they see results from it. And if you would like to get some more results out of your online business, we would love to help you too. Head over to fliplifestyle.com/flipyourlife to learn more about the Flip Your Life community. This is a community where we help people every single day take their business to the next level. We help you to figure out what to do next. If you’ve plateaued in your online business or if you are stuck and you can’t just get over the hump, we would love to help you make it to the next level. So, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we would love to tell you more about our community. So, now on our podcast, we are going to go straight into our Q&A with S&J, we are going to answer three or four questions today from Flip Your Life community members, and these questions are going to be focused on time management and priorities. This is a huge thing that we see when people join our community. A lot of people know kind of what to do, but they don’t know what order to do it in. They don’t know exactly when to take action on certain steps and building an online business. There’s a lot of moving parts in your online business that people don’t even realize. It’s not as easy as the ‘set up a blog in 20-mintue’ videos on YouTube make it out to be. So, one of the biggest services we provide for our members is, we help them set their priorities, we help them put the pieces together in the right order, like an instruction manual if you will, and we help them focus that limited amount of time. You know, some of us, when we start our online business, or working at night for a couple of hours, maybe in the morning before work, maybe even getting a little bit done on your lunch break; we don’t have a lot of time. It is critical that we prioritize, focus on the right things, do them in the right order and get them done fast and efficiently so that we can move forward in our online business, maybe even to get to that point where we can quit that nine-to-five and work fulltime on it. So, today we have, I think three questions; we might be able to get to four on time management and prioritization – is that a word? Is prioritization a word? Did I just make that up?
JOCELYN: I think so.
SHANE: I’m going with that. All right, prioritization, and we are going to try to see if we can answer these questions and the information that we put out there will help you the listener as well. So, Jocelyn, what is our first question from our Flip Your Life community today?
JOCELYN: Okay, well, our first question comes from Marianna and she’s at bilingualavenue.com and let me just say that the thing I love about Flip Your Life is that we have people from all over in our community, but the challenge for us, a couple of crazy people from Kentucky is that sometimes their names are hard to pronounce. So, if we totally mess up your name, I am very sorry. All right, so Marianna says, “I am interested in knowing how to best plan to split my time between free content, opt-in freebies or opt-in bonuses, working on marketing or creating new content for paid members. Also, how do you plan for your freebies; as in, how often do you give them, when and where timing-wise in your email funnel?”
SHANE: All right, we get this question a lot and it comes from different points of view because while you are going to work on your online business and how your time is split is actually dependent on where you are at in your online business. For example, Jocelyn and I have been doing this for quite a few years now; we have three or four very mature websites online businesses and we don’t spend a ton of time on content. Probably 10% of our time is actually spent on making content. On Flipped Lifestyle, we record our podcast; on our education sites, we almost do no content because we outsource that now. So, we are at a little bit different point so our scale might look at little bit different. We might say 10% on free content, and then we might say another 10% on creating new opt-in bonuses and then we might spend 80% of our time working on marketing or content for our paid members. That’s a little different when you first start out. The first thing you need to be working on is your lead magnet. Before you ever start your blog or anything, when you decide to go into online business, you really probably need to say, I’m going to spend 100% of my time to create my first digital product and get my lead magnet done. Once you get that lead magnet finished, then you are going to spend probably 100% of your time on setting up your website and getting that kind of the structure of that done. Then you might be saying, okay, now, I’m going to say 70% on free content, 10% is on new opt-in bonuses, 10% is on marketing and 10% on creating content for anybody that might be wanting to pay me; might be surveys and things like that.
JOCELYN: I’m pretty sure that was over 100%.
SHANE: Was it? Let’s see, 70% on free content – I think it was, I said 10% twice – let’s go back and do the math again. Somebody can check me on this.
JOCELYN: Okay, well –
SHANE: 70% of free content, 10% of opt-in bonuses, 10% on marketing and 10% – I don’t know, somebody do the math here.
JOCELYN: You know our math skills aren’t the greatest.
SHANE: You’re getting my picture here. You are going to spend a lot more time on free content at the beginning. Once you open a lot of doors into your website like Jocelyn says, with a bunch of blog posts and things like that, then that scale is going to slide back and forth. So, really it kind of depends where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, what you are going to focus on. You want to focus on product first, your lead magnets are critical and need to be in place. Free content is important to open those free doors and then we’ll balance it out later. But it just depends kind of where you are.
JOCELYN: So, really just as long as you are working in that order, that is the most important thing to do. Just make sure you have that opt-in bonus done, start that free content, those blog posts and start getting people to come into your site before you worry so much about the other things. All right, so to answer your next question, “How do you plan your free content; as in, how often do you give the free content, when and where, timing-wise in the email funnel?” Well, obviously if you offer someone an opt-in bonus, then you need to send it to them immediately after opting in. You should send this to them via email; don’t just redirect them to a page on your site, because they’ll give you bogus email addresses just to be able to access the free content and you don’t want that because that doesn’t help you later on. So, there are a variety of ways to do this. I do this quite often with my list of knowing customers; I will send them something free every now and then, just to keep them warm and see if they might possibly be interested in purchasing in the future. This is called a ‘nurture sequence’ and I use it on Elementary Librarian just to kind of keep my people engaged on the email list and keep them opening the emails, keep them clicking to sort of train them to do that.
SHANE: And it works a little bit different from site to site; for elementarylibrarian.com like, I think Jocelyn has like a lot of holiday stuff. Like there’s a Christmas lesson plan or you know, whatever. So, like she can send those out like once a month, just to kind of keep dripping that content out because a lot of times people don’t join your membership just because they are not ready yet, but later on they might. So you want to make sure you keep giving them things. For U.S. History Teachers, I actually – as soon as you sign up for my list, you are going to get stuff every week for like 15 weeks, something like that, and then it kind of runs out and then I send you a very small thing about once a month because I’m really trying to blast you at the beginning, start giving you all this amazing value, they start using it, they really want more and then it just kind of goes away so they have to come and join at that point if they want more content. For Flipped Lifestyle, it pretty much works weekly because the only thing we really offer free at this point is our podcast. So, when our podcast comes out each week, that rolls out, we send an email out and say, here’s some great content, here’s some answers to some questions you probably have, come check this out, and then maybe once a month, we’ll drop a little how-to video or a tutorial or maybe every other month, just to kind of throw that additional value and give people a peek inside our training forum and see how our videos work. The biggest key is, there is no perfect, set schedule to deliver free content. We know people, they go every two weeks, we just talked last week on our Flipped podcast, to Lauren; she has blog post every other week, that’s fine. We know people that have three times a week, that’s fine too. What’s best for your audience is the schedule you need to follow and the key is consistency. Be consistent. Get a schedule, stick to a schedule, follow the schedule, don’t miss the schedule. If you are doing that, then over time, the long game, the marathon, not the sprint, you’ll be successful online.
JOCELYN: All right, our next question is from Rina at onlineflamencostudio.com and she says, “Please help me to make a solid plan for scheduling. I can say yes, I need to advertise my site on Facebook and schedule it in, but being able to break that down into doable chunks rather a nebulous to-do list is hard. What are some tips and tricks to make sure that I do the to-do list?” Oh boy, yeah, this is probably something that I am better at than Shane. So, I will –
SHANE: She’s taking this question.
JOCELYN: I’ll take this one for you.
SHANE: I make myself do the to-do list by letting Jocelyn tell me to do my to-do list. That’s kind of my philosophy on that.
JOCELYN: So, it is definitely hard to take big task and break those down into smaller chunks, but that is really the best way to do anything that requires a lot of steps. And something like advertising the site on Facebook, that definitely takes a lot of steps. So, what you’ll need to do is, you have your list of things that you want to do and for each of those things, you have to break those into a sub-list of things to do. So, maybe you are not even sure of where to start; well, if I wasn’t sure of where to start, I would probably go to YouTube and look up a video of how to do what it is that I am wanting to do. And from there, as you watch that video, you can just take down steps and that will be your next steps that you need to do. What I like to do is to put that in a calendar, like a Google calendar and I will set up time to work on something and when I do that, I set up time to work on a few tasks. I don’t just say, ‘Create ads for Facebook’ but instead what you want to do is say, ‘Watch YouTube video, complete steps one through three.’
SHANE: ‘Choose pictures for Facebook ads’ or something like that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so just break it down into more manageable steps and that is what you need to schedule on your calendar.
SHANE: And the key here is scheduling on the calendar. We don’t make to-do lists. We don’t do that. Like, we will write things on post-it notes, or we will make you know, maybe the next 30 minutes of what we are going to do, but we put everything on the calendar. I actually use the Google calendar and go in and set it up and try to schedule things for every 15 minutes when I am trying to do some complicated task because things are on a calendar and there’s a time by them, and you have something else coming up in an hour-and-a-half, you see that, there’s more urgency to get that done. If you just throw something on a random piece of paper, you are probably not going to finish those tasks because there’s kind of a psychology thing where you dump everything on the paper and you think to yourself, ‘Oh, I kind of did it because I wrote down how I was going to do it.’ But when you put it the calendar and you’ve actually given time out of your schedule to that, you’ve given parts of your life and you say, ‘I got to get this done in this said amount of time, I’m going to finish it.’ So, the biggest thing is, like Jocelyn said, break it down into small chunks, be more specific, don’t just say ‘Schedule my Facebook ads.’ Say, ‘Pick pictures, write copy, go in and choose targets.’ Write down the things you are going to do and then put them on the calendar for the time that you are going to do them, and you’ll find yourself doing a lot more because you’ll want to get that stuff done. Another big thing that we do is, we use every tool, computer program, app, anything we can to kind of help us; whether it’s batching things like for example, the social media posts, I think that might be some of the stuff you are talking about here. Sit down for one hour and get all of that scheduled and done and that way the machine handles it for you. Don’t rely on yourself to do this. You are going to fail if you do that. Humans are really bad at time management. Humans are really bad at finishing to-do lists in general. Humans are really bad on doing anything on time. A task might take an hour, but if you give yourself three hours on the calendar, you are going to take all three hours to do that. You’ll spend half the time just searching on Facebook. You know, cut the time down, be really strict about it, and use any tool you can. Set alarms to stop working and watch the clock; let it sit there right beside you.
JOCELYN: Sometimes I also tell people who have this question to set backup times for task that you want to complete. So, we all know that life happens, maybe you are in the middle of creating a beautiful camera image for your Facebook ad, and your child spills cereal all over the floor – not that I would know anything about that.
SHANE: That happens.
JOCELYN: But you know, things happen and things are going to happen sometimes when you are trying to work on something and you are not going to be able to finish it. So, then what happens when you come to your next block of time in your calendar and you are like, ‘Oh well, I didn’t get these other things done’; well, schedule in backup time just in case so you can catch up on anything that you didn’t get to finish earlier in the week when you said you were going to do that task.
SHANE: So, the biggest tip here, the biggest takeaway is, use the amazing technology and tools that we have available to kind of block your time. Be more specific; when you write things down, don’t just say ‘Work on Facebook ads’, say, ‘15 minutes, pick the pictures. 15 minutes write the text. 15 minutes –’ whatever and then set the backup time in case you don’t finish or you estimate it not enough time so that you don’t have to feel guilty or that you are taking something away from something else later. Also too, a big thing that really helps me is focusing on one thing at a time. I am very bad at this, I want to be a multitasker, but we can’t do it, but Jocelyn has shown me the light in doing this and has taught me –
JOCELYN: I have?
SHANE: Yes, well, I know I’m supposed to do it, but I don’t know if I actually do it all the time. But like really doing one task at a time, turning everything else off is really helpful for getting this stuff done. Even though you have ten things on your to-do list, do one thing. You can only do one thing at a time, finish it and then move on to the next thing.
JOCELYN: All right, our next question is from Karen at weturnedoutokay.com and Karen says, “I have several goals I want to achieve in 2016, all related to my niche. How do I know which is the best one to start with, and which ones can wait?” This is a great question and one that most entrepreneurs are faced with on pretty much daily basis because there are a lot of things to do, and there will be a lot of voices out there telling you, ‘Oh, I would really love to see this, I would really love it if you do this’, but sometimes we just have to close those voices out and say, ‘Here’s all the options that I have. Which one is going to be the most effective for me to work on right now?’ And typically if you are in a place where you are just starting out, like I think Karen is, you need to be concentrating on what is going to help you to make money the fastest. Like for instance, we have a friend Shelley Hitz, over at authoraudience.com, she’s actually been on our podcast before and she had this big plan for what she wanted to work on for her new site. She had been selling some things online for a while, but she wanted to start a new personal brand and that’s what Author Audience is, and she came to us just asking, ‘Okay, here are my ideas, which one of these should I work on first?’ And her thought was that she wanted to get a lot of content done and to record a lot of podcasts and we were like, ‘No, you should come up with your product first and then once you get that finished, then you can start working on all this other content’ which it is important to have content too and we talked about this earlier that you do need content on your website, but she already had a lot of content. She wanted to just keep making more and more and more content –
SHANE: Which was not making her any money, basically.
JOCELYN: And we were like, whoa, you need something to sell. If you are going to bring these eyes on to your website, what is going to be there to greet them?
SHANE: And it makes no sense to just endlessly create content. You know, the content marketing myth almost is, ‘If I just keep making stuff, eventually money will follow into my bank account’ and that is not true. Content is designed specifically to serve your audience and promote the things you sell. There is no reason to create – unless you are a charity or your blog is your hobby, then that is the only reason you should aimlessly create content. If you are in this for online business and you want to monetize, then everything on your website leads to one place, a product for you to sell so you can make money. So, it’s critical that you prioritize that first. I always say that you should work backwards. If the end result is someone buying my product, then the product must be created first and then I go back a step. Well, how did they get to my product? Well, maybe they opened an email and had a pitch from my product. Well, how did they get on my email list? Well, they wrote – you know, my lead magnet and then I move back one more step, how did they find the lead magnet? There’s content. So, in reality, the priority is to get that product done and then I need my lead magnet with some emails done, and then I can start writing content to promote those things. I think a lot of people, gurus out there, they promote it backwards. They just want you to write a lot of content because it’s really easy to convince somebody to start a blog, ‘click my affiliate link’ I made 50 bucks off you and go make some content. And it’s like now, you’ve got an online business, but you don’t because you are not selling anything. So, a good way to organize this is to look at all the things that you want to do and you can kind of evaluate those first and see what you can delete, what you can delegate and what you can do. Try to eliminate some things that you don’t need to do first, that just shortens your list and makes your life easier. Then look at some things you can automate or maybe delegate and maybe schedule those to get them done with a process so that is off your plate too. Then look at all the things you actually have to do and when you see those things, you need to evaluate them in a couple of different ways: kind of score them on things that will make you money or things that will promote your brand to other people, or processes that you can create to get things off of your plate. Once you have evaluated all of that stuff, focus on the ones with dollar signs, the ones that you scored as things that make me money, that’s your products, that’s your lead magnets, that’s the things that lead to people giving you money. Get those done first. Once those are finished guys, they are done for good. You don’t have to make a million different products to make it online. In reality, Flipped Lifestyle has one product, our Flip Your Life community. Our memberships on our educations sites, to get lesson plans, yes, we made all the lesson plans, but those are finished, they are done, we don’t have to go back and make them. We add to them from time to time, but it’s not something that is totally consuming our time. Now, we can shift back after we have done those things to the content creation, to the marketing and all that other stuff that gets people to your product. So for 2016, prioritize things that make you money first. Create those, then create things that get people to the things that make your money, that’s your second priority on the list.
JOCELYN: So, I just want to throw in here that remember that this advice is for people who already have a basis in their business. If you are staring out, you have no product, no website, you don’t even know for sure if this is a problem that people are going to have, then your priority at the beginning is going to be to develop your lead magnet for the problem that you think you are going to solve, and then get people on your list so you can find out more information about problems they want you to solve for them. So, I just wanted to clear that up that we are not expecting you to go out and make a 100-page book that you don’t even know if anyone is interested in buying. We never recommend that, but what we do recommend is that you do appropriate research, then you create your lead magnet based on one problem that you know your audience has, then start collecting that information, start putting that content out there, getting eyeballs on your website, and more importantly, getting information about what problem they want to pay you to solve for them.
SHANE: Basically at the beginning, your lead magnet is your first product and the currency that people pay you for that lead magnet is an email list, email address. Once you get that, you get some content and you get some traffic, you can poll people and you can ask them what they need help with and then you’ll create that for them and charge them money for it. So, basically products; product-first mentality, that is what we always teach; if you have been in the game for a little while, then your priority right now is to get a product that people will pay you money for. If you are just starting out, your product is still your number one focus, but it’s going to be that lead magnet to start getting people on your email list, to start building a relationship with customers so you can learn what to create down the road. All right guys, we hope the answers to the questions today from our Flip Your Life members served you as well. We hope you can take some of these time management tips, these tips for setting priorities in your business and apply them to what you are doing right now and get ready because we are only a few weeks away from the New Year. Use these tips and tactics to kind of organize yourself and get ready to have a great 2016 in your online business. Before we sign off today, we want to share with you, our can’t-miss moments; these are moments that we experienced in the last week or two, that we might not have got to experience if we had not been working in our online business. We might have missed the chance to do these things. We got a couple of things to share with you. Mine this week is stopping by my mom and dad’s and having a cup of coffee with them. Went over there the other day, and just stopped by after I dropped the kids off at school, went and poured myself a cup of coffee, I walked in and my mom was cutting my dad’s hair. So, I just sat down and drank my coffee and laughed and talked with them. When my mom had cut the hair, me and my dad went and sat down in the living room for a little while and it was just good to be able to roll in, sit down and relax and enjoy my mom and dad, and be able to spend some time with them. I would have been working at school, teaching class during that time and might have missed the laughs and the good times that we got to have the other morning. I like doing that every once in a while and it’s just awesome to have the freedom to be able to do that and enjoy their company.
JOCELYN: And for me, my can’t-miss moment this week has been Ana’s dance competitions; Ana is on a little all-star team, it’s called the Tiny All-stars and so we get to travel to different places, and granted that these are on Saturdays where I typically wouldn’t be working anyway, but the difference sit that I have so much more time to prepare and Shane would probably say, ‘Order things online’ because I’ve done a lot of that. I had to order some rollers and she has a bag for dance that I think she could fit inside of. It’s huge and I’m not really sure why we need it for two costumes, it didn’t seem like a good idea. So, it’s mostly just being able to mentally prepare and get ready for that competition without having to worry about being at work the whole day before and you know, just what’s going to happen when we get there and just having everything ready to go and be in there and not being exhausted at the competition.
SHANE: It was really cool, we went to her first travel competition recently and it was in another city, they don’t do the competitions around here and we got to – you know, we took the day before off. So, Jocelyn packed everything and she got everything ready and after we took the day off, we left. We went and stayed all night up at the place. So, we had the resources to be able to get a hotel room, wake up in the city the next morning, we didn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn and drive up there because we had to be at work the day before, and it was just really cool to not only be able to give her that opportunity to compete on this dance team because it is pretty expensive, but to have that mental space available to be able to just drop everything the day before and get to where we need it to be. All right, as we close up here, we would like to leave you guys with a Bible verse. The Bible is where we draw a lot of our inspiration for life and for business, and we would like to share with you some verses that have been speaking to us lately. The verse today, comes from 1Peter: 4-10 and it says, “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others.” If you do that guys, if you take the gifts that you have, the ideas that you have out into the real world and you help people and you serve people, the money will follow because when you are solving people’s problems, you are taking care of others, the rewards will come back to you. So, get out there guys, serve other people, work on your online business, take action and flip your life. I’ll talk to you next time.
JOCELYN: Bye!
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