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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Matthew discover a step by step process of going from product idea to implementation, and launching that digital product.
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Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us, each week, as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
JOCELYN: Hey guys, thanks for joining us for today’s Q&A with S&J mini podcast. We are still recording from 30,000 feet up in the air. We are on a plane and trying to stay awake. We are batching content today so we are recording several Q&As for you here in the air. Today’s question is from Matthew Dunstone, he is in Australia and he says, “I am a new recruit to online marketing, I have yet to create a website. I’m trying to make good early decisions on technologies and workflow. What I need is a string of practical examples of how individual sales campaigns are put together. I want to see what was for sale, how it was presented, what automated steps and technologies were employed. I guess I’m asking for a diary of a project.”
SHANE: All right, first of all, kudos to you Matt, for thinking about the sales process and your product first before creating your website. That’s something we are going to talk about kind of in this episode really quick. You’ve got this going correctly because you’re thinking in the right order. You’re thinking about what am I going to sell, how am I going to sell it, how is that going to work, what should I create and then you’re going to go back and make that website thing. So basically on that note, what happened recently is we just created a project and I’m going to go over that real quick. We’re gonna talk about how we actually put that together. We started Flip Your Life sometime last in 2014, I think it was November, maybe. I think there was actually one session before that, our beta test group and we got everyone through the project, and we don’t talk about building websites and all we do is build my digital product and we get it for sale and we get it marketed and we get it out there, to get those first sales made and to learn the process of selling something online. And in that process, a lot of people asked, ‘How do you build a website? I’ve got this product now, I know how to sell it, now I’m ready to build my website’. So that was an obvious cue to us that there was a market that wanted us to show them how to set up a WordPress website. So, we didn’t just make that product as soon as we saw the need for it because we didn’t know for sure. People will ask for things but sometimes they are not actually willing to pay you for that thing. So what Jocelyn and I did is, we basically outlined how would you make a WordPress website from scratch knowing everything we know over the last three years and we’ve create a bunch of websites in that time. What is the least you need to know, the basic steps to get it started. We created an outline for that project, this is page one in your diary here, and we presented that to the people in Flip Your Life who had already you know, came into our system and said, ‘Is this something you are interested in?’ and we pre-sold that for a hundred dollars.
JOCELYN: And we actually do this with a lot of our products basically just to see if there’s interest there and so that we have money there, and we know people want it before we start working on it. And it’s been really good for us; I mean, we’ve had people in there that helped us to make the course and to show how it’s gonna go, and it’s just really effective way to do things. It really lights a fire under you because once you’ve already sold something to someone, you have to get it done. I think sometimes people use that as a point of procrastination. If they haven’t already sold it, they’ll say, ‘Oh well, you know, I still got to keep making my product perfect’ and we talked about this on a podcast recently about how you can’t use perfection as a way to procrastinate. So, having a Beta group and having them know exactly when to expect content is a great strategy to getting your product done.
SHANE: So the first thing you do is, you take your concept and you outline it and then you present that to a potential market. That might be someone you know, that might be ten people in a forum, you may run ads to a page that’s selling this, you should be upright and honest and say, “I’ve not made this yet but I’m going to if you are interested” and once you get paying customers – I had a buddy that did a prelaunch and he sold three. We sold 24 of our website course on the pre-launch but when he got three people interested, he knew that someone was willing to pay for that. So after you have your concept and then you start pre-selling, and once you sell it, the next step is, you’re going to start rolling out the content on a specific schedule like once every three days, maybe, something like that and you create this steady, consistent deadline where your people that paid you are waiting for content and you are under the fire to get that to them. Now the process here is not just to make the outline like you had, the original outline for a website course had 40 bullet points that we thought we were going to create. We were gonna create 40 modules for that. We ended up only creating about 30 because as we taught each lesson to the audience who had paid us money to be in this course, they gave us feedback. They told us what to do next, they shifted it, they shaped it, they molded it into whatever they wanted and we just taught them what they asked for. And that allowed us to make less modules, gave them exactly what they wanted, they helped us clean up the product; so now we know on the back side, it’s exactly what an audience wants, it’s not what we think that it should be.
JOCELYN: After your product or course is created, the next thing that you’ll want to do is create a sales page for it and we use Lead Pages to do this. There are a variety of options that you can do if you don’t want to use Lead Pages but we think it’s really good for people starting out. Once you have your sales page built, you can get traffic to it and you can do that either organically, just people finding you out there on the internet or, you can take out ads to drive people to your sales page; people who may be interested in your product or your service. So that would be your next step.
SHANE: And the automation really kicks after you have created the sales page marketed and started selling this. You don’t automate in the first phase because you are wanting to learn – you want to be hands-on and touching base every step of the way with your audience. The automation comes later; later on you’re gonna create an email sequence where if people sign up for your product, you put them in an automatic email sequence where maybe every two days, they’re gonna get an email that says, ‘Hey, go to lesson one’. Couple of days later, ‘Hey, go to lesson two’, lesson three, lesson four, lesson five; that’s when you are going to automate everything. You’re gonna automate the signup from your lead page to your membership site, wherever they are consuming your content so you don’t have to you know, manually generate passwords and things like that. And it’s at this point, you’re probably going to start turning things over to a VA. Maybe they are going to go in and clean things up, make the pages look better so you don’t have to sit there and tweak them, or they can handle your customer service for you. Jocelyn does this with one of her products and we have a part-time assistant that works for us, and she handles all the customer service for one of Jocelyn’s products. That way, we don’t have to deal with that; we can focus on content and marketing. So in a nutshell, this might be a better podcast, something we can do on a longer podcast some day. We might go through the entire process of creation through prelaunch to automation and handing things off to a VA. But that’ll give you a good outline starting out Matthew to kind of give you an idea of how you’re gonna build your product, what you’re looking for is the end result, how you’re gonna engage with that audience and then you can roll on in and start building your online business.
JOCELYN: Thanks so much for your question and we will see y’all next time.
SHANE: Get out there, take action, flip your life, guys. See you later, bye.
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