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This is Our First “Flipped Podcast!”
Wait… what is a “flipped podcast?”
Like you, we listen to a lot of internet marketing podcasts, but after a while, most of them sound the same.
You know the drill: Bring on a “guru.” Guru and host talk about how awesome they are for 20 minutes. Guru then talks about high-level marketing tactics for millionaires that are often theory or way over the beginner’s head. (Not all podcasts are like this, but more and more are.)
How does that kind of show help families starting out? How does advice from a 25-year-old single dude living in Costa Rica help a normal family start an online business while working full time and raising kids? Um… It usually doesn’t!
BUT, what if that normal family could get on the podcast with the expert? What if that normal family could ask REAL questions, and get REAL answers about starting an online business or taking their business to the next level? And what if we could all listen in? Now, that is a show I want to listen to!
That podcast has never existed…until now! We are introducing “The Flipped Podcast,” where our audience becomes the guest! We are so committed to helping families find freedom online, that we are giving away FREE consulting calls to members of the Flipped Lifestyle community. Then, once a month, we are turning one of those calls into a podcast episode for everyone to listen to!
Not only will the family on the call receive free consulting, but everyone listening will benefit from hearing the answers to their questions!
In today’s podcast, we are going to help Ben and Deb Pugh get their online business started.
We thought it would be great for you to be a fly on the wall when we’re helping others get their online business started.
Here’s what we’ll be covering:
- The vision that Ben and Deb have for their foster care online business
- How to use keyword research without getting stressed out
- How long your blog posts should be
- Tips on staying focused and consistent when you have an already busy schedule (if you like Cable, then prepare for some bad news!)
- The best way to start guest posting and get featured on other sites that are similar
Resources Mentioned in this Episode:
- Check out Ben and Deb’s website if you are interested in becoming a Foster parent
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey Y’all. On today’s podcast, we are going to help Ben and Deb start their online business.
SHANE: 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 the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We are super excited today to do something totally different on our podcast. We have been getting tons of emails from couples and just people everywhere, just asking us tons of outstanding questions and we’ve been working on some consulting and with people just talking to them, helping them out in their online business. The other day, we were kind of thinking as we were doing one of our consulting calls, like, it would be so cool if people could be sort of a fly on the wall and just listen to these conversations because so many good things come out of every single one of them. So we thought wouldn’t it be cool if we could get people to come on to our show and ask us questions, and we could record these answers and make those into a podcast. So today, we are bringing you the flipped podcast.
SHANE: See what we did there, it’s a flipped podcast like that? We just kind of flipped it on its head. Okay, I’m going too far in this. Another reason we wanted to do this, we thought, man, it’s always like the same kind of experts and they are bringing on the same people all the time, talking about the same high-level things, and it just makes online business so overwhelming. And being teachers as our original trade, you know, it’s kind of like in a classroom setting, you always tell your students, “Ask a question if you got it because a lot of other people probably have the same questions,” and we started noticing trends in all of the questions. People were emailing us, were tweeting us, and even in our consulting calls when we were helping people start their online business, the same things were kind of popping up.
So today, we are going to be bringing on Ben and Deb Pue who are listeners of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast and they use our blog. They were sending us some questions asking us things, getting some help from us about their online business. So, we have actually invited beginners on today. We have brought on actual family, a couple, who has a passion, who has a dream, who have an online business that they want to start, and we actually did a consulting call for them, a free consulting call for an hour, where we just talked to them about their online business, let them ask us questions, and we are going to share that with you today in the hopes that it will answer a lot of the questions you might have if you are just starting out in your online business as well.
JOCELYN: And so first before we get to the interview, we are going to read an iTunes review. We do this every week just to say thank you to the people who are leaving these awesome reviews. This one is from MBBell, I’m not sure how you say that, but it says, “Inspiring and full of ideas” and it says, “I don’t have a ton of time for podcasts so I have to be selective, but ever I heard Shane and Jocelyn as guests in Smart Passive Income, I’ve really enjoyed their story. For me, the inspiration they provide to just put yourself out there online has been excellent. I’m just launching the first online business and I’ve had night terrors of what people would think about my material when it’s out there online.” We’ve all been there.
SHANE: Yeah, no doubt.
JOCELYN: “Shane and Jocelyn are providing the inspiration to help me get over the hump. I look forward to enjoying more episodes as they come out.” So, thanks so much. We love reading your reviews. It’s like one of the best parts of our day.
SHANE: And also too, like if you do leave us a review, email us at shaneandjocelyn@flippedlifestyle.com and let us know that you left a review. If you have a blog or website, we would be happy to read your URL on the air as well and link to it in the show notes of the podcast that we read your review on. So, make sure you go to iTunes, the actual program, that’s the only place you can leave a review is on your computer in the actual iTunes program. Leave us a review, we appreciate it. It really helps with the rankings and it helps with our goal of getting our message out there and helping as many families as possible. And speaking of helping families, see that transition right there Jocelyn, what I did there?
JOCELYN: That was great.
SHANE: We are going to go straight to our interview now with Ben and Deb Pue, and we are going to be helping them start an online business about foster parenting at the fosterparents.com. We are going to help them get their blog ready, learn what to do to start out and let them take care of their message of helping foster parents.
JOCELYN: So, we are so excited to have you guys today. Let’s start out and tell the listeners a little bit about you and a little bit about your plans for your online businesses.
DEB: Alright. So I’m Deb Pue, and I have Ben, I have been doing foster care for five years and we have three kids of our own, two boys and a girl. Ben’s been doing education, teaching high school, junior high, English.
BEN: Coaching football, just working with youth.
SHANE: Yes! That’s what I’m talking about right there.
DEB: Yes, that’s a time-consuming thing.
JOCELYN: Yes, I know.
DEB: Yes, so we’ve been doing that. I used to work at a residential treatment center for troubled teens and decided after my oldest was 1 year that it was time to stay home, and then Ben decided to get into the teaching stuff and man, that hit our budget pretty good, and so we had to figure out a way for us to be able to make it. So we started doing foster care so I could stay home.
BEN: And then after doing foster care for a while and after teaching for quite a long time, I kind of decided I was tired of just being a lowly teacher and I wasn’t very happy with the way things were going. One of my buddies suggested that I listen to Pat Flynn and all of a sudden, that got our brain turning and we were like, “Man, maybe we could create stuff online and…”
SHANE: Pat will do that to you every once in a while.
BEN: I know. He just changes the whole way you think. And so right now, the direction that we are moving in is creating online content and digital products to help people become foster parents and to also help people who are foster parents be better foster parents, to kind of have resources that they can rely on to help reach their youth and help just the whole foster process go more smoothly.
DEB: Yeah because sometimes, you have very stressful moments and you just want to be done. So if you have some sort of way to manage that then I think it would be very helpful, beneficial for people.
SHANE: Okay. So, basically what you want to do is you want to create a website that where: one, maybe people who are like you guys are like, “Okay. How can I get into foster care?” It will help them do that and then also once they are already in it, they are going to have like resources or maybe access to you guys and your experience where you can help them through like the trials and the pain points of being a foster parent, right?
BEN: Exactly. Like, we want to help people jump into this but as it is with any other business, once you get in, you are like, “What did I get myself into?” And so we kind of want to be there to help get through the pain spots and the tough areas. So to help us do that, we have created a website called thefosterparents.com.
SHANE: That is a really good domain, by the way, that’s- it kind of says what your thing is about. That’s awesome. So, you are off to a good start, you know what I mean? Okay. Well, let’s talk about more specifics and let you go ahead and just- let’s try to get through about four or five questions while we’re on the air here because I’m sure a lot of your questions will probably, you know, we always think, “I’m stuck at this place and I’m the only one that’s stuck there,” but it’s just like in school, you know, we always tell our kids, you know, you are a teacher, Ben, “If you’ve got a question, everybody might have that question, so you might as well ask it.” So that’s how we want to kind of treat this. So just go ahead and kind of throw a question or two at us, or just give us one question and will kind of brainstorm and give you our thoughts on it.
DEB: Okay. So one of our questions that we came up with was we found some keywords that are highly searched on Google AdWords, the keyword “planner tool” and we don’t know what the most effective way to use those to drive traffic to our site is.
SHANE: Basically you found that there was a lot of search volume, right? Is that what you are saying on certain keywords?
DEB: Yeah.
SHANE: Okay. And you want to know how to use those basically, like, all right. One thing I want to tell you right away is that don’t get totally caught up in keywords, okay? Because keywords basically, keywords used to, about two years ago, mean a lot more than they do now because there were ways to trick Google with keywords and things like that. But they’ve really messed with their algorithm. So keywords are still important, but not because we are trying to necessarily SEO and rank in the search engines, but they are important because they tell us exactly how our audience thinks. Does that make sense?
DEB: Yeah.
SHANE: So basically, it’s not that you want to load up on keywords all over your website because just from naturally talking about foster care and foster parenting, those natural keywords are going to come out in your conversation, in what you are saying. But what we use keywords for, we use it to guide the type of content we create, okay? So for example; if I was going to make a new playbook or something like that, and I wanted to get in, you know, I want to see what do coaches want right now.
Then I might go look up keywords about playbooks and I would choose maybe the one that had the most search to kind of talk about, but I’m not going to like use that and keyword stuff my article and have to use that ten times, and in my heading and all that. So, what you should do with those keywords, if you’ve got a bunch of keywords that have a lot of tart, like, good search traffic, list those out, list maybe the top 20 search terms for foster parenting or whatever and let those just be guides to your blog posts. Like that’s what you need to write about and after you figure out like a topic-like what’s one of the keywords, do you know? Like besides… Give me a keyword for example.
BEN: One of the phrases is “becoming a foster parent.”
SHANE: Okay. That’s great. All right, so, let’s just say that that’s one of your things, becoming a foster parent. You could just take that and make that the blog post title. You don’t want to just stick keyword phrases in your blog post titles, you want to actually make them into sentences if they don’t sound right, like, “becoming a foster parent quickly” or “how to become a foster parent,” that’s kind of a play on that keyword and then you just want to write down like an article, don’t look anymore keywords up.
Don’t worry about using that keyword, you know, X amount of times in your content. Just write a good solid article related to that keyword from your heart, from your experience, and that is going to not only relate, you know, to that keyword in the search engines but it’s going to relate to the people in your audience, the people you are actually speaking to. That’s who you should be writing for, write your content for the people based on those keywords you find, that’s the language they are using to search for answers, but just use that as a guideline. Don’t really get caught up in targeting those keywords and it’s going to happen organically. Does that make sense?
DEB: Yeah.
SHANE: Yeah. So, just list those keywords. Take the top 20 and then turn them all into blog titles. Then at that point, forget the keywords. Just write solid content based on what people are looking for and the traffic is going to start coming because of that.
BEN: Okay. So, we are going to take the top 20 keywords and basically, those are what our next 20 blog posts are going to be based on.
SHANE: Theoretically, yeah. You might mix up some a little bit. You don’t have to write them in exact order of top to bottom because like four or five of the keywords might relate to each other, but it will give you a good guideline of the language that your audience is using to try to find this information and it will help you know what to talk about. So, not just exactly what to write down, it’s just what to talk about, does that make sense?
DEB: Yeah.
BEN: Awesome. How long would you recommend that those blog posts be, maybe, I don’t know. Do you guys count words or just…?
SHANE: No. I write until I’m done talking.
JOCELYN: My blog posts are usually fairly long and that’s just because I’m sort of longwinded individual when writing, but I would say maybe aim for about 500-700.
SHANE: Yeah, just go for something. It doesn’t matter, you know what I mean? I mean, there are numbers out there that say like you have to write 300 or the search engine will ignore you, but that’s not true because think about the things you see on Facebook all the time, like Buzz Feed, it’s just a video with one sentence, you know what I’m saying? So, I mean it’s really just whatever you are trying to say. Say it in the clearest way possible and don’t really get caught up in those words, the word counts.
BEN: Okay and then one more question, sorry. Do your blog posts kind of go along with your podcast episodes as well or?
SHANE: No. Sometimes they do, it just depends. It depends what’s on our mind. The way we write our blog post is, we will do research to see what we want to write about but most of the time, it’s kind of what are we doing right now and that’s kind of what’s on our mind – that’s what we blog about. Whereas our podcast is a little bit more planned out and a little bit more strategic, because we have to think ahead a little bit about what we want to cover.
So, our blog posts are kind of just, “I’m going to write about this today.”
JOCELYN: And it can also be like if people are asking you specific questions, we do a lot of blog post and even podcast based on that. We will, a lot of times, change what our plans might have initially been to adapt to what our audience wants to hear about.
SHANE: Yeah. A lot of times emails, like, if we get an email and someone asks us a question, we’ll just be like, I just wrote like a 500-word response to this email so I’m going to use that as a blog post basically. So, we’ll do stuff like that.
BEN: Alright, awesome. Thank you.
JOCELYN: Okay. So, let’s move on to your next question.
BEN: The other question that we have, it’s kind of related to this. How do we figure out what products our audience is looking for? With so many things out there like ebooks, webinars, trainings, coaching, what are some tools that we can use to figure out what products they are looking for? Do we need to take surveys or what would you guys recommend?
JOCELYN: Well, that is the ideal, of course, but the thing about it is, if you are just starting out and you don’t have an audience, it’s going to be sort of hard to survey them. So, what I would recommend doing would be to come up with a product that you think best suits whatever it is that you are doing. If you think it’s an ebook and that’s something that’s fairly easy for you to create, then that’s what I would recommend starting out. You need to do something that you know that you can do and that you know you can get done in a relatively short amount of time. That is the most important things for starting out because you want to make sure that you get that product finished.
Once you get that product done, you get some people coming onto your website, consuming your content, downloading that free product, whatever it is that you have for their opt-in bonus, then that’s where you can start getting more specific and asking your audience, what is it that we can make for you? How can we better help you? You can start asking them those questions. Would you like for us to do a webinar? Would you like for us to do one on one coaching? Things like that. So, that’s what I would recommend.
DEB: Okay.
BEN: Awesome.
SHANE: And that’s how we started out. We weren’t exactly sure when we started out what to do. We didn’t… I mean like we didn’t… Like I thought people would want video but I wasn’t necessarily ready to do that for my football coaching stuff. We just made an ebook and we got it done and we put it out there. Once we started talking to people, it became very obvious what they wanted, does that make sense?
DEB: Yeah.
SHANE: So, really you just got to start that conversation with something that you feel comfortable with and you’ll be okay.
DEB: Awesome, thank you.
SHANE: Yeah. Don’t get caught up in that either. Just put something out there and get it done, you know.
BEN: Alright, yeah.
SHANE: Cool. What else you’ve got?
BEN: All right. So another one, like Deb said we have five kids, we have three of our own and then two foster kids plus we are both busy with our jobs. What are some suggestions that you guys have for us to increase our consistency and our focus? I have the… Anytime something shiny comes up, that catches my attention and there I go.
SHANE: That’s me and here is how I increase my consistency and focus. I let Jocelyn tell me what to do. So I’m going to switch this one over to her she’s going to talk about it.
JOCELYN: So yeah, this is something that’s hard for a lot of people especially starting out, I think it’s because there are so many different voices out there and just so many different things to read. I mean, all of it is such awesome information. You just want to soak it all up and start taking action on all of it, but that is a problem because if you are taking action on 10 things then you can’t finish the first thing. So, yeah, something that has really helped us is just the calendar. We just use the Google calendar. I have a calendar and Shane has a calendar, and…
SHANE: And they are linked together, so we can see each other’s calendars in real time. So, we don’t get mixed up.
JOCELYN: Right. And so what we do is we try to work on things that are on the calendar. So if we have something pressing, you know, I don’t work on it right then. I calendar a time for it in a couple of days. We do try to keep a general schedule, like, we might work on things for Flipped Lifestyle on certain days. We might work on our individual websites on other days, so we do try to keep a very general schedule that way. But I would definitely recommend calendaring times if that’s a word – calendaring – I’m not sure. But…
SHANE: It’s a word here.
JOCELYN: It’s a word in Kentucky. I don’t know.
BEN: It sounds good to me.
JOCELYN: So that’s one thing that we do that really helps us out. I would say also for your children, what ages are your children?
BEN: Our oldest is 7, he’s almost 8 and then…
DEB: 5 and then 1, and then we have two foster girls who are 6 and 7.
SHANE: And we have proven that Ben does not know the ages of his children because he got totally confused right there.
BEN: I figured, let Deb take over, you know.
JOCELYN: Okay. Like the children watching each other is really not an option for you, I mean, you know. Unless you want the house burned down or something like that. So, you know, you are going to have to be very strategic in your working time on your online business. One thing that Shane and I do a lot is we will trade off child watching duties and it is hard, especially, I mean, I can’t even imagine having five. It’s hard having two kids. I can’t imagine having five that you are trying to watch by yourself. But if an online business is something that’s really important to you then you’ll find a way to make it work.
SHANE: Let me tell you what we did, this is exactly what we did when we first started, okay. Because we had, our schedule was actually very similar to yours so I can kind of go through this and show you what we did. When we both were in it and we were like, “Okay, we are going to do this,” the first thing we did is we literary wrote down 168 little squares and we said; there are 168 hours in a week and we planned for every one of them every week.
On Sunday, we said, there are 168 hours this week, when are we going to sleep? That’s where we started. And then when are we going to have to be at work, and we blocked that out. We meticulously planned every minute of the week and that bought us back time because we could see on paper when we were wasting time, we took that time back and made it like online business time. Does that make sense?
DEB: Yeah.
SHANE: And then what we did was, like we would both go to school. Jocelyn would come home like, you know, she’d probably be home by 4. She would pick up the kids. I would go to football practice. I probably wouldn’t get home until 7. We kind of knew when we would actually make it in the door. So, like what we did there was, Jocelyn basically had the kids and she was by herself from 4-7. When I got home, I took the kids. Jocelyn immediately went to work on her online business stuff and she would work from like 7-9. I would come home from football practice, get the kids, and get them bathed and put them to bed. Now, Jocelyn by this time is exhausted because she’s been gone since 6 AM, right?
So at that time, she’s pretty much taking a step back, laying down and getting ready to go to bed, then I would from like 9-11. So we tried to always block out a couple of hours in there every day where one of us have the kids no matter what, even if we were tired and one of us had a chance to work.
Another thing we did was, Jocelyn, would send a lot of information out there. You’ve really got to stop listening to every podcast and everything, except the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Don’t stop this one though, Deb and Ben. You really got like narrow it down to a couple of really good sources of information and on the way to work, we would drive to work. That was our podcast time and we didn’t get to do things like that any other time. We really narrowed down the amount of information we were allowing into our brains about online business because we had to focus on something so we could latch onto it and get it done.
Another thing we did was get rid of our cable. We like basically said, “We are not going to waste time watching TV when our dreams are on the line.” We canceled our cable completely and that might be some other form of entertainment for you but one thing it did, it freed up money, like, we could buy resources, like tools online, things we needed to learn more about online business, and it also gave us all that time back. So, we made some serious sacrifices in entertainment and time to make sure we had enough time to work on our online business.
BEN: Awesome.
JOCELYN: I mean, it is a lot of sacrifice — especially upfront.
SHANE: It’s very hard upfront.
JOCELYN: Yeah and it’s even hard to explain to your kids sometimes, you know, they’ll want to know, “Why can’t we all play together” and things like that. But the thing about it is, you know, it’s hard for a little while but if you can make it work, it’s so much better now. I mean, I can go to my son’s school in the middle of the day and we can do pretty much whatever we want, whenever we want to do it now. So, it is definitely a trade off but I would say, overall, it’s totally worth it.
SHANE: And one more thing on this topic, I know financially this is hard sometimes but with family, you can make it work. Jocelyn and I made an agreement with each other when we started this. We knew we were going all in the work and going to make this work. We said we are going to use childcare. We are going to allow grandparents to watch our kids sometimes. We are going to allow ourselves a moment to go out to dinner together and hire a babysitter.
Even though we are sacrificing a little bit of time during the week and we can’t all be together all the time, we had to tell ourselves upfront we are not going to feel guilty because we are investing this time for our children in our family, and it’s going to pay off. We just have to get through the tough part first. So, if you need a little help, go find it, put a little money aside. Maybe if you do cancel cable, you use that for some child care money to give yourself some focused time to work on your business sometimes and get a few things done when you have to.
BEN: Awesome. So, would you say between the two of you, you had maybe four hours a day that you would work on this then?
JOCELYN: I would say that’s kind of optimistic.
SHANE: Yeah. Maybe three, maybe, that’s counting drive time too, listening to a podcast. I’d say we were probably hardcore working for two to three hours a day each, maybe about, yes, something like that.
JOCELYN: Yeah. Probably towards the end, like when we were getting ready to quit our jobs. I mean, I was almost working two full-time jobs at that point and it was killer. At the beginning I would say, I would say just maybe even try to budget like an hour a day just to start out and try baby stepping that way. And then you can catch up on stuff on the weekend. That’s what we would do. We would kind of switch off on like Saturday and Sunday, and we would try to watch the kids for each other for a longer block of time. Playgroups are fantastic for that if you have a friend. I was lucky that I had a friend whose husband was also a football coach and so we were football widows at the same time. So, we would get our kids together and play. And so, you know, that worked out for me. For Shane, he has family around here, so he would take the kids over to…
SHANE: I’d go to my mom and dad’s and just hang out there while Jocelyn was alone at the house and could work, you know. And when we had the kids, we were literary away from each other. We didn’t just say, “I’m going to take the kids in the living room.” It was, “Get the kids in the car and make them go to another location and have fun with them while I stay here and work alone,” basically that.
JOCELYN: I mean, as you know, it doesn’t work if you are in the same house.
SHANE: Right, exactly. So, I think the biggest take away from this segment is to be super deliberate and plan. I mean, if you are really not willing to sit down for 30 minutes every Sunday after church or whatever and write down your 168 hours, then you are probably not dedicated enough to make this work anyway, you know. Because that’s a very small sacrifice to sit down and actually plan that to make sure that you’ve got enough time, not only for your family needs but to actually work on this online business on the side and try to make it happen. So, you just got to be committed to it and you’ve got to be super deliberate and super patient, and help each other find the time to work on it.
DEB: That makes sense. Thanks.
BEN: Yeah, awesome. I just got that workweek schedule off your website and it kind of hurts a little bit but I can see where I can pick up more time and stop wasting time doing meaningless tasks.
SHANE: Yeah and you are going to have some tough conversations there too because you’ll be like, “But that’s the time I like to do X,” and then the other person is going to be like, “Yeah, can’t do that anymore, maybe.” So, and that was usually me, the one that couldn’t, I had to give up a lot of stuff. You’ve got to really go into it being able to compromise and say, “Yeah, I’m going to sacrifice and so are you, and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
So, cool. What else have you got? What other questions?
DEB: Well, we were talking about the blog stuff. We’ve heard about doing things like guest blogging on other people’s sites that are doing the same type of things we are to get things like backlinks. Since we haven’t really started, we don’t know how to go about getting on other people’s blogs or having other people get on ours. Do you have any suggestions for that?
JOCELYN: Yeah. I would say especially starting out, I would just go out and do some searching on some of the keywords that you found and just see who is out there blogging about it. See who might have a podcast about your topic and just see if you can be a guest on it. I mean, we have people that send us messages on all of our sites all the time and we can’t do everything. But just reach out to them and chances are, they’ll probably say, “Yeah, sure.”
SHANE: Yeah. The way CoachXO actually got started with my podcast over there is I said, “I want to be on a podcast, I want to do a podcast.” I just emailed a guy that had a football podcast and he let me be on it. If you send five emails, somebody is going to say yes, you know. But I think that the backlink thing gets way overrated because you need to focus on your own content first, okay. Don’t worry about all these backlinks and all these strategies. That’s kind of that information overload that everybody gets to in the beginning.
It’s funny because we really don’t have a ton of backlinks and stuff and all of our sites do very well. We just focus on writing content and if it’s good content, people are going to link back to you. Eventually those opportunities are going to come organically especially in it, but the thing is, if they are backlinking to you and you are interviewing on a podcast and you don’t have anything on your website, then when all these people that get to your website from their site look around they are going to leave. So, I would say for at least the first six months to a year. I wouldn’t even worry about that, I would just write my own stuff and focus on putting the information out there that I want to. That way you can say, “Oh look, my awesome site with 80 blog posts, come look at it,” and they’ll have something there to look at. Does that make sense?
DEB: Yeah. That’s awesome.
SHANE: Yeah. That’s very stressful. I used to worry about that all the time. Like, “Oh my gosh, how am I going to get my page ranked to one” and stuff like that. you know what I mean? It’s really not that relevant in the long run as long as you are writing really good stuff and helping people. So, that’s the main thing.
BEN: Awesome, thanks. I was just thinking, well that takes such a huge load off of my shoulders. One of the things I have been noticing is that there is a lot of Facebook groups that say, “Don’t post any links in here” and don’t do this and don’t do that. As we go through this and create our content, I think when people come and visit our site, they’ll see the value.
JOCELYN: Exactly, yeah. If you are a member of those groups, here is the funny thing about those groups. I’m a member of, probably, I would say no less than 60-100 Facebook groups because I always join things that are relevant. I have probably 40 or 50 just football coaching groups that I’m a member of from coachxo.com. They do say things like that like “don’t post anything. If you post a link, you’re going to get kicked out.”
You think to yourself, “Well, how in the world am I supposed to tell anybody about my awesome blog about foster parenting?” The thing is, though, if you go into that community and you just start talking to people a little bit and you get to know some people, and then you just say, “Okay, who’s the owner of this group?” And you just state, they will show you who it is. You just ask them and they’ll probably let you share it. That’s more to stop people from just spamming, “give me money.” You know what I mean? You need to just go in there and be like, “I’ve got this really cool article about becoming a foster parent that helps people overcome the three biggest challenges in that process. Would you mind if I shared it?” They’ll probably let you.
JOCELYN: And I would just say like on the Facebook groups, just be an authentic member of the community. The reason that they don’t allow people to share links is because people just come in there and post nothing but links, but if you go in there and you actually start having conversations with people, helping them and not putting any links in, just authentically helping people, then you could even start saying things like, “I wrote an article about this on my blog. I can give you the link if you’d like. I’m not allowed to post it here.” Chances are, probably 4-5 people are going to say, “Oh yeah, I’d really like to see that.” So that would be one way that you could, I don’t want to say get around it but that would be one strategy that you could use going into the Facebook groups.
SHANE: And Facebook groups are really valuable because it’s not necessarily a place to share links and things like that as much as it is a place to learn what people need. I have a group that I started myself that has 1,000 members in it and I rarely ever post any links in it back to Coach XO or any of my football products. Really, the only reason I’m in there is to listen to the conversation and to hear coaches saying, “I’m having trouble with this. Do you guys have a solution for that?” It just kind of gives me like an ear in the conversation of what my audience is talking about so I understand what to blog about, what kind of products to make to solve those problems and things like that. So don’t necessarily just look as a group as a place to add your links. Look at it as a place to really get to know the pain points of your audience and once you know that, then eventually, you’ll be able to share it to them in other ways too.
DEB: Awesome. That’s really cool.
SHANE: Yeah. Facebook groups are awesome and they are a great tool, but you do have to be careful because man, you will get the ban hammer quick in some of those. They will kick you out if you post it too fast.
BEN: Yeah, it sounds like we’ve got our work cut out for us for the next 6-12 months.
SHANE: Yeah, no doubt. Now, where do you think you guys, kind of pulling all this together a little bit, what we’ve talked about because those are some great questions that we had when we started out and we had to kind of like bump our heads against the wall for six months to figure it all out. What’s your take away from that conversation? Where do you think you’re going to start with the fosterparents.com and what do you think you’re going to focus on right now?
BEN: You know I think the thing that we need to start working on first is probably the blog posts and just getting valuable content out there and just having something so that when people come across our website, they’ve got something to engage them and something to read, and then possibly an ebook so that we have something else of value to offer for an opt-in.
SHANE: Right.
DEB: Yeah, that was what I was going to say, an opt-in for getting email addresses to get people different content in the future and stuff like that.
SHANE: That’s awesome. I’d give you one more piece of advice before we have to close up this call here. One thing that I think a lot of people do is when they find people online, they see people, they’ve got a blog, they are doing YouTube videos, they are doing podcast things, and things like that, I always ask that question to people at the end of our consulting calls because it’s important to focus on that one thing, like the first thing that came to your mind was like, write the opt-in, get the blog posts up. You don’t have to do everything at once.
Your brand and your stuff are going to grow over time and you can add layers to it once you gain mastery and control over another part so focus on that blog and get that blog to be the best it can be first. Make your posts really good, really focus on that for a while. Don’t think you’ve got to add a podcast right away – you’ve got to start doing YouTube videos, you’ve got to start taking consulting calls, you’ve got to do a webinar for foster parents. You don’t have to do all that at once and that way, you’re not going to be overwhelmed and give up basically. I think you guys have some awesome focus there with all that information.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I think that that is a great place to start. I think you guys have the right idea and I can’t wait to see what you guys come up with. Thanks so much for being on our flipped podcast today.
DEB: Thanks for having us. It’s fun.
BEN: Yeah, thank you, guys. I feel like this has been so valuable. I just appreciate everything you guys offer.
JOCELYN: All right, thanks so much.
SHANE: Awesome guys, thanks. Okay, guys, that was our interview with Ben and Deb Pue. What an amazing conversation with two amazing people. They just have such an awesome passion for helping foster parents and we feel so blessed that we get to be a part of their journey and help them kind of get their message out there. What a worthy passion to go out and help foster kids relate to their foster parents and find the kids a home. Your passion is just as important. Everyone has something that they love or that they really want to talk to the world about. We don’t do online business just to make money. We do it to impact people, to connect with people, to change the world around us. So if you would love to get some help with your online business, we have set up this flipped podcast to help you do that.
JOCELYN: And so if you would like to be a guest on the flipped podcast, you can just head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/flippedpodcast and we will have a short little questionnaire there and you can fill out your information. We will look over these and we will select someone to do it again.
SHANE: We’re going to try to do this very regularly. We think these are very beneficial, people. We’ve run this by a couple of our friends and they loved the idea. Ben and Deb had so much fun on the show that we think this would be a really good thing for you guys. So go ahead and go to flippedlifestyle.com/flippedpodcast, leave your questionnaire, and hopefully, we will pick you for a show. That’s our show for this week. Next week, we will be back on a solo show, well, it’s not really solo because it’s both of us, it’s like a duo show. Jocelyn and I will be back with no guest next week but hopefully, we will be bringing you another flipped podcast very soon.
JOCELYN: And if you liked today’s show, be sure to head on over to iTunes and leave us a review. We appreciate that so very much.
SHANE: You can also head over to flippedlifestyle.com/podcast10, that’s 1-0, and we would love to get some comments and get your feedback on this flipped podcast format and see if it’s something that you would like to hear more of in the future. Until next time, we will catch you all on the flipside. Thanks for listening.
JOCELYN: See yah.
SHANE: One more thing, guys, if you would like immediate, one-on-one help from Jocelyn and myself, all you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/talktous and you can check out our consulting services. We do not do a lot of consulting but we do block out a few hours a week where we can get on the phone, get on Skype, get on Google Hangout and talk to you about your online business where you can work personally with me and Jocelyn to help you go to the next level. If you need any help, you need one on one attention, and you just can’t wait until maybe we select you for a flipped podcast, all you have to do is go to flippedlifestyle.com/talktous and you can check out when our schedule is available for you to get on a consulting call.
Arvind says
Shane/Jocelyn,
Way to set the bar to another level. So excited about this. Eager to listen to other peoples struggles and participate. My wife and I have been working so hard to improve the blog and take action. Giving a little more focused advice is such a wonderful and selfless gesture for people.
Hopefully at some point in time we make the cut and can talk about our niche.
Best Always,
Arvind
Jeff says
Love the show format. Really informative and insightful!
Waiting on your new show to hit iTunes is like waiting on Christmas morning. So much help.
Paul says
Hi Shane & Jocelyn,
Enjoyed the interview! I like seeing how you’re working with folks new to the internet marketing business and good to learn from their questions and your answers.
Paul
Shane Sams says
That’s the goal! To help families get started online!
George says
What a great idea!
I love the big guys, who I call “Empire Builders” but you guys are focusing on a part of the market that I can relate to.
I would think of a question as you were interviewing Ben and Deb and then Ben or Deb would ask it. Awesome.
Can’t wait for the next episode.
But you didn’t do your Can’t Miss Moments at the end of the podcast, what happened?
Shane Sams says
We decided to keep this episode TOTALLY focused on the family we were helping 🙂 Don’t worry, the can’t miss moments will be there next Tuesday!
Tom Haupenthal says
Another awesome podcast from you two!! I love the idea of talking to people just starting out. As someone mentioned above, it is nice to hear about the empire builders but this is the stuff we need. We aren’t anywhere near building an empire and hearing from someone that started years ago just doesn’t help as much as you two!!!
Can’t wait for the next episode!!!!
Ps. I missed the “Can’t Miss Moments” too. 😉
Patrick M Matherne says
Loved the podcast. Listened to it twice. I filled out the form to be a question your show. Also listening to this the second time I thought of a new website idea that might work better than the other ones I have done already. Unfortunately I have no clue if it is being searched for, or even what to search for it as
Ben says
Shane and Jocelyn,
Thanks so much for having us on the show. It was such a great learning experience and hope it can help others too. Can’t wait for the next episode.
Ruth says
What a great idea! Your podcast helping the couple start their online business is terrific because so many people are needing this help, myself included.
Thanks for standing out by helping us at ground level.
Debbie says
Recently found your website. AWESOME! I love the podcast! Each one brings a bit more insight into the big unknown of internet marketing. It is overwhelming. And you are helping bring it into focus for me. Thank you!
Dan Caldwell says
Great interview! Proven strategies from people with experience! Thanks for sharing what you gave up to provide more resources toward your start-up business. A real example of living like no one else so that someday you can live like no one else!
Derek says
As others have mentioned, I really like this style of podcast where you bring in some people that are relatively new to the space and you go through their questions with them. They are where are lot of us are, and it is almost like having a chance to have our own 1:1 session with you.
Look forward to more episodes like this one in the future!