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Need ideas on creating and optimizing sales funnels for your online business?
Listen in as we help today’s guest improve her current membership engagement through optimizing her sales funnel.
On this week’s episode, we have Flip Your Life community member and Tibetan culture advocate, Yolanda O’Bannon.
Yolanda and her husband, Lobsang Wangdu, are currently teachers at the University of California. She is also the Executive and Editorial Assistant for Science magazine and the Web Producer for iBiology.com.
She has been to Japan, India, Spain and many other countries, but is especially fascinated with the Tibetan culture. She had advocated for its preservation and promotion for many years by volunteering for several affiliate Tibetan support organizations.
In 2009, Yolanda and Lobsang decided to pursue their passion and created the “YoWangdu Tibetan Culture,” a website and business whose mission is to enable visitors to truly experience and genuinely appreciate Tibet’s remarkable cultural heritage, as well as support Tibetan education.
Yolanda is the website’s producer, writer and editor. Content creation is her forte, but has had slow development the past few years. She only has a few members and wants to connect with them without being too pushy.
We’re going to help her gain new insight on how to improve her current membership engagement and also introduce a new angle on how to create a new sales funnel.
Join us as we help her take it up a notch.
Let’s get started.
You Will Learn:
- How to improve your membership engagement
- How to organize and focus your sales funnels
- Why you should create seasonally appropriate products/content
- And a lot more…
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Flip Your Life membership community
- YoWangDu Tibetan Culture
- Tibetan Home Cooking eBook and video series
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 Moment:
Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is studying with our children. Having an online business has given us so much freedom. We get to have the energy left in our tank at the end of the day to stop, study with the kids, help them do well in school and just do those extra things like read the Bible to the kids something that we might not have done if we were working full-time.
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 help Yolanda take her travel and culture business to the next level.
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. Now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to Flip Your Life? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. We are super excited for our guest today. We have a Flip Your Life community member coming on so that we can help them take their business to the next level.
This person just finished one of our Masterminds recently and launched her membership site. We are going to get into that. She also was an attendee at one of our most recent live events and we are just super excited to have our good friend, Yolanda O’Bannon on the show today. Hey Yolanda how you doing?
Yolanda: Hey, you guys how you doing? It’s great to be here.
Jocelyn: Yes, we are great. It’s great to have you on today. We actually met you a few years—
Shane: A long time ago at a live event actually. And we started working together if you months ago together really in-depth.
Jocelyn: It’s been awesome. We love people that we meet from live events. We’ve talked about this many, many times on the show, the relationships that continue long after that event. We are really happy to have you as a part of our community. We are happy to have you here on the show today.
Yolanda: Thank you! I’m so happy to be part of this community, you have no idea.
Shane: Alright, let’s jump into your specific online business. Tell everybody maybe a little bit about your background, first of all, and then what it is that you are creating online.
Yolanda: Okay, I live in the San Francisco Bay Area with my husband, Lobsang Wangdu, and Lobsang is from Tibet we all know. Lobsang and I both work for the University of California, but our passion is Tibetan culture. I’ve always been a traveler since I was an Air Force brat. As soon as I became an adult I lived and studied in different countries: Japan, India, Spain, traveled in other places. But since I met Lobsang that got introduced to Tibetan people and Tibetan culture, I’ve been a Tibetan culture fanatic.
In 2009, Lobsang and I started a kind of version of our online version called YoWangdu Tibetan Culture. We basically allow people around the world to experience the benefits of Tibetan culture through our website and our business. And we do that through sharing travel, food and Tibetan Buddhism.
Shane: Awesome. You know for everybody listening, this is like a travel site, a lifestyle site, a culture site, and there is going to be a lot of overlap here for anyone that is doing anything of that with any culture. There is a lot of strategies that definitely go back and forth between different culture sites, lifestyle sites especially travel. When anyone is doing a travel site, the goal is get people there, get them safely, get them where they need to be going so they don’t miss out. You guys have created a really awesome platform for a very unique part of the world.
Jocelyn: I love that idea, it’s very different than I guess what we typically talk about on the show. It’s nice to have some diversity a little bit. Tell us a little bit– we always like to start with ‘Why’ in everything that we do– so why is it so important to you guys to have this online component of what you do, and to make this money online?
Yolanda: We have several reasons. One is that Tibetan culture has such a huge value to offer the world. Over a thousand years, Tibetans have been developing this deep understanding and practice of really important principles like wisdom, compassion and nonviolence. We want to share that with our audience, and at the same time we are committed to helping promote and preserve that Tibetan culture because it is so valuable, and it would be such a huge loss to the world if it were to disappear. Personally, also we want to be able to work full-time on our passion, and not to have day jobs and we want to have enough money to live and travel like we want to. We would love to have a foundation to support Tibetan education and culture products, too.
Shane: I love that mission. That is amazing. I think that sometimes, when people want to start an online business and want to get too far into the follow-your-passions kind of stuff because of sometimes I can get a little far off the map. But it is really important to do stuff like travel and culture and people think, “Well, that is just fun and entertainment.” But no, it is not.
You take Tibet and you look at the history there, and you look at the government issues they deal with, and things like that. It would be really easy to lose sight of that part of the world or that culture or it really is hard to travel there. People who are passionate about it or have family there need help doing things like that. It’s not just that it’s just a travel on a culture site. I hate it when people say that to people, “Oh, well, you’re just a travel blogger.”
But you are actually doing something much more really worthwhile and that’s really what any of us want out of our online business: to help other people. I think that is amazing what you guys have set up.
Yolanda: Thank you Shane . We do truly believe that it can help people.
Jocelyn: Awesome, well tell us a little bit about your online journey so far. You spoke a little bit about how you got started several years ago, but how has the business changed since then and what are you doing right now?
Shane: Especially recently, that is what want to the want to focus on. Kind of give us the nuts and bolts how you got to now, okay?
Yolanda: Okay. We’ve been doing this a long time since 2009, and then for the last several years we made almost nothing in the first 4, 5, I don’t know, years. The last several years, we’ve been able to earn about 20,000 a year online through some products and services. And we are glad for that, but we are really frustrated by how extremely slowly we’ve grown. We work hard but we are so slow as learners.
It would take like three days to talk about all the kinds of mistakes we’ve made but I was just reflecting before the podcast about– I think the biggest one that we made was that we focused too much on content and we didn’t make enough products and sales funnels. As soon as we got with you all I think we started in the main mastermind, we just kind of been working on products and funnels since then which has been awesome.
Jocelyn: And I feel it you guys have come a long way as far as your strategy and just what you want to do going forward. I feel that that has sort of changed a little bit for the good.
Shane: Sometimes, we see it as a virtual world, but really though rules and laws of life apply so much in the real world business as the online business. You have a couple of years of inertia of movement toward making all of this content, doing all of these things. You had to throw the lasso around and hauled, be dragged a little while, and then we kind of turn this ship.
It really is like turning a ship, that is a good analogy for that because when you move the rudder it takes a little while to get it over to the new direction. I feel like you guys now have reached that tipping point where we are like, “Okay, now let us just settle in and move in this direction because we finally got turned where we want to be.”
Yolanda: I think so, too, we had a few products before we had this cook and e-book with a video series. We spent a lot of time actually on this big Tibetan Buddhism course that we sold and no longer sell. But since starting with you guys, we kind of focus more on the travel which is something that we have been coming to for a while because that is where our most lucrative stuff is.
So in the main mastermind, we started building the funnel for our major Tibetan travel training and membership. We first built the whole core product, we built the sales funnel, we built the membership since May, we’ve been building all this stuff. Just recently, we got everything in place and we made a live webinar to promote it, so that was our first big promotion. Then we were thrilled we got two members in there.
Shane: Which is awesome.
Yolanda: Which is awesome, and we are just so happy about that just to have a member in there, so exciting because I’ve been hearing about members all the time.
Shane: Right and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, these people paid us and they will probably pay again, it is incredible.”
Yolanda: Yeah, they signed up for six months each, which is fantastic. That is another thing. So here we are, we’ve got a couple of members in there, they are not active yet, and I have a couple of unpaid members, people that are Tibet travelers.
Shane: Beta kind of tester deals, basically.
Yolanda: Yeah, I actually want them for their expertise, there are people who know about Tibet travel already, and I just ask them to come in and join us, and they have been a little bit in there. But you know we are now here. What is the next step? Where do we go now?
Shane: Let me just fill in a couple more of the details just because we know your business so well. Just so everybody listening knows. The money you have been making online is basically, you have been using your content strategy to refer people to Tibetan travel courses that you partner with and you get commission. It is like a Disney coordinator basically.
Yolanda: Two travel agents in Tibet, where people sign up for trips, yes.
Shane: Exactly, and that is where most of the money came from. What we are trying to do now with the memberships is we’re going to add a huge educational component like, A-Z, when you get on the plane to when you get home, we are teaching you how to get to Tibet, how to stay safe, what to see, what not to miss, and basically you become their virtual tour guide because if you’re already sending people to Tibet, you might as well monetize them and help them through your membership site to make sure they have an amazing Tibetan experience. Right?
Yolanda: Shane, I going to listen to this recording. I’m going to keep this recording because you are so great. Like, off the top of your head, that virtual tour guide, it’s brilliant. It’s great.
Shane: That is what I do for a living, Yolanda. We figured something out here, I think. But it’s so funny because we spend all day helping other people, then we go to market our own stuff and we freeze for a minute just like everybody does. I’m like, “Oh man, I think I poured out all my ideas today.”
Yolanda: Two percent left, yeah.
Shane: Okay, so let’s go ahead and transition here. We’ll just jump right in. You wanted to know what to do next, but let’s break it down, let’s get more specific. Go ahead and jump into your first question that will kind of just go from there.
Yolanda: So I’ve got these two people. One person, when they first signed up, they signed up, got on the email, got into the course, and then promptly sent me, instead of in the membership, they sent me a big long email about what they wanted in Tibet and blah blah blah.
I wrote them back and said, “I would love to answer this in the membership,” right? She hasn’t replied yet and the second one paid and then even didn’t sign up anything. He just also emailed me instead of going into the forums. I don’t know if I should push them. There are only two people. Over time, there’s always going to be people who are not engaged. Should I push them to get in there? Should I leave them alone and move on to other people? I’m just really not sure what to do.
Shane: Okay, the first thing I want to say is, it’s awesome that they reached out to you. What’s happening here as they want to engage but they just don’t know exactly how, right? And we have on boarding, and we have things like that you know we could send them a video to show them how to login, and where to ask questions. But one thing I always tell everybody, especially when they launch is, it is not their responsibility to go to your forums. It is not their responsibility to engage.
It’s your responsibility to drag them there and show them what to do. Take that email example: what I would have done in that situation is I would have went in for this first member especially and started the thread. I would have taken their question and put it in the title. I would have answered it there and then I would have emailed them this, “Hey, so-and-so, click the link below. I answered your question.
Jocelyn: Here’s your answer.
Yolanda: Okay I could still do this. Yes.
Shane: Exactly, and that way, you show them, you are teaching them this is where you go to get your answers. Sometimes, I’ve got an automated response that I will send to the people if they email us a question, and say, “Hey, this would be an amazing thing to talk in the forums. Click here and go ask it in a new thread,” because I think everyone could learn from our answer. If they email me back and they’re not getting it, then I will do the answer thing. Does that make sense? That way, I’m the guide. I have to train my members to go into the forums and engage.
Jocelyn: And I want you to not really freak out about people not engaging. We actually get this question a lot. Sometimes people just don’t engage right away for a variety of reasons. Maybe they wanted to Join while you had a special price, but they just don’t have time to work on it right now. It makes me think of one of our members.
We’ve actually become one of her members. I have joined her community for a full year, but I’ve been in there maybe once or twice because my life is super busy right now, and I just don’t have time to dive into that material, but I wanted to support her.
Shane: Right, we wanted to get into the content, and we wanted to have access to her for some questions that we have, but we are probably not working on that for two or three months.
Jocelyn: Exactly.
Shane: They may not be going to Tibet for a year, but they wanted to get in now as a beta member and starting asking some questions.
Yolanda: I realized that if I had 50 or 100 members, the two members who are not active, you know are at the 10, I’m not going to care. Maybe at some point think about it, but yeah it’s just there. It’s like sore thumbs right now because nobody else is in there so I’m super focused on them.
Shane: It also takes time and numbers. The biggest freak out we see are the first time people get members and run ads. The reason why is because sometimes we get these preconceived notions that everyone is into our content as we are. We spent 10 hours on an ad and by golly, I want a thousand clicks day one. But really, what happens is you have to always go back to, this is a marathon it is not a sprint.
It is going to happen. If you put a hundred people in your membership and nobody talks, we might have to change something. But right now, there is really five people in their counting the three people you put in before. That is not statistically significant.
Jocelyn: And what you have to do is just to make sure that you are continuing to continue communicate with them. Make sure you are sending them emails. “Hey, here is something interesting that we’ve been talking about the week. Come and discuss it with us.” If they still to choose not to come in and engage, that is not your fault. You just do everything that you can do to get them to come back and engage with their content. If they choose not to then don’t beat yourself up about it.
Shane: Let them wait until it is their time to use it. I will give you an action step here, too, and for anybody who is listening for any kind of community whether it is a free Facebook group or a paid membership, write down one time a day where you are going to engage with your followers, and tell them what to do next. That is the key to engagement.
Send them a newsletter once a week. Post something that clicks back to your membership area, or write on a day where you’re going to bulk email all of your members and just say, “Hey, did you see this training? Hey, I just posted something cool in the forums, go read it.”
Jocelyn: Or, “So-and-so, ask a really insightful question. Check it out here.”
Shane: That is another greatest strategy, too. Answer her question, send her the message I told you and then like Jocelyn said, email everyone and say, “Did you guys see this forum post, because it was awesome.”
Yolanda: That is really good
Shane: Now you’re bragging on your member, she feels good, and everybody gets the benefits, then they all learn to go to the forum to get answers.
Yolanda: That is really good. The other thing is, we were supposed to do a live Q&A. It Do I do this with two? Unless the other ones would come in–
Shane: I usually tell people, their first 10 members, to try to do one-on-one calls.
Jocelyn: The reason for that is not only so you can serve them well because they invested in you from the very beginning, but also so you can get information from them. Figure out what was the main reason you decided to join? How did you find out about us? Things like that so that way you can find more people who are like them.
Yolanda: Okay that sounds great.
Shane: Okay, I think we’ve got a solid engagement plan there. I think that kind of straightens out a little bit about how to engage with your first few members. That is going to give you so much information on how to grow this thing inside the community. But let us switch back now and talk about next steps and growing it, the community bigger from the outside. What is your next question?
Yolanda: Remember that thing we had hanging over our heads it was just a little sideways for a while now. We have really good traffic. It’s like 40,000 people a month come to our site.
Shane: That is amazing traffic.
Yolanda: It’s great and half of those are food. Half are Buddhism, and we’re not going to deal with now, but let say 20,000 people are coming a month with food. We have no food funnel. We do have our Tibetan Cooking Training in the membership now. We’re thinking, we just need to take a few weeks and build the sales funnel, you know like an arm of the octopus like we’ve talked about before, to get people into the food funnel. Does that sound reasonable?
Jocelyn: Yes.
Yolanda: I don’t know, is that too side-tracked?
Jocelyn: No, I think that is fine. I think that you already have your first funnel established, which is good. People, I think, think that maybe it’s too hard to build a new funnel. What you have to do is just think about it really simply. On one of your blog posts about food that you already have, make sure you have a food-related lead magnet. And then all you have to do in your emails is just link to other food-related posts that you have. It’s that simple.
Shane: And then create a sales page that’s geared more toward the culture aspect, and the travel aspect. And this is so easy to do in forums. That’s why we love forums as a membership, I know there’s a lot of fancy course software out there, and a lot of different ways that you can distribute your content, but we love forums because when you create new funnels, you really want everyone to go to your membership.
I’ve almost am starting to view my memberships as a Main St. downtown. All roads lead to Main Street downtown. If I go to Main St. downtown in our little place where we live, I might go to the coffee shop, I might go to dinner, I might go to one of the little shopping areas. But I’m going downtown, and all roads in town must lead there. You could have two forums. Culture and travel, You have two funnels: you have a food and culture funnel, where you’re teaching Tibetan culture through food and cooking, and things like that, and you’re like, “Hey, let’s take it to the next level, and become a gourmet Tibetan chef, or whatever. I don’t know what the in game is.
But when those people log in, their on-boarding says, “Hey, the first place you should go is the Food forum. Go look at some of our food and cooking trainings in the training area.” And you just set up forums for these, and it’s not starting a new business. It’s adding a layer to something that already exists. That’s why memberships are so powerful. When we come up with a new layer, we add it in. Same thing with us. We have a WordPress training. You need to know WordPress? There’s your layer. But we also have an email marketing funnel training. We also have a sales funnel training. We also have a webinar training. All kinds of other things.
Jocelyn: And didn’t you guys already work on a cookbook at one time?
Yolanda: Oh, we have. It’s already in the membership. It’s like a Tibetan home cooking e-book.
Shane: You did videos for those, too, didn’t you?
Yolanda: And it’s got 27 videos with it.
Jocelyn: Could you maybe use one of the videos or a few of the recipes from the book as an opt-in bonus for the blog post that you already have? That way you’re not having to recreate new content.
Shane: And then you just build around that, basically. And here’s an easy way to think about this, okay. When you get one part of your membership area, and you have the same avatar, and you have traffic, and you just need to get the same person in there, but from a different angle, imagine if that other stuff didn’t exist.
It’s just there, draw a line in the sand, forget about it for a second and say, “If I was going to start an only-food area of my membership, where do I put the trainings? How do I get people there?” And treat it like a new membership. But you’ve already done this once, and all the infrastructure is already in place, so now it’s really just, make a new sales page, make a new blog post, make a new ad. Work backwards, and you’re done.
Yolanda: And then new email funnel.
Shane: That’s it. That’s it.
Yolanda: Yes. Yes. Okay, cool. I’m so down for this. I’m tired of just slicing in off all that traffic.
Shane: Yes. A big thing about online business, too, is build one thing, and then put another brick on top of it, and make some more money. And then put another brick on top of it, and make some more money. You’re building around it. You’re not starting from scratch every time. You’re just going and finding more people to pay you monthly.
Yolanda: I’m kind of confused about what to do next. Let’s say for the travel, we’ve had the live webinar, we emailed our list kind of to death at that time. I want to get my first 25 members in there. More webinars, but can I still target those lists? I mean, I’m doing some Facebook ads to get people in there, but I’m a little bit a deer-in-headlights about getting those first 25, 50 people in there.
Jocelyn: Right, and I don’t know that you have to do another webinar right away. I think that there are other things that you can maybe try. Certainly that is an option, and maybe you could even do one about the food part, and try to get people in that way. That could be an option. I think also, a lot of our members have been having some luck with either a free trial or a discounted trial.
Yes, and you might even consider doing something like that just to get people in. Let them take a look around. This is for your list mainly, is what I’m talking about, to see if this is something that they would maybe like to be a part of.
Shane: I would build the food funnel first because, I’ll be honest with you. That should not take more than a week. You know what I mean? And then you’ve got two angles–
Jocelyn: Because you’re using post and material you already have.
Shane: And you’ve already been through setting up funnel one. It’s the same funnel, it’s just food instead of travel, now. The content’s all that changes, so I would build that first so you have two angles of attack. Then just keep swinging. Everyone needs like a content plan, and a promotion plan.
Jocelyn and I learned this in our second year in business. We said to ourselves, “We have created a boom and bust business.” This is really good for four months out of the year, but it really stinks the other four months of the year.
Jocelyn: There are eight months in a year?
Shane: I was saying that four months—
Yolanda: I didn’t even catch that.
Shane: Four months were average, and that’s Math. [crosstalk]
Jocelyn: That’s the Kentucky calendar, my friends.
Shane: Yes, our months are really long down South, that’s why we talk so slow. Thanks Jocelyn, I appreciate that.
Yolanda: [crosstalk] Shane, I didn’t have any problem with that.
Shane: Hey, I was going with people at average, like the bell curve, like four good months, four bad months, four in– it’s like baby bear’s porridge kind of deal. But moving on.
We need to revisit the Working with Your Spouse and Not Killing Each Other topic, I think. We would need to go back to that. But I don’t even know what I was saying now.
Jocelyn: We were talking about how when you launched–
Shane: Oh, the calendar. I got you. Okay, good times. So basically you need to look at your calendar and say, “How does my business make money this month? What am I going to do 12 months out of the year to promote?” Sometimes we had to create new areas in our membership, we had to create new products that sold at different times to get people to come into our membership, and be there all year.
But we had to sit and think about it, and we said, “How can I promote in January?” “How can I promote in February?” “How can I make sure that I make money every month, and add new members every month?”
Jocelyn: And we’re not making new stuff. We’re just using what we already have in a way that it makes it seasonally appropriate, or whatever our business is like.
Shane: And the food thing is beautiful in that regard. Every culture has traditional things throughout the calendar, alright.
What is happening in Tibet? What are they eating? What are they doing? That’s the kind of marketing that you need to be thinking about, and say, “What’s happening in Tibetan food culture in January? Or Winter? Or Summer?” You can start quarterly. But think about the calendar, and that will make your promotion for you.
Yolanda: Shane, we are super slow. I guarantee you, and I’m going as fast as I possibly can, but it’s going to take me three weeks to do this, I promise you.
Shane: That’s alright.
Jocelyn: Well, let’s just say by the end of this month that you will have the food funnel ready to go.
Shane: There you go.
Yolanda: Yes, oh no problem with that. I was kind of hoping to avoid doing a food webinar right away because that was so tough for us. It took a lot of effort–
Shane: Then don’t do it.
Jocelyn: That’s fine. Why don’t you email your list with something different? Maybe something like we were talking about, maybe you do a trial period of some kind?
Yolanda: Okay. I think you can do the same people that we did–
Shane: Yes.
Jocelyn: Oh, yeah.
Yolanda: Okay.
Shane: Between Thursday and Monday last week, I sent 17 emails to our list.
Jocelyn: And you’re giving them something free.
Shane: Yeah, it’s not like you’re hurting them. You’re not throwing lawn darts at them. You’re throwing emails at them.
Jocelyn: Just remember, on the free trial, you’re going to probably get around 50% to stay with you. If you have–
Shane: 20 people join
Jocelyn: –seven or eight are going to stay with you.
Shane: Also, too, I think the new angle is good. Yeah, you’re going to email them more, but now you’re talking about something different. This is food and culture, it’s not travel. All that stuff doesn’t count toward your email capital.
Yolanda: Well, here are some quick questions: we have a bunch of lists, and this is something that we’ve got to consolidate and fix. But we have several different travel lists. We have maybe 400 people total on all our travel staff, and then maybe, 2,500 on this YoWangdu newsletter thing which is like travel, Buddhism, it’s everything. They get all that. I’m thinking the travel people themselves, that I could actually just go to them for a travel trial offer, even though we emailed them a couple weeks ago about the webinar. That sounds reasonable, right?
Jocelyn: Yes, absolutely.
Yolanda: And then the other ones are everybody. We could do the food one when that one’s ready, too.
Shane: Yes, for sure. I also think it would be neat– Are any of the food things in there seasonal on the Tibetan calendar, that you’ve already recorded?
Yolanda: Sort of. Tibetan food is all about warm food, because it’s high and cold generally speaking.
Shane: Is there a holiday at the first part of the year in Tibet?
Yolanda: There is a massive holiday. It is the Tibetan new year around February and March, is when we get a million hits on our site.
Shane: Okay this is the perfect time to do this right now, then. You need to make a funnel and you need to circle that date on your calendar, and your marketing is going to be “How to Cook a Traditional Tibetan Meal on the Tibetan New Year,” like that’s the goal that you want everyone to sign up for.
Then you’re going to take all your content and your stuff, or you might have to record a new video or two. And you’re going to have a thing in there in your membership that is start to finish, every course, how to create this Tibetan Meal.
Jocelyn: That would really be an optimal time for your webinars as well. So you give people free stuff, and you say, “Oh, by the way, we’re going to have this free event.”
Shane: Like you show them to make– I don’t know if there’s an equivalent to an appetizer but, something. You show them how to do something.
Yolanda: There is all this stuff. Yes. There is always these traditional losar foods that we show. We’ve got a huge amount of content about losar foods, actually. Over the years, people are so interested in that.
Shane: This is golden opportunity time. This is the calendars working in your favor, you’ve got time to get this all set up. You’ve got time to market it. You’re about to get a massive influx of hits, and you know why they’re coming, and you’ve got to really be able to capitalize that. Once you make this, guess what? Every year forever, you can do this same promotion with no work.
Yolanda: Exactly. I was thinking about Losar for the food. Let’s say we get the regular funnel all ready by the end of December. I guess it’s still just good timing to just build up the webinar and whatever in the meantime.
Shane: I would not do a regular “funnel” for food. I would focus all your energy right now on the Tibetan New Year. That must be running by January. We’re in December when we’re recording this. This is not create-a-bunch-of-new-stuff. This is, like I said, this is a sales page, a couple emails and an ad. It will take you about three weeks to do it, that’s fine. And then you might have to rearrange a little content to make it like a plan, A to Z, start cooking in the morning and be done with that. That’s your main focus right now, okay?
Yolanda: Well, the thing is it’s lunar, so it falls at different times, but it’s usually like February, March kind of thing. That’s still a good timeline?
Jocelyn: Yes, exactly. Let’s just run toward that goal. I think that gives you plenty of time to work on everything. I think that’s going to be awesome. You’ll get a lot of influx of visitors on your site, that should give you a nice amount of members as well. Yolanda, this has been a great conversation. We have learned a lot about your business and I think that we brought out some really interesting things for you to try coming up in the near future.
Unfortunately, we are running out of time, but we always like to ask everyone before we go, what is one thing based on what we talked about today that you are going to try to work on say in the next 24-48 hours?
Yolanda: Well, I’m going to get started right away on making this Tibetan New Year food funnel to lead people into our membership right away.
Shane: Awesome. Why don’t you start a post today in the forums? Let’s outline which material and content you already have that we can turn into this product because we want to give a little plan to do this like, “Watch Video 2,” “Watch Video 5.” And then we will work that out, and then we will work backwards from there, okay?
Yolanda: Fantastic.
Shane: Well, listen, we’ve had an amazing call and I just love talking to you, it’s so fun to catch up. Your business is doing a lot of amazing things. I feel like we’ve been on this plateau that you talked about earlier, but I feel like you’re starting to break through it, and you’re getting past it. It’s starting to kind of move that needle back up. Let’s keep grinding, keep taking action, and let’s see if we can take this thing to the next level at the Tibetan New Year. Okay?
Yolanda: Exactly, I’m so glad to do that. I just want to let you guys know something, too. Our mastermind in September– we have been in this Voxer group, and I don’t know if anybody else has told you, but we’ve have this fantastic ongoing Voxer group that is like sometimes 30, 40 messages a day. We’re just in there, we’re doing challenges, we’re having a great time.
Shane: Yes, a couple members had let us know that. What happens with our monthly mastermind, about every other month we’ll take about 10 to 15 members and we’ll form a mastermind, or we’ll meet once a week. We’ll try to get one big thing done in our online business, but we start a group chat on Voxer, which is like a walkie-talkie system, basically.
We leave the group, but we leave the group open, and that is one of our huge goals for the mastermind is get people together. That is the ultimate goal at Flip Your Life, is to bring a community together. Get people in their pods, in their small groups where they can really help each other. The amazing thing we watched over the last couple years is, there are like three or four of these Voxer groups that are floating around there now.
We’ve got people meeting in person. People are really just encouraging and helping each other because really, the key component to this is not doing it alone. When you’ve got mentors, when you’ve got help, when you’ve got friends, and you’re kind of grinding through things or you got someone to vent to, it makes it so much easier to say, get back on the saddle, let’s move forward, ups and downs, but we are going to make this happen. I think that it’s awesome that you guys have built that relationship and that you’re all keeping it going.
Yolanda: It’s been fantastic but thank you guys for getting me started.
Shane: Awesome, and thanks for being on the show, and let’s get this going and take action.
Yolanda: Alright, bye guys.
Shane: Another awesome calls from one of our Flip Your Life community members. To learn more about our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can help you with your online business today.
Jocelyn: All right. Next, we are going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment of the show and these are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our regular 9-to-5 jobs.
Today’s Can’t Miss Moment is studying with our children. This is something that everybody has to do. Sometimes it’s a dreaded task. It’s not always my favorite thing but I’m really glad that doing what we do in online business, that they now have the time to be able to come up with new ways to do that and think a little bit outside the box.
Recently, Isaac was really upset about studying spelling words, and so we have a ton of dry erase markers in our house and we have tile in our bathtub. I thought that maybe we would take the dry erase markers in the bathtub, and study that way. That was like a miracle pill or something. He loves studying spelling words now.
Just a few years ago when I was still working at school, I don’t even know if I would have had the brains cells to do that at that time of night. I mean seriously, because I was just so exhausted and just didn’t want to do anything like that.
Shane: The timing and frustrating out of that, coming home from a long day of work, coming home and just being stressed out and wanting to rest or watch TV or just get something to eat, but then it is bedtime for the kids, you haven’t got their studying done yet. We can do things like we can get the studying done around 3:00 or 4:00 if we want to.
At nighttime, we get to sit down and slow down and talk to our kids instead of rushing them to the bed. We get to read Bible stories to them. Isaac every night asks me his Five Questions, that is what he calls it, where he just thinks up five random questions.
Probably, at this point, if we have been working full-time it would just be like, “Go to bed, I’m tired of answering your questions, I’m tired, you go to sleep.” That just doesn’t happen in our house. We get to have the energy left in our tank at the end of the day to stop, study with the kids, help them do well in school and just do those extra things like read the Bible to the kids that we might not have done if we were working full-time.
Before we sign off, we would like to close every show with a verse from the Bible. Today’s verse comes from 1 Peter 4:10. The Bible says, “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others.” Make sure you are using whatever gift and talents you have in your online business. Get out there, serve other people. People need you, and what you know. That is all the time we have for this week.
As always guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and until next time get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We’ll see you then.
Jocelyn: Bye.
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