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Yes, we said it. And we’ll tell you exactly why we are not a big fan of affliates.
We are going to tackle a topic that has been on our mind (and to be honest, getting on our nerves) for a while now: Affiliate Launches.
SO many online marketers jump on the affiliate launch bandwagon.
You know the drill.
A guru has a new product, book or course. Offers a great “opportunity” for other people online to sell it to their list…for a sweet commission of course. And BOOM, inboxes around the world explode with message after message after message about this life-changing widget.
Sigh.
Affiliate launches kind of drive us crazy, not just because of the endless spamming, but because of the missed opportunities!
What would happen if all of those affiliates focused on building their own brands, instead of someone else’s?
We get offered to join affiliate launches all the time. We have always said no.
Today we tell you why.
On today’s podcast, we are going to share our personal take and insight on why we want to keep our brand ad, affiliate and guru-free.
We will also reveal our big surprise for the incoming year, future plans for our premium community and other good stuff y’all are going to find useful in your online business journey.
Also, we want you to know that we are over-the-roof from all the success stories that we’ve received from our listeners, fans and members throughout the year.
We are very proud of what you have accomplished and are excited for even greater successes to come!
It has truly been an amazing and eventful year here at the Flipped Lifestyle, so we would like to thank every single one of you for your trust and continued support.
Although 2016 is about to come to an end, we urge you to keep dreaming big, get out there and do whatever it takes to flip your life.
You Will Learn:
- Our insights on affiliate ad launches
- The importance of focusing & investing on your brand
- And a BIG surprise for Flipped Lifestyle listeners, fans and members this 2017!
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!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we’re going to tell you why we keep the Flipped Lifestyle podcast ad-affiliate and guru-free.
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. Hope you guys had a great Christmas, and are getting ready for an awesome New Year.
Jocelyn: It is our final podcast for 2016, so that is good news, I suppose. We are actually broadcasting today from our son’s bedroom because we are in the middle of moving. We finally have our paint done, but we still don’t have furniture here, so we are using two folding chairs, and our microphones are connected to a bookshelf. So, yeah, it’s actually great.
Shane: Yes, we’ve actually been living in our new house for a couple weeks. We got so tired of waiting for the painters to finish the job. They just got so far behind, that we said, “You know what, let’s just take our mattresses over there.” They got the upstairs done, so Jocelyn and I have our mattress on the floor in the living room upstairs. The kids’ beds are still on the floor in their room. We’re hoping to get the furniture this week, actually, so it’s going to be coming here in a couple days. We just couldn’t take it, we had to come over here.
For those of you who have seen our new house, we’ve got a house that’s on a lake, we’ve got a view that’s awesome outside of our office that we just wanted to work in front of. We’re the kind of people who really don’t wait for everything to be perfect. We’d rather just get what we want even if it means sleeping on the floor, and I’ve stood up for every meal, it feels like, for a month. We just got our dining room table last week. We’re now eating at a table, we’re sleeping on mattresses, and almost in beds, and hopefully all this madness will be done, and now that the holidays are over, we can calm everything down.
This is going to be a special edition of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Last week, we had a great year-end wrap up with our Flip Your Life community member, Rina. We talked about her first year in online business. I highly recommend anybody thinking about starting a business in 2017, or wanting to take their business to the next level, go back and listen to Rina’s journey. It’s a fascinating discussion about what the first year in online business is like. But this week, we are not going to have a guest on the show. We are just going to talk, me and Jocelyn, and we’re just going to talk about something that’s really been on our mind lately – a lot.
Jocelyn: Well, in a bit that has been on our listeners’ minds as well because you probably received a lot of e-mails lately from a lot of internet marketers about some type of affiliate launch. We’re also on a lot of internet marketing lists, and we have received lots of offers from lots of people, and it’s starting to get a little bit old.
Shane: For those of you who may not be familiar with what an affiliate launch model looks like, an affiliate launch is where some “influencer” or self-proclaimed guru creates some form of product. Usually these are something like, “Have your best 2017 of all time,” or “The ultimate strategy to do X next year,” and what they do is they create this product and they get a lot of people under them like other internet marketers, and they kind of hijack their network. They will get these people to come under them, sell that product. They’re actually selling the guru’s product and then they will try to send that to their e-mail list, and then what happens is, you start getting the same e-mail over and over and over from 20 different internet marketers where they’re telling you this story of how this thing is life changing, or this magic guru did something for them, and now you need to buy the thing, and what happens is they get a cut for selling that product that they may not have even used or seen.
Jocelyn: Network marketing, this is nothing new. This has been around forever; this is the same type of principle as the MLMs/pyramid scheme. It’s the same type of thing. One person starts something, other people sell it, they use their network to get other people to buy it, and their network to get other people to buy it. This is nothing new. This is marketing that’s been around for years and years.
Shane: It’s just more annoying now because we all get 50 e-mails and we get it all about this same product from 50 different people. All these people we follow on the internet who we know, like and trust, we followed them because they had something to say, and we wanted to know what they thought about a topic, but then we end up getting sold something from someone else. What we really dislike about it is, they sell the same thing every year. You gear up, and you’re like, “Oh, it’s times for that guru’s launch,” and then you get a thousand e-mails. It’s like there’s a circle on top where there’s 15, 20 of them, and they just keep on rotating every month, like “l’ll do my launch this month, you do your launch this month.”
They keep activating that next tier down, which are the internet marketers who sell that for them. Normally, this just gets on our nerves, we hit unsubscribe, and we don’t follow these people that do this to us because we just hate getting e-mail spammed. But we have a lot of problems from this model from different things. One thing that we have noticed lately is as our audience grows, as our network grows, there’s so many of you out there listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast now, we are starting to get approached by these people at the top of the affiliate chain, and they’re asking us to do all these things.
They’ve never reached out to us before, they never asked us to do this before, but all of a sudden, we’ve become valuable to them. We’re not going to name names. We’ve decided that we don’t want to call anybody out. There are some people out there that are selling fine products, we’re not bashing everyone’s products here. We’re just talking about the general strategy of affiliates, and what our problem is with it.
A couple weeks ago, I got an e-mail from a very well-known influencer, and it kind of rubbed me the wrong way. What it said was, “Hi, so-and-so has a product for sale, and he wants to give you $$$$$.” That’s what it said. They actually said that in first sentence of the e-mail. “We want to show ads on your podcast, and we would love for you to sell our thing as an affiliate. And then the next statement really blew my mind. This was the first time they had reached out to us, remember this.
It said, “How many people listen to your podcast?” Bullet point. “How many are on your e-mail list?” Bullet point. “How many people follow you in all social media channels combined? We look forward to hearing your reply.” If anybody knows me, that’s not how you talk to me. That rubbed me really, really the wrong way. It was just so selfish and so greedy, and it was like, “Hey, congratulations, you have an awesome show, and here I want to give you some money so you can scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.” I just didn’t like the way that made me feel, and I started thinking about all the things around our podcast.
Look at all the power that person wanted from me. They wanted to know my numbers, they wanted to know what I could do for them. There was nothing relationally in it. It was clearly a top-down, I’m-on-top, I-want-you-to-be-below-me-but-I’m-gonna-give-you-some-scraps-from-my-table.
Jocelyn: It sort of reminds me of my personal network. I have a friend who sells an MLM product on Facebook. It is about losing weight and feeling better. Well, this particular friend, she posts every single day, something about how she feels so good because of using this product, or how you can have this fantastic opportunity to join her team. Every single day.
Now I know what some of you might be thinking. “Well, why don’t you just unfollow her?” Well, I do like to see pictures of her kids and things like that. It’s somebody I used to work with, so I don’t want to just completely unfollow this person, but at the same time, I get so tired of hearing about this product, which is really not a product at all. It’s really an opportunity to make more money. In other words, get into the network marketing scheme.
Shane: That brings us around to one of the main reasons why we don’t really don’t like this affiliate launch model because it feels like a pyramid scheme. It feels like multi-level marketing stuff, where they’re not really selling us the product, they’re selling us the opportunity. I actually had another really good friend of ours the other day, who is selling a guru’s affiliate product this year. They asked me to be an affiliate for this product, too.
I’m like, “Well, I don’t even use that product, I don’t think it would really benefit me, and I’m not sure how it would help anybody in our Flip Your Life community.” They were like, “No, no, no, man, you be my affiliate, you sell to your e-mails, I’ll get a little bit of what you sell, but you’ll make a cut, too.” Basically, I was going to be an affiliate for him. The main guru would have got some of the money, he would have got some of the money, and I would have got a portion of the affiliate sell, too, for selling through him, and he said I had to do it that way because the guru at the top, he only has 20 affiliates. He cuts it off at that second level, so then those affiliates go find other affiliates for this product. To us, it just doesn’t make any other sense to build someone else’s brand instead of our own. I don’t understand why anyone would get into online business and put in all the work to create all these e-mails that they send to their list, and put in all the work that it takes to build a list and at the end of it, they don’t have anything to show for it. The guru, who’s selling the big thing, yes, he’s going to make a mint off of this. He’s having these contests in the background to make all of his affiliates feel good, and they’re competing with each other on who can sell the most, and who can go find the most other affiliates. But really, he’s the only one that’s benefiting from it, and when that launch is over, you don’t have anything to show for it. There’s just absolutely nothing to show for it, and you’ve done nothing but prop someone else’s brand up at the expense of all the time you could have been spending on building your own brand.
Jocelyn: In addition to that, it just wears out your list. You keep sending these e-mails out about somebody else’s product. These people have signed up on your list to hear from you. A lot of times, they’ll have a little opt out. If you don’t want to hear any more about best product in the world, then click here. But they’re still going to unsubscribe, you’re still going to get people to unsubscribe. It may be a small percentage, but even so, to me that just doesn’t feel good. It’s not something that I want to do to my e-mail list personally.
Shane: All those people that sign up for your e-mail list are real human beings, and when they do that, it’s because they know, like and trust you. They expect you to look out for them. If you’re going to say you offer something, then to offer it, and it’s something you actually use, you actually think will benefit them, not just something you’re like, “Hey, that pays the highest commission, so I’m going to be the one that supports that launch.”
Jocelyn: Now, I know some of you might be thinking, “Well, Shane and Jocelyn, I promote XYZ’s product, and it is the best product ever because I personally have used it.” You know what, that’s fine. If you want to do that, if it’s something that you really believe in and trust, that’s fine. But what happens on the other side of the coin? What happens with all these people who promote these things that maybe they really haven’t used, but it just sounds like a really good thing. What happens when their audience buys it, and the product is not that great?
Shane: In our general experience, most of the people, if you really read the e-mails that are supporting these affiliate launches, they have not used the product. Sometimes, the product has not even been created. I had a buddy of mine the other day, and he bought a big affiliate launch that happened back in the fall. Just a huge thing, everybody was promoting it. Oh my gosh, it felt like New Year’s because at New Year’s it seems like all the affiliate marketers come out. But a couple months ago, there was a huge affiliate launch for this product, and he bought into that. He said, “Man, I got in there, there was nothing there, it wasn’t created, the customer support was really slow.” They weren’t prepared for how many people were supporting it, or bought it. He goes, “Man, I just got really disappointed in that product, and you know, the person I bought it through, I bought it through someone’s affiliate link. I just unsubscribed from them as well because I was really disappointed that they recommended that.” That’s another huge problem with supporting affiliate launches. You want control on an online business. We do this for freedom, we do this so we can control our own destiny so that we can go out and decide how we serve people, and we can go the extra mile, and help our audience. But then you turn some of that over to someone else when you’re an affiliate for their product especially if it’s not created or you haven’t used it yet. When you focus on your own customers, and helping them with exactly what they need from you, you can control that service. If that person has a negative experience with their customer support, if they have a negative experience with that product, if it doesn’t meet their need, you’re the one that’s going to suffer. They’re not going to unsubscribe from the guru’s mailing list because they’re thinking about you, and they clicked it from you, and you’re the one who sent them the 20 e-mails to recommend this. You’re the one that’s going to take the hit from that if it’s bad.
Jocelyn: A lot of you might be thinking, “Okay, well, there’s all these bad things about it. Why do people do it to begin with?” I think for a lot of people, it is a low-energy way to make money quickly. You basically just send out e-mails or social media posts to your audience letting them know about this fantastic product, and they buy it. You just basically get a cut, and you don’t have to provide any customer service. But the problem with this is what we were just talking about a couple minutes ago, is that you lose control of your customer experience. To us, our customer experience is the most important thing that we have. If our customers, or our listeners have a bad experience, that reflects negatively on us.
Shane: Also, to the allure of quick money online is the dangerous thing about online business. It’s what a lot of gurus promote: quick money, quick thing, in 30 days, everything will be alright. Do anything you want in 90 days, whatever it is. That allure of quick is a problem on the internet because if you go after quick, you might make a quick buck. We have some friends, and they did an affiliate launch, and they made $10,000. But I know for sure that they, earlier in the year, worked on their own thing, built their own product, and they made triple that off of that product. When you go after the quick buck, when you focus on the sprint instead of focusing on the marathon, like you should online, you’re worn out, you’re tired, and you don’t have anything to show for it. When you run that first mile of a marathon, you’ve got 28 left, is it 29.2? How big is a marathon, Jocelyn? I don’t know. What’s a marathon?
Jocelyn: It’s 26.2 miles.
Shane: Yes, whatever, 24 miles. When you run that mile, you’ve got a mile to show for it. When you run the second mile, you got a mile to show for it. When you run the sprint, you just don’t have anything. You got this quick buck, but you probably could have just made more selling your own thing, you probably could have laid another brick on the foundation of your business that would have made it more profitable in the long run instead of saying, “Hey, I made X dollars now.” Well, why didn’t I just invest that in myself, in my own brand, and really serve and help my audience and I could have had a business instead of being a flash-in-the-pan part of this affiliate launch.
Jocelyn: The consequences of participating in someone’s affiliate launch are basically that you could have used the time that you spent talking to your audience, and talking up this product and promoting it to make something of your own, and have it to sell forever. Especially if you have a recurring income source. Think of what you could have done, think of the products you could have created, or the services that you could have done instead of working on all this affiliate stuff.
Shane: The worse part of it is, the stuff that’s not even aligned. Like, I’ll find someone who might teach people to set up ads or something, and they sell something that’s totally unrelated to advertising. Or somebody will sell something. All of a sudden, they’re in the productivity space selling someone’s productivity internet marketing thing, and they make apps for you to make your WordPress more efficient or something. People sell affiliates for non-aligned products. That brings up another thing that people do. We’re not talking here about affiliate links to like products on Amazon. If you review dog houses, by all means, put an affiliate link to a dog house. If you have a great program that you love and it really does help you in your online business, and someone is like, “Hey, how do you edit video?” Well, go get your Camtasia link and drop it in. That is not what we are talking about. We are talking about choosing to take two months out of your life, focusing totally on bombarding your e-mail list with all this information about someone else’s product, and then you make a quick buck, they go away, and you try to go right back like nothing ever happened. Another reason that we think, besides the quick buck that a lot of people fall into these affiliate marketing programs, is that they want the rub from the guru. They want to be perceived as someone who gets to hang out with this person and, “I’m in the in crowd.” Someone actually sent out an e-mail the other day that was like, “I’m in the crew, and this is what it looks like in the crew. This is what made the crew successful. Now it’s going to make you successful.” I think that a lot of times people want to sell the affiliate because they think if my audience thinks I know this person because I’m selling their product, then I will automatically be perceived as good as this guru instead of building your own social capital and telling people what you actually have to offer. It is almost like the people who jump on these affiliate programs are trying to ride the coattails of the guru.
Jocelyn: It actually sort of has the opposite effect on me. There have been a couple of people that we followed recently that I actually had a lot of respect for, and then they started jumping into all these affiliate launches. I’m just like, I cannot believe this particular individual is doing this. It just seems so against everything that they stand for but yet they are right in the middle of all that. I just stopped following that person because I just lost respect for them, honestly.
Shane: It’s like everything that they set up front, everything inside was completely hollow, and they just kept trying to stuff it with all these things to consume, all these affiliate products. “What do you think we should do next? Well I think you should go here.” It was an affiliate link. That is what the e-mails we were getting are saying. We’re like, “What about your own stuff? You had all these great ideas that you never really flushed out, and when we just started looking for substance and you just pointed us to someone else.” I think that looking for that street cred, and that was what it boils down to online. People fall into that trap bubble. “If I could just make money, and I can just get street cred, and if I can just interview this person on my podcast, then everyone will like me.” Or, “if I can just be on this person’s YouTube channel then everyone will like me. How do I get this person to like me? I know. I will sell their thing for them. I will become an affiliate. I will sell their stuff.” But then at the end, the guru doesn’t come thank you. The guru doesn’t help you in any way. You help them. They gave you a little bit of money, and they’re off to their next thing.
Jocelyn: Today I think it is pretty fair to say that we have come out with a pretty bold stand against affiliate network marketing. I know there are probably a lot of people listening to this, thinking that it’s a little crazy or everybody else is doing it and maybe that is what you should do. But we feel a little bit differently and if you have been following us for very long on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, you know that we don’t always do what everyone else does.
Shane: I love it when Jocelyn, whenever we start talking about things, she goes, “While everyone else is zigging. Let’s zag.” That’s one of my favorite things she says.
Jocelyn: Yes, let’s do it. Let us do something different. Are we the most successful marketers on the face of the planet? Maybe not, as far as money goes. But that is not really what is most important to us. We want to build a sustainable business that serves our customers and continues to serve them every single day. The question is what do we do? Okay so we are against affiliate marketing. What are we for? Why are we here at Flipped Lifestyle? Well, first of all, we are here to make money. We are not going to pull any punches with that. That’s why we are in business. This is a business, therefore we want to make money and be profitable. It is how we support our family, but everything that we do we want it to feel right for our audience. Everything that we do here at Flipped Lifestyle is about our audience.
Sometimes, people come to us with things. It is like the e-mails we were talking about earlier. Sometimes, they are really attractive. We are like, “Oh, well this sounds really good, and it sounds really easy.” But that isn’t always the right thing to do. The easy thing often is not the right thing to do. We want to focus on what we know works based on our experiences, and we want to communicate that in a way that benefits you, our audience, that has trusted us for the past several years, not the latest flash-in-the-pan offer.
Shane: You know, whenever Jocelyn and I are talking about the direction of Flipped Lifestyle or the direction of one of our education companies, where we sell lesson plans, or anything else that we are going to sell online, we always tried to start at the top of the page with what is right for the people that are listening to us. What is right for the people that are listening to our podcasts? You, the consumer, what is right for the people that follow us on social media? What do we need to share? Do we need to share some thing, sell some products were going to make a dollar off of, or do we need to share something that inspires, or something that educates, or something that entertains? What is right for the people who has joined the Flipped Lifestyle community?
Jocelyn: We’ve come to this conclusion after several years of trying different things. There might be people out there saying, “Well, you guys used to interview gurus and things like that.” And we did dabble in that for a time. But we determined after trying it that it wasn’t right for our audience, and so we don’t do that anymore. Basically, what we’re trying to say on this podcast is, that from here on out, we are always going to put the needs of our audience first and we’re going to try to serve you in the best way possible. Just as I said at the beginning of the show, our goal for Flipped Lifestyle is to be ad, affiliate and guru-free.
Shane: That keeps you guys completely at the center of everything that we do. Every word that comes out of our mouth, every video that we’ve released on YouTube, every podcast that we release is helping you move your business forward. It makes me go back and think about why we started Flipped Lifestyle in the first place. Our other companies make plenty of money. We didn’t have to start another business. But Jocelyn had a friend named Lindsay who came to her. Once we started making it online, work got out. People figured out, “Man something is going on over there,” and she was like, “How are you doing this? Do you think I could do it too?” Jocelyn helps her create a digital product. She goes on to make over a thousand dollars a month on this online business, or on these digital products. This is before Flipped Lifestyle, before the podcasts. Never even thought about going into this space. Her husband came out to me at church, and said, “Man, I just wanted to know that that changed our lives, that we are using that money to pay for our mortgage, I’m using it to save money.” He ended up saving the money for a couple years and went and got a PhD with it. I remember driving home from church that day, went over to Jocelyn and I said, “Man, if we can tell people what we know– what we know had changed people’s family trees forever, what if we could do for more families what we did for Lindsay and her husband’s family?” Our discussions about all these affiliate launches, about the direction of online business, and how other people kind of do it and how we don’t want to do it, is what led us back to that point of our reason we created this, was to help people flip their life. That was what we wanted to do. Give people extra money by selling online products to pay their mortgage, to maybe quit their job someday, but just to create margin and give them freedom in their life, and that is 100% what we’re going to dedicate ourselves to next year.
While the topic of this podcast may be very controversial, I’m sure the haters are going to come out in full force when this one is released. We’re kind of drawing a line in the sand and saying, “We are committing to serve more people. We want to help more families next year.” While other people are endlessly serving the gurus in their latest launch, we want to endlessly serve you and help you actually Flip Your Life with online business. We’re going to do that with a lot of access, both to us and to our trainings, and we’re going to put a bunch of different things in the plans for this year.
Jocelyn: We’re changing it up a little bit for 2017. We are doing a few new things. We’re going to start to tell you just a little bit about what we’re doing. The first thing is we’re going to continue to make this podcast, and we’re going to continue to help people live on air every single be just like we do every week at that Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We are also committed to keeping this podcast free, so we won’t have any premium editions, we are not having ads, and we will not have any gurus pitching affiliate products, pitching books or anything else that a lot of the online business podcasts do currently.
Shane: To add onto that, too, our goal is to keep our e-mail list as clean as possible. We don’t want to spam you with all these endless promotions and things from other people. We want to send you things about our podcast, new trainings that we are going to release. We want to make sure that not only our podcast is as valuable and as ad- and guru-free as possible, but we want to keep that e-mail list clean too so that you know when you open an e-mail from Shane and Jocelyn, it’s not going to be some promotion for the latest, greatest widget that is out there. It is going to be direct content from us to help you Flip Your Life.
Jocelyn: All right. The next thing we’re going to do in 2017 is we’re going to continue to work with our Flip Your Life membership community. The Flip Your Life community as a paid community where we help our members to figure out what to do next and their online business. Our community is an amazing opportunity to either get started with your online business or take your business to the next level, and we have hundreds of entrepreneurs from around the world and our community. It is a direct connection to Shane and myself. We are in there most days, and we love working with our members. If you are interested in that, we would love to have you.
Shane: The third thing we’re going to do is something radically different than what we think all other online business experts are doing out there. We’ve actually ran this by a couple people, and they’re like, “Don’t do it, nobody does that. Why are you doing this?” But we decided, “You know what? That is probably a good sign that this is the right way to go. We have decided to open another channel of access for you to get the training and support that you need to get started with your online business or take it to the next level. But we are also aware that not everyone is aware to join the Flip Your Life community. Not everyone is ready to go out and get coaching, and make that investment. Some people are kind of waiting into online businesses. Some people are just trying to get their feet wet, get something going before they take that next step. We want to make sure that you have the training and access to the coaching that you do need to get past that initial stage, and to take your business to the next level. We also want to do something that makes us completely community-supported by all the people we serve. In 2017, we’re going to be launching our own Patreon community, where you can pledge support and keep the podcast ad- and guru-free. Patreon is actually a website. It’s Patreon.com, and it allows people to pledge support to creators of content. You can pledge as little as a dollar a month. You can pledge a dollar per show that we release. Or there are other tiers where you get special benefits for becoming a patron to the show.
Jocelyn: Now this is not a make-more-money thing, so much for us as it is a way to better connect with our podcast audience. The way that it is right now, we basically have our podcast listeners and then we have our premium community. We really don’t have anything in between right now. When we first started Flipped Lifestyle, we answered all of the contact forum submissions ourselves. Every single day we would get in there, we would interact with our audience. But as we grew, we just weren’t able to serve people who weren’t our customers the same way that we did when we started out. For us that is a problem because of all of the things that we talked about earlier, we don’t want to lose touch with our listeners and our fans, but we also have to have some type of gate to be able to manage everything. We can’t answer dozens of messages-
10,000 questions a month -a day, it just doesn’t work. With having that support level, that just gives us a way to distinguish between our supporters and our fans. And allows people to ask us questions and to interact with us more so than they can right now.
Shane: That’s another thing that really bothered me lately, as all my favorite podcasts are just being eaten alive by advertising, and I can see why. We have to hire an editor for this show. We have to hire someone to do show notes. We have another person we hired to do transcriptions. We have people that manage social media. We have editors and all these people that go into it. It takes a lot of energy, effort, and money, and time to put one of these shows on. I didn’t want to sell out to advertising and make our 30-minute show 10 minutes of podcast. We didn’t want to have to compromise our integrity and say, “I’m sorry, Joe, you are a member of our community. We would love to have you on this week to help you with your online business, but I’ve got to have Guru X because he is launching something, and I need to make the money.” We want to make sure that we keep all of the outside influence away from our podcast and we keep the runway completely clear from minute one to minute 35 of our podcast, and we can just help people change their life. There is going to be some huge benefits. The Patreon system allows us to bring you a lot of added value, so anybody that supports the podcast, you are going to be able to get access to what is called our “Patreon Feed”. What we decided to do is make a lot of our training courses that are available in the Flip Your Life community, available on the Patreon feeds. You’re going to be able to go in, and watch things like our avatar and offer master class. You’re going to be able to go in and get some of that training you need, maybe to put your website together, or maybe even to do some Facebook advertising. While we will not be in there to answer questions every day, like we are on our Flip Your Life community, you will be able to get started and get the training you need for a much lower price than you could ever get it anywhere else. Another huge benefit for patrons of the podcast is we are bringing back our Q&A with S&J in 2017. We’re super excited about this. This is going to be where we take questions from our patrons, and we’re going to answer their online business questions live on-air. This is going to be a YouTube exclusive. It will not be featured here on the podcast. We will send out e-mails to our list every week, and we will answer our patrons’ questions live on YouTube. The Q&A with S&J will come back and patrons are going to be the people who are going to be allowed to ask questions on the Q&A with S&J.
Jocelyn: In addition to submitting questions, we will also say your website name we will talk about social media channel when we talk about your question on YouTube. That is another benefit of being one of our patrons.
Shane: We want to make sure that we are supporting you as much as you support us. We have so many people e-mail their friends or put a link to our website and share us on social media. I would much rather share your website and your social media account on our accounts than I would some guru launching a product.
Jocelyn: Probably my favorite part of this new patreon system is that you guys are not only going to be supporting us and the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and what we’re trying to do. You’re also going to be supporting each other. The reason for that is we are going to use a portion of that patrons support to set up Flip Your Life scholarships. There are a lot of people out there who would love to join our community. Maybe, now is just not the right time for you as far as from a financial standpoint, but by supporting us through Patreon, you are going to have an opportunity to receive a scholarship to the Flip Your Life community. That is one of my favorite things about what we’re doing right now.
Shane: Basically, how that works is, if you are a patron, you are entered into our system for applying basically for a Flip Your Life scholarship and periodically, we are going to give away discounted and even free Flip Your Life memberships to deserving Patreon supporters. We really want to create a system just like we did in the Flip Your Life community. We like to kind of view it like the roundtable, like the knights of the roundtable. We are in there and we know people joined to talk to us. We know people joined for access to us. But really it is that help that you get from so many other people working together. Various opinions, every post gets five or six replies on different opinions and different ideas. It is uniting together to help each other. It is that “a rising tide that lifts all boats” kind of thing. That is what we want Patreon to be. We want our patrons to help each other get the coaching that they need, and the support that they need to take your business to the next level so that is why we want this money that we are raising on Patreon to support people getting that coaching they need.
Jocelyn: We’re trying to come up with the ways that we can be more accessible to you, and help you as much as possible.
Shane: You know; I always think about this when I go to live events. I think about the people on stage and everybody wants to get on stage and be a speaker, and then they get to go back, and the speakers get to talk to the speakers, and that is big-time. Oh, you are special. Jocelyn and I have never really wanted that. We don’t want to be on the stage or backstage. I would much rather be in the crowd sitting with you guys, and talking about what it really means to raise our children and live a better life and have more time and build something successful that we can be proud of that supports us. That is what we want. We want to make sure that we are never influenced. I feel like when you let the ads and the affiliates and the gurus enter your brand, you lose that autonomy and you lose that power to control your own destiny. We want to throw our lot in with our audience, and we’re going to do that moving forward. We’re going to keep it that way by giving our audience more ways to support us so that we can in turn make ourselves more accessible and better support you.
Jocelyn: We are really excited to have just opened the doors to our Patreon community. You can head over to flippedlifestyle.com/patreon, or you can check it out in today’s show notes. If you support right now, the very first 20 people are going to get a guaranteed Q&A with S&J. They will be sure to have their questions answered, and we will also share your URL.
Shane: Make sure you do check that out today at flippedlifestyle.com/patreon. There is a lot of other benefits. There are different levels of support that you can go in there and join to get even more access to content, even more access to me and Jocelyn. We don’t really have time to go over every single benefit today, so make sure you check that out as soon as you get in front of a computer screen or on your phone, flippedlifestyle.com/patreon. We appreciate your support so much. You guys are what keep us going. You guys are what motivate us. Your success is our success. We always say that we get so much more out of when one of our Flip Your Life community members or one of our listeners writes in and says, “I had this success.” That means so much more to us sometimes than even our own success, we can’t even put it into words. The other day, one of our members have been trying for like three or four months to get his first sale since he launched. He was getting so dejected and I got a message that said, “I got my first member, it came from a Facebook ad.” Jocelyn was buried under boxes, trying to unpack. She just stopped everything she was doing and ran upstairs to tell him congratulations in the community. That is really what we are doing this for, is to help you guys experience the freedom that we have found through online business.
Jocelyn: Just to wrap up 2016, we want to say thank you all so much for supporting us in every way that you have over the past couple of years. We’re excited to bring it even more content, more Flip Your Life community members and questions from our new Patreon supporters. We are very excited. Thank you for an awesome 2016.
Shane: Make sure you tune in next week guys. We have an amazing success story from one of our Flip Your Life community members. We’ve got a member who launched and they got almost 30 members on their launch. We are going to break that down and talk about why she had such a successful launch, and how she has built a successful online business. And in two weeks, we have an amazing Flip Your Life community member coming of the show. This is a guy who has survived cancer, he’s got five kids, and he is crushing it in his real-world business and he is building an online brand. we’re going to break it down with him, and talk about how he overcame all these obstacles in his life. You know, if you ever make excuses, you really need to listen to this one in two weeks and hear this inspirational story of how our Flip Your Life member overcame the odds and beat this horrible disease and then, Bam! Now, he is working hard and setting big goals to build an online business. We have some amazing content, amazing interviews with our Flip Your Life community members coming up for you over the next couple weeks, and all next year. We want you to be a part of it. Whether that is just listening to our podcast, we appreciate that whether it is joining our Flip Your Life community or supporting us on Patreon, we love you guys, we’re so grateful for you guys and we’re going to do everything we can to help you Flip Your Life. We will do our part, you do your part. Get out there and take action.
Jocelyn: Bye.
JP says
Well I for one loved the podcast. I must be on some of the same email lists. A “guru” promotes a product on productivity/creating courses/membership sites in the $1,000-$3,000 range. Then a group of other gurus send auto-responder sequences and my inbox gets bombarded. Like you said, these are often new product launches,. There’s no way the other gurus have thoroughly gone through and applied the course.
Thanks for all of your great podcasts and blogs!
Shane Sams says
I always wonder that too. Like “have these people ever even REALLY seen this product? Food for thought JP.
Lee says
I felt the same.
Thanks for speaking up.
I feel you guys really care about our success.
I was blasted with affiliates too. And I too lost respect for a lot of them.
Shane Sams says
Thanks Lee!
Angela says
As a longtime listener of your podcast who has learned a lot from you, I feel compelled to speak up about the shift in tone I’ve noticed in your podcast. I am not a competitor or marketing guru myself (nor am I attempting to be) so please know these words come from a constructive place as a fan.
Every episode for months has included at least one derogatory remark about “gurus” in an attempt to distinguish yourselves from them. But before that, you always shared how your business wouldn’t be in the place it is if it hadn’t been for the guru you were listening to on the lawnmower that first day, or the two gurus whose event you attended in the Philippines, etc…It feels like you’re forgetting where you came from and are positioning yourselves as the only people whose advice is worth featuring now.
This most recent episode explaining a further shift really went too far for me. Why would I want to donate money to keep your podcast free of expert guests who can offer me helpful advice? When I think about all the meaningful causes I could give money to, this feels pretty hard to justify. I understand wanting to be ad-free, but I’m pretty sure every podcast episode is still going to include a 30 second ad asking listeners to become Patreon supporters, so you’re still interrupting the listening experience with a pitch.
I would love to hear you lift other gurus up and distinguish yourself from your competitors without making a critical remark about how they operate in every episode, and without asking for donations to keep them and their products off your show. The two of you can’t be the foremost experts on every problem that members encounter on your coaching calls, so it would be amazing if you let us know about (or hear directly from) other experts on occasion. That’s the primary way I learn about other great entrepreneurs to follow—if fact, I never would have discovered your show if another guru hadn’t featured YOU.
Please, keep it positive and promote the practices you love instead constantly bashing the ones you don’t. I really enjoy listening to the podcast, but this condescension toward other gurus is dragging down the tone of your show and making it hard to listen.
Shane Sams says
Thanks for your comment.
We are 100% trying to set ourselves apart from self-proclaimed gurus. Our goal is to protect people from the many bad marketers out there who are out to bilk people out of tons of money.
We have never once in any way said we wouldn’t support legitimate experts who actually help people. But we do say that our show is a pitch free environment where we expect guests to actually help people. That may not be for everyone, and that’s OK.
We get TONS of requests from experts to be on our show. We always tell them “If we let you on, you have to help our audience, we get to ask these X questions, and other than telling people your website, this is a pitch free environment.”
You would be SHOCKED at how many and WHO has said no thanks after that.
Sometimes these gurus even send us a script of what they want to talk about on our show lol. Its crazy.
We know most of the major online business podcasters personally. We consider ourselves kind of a filter to help people get the real story on folks they follow and not just what they see on social media or advertising.
Many of the people we actually met and followed early on turned out to be BAD BAD PEOPLE after we actually got to know them. Once we determined that, we never bashed them or called them out publically. But we definitely removed ourselves from their circle.
That is the reason we actually went to a no expert format. We got to see “backstage” at live events, the speaker circuit, the podcast world…lotta good, but some bad bad stuff too.
We fully support people who are legit. I will go to bat for Pat Flynn, John Lee Dumas, and Jill and Josh Stanton for example any day of the week.
Proven people. Not just in public, but in private too. Not constantly pitching, not constantly promoting, and from actual experience and knowing them personally we can certainly say they are out to help people…not just make as much off someone as possible before casting them aside.
Nobody is perfect, many of those people support things we don’t. Thats cool. But we know their heart, so while we can disagree with them, we are proud to support them.
It is our mission to help real people succeed. That involves helping them do what we have done, and guiding them away from people we know are spitting snake oil.
Self-proclaimed experts and gurus are our problem. People who have never actually done anything in business, but are business coaches. People who offer nothing in a podcast interview but their latest product they are pitching…which actually doesn’t do anyone any good.
We cut through and see through the hype from behind the scenes…so people who are not behind the scenes can see Oz for what he really is.
We have actually had a number of experts on our show to answer questions.
Pat, John, Kate Erickson, Josh and Jill, Jessica and Marilyn from The Bottom Line, Josh Bauerly, Michael O’neal, Amy schmittauer, Matthew Kimberley…all legitimately came on to answer questions and did not pitch anything or make it all about them.
All people we know in real life. All people we believe are actually helping people.
We have no problems with experts we know are legit. We have a problem with the shadier elements of Online Biz.
We have actually turned down quite a few people like this, big time influencers, because we don’t trust them. So we didn’t expose our audience to them.
We protect our content from them at all costs. We protect our audience from them at all costs.
Our heart is for our people. We are different and will stay that way moving forward.
Please know it’s the bad guys we are against, not the good. I hope have proven that over hundreds of pieces of content and interviews.
Unfortunately in this space, the bad apples DO ruin the bunch. Our only way to keep us and our audience in the clear, is to keep our podcast free from guests like this going forward.
Our only way to protect ourselves from that kind of corruption, is to stay away from ads and affiliate relationships if possible.
We also will not be interrupting our calls with members for pitches. We save promotion for the end and people can tune out after the show once the content is done if they don’t want help getting their online business going. We like to say our content is our pitch. We just show what we do and if that is what people want, they will come.
We want to answer to our audience, and nobody else, and give back.
Those other experts will be on many other shows. SO everyone is playing a part in bringing you the content you need.
Just ask yourself this when you listen: when was the last time you heard another expert actually help someone in person on a show instead of just promoting their book or product?
When was the last time you heard your favorite expert say something different from interview to interview?
How do you REALLY know they are living the life they say they are?
Good experts are awesome. Bad experts are not. Just be careful.
Thanks again for your comment. We will definitely think about our tone, to make sure we are respectful while trying to still get our message across.
Feedback like this is awesome. It gives us a chance to not only clarify WHY we do what we do, but to think about HOW we do it moving forward 🙂
“It ain’t gotta be perfect!”
But it can always be better 😉
Shane