Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Welcome back to another week of taking action and flipping your online business to the next level!
We have a very special episode for y’all this week, we’re going to give you guys a sneak peek of what goes on when we conduct our exclusive Flip Your Life monthly members call.
Our members send us their questions, then we help them analyze, strategize and achieve the insight to take their developments up a notch.
We answer all sorts of online business questions, from beginner level to intermediate level inquiries.
No matter where you are in your online business journey, we can provide you the much needed support, leadership and the momentum it takes to succeed in this space.
Stick around and get a feel of what the Flip Your Life community can do for you, your family and your dreams.
Don’t miss it!
You Will Learn:
- how to set up your courses on your website
- how to effectively allocate your hours
- the advantages of batching up content
- determining which price makes the most profit
- knowing your niche market’s calendar
- how much do you spend on ads and promotion
- working on a better upsell strategy
- plus SO much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Flip Your Life community
- Elementary Librarian
- FL Patreon page
- FL YouTube Channel
- Joe’s Football Defense Website
- Jason Brown’s Website
- Russell Brunson’s Website
- Jeanette Stein’s Website
- Natalie Eckdahl’s Website
- Erin Chase’s Website
- Ladyboss.com
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!
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thank you for listening!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post.
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
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. And now, we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? Alright. Let’s get started.
What’s going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. We’ve got a special episode of the Flipped Lifestyle podcast for you. We’re not going to have a guest on today per se, but we wanted to give you guys a glimpse into the Flip Your Life community, kind of let you be a fly on the wall and see what we do on our monthly member call. What you are going to hear today is a real call with our monthly members.
We do these group calls twice a month. Tons of people login, come with us in the forums, come into a live chat room, they ask us questions in real time, and we give them answers on the air. We are actually going to have 10 people ask questions on the show today, and give our answers to online business. We hope that you enjoy this little change up for you on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and check out what we’re going to do in this Flip Your Life community monthly member call.
Can everybody see the video? I’m looking pretty rough right now. We were with the kids all day, dogs, all that good stuff.
Jocelyn: A lot of people are saying they might fall asleep during this call. This is how you know when you have your people because I’m so exhausted right now.
Shane: You guys are our avatar. You are our people. You’re tired, you’ve got kids, you are working, you are trying to make it.
Jocelyn: You may not be able to to stay up past 1 AM.
Shane: You’ve got dogs, and cats, and fish, and whatever else you’ve got going on.
Jocelyn: All right, we always start with our live questions. This is from Kathy. It says, “I need someone to tell me how to put a page on the website for my different courses. I will eventually have one for dental anatomy, then another for dental assisting, then another for EFDA,”– I don’t know what that means, but okay–
Shane: I have no clue what that means, but it makes sense to you, so it doesn’t matter.
Jocelyn: — Yeah, yeah. That is fine, okay. Let’s see, “Tell me what to do, but I don’t understand, so I was thinking about hiring a VA.”
Shane: Okay, alright. I’m not sure if you are talking about batching content here, or you were talking about just the process of selling multiple courses. This can get convoluted, but in a general sense, what we always say to do is, if you are doing it with pages, you want to have one master page that is like a table of contents so you would have your first course, then your second course. And then you want to have a page that is going to host your course.
That might look like a video, plus the links to your resources for that video. Any text that you want to write describing it, and then maybe your comments are turned on on that page. That page would then be protected by membership software. It doesn’t matter if it is a membership or not; you can still use membership software to sell one-off products. If you use something like WishList, you can protect that page.
Than it is a matter of adding a new page and creating a new course, adding a new page and creating a new course. We have actually went a different route. We use our forums to manage our content because it is a whole lot easier to just say, start a new form, start a new topic, and do the exact same thing you do on the page, but it is all a little bit more organized inside of there. For your course content, you can still do that table of content page, but what you really need to do is you just need to have a page, protect it, and when they log in, basically you can use those as different membership levels.
In WishList, you would say, Course One Level. If they buy Course One, they get access to Course One; if they buy Course Two, that is on another page, they get access to Course Two. So they can see what they’ve purchased on that table of contents page. I think that is what you are asking. That is primarily just content management. Does that make sense?
Jocelyn: Yes, so basically you are just want to make different pages, and you can even put those on the menu. That is relatively simple to do in most things. If you’re still having trouble with it, probably the easiest thing to do is just hire somebody to help you. You can probably get somebody overseas for not a whole lot.
Shane: Yeah, you could also use a teachable platform to sell your courses or something like that, if you wanted to do it, where there is like a self-contained course-in-a-box type theme or plug-in. But the easiest way to do it is just protect it like that. Okay?
Jocelyn: Alright. Ben says, “I’m squeezing out 15 hours a week to work on my online business. I can maintain content creation, and stay updated with social media, but studying the analytics, conversions, and getting my paid marketing going is such a struggle. How do you guys recommend allocating my hours?”
Shane: I would take a week or two, and spend 30 hours, like 15 two weeks in a row, free up so much content batched up that you don’t have to do it for a couple months. Then, what would happen is, you would spend time to buy time back. Let’s say, you take 30 hours, you don’t touch your social media for the next 30 hours as you work on your business. You only create content. Now, once all that is scheduled, you take the next week, there is 15 hours. Then you schedule your social media for– set a goal– three months.
Once all that starts rolling out, basically three weeks from now, you are ready to say, “Oh man, I have 12 weeks times 15 hours a week of getting my advertising rolling, get it diving into the analytics as I go, and the content is just taking care of itself. That was a lesson we learned very early on was, you’ve got to turn off content creation from your brain you can’t worry about it. That is why I am batching 20 hours of the recording this week.
I’m going to do 20 different master classes if I can. I’m going to push through it and try to get it done, and just recorded them all, because I find I know that if I do that now then I don’t have to create that content again for the rest of this year inside the membership area. The course that we want will be in place. The same thing with our podcast. We do tend in a week so that we don’t have to worry about it for three months, and that the only thing we can worry about is promotion. What do you think, Jocelyn?
Jocelyn: I mean, totally. We batch pretty much everything. It is like the only way that I can wrap my head around moving onto something extra. As far as what do you recommend to schedule social media, we’ve used Meet Edgar before, and it works fine. There is a new one that somebody was telling me about.
I can’t remember the name of it. Somebody popped it in the chat, if you know. It’s like Meet Edgar, but it is like a newer version. You might want to check that out. If you are using Facebook, if it is a page, you can schedule right there on the page. I do that a lot for Elementary Librarian.
Shane: People say that it gets better reach. It’s never really been proven, either so that’s also a good thing to do. The reason, real quickly, that we use Meet Edgar is very specific: number one, we primarily– I don’t say only, because we use Google, too, but we primarily use Facebook ads for a lot of our advertising, and Meet Edgar can schedule on Facebook very easily.
Also, Meet Edgar recycles old posts automatically for us. Instead of me having to do social media all the time every single day, every week, schedule something new, I can post something in Meet Edgar, and it will get shared again over and over three months from now, every three months that one post get cycled back through. Last week, we went to Funnel Hacking Live in Dallas, and I didn’t touch the social media, and neither did any of our VAs, really because they were working on other stuff.
But we knew we had dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens of old content that were going to come bubble up to the surface. That is why we like Meet Edgar. There is other programs that do the same thing. Just pick something that takes it off your plate.
Jocelyn: All right, let us move on to Kyle. He says he is worried about falling asleep also. I feel you, Kyle.
Shane: Yeah, I’m going to scroll back after this one because he had so many numbers in it.
Jocelyn: Okay. It says, “I know there is no magic answer.” That is very good. “Here is what my numbers say: lifetime value of customer at $9 is $94.62, at $12, it is $71.25, and $19 is $102.45. At $24 is $61.”
Shane: What was that one after 12 again?
Jocelyn: 19 is 102.45. And 24 is $61, but he only has three members there. And 39 is 117, but only two past one month. “I think that the two in front of the price scares people in my space because very few people sign up at over $20. The analyst price of $29 with 199 yearly as the list price, then discounted 19 a month with the $1, 10-day trial and $157 yearly in automated webinars and in my autoresponder. 157 is where most of my yearly sales came in my autoresponder. As I look at my still active members, that is where my most productive members started.”
Shane: What Kyle is trying to do for everybody listening is, he is trying to determine which price is the most actually the most profitable. Which ones sells the most. Which price do people stay– not stay in the longest, that doesn’t matter. Sometimes a higher price, you’ll make more money. At $9, we get good retention, and he makes a total lifetime value on average of $94.62 off of each person that joins at that price. But in $19, it looks like 102.45, so he makes more money off of the $19 price even though maybe they don’t stay as long. That doesn’t matter. What we are looking for is the LTV, the price that gives us the most money.
Even if people leave a little quicker, that it’s okay. I will tell you what was interesting there is, he said 157 is his best annual price. I wonder if you could play both angles and say, “Just go all in on that $19-a-month price. But make that annual 157, regardless of the discount.” Doesn’t matter, it is still less than paying 19 every month for 12. Why not just pick your two best prices from annual and monthly from your data, and say, “Forget it, those are my prices.” I know 19 is a really solid return. I know 157 sells because I get the most annuals at that price. Do that, and then why don’t you take six months and spend every dime you make? You’ve got a job.
You are working doing something else. Take every bit of money you got on getting more monthly members of that price, and just keep recycling those ads in 46 months a year until you get to the next down period, and just pick two of your best prices. That is what I would try if I was in your shoes right now. I would do that. Would you do something different or what do you think?
Jocelyn: I think that that is a good strategy for sure. I think it also depends on how many people are in each of these levels.
Shane: He said 19 had quite a few, it sounded like.
Jocelyn: Yeah, if you are talking about just 10 people, I just think it is hard to say without having a lot more numbers to go off of. Some of the ones you said you had like three people or two people, and I just think that is not enough data to go off of really.
Shane: Also, that touches on a different issue, Jocelyn. One thing I am seeing here is his tried 18 prices. Raising prices is definitely a thing we want people to try. You’ve tried so many prices here, I wonder if you could just pick two and be consistent now. You’ve got a little data, you’ve got a good educated guess, there is nothing for sure, but maybe take 19 and 157, make that your prices, and just commit to them for all year this year, and commit to getting as many people to those levels as possible so you have a really strong idea of what those LTV’s are. The next time we have this conversation, you are ready to go. I think, just from what you’ve got, pick two, 19 and 157, and then, you know, roll with it consistently.
Jocelyn: I think that if you are finding that people are getting scared away, sometimes it is a matter of maybe don’t feel like there is enough value there.
Shane: Or timing of the year.
Jocelyn: It can be. Maybe we are not communicating the value in a way that people are thinking that it is worth it, do you see what I mean? So maybe that is something that we could look at also just making sure that that value is adequately communicated, or you can change your offer around it, too.
Shane: Like the after-the-season marketing. People join probably at peak times for baseball stuff, and then all of a sudden baseball is over. Yeah, they still need you for things like fall ball or off-season stuff, but they don’t know that. Maybe you’re spending so much time thinking about getting people in at the beginning of the year, you’re not thinking about how to keep them in the off-season, so even that could skew the LTV numbers. Pick two and be consistent. Go long-term with a price, set the parameters, and go all in on those prices, and let us build some data over the next six months, and then we will re-evaluate.
Jocelyn: Alright, this is from Kathy. She had posted it in the forum, but she is also here live. She says, “I have a few weeks of batched emails to send to my list ready. I have Facebook and Pinterest ads going. I’m posting weekly on my site, new blog posts or recycling older but evergreen topics, and rotating those to the top. I’m working on doing more webinars doing teacher trainings. I haven’t made any sales.”– she’s selling math lesson plans– “what do we need to be doing in the day-to-day to make sure that I’m doing all I can to continue to build my list, and one day, make a sale? I feel like I am so close to making that one sale. I had one customer take advantage of a free week, but he left because he said my content was too low for his students. My email sequence open rate is as follows: Email 1, 63; Email 2, 48; Email 3, 45,”– all those are really good.
Shane: That is amazing, your emails are ridiculously good.
Jocelyn: They never drop below 30, so that is great. I would wonder what you were doing on Email 6. It jumps up to 37.
Shane: Yeah, I also wonder, too, you said something interesting there. The one person who finally joined said your stuff was too low level for his. That guy got so far down your funnel, that he thought he was your perfect avatar, saw this stuff and wasn’t. There was a slight disconnect there between your marketing and your lessons.
Jocelyn: And granted, that is only one person.
Shane: That’s only one person, but that is a clue, that is a hint. We might have to just tweak something right there, that might be the problem. What if all those other people on your list, if they knew that your stuff was a certain level they would buy? I think that timing is critical here because it is an education niche. All niche markets, you better know your avatar’s calendar. That is how you make money. We made money at first, kind of by accident. We just pick a good time, we had a big hit and it was awesome. Then, we realized it tapered off and we didn’t have anything for the next nine months. We didn’t know what was going on. We realized every market has a calendar. Every customer has a calendar. You have to know your calendar.
You have some big things coming up soon, like testing, summer vacations, end-of-school clearance sales, and then you have people’s budgets resetting coming up in July, and then you have the back-to-school market. I think we need to maybe tweak a little bit here. Your language seems amazing. Your open rates are so good that I want to see your click-through rates, and then I want to see your sales page, exactly. I want to see if there is alignment between those the two things, but right now, it is just keep growing the list, keep growing the list, and let’s attack to those big areas, especially back-to-school in August.
That is what we’ve got to go all in and see it. I want to remind you, too, if you’re getting frustrated a little bit, Jeannette Stein, who everybody has heard on our podcast, seen in the forums, we just spent a week with her in Dallas. We had dinner with her a couple nights, and just hung out because she was at the same conference. She went like two or three years making pennies. She literally made a penny the month before she joined Flip Your Life online. Then, we just tweaked one or two things, and straightened out some stuff, and it exploded during the back-to-school time. Let us try to tweak a few things. Something is not closing the deal because you are getting engagement. Your numbers are awesome, by the way. To have 45% on your third email, that is ridiculous.
Jocelyn: But I’m wondering are you pointing to a sale in the email? And pointing to a sale doesn’t mean you’re being spammy and being like, “Buy my stuff.” But, are you letting people know that you have something for sale? Are you doing a P.S. that says hey, check out my, whatever.” You need to make sure that you are doing things like that. When they land on our page, assuming that you’re sending them somewhere from the emails, does your page have an advertisement to your community, to your product? It should. There is no reason you should not have picture image advertising to your own products on your own site. That should be happening. And if you don’t have that yet, it needs to happen immediately.
Shane: Yeah, I would like to see the analytics here, two things in the forums. When we get off the call, if you are using leadpages, go see how many people have been to that page compared to the amount of that people who have been through the funnel. Then let’s look at the sales pages and also your click through rates. Open rates are great, but I want to see how many people have actually been to the sales page, and then we will look at conversion after that.
That is where the link in the chain is. Ads, content, and then we have emails and then we have our sales funnel. We see that the chain is working, you’re getting ads, you’re getting traffic, you’re getting e-mails and people are opening them. That is amazing. The next link in the chain is probably where the problem is. We need to look right there, and see what is going on with your copy, and why it is not converting, okay?
Jocelyn: Alright, this is from Brent. “I’m starting live webinars next month. I have my slide deck done and script rehearsed well. I’ve watched your webinar training. What advice would you give me, and how much do I spend on Facebook ads promoting it? I plan on doing two a week for a month.”
Shane: Alright if you are going to do two a week for a month, I would just set your budget and push it to the limit. You want to get as many people into these webinars as possible because the kind of webinars you are doing are a little different than what we would do. We have an established big audience. We are going to really talk to our list. We don’t use our webinars to build our list we used our podcast to build our list because we have a big audience. We just have to convert them from listeners to emails, and get more listeners.
You’re trying to grow your email list through your webinar while you’re also trying to make sales, and that is great. We did that for a while, too. I would spend almost as much as you can, man, on getting people into the those webinars, or at least registering for them and not really worry so much about show up rates because are going to have replays and all those things. Try to use this as a great way to target people in your space, get as many people registered as you can. The registration for you right now is almost more important than even the show ups and sales, because we’re trying to build that list, built that community, build that Know, Like and Trust.
Then use your email funnel, your replays, and the live events to get people on board. I want to stress this to anybody starting webinars: we spent an hour and half on webinars when we first started doing them. Get your webinar done, pitch and all, Q&A and all, 45 minutes or less. Make it go. Practice it over and over again until you can get it down to that because the quicker the webinar is, the better your chances of making sales are, because you will keep people, people will start tapering off. Other than that, use it to build your list, and spend what you can to get as many opt ins as possible.
Jocelyn: Alright, next is from Jennifer. She says, “Can you talk about how Gravity Forms hooks up to Gumroad or E-junkie. I’ve got an e-book done, and I’m going to get Gravity Forms, but I’m not sure how the forms connect to the delivery system.”
Shane: Why would you not just use Gumroad and E-junkie’s pages? I know there is an opt in using Gravity Forms on site, but they make pages to do that in their systems. They make order forms basically.
Jocelyn: Yeah, Gravity Forms does connect to a lot of different things. I’m not sure if it connects to either of those.
Shane: I think it does connect to E-junkie. There is instructions on it. I’ve seen somewhere.
Jocelyn: Usually when you are connecting anything up, it has to do with the code that is called like an API; it’s a really long string of letters and numbers, and you basically put it into another tool to let it talk to the first tool.
Shane: Oh, I see. You have to use that here. For those of you who don’t know, Zapier is a tool– and I’m going to drop this into the the chat. That is probably where she is getting hung up. All tools can talk to each other, but not all companies make connectors for all tools. E-junkie can talk to Gravity Forms. But that company didn’t make the thing that does it. They need a third-party company to help them. There is a tool called Zapier that can link– gosh, it links so many things. You can use it for a ton of different stuff. But I’ve actually got here the Zapier link, and I’m going to drop that if I can– I’ve got so many windows open, I can’t figure out where I was. Where was I?
Yeah, so I’m going to drop that in here right now. That is how to use that Zapier to try to E-junkie to Gravity Forms. I would be probably certain you could do Gumroad to Gravity Forms, too. But I would like to take one step back and say you could use Gravity Forms to just, on your site, collect all the information from your customer or an email or something and then push them on a redirect. E-junkie and Gumroad, these third-party distribution programs, they have their own order forms, and things like that that I used to use the E junkie order form when I sold my playbooks. You might want to look at that, that might be simpler to get started out, but you can connect it with Zapier. Okay? All right.
Jocelyn: Alright, let’s go to Rachel’s. “Since I got my website up, my opt in freebies, and I released free seven-day healthy habits challenge to grow my email list, I have about 92 people on my email list. What should I focus on next?
Shane: Alright, so we now have people on the list.
Jocelyn: Which is awesome.
Shane: Which is awesome, so that worked. We have this challenge. We have a direction, we have an avatar, we have an offer. Right now, when you get people, the next step is usually to start talking to those people that have signed up. You might want to have a live Q&A. A live webinar, where you can either sell them something, or you can ask them questions, you could send surveys. Ninety something people have raised their hands, and say want I want to follow you.
Jocelyn: Don’t fall asleep on them.
Shane: Yeah, exactly. You’ve got to go to those people, and say what do you want? How can I help you? What problems can I address for you? This is the thing I am creating for you. Is that the right thing you need? Go talk to those people, see who they are. Compare it. You can do a demographic survey, like all those things from the avatar training video. You can create like a form in Gravity Forms, send that to them, or on Survey Monkey or something, and asked them all those questions, and see if it matches up with the avatar that you’ve created in your head. There might be some alignment there that you can fix. Ask them their problems, say, “Do you have these symptoms? If you do, what do you want me to create?
Jocelyn: Find commonalities, make additional content for those things that they are saying that they have problems with.
Shane: Let those first hundred to 200 people that come follow you, guide the next step to help you go get the next thousand, 2000 people, because if there is 92, there is 992, there is 9,992– there is more people like the ones that follow you. Figure who they are, and let them tell you where to go next, and it will make things a lot easier as you are taking steps in your content creation, okay?
Jocelyn: All right, we are moving on to Jeff. He says, “Paid Memberships Pro has ugly checkout pages, and cannot do one-click upsells. I have on my sites using Paid Memberships Pro, however I know I am losing sales because of the horrible checkout pages, and also losing out on upsells. I don’t even know where to start the process of addressing this. Should I migrate to a different memberships software that can hook to ClickFunnels or some card? What do you guys think?”
Shane: I would like to see the data first though, to prove to me that it is your checkout pages. I would like to see your stats, and say, “How many people landed on your sales page? How many people clicked to your options page, how many people landed on the order form?” And then I want to see the cart abandonment number to prove that that is the reason that people are not doing it. Have you split tested prices on different pages at different times to see if that might be the cause? Have you split-tested copy your testimonials?
Some people come to us sometimes and like, “I know this is why because I think this is ugly or I think this is this,” and Jocelyn is going to lay the smack down on the design issue here in a minute. Then I look at the numbers, and I’m like, “No it doesn’t, nobody is clicking from your opt in page to your order form.” Let’s see those numbers, and be sure, but let’s also start addressing the design issue.
Jocelyn: Alright, so, here’s the thing. It’s not so much design to me as it is user-friendliness as far as, are they able to view it on mobile? There’s also a big point of contention for me when we first moved over to Infusionsoft because they had Infusionsoft checkout, which would have been lovely however it was not mobile responsive. On my Google analytics, I can tell that 40% of my people on Elementary Librarian visit the site on a mobile device. For me, not having a mobile responsive order form was not a thing. It could not happen. I must have a mobile responsive order form. I decided to go with SamCart. Now, some people might think SamCart is the greatest thing ever, however using the setup that I have it with right now, it has been a total nightmare.
I mean, it does not play nicely with Infusionsoft. We have had a host of issues with it, so I would just say, be very careful with whatever you are connecting it to because once you start processing payments using one form of payment processor, which SamCart is not a payment processor, it is just a shopping cart, but once you start with one thing, it can be difficult to change to something else, especially with recurring payments.
Shane: I see what you are saying about the upsells, Jeff, that is a really important thing that you need to be able to do. We do not upsell on the backend of our shopping carts. We upsell through our membership, through our emails, asking people to go from monthly to annual, things like that. Personal preference, we have actually strategically done this in a different way. And you say, for example, I have a book for geometry teacher product, but I want to sell it for $4.97, then immediately upon checkout, offer the membership.
Dude, that, to me sounds like a redirect. I know Paid Memberships Pro is redirecting those people to a Thank You page after they buy. That has to be happening. We don’t even use Paid Memberships Pro, but it is redirecting them somewhere. That sounds like, just go change the redirect to another sales page, which is exactly what an upsell is. If you’re wanting to include upsells in a shopping cart, you are getting a little bit more high-tech there. You’re going to have another sass solution for that. If you want to say, “Here is 4.97, you bought the book,” don’t send them to a Thank You page.
Send them to a thing that says, “Thank you. Oh, by the way…” and have a sales page. You can also put the option to buy that on the options page to upsell it. “Yes, I can redirect, but then they will have to re-input their payment info.” That’s interesting.
Jocelyn: The one click upsell is definitely ideal. I use it for Elementary Librarian, too.
Shane: Do you use that for your book when they buy the membership?
Jocelyn: I do, yes. What I would say is talk to Paid Memberships Pro, you may have done this already. Ask them, do they have any third-party relationships where people are making these types of forms to make them look a little bit nicer? I’m willing to bet that if they don’t have it already, it is probably something that they are considering doing for the future. I would start there, so you don’t have to start all over again from scratch.
Shane: Jeff also made another comment here, he says, “With ClickFunnels, it is a one click upsell.” I get that. Every tool is going to do something that another tool doesn’t. We just spent a week at a ClickFunnels event, and trust me; we were sold to ClickFunnels at every single speech presentation out in the hall. That was their goal, is to get as many people in ClickFunnels were upsell into bigger ClickFunnels if they can. There were some people they are complaining about things ClickFunnels did. Just because the grass is greener here, doesn’t mean it is automatic. What if it screws something else up?
Jocelyn: Here’s the thing, software solutions, they all have pros and cons. Every single one.
Shane: Exactly. A lot of people complain about Infusionsoft, which has its pros and cons. But every piece of software can be made to do what you want. You’re worrying about the resource, and you need to get more resourceful.
Jocelyn: Yeah, and I would just say like I said before, just make sure that you do your homework before you start installing stuff because somebody told me about SamCart, and I was like, “Oh, SamCart is amazing.” Well, something has just blown up on it.
Shane: And you have a business. For those of you don’t know Jeff, Jeff has an amazing online business. Making a great, great income online. When you are deep into a product, you’ve really got to say to yourself, “Is it really worth it to add one more feature to this? Or can I get resourceful and figure out a way to just go ahead and deal with what I’ve got?” We would never quit Infusionsoft right now because I don’t want to go through it. It is not worth it. We have thousands of customers, and we are just not going to switch just to get one more feature.
Jocelyn: All right, so to answer your questions– I see have some questions here– the process for Elementary Librarian, it is very convoluted.
Shane: But at the end of the day, it is our member, right? To protect our member.
Jocelyn: Yes, it is our member to protect. Someone goes in to my site. They are on my sales page, which is a lead page. They go from the sales page to the options page. From the options page, they go to a checkout page.
Shane: That is where SamCart starts.
Jocelyn: The checkout pages are SamCart. Once they complete the SamCart page, they submit it, they get the option for the upsell, so they either say yes or no on the upsell. Then, they go to a Thank You page. In the back end, what happens is that, SamCart sends the payment to Stripe. Stripe tells SamCart it received the payment; SamCart, through a third-party– sort of like Zapier but it is something different, but anyway– it is supposed to tell Infusionsoft that someone joined, and it is supposed to get them the appropriate tags.
Shane: Then we use a program called iMember360 to protect the membership area. Welcome to high-level online business, y’all.
Jocelyn: To make a long story short, what happened is that one of the bridges that we were using, they stopped supporting the product. Some people decided not to do it anymore, and I didn’t know this for whatever reason. I did not get the emails or whatever. We didn’t pay for it, because I did not know it was due.
Shane: The conversation is very interesting, Jeff, because I had a conversation with the guy at ClickFunnels. This was the guy who was complaining about a thing in ClickFunnels. He has this big long sales funnel with ClickFunnels but then he’s got to use WishList to protect his other stuff. He’s got to use Zapier to connect WishList with ClickFunnels, and all this other nonsense. It ain’t going to change. I’m not saying there is never a better idea to switch to something, but, I’m guessing that with a little resourcefulness, and a little back-and-forth, and spitball this, and the forums, we can figure out a process to let you easily upsell people. I’m also willing to bet, if you go call Paid Memberships Pro, and tell them, “I want to upsell people. Tell me how?”
They’re either going to tell you how to do it, or they’re going to add the feature. If it is not the biggest WishList, it is probably the biggest. But it is the second biggest membership program out there. There’s got to be a way to do that, and somebody has figured it out. We just got to look into it, okay?
Jocelyn: Just before we have more questions, before we go there, I just want to say, just be careful again because what is happening to me is because of this SamCart issue was happening. What I’m going to have to do is switch to another payment solution, but the problem is, all of my members’ credit card info is stored in SamCart. I can’t access it because it is all encrypted. Therefore, I’m going to have to continue paying for SamCart for my existing members, and pay for another membership solution.
Shane: Yeah, once you get deep into something, you can’t just back out. You would have to tell, “Oh we have 1000, 2000 clients. Let’s make all of them re-sign up.” They’re not going to do it. You’ve got to be really careful.
Jocelyn: I’m not saying definitely, don’t do that. I’m just saying make sure you understand all the repercussions before you make that switch.
Shane: And make sure you understand all the potential solutions which I doubt you’ve exhausted yet, okay? Alright. Let’s jump into some more questions.
Jocelyn: Alright. Tim says, “What freebies have you found to be the most valued by teachers?”
Shane: I think just lesson plans that they can use in general. Right now, you’ve got to prove that their life is going to get easier if they buy your stuff. That is true with any niche. It is something that you can get a result. What can you do to get a teacher the quickest result? Give them a lesson plan. They go teach it tomorrow, their day was amazing, they come back to see what’s next. Same thing with anything else. If your lead magnet is not getting a result in one day or less, then your lead magnet is probably too big, too convoluted. Unless it is something like a challenge, but same thing. Can you get someone a result in seven days? If you got a lead magnet that will do that, they’re going to want to see what the paid product. Will do, too.
Jocelyn: I really love the teacher market because I feel like they’re very receptive to free stuff. They’re very used to giving their contact information to get something for free, and they are okay with that. I find that pretty much anything you want to give teachers for free, they are going to give the you their email for it.
Shane: Also, Jeff, he said something about design there. Guys, don’t get hung up with design. Design is important, I am not saying it is not important. Just because you think it is ugly doesn’t mean anyone else does. Go show our website to any big-time marketing thing. They be like, “Oh, it’s ugly, oh it’s terrible,” well guess what. My opt in, I was looking at our stats last week. Our sidebar opt in converts at 16%. If you know data, it is ridiculous for a sidebar opt in. But our Flipped Lifestyle one, 16% converts in emails. They can call it ugly all they want. It doesn’t matter. It converts.
Jocelyn: All right, Ben says, “What tools do you recommend to split test to use a specific plug-in?”
Shane: Leadpages. That is what we split test all of our stuff with, for ads we just use whatever is on the platform. Facebook has a really easy way to do this. You can just clone an ad, change one thing, and test them side-by-side.
Jocelyn: If you build your own sales pages, there are probably plugins that do it. I don’t know of any offhand, but I’m sure that there are some out there.
Shane: I bet OptimizePress does that. Yeah, it does because Joe did it for footballdefense.com. OptimizePress is the thing that people use for sales pages, too. Basically you can hit a button and A-B split test your pages. I would say this: you need to split test things, but don’t go crazy with it unless you’ve got a good traffic. When you’re split testing something, change one thing. Headline, maybe a picture, maybe colors on your buttons. Don’t go crazy and be like two different pages. Just change one thing when you’re split testing.
Jocelyn: All right, we’re going to jump into the questions that people have asked here in the forums. Kevin says, “Is there a typical unsubscribe rate? I’ve had a really good week with 55 opt ins to my list,”– good job,– ” But I’ve also had 12 people unsubscribe. I expect some of that since I have been pitching my membership to my list, and when I have done that in the past, I have lost a few folks. My unsubscribe rate is 15% overall, 60 out of 386, does it sounds pretty typical?”
Shane: Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it as much. If you are seeing something that feels high, that might be an avatar communication issue. But that is not bad.
Jocelyn: I think that is a little high.
Shane: Maybe. But it is so low-numbered. He’s not even in the 400s yet.
Jocelyn: Yeah, let us wait until we get a few more people going through, and we might just want to look at the pitching language. Exactly what are you saying.
Shane: Yeah, there’s ways to pitch without making people click unsubscribe. We don’t get a ton of unsubscribes.
Jocelyn: Maybe just put your pitching emails into a general discussion. And we can take a look at those, and just see if we can maybe change the language around it. Maybe you need a little softer sell.
Shane: I want to touch on unsubscribes for everybody here, too, because this is kind of a high-level thing. I’ll be honest with you. That is not a stat that Jocelyn and I look at a lot. I don’t remember the last time I really checked. In fact, one of Jocelyn’s favorite things in online business is to go purge her list of all the people not opening, who didn’t unsubscribe yet.
Jocelyn: No, probably my favorite thing is to unsubscribe people who are annoying.
Shane: Yes, exactly. If people leave terrible comments, or they just say bad things or something.
Jocelyn: If somebody was just trolling, I will just go ahead and unsubscribe them.
Shane: Oh, Jocelyn just goes and take them off the list, and she comes in smiling like, “Chopped it off.” Don’t get too caught up in general unless it is like 50% unsubscribers, I’m crazy. But worry about the people that stay. Screw the people that left. Let them go. Goodbye. Don’t let the door hit you where the good Lord split you, you know what I’m saying? Bye-bye. Just worry about the people that stay. You’ve got 85% of the people that are staying. If you go get 10,000 people, you’ll have 8,500 people that desperately want to hear more from you. Let’s focus on them, let’s turn them into customers, and let’s not waste energy on all the haters that are out here.
Jocelyn: If you hate on me, I will take you off my list.
Shane: And if you hate on us anywhere, you will no longer be on the Flipped Lifestyle. You are warned! Everybody is warned.
Jocelyn: Alright, this is from Rebecca. Rebecca says, “What is the number one take away from the conference you just attended?” I like this one actually.
Shane: How about conference content sucks?
Jocelyn: Okay, well here’s the thing.
Shane: We saw Tony Robbins live, that was pretty cool.
Jocelyn: Yeah, that was interesting. Here is thing. Conferences are great. You’ve heard us talk about a million times how awesome live events are, and I still think that is true. However, yes, the content is usually just okay. I’m not going to say that I didn’t pick up anything from this conference because that is not true. There were a couple of sessions that were really, really good, and you know I got a couple of good ideas. However, I think for me the biggest benefit of attending any live event is just being away from your normal day-to-day routine, being able to sit there, and have the mental capacity and mental space to think and process; think about and process things that maybe you just haven’t had time to think about in ages.
Shane: And also getting in a room with 2000 other people that are high-energy, and people are there. It was like a moment of clarity. The second day we were there, we just had all these ideas, and nothing really came from the content as much as we just got to put ourselves in our environment more. Jocelyn and I are actually going to plan to go to something every eight weeks for the rest of the year because those moments of clarity are just unbelievable. That is what births these huge things that we do. I think that was the same thing to me.
The one thing that I did get though was listening to Russell Brunson, is and we do this, but I like to hear it from other people. It’s just, man, simplify your sales funnel. People really over complicate this online business stuff. Russell’s sales funnels are like three steps. And then bam, it is time to go. He had a great quote. In one of his talks, where he was showing a giant funnel and we have all these things that they were doing. To simplify everything, get people to know like and trust you, and sell them something. It is not hard. You just have to keep pushing and doing it. That is my biggest takeaway.
Jocelyn: I just maintain that live events are so important. Heck, we don’t even use ClickFunnels, and we went to the event.
Shane: I know. Every single thing at this event was about ClickFunnels. Members kept coming up to us for Flip Your Life and people who listen to our podcast. We get to meet all these people listening to our podcast. I met this one guy, his name was Jason Brown, he has a website called The Brown Report and he walks up to me with tears in his eyes, and he is crying and he is like, “Man, I’m not a member of the community. I do listen to podcasts a little bit, but I will be honest. I’m just so into my business, I don’t listen to much content.”
But he’s like, “I heard your story on a podcast. It was the thing that made me go forward. I was about to quit.” He said he made $500, all the people left. He was back down to zero, and he was like, “This is a scam. This is not true.” And that he said, “I heard Shane and Jocelyn Sams’ story. Real people who made it happen. And it changed my life,” and he made like 500 grand last year on his website. When you go hear something like that, you’re just interacting with these amazing stories, that is what fires you up. When you hear, you’re down, and you go to a live event, maybe you’re like, “I don’t know if this is really true,” then you go hear someone say, “I started an online business and I made my coaching practice happen.” “I started my online business, and lo and behold, I changed one thing, and I made $30,000,” or something you just hear these stories from people.
Even if it is not about you helping someone, you hear that it is true, and you see it is possible, and get away from the naysayers and the doubters in your real life, you cannot place that energy and come back. Jocelyn introverts away for me for 24 hours when we usually get back from these things, to just let me roll. I’m so fired up.
Jocelyn: Yeah, it wears me out. I get so tired after them, but it was much fun.
Shane: The energy just cares you forward.
Jocelyn: We got to hang out with Jeanette, she was there are also. Natalie, The Biz Chix podcast, she was there. We got to hang out with her and her husband. I got to meet a friend of his mine, Erin Chase, whom I’ve never met before, but I have been in a mastermind with her. Anyway, Ricky says, “I just assumed you guys use ClickFunnels.” “No, we just went to hang out.”
Shane: We just went because it was in Dallas, and there was this great place there called Velvet Taco, and I loved it. I wanted to get more tacos. We were like, “Hey, five days, leave the kids with mom and dad, and let’s get out of here and eat tacos and hang out with people.” And let’s get excited, and learn a little bit about business, too.
Shane: Alright, I’m going to jump down, I’m going to skip Kat’s question for second, I’m going to jump down to David’s. He says, “When are you going to have your next live event?”
Shane: The live event, okay. We’re going to have an event this year. This is actually Jocelyn’s idea, which I was really surprised about. We’re thinking about making it a really big event where it is like 100 people, and we’re going to invite all of our audience in the Flip Your Life community. We want to have a big event, and we’re going to do a VIP mastermind the day before the event. Of course, something like this is something you’ve got to plan, and you’ve got to really look at and figure out the logistics. Something like that cost tens of thousands of dollars to put on, but we really want to make it something where it can be big time. Everybody can come, and have that private exclusive mastermind as well to help you take it to the next level. If and when it happens,– well, we’ve got to meet with our event coordinator– but I would be looking for Nashville or Atlanta, and it would probably be later in the year, okay?
Jocelyn: Possibly ’18, because that is going to take a lot of time.
Shane: Now, as for private life events, we may piggyback another event or two this year once we get our calendar in place. We are going to look at that. We had an event scheduled for April, but we lost our venue so that did not happen. We’ve got to regroup a little bit and we’re going to put that together. Flip Your Life Live is going to happen. I’ve already talked to speakers. Live events are coming, and we will always keep you guys abreast of where we are going as well. You can meet us and maybe we can meet up at some other big conference, or something like that.
Jocelyn: But it’s seriously so much fun. We had a ball. Okay, this is from Kat. “I’m going to rerelease might Pinterest course next month. It’s been updated so I’m raising the price to around $60. I used to sell it for $29,”–way too low– “and then immediately upsell to my $29 permanent membership. Let’s see.”
Shane: “Question is, is the pricing still going to work well with the upsell? Will I get more members that way? I’m in two minds about this because I’d almost rather sell more Pinterest course is right now because it is more passive.” Look. I would add maybe a bonus or something to the Pinterest course. Here’s my philosophy on this: you need to look at everyone that is taking a course, and you need to look at any testimonial back from that course. You need to ask a specific question.
How much more money did you make because of my Pinterest course? Let’s say someone comes back and says, “Kat, I did everything that you did on your Pinterest course. Oh my gosh, it was amazing, I got more traffic, and I literally, within the first two months, made like $1000 just from fixing my Pinterest like you told me to.” If that is true, if you have people in your community that can say that– or they have made $500, whatever– why are you charging $60 for something that can make someone $1000? Let’s look at traffic. Let’s say it cost someone, I don’t know $500 to get a thousand visitors to their website. But if they take your Pinterest course, they can get 1000 visitors for free because you’re going to fix everything for them. You just saved them $1000. Why are you charging $60 for something like that?
What I would challenge you to do is, why don’t you try to sell this thing for $399 or something crazy and say, “If this, then this. You will get this if you take my course.” I know people that sell $500-courses and they are 30 minutes long. It is not like the course has to be long. It just has to deliver a results. I know that your Pinterest stuff delivers results because you did our pages, and they worked better. I would challenge you to say, 60 bucks? Who cares what everybody else saw was the price before. They got in early. See if you could sell it for something crazy, and it is passive.
If this is a membership play, so it for something big, give them a course and then sell the membership of the back of it as a downsell like, “Oh, here’s my $399-Pinterest course.” “Oh, here’s all my other stuff, join my membership.” I mean, why not sell 100 for $399 instead of 100 for $60? You do the math. I’m not going to do it on air because that’s embarrassing, and I always mess it up. If 50 people bought it times $60, or 50 people bought it times $399, I think you can justify that the course is worth that because it will pay for itself over the long-term. Go for it, but let me ask you this: what is the worst thing that happens if you charge $400 for that product, and only 20 people buy? What is 20×400, Jocelyn? That is eight grand for 20 people.
Jocelyn: Hold on, hold on, I got a calculator.
Shane: Calculator? Bam. Eight grand. I got it.
Jocelyn: That’s right.
Shane: That’s right. Flip your calculator. I think we need to have a serious conversation about the price of that product, and I think you need to go balls out and say, “This thing is worth $500, and if it is not, I’m going to add something to make it worth that. Let’s have a big ticket launch, and go and attack everybody that uses Pinterest with ads.
Jocelyn: All right, we’ve got a final question for tonight. It is from Brian and Audra, and it says they took a new job, they closed the gym and the store around a few weeks ago, and Annabella, their new baby, is teething. “So, needless to say, we are sleep deprived, so we will be in bed at nine.”
Shane: Welcome to the real world, Brian and Audra. Your life has changed.
Jocelyn: We feel you. I get it. She says, “Our current pricing on our training program site for coaches, basketball, and football is set at $360 yearly or $38 monthly. Is that too high?
Shane: No.
Jocelyn: No. “My other site, which is training programs for the general public, is set at five $15 a month or $150 per year which has done very well. There is more work on the coaches site versus than in the public site. Should I matter in pricing?” Yes. “Looking to make the coaches site to below $25 a month and $220 for the year.
Shane: No, no I would not lower your prices. I think that price is fine. I think it is weird pricing because it’s like 360 and 38. Why not just do 399 and 39 or something? But I think that what you got to do is, number one, you need to go research some people who are killing it. There was a girl– was that website of the girl, the fitness girl– lady boss?
Jocelyn: I think so.
Shane: Lady Boss. Go to ladyboss.com, and look at this girl. They made $2.5 million selling workout memberships last year. Granted, she is an IFBB Pro, or whatever, she has the same story. “I lost weight, and I figured it out. And then I became a bodybuilder. Now you can, too.” Ladyboss.com, she’s got like a Facebook page, too, and a lot of people are following her but they made a fortune last year selling really high in prices. I think your prices are too low, but it is working so maybe we just need people, and maybe we just need a ton of them.
As for the training program, you need to go to schools. Brian has got to target these coaches. He’s got to go directly to them. You need to get into those varsity club budgets, the football budget, the athletic department budget. You need to attack that school money, and get those annuals being sold about so that you can make more money on that. I think it is a marketing problem, not a pricing problem. With his and with yours, if it is doing very well, we need to figure out why, and we need to pour some gasoline on that fire. What do you think about her prices, Jocelyn, about dropping them?
Jocelyn: I mean, I don’t really like for you to drop the prices unless you were doing some type of a special like if you need to get some people on board. I’m okay with that, like something temporary. But as far as long-term, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t sell it for that.
Shane: I also have a statement here too, and this is an ego thing, we will finish this call up with it. If you find a nail, and you can hammer the nail, you should put all your energy into the nail. Right now, you need to tell us how good that is doing, Audra. If it’s doing very well, you guys might need to just say, “Oh man, Brian, hang that on the shelf, and let us move forward.” We made that decision with CoachXO after he got hacked. It made money. It was fine, but we had these other things that were making more money, and we couldn’t do them all, and it was like, “Why don’t we channel all our energy into these things that are working great instead of the things that are working good?”
It may be good to tag team that $15-a-month, $150-a-year, your training program for the general public. Now, I want to look at the numbers. I want to know what ‘very well’ means, because ‘very well’ could mean 10 or a thousand, I don’t know. But what if you put all your energy into one that is doing very well, and you’ve got a thousand people pay you $15 a month? You’re good. You don’t need any kind of gym or anything else. And then you can go back and pour some gasoline on the other fire, okay? It might be an opportunity here to say, “This is working, let’s go for it.” Okay?
Jocelyn: Great, we are out of time and I think we’re out of questions, so it’s been a good call.
Shane: I want to remind you guys, too, make sure you go over to our Patreon page, patreon.com/flippedlifestyle. If you are not a patron yet, we would love to have you to be a patron there. It is only $1 an episode, and the reason we’re using that platform is to use as a production cost vehicle for Flipped Lifestyle, and we want to create a ton more content on YouTube, so we are taking all the questions that Patreon people ask us, and we’re putting them on YouTube, we are putting links back to people’s sites. We are promoting your sites while we’re on the YouTube questions.
Jocelyn: I’m even appearing on video.
Shane: Jocelyn is on video answering your questions. And look for us on YouTube, make sure you do subscribe to our YouTube channel. We’re going to try to build that back up this year as big as our podcast has become, so that we can just reach more people, be found more, and just change more lives through the Flip Your Life community. Thank you guys for being here tonight, awesome call, some super awesome questions, and some high-level discussion. We love you all. Good night. Jocelyn is back on camera, second time. Maybe take a screenshot and share it on social media. Somebody going to read back on the replay.
Jocelyn: No, please, please don’t do that.
Shane: Take a picture of Jocelyn, and I want that posted on someone’s Facebook page.
Jocelyn: I might unsubscribe you for that.,
Shane: Alright, alright. By the guys, see y’all!
Alright, guys, we hope you enjoyed that little peek into our member calls with our Flip Your Life community members. If you would like to join us on our next Flip Your Life member call, all you have to do is go over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and you can login and ask questions as well and hang out with everybody in the Flip Your Life community. That is all the time we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flip Your Life podcast, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life. We will see you then
Jocelyn: Bye.
Leave a Reply