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Need ideas on how to drive more traffic to your membership site?
Listen in as we help today’s guest with strategies on driving traffic to her membership site to grow her online business.
Setting the Flipped Lifestyle stage this week is one of our most engaging community members, Lea Saccoman.
Lea is a proud mother of two teenage girls, and has been married for over 22 years now to her amazing husband. Their family lives in Boise, Idaho, which also happens to be the birthplace of her online business called, “Mom Knows College.”
For the last 10 years, she has worked for an educational company doing ACT and SAT prep, as well as provide other academic tutoring assistance.
Aside from her usual nine-to-five job, she also coaches clients with high schoolers, helping them understand the college planning process and admission.
Now that she has become an expert in college planning, she wrote an eBook called, “Eight Steps to Finding the Best College Fit” and has already managed to sell these in the market.
Lea’s puzzle pieces are right on the table. Her website and avatar are in place, but she needs help on how to launch her membership – what’s the process and timing to do this effectively?
Join us as we share our strategies on how to drive traffic to your website, tips on how to start a beta membership, and creating & analyzing scarcity.
Are you ready to take action? Let’s get started.
You Will Learn:
- Cold ads, warm ads and hot ads
- How to drive traffic to your website
- Timing your grand opening
- Creating and analyzing scarcity
- Tips for opening a beta membership
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
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!
Patreon question of the week from our Q&A with S&J YouTube series:
Patreon question of the week from our Q&A with S&J YouTube series. This week’s questions as from Cathy B. She writes, “There are so many options for building a website. Which platform should I use to build an online business?”
Click here to hear the answer to today’s featured question!
And if you would like to watch all of our Q&A with S&J videos, head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/YouTube, and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
To ask a question for the Q&A with S&J YouTube show, you can do that over on our Patreon page at flippedlifestyle.com/patreon.
Click on the image to Listen on iTunes:
To learn more about working directly with Shane & Jocelyn in their Flip Your Life community, visit: https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife
Join HUNDREDS of entrepreneurs from around the world pursuing the Flipped Lifestyle online!
Success Story of the Week:
Today’s success story comes from Joanne, and that the subject line in her success forum post is, “I can finally tell my husband I made money online!”
“So I threw out a $5.99 entry-level product out into the world, and people bought it. I’ve made $29.95 so far. I know that is not so much compared to many of you, but it is my 11 cents moment.”
“As some of you know, I’ve been here since the beginning and it has taken me a while to jump off the cliff. I have a lot more ideas and plans, but I wanted to celebrate for just a second. Now, it is time to move onward and upward, I’m heading on over to the action plan forum now.”
Congratulations, Joanne, sometimes it takes you a little bit to get out of the gate when you are starting an online business, but then once some things positive happens, you get the momentum going, and that is what Joanne is doing now. This is only the first sale of many more to come! Now heading over to her action plan forum to take that next step so, Joanne.
We would love to help you write the success story for your online business.
At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community.
Can’t Miss Moment:
This week’s Can’t Miss Moment is what we are calling The Staff Lunch. Jocelyn and I have been, for the last month or two, trying to go out to eat for lunch two or three times a week. There is also this place in town that makes this amazing stir fry. We’re calling it the staff lunch but really, it is just being able to sit and be calm, and eat meals together, and just be able to experience life in the same place all the time.
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. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey, y’all, on today’s podcast, we help Lea take her college planning website to the next level.
Shane: Welcome to 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, y’all? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is awesome to be back with you again today. We are so glad that you tuned in to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. This is the place where we help you figure out what to do next in your online business. No shiny objects, no gurus, no gimmicks, just real people, real businesses, and real conversation. We are super excited to have another member of our Flip Your Life community on today’s show.
Jocelyn: But before we get started with today’s guest, we are going to read our Patreon question of the week from our Q&A with S&J YouTube series. This week’s questions as from Kathy. She writes, “There are so many options for building a website. Which platform should I use to build an online business?”
To hear the answer to today’s question, you can click the link in today’s shownotes, and if you would like to watch all of our Q&A with S&J videos, head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/youtube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Shane: And if you would like to ask a question for the Q&A with S&J YouTube show you can do that over on our Patreon page at flippedlifestyle.com/patreon. Now, let’s jump into our interview with our Flip Your Life community member and see what questions they have for us today.
We are super excited for our guest today Flip Your Life member, Lea Saccoman. I had to practice that one before we started. Lea, welcome to the show.
Lea: Nice work! Thank you very much.
Jocelyn: Now, we’re really excited to have you. You are a very active member especially on our monthly member calls. We talk to you quite often on there. We are excited to talk to you here today. Before we dive in, and get started on your questions, tell our audience a little bit more about you, about your background, and what you are doing online.
Lea: Sure, thank you guys so much for having me! I am the mother of two teenage girls. They are 14 and 16. I’ve been married twenty two years now to my amazing husband. Our family lives in Boise, Idaho. This is where I started up my online business called Mom Knows College. For the last 10 years, I’ve worked for an educational company doing ACT and SAT prep, academic tutoring, is what we are all about. Although that is our focus, a lot of what I do, is talking with families through the college planning process and admissions, which involves way more than just those ACT and SAT exams.
They have so many questions, but nobody is answering those, and so I have become an expert in college planning and I love that. I started coaching friends who have high schoolers. I filled questions for them all the time, and then I coach my own clients outside my 9-to-5 as well.
Shane: This is a one-on-one practice that you are actually charging people for, correct?
Lea: That’s right, yes.
Shane: The goal is scale, because you can only with so many people a week, basically. We want to figure out how to take this to the masses, and where people can go through this.
Let me ask you a couple follow-up questions there real quick. When you talk to these people one-on-one, do people have the same problems? Like, it’s always these 10 things, and then maybe there’s two things unique to their situation. Do you find that with your one-on-one clients?
Lea: Yeah, in most every call, the all start out the same. I will ask where they are in the process. Most of them are just starting, and they just don’t know what to do. They know their kid needs to get to college, wants to get to college but they have no idea what steps to take to get there. We usually go through a timeline of, “Okay, where is your kid in high school right now? Let’s talk about what you need to be doing right now at this point to get you to the end game.”
Shane: Okay, and then you find that that process just a pretty steady throughout the thing? Do you have a roadmap that you take people through, and you are like, “A-to-Z, there you go.” And then maybe we had to veer a little bit, but it is not just the beginning that is the same, it’s pretty similar to throughout the entire process, correct?
Lea: It is, absolutely. There’s tweaks and little curves on that road, but there is yeah, definitely same process.
Shane: One that is a great sign, whenever you are doing one-on-one stuff, and you really hear the same questions over and over and over again, that is a huge flag that there is a digital product waiting to happen that people can consume with leadership, followed up as a more expensive tier. That is awesome. This reminds me of our member that came on the call, and he was talking about guiding people through administering wills. College planning and death–
Jocelyn: It’s not really related.
Shane: Not totally related. But he said the same thing. He was like, “I am doing one-on-one. Everybody asks the same thing. We always start out the same place.” Whenever you find that in anything that you are doing you probably have something that can turn into an online business.
Lea: Awesome. Yeah, definitely replicable. Is that the way to say it?
Shane: Totally. We are good with that.
Lea: Hopefully, definitely replicable.
Shane: You don’t want us pronouncing things. Nobody wants us to be the interpreters around here.
Jocelyn: You have a great foundation as far as your meeting with people, you are helping them solve their problems. I know that you’ve already started the steps to taking this online. Where are you now and that process?
Shane: Have you monetize? Have you made any money? Like share with us this kind of what do you already have in place?
Lea: Right now I’ve got my blog, Mom Knows College, and I post there– now it is once every two weeks. I was doing at once weekly for a while but it got so overwhelming working my 9-to-5, and eating into family time that I couldn’t keep it up for a while. Now I’m a lot less stressed. I’m doing it once every other couple weeks. I’ve got that, I wrote an ebook called, “Eight Steps to Finding the Best College Fit.” That has been out there for a while in my auto responder, so I’ve got a lead magnet, pointing folks to a college planning checklist on my website, and they can go through, start getting my autoresponder there, and that is where I kind of pitch my e-book in there.
Shane: Have you sold any of your e-book?
Lea: I did, I sold one two weeks ago.
Shane: Yes! That is what I am talking about.
Lea: Yeah, finally I got my first one. I was so excited. You know your 11 cents, my $9.97.
Shane: that’s like a thousand times bigger than our 11 cents, so you are clearly destined for greatness. That is how it works. I plant questions in there because you’ve posted in the forum when you got that sale. Whenever anyone has their first sale, that is our funnest moment. People quitting their jobs is great, too, and all that.
Jocelyn: We celebrate. One of us will be working in the forums, the other one will be doing something else, and that is party time right there.
Shane: And we’re designing a wall, and I was saying this because someone sent us this big, huge giant thing that says Flipped Lifestyle. It is made out of metal, and it’s got a Kentucky in the middle of it. I actually posted it over on our Facebook page. We’re putting that in our new office, at our new house, but when you make a ‘first sale’, we print people’s pictures, and put like, “$9.97,” and we hang it around this thing.
Lea: Oh, yeah!
Shane: You are going to be up on the wall.
Lea: What amazing real estate. I appreciate that very much.
Shane: An everyday we will be like, “Motivation! Here we go now.”
Jocelyn: That is why we do what we do. This makes us happy.
Shane: So we’ve got the first sale, but we’ve got to get more because you can’t make a business on 9.97 one time. Let’s jump into some questions, okay, let’s figure out how to take this to the next level.
Lea: Great, okay. Let’s see. This is kind of a big question, it expands a lot. I just get so stuck, and I tend to get paralyzed with all of the options floating out there as far as how to market, what to do, first, second, third. I’m just not sure how to get from here to there, really. What I really want to know is what should my process and my timing be starting right now, and it’s just up through the launch of my membership?
Shane: I think the easiest way to look at this is, there are a million options. But you know what is crazy about online business? It is usually just action that leads to results, right? It is not like you have to do everything like one guru does it, or one expert does it. You don’t even have to do it the same way we did it. You have to do with what fits into your schedule like, you are getting stressed out trying to blog post weekly.
You didn’t even want to batch it. You just said, you know what, I’m doing two a month, and that is fine. That’s what this in your life, and what moves the needle for you, so that is cool. I think you’ve got to simplify the process, and it’s just say, “Hey, I need to run an ad–” that is step one, “I need to run that ad to something free, and then I need to run a second ad to get the opt in.” After that, let your autoresponder take over.
There is really only three steps that you need in place to actually make things happen. You need cold traffic to get people introduced into your brand. You are going to pixel those people when they land on your site, you’re going to track them like with a Facebook pixel. And then you’re going to set up another ad that leads to your opt in like that checklist. You might even get their email on the first thing. Some people will sign up. But maybe, the free ad is something like, “The first thing you must think about and planning for college,” and it is a blog post you write.
That is going to get people on there, and get their thought process going, but then you’re going to have another ad to the same people that says, “The Number One Sure Fire Checklist You Must Read if You Are Going to Send Your Kid to College,” or whatever. After that, we’ve written an autoresponder that would take over, and then we can do other promotions on top of that thing, like a webinar at certain times of the year, and things like that.
Lea: Okay, this is so much more basic than I was making it in my head. I have papers, you should see my desk. Notepads everywhere. With maps, and things I should be doing. I am running an ad right now to free timeline so that folks can see exactly what to be doing at what time during the high school years. And then, I’m getting some opt ins just off of that because on that page, I offer it. So I’m pixeling that, I’ve got that piece, I’ve got my email subscribers coming in.
Shane: So, now you need a second out called a warm ad.
Lea: Okay.
Jocelyn: Yeah, so what happens is, once these people, these cold people who are not familiar with their brand, they start hitting your website, you’re going to have that Facebook pixel on your website, and you are going to show them and ad. The purpose of that ad is to get them on to your email list, if they are not already, or you can get them to do something else.
Like what I do for Elementary Librarian for my warm ad is I get them to sign up for what I call a free training, which, in other words is an automated webinar in this space. Maybe that might be something you can consider doing. It doesn’t even have to be a webinar. It can even be like a video, or something, and it just needs to be something that they opt in for so that you have their contact information, and you can continue to follow up with them.
Shane: You want to remove friction while you are building your Know, Like and Trust. That is why there are two ads here. There is the cold people, who know nothing about you, but they go consume a piece of content. All they have to do is click. They don’t have to sign up, they don’t have to do anything. They get the timeline, but then you follow up with, “Hey, get this free checklist.”
Your ad can be strategic. Your ad can change like the actual picture they see. It might be exactly what you should be doing in February, and then in March exactly what you should be doing in March to prepare for your kids college. You can change the ad each month, but there is one category of ad, the warm ad, that you are running, and you can make it time-specific.
Don’t over complicate this. For us, we might send an ad to something that says, “A free blueprint on how to start an online business.” Because we’re about to we have this product called the Flip Your Life blueprint. We would give them the checklist, which has a list of the 24 things that you have to do, or whatever, to start an online business. And then, the second email, the warm ad, once people click on that, people get that, then we might say, “Hey, opt in, and get the first four steps for free. Then we give the free videos.
Then, we would use our autoresponder at that point to sell to them. We could even have what is called a ‘hot ad’ where anyone who has one went through the second phase is on our email list, we would upload that into Facebook, and that’s it third tier would just be, “Hey, join this, start an online business. Your inner email lists, if you are interested”.
Lea: Got it.
Shane: People way over complicate their sales funnels. Way over complicated. It is really just, “Get over here, and read this.” “Get on my email list, buy my product.”
Jocelyn: You speak to people where they are at. You figure out what their problems are. Speak to their problems. Have solutions for their problems. Have more solutions for their problems.
Shane: That is it.
Lea: Beautiful, okay.
Shane: So throw all your papers away, and start over.
Jocelyn: It is very simple. It is deceptively simple.
Shane: Yeah, it is like checkers, you know what I mean? Checkers a simple, but my dad beats every time because he is really good at it. You’ve just got to simplify and master it. Not try to do everything a little well, or poorly.
Lea: Got it, excellent, thank you. Yeah, that help straighten things out in my head.
Shane: Is that not as big now to you? Is that not as overwhelming when you look at it?
Lea: Yeah, no, for sure, not at all. There are so many steps in weird little arrows I’ve got going on in my head, or I did, as far as what I should be doing, and when. And you you hear about webinars and challenges, and all of these things that people are doing.
Shane: I actually drew this while we were talking. I’m going to explain this, because I’m very visual, and Jocelyn is rolling her eyes at me because I’m about to get into visual description. But basically, a square, and in that square, I put ad. I put cold ad. And then I drew the arrow over to free content. This say free into another square, right? Then I draw a line, and on that line, I wrote pixel.
That is my cold ad funnel. That is it. And then under that, I drew another square, under that line. And that’s as a warm. And I draw arrow over to the right enter another square and that says opt in, okay? And then I draw a line under that, and that but autoresponder. And that is it. That is what the whole thing looks like. That is all you’ve got to do is to start getting traffic.
Lea: Alright, I drew that very easily on my pad. I will keep this one, and I will throw everything else away.
Shane: See, Jocelyn? Sweet description.
Jocelyn: You know, there’s a lot of other things, and I know what you are saying. People are always talking about different strategies, and that is fine. You can eventually get there. But the most important thing is that you have one direct path. If you have one direct path, you can later come up with more direct paths. Let’s just get one direct path.
Shane: Just springboard off what Jocelyn just said, take that framework, and let’s say we build that, and we assume that, okay, we start with, “What should a parent be doing in March to get their kid ready for the admissions process?” Alright well we can build that really simply, and then run it in March, and then we can do another one for April. What should they be doing in April? How can we speak to them in this time? Eventually, you build a few of this, and you don’t ever have to build them again. You just rotate them. In and out, in and out, in and out. That is how you drive traffic to your website.
Lea: Got it, great, thank you.
Jocelyn: So this was a lot of information we’ve thrown out there. Did you have another question today that we can help you with?
Lea: Yeah so, I have my membership. I’m going to just follow up on that question. My membership, I’m not sure about timing. I get confused and get stuck about when I should open it, and when I should have people actually join. But now, are you saying that at the end of this autoresponder, that is when people are invited to join the membership to come in, or is there a launch? That is what I get confused about.
Shane: No, we more consider it a grand opening that a launch. It is kind of like this. I’m going to have a store, and I want to open it. But if I was going to open a real store, with a really building, I wouldn’t say, “We are launching today! Everybody open, fire sale, buy it all!” And then shut the doors and never open it again until next January. When we think of forever customers, and we think of lifetime value, we think, we’re going to open the doors, and we are open every day.
Our job as an Internet marketer is to give people reasons to come buy from us every day or every month or every week. Your job is to look at the parent.
When I think of your niche, I think of my brother, because my brother has a senior that is graduating, and I’ve watched him go through this college process. He started it and like maybe the end toward his junior year. I watched him in June, he was doing stuff, and thinking about stuff. In July, he was thinking about stuff. In August, during football season they were thinking about college and scholarships, and who they applied for, and when did they have to get in their resume, or their article they had to write or whatever. That process makes sense, that is a membership, but you have to speak to them differently at different times. They are thinking about very different things and now in May, or in April of my nephews and senior year than they are in August at the beginning of the senior year, or in February, his junior year when he is taking the ACT.
Jocelyn: Their other son is now a sophomore so they are thinking about other things for him. I was just saying this in the forums earlier today, and I haven’t gone back to see if you replied or anything, but I was thinking about maybe one thing you might consider targeting for those type of kids would be things that they want to get involved in. Earlier in their high school career, I assume that people are wanting to know what kind of things their kids need to be involved in to look good on a college application.
Shane: Are they a Beta member? Or are they in the National Honors Society? Whatever. GPAs, and things like that. You can open the doors, and leave them open forever. But you can create scarcity different ways like, “Hey, did you know that April was the cut off for certain scholarships? Click here to see more.” You’ve got to figure out in your niche each month how you can create scarcity.
Jocelyn: Things like the ACT, because I’m pretty sure those are national dates so you can talk to your audience about, “Hey, the ACT is coming up. Here are some things you can do to help prepare.”
Shane: Yeah, so the doors are always open. It’s not launching, but you’re creating a way to get people in constantly because different people are going to want to buy this at different times. My brother started planning my nephew’s junior year. But I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of people that are looking up in January going, “Oh crud, my kids got to go to college in six months.”
If you only open in June, what about all those people? That is the concept of a membership, a constantly open, constantly living, breathing community of people in the same boat. But everybody in this room that you create, there is a backdoor, there is a front door, there is a side door, they are all coming in through different doors and you are going to focus on different doors at different times.
Lea: That make sense, absolutely.
Shane: Whenever you have this ready to open, it’s open. It’s on a sales page, it is ready to come in. We can create scarcity by analyzing each month of the year, and say okay, how are we going to promote this month? How are we going to promote this month? How are we going to promote this month?
Jocelyn: And I will say is when you first open the doors, you are going to have a bit of what we might refer to as a launch in that, you are going to say, “Okay, this is now open, I am now taking people to be Beta members.” That is typically what we do. We just open it to a small amount of people. We get them to come in, kind of kick the tires, make sure everything is working correctly. Then, we open it up to everyone. But, I mean as far as that goes, for you, I don’t think that I would restrict people coming in.
Shane: I would actually love to see you to take your real-world clients that are already paying you, and as a value add, put them in your initial membership.
Jocelyn: And just tell them they get X months free.
Shane: Tell them, “Hey guys, I know you’ve got questions, and it is not always when we meet, or when we have appointment. Let’s do this: you come here and ask me these questions.” It doesn’t matter if it’s a private Facebook group, or forum, whatever it is. You just say, “You know I’m going to be charging for this, but I want you guys to have it for free.” Put a few people in there right now, so that you can start getting the feel of it.
Anybody with one-on-one clients, that is how you open your membership. You take your one-on-one clients, and put them in their first, and then let them do all that kicking the tires, like Jocelyn said. Then now you really know that it works. You’ve really got people in there, and you can get testimonials, you can have conversations that are already existing. When your real clients from online come in, they’ll already have a place that looks vibrant.
Jocelyn: Yeah, and just as an aside on that subject I would think that probably Facebook might be a logical place for your community for it live. The reason being is because a lot of people who are at the age where their children are now going to college, I think they are not quite that tech savvy group. A lot of them are already on Facebook. I think that probably makes a lot of sense for your market.
Shane: It removes friction for sure. You want to host your content in the forums because they can watch the video, they can download the stuff, and they can comment on those threads just like we do in our community. If you go watch the product offer course or the, “How to Batch Content” course, you can actually respond to it right there, because it is posted in a forum thread.
You create that system. That’s fine, leave that the same. You can still have some community there. But you want people to be able to just be in your community. So when people join your membership, you can add them to a private group. As long as you can have conversation, you are good to go.
Lea: I love it. Okay, that is fantastic. It is kind of what I had at the back of my mind. I’m like, “Are these people get to know how to do these forums?” I didn’t know how that was going to work. Facebook, I know works for them so.
Shane: That is one thing we really stressed when we redid all of our content, and we created the Flip Your Life blueprint. We wanted to really stress people get so hung up, “Hey, Shane and Jocelyn, what tool are using? How did you create this? What did you do?” And we were like, “No, guys. Content, community, make them pay to get to content and community.” That is our entire business model. Those three things I just said. It doesn’t matter what tools you use.
Lea: Awesome, this is fantastic.
Jocelyn: Alright, Leah, what else can we help you with today?
Lea: Well, we talked about Facebook groups for community when I have my membership site, but I am wondering if it would be smart for me to have another Facebook group just to show them more value that I can give right now, just to get them to know me better and then use that.
Shane: Basically, like a free group?
Lea: Yeah, just to get them into my membership afterward.
Jocelyn: I think this can make a lot of sense for your content, also maybe more announcement type things, so just more like I mentioned earlier, it is the last day, you can take the ACT or SAT. Just are different things like that. I think that that could be a valuable service for talking to people who are not in your community yet. Just a free group. I just think you have to be careful about exactly how much you put in there, like you don’t want to…
Shane: You do want to be available for sure all the time just to answer every single question in the free group. Usually free groups work best if you automate things, like you might, once a month look at the calendar and say, “Okay ACT is coming up on the 25th, so by the 14th, you need to do this. Whatever, and then you plan it out and schedule it all. It is kind of automated. And then you post things like questions to start the thing like, “What have you done to prepare your child for the ACT? Do you have any questions about the ACT?” When they ask a question, you say, “Hey, I’ve got a training course on that. Click here.” And then go your sales page.
Jocelyn: You might occasionally pop in with a Facebook live or like a Q&A session, or something like that. You might occasionally do that adjust to interact with them somewhat that you want to make sure that you are not giving away all of your community value ìn your free group.
Shane: And, especially all of your time. Access is going to be a selling point in this. Access to an expert, right? Well, if they get access for free, then, they are not going to do it. Also I want to stress, people are going to get mad, too, when you do this. I just had a Facebook message. I’m not going to call this person out, but I’m totally going to read it, the Facebook message. I got a very hateful message the other day on our Facebook account. I’m warning you because anyone who starts a group like this where you just let the general public in, you’re going to get a little bit of this.
Jocelyn: And this actually isn’t from a group. This was actually on our Facebook page.
Shane: So someone sent me a message, and they asked me a question about online business on Facebook. They weren’t a member, and Jocelyn and I have a lot of people vying for our attention. So we have to really protect that.
Jocelyn: We pretty much have a policy that we do not generally answer people’s questions just because we have too many.
Shane: Because they’re not in the community, okay? So, this person asked a question, and I was like, “You know what, I’ll just send it out, I will shoot this guy an answer back.” I sent him an answer, he asked another question. And I was like, “Seems like a nice guy. So I sent him another question. Then, he has been a huge elaborate game-changing question about his business that would take me forever to answer anyway. I just basically sent him a message back.
Jocelyn: We have a canned response.
Shane: We have a canned response that says, “Hey, man, I’m glad we had this conversation, but we really have to spend our time in this community because people are paying us for it,” and the message I got back was, “Well, that is not very relevant to what I was asking. Thanks for everything, I guess.” And I’m like, “What?!” I totally answered your question for free twice, and you got mad at me. Be ready for that when you start letting these free groups open. Don’t let it get to you and set boundaries.
Jocelyn: Just for everybody out there, don’t undervalue your time. Right now we’re working with a trademark attorney on some various things. They bill us for the craziest stuff.
Shane: $44 an email.
Jocelyn: Just to email.
Shane: One-sentence email for this lawyer.
Jocelyn: And I’m like, we’re missing out.
Shane: Why are we not charging for you? I’m going to send this guy, this hater, a $55.00 Facebook message fee, or something like that.
Jocelyn: I’m also, this is totally unrelated,
Shane: We totally derailed this conversation, yeah.
Jocelyn: It’s like a rant that I have. I’m going to start billing people for my time. When I go to the doctor’s office, and my appointment’s at 1, and they get me in at 2:30, yeah, I’m going to start billing an hour and a half.
Shane: The point of the story is, just be ready for anything that could happen when you open a free group because people are crazy. I mean, they just are. Some people go crazy on you.
Jocelyn: Yeah, and I always recommend having a canned response ready. If you know that somebody is going to constantly being asking you stuff for free just go ahead and have a response ready so that way when they do, you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to use your mental energy on somebody who might be hating.
Shane: And set hard boundaries between your free group. Not necessarily in content. Content is fair game, wild west, but access to you, your time; you have to set hard boundaries between your free group, and the people that are actually paying you for advice.
Lea: Very good. Yeah, that could be a closed group, too. I suppose I can kind of throw the trolls out.
Shane: You can. Michael O’neal over at Solopreneur Hour– great podcast, if you don’t listen to that– but he always says, “Innocent until proven creepy.” He just lets anybody come into the group, and then when you cause problems, he kicks you out.
Jocelyn: Yeah just boot them out because it’s not worth the mental energy. Well, it’s been a great conversation today. You had some really good questions, and I hope that we are able to help you to free up that mental space, and to figure out exactly what it is that you need to do next. With that in mind, we always ask people at the end of our call, what is something that you are going to take action on in the next day or so, based on what we talked about today?
Lea: Well I am going to clear off my desk of all these notes. I am going to start working on a warm ad right now. I’m working on just refining my cold ad. I think that if I can also get a warm ad out there to opt more folks in, I can get that autoresponder in full gear, and actually start making progress toward this membership.
Jocelyn: Yes, that is awesome, I think that that is a very logical next step. I would say that I’m sure you are aware of this, but we do have a warm ad training, in our community and we also have an autoresponder training. I think both of those would help you a lot right now.
Shane: And there’s also two other trainings that have been added with Flip Your Life blueprint. One is called The Ad Chain, which is basically what I explained on the podcast today, but in greater detail, and then there is another one, not just our sales funnel training, there’s a Sales Chain, too, where we really link all of the pieces together in depth, like what happens after the autoresponder, after the purchase, and things like that, so you can check those out as well and it should kind of connect the dots for you.
Lea: Oh my gosh, you guys, I’m so excited about all that to come. I’ve got through a lot of your trainings already, and that is why I am at where I’m at. So grateful, thank you so much!
Jocelyn: Yeah, that is awesome. Listen, you are doing a lot of things right. It’s like a lot of other people that we talk to all the time. Quit making things so hard, you can do this!
Shane: It is hard enough without you making things harder. That is what I say to myself all the time.
Jocelyn: We run into this all the time. We catch ourselves doing it all the time. It’s just not you. Everybody has a tendency to just make all this too hard. It is really not that hard.
Shane: You know what I actually do, totally out of tangent here, but you know how the stereotypical entrepreneur is like, “Oh, we are all surrounded in a table in front of a giant whiteboard mapping out the future of humanity.” I literally, when I plan things now, I get a Post It note, and I have to be able to draw my thing on one or two Post It notes, or it is too big. This is too big for me to handle right now. Reduce that mental space that you’re trying to plan in, and you will find everything will go a lot smoother.
Lea: Great, simplify, I love it. Thank you.
Shane: Well, Leah, thank you so much for sharing a glimpse into your journey, and for being so open, and asking great questions. I hope that we help you today, and I know that someone out there is listening to you, your story. They are where you are, and you helped them by allowing us to share this conversation with them today.
Lea: Awesome, thanks guys, I so appreciate it.
Shane: What a great call to one of our Flip Your Life community members. We would love to have you in our Flip Your Life community as well. If you would like to become a member of the Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we can help you with your online business, too.
Jocelyn: All right, next, we’re going to move into the Can’t Miss Moment segment of our show, and these are our moments that we were able to experience that we might have missed if we were working at 9-to-5 jobs, still.
Shane: This week’s Can’t Miss Moment is what we are calling The Staff Lunch. Jocelyn and I have been, for the last month or two, trying to go out to eat for lunch two or three times a week. There is also this place in town that makes this amazing stir fry.
Jocelyn: Every Thursday.
Shane: Every Thursday. So every Thursday, we’ve been going and having a staff lunch with our team so that we can actually go out and talk about business. We make sure it is business-related while we’re eating.
Jocelyn: We talk about business all the time so pretty much any meal is a staff lunch, or a staff dinner, or a staff breakfast.
Shane: Whatever you want to call it. But we go out to these lunches, and we get to hang out and get to spend time together, and it just occurred to me the other day I was like, “Jocelyn, how many times did we ever eat lunch together when we worked in your corporate job, or when I was a football coach, or when we both were teachers?” It wasn’t even physically possible to eat lunch together.
Jocelyn: We were at two different schools, so we could never eat lunch together when we were worked at schools.
Shane: Even when we had her other jobs, when Jocelyn was in corporate, she would be gone. She would be on a trip to a tradeshow, or maybe I was off on a trip to a football game, or something like that. We weren’t even in the same city. Now, we just have the ability to eat all of our meals together. That is such a blessing to be able to come home, and eat breakfast together. On Fridays, we do a thing called donut day where we take the kids to a little donut shop before school, and we’re just all together, and we all get to eat breakfast, and it is just a really neat thing to be able to sit and eat meals together especially every meal everyday.
That is our Can’t Miss Moment this week. We’re calling it the staff lunch but really, it is just being able to sit and be calm, and eat meals together, and just be able to experience life in the same place all the time.
We love to talk about our Can’t Miss Moments with you guys each week, right here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, but there’s one thing we like to talk about even more, and that is the success stories from the members of our Flip Your Life community.
Today’s success story is an awesome one. It deals with the topic that we touch on here from time to time, and that is getting your spouse on board with your online business. One of the best ways you can do that is to prove that it works.
Today’s success story comes from Joanne, and that the subject line in her success forum post is, “I can finally tell my husband I made money online!”
Jocelyn: It says, “Is so I threw out a $5.99 entry-level product out into the world, and people bought it. I’ve made $29.95 so far. I know that is not so much compared to many of you, but it is my 11 cent moment.”
A lot of you guys know about our story, about how we may first made 11 cents. Now, Joanne is saying this is her 11 cent moment.
Shane: 11 cents was the first money we ever made online, it was the first time we sent content out into the world, and money actually came back. We really strive to help people get those 11 cent moments in our community.
Shane: “As some of you know, I’ve been here since the beginning and it has taken me a while to jump off the cliff. I have a lot more ideas and plans, but I wanted to celebrate for just a second. Now, it is time to move onward and upward, I’m heading on over to the action plan forum now.”
Shane: Congratulations, Joanne, sometimes it takes you a little bit to get out of the gate when you are starting an online business. But then once some things positive happens, you get the momentum going, and that is what Joanne is doing now. Now heading over to her action plan forum to take that next step so, Congratulations, Joanne. This is only the first sale of many more to come.
Jocelyn: We would love to help you write the success story for your online business. At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, where you can learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community.
Shane: Before we go, we like to close every one of our shows with a verse from the Bible. Today’s verse comes from Proverbs 4:25-27. “Look straight ahead and fix your eyes on what lies before you. Mark out a straight path for your feet. Stay on the safe path. Don’t get side tracked.” That’s all the time we have for this week. As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life.
Jocelyn: Bye.
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