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The power of social media is at its peak now more than ever.
As online entrepreneurs, we must learn how it works and how we can take advantage of it.
Listen in on this episode to learn how to use social media platforms to grow your online membership community.
We have another fantastic guest on the show today who’s serving his community in a truly meaningful way.
Flipping his life and online business to the next level is FYL community member & Church Tech Specialist, Paul Clifford.
Paul has been married to his wife, Christina, for 18 years. They have two kids: Trinity and Ellie.
He has been called to serve since his teenage years, but was unsure how to fulfill this purpose until he became Church Technician. He is an expert in a church presentation software — ProPresenter, and has created several courses on it.
Being a church tech is quite a lonely vocation, but Paul was dedicated to creating a platform by which he can help others like himself to provide high quality church presentations in order to improve the service experience.
He started his online venture in February 2011 and has significantly grown his online presence and credibility. He has also created books and multiple courses that would lead his audience towards his online membership.
Paul has already gotten his first 12 members. The questions now is, how do we ramp it up to 100?
Join us as we help Paul understand the push and pull behind social media platforms, how to use that to his advantage and win the sales-numbers game.
The conversation is fun and easy to digest, if you’re looking into taking your online business to the next level without all the crazy jargon, we got you covered — so don’t miss this!
You Will Learn:
- Facebook groups VS Forums
- Finding a way for your avatar to talk conveniently
- Sales as a numbers game
- How to drive in more traffic using Google Ads
- Google-Facebook strategy
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Paul’s Website
- Flipped Lifestyle’s Mobile App
- Elementary Librarian
- US History Teachers
- Learn Scrivener Fast
- Flip Your Life community
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!
Success Story of the Week:
Today’s success story comes from Lea, and it is an awesome success story because we get so wrapped up as entrepreneurs in the money and in growing our memberships, and growing our businesses that we forget that our online business is changing people lives, are changing the world and that is what this one is about. The subject for this success story is, “Making an impact.”
Lea posted:
“It’s not often that we hear how we are impacting lives through the content and teachings we offer. I just had the best conversation with one of my followers. She told me that my recent blog post, ‘Seven ways parents can help teens find their passion,’ helped her reconnect with her daughter in a spectacularly meaningful way. She downloaded the lead magnet, and use the questions there as conversation starters to help her kid figure out what she really cared about. It brought to light a lot of the things mom didn’t know about her teenager, and helped the daughter really feel better about her own path.
The best part: the mom cried when she told me that it brought her closer to her teen. Their relationship has been strained for years, and this left them both feeling great. It gave her kids so much relief to better understand herself – she has been struggling with that. Helping people with college planning is fulfilling when I know I am helping kids get to where they need to be. It is even more meaningful knowing that some of this stuff is actually helping to strengthen relationships, and figure out life purpose. Wow!”
I read that today in the success forum, and it just sent chills up my spine. It got me thinking: those are the success stories that we actually love the most. When someone writes us, and says, “I quit my job,” or, “I’m actually making enough money to pay my bills now,” or, “I’ve been trying for years for my online business to take off, and it is finally working,” that has more reward in our lives than any dollar amount that we ever made. Great job, Leah!
We say it all the time. Our success is great, but when somebody says, “You changed my life,” or, “You helped me pay my mortgage,” or “You help me quit my job,” that makes us so much happier than any amount of success we can never create for ourselves.
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 taking our kids to Sweetwater, TN for the Great American eclipse of 2017. Jocelyn and I were able this week to jump in a car and just take off on a Monday down to watch the eclipse. We actually had some plans to go somewhere else that kind of fell through, and we just looked at each other and we’re like, “Where is the best place we can get to, to watch this eclipse within two and half hours?” So we found this little place in Sweetwater, TN, they were having a big festival, they had a hundred tents and food trucks, and all this stuff everywhere. They had inflatables, and they were going to have a really cool thing in this little bitty kind of hole in a wall railroad town. We just jumped in the car, and went down there. And this was a Can’t Miss Moment for sure because the school district that we used to work for, Jocelyn and I used to work in the same school district, they had school Monday. We would have been at work that day. We would not have been able to be with our kids. They would have been in different schools than we were teaching at, and we just wouldn’t even have been able to experience that at all, let alone with them because where we live, we didn’t get the full eclipse.
But man, we went down there, the kids got to play in this creek, they got to have a blast, and they just flipped out. They thought it was the coolest thing ever and we saw totality so we had the black sun with the ring around it, and it was awesome when the eclipse started, all the crickets woke up because they thought it was nighttime, and it dropped 20°. It was just an amazing it experience that we never would have had if we had not been doing what we do now and that is living on our own, being self-employed and having our online business.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
Jocelyn: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Paul take his church technology membership site to the next level.
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
We’re a real family who figured out how to make our entire living online. 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.
Alright guys, we are super excited to welcome a fellow Kentuckian on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast today, but he is calling in from the Florida Keys, and we are a little bit jealous. Our guest today is Flip Your Life community member, Paul Clifford.
What’s up, Paul?
Paul: Hey, Shane and Jocelyn! Happy to talk to you from the Keys which is atypical for me.
Jocelyn: It’s great to talk to you as well.
Shane: What’s the weather right now where you are sitting? Come on, tell us. Paul already lives a little bit of the Flipped Lifestyle, folks. He’s got that 9-to-5 thing kicked. He is doing his thing. What is it like right now where you are at?
Paul: Well, it’s about 88, 89°. I wear glasses so it’s a little odd for me that every time I step out of the house we are staying in, my glasses fog up with all the humidity. But we flew down here on Tuesday, rented a car, drove on down and it’s really cool to be able to do this. This is, by the way, the second time we’ve been in Florida in 2017. It’s the beginning of June is when we are recording this, and I never thought I’d be going to the beach twice in one year. That is kind of crazy.
Shane: It is cool you see that, and we will jump right into your story here in a minute. I love it when people say that because you remember your old life. Jocelyn and I remember five years ago, even doing things, it’s so funny. I’ll go to the grocery store and I’ll pick the real Lucky Charms instead of the generic Lucky Charms. And it’s like little stuff like that, or like, we were going to go to Disney World once in our life, and we go every six months now. Even from the little mundane thing, all the way to the, “How am I on the beach again this year?”
It is just crazy what happens when you really put yourself out there and you say, “This is how I’m going to live, I’m going to make it happen.”
Man, thanks for sharing that. I’m totally more jealous now because it sounds so amazing there. Tell everybody on the show a little bit about you, little bit about what you are doing online. Let us know your background, and catch them up to speed with the stuff we talk about in the community all the time.
Paul: Yeah, I am a church tech consultant, is how I tell people. I’m an expert in a piece of software called, ProPresenter which is, if PowerPoint was a VW bug, ProPresenter would be a Ferrari. Counter-intuitively enough, it is made for churches. It is better than PowerPoint but it is made for the church market which usually, it is the opposite. Usually churches get crappy stuff, and the business world gets the best stuff. That is what I do. That and live streaming. Those are my two areas of expertise.
Shane: And that is really neat. I think we use ProPresenter at our church, and I’ve seen how it works because they have it in our youth room. It is so ninja how you can do all these crazy things like with the way you can flip the Bible verse up, go back to the bumper video.
Jocelyn: You can put a timer on.
Shane: Put a timer on the screen, do all these things. You’ve got to have some help setting that up. That is not just going to be, hey, out-of-the-box, totally intuitive.
Paul: Yes, yes, so that is part of what I do, is I’ve got right now four courses on ProPresenter. They are all served through Teachable. One for people running ProPresenter, one for people that create the presentations, one for pastors, and one that is tips and tricks and hacks and stuff like that.
Shane: Cool, very cool.
Jocelyn: Alright, awesome. Then, you also have started an online membership, correct?
Paul: That is correct. That’s part of the whole thing. I want churches to subscribe to that, and every time I release a new course, they will just get that as part of that. I’ve also got a couple of other tech courses in there so yeah. And then a community which right now is on Facebook.
Shane: And that is to just stabilize the revenue, get away from, “Hey, did I sell courses?” You just want to create a more recurring revenue system, more predictable revenue system. And also, the tech guy at church can be a lonely guy.
Jocelyn: Especially if you are in a smaller church.
Shane: It connects the tech people, right?
Paul: Yeah, when I first started doing church tech, which was back in 2000, when I found a little community back then, it’s like, “I’m not alone! I’m not the only person that has to say to the pastor, ‘No, I’m already working on the problem you just noticed. I’ve been working on it for 10 minutes. Thank you for pointing it out. You’ve just distract me from fixing it.'”
Shane: That’s the thing. Cool, man. Listen, I also want to point out here, too, Jocelyn and I listen back to our podcast sometimes and we also look at each other and say, “Are we really that country?”
Jocelyn: And we make fun of words that we say.
Shane: We make fun of ourselves like, the way we say things. One of the things we always talk about is how we don’t use G’s on the end of our words. I don’t know if anybody listens to it.
Jocelyn: Fixin’, findin’–
Shane: They have fixin’, findin’, swimmin’. And I just want to point out, Paul, you just dropped a “doin'” instead of a “doing”, and I thank you for it. I am so glad that we are not alone right now in the way we talk.
Paul: Well, I think nowadays they call it “code switching”, and I can do that.
Shane: And go back and forth.
Paul: I’m from the largest city in Kentucky, although I haven’t lived there in years. I have a more Northern-Midwestern kind of an accent even though I live in Kentucky.
Shane: You’re on the border though, so you can be like, “Okay, I’m talking to Kentucky people, so the Kentucky accent comes out. I’m talking to the other people, so the northern side comes out.”
Paul: I went to a seminary and when I was there, I would translate the second person plural which the northern people might call “you guys” or “you ones” or whatever I would translate that as “y’all”. They say like this, like, from Indiana or something.
Shane: If you dig deep enough into Southeast Kentucky, there’s actually an area over past Knox County Pineville and all that. They say “you’uns”. “How you’uns doing over there?” All right, let’s move on. This is totally derailed, by the way.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I don’t think anyone wants to hear the Appalachian pronunciation.
Shane: Yeah, the rest of the program today, folks, will be in Appalachian dialect translation by Paul, Shane, and Jocelyn.
Jocelyn: Okay.
Paul: That sounds– *intentional unintelligible accent impression*
Jocelyn: That is kind of what we sound like around here. All right, Paul, well it’s been a lot of fun talking to you already, but let’s start diving into your questions. Before we do that, we want to start with “Why”. Basically, we all have a “why” as to why we do what we do online, and just wondering what is yours.
Paul: Yeah, I’ve actually got two why’s and you might guess, being a church tech guy, that one of them is God. When I was a teenager, I was at a youth camp, part of Kentucky, and I really felt like God was telling me that he wanted to use the best days of my life for something. For most of my life, I wasn’t clear what that was. Part of it is because it hasn’t been invented yet. That makes sense in retrospect. That is part one. Part two is I just love that I get to spend time with my family. But, like you guys, whenever there is something that comes up for school, it’s at least an option that I can go, I can talk to my boss, “me” and I typically let myself off whenever I want to go do something with the kids or fly down to the Florida Keys. You know, things like that. Those two things combined I think are really why I want to do this, why I want to take it to the next level, so that I can have that kind of life where I can go anywhere in the country to help out churches, or stay at home and watch my 10-year-old be the genie in Aladdin.
Jocelyn: Absolutely, and we love both of those reasons. I think that is awesome.
Shane: You know, some of us are like, “Oh man, I want to serve the church. I want to serve God. But I don’t want to go to Zimbabwe on a mission trip, or something.” That is really not what it’s about. Especially like you said, it has not been invented yet. We all have these crazy tools now. We can all meet our purpose that way. Going out, helping churches with technology, you’re using your talents to do what you are supposed to do to serve in the church. One of the craziest things that we always notice is when we look at our metrics, we have people who listen to our podcast in Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia. There are people there somehow listening. We have downloads there. We are sitting there, and we are like, man, we’re sitting in Kentucky, we are reading a Bible verse at the end of every show. Somehow, God is using our podcast, not to just tell people, but maybe His message is penetrating places where a missionary can’t even go. And it’s just because we are taking action and we are using our talents and our tools to the way that we should be using them. I think it is just amazing that that is your mission, too.
Paul: Right.
Jocelyn: Alright, well, let’s jump into some questions about how you can grow this thing even more so that you can share this gift with others, and that they can learn from you, and go back, and make their church tech even more awesome.
Paul: Yeah, right now, I have a community on Facebook. I only have 12 members in the Facebook community. They are paying members, so that is good. But I have a ProPresenter users group that I started that has 2,600 members. I’m trying to figure out how to get more of those people and more of my paid Teachable course people and YouTube subscribers, all that, how to get them more and to the paying line of things so that not answering the same questions over and over again. They can just go there anytime of the day and night, and get their answer.
Shane: True. The people in your Facebook group, those 2600 people, they are from Teachable, you said. These are people who bought your course and then you add them to the group, correct?
Paul: No, I’ve got a couple of groups on Facebook.
Shane: Okay, are these free groups or paid groups? Or how do they get into the groups?
Paul: Yeah, so I have a paid group which has 12.
Shane: And they are on Facebook, or they’re on your forums?
Paul: They are on Facebook. I have a forum but no one seems to care that I have a forum. I started this Facebook group and I guess that is another question: I’d love to get them onto my forum where I have control as opposed to Facebook where they get mad at me, and they shut down my group. I don’t want that happening. I’ve got that on my mailing list but still. It would be better if they would just be where I have control as opposed to where Mark Zuckerberg all of a sudden decides that he doesn’t like what I do for some reason. There are other groups with perfectly legitimate stuff that they’ve decided they don’t like, and they’ve shut down. I don’t want to be in that boat.
Shane: Where were the 2600 people, and that another Facebook group?
Paul: Yes, that is a free group. I wish it was paid.
Shane: Yeah, that would be amazing, wouldn’t it?
Jocelyn: Yeah. Are you making an effort to try to capture their emails from time to time? Maybe by offering them something for free, just saying, “Hey, here is something cool that I’ve developed. You can sign up here to get it.”
Shane: The free group, that is what we are talking about.
Paul: Yeah, so the teachable classes I have a mini-course of each of those that has three or four lessons that they can sign up and get a part of, and therefore they get onto my list doing it that way. I’ve also started it doing in-person training. In fact, I’ve got one coming up. Here is another little ninja thing, this is also a business trip in the Florida Keys.
Shane: There you go. Write it off, every dime.
Paul: I’m traveling up to another city in Florida to teach a class on Saturday. I’m going to do that in person, and I have also a thread on the user’s’ group that says, “Hey, you’re interested in attending an in-person training, then sign up here.” I’ve gotten 26 or 30 people that are interested in that there.
Shane: There’s two things that have been where the Facebook groups and forums. The first thing that happens usually is your people will prefer one or the other. You’ve been in Flipped Lifestyle, there are literally almost 100,000 topic threads. Our forums are crazy active, I guess because of our avatar and they really prefer that. But, there is another layer to it that we do. I want follow that up with a lot of times, you have to go with what your people prefer. Jocelyn on Elementary Librarian does a Facebook group. And the reason why is–
Jocelyn: Yes, and so, I had forums on Elementary Librarian, and people just weren’t active in them. I tried doing conversation starters, I tried sending out emails. People just didn’t want to talk there for some reason. We started a Facebook group, and it has improved since we’ve started that. I would say, don’t be so concerned about losing control of that. As long as you are following guidelines, I don’t think that is probably going to be huge issue. And then also you always have that forum to fall back on just in case something ever were to happen.
Shane: And I think the reason that Jocelyn’s people preferred the Facebook group is, educators in general aren’t really tech savvy. They are very regimented people, very segmented people because you got the school schedule, everything is really kind of planned out. I’m-already-using-Facebook-why-would-I-go-there?” is kind of their mentality. You could be experiencing some of that, though, because a lot of people that do tech, may know tech, but they are also busy people that help the church, but don’t necessarily do that. “I talk on Facebook, I don’t do anything else.” There is a second problem that can happen though, and you are going to have to experiment to do this. Facebook groups that are paid. If you have a Facebook group and a forum, they can cannibalize each other.
If you have a group, and they are talking in a group why would they go to a forum? It does not make. But if you cut the group off and give them no choice but to ask you questions in the forum. It can force people to do that. That is one thing that we did early on in Flipped Lifestyle. We thought about having a Facebook group. “Hey, will give you more ways to talk to us.” But another problem with Facebook is it is extremely disorganized. People keep asking the same questions over and over because threads bump away, and people don’t know you’ve answer that question for, which is something you are experiencing.
Jocelyn: Yeah, and I was also going to say that there are ways to get people to talk more conveniently, because I know that that is sometimes a problem. The forums is like people don’t want to log into a different place, but one thing we’ve done, and we’re getting ready to release it. At the time this podcast airs, it will be a released. We are going to be having an app so people can just login right there on their phones just like they do for Facebook. It is a very simple, very easy to use.
Shane: And it is our app. Like it’s a Flipped Lifestyle app. It is also cool. It feels like you are in the club because you downloaded the app, you know? And that might be something here, too. I know that church technology for customer service management basically, for a better word, it is very unique to the church space. They are used to being like, “This is my church thing that I use for this service.” That might be something cool you could look into. You might want to force the issue. There is only 12 right now realistically. You could say, “Hey, guys, I can’t do this Facebook group anymore. It is just not efficient, I can serve you better right here.” Then, it becomes your responsibility to email them over and over to come to the forum, to ask questions, to do things like that. You could try that for a while. It may not work, but I would rather it not work with 12 people than not work with 1200 if it grows that big, right?
And I think you are going to have to focus a lot more numbers-wise. You’ve got to converse those 2600 people into members. If you dropped all of a sudden 100 people into your community, I don’t care if it is a forum, a Facebook group, or a hashtag on Twitter. More people are going to talk where you want them to because it is a numbers game. Meet we might want to shift priorities here as well. Maybe we do cut the Facebook group off, go all forum. Or, maybe we just say, “You know what was write a bunch of canned responses, and we are going to deal with it.”
There is actually a cool tool called TextExpander. If you use a Mac, there’s probably something similar, and may have its own thing for a PC. If you are running a Facebook community free or otherwise, you need TextExpander or something similar on the computer. You can make canned responses to questions that get asked all over again, and create short codes. Whenever anyone asks me, “Hey tell me about Flip Your Life community. I type in and parentheses, Flip Your Life, and a 14-page paragraph sales letter appears in that post. Bam, done!
There are lots of tools that you can use to make it easier to manage a Facebook group but I would still try it the other way. I think you were better off saying, “Forget this, I’m going to put 200 members in and now 20 to 40 of them will talk all the time.”
Paul: I guess that is the question. I’ve got autoresponders set up, and I’m sending traffic to them from Facebook ads. I had some initial success when I sent, not only new people, but also the old people on my list that have been converted through–
Shane: Autoresponder.
Paul: The autoresponder, yeah. I was thinking, “Well, this is great. I making more money than I’m spending. Oh, wow! It is wonderful! I’ll just slowly ramp this up, and then I will retire!”
Shane: If only it were that easy. Yeah, if only it were that easy.
Paul: You are right. Once I’ve set all the old people through, now I’m back to not quite breaking even on my Facebook ads, and no one has converted all the way to my community, Church Tech U. They’ve only gotten through to the cheaper version of the course, or occasionally, the full version of all the ProPresenter courses, not nearly all the way to the paid membership which is of course what I want them to do. That, and the in-person training which are the big profit makers.
Shane: What you’ve done is you’ve already exhausted your hot and warm leads, and now, you’re going to have to shift attention into pouring more people into your sales funnel, basically.
Jocelyn: Yeah, and are you doing re-targeting on those? Are you posting blog posts in this free group, and getting people to come to your website so that they can then be re-targeted with advertising?
Paul: Yeah, absolutely.
Shane: I think this is a cold traffic issue, not a warm traffic re-pixeling issue. Usually, what happens when a sales funnel kind of runs dry, it’s because not enough new people are discovering this. You’ve got these 2600 people in a Facebook group, that is fine. They’ve already seen your stuff three or four times. Their frequency’s high enough, and they are not converted quite yet. They are either going to need a new offer, which might be a new course. That is one way to kind of jar your sales chain or you’re going to have to say, “I’m about to put another thousand church tech people in this, and see if I can get them through it. I’ve got to put another thousand users of these ProPresenter in this funnel. That is the only way I’m going to get new people and play the number’s game again because then I get to start over and it is as cool as it was the first time.” I think that is what’s happened here. It sounds like, as you’ve got frequency, you’ve got ads, but it’s the point of diminishing returns is getting close and you are going to have to find more new, fresh people to discover you.
Jocelyn: Do you have a file of email addresses of people who have purchased from you like courses?
Paul: Yes.
Jocelyn: Okay, so what I would do is, I’ve had a lot of success with cold lookalike audiences to people who have actually purchased. I did that not too long ago for Elementary Librarian, and that has been the most successful cold lookalike audience ever done.
Shane: You could also look at Google ads. If someone types in, “How to use ProPresenter,” that is going to be a very specific person that is using that. You could start driving traffic from Google to these blog posts like Jocelyn said earlier based on search results. Then your pixel them, and now they are warm again.
Jocelyn: So then you use that re-targeted traffic, and try to get them to opt in to your list.
Shane: Yeah, yeah. You’ve got to find the cold people.
Paul: I’m doing that already.
Shane: Okay. How much are you doing it though?
Jocelyn: And how many people have seen it?
Shane: And how many people have actually seen the ad?
Paul: Just started doing it a few days ago.
Shane: Okay, this is brand-new then.
Jocelyn: Yeah, you are going to need probably at least a 500 or 600 people to go through that before you can decide whether or not it is a success or a failure.
Shane: And also, too, just so the pixels– you know how the pixels like 180-day, 90-day, 30-day? I would change all your advertising maybe or set up another ad for a 30-day pixel. As you are running this Google traffic into your site for the next 30 days you’re going to be really confident that the pixeled ad is going to be showing people who have been to your site in the last 30 days. When you hit that 30-day mark of these Google ads, now you are going to start getting a real feel of, “Oh, okay these are all probably people who are going from Google to my site now, or at least a lot of them are. I’m starting to see how the warm ad is going to convert with these people.” You are in the process where we’re kind of testing it now, and see how that works.
Paul: Okay, yeah. I can see how that might work. I had turned off my cold Facebook ad, and of course Google wants me to spend money, so they sent me the, “Hey, you’ve got so much free money to use on Google ads.” So I said, “Well, I will try you for the free money, if it doesn’t work, I will turn off the free money.”
Shane: Exactly. Facebook is a place where you connect with friends and family. There has to be already be some know, like, and trust in those Facebook ads, we believe. Especially for niches like this. This is not the, “Come to my seminar, and feel good about yourself three days, and walk on hot fire, and you are awesome.” That stuff can work on Facebook. But this is a very specific niche, and a very specific industry in the real world that is happening with people every Sunday. You have to step outside the cold traffic and find people where they are, and where they are looking. People look on Pinterest. People look on Google. People look in other places. Once you meet them through that ad, now you pixel them and go build that relationship like on Facebook.
Jocelyn: I really do love the Google-Facebook strategy for this particular instance because I think it is so specific what the people are looking for. It’s like what Shane was saying earlier, that is a very specific type of person. I just think it was going to work really well for that.
Paul: Yeah, I do have an added advantage in that, if you Google ProPresenter, you are going to run into one of my videos that I’ve done on YouTube. I have some SEO juice happening, it does not lead back to my site, which I don’t like, but it does lead to my YouTube channel where I’ve got 1800 people that are subscribed there.
Jocelyn: So, on that listing, do you have a link to your site? Like get something for free here?
Paul: You know, that is a great question. That is an obvious thing that I missed.
Jocelyn: I would definitely change that and make sure you are saying, “Hey, would you like more help with–” what is it called, ProPresenter? “Click here to get my free guide to whatever.”
Shane: Also, yeah, there is some optimization stuff on that YouTube channel for sure we could talk about. This is where it gets art, not science. Jocelyn’s like this, too. In our US history teacher site, it’s like this, too. We have a lot of number one things in searches. But think about how you search. I’m going to type in ‘ProPresenter’ here into Google. I just want to see what comes up. I’m going to put in ProPresenter, and I’m going to hit Google. Of course, like you said, there is YouTube. I’m looking down here for some stuff. Okay, you’ve got YouTube, I see you there. You are doing a presentation or something like. It’s just, like, a how-to video, right?
Think about this if the title of that was “ProPresenter-something, how to make your first live show in ProPresenter by Paul Clifford,” now imagine if you bought an advertisement, and it says, “Learn ProPresenter with Paul Clifford,” as a user, I’m going to be like, “Whoa, there is a video. Cool, I could look at that. It is by Paul Clifford. He’s going to show me how to do– oh, wait a minute, Paul Clifford has ‘How to Do Everything in ProPresenter,'” an ad at the top.
You’ve pushed yourself onto that page twice, and not only have you proven there is a video by you, but now above the fold there is ad by you. You’ve created this weird credibility thing, where it’s like, “Man, this dude is on YouTube. This dude is buying ads. This dude is legit.” You’ve kind of given yourself extra chances to get clicks there. You know how the YouTube video always shows up like a couple search results down? The ads appear on top. You’ve sandwiched the other search results with your brand.
Jocelyn: We have some people in the community who have been experimenting with YouTube ads. I’d like to see you go in, and start a conversation, and just kind of talk to them about that. I think that they have some experience that could really help you out there.
Shane: If I’m looking at how to learn something like ProPresenter, if I want to learn any software, I’m going to Google or YouTube first. I think if we focus all your cold strategy there, and then your warm strategy on your re-targeting campaigns, we can kind of build up an audience again, and get more people involved.
Paul: Got you.
Jocelyn: Yeah, in your free group, too, I was just thinking about this: I don’t know what it looks like right now, but I would like to see you change that cover photo at the top to say something like, “Hey, get a free whatever here.” And direct them to your website.
Shane: Also, I love how your site is church tech, right? That sounds really general, man. For what you are trying to accomplish, it might be too broad because church tech could be anything. It could be lighting, right? I’ve got a buddy named, Joe Nicoletti. He runs a site called Learn Scrivener Fast. Scrivener is a software program that helps you write scripts and plays and writing and copyrighting, all sorts of stuff. When you hear his site, there is no question, there is absolutely no doubt that you are in the right place, and that you are going to get a result. You might want to think about a little slight re-branding here of, “Learn ProPresenter fast, and go all in and this one thing that you are the expert in,” and if we add stuff to it later or you talk about other things, that is fine it doesn’t matter. But the client needs to know, “I’m about to learn ProPresenter fast. Pastor bought this on Tuesday, and he wants to preach his first sermon Sunday and I have no clue how to turn this bad boy on.”
Paul: Got you. Well, you should know that I know a little bit about Scrivener. I own learnpropresenterfast.com, which directs to my Teachable page with all my ProPresenter stuff.
Shane: See, and I’m wonder if there should be a niched-down rebrand. Just a little bit. Change the domain, change a few things here, let people know that Paul Clifford is the guy to go to for ProPresenter. If you buy this for your church, he is the guy who has to teach you this, and then you’ve got to sell it to them as, “This is not an overnight process. It is going to take you four, five months to figure this thing out. I’m going to walk with you the whole way in my community.”
Jocelyn: ProPresenter with Paul.
Shane: There you go.
Jocelyn: Or something like that.
Shane: ProPresenter with Paul, baby. That is the upsell. You can get the ProPresenter or you can get ProPresenter with Paul.
Paul: Right, right.
Shane: That might help, too, just really drive home– what is your group called?
Paul: It is the ProPresenter users group.
Shane: Okay. Is that the paid group or is that the free group?
Paul: That is the free group.
Shane: ProPresenter users group.
Paul: The paid group is Church Tech U, which I eventually want to be the Lynda.com of church tech training. That is why I have the big one and the little–
Shane: But you’ve gotta start somewhere before you can be everywhere. It’s like us: We can say, “We’re going to teach you all the lesson plans for all the courses.” No, ElementaryLibrarian.com. You’re the right place. UShistoryteachers.com.
Jocelyn: I feel like we’ve thrown a lot of things at you. How do you feel so far about what we talked about?
Paul: I feel great about all of it. I like some of the new ideas, the cover photo on my big group. That is a great idea right now, it is kind of generic.
Jocelyn: That is like that is super low-hanging fruit for you. That is something you can change today.
Shane: Even a slight brand change on the site and stuff is not going to be that big of a deal.
Jocelyn: Yeah, you don’t even have to change the domain or anything but maybe just make it a little bit more obvious.
Paul: Right.
Shane: Be Lynda.com later.
Jocelyn: Exactly.
Shane: Be ProPresenter now.
Jocelyn: Yeah, let us concentrate on that right this second. All right, well, we are running out of time, unfortunately. This has been a really fun call today. Before we go we always like to ask people, what is one action step that you plan to take in the next day or so based on what we talked about here today?
Paul: Well, I think that probably right after I get off the call, I’m going to start working on the cover photo for my big group saying, “Hey, go here!” make sure that is mobile and everything so that everyone can see that.
Jocelyn: And just make sure it’s got an obvious opt in opportunity, and tell them exactly what to do. Don’t leave room for people to say, “Oh, I’m not really sure what to do here.” Tell them exactly what you want them to do.
Shane: And also, really plan out that Google ad that you started a couple of days ago, let’s drive that through, and really let it run. Change that pixel on Facebook to the 30-day re-targeting, let’s see if we can really narrow in and see if that will help bring in more cold traffic.
Jocelyn: And we didn’t mention this earlier, but I would also like to see you go at your list some more. If they’ve gone through the funnel one time, and they did not purchase, have you reached out to them again? I would like to see you do some more of that also before just completely giving up on them.
Shane: This is a mistake people make, too, is relying so much on the autoresponder. You’ve got to put things in there, maybe you need to live component, or maybe you just need to drop in a new email but hasn’t Evergreen webinar. Just something where Paul is there and you can get questions by email or maybe there just needs to be a little something added to that campaign that is going to make it convert like it did in the beginning. Okay?
Paul: Got you.
Shane: Alright, Paul man, this has been a great call. Love talking to you in the forums, dude. Love connecting with people from Kentucky. I wish I was with you right now in Florida, but I am not. But thank you so much, man, for coming on the show. We were talking a little basketball off air with us before we started, and also, too, man, you are doing a great job. Just keep it up, and we can make great things happen with this business.
Paul: Great, looking forward to it.
Shane: That was another information-packed call with one of our Flip Your Life community members. Hope you’ve got a lot of benefit out of our answers to our guest questions as well.
If you would like to become a member of our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we can help you with your online business.
Jocelyn: All right, it is time to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment of the show, and these are moments that we were able to experience that we might have missed if we were still working at our normal 9-to-5 jobs.
Shane: This week’s Can’t Miss Moment is taking our kids to Sweetwater, TN for the Great American eclipse of 2017. Jocelyn and I were able this week to jump in a car and just take off on a Monday down to watch the eclipse. We actually had some plans to go somewhere else that kind of fell through, and we just looked at each other and we’re like, “Where is the best place we can get to, to watch this eclipse within two and half hours?” So we found this little place in Sweetwater, TN, they were having a big festival, they had a hundred tents and food trucks, and all this stuff everywhere. They had inflatables, and they were going to have a really cool thing in this little bitty kind of hole in a wall railroad town. We just jumped in the car, and went down there.
Jocelyn: They did a great job down there.
Shane: It was awesome.
Jocelyn: We had a good time, they had a kids’ area set up, they had all kinds of vendors, just did a really good job. It was just a really nice, small hometown type festival.
Shane: And this was a Can’t Miss Moment for sure because the school district that we used to work for, Jocelyn and I used to work in the same school district, they had school Monday. A lot of school districts around our area kind of let out for the great eclipse. This school district did not, so 100%, we would have been at work that day. We would not have been able to be with our kids. They would have been in different schools than we were teaching at, and we just wouldn’t even have been able to experience that at all, let alone with them because where we live, we didn’t get the full eclipse.
But man, we went down there, the kids got to play in this creek, they got to have a blast, and they just flipped out. They thought it was the coolest thing ever and we saw totality so we had the black sun with the ring around it, and it was awesome when the eclipse started, all the crickets woke up because they thought it was nighttime, and it dropped 20°. It was just an amazing it experience that we never would have had if we had not been doing what we do now and that is living on our own, being self-employed and having our online business.
We love to talk about our Can’t Miss Moment with you guys each week right here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, but there is one thing we like to talk about even more, and that is the success stories from the members of our Flip Your Life community.
Before we go, we wanted to share an actual success story from the success forums in the Flip Your Life membership.
Today’s success story comes from Lea, and it is an awesome success story because we get so wrapped up as entrepreneurs in the money and in growing our memberships, and growing our businesses that we forget that our online business is changing people lives, are changing the world and that is what this one is about. The subject for this success story is, “Making an impact.”
Jocelyn: “It’s not often that we hear how we are impacting lives through the content and teachings we offer. I just had the best conversation with one of my followers. She told me that my recent blog post, ‘Seven ways parents can help teens find their passion,’ helped her reconnect with her daughter in a spectacularly meaningful way. She downloaded the lead magnet, and use the questions there as conversation starters to help her kid figure out what she really cared about. It brought to light a lot of the things mom didn’t know about her teenager, and helped the daughter really feel better about her own path.
The best part: the mom cried when she told me that it brought her closer to her teen. Their relationship has been strained for years, and this left them both feeling great. It gave her kids so much relief to better understand herself – she has been struggling with that. Helping people with college planning is fulfilling when I know I am helping kids get to where they need to be. It is even more meaningful knowing that some of this stuff is actually helping to strengthen relationships, and figure out life purpose. Wow!”
Shane: I read that today in the success forum, and it just sent chills up my spine. It got me thinking: those are the success stories that we actually love the most. When someone writes us, and says, “I quit my job,” or, “I’m actually making enough money to pay my bills now,” or, “I’ve been trying for years for my online business to take off, and it is finally working,” that has more reward in our lives than any dollar amount that we ever made. Great job, Leah!
Jocelyn: We say it all the time. Our success is great, but when somebody says, “You changed my life,” or, “You helped me pay my mortgage,” or “You help me quit my job,” that makes us so much happier than any amount of success we can never create for ourselves.
Shane: If you’re not out there and you’ve not got this online business going on, you’re hesitating, you need to do it because it is not just your life that is going to change. You are going to change dozens of other people’s lives, and they need you just like this mom needed Leah.
Jocelyn: What if you had only one other person that could say that you changed their life, wouldn’t it be worth it?
Shane: Yeah, it would. Before we sign off, we like to close of every show with a verse from the Bible.
Today’s Bible verse is Proverbs 3:5-6. The Bible says, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; lean not unto your own understanding and always acknowledge Him and He will direct your path.”
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. We will see you then!
Jocelyn: Bye!
Anna says
I absolutely LOVE your podcast and listening to the two of y’all. And yes I can understand ever word considering I’m a Kentucky girl! I have been totally binge listening for the past few days and can’t get enough. I would like to make one little ole suggestion. It would be awesome if you could include any tools that you mention in your podcast under your resources section of the podcast. Most of the time when I’m listening it is when I am unable to take notes so later on I will come back and try to figure out what the tool is but scheming through the transcript. Hey it could even be a little affiliate compensation coming your way too! Just wanted to stop in to say HI and let ya know that I love what ya do!