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In today’s Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we are helping Jeff and Stephanie Jones take their business to the next level.
Jeff is a musician who found himself spending most of his time away from his wife and children, so he wanted to make the transition into online business to be home more often. Stephanie got her beginnings a few years ago, but took a break and is now looking to get back into the swing of things.
You will learn:
- How Jeff & Stephanie made the move into online business
- How long they’ve been in business and why they want to flip their life and give up the “security” of teaching and spotlight of being in a rock band
- What’s better; a static webpage or a blog-style
- What sort of product should they offer as a free opt-in to grow their email list
- Is it worth re-launching a website or just letting it sit there
- What’s better; starting off with a service like eJunkie or implementing an online store
- What topic is recommended for a webinar
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- TeachingWithPassion.com – Stephanie’s website
- CustomStix.com – Jeff’s website
- eJunkie – the online shopping cart service we use to sell digital products
- LeadPages – our favorite tool for creating amazing web pages to sell our digital products and for hosting webinars
- Aweber – the best product on the planet for building your email list
- Easy Digital Downloads – Jocelyn’s favorite shopping cart solution
- Launch by Jeff Walker – Great book on how to do a launch
- Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook – Gary Vaynerchuk’s book on how to sell online
Can’t Miss Moments This Week:
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
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 Flipped Podcast, we help Jeff and Stephanie Jones take their online business to the next level.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It’s great to be back with you again this week. I am Shane Sams and Jocelyn is right here beside me.
JOCELYN: Hey!
SHANE: And today’s podcast is a Flipped podcast where we bring in people who are new to online business and we do a free consulting call on the air and we kind of let you guys listen in so that they can ask us questions about how they can take their business to the next level and you guys get to kind of hear our answers and apply that to your own online business.
Today’s guests are Jeff and Stephanie Jones and they have an amazing story of how they got into online business and some awesome goals that they are setting out to achieve online with their online business. So let’s jump right into our interview with Jeff and Stephanie, and we will be back after we talk to them on the call.
So guys introduce yourselves to the Flipped Lifestyle audience and tell them about how you met, how long you’ve been together, how many kids you got, and things like that.
JEFF: Okay. Well now the stories might differ a little bit on how we met. Anyway, I will give you all the gory details. So we’ve been married for 12.5 years and we met at Singles Group at church. Stephanie saw me. I was the drummer in the band. She saw me, as I like to tell people, she saw me from afar. Of course that’s now what she likes to say.
SHANE: Through the smoke in the band.
JEFF: That’s it. So we started dating and then got married. Well, I was in a band. I used to play in a band, travel all around. So that has been our entire life was I was gone about 40% of the year. We’ve never known anything other than that and she is a first-grade school teacher, how many years now?
STEPHANIE: 17 years.
JEFF: So she’s kind of been the educator and I was the musician. At some point, I started to kind of realize that “Gosh, I’m gone all the time” and so I decided to come from that so that I can focus on my family. But that’s how we met and now we’re trying to do some other things. She’s teaching and…
STEPHANIE: We have two girls. We have a 10-year-old and a 6-year-old. They bring so much joy to our lives and that’s one of the reasons we wanted to start an online business.
SHANE: Awesome. So how long have you been in online business? When did you kind of get online, like, start doing things? When did you realize you can kind of make money online? How long have you been doing that?
JOCELYN: Well, I think we have two different stories with that but I, about 3-3.5 years ago, I was just kind of learning about blogging and seeing all the different bloggers, and I’ve decided to create my own website, TeachingWithPassion.com. I was kind of getting used to it and getting my website built the way I wanted it. I started for about, I guess, two weeks and then we found out that my dad had cancer. That kind of sucked the wind out of my sails and school started. It was in September and I kind of stepped back away from the website and I have just now recently wanted to start picking that up again.
JOCELYN: Right, I totally can empathize with that. I mean, I’ve not been in that situation but I know that things like that are just so difficult when you’re trying to start out and something so, you know, I think that that’s great that you’re ready to move on and start it back up again.
JEFF: My side of the story, while I was floating around the country in a 45-foot tour bus, I started noticing an opportunity that was available to sell custom-printed drumsticks and I was the merchandise coordinator for the band as well as drummer, and so I started selling these drumsticks and I started the website, it’s CustomStix.com and that was about five years ago and I’ve been doing that while I was in the band. I did that for about 3-3.5 years and then when I left the band in January 2013, that really became my focus and trying to turn that into my full time job.
JOCELYN: Right, right. Let’s talk about your businesses so far. How much money are they currently making? What kind of success have you had with them so far?
STEPHANIE: Well on my end, I have most of my products linked to Teachers by Teachers and I’m averaging about $75 a month and usually August, I have a few products that I had updated about a year ago so it spikes to about $500 a month during August, September.
JEFF: But then after that, you know, everybody is…
SHANE: It just sinks basically to the ground.
STEPHANIE: Yeah, we get busy.
SHANE: Yeah. Well let me ask you this, okay. I always wondered the reasoning behind this because we’re talking about, you started an online business, you put some work into it, and you’re only seeing that little bit. Every once in a while, they will give you a little hit like $500 but you’ve got a teaching job, it’s safe and secure. You’ve got retirement and Jeff, you were in a band. You were in a rock band. That’s like everybody’s dream, you know, touring the country and all that stuff. Why do you want to flip your life? Why do you want to change to the online business world to give up the security of teaching and dude, why are you stepping out of the rock band? You’re a rock star? So why do you guys want to do this?
JEFF: Well, I have to tell you that whenever I think about what I did, you know, the best way to describe it, if you were to go into a guitar center, which is like the Wal-Mart of music stores, and you were to stand there all day long and you were to take a poll of all the people that walked in through the doors, there would only be maybe one or two people that walked in during the day that their entire job was nothing but playing in a band and that’s how their entire income came from that.
So very few people, I mean, that’s what I was getting to do. I did it for 13 years. It was like a dream job and that was my full-time job. Like I said, I was gone about 40% of the year, about 150 days a year, and it was incredible. I mean, I was getting to see all these places. I’ve been to 49 states, different countries, touring in a tour bus, all those things, it was like a dream. Well, then we started growing as a couple and of course, you have your first child and then three and a half years later, we had our second child and I started to realize, I’m missing 40% of the influence that me, as a father, has over his children. I was trading that for something else. What I was doing was good things.
Of course, stories people told and how the music was being used in their life, it’s incredible in that way but I was trading that. I was putting something else first instead of that influence in my family. So after a year and a half, I traded it all in. I said, you know, and I completely stepped out on faith. We didn’t have anything secure for me. My website was growing but I completely stepped out because I wanted to make that investment and I didn’t want to look back and say, “I wish I had done that” because those years are going to be gone. They are going to be completely gone.
JOCELYN: Definitely and I think that that is something that having kids does to you. It just makes you think about just life as a bigger picture, I guess you would say. So yeah, I totally get where you’re coming from. I mean, our kids just really had a major impact on the reason we decided to start an online business as well.
SHANE: I basically said the same that you did, dude. I was at football practice every day. I would teach all day then I would go to football practice until 8 o’clock at night and I come home, and my little boy and my little girl would be asleep. Then I would get up in the morning at 7 o’clock and I put my kids in the car. My little girl would just stay asleep until she got to the babysitter. I wouldn’t even see her awake. So it’s like you’re raising everybody else’s kids but yours basically, you know what I’m saying?
STEPHANIE: Exactly. You know, I’ve been a first grade teacher for 17 years so about three and half years ago when I was thinking of my website and I was trying to come up with a way to stay home. Jeff was still in the band. We didn’t really see an exit plan for him to come out of the band and so I had been, half of the time, single mom just teaching, working that job, and then coming home and taking care of the kids by myself, and making dinner, doing everything, taking care of the house that I was exhausted. I was becoming bitter towards Jeff and it was just not fun after a while. I did it.
I did the best I could but it was just time for either him to come home or for me. So I saw the website as a way that I could possibly make enough to come home but it didn’t work my way and we wanted to bring him home, and it worked out that way but I’m still looking to come out of the classroom. My website, Teach with Passion, I started it because I had a passion for teaching but I’m wanting to reach teachers more right now than children. My passion has changed. I love helping. I love when other teachers come and want to use the activities that I’ve used, and so I’ve started to share and create things that other people can use in their classrooms.
SHANE: And Jeff real quick before I move into your questions because we’re going to focus on Stephanie’s site. What was the band you’re in and what genre of music because you said something about like your music was making a big difference in people’s lives?
JEFF: It’s a contemporary Christian band. Name of the group is called Big Daddy Weave and I like to joke that and say I was the littlest of the weaves. We started in college. Things grew and developed and developed. I think we did eight records when I was in the band and I actually resigned from the band. I gave them about 3-3.5 months notice but I resigned from the band the week our song was number one on the charts. I mean, I literally gave up the dream job, the dream of a lifetime because I knew that I needed to focus on my family.
SHANE: That’s incredible.
JOCELYN: Yeah that’s great story. Just out of curiosity, what did people have to say about that? People that you were surrounded with, did people say things like, “Are you crazy? What are you doing?”
JEFF: That’s an interesting question. That’s a good question because a lot of times, people that are surrounded by music all the time, they kind of see, like, that’s the only thing they can see but everybody at home, all of our friends and family, I mean, they would ask Stephanie, there were like, “Wow, I don’t see how you do it. He’s gone all the time, all the time,” and she was always so willing and gave and served our family. She wanted me to have that dream but then when I came home, people are like “Man, I don’t see how you were gone from your family that much.”
Now when I see my suitcase in the corner, it’s like, “Oh, I’m so glad I don’t have to pack that thing up” because I literally lived with a suitcase in the corner of my bedroom for about 13 years. In fact I would never unpack it. It would just stay open.
JOCELYN: I’m so glad that everything has worked out for you guys.
SHANE: Hopefully we can make it work out even better. So let’s see if we can figure this business out and see if we can get your wife home too.
JOCELYN: Okay guys. We’re going to move into the question part of the consulting call so go ahead with your first question.
JEFF: Well the first question is about Stephanie’s website. Currently, it’s basically a blog and she uploads different files. She does it randomly. So the question is should it be a blog driven website or should it be a static website with a home page basically stays the same if what she’s offering downloadable PDF files, smart board files for teachers?
SHANE: Okay. This is kind of a tricky question because at different levels of your online business, your website is going to become a different thing. If you’ve got a business or a website that’s kind of established and you are offering a lot of products, then you can kind of do the static thing because you can still run a blog behind a static website but what it is, if you’ve already got an audience, people are going to come there and they are going to see a portal where they can go do the things they like to do on your website, and those are your regular users. But when you’re first starting out, most of your traffic is going to happen kind of randomly, like, throughout the site.
You’re really better off at first to just keep posting things, keep that blog going. You want Google to see the front page of your website updating and moving. When people do discover your content, they are going to come back for more and when they come back, make sure something is different. So they are like, “Oh, it’s the same thing every week. I’m going to stop coming here.” Whereas if it changes all the time as you’re building an audience, then people are going to come back and find something that’s going to be different.
I would definitely suggest at the beginning that you keep that moving, keep that fresh, keep that blog kind of rolling, but you can have like a store area of static pages or something and you just have to be able to clearly make it where people can come there and say, “Okay,” they have to be able to see because you want them to click your store and check out your products. So that one thing that you want them to do needs to be very clear, very defined, maybe a large button, start here, or check this out, or whatever. You want to have a way to get them to your products but I would not make it static now. Jocelyn’s is actually a static website so I’m going to let you tell her why hers is static and why we changed it from a blog format.
JOCELYN: All right. Well, I actually still have the blog in the background. If you go to my site, ElementaryLibrarian.com and there is a button that says “blog” in the top bar. I do still update that and it is updated roughly once a week, but I have my homepage as static just because I feel like people now come to my homepage and my thing that I want them to do is join my email list. If you come to my site and you don’t do anything else, I want you to join that email list.
So that’s like the one thing that I highlight on that homepage but I do still update the blog and it is important because Google likes a homepage or a website that is constantly changing and updating. It’s also important that you speak the language of your visitors. I was looking at some of your posts and while they are fine, I think that you might want to pay a little bit more attention to, and this is sort of our dirty word, SEO, Search Engine Optimization.
We’re not big fans of Search Engine Optimization as far as like what most people think of it, but it is important that you go into the Google Keyword tool and look and see what kinds of words that are phrases that you are audience is using to describe things that you are writing about. That will help you come up in those search engine results.
SHANE: We don’t mean like put all those keywords in your post, what we are saying is just study a little bit. Think how you would search for something and go into the Google Keyword tool and see if that’s also what other people are searching for. If you are going to search for, I did some research earlier today for a blog post called, we were going to write a blog post about doing webinars. So basically I looked up all the things that people searched for. I typed in, “How do I start a webinar” but then I found things like how to run a webinar, how should I begin using webinars and things like that just to kind of get a better feel for what my audience is saying, instead of just what I want to say.
Jocelyn said something really important there in the last sentence I wanted to highlight. Her site, people come to her home page first and then move on throughout the site, because they know her. She has a huge audience and she has already established herself. Most of your content early on in your online business is going to come random pages. Someone is going to search for something and land on a random blog page and then they might click back to your home page to see what else the site is about.
That’s why it’s so important for it to be dynamic at first because if they don’t know you and they click to this static, generic, sterile home page that has like two buttons, they are going to leave. Whereas if they find you from this random blog post and they click over to your home page to see what’s going on, you are going to have dynamic content right there in front of them and that first post is going to be something new and ready to consume. So they don’t hit a dead end and leave. So that’s why it’s so important to stay dynamic at first and once you build that audience, once you’ve got that core group of people, then you can kind of make it more like a static type portal and move on after that.
STEPHANIE: Okay. That sounds good. Thank you.
JOCELYN: Okay. Was that helpful?
STEPHANIE: It was very helpful, yes. It makes a lot of sense.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s good. Let’s move onto your next question.
STEPHANIE: What would you recommend we give away as a tool to get email addresses? Most of the things I create are either PDFs or a smart notebook. Do you think I should offer like one Halloween, like I was thinking about creating a Halloween safety notebook? Are you familiar with smart notebook activities?
JOCELYN: Yes.
STEPHANIE: Okay. So, I use smart notebook but I also can use PowerPoint and I can make PDFs. I don’t know whether to do a bundle. How could I maximize getting the most email addresses?
JOCELYN: I like what you said about doing like a PDF or a PowerPoint because a lot of people don’t have the smart notebook suite. They have like, what’s the other one called, Promethean Board and I think there are a few other ones. So you might not want to stick with that format. I try to stick with a format that the most people have. So when I make something, no matter what kind of activity it is, I try to make it something that they have already on their computer, just something to think about on that.
I like to have an Evergreen lead magnet myself, something that never really goes out of style or out of season. My lead magnet is sort of a sample of the different kinds of lessons plans that I offer. I actually give away like one kindergarten, one first grade, one second grade because I do all the grade levels. So I offer the same thing pretty much all the time but I don’t think is a bad idea to have seasonal products. The only thing is that you have to constantly change them or you can do what Shane does and I’ll let him tell you about that.
SHANE: All right. One of the big things that we’ve learned lately is that you don’t have to have one lead magnet. I think that’s something that a lot of people just starting out get confused with. If you’ll go to FlippedLifestyle.com and check it out, we have a lot of different lead magnets. What we try to do is actually with every podcast, we try to have a different lead magnet that’s related to the podcast we are talking about. So if we do a podcast about bringing people back to your website, I might have a video about doing keyword research to find good terms to target or whatever, and we will put an opt-in for that. You’ve got to give me your email before you can watch the movie. It might different than the lead magnet that’s on the main side bar or the main home page. That is like our six free videos to start to create a digital product.
Another thing that I do is I have another lesson plan website called USHistoryTeachers.com and what we do there is, there is daily lesson plans for history teachers. It’s like each day has like different activities; it might have a test, PowerPoint presentation, worksheet, things like that. I might give away very specific worksheet from that lesson as the lead magnet for that lesson. Let’s go back to your Halloween example. You could have a general lead magnet for your whole site but then if you write a blog post about Halloween stuff. Well, just do a separate email opt-in that goes to the same list for a different lead magnet. You don’t have to use the same one over and over, and that’s actually a lot better because let’s say someone searches for, what did you say that product with Halloween? What was it called?
STEPHANIE: Halloween Safety.
SHANE: Okay. Let’s say someone for some reason gets on Google and they search for Halloween safety and they find a blog post that you wrote about Halloween Safety. Maybe your blog post is one of your 10 tips for Halloween safety, like you just flash out that one thing. Then at the bottom of that post you say, “Hey, would you like nine more tips for Halloween safety? Give me your email address and I’ll send it to you in a PDF. ” Of course they are going to opt-in because it’s directly related to how they found you. What I would recommend doing is do what Jocelyn said; get an Evergreen, one that you are really comfortable with, something that’s like just ridiculously awesome, something that you could charge for. Make that your evergreen product but make smaller little opt-ins that are related to your blog post. Take five minutes and make a checklist and just go in and set that up to where you can collect emails for it.
JOCELYN: Just another note about opt-ins; don’t ever email people files, like don’t attach files to an email. I always want people to come back to my site. So whenever you send them that email just have link back to your site. You always want people coming back to your site.
SHANE: Like to come back and get the file. Don’t email them the PDF. Email them a link to a page on your website that’s hidden that hosts the PDF because that gives you more traffic, that gets them back into your funnel, and things like that.
JEFF: Got you. Do you think there is a problem if you have a different lead magnet for a different blog post, which that’s a great idea, but if the same people are doing the same thing and they are having to re-enter their email address every time. Do you see that as bad thing or?
SHANE: No. Here is why. What you do is you don’t… we use AWeber to collect emails. Do you all have anything that you use to collect emails right now?
JEFF: Yeah. We use MailChimp.
SHANE: Okay, MailChimp. That’s great. They are both good companies and they both work the same way. That’s what cool about this. What you want to do is you set up your list on MailChimp or AWeber, but then you use LeadPages. A tool called LeadPages at LeadPages.net and what LeadPages lets you do, LeadPages lets you create buttons that open pop up boxes and they can put their email in and it will deliver that link or that file for you from Lead Pages. It doesn’t matter if they are already on your list or they are not on your list. Lead Pages will send that to AWeber and the person will never see it.
If they are already on the list, AWeber or MailChimp just says, “They are on the list. I won’t put them on there again. That would be a duplicate,” but LeadPages goes ahead and sends that email opt-in. So the user never sees it. All your backend stuff will be there but they don’t ever see that. They don’t get sent to a page that says, “Oops! You are already subscribed, sorry.” They get sent to that page, that redirect that page that we created to host your file. As soon as they put their email in, it will redirect them to that page. They’ll get their file, they’ll be happy and then MailChimp or AWeber will sort out whether or not they are already on your list. So, none of that matters.
Now if you do use something like AWeber or MailChimp and you don’t have LeadPages, you are going to have to set up a different list or segment for every single opt-in. So you can’t do it that way. But LeadPages makes things work so much easier because you can put a little button, it opens up the email box, and it sends them to the file or they redirect and they never see that other thing. So we highly recommend using LeadPages for that. But you can do it with MailChimp or AWeber just by creating a new list for every opt-in.
JEFF: Okay. Yeah, that’s great. That’s awesome.
JOCELYN: And you guys had signed up for a LeadPage. It’s right out there. I just saw it on one of your sites.
JEFF: Yeah, we did and oh my goodness, it blows my mind how professional. It’s crazy.
SHANE: Yeah. How fast you can do it too. That’s what I love about lead boxes, which is how we collect opt-ins. You just go in, you set up the little box. You click which list you want, you upload whatever you are giving away for free it’s over, you are done. You copy the code onto your website to make the little button and you are ready to make those lead boxes.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s great. Okay, so let’s move onto your next question.
JEFF: A book that I recently read by Jeff Walker called “Launch” it really opened my eyes to, I guess, how to launch a product. We want to re-launch Stephanie’s website, have a fresh new start in January. Of course we are collecting email addresses up until then but do you recommend that we do that in this big anticipation, this build up or do we just kind of let it kind of roll into play? What are your thoughts on that?
SHANE: Yeah, I’ve read Launch. It’s great book. I think that a lot of his fundamentals are sound. We use a lot of those fundamentals for our launches especially in August when we are preparing like our football-related products or our teacher-related products because people are starting the football season, they are going back to school. I think there is merits to that. I’ll be using a lot of Jeff Walker’s probably different step for my weightlifting manual that I sell in January but I think what you are missing here and you kind of said it in your question, the launch sequence is more for a product not for like the website. Does that make sense?
You don’t really want to launch the website because the website is there. It’s got some traffic. It’s getting some sales here and there. You’ve got your audience that you are kind of building over on teachers, paid teachers and things like that. So I think what you need to do here is you need to focus on just creating more content. I think you need to create a lot more products, I think that is where your energy should be focused on not necessarily this big email sequence and launch in for January.
Launches really are more for two when you have a big audience to email to or you have a lot of people that are helping you support your product, maybe affiliates and things like that. Your focus now does not need to be on launching, it needs to be on more contents, more products, getting audience, and then as you build that, you will launch products. So when you move on maybe from a lot of one off products, maybe you can bundle those together into bigger products or maybe you are having like a special deal. Like something you could do coming up, maybe a Black Friday sale for what you’ve already created, Stephanie.
That could be something that you would have kind of those launch principles on but not for your website. Your website, what you need to focus on is just kind of the marathon not the sprint – steady content coming out on a schedule, steady products rolling out on a schedule, and then building that up. Once you’ve got that base, once you’ve got more traffic, more people, more products, and you’ve got bigger products, maybe you could have something, Jocelyn offers an entire year of lesson plans every single day of the year, that’s something that you would launch. You wouldn’t launch like a Halloween pack or something, you know what I’m saying?
STEPHANIE: Okay, yup.
SHANE: I think that’s the best thing you want to do with your website. Your website, just let it grow, let it be organic. Fix it, change it, don’t tell anybody,y just do it and just roll with it and focus on it. That way, you are not wasting all that energy trying to build a launch when you could have created 30 more blog posts and 10 more products, you know what I mean? So definitely early on, don’t really worry about all that launch stuff. That’s more for later down the road.
JOCELYN: I think, too, on that note, Stephanie, if I were you, I would really concentrate on some marketing right here. There are tons of teacher bloggers out there as you know. I might reach out to some of them and just say, “Hey! I’d like to do a giveaway on your site” or something like that just to kind of get more people coming onto your site and hopefully signing up for your list. Have you done anything like that before?
STEPHANIE: I have not. I haven’t really been sure how to do that.
JOCELYN: Right. I think that would be a good way just to get started a little bit, is to offer some type of a giveaway for other school bloggers. There are tons of them out there, as you know. I think that will be really good. Also, you need to be really on Pinterest as I’m sure you are aware, Pinterest is really big deal especially for women in education. Pinterest is huge. I get roughly about 40-50% of my traffic from Pinterest. Yeah, it’s something that’s really important. So when you are making those blog posts, just make sure that you are aware the pictures that you are putting on. They might be re-pinned and things like that.
SHANE: So in a nutshell don’t worry about the launch. Jeff Walker is really good at selling the launch. That’s why you always got to be careful with those gurus because they are good. The launch principles are sound, I’m not saying what he’s saying is wrong, it’s just it is not for the beginner necessarily. Does that make sense? Yeah. You’ve got a good base already. I think you should just focus on content marketing.
JEFF: That sounds great.
SHANE: Awesome. What you got next? What’s up?
JEFF: What about just out of the gate, because right now we are using Teachers Pay Teachers to handle all of the transactions and I have showed Stephanie, I introduced her to E-junkie and it’s super easy, and then of course on my Drumstix website I use a traditional store. So, we are wondering, do we need to come out of the gate and change it to have a store? Do we need to just use E-junkie and do we need to shut down what we are doing with Teachers Pay Teachers? We are kind of torn.
JOCELYN: I wouldn’t take my things down from Teachers Pay Teachers. I use Teachers Pay Teachers a little bit myself. I mostly use it as a tool to get people to come onto my website. I make sure that I have my web address on all of my content and I never had any problem with that from them. I don’t actually sell on Teachers Pay Teachers. I only have free products on there and it’s mostly just to get traffic to my website. I always want people coming back to my website. So Teachers Pay Teachers, for me, is not where I want to do my shopping cart, I guess you should say.
SHANE: The reason we don’t want to do Teachers Pay Teachers is because Teachers Pay Teachers and other websites where you would sell digital products like Amazon, Kindle, iTunes, or anywhere where you would sell something digitally, those marketplaces are controlled and owned by someone besides you. You have no power over that platform. If they go out of business, so does your business. So if you build all of your efforts on these other platforms and they leave you or what if they just decide, “I don’t like her. She’s violating my terms and conditions. I’m going to close her store,” and you’ve built this business up on someone else’s website, you lose everything.
Another thing that’s really bad is they don’t tell you anything about your customers. You don’t know their email addresses, you can’t ask them their phone numbers, you can’t build a relationship with them. All they do is find your product, buy it, and like it or not, maybe you leave a comment. So it’s so much better to always bring people back to your website than it is to build on someone else’s platform. Now, are those good tools? Like Jocelyn said, we use Teachers Pay Teachers a lot for free products and then when you download our PDF, the top, bottom, middle, and left and right; all have links back to our website. So you may find a great free product on Teachers Pay Teachers and then click our link, come over, and then start buying our products from us where we get a 100% of the profit.
We always tell people, “Build your website. Build your brand, build your platform, build your store and don’t build somebody else’s store.” Now, Let’s go back to the E-junkie issue. E-junkie is more for like one-off products where you have a very small product line. I have probably maybe 10 products that I sell to coaches. That’s a very small product line. I roll them out at different seasons of the year. Jeff, that’s more of like the launch. I launch those every three months or so. It’s a different product launching. Does that make sense?
JEFF: Yeah.
SHANE: But I use E-junkie for that because those are one-off deals. It is not a robust like full shopping cart system. How many products do you have right now, Stephanie? It’s quite a bit I know.
STEPHANIE: It’s about 20.
SHANE: Okay, 20, and you anticipate that to grow, correct?
STEPHANIE: Oh yes.
SHANE: Okay. I think you are a little more like Jocelyn’s website where she has a bunch of different products and my history teacher website has like 180 products or something like that. I do not use E-junkie for that. I use a shopping cart but I don’t know anything about the shopping carts because Jocelyn helps me set those up. So, let me ask her what she thinks you should do.
JOCELYN: I would actually recommend one called Easy Digital Downloads, it’s one that I have been using for about six months now and I really love it. It has been really easy to integrate into our site. We are on the Genesis platform and it’s just really seamlessly integrated in. I’ve had no issues at all. I was using one before that was not working out, and so this one has been such a breath of fresh air.
We will put a link to that in our show notes for Easy Digital Downloads. It is a plug-in type system. It’s very easy to integrate into what you already have and like I said, it just works great. It’s mostly for digital products so if you sell physical products, I think they do have some capability of working with a limited number of physical products but it’s more for just products that are downloaded. Like I said, it has been just a real life saver for me.
SHANE: What all does it do though? Tell her what you can see in it and reports and stuff like that.
JOCELYN: Mostly it will just, you put your products in. It’s going to give you a link for the products and you tell it like the file name. You upload your life and there are tons of different options you can do. You can have it email the file directly to them. You can have it where they download it automatically, which is what I choose because I have a lot of issues with people saying they didn’t get their files. So I make it where if they purchase, it automatically downloads so I don’t have that issue. You get all kinds of sales reports on it that you can break down in a variety of different ways. You can look at how many individual items were sold, how many were sold in a category, the average sales, the monthly sales, the product sales. There are just tons of different reports that you can look at. It has been a real lifesaver for me so I would really recommend it.
SHANE: You are going to need something like that. If you are planning on having more than 20 products, then you are going to outgrow E-junkie too fast. You need something on site that will manage it and that’s what we use for our sites to have a lot of products on them, and we keep E-junkie. You still might want to keep, you have an E-junkie account to do other things. Maybe you’ve got this special deal that’s not related to your product line or maybe something like that, but you probably you need a more robust shopping cart right away because the more you can do it at the beginning, it is hard to transfer all that stuff over. We’ve done that and when you get into 30, 40, 50, 100 products, we had to pay someone like $4,000 to transfer from the old shopping cart to the new one because went cheap and didn’t do the right thing, you know what I mean?
STEPHANIE: Right.
SHANE: It’s always better upfront to just get the thing that works and get it right than to mess up like we did and you are out $3,000 on the back end.
STEPHANIE: Exactly.
JEFF: That’s fine, for sure that’s great.
SHANE: We’ve been going here for a while. Gosh, we can talk to you all forever, this is a fun discussion. But I think we probably going to have time for one more question before we are going to have to wrap up this episode of Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. What have you got for us to close the show up here?
STEPHANIE: Okay. What would you recommend as a first-grade teacher to do a topic for a webinar? My audience is mostly kindergarten through second-grade teachers and I’m interested in starting webinars.
JOCELYN: Yes. Webinars have been really, really successful for us and for me in particular on the librarian, site, I had some really huge numbers on webinars both in attendees and sales. So that’s always a good thing. What kind of audience do you have right now as far as like an email list?
STEPHANIE: About 300.
JOCELYN: That’s a good start for sure. What I would concentrate on first before I started like jumping with both feet into webinars, I would concentrate first on really building that list up because you are going to need a list of probably at least 1,000 to get a decent webinar following, unless you have like a lot social media followers or something like that, but I’m assuming that you probably have about the same number roughly.
STEPHANIE: Probably less.
JOCELYN: Yeah so I would concentrate on building those up first and then once you can build an audience, then you can start asking them what you would like to see in a webinar. I think the best webinar topics really are pains that your audience has. For librarians, for instance, it’s things like how to get involved in your schools open house, how to get volunteers in the library, how to get ready for a book fair, things like that. I haven’t really been on that teacher side, like a classroom teacher before, but you know the pains, and maybe even as the school year goes on, just sort some of those down, things that you are struggling with at the moment and those have probably made perfect topics for webinar.
SHANE: Don’t doubt that list. Those 300 emails that you’ve already got, ask them what they want to have a webinar on. Send an email to them and just say, “Throughout the year this year, what are you struggling with? Are you having a hard time?” You know the pain points, That two weeks before Christmas break, everybody is waiting for the Christmas break. What are you struggling with right now? Great time to send an email. When April gets here you know everybody is in that grind trying to get to summer vacation. Send an email saying, “What is on your mind right now?
We are not too from the beginning of the year. You can send an email out right now and say, “How did the beginning of your year go? What do you need to make it go better next year” or something like that. So poll your audience and ask them what they want the webinar on because if they tell you, “I want a webinar on X” and you say, “I’m having a webinar on X this Friday.” Well, guess who is showing up Friday? All those people that said X. So that’s the best thing to do for webinars.
We do that a lot. We’ve been planning out some Flipped Lifestyle webinars lately and like our Q&A podcast that we do. We only poll those topics from the people in our audience, if we get 10 emails in a week and every one of them said, “Hey! What’s an awesome way to create a sales page?” Well, we are going to do a webinar about lead pages because that’s what a lot of people ask. If 10 people asked it, then there is a couple of hundreds out there that probably are thinking it but didn’t send the email. So, use that list, that 300 is a great email list. That’s a good base to start with and get them to come to your webinar. Get them to tell you what to talk about.
JOCELYN: And on that note, I think I would maybe try to aim for the end of the school year. I had a lot of success this past school year with sending out what I called “End of the Year Survival Guide.” I sent them out like I think 40 library centers just for free to say, “Hey, I understand where you are at and I have been there before and here you go. I’m going to give you this for free.” That email was opened like crazy. So I think maybe if you could do something like that, get people to share it, keep building that list and maybe you could build a webinar or something like that.
SHANE: What she’s talking about there in like a more strategic way, don’t just send an email saying, “Hey, what do you want me to have a webinar about?” Send your audience an email that says, “Check out this free thing that’s going to change your life right now this minute,” and give them a quick win and then that guarantees they are going to open the next email where you are trying to get information.
STEPHANIE: Okay.
SHANE: You got to train your list. You can’t just always be a taker on your email list, 90% of the time, you got to be a giver and then when you need something, like you need information, you need to know what their struggles are, Don’t sell on your email list. Use your email list as a relationship building tool between you and your audience and then when you sell something they are going to buy it because they are coming to your website. It doesn’t matter if you say like, that’s the thing I have a problem with sometime on those launch things. Like when you are doing a launch, it’s “Blah, blah. Buy my thing.”
STEPHANIE: Right.
SHANE: Jocelyn and I take a totally different approach to that. We want to give you everything we can and help you as much as possible in every way we communicate with you. We just want you to come back to our website and be a part of our community and then when we have a service that we can provide for you that we need to charge a premium for because we have to eat too, right, like “You are already at our website. You are going to see what we have to offer and if you want that, you are going to buy it. I just want to help you as much as possible in the meantime so that you’ll just be around us” and when we do offer those services then they are there for you if you need them. If not, you can just use the free stuff. No problem.
So, give, give. Give a lot of stuff away and once you see those open rates kind of coming back, if you see an email and you get a 45 or 50% open rate, the next email you send is, “What do you want me to have a webinar on?” Because they just opened the last one and they are going to open your next one, and then they’ll tell you what’s going on.
JEFF: I never thought about that, that’s great.
JOCELYN: On that note, there is a great book by Gary Vaynerchuck, it’s actually on our resources page on Flipped Lifestyle but we will put a link in the show notes too. It’s called Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, I think. That’s a really good book that’s about exactly what Shane was talking about there.
JEFF: I’ll have to check it.
STEPHANIE: Thank you so much.
SHANE: I think we are out of time guys. We always close up our consulting calls with like a question like did this help you guys? Did it answer your questions and maybe help you guys some direction in your online business?
STEPHANIE: Yes, it really did. Like you said; just building the relationship, just blogging, and having people come to the website, I think that you really helped me with that.
SHANE: Like Jocelyn said, keep building your audience, the more people that are in your audience, in your group, the better and roll out products. I think people see online marketing as get rich quick, passive income all the time. I’m going to make one eBook and roll off into the sunset and that is not how it works. Passive income means I make money 24 hours a day but it doesn’t mean I can stop working. That’s not what passive income is. It just means that as you keep building more and more products, you keep growing your business larger and larger. You keep helping more and more people with free stuff.
What happens is eventually, you’ve got so much out there that then that kind of income starts rolling in and you’ve got a consistent base of people that you help with your stuff, so you can just make more products, make more money. Make more products, make more money. You are on the right track. Listen, there are a lot of people who will be like, “Man! I wish I can make $75 in a month and $500 every once in a while.” You’ve got that base and you know your stuff works. Now you just have to expand it and scale it out.
JOCELYN: Yeah. So, along those lines I’m the sequential person. I guess you’ll call me the nerd. I like to have ABC and so we also always end our consulting calls with a few action steps because I know we have thrown a lot of stuff out there today. We think that first of all, you need to continue to grow your audience, get your lead magnet down, whatever it is that you want to do and continue to draw those emails in.
SHANE: Yeah. Once you’ve got your lead magnet kind of strategy down, and this is ABC. Use your lead magnet, grow your audience, and make more products because you’ve got something that people are buying. You just need more of those things and you’ll make more money. What you might want to do is make that lead magnet, the Evergreen one first, and as you make new blog posts maybe make some smaller ones to kind of be more related to the content second, and once you’ve got that opt-in strategy down, start working on more products and let your product line grow. You are going to see your sales grow too as you do that.
JEFF: That’s awesome.
STEPHANIE: Thank you so much.
SHANE: All right guys.
JEFF: Thank you, guys.
SHANE: It was awesome talking to a rock star and a soon to be retired teacher. This was a great conversation, guys, and we are so glad that you reached out to us on email and we were just glad to be able to help you here tonight on the show.
STEPHANIE: We appreciate it, thank you.
JEFF: Thank you, guys.
JOCELYN: Thanks so much all.
STEPHANIE: Okay. Bye, bye.
JOCELYN: We want to thank Jeff and Stephanie for taking their time to talk to us today on the Flipped Podcast. We had a great time talking to them and learning more about their business. If you are interested in being a guest on a future Flipped Podcast, just head on over to www.FlippedLifestyle.com/FlippedPodcast, you can sign up there to get a free consulting call from Shane and me.
SHANE: All right guys, before we get out of here, we want to do our Can’t Miss Moments this week. We’ve been doing a lot of stuff with our kids lately. So this was a tough choice this week. But I think my Can’t Miss Moment was definitely our trip to Disney World but in particular where we stayed. We got to stay in the Animal Kingdom Lodge and it’s really cool because they give you suites in this place that overlooks like the Safari back into the park. Every morning, I get to get up with the kids and I was out there drinking my coffee and they were out there eating little snack for breakfast, drinking their chocolate milk, whatever, and literally, giraffes and oxen, all these zebras and animals will just walk by your room. It felt like you could reach out and touch them.
That was a really cool moment. It was kind of expensive to stay in Animal Kingdom Lodge. I don’t know if we would have stayed there a couple of years ago if we would have been to Disney. I don’t know if we could have afford that but it was really cool to be able to experience something that awesome and just to be able to get up, go out there, and just see those animals every morning right outside our hotel room. Jocelyn, what’s yours? What’s your Can’t Miss Moment?
JOCELYN: For me it was when we went to Magic Kingdom. Our little girl, Anna, she loves Ariel. That’s her favorite princess and we went to meet Ariel in her “grotto” as they call it. She was just so excited. We actually have a picture of her just hugging Ariel just as hard as her 3-year-old hands can hug her, just closing her eyes, and just being so happy just being there. If it hadn’t been for online business, then we would not have been at Disney the week that we were there or maybe even at all.
SHANE: Yeah, we have been planning this trip for years and we just never had the money or time to go, so it was pretty awesome.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it was just a lot of fun. We had a great time with our kids. The kids loved it and we got to do some things that I don’t know if we would have done before. It was a lot of fun. It was great.
SHANE: Awesome. All right guys, that’s our Can’t Miss Moments this week. Thanks for tuning in and until next time. We will catch you all on the flipside. See you next week.
JOCELYN: See you later, bye.
One more thing guys, if you would like immediate one-on-one help from Jocelyn and myself, all you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/TalkToUs, that’s all one word. You can check out our consulting services. We do not do a lot of consulting but we do block out a few hours a week where we can get on the phone, get on Skype, get on a Google Hangout, and talk to you about your online business where you can work personally with me and Jocelyn to help you go to the next level.
If you need any help, if you need one on one attention and you just can’t wait until maybe we select you for a Flipped Podcast, all you have to do is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/TalkToUs and you can check out when our schedule is available for you to get on a consulting call.
Glen says
Great nuggets of information on today’s show I had to listen to it twice! Lead magnets, growing an audience, and payment info, good stuff!
Michael says
Wow! More great information. Thank you so much!
And thanks to Jeff and Stephanie for sharing their questions with us. I learned several new (good) things on the podcast.
Jeff — if you see this — please know that I’ve been a fan of Big Daddy Weave for a long time. “Redeemed” is one of my all-time favorite songs. Awesomeness.
Best of luck to Jeff and Stephanie as they continue their business ventures.
God Bless you guys!!
Jeff says
Michael!
Thanks so much for writing. Great to hear from you. Yes, it was an honor to be a part of that record. Amazing hearing all of the stories of people who were touched by that song.
We are super excite about this new venture. Can’t wait to see what the future holds.
Robb Gorringe says
Shane & Jocelyn,
I really appreciate the way you’ve brought on different types of guests . Most podcasters are only concerned with having “the experts” on. But with the guests on this week’s episode, so many of us could put ourselves right in their shoes. To me, that’s just as valuable, (if not more so), than having someone who’s ‘already attained’.
And for the record, I think it’s totally cool that Big Weave Daddy drummer is focusing on his family and becoming an online entrepreneur. More power to him & his wife.
Robb
Jeff says
Robb! Thanks for the support.
It has taught me to be careful in how I define success. Today I had to turn down a potentially huge contract that would have essentially turned me into a post office and a manufacturer. I would have sold a lot of drumsticks, but I would have lost my ability to control my future.
I would rather make good money and be able to meet my girls at school for lunch than make huge money and have no life.
Thanks for the comment and you, like me and Stephanie, love this format. I learn so much from hearing others who are going through what I am as well.