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We’re so excited to have one of our Aussie Flip Your Life friends on the show today!
Ready for this week’s exhilarating mind mapping session, we have FYL community member and journalist-autobiographer, Nicola Davison.
Nicola is a wife, and mom with two kids from Queensland, Australia. She has been a journalist for over 15 years and She has worked for daily and community newspapers in New South Wales and Queensland, as well as in the United Kingdom.
She has interviewed thousands of people throughout her career and believes that everyone has their own story to tell, with years full of many interesting and inspiring lessons, it would be a waste to miss the chance to share it with loved ones.
Her online business, Forever Young Autobiographies, focuses on helping folks write their life story, get it self-published and preserve their key memories to pass on to the next generation.
With her avatar identified, Nicola will be needing our help to develop her next offer. Would it be an opt-in, an introductory offer or can it be MUCH BIGGER than that?
Join us as we get our thinking caps on and polish Nicola’s gem of an idea. We’ll be diving in on the importance of getting standard procedures in place, creating irresistible challenges and experience how we help take our members from mind mapping a product to their sales game.
Let’s have some Flipped Lifestyle fun and take this online business to the next level!
You will learn:
- The anatomy of an introductory offer-based challenge
- Why it’s important to have standard procedures in place
- What its like when we do a “product” brainstorming session
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Success Story:
Today’s success story comes from Kathy, and Kathy writes, “Holy cannoli,” — she is really doing in her subject line right, ‘Holy cannoli!’ with two exclamation points — “I’ve hit double digits!! ”
Kathy says, “I spent my entire summer vacation just grinding and working away at my business. I head back to school on Monday and I am so pumped and excited to show that I have officially hit double digits with my members. I have 10 real life people who are paying me money, and using my stuff. What the heck?! I actually had had 12 members, but to members left which was totally okay. I’m learning to navigate the highs and lows of people leaving, but all is good. Thank you for everyone’s help here especially Shane, Jocelyn, Kitty, and Kat.” “Your encouragement on all my posts, especially my action plans really help to continue to push me onto the next 10. Mega high-fives all around.”
Something I love about Kathy is that she shows up. She just said that she goes and posts in the action plans. I see her all the time on our live member calls twice a month. She asks good, insightful questions, she comes in, she signs up for her podcast, if you are one of our members you get a podcast once every six months. She signs up every time. She takes action on what we tell her to do. I love working with people like Kathy. Great job! 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 pretty cool.
We actually bought all the furniture for our house and it finally just got pretty much finished. Every room has its core furniture in it, we got to go out and pick out whatever we wanted.
I can just remember when we were really on a strict budget. Sometimes we couldn’t go out and buy exactly what we wanted, or we would have to save up and do like one room now, and another room six months from now. Maybe we needed a new bed for this room, so we would have to find that. Maybe sometime, the kids’ rooms, maybe they had furniture that was a little piece together, or maybe we would have a dresser over here or a bed we picked up over here and they all didn’t quite match.
This time when we bought our new house, we just went out and got whatever we wanted. We just had a decorator actually come in and put all the rooms together and it was really cool the way we did it because we would go on a vacation.
We went to Dallas one time, we went on a Disney cruise one time, and we let the interior decorator come in and put all the furniture in here while we were gone. We would go on this big trip, and then we would come home and all that furniture would be in there.
It was just really cool to be able to get it all done at once and to not have to worry about exactly what we were buying because of the money.
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 Nicola take her autobiography 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. 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, everyone? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. For those of you new to show, welcome. 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. Now, let us jump into our interview with our Flip Your Life community member and see what questions they have for us today. Alright, guys, super excited to welcome our guest today, Nicola from Australia. Nicola, welcome!
Nicola: Great to be here, you guys.
Jocelyn: Yeah, we are super excited to talk to you. We love our Aussie friends and our Aussie members. Welcome to the show today! Let’s jump in and tell everybody a little bit about you, your background and what you are doing online.
Nicola: Sure thing. I am from Queensland, Australia. Don’t hold it against me.
Shane: We’re from Kentucky, we don’t hold anything against anybody when they talk about location, okay?
Nicola: Oh, yeah, I’m a wife, I’ve got two kids, one and four. I’ve been a journalist for over 15 years in daily and community newspapers in a couple of states here and in the United Kingdom. I’ve mainly been a sub editor, print editor working in with journalists and that kind of thing to correct, polish, and publish stories printed online. I know everyone has got a gold mine of fascinating stories and I’m trying through my online business to help people share and preserve their memories.
Shane: So, basically what you do is you help people write like a memoir, an autobiography to get that thing that– maybe not even to be published, it is more like they could be published, they could just have a book where they sell and things like that– but it is more like preserve that story so they can hand it down to people. Is that kind of what you were talking about here? Nicola: Yeah. I think mostly, it is for their friends or family. It is a record of their life but it could be really be entertaining. It shares a lot of life lessons for people. Yeah, I am trying to help people write and publish their life story. If they want to do it for their friends and family, but if they would like to go further then that is always a possibility.
Shane: When you joined the community and I read your first post, I thought this was like the coolest niche ever because we talk a lot about aspirins and vitamins and what do people want versus what do they need and what really solves problems. But as we get older, and especially now that our kids are starting to get a little bit older, I can see how this would be an enormous, enormous thing that someone would feel a compulsion, like a need to do later on in life like when you become an empty-nester, or your kids go off to college, and all of a sudden, you look around and they start having kids and it is like you start really confronting that mortality. You look at yourself and say, “Man, I have so much I have never told my kids.” Even now, I have so much that my grandkids and their kids to know. This is just a cool thing to kind of present that to them.
Jocelyn: And I love this idea because of the society that we live in today. People are living longer times, which is cool. But then, we are also going 1000 different directions. I have a 97-year-old great-grandmother, and I think about all of the stories that she has that she tells us from time to time. She can remember so many things, and I just think it is so cool because I can’t remember what happened yesterday. But she could remember what happened 90 years ago.
Shane: And we live in a society where we can actually do this ourselves now. I think, when we were growing up or back in the day– let me just get my old-timer language out here– but back in the day, really, only people who wrote autobiographies were for famous people or presidents. Now, we have all the tools available to document everything in our life. It is the first time really in history that everyone has access to something like this, right?
Nicola: Yeah, that is right. You learn a lot by writing it, too. You get that self-awareness and it is kind of exciting because you get to go back and revisit and see things from a heightened perspective. You’ve got decades in between to say, “Oh, okay, I can see how all the pieces fit together.” It is not just for the people that you are writing it for, but I think, too, it is a bit of an adventure yourself like tapping back into your life.
Jocelyn: Yeah, definitely, for sure. You work in writing; you are trying to get this business off the ground. Before we get into what we want to do with that, tell us a little bit about why you want to start doing this online. What really spoke to you and said, “I need to take this to the world?”
Shane: And also, too, just to add to that normally, it is just your ‘why’. Why do you want this to be a successful online business.? I would like to hear that and why is this so important to you to help people write down these stories?
Nicola: Well, you are the history teacher, Shane. I think you could tap into this one. Everyone does have a story, and might not be the world’s best story or something famous. But there is so many little highlights and gems about your life, or places that you’ve lived, and I think we need to be passing that on. Just for my mom’s perspective, she lost her mom. She was 94. They used to talk every day, and she would say, she says to me, “You know, there are so many things I never asked and I wish I could ask her.” My Nana, she wrote a little book and all that but, you know I think you don’t realize until it is too late that you should do this stuff. I just want to help people think well, everyone has a story. You don’t have to be famous. Let’s just get this down, get something in, even just something really short is completely valuable to the people in your family and future generations.
Shane: Well, that is like chills. I just got, like, the chills when you were talking about that. This is just absolutely amazing and I very passionately want to help you succeed in this because stuff like that is important and the more people that get to do this through your service, you’re going to be basically impacting families for generations with these things that are they are going to hand down. Let’s talk a little bit more about the business now, and what questions do you have for us to help get this moving forward.
Nicola: Yes, sure, well, as I said to Jocelyn, they move at glacial speeds here.
Shane: Glaciers are unstoppable. You can’t stop them. Nothing gets in the way of a glacier, you know what I mean? That’s great, we like glacial speed around Flipped Lifestyle.
Nicola: I really embraced your website and courses. I’ve been going through those every week. There is something in between. Napping kids and kindie I built a very nonsense-y website, and I’m starting blogging every two weeks at this stage collecting emails. I’ve recorded a lead magnet or an opt-in to get people to nod out their chapters, a basic draft kind of like a road map as you would say. That is where I am at. I am thinking, well, what is the next logical step for me? What should I focus my energy on now?
Shane: What is the magnet, what is that?
Nicola: It is about a 10-minute video of I’ve recorded, and it goes through four key steps, sort of like an exercise, where you note out your key memories that you want to go in, and then stepping back and thinking about like a director’s cut of your life.
Shane: So, it is like a brainstorming activity, kind of, or a mind mapping activity?
Nicola: Yeah, yeah.
Shane: That is a perfect first step.
Nicola: Find a Post-it notes, get that all sorted out visually and go for it.
Shane: Let me ask you this: let’s say that I watched your video, okay. Let’s say that I took action on that video immediately, and I said, “Man, I might grab a piece of paper, sketch these out, the five core events in my life, I’m going to get the Post-it notes with the bullet points of each thing, and I’m going to stick them on the wall.” Me and you are literally sitting in a coffee shop. I’ve done this. We’re meeting after I’ve done this. What would you tell me to do next in my autobiography process?
Nicola: Just keep writing, jump in. Don’t be the deer in headlights, and–, “How am I going to do this?” Just jump in and start writing anything.
Shane: So what I take one of those stories, and flesh it out and actually write at like a chapter?
Nicola: Yeah, yeah. You need to start wherever you feel comfortable, what area of your life is exciting that you just, “Yes, I want to revisit that,” or that’s definitely going to coincide with something that would give you good motivation to get the ball rolling.
Shane: Okay, what probably needs to happen here in your autoresponder, or on your site, or after I opted in and took action on this, you probably need some kind of challenge. Like, “Hey, I’m starting a seven-day challenge to write the first chapter of your autobiography.” You need to be able to create something that is passively doing this for you. It could be as simple as a seven-email challenge that they opt into, and each day they get a thing that says, “Okay, write the first draft of your thing,” — I don’t know the process, you’re going to know the process. But if I had a week to write this first story, you are going to have to give me some instructions to do that and then you’re going to have to deliver that to me and help me get through the next step. That is what you probably need to create right now. This can also be a paid thing. This is almost like an opt in or not an opt in, an introductory offer. It’s, “Hey, I am doing a seven-day, seven-dollars challenge. Everyone is going to come in to a private Facebook group, you are going to write down this first story,” — we’ll call it the first chapter, it might be the first couple chapters– “But you are going to write down the first story of your life that you are going to include in your autobiography. I’m going to guide you through the process,” — you’ll send an email each day on what they should do, give them some instruction, then you give them a community aspect of it like a private Facebook group where they can share with the people in there. They can share their story for editing and everybody can read it and stuff. That is the next logical step to create the thing that happens after the lead magnet. Even though you don’t have a full-blown course yet on autobiography stuff, this is going to take care of that and start getting you some paid customers, and giving you some feedback. Don’t you think Jocelyn?
Jocelyn: Yeah, I think that that is a great logical next step. Give them another quick win to do and succeed at and then from there, they will be hopefully willing to move on to the next step. Shane: Would you charge for that, do you think, Jocelyn? Or, I don’t know.
Jocelyn: Probably, not the initial. I don’t know, maybe you could do part of it in an email sequence, and then say, “If you would like the next part, join my community, join my group, join my writing.”
Shane: So, would that be like an autoresponder, you think? Maybe this is something you could do for free. Maybe you need to create your automated email autoresponder. It makes them do this immediately after they opt in. That way, you can stretch out. It feels like they’re getting a bonus, like an unexpected bonus. Like, “Oh, now that you’ve brainstormed it, I’m going to help you write your first chapter.” I would use those words even though you know the story might end up being three chapters.
Nicola: That’s, you know, extra.
Shane: It’s not daunting to write your first chapter.
Nicola: No, you can do that.
Shane: Yeah, I don’t have to complete the whole book. I just have to do the first chapter. Maybe you could create within your autoresponder a seven-day challenge to get the moving and then the next thing you offer is something that is more like, paid.
Nicola: Yeah, that makes sense. I need the feedback too so that I can develop the offer like the bigger product.
Shane: What are you going to teach in your big course? That is what we need to figure out. You’ve got to still focus on some self-publishing because the endgame is holding a printed book in your hand. That is success for this thing. It is not, “Sell the book.” It is, “A book shows up at my door, a hardback book with my face on it,” or whatever. How are you going to get them literally from that first initial brainstorm to a printed book showing up at their doorstep?
Jocelyn: I also want to throw in there, I was just thinking about this. Who do you feel is your target customer? It is probably not these 90 something-year-old people because they are probably not going to be online. I think that your approach is going to be a little bit different for their children versus the actual person.
Nicola: Yeah, this is right, okay. I suppose you’re asking me who’s my avatar–
Shane: Yes.
Jocelyn: Yeah, exactly.
Nicola: Yeah, I would think, yeah, you’re right, Jocelyn, they’re really old. They’re great but–
Jocelyn: Yeah, but they’re not likely to be online.
Shane: They’re not going to do it. Yeah, it doesn’t matter. Even us, we wouldn’t be your avatar because we’re not to that point yet.
Nicola: I sort of narrowed it down. Self-funded sort of retirees who are married and have grandkids, sort of 50s and 60s.
Shane: Empty-nesters, basically.
Nicola: I was even thinking, they are probably like the ex-hippies, first-generation backpackers, even rock and rollers or surfers who were teens and young adults in their–
Shane: Gen-X, isn’t that what they used to call them, something like that, in the 80s? The people right after the Baby Boomers is probably your best bet for this. They are still young enough to do it and not old enough to not care because it’s just too late. Are you going to teach them how to write? Are you going to show them an outline of how to do all this? Because right now, it feels so broad. I’m not sure how far we can go down the rabbit hole until we know exactly what you are going to teach. You know the avatar; you know the result that you want to get for them. How do you do this?
Jocelyn: I have some thoughts, but I am curious to see what you had in mind.
Shane: Yeah.
Nicola: I sort of broke it down into four chunks: I think people would need to plan the rough draft, get their memories all aligned and what they’d like. Then you have to instruct people on how to write because a lot of these people, they have never written something like this before. There would probably be a bit of mindset and encouragement saying this story is important. We can do some techniques or try these exercises, just a few simple things like that. Once they get a draft together. The third step would be polishing it, editing it, make sure it flows correctly, that kind of thing, and then the fourth step would probably be, “Hey, here’s how you can publish it. Let’s get this out there.”
Shane: You think you can do the each of those steps in video trainings or something, where you are telling them what to do, right? You will have all the exercises to beat the writer’s block and motivate them. Then the formatting, are you going to teach them what an autobiography should look like, how it should be structured? Are you going to go through like, you know the Hero’s Journey outline, have you ever seen that before? This is their story, they leave home, they encounter obstacles, they meet their mentor, all that stuff– are you going to take them through that kind of process?
Nicola: There’s a sliding scale there on how complicated you want to get. I sort of think, okay, maybe if you’re going to get fully published by a publisher, that may be applicable. I don’t know. I need more feedback from my avatar, but my gut feeling is that if I went down that road too fast, they would get totally freaked out and be, “Oh, this is all too hard.”
Jocelyn: Let me tell you how I see this, okay. This is just my thoughts, okay. I see this as more of a gift-type product and what I mean by that is maybe it’s a kit of some kind, that you would either email to people, or even physically send to people. It would have questions, the person would ask the relative these particular questions. Then, I think in a perfect world, you would have one of two situations: you would either have a team in place to take their answers from those questions, and turn it into the book for them, or they could write it themselves. You would have a community to support them, but it would be more work on you. Do you see what I mean?
Shane: Or you can have editors.
Jocelyn: I think this is a beautiful gift product.
Shane: Oh, I would totally buy this for my parents or something.
Jocelyn: I think that you could package it up, marketing-wise, and say, “Okay, here is a perfect Christmas gift.” I might buy this for my parent who still has a living parent.
Shane: That is pretty smart. Basically, even though the end product is for the person who is in the autobiography, it doesn’t have to be physical, like Jocelyn said.
Jocelyn: It could be something you could print.
Shane: Yeah, it could be digital and be printed. But it is still like, I would give this to my parents, basically or something. Or my kids would eventually give it to me, or you would market it to the, “Don’t lose your parents memories, help them write their autobiography,” kind of thing and then they buy it on an impulse purchase or on a Christmas gift. Jocelyn: Exactly. Chances are, 80% of them will probably never do anything with it.
Shane: Or 20% will.
Jocelyn: But it doesn’t matter.
Shane: But it doesn’t matter.
Jocelyn: Because they will still buy it.
Shane: It doesn’t matter how you market it. Most people won’t do it even if they buy it anyway. That is just the way life works.
Jocelyn: Yeah, even if you sell it the way you are thinking, still, only 20% of the people are going to do that. Do you see what I mean?
Shane: But you catch the people that are looking now, and now you’re looking for the people who are in the 30 to 49 to buy it for their 50- to 60-year-olds, they are online.
Jocelyn: And I like this method because I think that it is going to give you such a smaller amount of people to work with. The service that you are talking about offering, the product that you are talking about doing, actually working through the writing process steps with them, that is very high-end product and not a lot of people are going to take that.
Shane: Is it though?
Jocelyn: But that is a good thing for you.
Shane: But, for example, I bought a course the other day. We are writing our first book. Our book is the Hero’s Journey story. It’s two teachers who quit their job, made millions. We did all this. It’s like, I actually took a course on the Hero’s Journey format. Here is the reason I did that. I need paint by numbers. I need step-by-step for this process. I didn’t want to figure this out on my own. Like you were saying, you don’t want to make it too complex. Let me tell you something: it is more complex if I’m just trying to write my own book, and I don’t have a step one: Who was your mentor? Why did they help you? Step two, what was the three obstacles that almost stopped you from doing this? You still have to include that in the kit to write the book or it’s not going work.
Jocelyn: I agree with that. I am not disagreeing with that in any way. I am just saying there is going to be a smaller amount of people to take that. I think that you could give it more personal time and attention because there are going to be fewer people in there doing it.
Shane: I like the idea of her having people to edit and stuff, too, for them.
Jocelyn: I think maybe you could do it yourself at first, kind of compile the information and turn it into a book, create a process, and then have virtual assistants to take it.
Shane: The kit has to be able to produce the book, though. If I buy this, maybe it is something I do with my parents, like Jocelyn said. It is just not, “Here is the book, write it.” It is like a process where we interview and stuff.
Jocelyn: I think that it is a product of that you could sell in different steps, I guess you would say. You could have just the part with the questionnaire. Maybe some people just want to ask their parents the questions, write down the answers, and keep that.
Shane: Or maybe, they want to write the biography based on the interview.
Jocelyn: Maybe some people want to take it a step further, and actually write the book, and I think that is cool. What I’m trying to say is I think you have more opportunity then you are really thinking about. I think you are thinking about it too narrowly.
Nicola: Yeah, I’m just coming in from the journalist-writer’s perspective, like I’ve got my blinkers on.
Shane: That is the problem with the curse of knowledge. You are a journalist. Like you, if you’re going to write your autobiography, you’re going to sit down and write it. What you are becoming is a facilitator. Your job is to facilitate the creation of this story of this person’s life. It may not be them sitting at a computer typing it, it might be, “Here is my kit. If you gave this to mom and dad and they sat down and did it themselves, they could produce a book.” Or it could be, like Jocelyn said, you go with your parent, you ask them these questions, you have these interviews–” Jocelyn: And it would just be conversation starters because if I were going to interview my great-grandmother, I might think of a few questions, but there’s things I wouldn’t think about to ask her. Maybe you could have a list of, say, 50 conversation starters and “My best moment from childhood was this.”
Shane: But I would also make it like I would choose a story structure. You’re going to have to do that, I think. Because if you just open it up to these open-ended questions, that is not really what we are looking for here. We are looking for a narrative that highlights the five key moments of their life, right? All you have to do in this case is create a narrative process. Step one, ask your parents this. Step two, ask the person this. Step three, these are the things you would do, say, if you’re going to write this book for someone, and you were going to go interview them and then come back and you are going to write their biography before them.
Nicola: That is funny because, Jocelyn, I have a 97-year-old grandmother, and I’ve been helping her do hers. I did start out down this track saying, “Here are some questions, like basic stages of your life, about your ancestors, about your birth, about your childhood.”
Shane: And then are you writing it for her?
Nicola: Yes.
Shane: This is what you are selling. That is where you’ve got to be at.
Nicola: She is 97. She tried to write a bit but my grandma Shane, you understand, she is a talker. We got on the phone, we’ve been doing it on the phone, that’s made a lot of the difference. Shane: I think that is what you’re selling. That is what is valuable here, and that is your product. We know the avatar.
Jocelyn: But I just think that I think you’re leaving a lot of money on the table if you don’t go for a broader audience because I think that you can.
Shane: Imagine this: I go to the store or I get online, and I am like, “Man, my kids are eight and six now, our children are getting older. We’re going to blink, they’re going to be 16 and 13 or whatever.” Imagine, I’m sitting there at Christmas time thinking about what I can do for them, to get my kids a gift and online, in my Facebook feed newsfeed, I see a kit that’s designed for me to buy, but it’s designed for my kids to sit down with their grandparents, and ask these questions. Then my kids bring that back to me, and my kids and me work together to create this book for grandma and grandpa. We get it created, and we go hand it to them. That’s legend. A hundred dollars, I will pay that right now for $100.
Jocelyn: Yeah, and probably more.
Shane: And probably more.
Jocelyn: Yeah, if you get a printed book out of it, you could even do it through a shutterfly type situation. You send them pictures, you write the small things. You wouldn’t even have to write a novel. You could even just write captions on pictures. I mean, I think the sky’s the limit for this, honestly. It reminds me of the thing that I see on Facebook every year. I get this thing in my newsfeed, usually around Christmas time, it will say, “Don’t sit down and make a big book. Just use your Facebook newsfeed. You can upload it, and we’ll make a book for you.” I think that that is what you’re going for here, is this fast and easy type gift idea, and if people want to take it a step further, give them that opportunity.
Shane: You just said to you talk to her, and you recorded them, sure and then write down the stories and whatever.
Nicola: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if you could do that? We have processes. For example, one thing we thought about offering for our community is, we have a process to create the Flipped Lifestyle community, the membership site and all that stuff. We were just talking the other day, why would we not hire a few extra VAs and have them do this for people as a fee? For very little, what if people did this and they recorded the conversations, they uploaded them to you, and then you had them transcribed and turned it into a book for them as service?
Jocelyn: That is a very high-dollar gift idea.
Shane: High-dollar gift idea. But for you, it wouldn’t cost that much because all you are doing is, here is the kit, go do the instructions, come back to me with your stories in the audio. We have them transcribed and you know the process to get it self-published so you just to have for them, and they get a book in the mail. It’s just all systems at the point.
Jocelyn: So there is a lot of options. That was a lot of stuff we just threw out there, and don’t feel like you have to have it all together, like right now.
Shane: You’re in the right ballpark, but you need to be over here a little bit where you need to keep this.
Jocelyn: I just think that you can have this initial product ready really soon. I don’t think it’s something you’re going to have to slave over that much. I just think you can have this questionnaire type thing done really soon, and start selling that out.
Nicola: Yeah, you think about 50 questions, you want to rains and rains of it, and something you sit down over, say, Christmas time and you do.
Shane: I don’t think it is 50 questions.
Jocelyn: I just kind of threw that out there.
Shane: Yeah, like I said with a narrative arc, you’ve got to look at it like a narrative arc. You’ve got to say there is chapters. What if there was 20 chapters, and what if we had 10 questions–
Jocelyn: — For each phase of life.
Shane: For each phase of life or whatever. You are going to have to create a story. That is why I always zero in on the Hero’s Journey because anyone can basically write that story if they really follow the rules. It is just, what was the catalyst that made you do this? What was your three biggest obstacles you ever faced in life? Who was the person that helped you the most or taught you the most about life or whatever? You’ve got to create the story for them and get them from usually there are teenage years to now. It is the big picture stuff you want to include in this.
Nicola: That is sort of what I was doing in my opt in, you know. What are the memories that just can’t be left out.
Shane: Now you just have to go into those steps and say, “Okay, well if this was one of the three obstacles that you faced in your life,” now you go into, “Well, how did that make you feel? What were some sights and smells you remember from that moment?” That is where you are going to guide them through the process. It is basically like 10 questions, and each 10 questions has five bullet points that you are going to guide them through, and then it is just off to the races at that point.
Jocelyn: We are kind of wrapping this up today. I don’t want you to feel overwhelmed and think that we are saying that something is wrong with what you had in mind because that is not what we are trying to say at all. I think that you are on the right track, I just think that you need to package it a little bit differently so that you can reach a larger market because I think the message is relevant.
Shane: And market it better, basically.
Jocelyn: I think that it’s a marketing issue. I think that this is relevant to so people, and I’ve never seen anything like it.
Shane: Never seen anything like this. I do know I would buy that. I would totally buy that, just because my dad is getting older, my kids are getting older, there is going to be a point where they can’t connect and that way.
Jocelyn: Well also, people start aging, it gets difficult to buy presents for them, too. As we start thinking about things to get for parents at holidays and things like that, it is hard because they are already have everything they need, so you just end up buying things. This past Christmas a friend of mine, they bought their parents one of those chromosome kits were you send, I guess a blood sample in or whatever. I know somebody who bought that this past year, so I think that there is a lot of opportunity there.
Shane: You came in here today selling a black and white thing to write an autobiography. That is not what you are selling. You are selling an opportunity to bridge the generation of families together. That is your mission statement. That is how big this can be. Now, you just have to create what they would do and then market it to them.
Jocelyn: You’ve got to think larger, my friend.
Shane: Yeah. This is a big deal; this is a really big deal. So, let’s wrap this up just a little bit here. This is a great conversation. I see two other questions here that are not even related to what we are talking about on your intake sheet, but we will just go with this because we’re overwhelming you. But what is something that you think you could take action on say, the next 24 hours or so? I envision you, you’re like you’ve got a bow and arrow, and you are aimed a little to the right. We just kind of pushed your arm over to the middle. What do you think your next step is that you need to take action on to be ready to aim that correctly?
Nicola: Yeah, I need to go back and have a bit of a think, maybe review some of the questions that I originally posed to my grandma, and like you said, write out 10 overarching questions with corresponding ones underneath that. Give them a bit of a road map, a mind map of where to start.
Shane: I love it, I love it. If you can put that in the forums, too, I’d love to look through it. I have a document that I can share with you in the community, too, of where the process that I went through to get our outline done.
Nicola: Yeah, that would be awesome.
Shane: Just so you can see what I learned and what I’m doing right now. I’m like, the customer so I can show you what I needed for this kind of thing. You can bridge that with what you’re doing with your grandma, and maybe we can come up with a really good product, and get it made. Another thing, too, sometimes people would start a podcast, and we get down to some huge ideas. You could be selling this thing like Jocelyn said in two weeks. You can just sell them the process and then add all these layers of helping them get it done. This could be something that you could have for sale very quickly.
Nicola: Just something you could print off.
Jocelyn: Alright, well, I think that you have a great plan of action. I can’t wait to see what happens. We’ve been excited about this idea from the very beginning, but now actually talking to you, I think that it’s going to be something really cool, and we look forward to working with you more on it.
Nicola: Thanks for all your ideas.
Shane: Alright, guys, that wraps up another call with one of our Flip Your Life community members. 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 as well.
Jocelyn: Alright, next we are going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment. These are things that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our normal 9-to-5 job.
Shane: This week’s Can’t Miss Moment is pretty cool. We actually bought all the furniture for our house and it finally just got pretty much finished. Every room has its core furniture in it, we got to go out and pick out whatever we wanted. I can just remember when we were really on a strict budget. Sometimes we couldn’t go out and buy exactly what we wanted, or we would have to save up and do like one room now, and another room six months from now. Maybe we needed a new bed for this room, so we would have to find that. Maybe sometime, the kids’ rooms, maybe they had furniture that was a little piece together, or maybe we would have a dresser over here or a bed we picked up over here and they all didn’t quite match. This time when we bought our new house, we just went out and got whatever we wanted. We just had a decorator actually come in and put all the rooms together and it was really cool the way we did it because we would go on a vacation. We went to Dallas one time, we went on a Disney cruise one time, and we let the interior decorator come in and put all the furniture in here while we were gone. We would go on this big trip, and then we would come home and all that furniture would be in there. It was just really cool to be able to get it all done at once and to not have to worry about exactly what we were buying because of the money.
Jocelyn: And it has been my dream for years to have somebody decorate my house. Decorating is something that I kind of enjoy doing. I wouldn’t say I am terrible at it, I don’t think I am great at it, but it takes me forever. The decorator coming in, she did in like five days what would have taken me five years to get done. It looks really nice, and I don’t know that you are ever finished decorating, but we are probably about 75% finished with the downstairs, which makes me very, very happy.
Shane: It was really cool to just get all the furniture done, and to be able to take the pressure off of Jocelyn to go out and even have to pick it out. Jocelyn just said, it probably saved us as much money as we spent in time just to get someone to do that. It’s just really awesome because when we walk into our forever home, it actually feels like home because we have all the stuff we need. My favorite piece of furniture in the entire place though is our new Tempur-Pedic bed and we got the old person’s beds that raise up and down. We can move our feet up and down and we can lift ourselves up if we want to.
Jocelyn: Or we can use the computer in bed. Not that I ever do that.
Shane: Yes, you can totally do that and sit up in one. All that’s finished and we actually have a place to sit and lay in her new home. As much as we love our Can’t Miss Moments, there’s actually one thing we love even more and that’s a success story from our Flip Your Life community members. 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 Kathy, and Kathy writes, “Holy cannoli,” — she is really doing in her subject line right, ‘Holy cannoli!’ with two exclamation points — “I’ve hit double digits!! ”
Jocelyn: Alright, Kathy says, “I spent my entire summer vacation just grinding and working away at my business. I head back to school on Monday and I am so pumped and excited to show that I have officially hit double digits with my members. I have 10 real life people who are paying me money, and using my stuff. What the heck?! I actually had had 12 members, but to members left which was totally okay. I’m learning to navigate the highs and lows of people leaving, but all is good. Thank you for everyone’s help here especially Shane, Jocelyn, Kitty, and Kat.” Shane: And Kitty and Kat are two people that work in our content team. Kat is our community manager in the Flipped Lifestyle community, and Kitty, she is the queen of all things that no one else has a job for because she can do everything. She helps us manage all of our content.
Jocelyn: She is our virtual assistant extraordinaire. “Your encouragement on all my posts, especially my action plans really helped to continue to push me onto the next 10. Mega high-fives all around!”
Shane: Kathy is hilarious because she shares my affinity for world wrestling entertainment and professional wrestling. We have a very friendship bond, me and Kathy do, about the world wrestling entertainment scenario. Actually, Kathy has been working so hard for 6 to 8 months and Kathy’s story cracks me up every time we talk about it because she is the classic example of an entrepreneur: someone who tries and tries it almost quits, almost gives up, and experiences those highs and lows and just can’t make that first sale, can’t make the community grow, can’t get those next 10 emails, tries for a year and nothing works and then all of a sudden through the grinding, through the effort, through all the hard work, it clicks and someone buys; and then another person buys, and then another person buys, and now she is starting to experience that first level of success. But it took her a long time and a lot of hard work and perseverance where many other people quit to get to this point.
Jocelyn: Something I love about Kathy is that she shows up. She just said that she goes and posts in the action plans. I see her all the time on our live member calls twice a month.
Shane: She asks questions.
Jocelyn: She asks good, insightful questions, she comes in, she signs up for her podcast, if you are one of our members you get a podcast once every six months. She signs up every time. She takes action on what we tell her to do. I love working with people like Kathy. Great job!
Shane: If you want some success, and maybe you spent eight months and you haven’t made a sale, maybe it’s been five months, and you can get any emails, you need to get into the community, and take action like Kathy is doing so that you can get your first 10 members, and your next 10 members and start passing those high-fives around, too.
Shane: Before we go today guys, we want to share a Bible verse with you. Jocelyn and I close every single one of our shows with a Bible verse. We get a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible, and we want to share some of that with you. Today’s Bible verse comes from 1 Corinthians 9:24, and the Bible says, “Do you not know that in a race, all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.” Make sure that you are giving every ounce of effort, that you are dedicated to making your online business work, and run that race in such a way that you will get the prize and everything will work out in your online business. That is all the time that 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!
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