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“I got this idea, but I don’t know if it will make me money.”
Does that sound like a familiar statement?
Have you ever come up with an online business idea, but thought “Nobody would ever pay for that!”
Well, don’t dismiss your idea so quickly because the internet is an amazing thing.
The internet changes everything and you could make thousands of dollars on almost anything you could think of selling if you just take action!
Yes, you’ve heard of so many business coaches, life coaches, social media coaches, and similar types making money online… well, today we have something different, and you’re in for a treat!
In our Flip Your Life community, we have a lot of different people with different niches, but this one is one of our favorites!
Today’s guest is Teresa Perleberg.
Her online business?
How about “Shearing sheep and turning their wool into a statue!”
Okay, that may be oversimplifying it, but it just gets better!
Teresa lives on a North Dakota farm with her husband and 4 kids, 93 sheep, 50 cattle.
Her husband had worked multiple jobs to provide for their family, she wanted to help out while still being able to stay homeschooling the kids.
It turns out that her discovery of an amazing craft (that utilized her sheep wool) would be the solution to this.
She does something really awesome called needle felting.
You’ll have to listen in to hear Teresa explain what that is in detail, but we absolutely love it!
She started selling her needle felted art on Etsy in 2008, then transitioned into making needle felting kits and selling them. And because her audience had shown so much interest in taking their needle felting to the next level by learning more techniques, Teresa had started a membership business on Needle Felting.
Her online business has grown to have a stable income which was enough for her husband to quit his night shift job and have more time with the family!
Now her husband and the kids all help out on her online business, working together as a family.
That’s Flippin’ your life, y’all!
Join us as we help Teresa on her membership retention strategies, audience engagement, overcoming technical problems, and growing her membership.
Anytime we can talk about shearing sheep in a podcast is always a good day!
You Will Learn:
- Strategies for membership retention
- How to connect more with your audience, get them involved, and get them to know you
- Overcoming technical problems and not getting caught up by it
- How to keep your members paying and not have too many customer service problems
- Live video and audience engagement strategies
- Plus so much more!
Links and resources mentioned on today’s show:
- Teresa’s Needle Felting Website
- Carolyn Lincoln’s Dog Training Website
- Beth Bohnert’s Cashmere Goats
- Flip Your Life community
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show!
We may even read yours on the air! ?
Success Story of the Week:
This week’s success story comes from Flip Your Life community member, Carla White!
Carla’s title for her success story forum post says, “I rebuilt and re-launched my website!”
Carla says,
“As I sat at my husband’s hospital bedside for an outpatient iron transfusion, I realized how very blessed that I am. God is so faithful. My motivation for branching out into online training is so that I can be financially able and physically available to do what I’m doing today. I just finished rebuilding and relaunching my website with the help of the awesome blueprint videos on how to build a WordPress site from scratch.
I tried to do this months ago before I joined Flip Your Life. I’ve always had the mindset that I can do anything I put my mind to. Well, that task proved to be a bit overwhelming and I ended up hiring a ‘professional.’ What she puts in quotation marks. That did not go well, but thanks to the support and encouragement of this community I recently fired her. While I lost a bundle of money in the process with the decision to part ways with her, I coupled it with the empowering do-it-yourself blueprint tutorials, and I’m now saving $100 per month. I’m counting this is a huge win because now, I have the peace of mind and ability to concentrate on creating digital products to grow this business and FLIP MY LIFE.”
Carla’s website: www.becompletelyfit.com
That is amazing, there’s so much to unpack in that success story!
She’s working on her online business so that she can be there with her husband during this treatment. She did roll up her sleeves and get after it, and now she’s saving money. Now, she’s gotten to a point where she can actually get her products done and actually get them for sale.
Let Carla’s success story be an inspiration to you no matter what you’re going through right now.
You can do this!
You can build your online business.
If you don’t think you’ve got the technical skills or you don’t think that you’ve got the experience with all the strategies and tactics, we have tons of training to help you and we have a community that will rally around you and give you support.
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:
Today’s can’t miss moment is heading down to Western Kentucky to visit my family and especially my 98-year-old great-grandmother.
I know what some of you guys were thinking, “You still have a great grandmother and you’re almost 40?” Yes. My family is very young, so I do still have a great-grandmother living. She’s our children’s great-great-grandmother.
She is not quite as spry as she once was, and her mind is starting to go a little bit since she is 98 years old. But we had a great time talking to her and just ask her a lot of questions about did she remember different things that happened in the past. Sometimes, she’ll say she did and sometimes, she says she didn’t, but it was still awesome just being able to talk to her and see her. It’s probably one of the last times I will have the opportunity to spend time with her, so I was very thankful for that.
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible 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 podcast, we help Teresa take her sheep shearing 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.
Shane: What’s going on, everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week! I am super excited for this interview for many reasons: One, this is one of our absolute favorite members. Two, she has got a niche that’s absolutely incredible, and I’m going to let her tell you about it – let’s just say it involves sheep.
I’m just saying, not a lot of life coaches running around the Flipped Lifestyle — we’ve got a lot of different people and a lot of different niches, but this one is definitely one of my favorites.
Coming to us live from North Dakota, today is Teresa Perleberg.
How are you doing, Teresa?
Teresa: I’m doing great! I’m excited to be here.
Jocelyn: Yes, we are excited to have you today and I have to say that North Dakota is one of the few places in the US that I have not been to yet and there’s probably a good reason for that because this is pretty freezing there right now, right?
Shane: What Jocelyn is saying is, we’re going to come to your house and just show up one day, and we’re going to hang out and if you’ve got a guest bedroom, we’re staying if we ever go to North Dakota.
Jocelyn: Maybe in the summer, but not in the winter.
Teresa: Yeah, you would love it here in the spring.
Shane: There you go, then we’ll come out in the spring. That’s happening. We’re doing it!
Jocelyn: Alright. Well, before we jump into the online business stuff, let’s talk a little bit more and tell people about your family, your background, and what you’ve been doing so far online.
Teresa: Okay. I live on a farm in North Dakota with my husband Jeff, and we have four kids. Their ages are 15, 17, 20 and 23. Some of them are at home. I homeschool the youngest two. We raise sheep, we have about 93 head of sheep and we have cattle, as well.
My business started in 2008. I started selling online on Etsy, then I started my own website. I started with selling just my art that I made — needle felted art. Then I designed kits on how to do the needle felting. I have about 13 kits so far and that really helped my business take off. I can only make so many of the art because it’s quite time-consuming.
Shane: So these are like boxes, what you’re saying, you actually send people kits and they can open them, and then do the needle felting. Right?
Teresa: That’s right. It has all the supplies in there and then instructions.
Jocelyn: I have to ask you a question. How did you get into needle felting? Is this something that you’ve always done? Is it something that you’ve learned?
Shane: On Etsy, you were, like, “Hey, I got an idea. I’ll take this wool from these sheep and I’ll stuff it in a box, and I’ll send it to people, and they will needle felt with me–” or were you looking around and going, “I’m the only needle felter I know. I’m going to create more needle felters in the world by selling stuff on Etsy!”
Teresa: I have a friend that did the needle felting and we had sheep and the wool here. I always knew I wanted to try and make money on the side. When I learned how I learned how in 2006, I had never heard of felting before.
Shane: And what is needle felting, exactly? Just tell our audience a little bit about what it is.
Teresa: You take the wool from the sheep and after it’s processed, which means it’s cleaned and combed out, it’s combed into roving. You just take that fluffy wool and there’s a needle that I use, it’s the felting needle and has little barbs in it. You ball up the wool and you stab the needle in. It pulls the wool into itself, and right back out again. It just keeps pulling it into itself and wool naturally has scales all over it, so it locks together. It just becomes more firm the more you poke it. Then once you have a basic shape, like a ball, you can add wool where you need it.
It’s like sculpting, just add more wool here and there. And you can make like the head of an animal separately, and you just poke right on it with the needle.
Shane: You can make statues and stuff out of this?
Jocelyn: Like a three-dimensional figure?
Teresa: That’s right, that’s what I do!
Shane: I love this show! Can I just say that I love our community? I’m serious! But like I say this all the time, there are definite needs for business coaches, life coaches and stuff like that and ad people and social media. But just hearing that someone makes money by shearing a sheep, and then turning their wool into a statue, that is the epitome of how the Internet has changed everything. It’s like, “You know, I got this idea but I don’t know if it’ll make money,” and I’m like, “Really? Well, I know this girl Teresa, and what she does is she cuts wool off a sheep, puts it in a box and let you make statues out of it.”
Jocelyn: Of course, I’ve had to go to your website, and these are so cute! I love these!
Shane: Jocelyn is literally ordering something from you right now as we’re talking about this.
Jocelyn: No, I think that my daughter would like this a lot actually. Yeah, this is super cool! And I’m learning something new today because I’ve never heard of needle felting.
Shane: And let me ask you this, too. This is actually a common thread we hear about a lot of people. We always say, first you make money by what you do, and then you make more money by what you know. So you started physically selling art and selling these kits on Etsy. But then when you came into the Flip Your Life community — which was a while back now, you’ve been a member for a long time– then you turned it into a membership community with courses like teaching people how to do this, right?
Teresa: That’s right, yeah. Last April I did that.
Jocelyn: Yes, there are seven billion people or seven to eight billion people on the earth and you are not the only person who is interested in needle felting.
Shane: That’s right.
Jocelyn: So, that’s a cool thing.
Shane: And you saw that. That’s what’s amazing! Tell us a little bit really quick about your membership now. What does that look like right now? How many members do you have and how has that grown for you so far?
Teresa: I opened the membership in April of last year. I did that because the kits that I sell are just for beginners. They’re just basic, they’re really easy. I had a lot of people that have completed those kits and wanted to learn how to do harder things like make a giraffe or more realistic, harder things. So, I opened up the membership and I have video courses in there where they can learn. Beginners can join as well as, and learn advanced techniques in there with the community, where they can talk to each other and ask me questions.
There’s 200 members right now.
Shane: Gosh! That’s amazing. You found 200 sheep needle felters.
Jocelyn: Who knew that there were 200 people who are interested in needle felting? There are probably hundreds, if not thousands!
Shane: — that we are going to find, that’s right. It is amazing! Someone who is listening right now is sitting around and they’re like… I’m just going to make something up, I’m looking out my window right now. We’ve got a 30-acre farm behind us. I’m looking across and I’m seeing a tree. And someone’s like, “Man, I could really cut that tree down, and I could carve that into a cane or something,” I don’t know what you carve them into; you’re whittling. Then they’re saying, “Man, then I could teach someone how to whittle,” and someone, someone is their car right now thinking, “Oh, nobody would ever pay for that!”
But then they hear this story and it’s like, “No, people are legit paying a membership to learn how to use wool to create statues.”
Jocelyn: And more importantly, they’re paying to be around other people who enjoy that because probably in their town, there may not be a whole lot of people who are interested in needle felting. But there are people online.
Shane: You’ve created a place where needle felters can find their peeps. That, to me, is just mind-blowing.
Jocelyn: That’s awesome.
Shane: How much do you charge for your membership?
Teresa: It’s $29.99 a month or $299.00 for an annual membership.
Shane: Perfect. Perfect. And I know some of those were annual or some of those are monthly, but let’s just think about that for everybody at home. If you had 200 monthly members paying you $30 a month, that could be like $6,000 a month. It just goes to show you, you can literally make thousands of dollars off of any idea if you just take action. I’m sure someone, if you had told them that idea, would be like–
Jocelyn: — and they probably did say–
Shane: — they’d probably be like, “Nobody is going to pay for that,” or maybe you even thought that. Did you ever think that before you did it? Who would pay for this?
Teresa: I did. Yes, I did.
Shane: And you just needed me and Jocelyn to grab you and pull you off the cliff with no parachute.
Jocelyn: All right, so let’s go back in time a little bit and talk about your ‘Why’. Why did you decide that you wanted to start doing something online? Why are you wanting to grow your business right now?
Teresa: Way back, when I first started it, I’ve always been able to stay home with my children. My husband has always worked extra hard so that I could stay home with them, and then homeschool them. That was very important to us. And there were times where he was working three jobs. He worked seven days a week, over time, we hardly saw him. He worked a night shift. He’s worked very, very hard for our family and so it was always my goal to try and come up with something where I could help out, but still be at home with my kids, and continue homeschooling them.
So the needle felting, I just took that and tried to grow it into a very helpful income and that has worked. My husband has quit his job at the factory. He’s no longer on the night shift. He was able to do that about four years ago and now he has a job where he’s home early afternoon. But now I’ve put him to work helping me with the business, but he enjoys that much better.
Shane: Wow, I seriously read that this morning, and Jocelyn and I, what we do is we take the kids to school, and we read the prep sheets for the interviews that we’re doing that day. Jocelyn was driving. I usually read through it, and then I give Jocelyn the bullet points. I seriously welled up, kind of, with tears when I read that in your story today because that’s something that we don’t talk about a lot, but we’ve had multiple members say that like, “I really want to help my spouse not work so hard.”
Jocelyn: And there are people out there who are working multiple jobs. Maybe it’s somebody listening to this podcast today, that they’re doing everything that they can to provide for their family. It’s like when I was growing up, my mom stayed at home. She was fortunate to be able to do that but because we needed extra money, my dad would often pick up extra jobs, so I know that there are a lot of people out there who are listening to this and thinking, “Wow, that’s me!”
Shane: And sometimes like we get really caught up because all the gurus and the people showing their mansions and cars and Lamborghinis, “I’m going in here to buy a Bentley,” you know, all that stuff, they think that’s the goal. No, the goal is, “My husband is working three jobs. Can he work one and stay home? Or could we work together, and do this full-time and be together more? Can we find a way to be all home at the same time?”
We know a lot of people. One of them I work first shift, the other one might work second shift and then they both sleep all night so they don’t see each other. Jocelyn and I, that was a very similar thing when we first got married, I was working all day. She was on the road a lot with a corporate job. We never saw each other. People would literally ask us, “How’s married life?” And we’d be like, “We don’t know yet. We haven’t seen each other since we got married.” Right?
Online business provides a path to change that dynamic, and you guys are just an inspiration and living proof that it’s possible. So we just want to say congratulations on everything you’ve done so far, first.
Teresa: Oh, thank you!
Jocelyn: Well, let’s talk about the road to getting to where you are today.
Shane: I’m going to just give you a little preview here for everybody. Teresa has got some great questions, so it’s going to be amazing.
Jocelyn: Well, let’s talk about what has been your biggest fear, confidence or mindset issue that you’ve had to overcome so far in your online business journey?
Teresa: When I was starting my membership, I wasn’t sure if anybody would join or if they’d be willing to pay the amount that I had put down. So, I started a Beta membership and had a lot of people join in that. I think there was at least 20 that joined.
Shane: What did you charge at first? Did you always charge this $29?
Teresa: I had done a course, just one course on making wool out of the sheep, and I offered the Beta membership to all the people that had taken that course. I offered them an annual membership at $100.
Shane: This is very interesting because a lot of people do this. They’re like, “Okay, if I can just get them to give me money once, give me money one time, everything will be okay.” And then when you got that first payment and you got those first 20 people — that’s like two grand by the way.
Jocelyn: Not a bad day.
Shane: Not a bad, bad day at the office, you know what I mean? But then, what was the mental shift going from that to, “Hey, charge these people $29 a month,” because I know is what we told you when you came in. It’s like, “No, you’re crazy. That’s worth way more than that, charge them $29 a month.” Did you think, “Would I pay for this? No one would pay for this.” Because a lot of people say like, sometimes we freaked them out when they come into the community, because we’re like, “No, you’re going to do this because it’s going to work,” and they’re like, “What?”
What was that like transitioning from, “Well, now will they pay me continuously for this?”
Teresa: Yeah. Well I started out with just $25 a month and I had a few join and then I was kind of wondering, and I had talked to you on a membership call and asked if I should wait and raise my prices until the new year or if I should raise them now and you encouraged me to raise them now. That’s when I raised it to $29.99, and that’s when just by raising my prices gained, I think it was close to 70 members just by doing that.
Shane: Then when you raised prices, more people joined? That’s incredible, that always happens. It’s amazing!
Jocelyn: It was funny when you were rehashing that member call because we answer a lot of questions on member calls.
Shane: A lot of questions.
Jocelyn: Sometimes I forget what people ask and all that kind of thing, but when you were saying, you were kind of going over that question, I’m like, “I already know what we said.”
Shane: Yeah, right? It’s so funny because that is a huge fear. I think that the reason that’s a fear is because you sit and you look at your price, and let’s say you want to go from 29 to 39 — which you might want to do actually by the way — but like let’s say you go from 29 to 39. The fear is, it’s not the fear of raising the price — it’s the fear of rejection.
A lot of us don’t like to toot our own horn, but when you raise your price, what you’re actually saying to the world is, “I am more valuable than this, and I need that to be recognized because I put a lot of effort into this, I put a lot of time into this, and I’m helping you do something you love and that is valuable.”
Jocelyn: And just know that no matter what your price is, there’s going to be somebody that says, “This is ridiculous and I’m not paying.”
Shane: Right, exactly, right.
Jocelyn: It really doesn’t matter what price you choose.
Shane: We have another member. Her name is Carolyn Lincoln. She has a website called playtobehave.com, which is about dog training. We love Carolyn, not only because she’s been a member for like three years now, but also, too, because we actually joined her membership because she teaches people how to train dogs. When we got our first dog we were, like, “What is this creature? What do we do with this?”
Jocelyn: We were pretty much the most clueless dog owners ever. She helped us do her dog thing. But she re-launched her membership, and changed her prices and everything, and someone literally took the time to write her a message and say, “This is not worth what you’re charging. I can’t believe you raised your prices because I would never pay for this.” She put it on Facebook, “I got my first hater. Does this mean I’ve arrived?” And we’re like, “Yes, it does!”
It was awesome because that person never would’ve bought anything in anyway. It could have been a dollar, and they wouldn’t have bought it. But what was so crazy about this whole concept of, when you charge what you’re worth, you’re going to get paid. Someone on that Facebook thread that was a friend of hers that didn’t even know she had a membership, and she was just doing that to talk to me and Jocelyn, they came on and said, “This person’s crazy. I went to your website, I looked at it and loved it and joined,” That hater made her money, and it’s just awesome that you’ve overcome that and you raise your price and you saw that success because it’s going to let you overcome those things in the future, too.
Alright, Teresa, the next thing we usually ask people when we kind of tackle some internal stuff, because we all have internal things that hold us back, but we’ve also got a lot of external things that hold us back. For example, time. Time is the enemy to all of us, we all only have 168 hours a week. We only have 365 days a year and you know, we got to get a lot of things done.
I was writing some notes down when you were talking earlier. A lot of people are like, “Man, I know I got a couple of kids, I just don’t have time to do this.” And I’m like, really? Because Teresa has four kids–
Jocelyn: Which she homeschools two —
Shane: She’s homeschooling two of them. She’s got 93 sheep. How many cattle you got? How many cows you got running around out there?
Teresa: We have fifty.
Shane: Alright. She’s got 50 cows, 93 sheep, four kids, a partridge in a pear tree. What are you doing? What are you out there doing? How do you manage all that time right now? And how do you do it?
Teresa: Well, my family has to help out a lot. My husband does take care of a lot of the chores and the things with the sheep, and he has taken over the shipping. I sell a lot of kits throughout the year and he’s taken over all of the shipping. And the kids will help. There’s a lot of things that go into the assembly of the kits that they can do and they’ve chipped in there. My daughter is really into the same things as me, and she’s very helpful as well, so they’ve all chipped in a little.
Shane: What an amazing way to overcome that obstacle, is to get your family involved. That’s not always possible, but you’ve got to sell it to them a little bit. I was thinking about yesterday, Jocelyn was going through Anna school assignments, and I was at basketball practice with Isaac. I got this text and one of the things said, “What does your dad or mom do for a job?”
Jocelyn: They were practicing writing sentences on this activity.
Shane: Yeah, they had to make up their own sentences. You flipped it open and Anna Jo wrote this amazing thing down. She said, “My mommy and daddy work at home. They have an online business.” And she spelled it, B-I-S-N-I-S, business. But what a powerful thing you’re doing for your kids to get them involved. What a powerful thing for them to see their whole family working together to move forward.
And I think that people forget, “Hey, I can just get other people involved. I can overcome this issue, we can find a way to do it,” because that’s what successful people do, they find a way to solve the problem, they don’t just talk about the problem. I love this quote. It says, “People with a wealth mindset don’t say, ‘I can’t afford that.’ They say, ‘How can I afford that?’ And people with a success mindset don’t say, ‘I don’t have time to do that.’ They say, ‘How can I find the time to do that?'” And that’s exactly what you did with this problem.
Jocelyn: Alright, since we’ve overcome all of these internal and external struggles to get to where you are today, what can we help you with to move forward even more?
Teresa: So, now that I have 200 members, I’m kind of nervous. I want them to stay and I want to make the membership as fun and engaging as it can be. I want them to just never want to quit but I’m running into some problems with, I need them to submit pictures. So they’re working on their, their needle felting project and they want feedback from me and so they need to submit pictures.
In order to do that in my forum, they have to reduce the picture size and a lot of them aren’t being able to figure this out and so I’m finding myself trying to help them with all these technical things. So then I’m just wondering if I should open up a Facebook group for them for the entire membership or if I should have that Facebook group just for a different tier or a different level. I’m not sure what to do there.
Shane: Okay. There is a couple, really deep questions in the single question you’re asking. Basically, you’re saying like what tools should I use to keep people and retain them, right? So this is a retention strategy. You’re getting them to participate, you’re getting them to submit a picture that gives you a chance to engage with your audience and it gives everybody in the community a chance to see what other people are doing, so it’s momentum.
Jocelyn: Let me ask you, are people using the forum otherwise? Like do you find that people were engaging aside from the technical issues?
Teresa: There are some that are engaging there. They asked me questions and I type them out the answer. I don’t feel like they know me very well. I would like to see them; I would like to talk to them a little better.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I would say there are probably two different options as far as like the platform. I think that you could probably find a picture resizing plugin of some type, or the alternative would be you could change the platform but I don’t know. I would be a little bit hesitant to do that just because you have so many members right now.
Shane: And you can also just do a Facebook group for that. You could also let people email you the picture and you start the post because you’re going to talk to them anyway.
Don’t get locked into a tool. Even if it’s like something that you see other successful people doing. We really like a forum-based membership because it’s so easy to throw up courses and talk to people, go back and forth. But you can overcome the technical problem 100 different ways. Don’t do it just because somebody else does it.
If the best way you can get people to participate is a Facebook group, then do it. If the best way you can do it is them emailing you the picture on the contact form, then do it. Do whatever it takes to get your members to participate with the lowest amount of energy. That’s what retention really does. Any retention strategy should lower the amount of energy that you are using to get people to pay their next membership fee.
Sales are where growth comes from. Retention is how you control your energy, your retention strategies. Whatever is easiest and the lowest energy for everybody, you and your members, that’s what you should do because that’s going to allow people to not only keep paying, it’s going to allow you to not have so many customer service tickets and headaches, and things like that.
Jocelyn: As far as them like getting to know you, I mean you could even do something as simple as what we do, which is twice a month– and you don’t even have to do it twice a month. That’s just the frequency that we do ours — but we do twice a month, we get on a google hangout and embedded into our community, and we answer questions. You could do that. You could also do a live demo. I think that would be something that would be really cool for your members. Maybe you could do a challenge.
Shane: Are you doing any live workshops or anything right now on a monthly basis for your people?
Teresa: I am not.
Shane: That would be a really interesting thing to do because you could do this: set it up like a thread, right? “Hey guys, click here and email me your work, and your question right now. I’m going to do a live workshop once a month.” Then what you do is, you put all those in like a PowerPoint thing, and you can pull up their picture on the live shot thing. You can record it. That way, if they can’t show up live, they at least get to go watch it. “Hey, this is Cindy’s felt needlework statue of a, I don’t know, a barn,” whatever, whatever you’re making. Right?
And then you can say like this is that you can go over it and be like, “If you just pulled your stitch through here, it would’ve done this,” or whatever. And then you can just interact with people live. Now you don’t have to create anything new. You just have to add a workshop once a month where everybody goes. That becomes like a community event. People are going to push toward it, look forward to it.
You’ve created easy participation because now they don’t have to resize pictures. They just email them to you. You know what I mean? And you could even use their pictures for blog posts, or you could set up posts weekly to talk about someone’s work, whatever. You’ve kind of eliminated all the problems, because I promise you your 200 needle felters, think of you just like you and our members think of us. “She’s the expert. I’d love to just spend 30 minutes with her a month, and ask her about this awesome hobby I’ve got.” If you give them that opportunity, they’re going to keep signing up month after month after month, because they don’t want to miss that call. What do you think about that?
Teresa: That sounds really good. I’m not sure about all the technical parts of it, and how to make it out.
Jocelyn: Ah, you can do it.
Shane: It could literally be this. Do you have a Facebook page?
Teresa: I do.
Shane: Okay, do a Facebook live. Just do a Facebook live for your people.
Jocelyn: And even if they’re not members, it’s okay. It’s a good strategy to try to get people to come in as members. And then also, one thing you could do to kind of differentiate members from non-members is that only members can ask questions on your Facebook lives. You could also do sort of like what we do on our podcasts. Maybe even do a Q&A with one of your members on the Facebook Live, and let them ask you questions even ahead of time and say, “Okay, today I’m going to answer Sandra’s questions about making this llama,” or whatever.
Shane: I want a felted llama, that would be amazing, actually. But think about that: all these people are seeing you on Facebook, or you email your list telling you’re doing it. They’re seeing you, they’re commenting, they’re doing all these things, but you only answer the member’s questions because they pay you. They are getting value, they are seeing what you literally do for people who pay you $29.99 a month, but you’re only talking to your members on the call so they don’t get to ask anything. Now they’re left wanting. They’re like, “Man, I want to do that. That’s cool.” So they go join. So this turns into a promotional opportunity, it turns into helping your members, so they keep paying because they’re the ones that get to ask questions. It’s just a win-win all the way around for you.
Jocelyn: Yeah, that’s exactly the reason that we went to members-only podcast when we first started. We didn’t have our membership yet, so we just listeners on the podcast. As we started to grow, we were like, okay, we have to gate this somehow because we have too many requests. And it’s basically an invite-only like people receive an email that says, “We would like for you to be on our podcast.”
Shane: This is also really low energy for you. In your question, you gave us some suggestions like, “Well, maybe I should start a Facebook group.” Well now you’ve got to manage a Facebook group. Or, “Maybe I’ve got to install 20 plugins and keep doing customer service to get them to do this.” Now, it’s just literally start a forum post, send an email to your members and say, “Hey, shoot me an email, attach a picture. I’m going to do a Facebook live next Sunday.” You do it for an hour, you’d answer questions and then you’re done. That’s all you’ve really done to yourself. And now you’ve created a system where people can say, “I look forward to this every month. I will keep paying.” Let me ask you this. Do you look forward to our member calls?
Teresa: I do, yes.
Shane: Yes. People will love that, too, because it’s a chance to have more access.
Jocelyn: A lot of times, people make it too hard. I feel like you’ve made it too hard.
Shane: Yeah.
Teresa: You’re right.
Jocelyn: Just give people what they want, and what people want is their questions answered.
Shane: Let me tell you my southeast Kentucky Caveman explanation. Your question was, “I can’t technically get people to resize these pictures, and I don’t know if I should do this and create this new thing.” So, really, it’s like your people want you to look at their pictures, and tell them what they’re doing right and wrong. That’s it. That’s all they want you to do. Do a Facebook live, look at their pictures, and tell them what they’re doing right and wrong. That’s it. It’s over and now you got better retention. Cool?
Teresa: Sounds good.
Jocelyn: We had another question that is about our upcoming live event in Nashville, so we definitely want to get to that before we go and if you are not coming to Nashville yet, you can head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/Nashville. We do have a few tickets remaining and you will be able to meet Teresa in real life and maybe she will even bring some needle felting projects.
Teresa: Definitely! I’m coming to Nashville in September. I need a goal or a project to complete leading up to the event. That’s the direction I need. I just don’t know what I should be working on. It would be exciting to have something completed when I get there.
- Start: commercial break
Shane: Hey, y’all, just a quick reminder before we get back to today’s interview, Flip Your Life Live, Nashville tickets are on sale right now and we only have a few left.
Jocelyn: We want you to join us and over 100 Flipped Lifestyle listeners, members and fans for a life-changing experience in Nashville, Tennessee this September.
Shane: You are going to have the opportunity to get help from us on your online business, build relationships with other family-focused entrepreneurs and take massive action toward your goals.
Jocelyn: Attending live events was the best thing we ever did for our online business and Flip Your Life Live is the game-changer you need to make your online dreams a reality.
Shane: We only have a few tickets left when we recorded this promo, so get your tickets fast. As soon as you hear this go to flippedlifestyle.com/nashville to order your tickets and join us this September at Flip Your Life Live.
That’s flippedlifestyle.com/nashville. We’ll see you there!
Now let’s get back to today’s guest.
- End: Commercial break
Shane: That is something for everybody listening that is going to Flip Your Life Live Nashville this September. The most powerful thing about a live event is you drop a place, a point in the future where you’re, like, “I’ve got to attack that point and get something done before I get there so that I can use it as a springboard for momentum after.” That’s how Jocelyn and I always view live events because you don’t want to show up and not have done anything or not have grown. You’re not waiting for September to grow your business. It’s your motivation now so you can be like, “Look what I did after signed up!” And then it’s your motivation moving forward to “I’m going to change our business.” Jocelyn and I went to a live event one time in the Philippines. We flew. I mean it was like– how long was that flight?
Jocelyn: It was like 14 hours or something crazy.
Shane: I remember when we were on the way back, we had no internet, we were over the Pacific Ocean. But before the event we had just blown up, sold courses, and sold all these products and we were like, “Man, we worked really hard because we wanted to show up at that event, ready to go.” We turned our seats toward each other. We sat in first class, so we had like a desk in between us and we turned them toward each other and we said, “Okay, what are we going to do now?” And we changed our entire business model to memberships. It was terrifying.
But that live event created the momentum and the excitement and we’d seen success stories, and we had talked to the event coordinators and the people that were hosting the event, and we were ready to go. But that would not have happened, all of the great things that happened after that event, would not have happened if we had not prepared before the event. So I think you’re asking the right question here. Your mindset is so spot on, and that’s where everybody needs to be as they’re moving toward Flip Your Life Live Nashville.
If you were a true beginner, I would say work on your infrastructure, get that in place, get your product done so that you can have that finished at the event. But because you already have products, you already have these kits, you already have courses, you already have members, I really think with this far out. I don’t know when this is going to air, but this is right now March. You’ve got quite a few months. I think you could add 50 to a hundred percent more members to your community if you just buckled down and focused totally on promotion because all you really need is to tell more people who are interested in what you sell about what you sell.
It’s not like you’ve got to create new courses or make new kits or shear more sheep or whatever you got to do. I don’t know what you do.
Jocelyn: Well, you might have to do that.
Shane: You might have to do that because you got to send the kit. I think right now your main focus in the community especially is, go look at the sales funnel training. Make sure your sales funnel is airtight and you’ve got a strategy, and you’ve got to plan. It doesn’t matter what the plan it is, you create it, you make it, you execute it.
Then go out and look at the ads trainings and get in there and say, “Hey, I’m going to reinvest a little bit of this money that we’re making to get more members. I’m going to do webinars every week until the live event. I’m going to send emails three times a week until the live event. I’m going to do whatever it takes to tell as many needle felters as possible about my membership.”
Jocelyn: And I think that there are even some really low hanging fruit items that you can do, too, and things like the Facebook lives. If you’re going to be doing them for your membership anyway, go ahead and make those available to the public like we talked about so that people might share it, they might watch it and say, “Oh, this is really cool. I want to join.” So that’s a really low hanging fruit thing that you don’t really have to work out that hard. It’s just something that you’re doing anyway, so I would recommend doing that regularly.
I would also go through all of your blog posts, and you could even hire somebody to do this if it’s not something that you think that you would be particularly good at. But I would make sure those are optimized for SEO — that’s search engine optimization– and you just want to make sure that the people who are coming to your site from Google, that they are able to opt-in, they are able to find out more information and they know, “Hey, there’s something for sale here.”
Shane: Yeah, I haven’t looked at your website recently. We might need to pull that up in the forum or something, let us kind of go through it. But I want to make sure, too, that you’re overtly selling. Jocelyn, I changed our website recently. If you’ve not seen it yet, head over to flippedlifestyle.com. We redid the entire site for the first time since 2014 and it’s completely changed. But we did two really simple things. We took our opt-in away from our homepage and on every single page of our site, the upper right-hand corner, it says, “Join now.” We are literally selling on every page of our website now. It’s not just get an opt-in and sell to them later. Even in our sidebar, above the fold, it’s, “We have a community. We teach real families how to start an online business. Join now.”
And in the first little period now that we’ve been evaluating, sales are way up it’s just happening more because every single person lands on our website now know we’ve got something for sale, so we’re harvesting that low hanging fruit and people are joining.
Jocelyn: And if it’s something that you’re just, like, “Whoa, I don’t want to do that,” or, “I have no idea what to do,” you can hire people on Upwork, different kinds of websites that do things like that, and for a relatively inexpensive price, you can hire someone to–
Shane: — put a button on your website and join in or whatever. Just selling, you need to be focused totally on, “I’ve got to tell the world that I have the best needle felting website on the planet.” “We have the most amazing community of needle felters on the planet, and I literally go get the wool for my kits, and put it in there, and that’s how much we love this business,” and you just need to tell them about it, and get more people to join.
Do not create anything except regular content right now. Don’t create anything new. Don’t change anything but making things more overt and just sell, sell, sell until we get there. Set a goal. I put it out in front of you. Can you double your membership between now and September? You know what I mean?
Jocelyn: Yeah, you can! Find an accountability partner. There are people right now in the Facebook group — you may already have one — but there are people in the live event Facebook group who are banding together and they’re holding each other accountable. They’re saying, “Okay, let’s meet once a week and make sure that we’re on track to meet these goals,” and I think that’s amazing.
Shane: We actually have another member in the community who sells cashmere goat fur. I’m not making this up, y’all! We are talking to a sheep wooling needle felter, and I’m trying to connect them to our goat cashmere fur seller.
Jocelyn: With whom we just talked to a few weeks ago.
Shane: With whom we just talked to on the podcast. Yeah. There are people in this space that could totally help motivate you and keep you moving forward. Do that, just focus on sales, focus on more members. Every day you wake up, I want you to say this to yourself. Look in the mirror and say, “How can I give my family a raise today?” Because this is not a job. You are not a W-2 employee who is locked into a salary. We have the power to give ourselves a raise every day.
Every time I sell a monthly membership, I look at Jocelyn and I say, “We got a raise today,” because they’re going to pay next month, too. Right? And give yourself a raise every day, do everything you can until we get to Nashville. Then we’ll talk about 5X and then 10X what you’ve already done.
Teresa: That sounds great.
Jocelyn: Well, that was a lot of information that we just threw your way.
Shane: This was a fun call, though. Anytime I get to talk about shearing sheep on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, it’s a good day.
Jocelyn: I love it! It’s amazing. We’re country people, we get it.
Shane: We know about that kind of stuff.
Jocelyn: We get a lot of cows across the street from us, and some chickens down the road too that run out.
Shane: Yeah, we’ve got to stop for the chickens every once in a while when we’re coming out to our farm.
Jocelyn: We’re just about out of time, but we want to know, what is one thing that you plan to take action on in the next 24 to 48 hours to make progress on your goals and get closer to flipping your life?
Teresa: I’m excited about getting the Facebook Live thing going and answering their questions live like that. That sounds like it will really work for me.
Shane: I’m challenging you to post that in the action plan forum as soon as we get off this call, and I want you to do that first Facebook Live for your community within 7 days. Got it?
Teresa: Oh! Okay!
Jocelyn: You got this, Teresa.
Shane: You’re going to figure it out. I’m putting the deadline on you, I’m going to hold you accountable, okay? Well, listen, this has been an absolutely amazing conversation, maybe one of my favorite interviews that we’ve ever done with one of our members because you just have such an awesome business, you’re such an awesome person and you’ve done so many awesome things, and I really want to encourage you that this is only the beginning for the Perleberg family. So thank you so much for coming on the show today, and thank you for being so transparent because what you said today is going to help somebody listening flip their life, too. Thank you so much!
Teresa: Thank you, it was great to be here!
Shane: What a great call to one of our Flip Your Life community members. We would love to have you in our Flip Your Life community as well. If you would like to become a member of the Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we can help you with your online business, too.
Jocelyn: Alright, next we are going to move into the Can’t Miss Moment segment of our show, and these are moments that we were able to experience that we might have missed if we were working at 9-to-5 jobs, still.
Today’s can’t miss moment is heading down to Western Kentucky to visit my family and especially my 98-year-old great-grandmother. I know what some of you guys were thinking, like, you still have a great grandmother and you’re almost 40. Yes. My family is very young, so I do still have a great-grandmother living.
Shane: She’s our children’s great-great-grandmother. So there’s like five generations still alive in the picture.
Jocelyn: And the cool thing about it is that she still lives at home. She has an adult son who lives with her and he helps her out. She is not quite as–
Shane: — spry as she used to be.
Jocelyn: –she once was, and her mind is starting to go a little bit, she is 98. But we had a great time talking to her and just ask her a lot of questions about did she remember different things that happened in the past. Some things she’ll say she did and some things, she says she didn’t. But it was still awesome just being able to talk to her and see her. It’s probably one of the last times I will have the opportunity to spend time with her, so I was very thankful for that.
Shane: As much as we love to share our Can’t Miss Moments with you guys, there’s something that we love to share even more and that is a success story from one of our Flip Your Life community members. So before we go, we wanted to share an actual success story from the Success Forums in the Flip Your Life membership.
This week’s success story comes from Flip Your Life community member Carla White, and Carla’s title for her success story forum post says, “I rebuilt and re-launched my website!”
Jocelyn: All right, Carla says, “As I sat at my husband’s hospital bedside for an outpatient iron transfusion, I realized how very blessed that I am. God is so faithful. My motivation for branching out into online training is so that I can be financially able and physically available to do what I’m doing today. I just finished rebuilding and relaunching my website with the help of the awesome blueprint videos on how to build a WordPress site from scratch.
I tried to do this months ago before I joined Flip Your Life. I’ve always had the mindset that I can do anything I put my mind to. Well, that task proved to be a bit overwhelming and I ended up hiring a ‘professional.’ That she puts in quotation marks. “That did not go well, but thanks to the support and encouragement of this community I recently fired her. While I lost a bundle of money in the process with the decision to part ways with her, I coupled it with the empowering do-it-yourself blueprint tutorials, and I’m now saving $100 per month. I’m counting this is a huge win because now, I have the peace of mind and ability to concentrate on creating digital products to grow this business and FLIP MY LIFE.”
Shane: That is amazing, that’s an awesome success story. There’s so much to unpack in that success story. She’s working on her online business so that she can be there with her husband during this treatment. She did roll up her sleeves and get after it, and now she’s saving money. Now, she’s gotten to a point where she can actually get her products done and actually get them for sale.
So, you know, let Carla’s success story being an inspiration to you no matter what you’re going through right now. You can do this! You can build your online business. If you don’t think you’ve got the technical skills or you don’t think that you’ve got the experience with all the strategies and tactics, we have tons of training to help you and we have a community that will rally around you and give you support.
Carla, we really appreciate you sharing that success story. It was super inspirational.
Jocelyn: We would love to help you write the success story for your online business. At the end of today’s show, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife where you could learn more about building and growing a successful online business with the help of our Flip Your Life community.
Shane: Before we go, we like to close every single one of our shows with a verse from the Bible.
Today’s Bible verse comes from Proverbs 11:3, and the Bible says, “Honesty guides good people. Dishonesty destroys treacherous people.”
Make sure you are always building an honest, online business that is full of integrity, and you treat people the way you would want to be treated. That is all that time we have for this week.
As always, guys, thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to Flip Your Life.
We will see you then!
Jocelyn: Bye!
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