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Getting started with your online business can be overwhelming for a number of reasons.
Do you find yourself creating your content, but unable to finish because of endless revising and refining?
Do things always get in the way of your time to work on your online business, even if you set a schedule for it?
Of course, we want our digital products to be good, or perfect if possible… but how perfect is perfect enough to stop and do the next step?
How long will that take?
Scheduling time to work on your online business is to be expected, but why doesn’t it always work?
These are just some of the reasons we feel stuck in our online business, and it can be very frustrating.
Well, hold your horses, y’all, because in this week’s episode we will help our guest tackle and overcome these issues to help him start and grow his online business.
We’re sure you’ll learn a lot in our brainstorm and it’s going to help you take your own online business to the next level too!
Our guest today is Dan Franz.
Dan is a general practitioner in Psychology and does mental health counseling. His wife is a teacher, and they have two children.
Dan did a group practice for 5 to 6 years working with and supervising other therapists, but recently switched back to doing his own one-on-one practice after the technicalities of having a larger practice deemed quite taxing.
Since the beginning of his mental health counseling, he started writing-related blogs to give him an online presence with the goal of leading people to his one-on-one practice.
This got him to acquire a list of about 800 people from his online writing, how awesome is that?!
And now, with his growing desire to help and reach more people, as well as have more time to spend with his family, Dan went on to take his business online (with an advantage of already having an existing following from his online presence).
With the majority of his digital product outline already done, he struggles with its completion due to constant revising and refining.
His work time for his online business also seems to get interrupted a lot, causing a delay in his progress.
But hey! Everyone needs a little help to get back in the right direction and get to that next step… sometimes even counselors need guidance. 🙂
So, join us as we help Dan overcome these setbacks — dealing with the overwhelm, prioritization, having the right mindset — as well as discussing strategies and direction on creating and selling his digital product.
You Will Learn
- Overcoming perfectionism
- Dealing with overwhelm in your online business
- Time management — setting a backup time and buffer time
- Having the right mindset
- How to sell your digital product online without overcomplicating things
- The importance of accountability and community
- The importance of getting audience feedback
Links and resources mentioned on today’s show:
- Dan’s Website
- Building A Story Brand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen by Donald Miller
- Flip Your Life Community
RELATED:
- FL 182 – How busy parents can find the time to start, build, and grow a successful online business
- FL 184 – Our TOP 7 Time management tips that actually work for busy entrepreneurs
- FL185 – We help Debi understand key strategies to successfully launch her online 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 is our favorite kind of success story, it’s someone’s first sale! We got an awesome success story in our Success Forums this week from FYL community member, Debbie Talbert, and the title of that success story post is, “My First Sale.”
Debbie says,
“I’m doing the happy dance over here in my office today because I made my first sale of my online digital self-coaching home study program. During my podcast interview with Shane and Jocelyn, they issued me the challenge of sending an email out to my list of 36 people announcing my Beta program. We have a paid Yes, plus two maybes. Proof: a teeny, tiny list of targeted people will include people who will say yes to what you have to offer.”
Debbie’s website: http://www.thesobercurious.com/
How awesome is that? No matter how small your list is, those are real people, they have real problems that you can solve. She took action and just said, “This is for sale here buy it,” and someone did. Use that as inspiration, guys, everyone listening to this right now, whatever you’re trying to sell online, whatever it is, no matter how big or how small your list, put it out there. Let people have an opportunity to say yes so that you can make your first sale or your next sale, too, just like Debbie did.
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 Isaac’s one-on-one basketball lessons.
Recently, Isaac has fallen in love with basketball, which makes my heart happy because I’m a Kentucky Basketball Fan. He takes his ball to school every day. He’s out in the garage before anybody else wakes up, dribbling and trying to learn how to dribble. And recently, we just finished Upward Basketball, which is a Christian youth organization.
They do basketball leagues around the country. He loved Upward, and he actually wanted to keep playing when Upward was over. We decided to sign them up for like a travel team, but all the other kids are older than him on this travel team, and they’re all a lot better — they’re just really good. They’re more experienced and Isaac was feeling kind of bad, he was like, “Man, I just wish I could dribble as good as them, I wish I could shoot as good as them.”
And for those of you who know me, I’m a football guy, not much of a basketball guy. And if you’ve got kids, you know how hard it is to teach your own kids anything. They don’t listen as good as they listen to other people. Jocelyn and I decided that we would get Isaac some one-on-one basketball lessons. We hired a local coach and he has been working with Isaac one to two hours a week, whenever we can pick up a session.
And the improvement has been just dramatic! Isaac just loved going and watching this guy coach and work with him. He can already shoot better, he could already dribble better, he already has more confidence, and I can’t wait to take him to his first practice tonight, after these one-on-one lessons.
Anna Jo also takes one-on-one gymnastics lessons! The reason this is a Can’t Miss Moment is because our online business not only gives us the time to be able to do things like this for our kids, but also all these doors and opportunities are open to us now, all of which might not have been possible if we had not started, built and grown our online business.
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 to the podcast right now? Check out the transcript below.
Jocelyn: Hey, y’all! On today’s podcast, we help one of our Flip Your Life members take their online business to the next level.
Shane: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams.
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 everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you as always this week. We are super excited to have another Flip Your Life community member on the podcast today so that we can help them take their business to the next level.
Let’s welcome Dan Franz to the program. Dan, how you doing, man?
Dan: I’m doing great. Really excited to be talking to you guys today!
Jocelyn: All right, well we are very excited to talk to you today, Dan, and before we get going, let’s tell everybody a little bit about you, your background, and your family.
Dan: Sure. Right now I have a mental health counseling office. And I just switched back, we were a group practice for quite a while. Probably about five or six years and I never wanted to be anybody’s boss. But I found myself supervising five or six therapists and taking care of their billing and supervising and everything. And just this year I have finally said, you know what, it’s time for everybody to go off and do their own thing and that’s what I’m going to go do.
And so I’m back down to just me helping people every day while trying to work on a greater online presence and to create a product, a series of products that will help people, but also hopefully get me out of the office that one-to-one, dollars-for-hours insurance, billing, kind of day to day work. So that’s what I’ve been working on now. With the hopes that my wife’s a teacher, she is a reading specialist at our local school.
And you guys know it’s not an easy field to be in these days. So it’d be great if I could do something with some online work that she could move on from that and wind up doing something she’s more passionate about. She’s creating some books online and trying to help people that way as well.
Shane: It’s amazing. You say you realized later on you’re like, how did I end up managing all these people? We actually say that, too. When you start any kind of business, you’re thinking about you own the business and you’re doing your thing and you’re making your money and you’re doing all this stuff. Then you’re looking around. You’re going, “Whoa, all these people are around me now,” and it’s kind of jarring.
Jocelyn: It gets a lot more complicated. You know, you think that it’s all fun and games when you can hire people to theoretically do a lot of the work for you, but then what you don’t take into account is all of the difficulties of working with other people. This is something that we are struggling with right now, just trying to figure out how do we become better managers because it’s not really something people teach you. Even though I have a degree in management.
Shane: Maybe you actually should’ve learned this better.
Jocelyn: I’m not sure it really prepared me.
Shane: You think of yourself as whatever your profession is. Jocelyn and I think of ourselves now as coaches who help families changed their life. Just this morning we’re talking about, “Man, if we could just get to the point where we’re only talking to people every minute of every day and helping people. But wait a minute, someone’s got to pay the bills and we have to manage our content and we have to lead our team and we need these people to help us take it to the next level because it’s hard to get there if you don’t, or you have to decide to step back.” But it’s just like, “Be careful what you wish for,” people. You know what I mean? Because it’s just crazy.
Dan: It’s funny, we were just talking about that this morning. See, my wife was asking me as we talked about goals and ideas and where this was going to go. She said, “Well, who’s going to do all that because you’re busy seeing people in the practice. How are you going to build all this online content and manage it?” And I said, “You know, it’s a good question. We’re going to have to put together a team to do that.”
Shane: “Luckily I’m talking to Shane and Jocelyn this afternoon. We’ll go over all that together,” yeah?
Dan: Exactly.
Shane: It is, man. You can’t do it alone. Even if you want to do it alone. That’s the hard part about it. But once you get over the initial hump, it’s easier. And it is really rewarding to work with people. We just got a message the other day from someone about one of our recent podcasts, and it was really positive and they were thanking us and saying, “Wow, this was awesome, and I read this post, and I did these things, and I talked to so and so on your customer service team and I joined the community.”
All these steps went along the way and I actually forwarded it to everybody who works for us and not to just say, “Hey, good job writing that post,” or, “Well, done editing that podcast,” or, “Way to go on that sales call,” or, “Good job in the membership serving this person.” It was more just like, “Guys, this is what it’s all about. This is why we’re doing it, and this is why we’ve brought this team together.” And I think that once you kind of have that mentality, it’ll make it a lot easier to kind of put the pieces together for your online business.
Jocelyn: Alright Dan, so you have a successful practice, which we talked about already, and at this point, we want to know what really brought you into online business. What was appealing to you? Why was it better than maybe trying something different in your practice?
Dan: I really enjoy what I do day to day. You know, I get to sit there for 45 to 60 minutes and help people individually, their families, whatever it might be. But it gets to be taxing. Billing insurance companies, having to deal with them is no fun whatsoever. But I also feel like I want to help more people in a bigger way.
I just wrapped up a course of studying for my doctorate here a couple months ago and that was one of the things that kept coming to me as, “Man, there are so many more people that need to know this information that I’m studying.” And the way to do that is online. I can only meet with so many people each day in my office. Going online gives me an opportunity to impact more people in a greater way and so that’s really what I want to try doing.
Shane: There’s no comparison in the current day and age than how much you can scale except for online business. You just can’t. The things that we can do and the people that we can touch, it would’ve been impossible ago unless you were on tour, doing a huge stadium tour or something and speaking. It always blows our mind when we get messages from other countries, and just other places, and people who sometimes don’t even really speak English, but they’re like, “Hey, I figured out your podcast. Started listening to it and I’m learning from it even though I don’t understand everything.”
That’s what you’re really looking for in your counseling. You want to counsel the masses and go beyond the one-on-one. What kinds of counseling do you do, exactly?
Dan: So I’m a general practitioner, but I also have a license in substance abuse so I do a lot of substance abuse work. But I just completed my studies for a specific kind of counseling that has a lot to do with meaning and positive psychology, like meaning in life and everything like that. So I’m really excited to share that knowledge.
You said that you wanted to spend more time with your family, wanted to maybe be home from the office a little bit more as well. How old are your kids? You got kids?
Dan: Yes, I’ve got a 15- and 13-year-old.
Shane: You’re in that age, too, where you really start thinking about your kids because when your kids are 13, 15, gosh, you only have four or five years left with them, really? And they’re going to be going to college or moving out or whatever.
Dan: Yeah, they’re happy to remind me of that. Pretty frequently. “Dad, you’ve only got a few years,” seriously, you never come back.
Shane: Seriously, it’s unbelievable. This will be a great time to get that online business growing because they won’t realize it, but if you can spend those last few years enjoying with them, and having plenty of free time, they’ll look back at that and go, “Man, that was awesome. I didn’t get it then, but I do now.”
Dan: Yeah, and the goal of going out. I left a management position, opened up my own practice. Right. So that freed up more time. But definitely, the goal is to have more time to make it to soccer games, to take fun trips, to do enjoyable things and then go visit them when they’re in college where I don’t have to be in the office all the time.
Jocelyn: Alright, well, let’s talk a little bit about what has been your biggest fear? What has been a confidence issue that you’re struggling with or maybe a mindset struggle that you have had to overcome so far, trying to bring this online?
Dan: I think I’ve conquered a lot of fear over the years. You know, I’ve had an online presence, I did a lot of writing a couple of years ago and then took a break from it and just started back up again. A lot of people are appreciating it. I’ve got a good list of people that are receiving our weekly updates. I’m OK there, I think the thing that I’m struggling with right now is just putting my product together, putting this course together, getting the membership site set up.
I’m noticing a tendency, “Man, I want everything to be perfect,” and I’m outlining and re-outlining and re-re-outlining, and doing it over again and just stalling on getting it done. So I’m pushing myself to actually get the product done.
Shane: That is a big mindset problem that people don’t even realize they’re having. Not just the perfectionism, but “Can I put all this together?” That’s really the root of the question when people think, “Oh, I’ll start a website, blog, people sending me money.” If only it was, right? And if you look at that, that’s one of the things that make people kind of give up sometimes that we see is that they look at all the things they have to do.
Most of them are simple, but none of them are easy. And if they look at all that, and the doubt starts to creep in, like, “When can I do this? Am I even capable of putting this together? If I don’t know something, can I find someone to do anything?” It’s amazing that you bring that up because I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about that overwhelm as a mindset issue that most people get hung up on here on the podcast. Because it is overwhelming. It’s still overwhelming to us. Let me tell you all out there, it gets worse. The bigger your business grows. The more complex it gets. There’s going to be things that you have to add to it all the time.
Jocelyn: Nobody has a class for this. You just have to figure it out. And sometimes it’s hard. I’ve had some of the same issues. I let things like that hold me back and usually, it is basically self-doubt. So you doubt yourself for whatever reason, something in your mind says you can’t do this, and it’s basically just a stalling tactic so you don’t get things done.
Shane: You’re just like paralyzed. We still go through this. We were sitting at the table the other day, Jocelyn was over at the bar in our kitchen on her computer and I was sitting at the dining room table. We were just working in the kitchen that day, I don’t know what we were doing. And I sat there for a minute, and we had a lot of personal stuff going on, like our dog got killed the other day. It was terrible.
So that was overwhelming us, and then we were trying to work and we had taken the kids to school, and they were upset. Then we got home and I had this big list of things and we’ve got this nasty email from a hater and like all these things happen. And I sat there and I kind of blinked. You ever do that when you kind of zone out and you just blink?
I was like, “I’ve literally been sitting here for 25 minutes staring at my computer.” My brain just locked up all of a sudden because of the overwhelm, and I know that people listening, everybody listening, sitting there nodding their head right now going, “Yep, that was me, like, on Tuesday.” And every stage of the game you’re going to come up with that point where you freeze, and you need something to kind of breakthrough that mental barrier or you’re going to quit.
And that’s what we stress in the community is, be accountable. Write an action plan. Celebrate successes. Do anything. It’s like writer’s block. If you get stuck, just start writing your name and see what happens.
Dan: You just gotta push through.
Shane: You’ve got to push through because we all do go through that.
Jocelyn: I love that Shane mentioned the community because that’s a great place just to say, “Hey, I’m stuck in this. Help me get through it,” and people can come on and say, “OK, let’s get this done by this date.” For me, knowing that I have a deadline for something, that helps a lot.
Shane: But let me ask you something real quick before we go onto our next segment here. You’d said you’ve had an online presence for a while, and you’ve got a list of people who are keeping up with your updates, but you’re not monetized. Right? You haven’t monetized yet. So why? How long have you been online, first of all, and building your list, and then why haven’t you monetize jet so far?
Dan: Well, the funny thing is I’ve been doing this probably since I started the practice. Because the monetization, that goal was to bring people into the practice. In a way, it was kind of monetized, but it wasn’t monetized online.
Shane: It was the time-for-dollars, more advertising and then marketing.
Dan: Yeah, there you go. That’s exactly what it was. But you know, I did, I built the blog and then when the practice got so big and so busy, I felt like, well I don’t need to be writing anymore because I’ve got people coming in the door. And now I’m back at it because I realized, well I don’t want to be in the office all the time I’d like to do this online. I probably got a list of maybe, I think the last count was around 750-800 people.
Shane: Oh Wow. That’s great. That’s awesome!
Dan: Yeah. I’m kind of starting with that. I feel really blessed that there it is right there.
Shane: Our first list was only like 200 and something people. We literally almost replaced one of our salaries in a single month when we started marketing to it.
Jocelyn: That just means that there are people out there who want what you’re offering, and there are people who are interested in what you’re doing. So, you just need to solve a problem for them.
Shane: I can’t tell you how many people come to us and they’re like, “Yeah, I’ve got this idea, and I think it would work.” And we’re like, “OK, are you online?” They’re like, “Yeah, I’ve had a website for a couple of years.” And we’re like, “Oh really? Are you getting traffic?” “Yeah, I have people read my stuff. I got like a thousand emails,” and we’re like, “What are you doing?”
This is like a very common thing. That’s why our general focus is always product first when we go into any coaching situation because we’re like, if you just had something to sell, people will buy it. So that’s what we’ve got to do is get that into focus.
Jocelyn: Alright, Dan, let’s jump into talking about what outside influences or obstacles have you had to overcome so far in your journey to come online? Things like time, technology, maybe people issues. What are some things that you’ve had to deal with so far?
Shane: What externally is holding you back?
Dan: I think a big one for most of us, but certainly for me is time right now. You know, I spend three long days at the beginning of the week in my office seeing people and helping people. Thursday, I go teach two courses at the local college. So I’m doing that, preparing for that Thursday. So by Friday, I set aside Friday, that’s my day to work on this and knock it out, and wouldn’t you know it, every Friday something comes up that derails me.
I’m going to plan for four or five hours to really work on it. And before I know it, you know, I’ve only got a half hour left because other things have taken over, so it’s really the time factor is really holding me back and that’s a simple solution, I just need to make sure I’m doing it. Got to set aside the time, got to get focused on it.
Shane: It’s funny you say that, too, because how you said it, I’ve just got to do it. I think with all of us, because we hear all these motivational-type guru type people say like, “You just got to take action. You just gotta do it.” Heck, we say that. You know what I mean? Really, what had happened is when you see some system is failing, you have to change something.
A really great example of this is Jeannette Stein, a member of our community who could not find the time to get her online business going. When we first started coaching her before she quit her job, she was like, “I just can’t find the time to do it. I’m trying to do it at night.” And we’re like, “Well, then, you have to find a different time.” If you go three weeks in a row and that Friday keeps getting overwhelmed on you, you’re going to have to find a different time because that’s not working.
Jocelyn: And I wonder, are you being really intentional about your time? Are you closing out everything else? Is it really a priority for you, and I would really dig deep and look inside your head and say, “Is it a priority for me?” Because if you have notifications turned on in your phone, it’s probably not a priority for you.
Shane: Yeah, exactly. Are you really closing yourself off?
Jocelyn: If you let people come and interrupt you that’s not an emergency, it’s probably not a priority.
Shane: Here’s the thing, it may not be a priority that day and that’s OK. There are days where certain things are not a priority. Today, for us, we’re not checking our email today. We will not be in the Flip Your Life community today because we will not be doing anything else today, but recording podcasts with members and we have to go to our kids’ school to read.
We have our notifications off; we have phones off. We told our assistant, don’t tell us anything that’s going on. We have to focus on these things.
Jocelyn: Unless something is on fire.
Shane: Unless something is literally on fire, and the alarm is going off, we can’t because if we don’t record our podcast, we don’t have a business. I just wonder if there’s a different day, a different time or something else. I think people say, “Man, something always comes up,” but really you have so much control over your schedule and your time, that you don’t even realize, are you willing to move it and make it that priority?
Dan: You guys, I love that! That is a huge nugget of wisdom right there in that intentionality, and I can look at it and just admit, no, I’m not as intentional as I should be. With turning off notifications and setting everything else aside. I’ll look at client e-mails, and this fire needs to be put out, or this needs to be taken care of, but you’re right. That intentionality, I need to find that the next Friday morning that there’s just nothing scheduled.
Shane: Maybe Friday is your day that you get all that out of your mind, and you change your time to Sunday night from 8 to 12 or something. You have a 168 hours. You can pick whichever ones you want and if you find something that is working, don’t just keep beating your head against something that’s not.
Jocelyn: And here’s another thing I tell people a lot when it comes to time: set a backup time. Because we’re human. Things do happen sometimes even if we are being intentional about our time, sometimes emergencies come up. So set a backup time. That way, “Oh, well, I can’t work on it right now because something really important came up, but I can work on it during my backup time.”
Shane: Time is the biggest enemy of us all. Time is the biggest struggle. We hear it from every single person that we’ve ever talked to, and everybody that’s listening right now, you’re probably saying the same thing, like, “I’m not fine at the time.” Even this morning, this is so funny about backup times.
This morning we got in the car, and we were taking our kids to school. We got our day planned, right?
Jocelyn: We were actually on time for once.
Shane: We were actually on time for school. Like, we’re intentional. We’ve got these podcasts that we got to record. Every dollar notifications are off. But there’s always an unforeseen thing. Anna Jo, we get to school and she goes, “Daddy, I can’t go to school. We need to go back home.” And Jocelyn’s like, “Why?” And she goes, “I kinda forgot to put on shoes.”
Jocelyn: So my kid has no shoes on, and we’re almost to school.
Shane: She has no shoes on, and we look back and she’s just grinning at us like, “Sorry!” We live out in the country. We live in rural Kentucky and we live out in the farmlands. We had to drive all the way home, drive all the way back. But one thing we have learned over many years of trial and error is, not only do we have backup time, we have buffer time, so we have like 30 minutes in between everything we put on our calendar, just in case to keep us from getting derailed.
This is something we all struggle with and nobody’s got it totally figured out. But if we all just try to do a little better, we’re going to find the time to make our lives change.
Jocelyn: Okay, we talked about our internal struggles, our mindset, issues and also the time management issues. Let us know now, how can we help you take your business to the next level and flip your life? What is the biggest question you have right now in your online business?
Dan: I think for me it’s– I’ve got the product formulated, I’ve got the outline, I’m going to get it written. I’m going to set aside the time and do it. My biggest question, I think is, then what? And I think that’s all those technical things. I’ve got the website, where do I put the product, where do I put the course? How do I set up the membership form?
- 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.
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Alright. So basically, whenever you’re building any kind of product or service or whatever online, there’s really only a couple of things that you actually need, and we’re going to talk more generally and then kind of dial down into the tools, because tools are tools. If I buy a Black and Decker hammer or I buy another brand of hammer, because I’m not a tool guy and I don’t know anything about hammers, but I’m still going to be able to hammer the nail. It’s a big piece of metal hook to a wooden handle, right?
Don’t get too caught up in what exact tools you need it. The only thing you need to run a membership site or to run any kind of business is you need an audience, you need content, and you need a way to deliver and protect your content. All you have to really figure out is, OK, I’ve already got the website done, I’m going to create a product. What is it going to look like? Is it going to be audio, is it going to be text, is it going to be video?
Jocelyn: And the best way to find that out, my friend, is to ask your audience! You have 700 people right there asking.
Shane: They may want PDF. We have a member of our community who runs an entire membership, and the whole lead in to their community are PDF products. People think you have to have video courses and things like that. Not necessarily, it depends what your audience wants to consume.
Jocelyn: But ask your people. They will talk to you, probably not a lot of them, but enough of them to matter.
Shane: When you decide what you want to do from a content perspective, all you have to do is say, how am I going to post this, and how am I going to protect that? You can do that in two ways. You can put protective software just on WordPress, and you can just make a page and post your videos on one page and say, “Here’s all my courses!” You can just like click a checkbox, and it will protect it and require a membership-like Login.
Or you could do what we do. You can start forums. We have forums that are set up so people can go talk about all of their issues, all their problems, celebrate successes, holding each other accountable. But we just use the forums. We post our courses in our forums and the same thing. We open up the WordPress editor, we click a little checkbox that says, “Only people with premium access can get to this.”
If you just pick like a membership plugin, like Wishlist or Paid Membership Pro, you could actually just do it right now on your website. You install that plugin and then when you create the page you can say, “Protected.” You set up another page where people can log in and either just redirect it the right to that page.
Don’t get too confused on, if you have to have some fancy tool or company or anything like that. You really just need a way to take a payment– PayPal works, Stripe works. Then you need a way to protect your content, which you need some kind of membership plugin.
Jocelyn: And if all that stuff sounds super overwhelming, there are people all over the world who do this type of work for very little money because currency is different in different parts of the world. You can generally find someone to install all this stuff for you for very minimal cost.
Shane: It’s like your money in your house. You could just get an old school safe with a three-button combination, and stick it behind somewhere, and keeps some extra cash in it. It doesn’t have to be so complicated.
Jocelyn: And just don’t let it become an excuse. That’s what I was trying to say earlier. Don’t say, “Oh, well that sounds too complicated. I’ll just keep writing content and hope somebody buys something even though I’m not selling anything.”
Dan: Right, right!
Shane: Yeah, we had a member one time and they were like, “I just can’t figure out the protection and the plug, and this, that and the other and I don’t want to hire anybody.” I was like, “Look, here’s what you do, get a PayPal button, click it. When they give you the money, redirect them to a page that’s not even protected. Half the people won’t even be able to find it anyway. Name it something like, ABP4Z123three@mywebsite.com or whatever,” and they did it. They sold this for like a year.
People would go to their sales page, they would click their buy button, the PayPal button, they would send them money. Then the redirect would just go straight to that page, but it was unlisted and no index and nobody even could ever find it. The page was on their website open, and nobody even knew it, but they wanted to charge for it and they couldn’t figure out the protection software.
We were like, “OK, can you figure out the PayPal button?” “Yeah, I got that part figured out.” “Start taking money and figure out the other stuff later.”
Dan: That’s awesome, you guys. That’s crazy.
Shane: Yeah, seriously. A lot of our opt-ins are not massively protected or anything. I just made a page and put no index, and then when people opt-in, we just redirect them there. So many people are really close-fisted with all their stuff. They really want to build a fortress around all that they’ve got and we’re like, “No, man, it’s all cool. Just send it out there.”
Try to make it as least complicated as possible in your brain, and do that even if somebody else is doing something differently because it doesn’t matter what they’re doing, it matters what you can do. Whatever you can make happen, that’s what you should do, and that’s what you got to do next just to get your product for sale.
Dan: That’s great. That’s great stuff.
Jocelyn: That is the beauty of the community, again, is that you can go in and say, “OK, this is my goal. This is my action plan, this is when I’m going to plan to have this done,” and there are people in there that can hold you accountable and you can update them and they will ask you how are things going. That is my favorite part about our community, is just that there is built-in accountability right there, and you can go in and say, “Hey guys, this is what’s up. I need help.”
Shane: Do you have your courses recorded and stuff, or you just have the outline done?
Dan: Not yet, that was one of the questions I had again. Over-complicating the equipment of, how do I want to record this? I’m probably using that to stall, trying to figure out what I need to do to record it.
Shane: Are you using a microphone right now? Or are you using just your computer? What are you using right now to talk?
Dan: Just using my smartphone.
Shane: OK, is it up to your ear, or you got like headphones in?
Dan: Nope, it’s up to my ear.
Shane: Okay, why don’t you just get a tripod for your phone, and plug it in and record yourself doing your courses?
Dan: That sounds way too easy.
Shane: I know right? You sound great right now. You’ve probably got an iPhone or an android, and they have high definition cameras on them. Don’t overcomplicate it. Just record yourself doing what you want to do.
If it’s a PowerPoint, then download Camtasia, which is a simple program, costs 100 bucks, and it can screen capture your PowerPoints for you, and just record it. I’ll even go a step farther, plug the mic into your computer and go to YouTube, and just broadcast them on a private thing and download that, and you’ve got your video done and just use your Webcam.
I have friends, man, they’ve got like $10,000 in equipment, and they’ve got cameras and they’ve got lighting, and they got microphones. I’m like, man, me and Jocelyn got $50 microphones we’d bought six years ago. We’re still here.
Jocelyn: We’re sitting at chairs in our bedroom.
Shane: I’m sitting in a chair.
Jocelyn: I have a laptop in my lap. I got my pair of headphones that I got with my iPhone 4, and I’m still using them on this thing. This is not rocket science guys. Like I said, it’s all simple. It’s not easy, but it really is. We overcomplicate the issue because we think we’ve got to be something. But if you sound good and you look good, it’s okay!
Jocelyn: And it’s content your audience wants, that’s a very, very important.
Shane: People won’t care. People just want the solutions to their problem. I’m reading this amazing book right now by Donald Miller. It’s called, “How to Build a Story Brand,” or something. It’s a great book, everybody should read that book. It’s basically like, people come into your website and you’re like, “OK, well, I’ve got to have a big picture of me grinning in a suit, and I got to have my name in lights and–” no one cares about you. They don’t care.
Does anybody come in for counseling come in and really care about you, or do they care about getting their problems solved?
Dan: They want their problems solved, you’re absolutely right.
Shane: You don’t have to be up on stage and your counseling sessions, you’re probably just sitting in a chair across from somebody, sipping on coffee. Why not do that in your courses and your trainings? Just do the same thing. Just record it, man. My Facebook lives and YouTube lives, I’ll tell Jocelyn I was so frustrated about making PowerPoints and stuff for presentations.
I actually bought an iPad pro for this specific reason, so I can plug it in and use it as a whiteboard and just be on camera, I’m just going to write stuff and I got messy handwriting. I just want it to be easy. I want to tell people what they need to know and I want to move on.
Jocelyn: And not one person so far that I know of has said, “Oh, that is so unprofessional.”
Shane: “I cannot believe you did not spend eight hours on a PowerPoint.” And they don’t do it, man, because they just want the answer to their problem. And if you can do that, you’ll make money online. Stop waiting. Just figure it out.
Dan: Absolutely.
Jocelyn: All right. This has been an awesome conversation, I think for everybody including us, because we get stuck on these things even today. Thanks for your great question. Before we go Dan, we just want to know like what is one thing that you are going to take action on in the next 24 hours to make progress on your goal and get closer to flipping your life?
Dan: Yeah. So I’m definitely going to complete that outline in just by the end of this weekend, and start recording. Set aside the time, make the time and quit over-complicating it and get the recordings done.
Shane: How much of the outline do you have done?
Dan: A good portion of it. I would say most just refining it right now.
Shane: Here’s what I’m going to challenge you to do. Stop refining. Don’t write any more on that outline. I want you to go make what you’ve already wrote down. Just go create it. Go create the first part and get it for sale. Someone will probably buy it, but while you’re making the second and third parts that you’ve not even thought up yet.
Jocelyn: I would also encourage you to, at the very least, send an email out to your list and say, “This is what I’m thinking about. Do you have any feedback? What would you like to see me create more content about?” I think even just asking that one simple question could really help you as you move forward.
Shane: And as those answers come in, I want you to make a recording this week just because it’s just writer’s block right now. We need to get you unstuck. Get your first course done. Even if it’s just you onscreen talking about it, and let’s get it for sale or at least get it up for an opt in, and let people start consuming that content instead of just refining and refining even more. Okay?
Dan: Done. Going to do it.
Shane: Well, listen Dan it’s been a great conversation, man. I know you’re an action-taker. You’ve done some great things with your business, your entrepreneurial. I know you’re going to take this to the next level, and you’re going to go out there and help a bunch of people with your online business and I just wanted to thank you again for being on the show, being so transparent and open.
We all struggle with these things and it’s good to talk about them out in the open because we all don’t do that enough, so we really appreciate you Dan.
Dan: Hey, you guys, this was an awesome conversation. Thank you!
Shane: Super call today with one of our Flip Your Life community members. We would love for you to be a member of our community as well. If you would like to join our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife, and we can show you how to join today.
Jocelyn: It is now time to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment. These are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our normal 9-to-5 jobs.
Shane: This week’s Can’t Miss Moment is my son, Isaac’s one-on-one basketball lessons.
Recently, Isaac has fallen in love with basketball, which makes my heart happy because I’m a Kentucky Basketball Fan. He takes his ball to school every day. He’s out in the garage before anybody else wakes up, dribbling and trying to learn how to dribble. And recently, we just finished Upward Basketball, which is a Christian youth organization.
They do basketball leagues around the country. He loved Upward, and he actually wanted to keep playing when Upward was over. We decided to sign them up for like a travel team. But all the other kids are older than him on this travel team, and they’re all a lot better. They’re just really good. They’re more experienced. Isaac was feeling kind of bad and he was like, “Man, I just wish I could dribble as good as them, I wish I could shoot as good as them.”
And for those of you who know me, I’m a football guy, not much of a basketball guy. And if you’ve got kids, you know how hard it is to teach your own kids anything. They don’t listen as good as they listen to other people. Jocelyn and I decided that we would get Isaac some one-on-one basketball lessons. We hired a local coach. He has been working with Isaac one to two hours a week, whenever we can pick up a session.
And the improvement has been just dramatic. Isaac just loved going and watching this guy coach and work with him. He can already shoot better, he could already dribble better, he already has more confidence, and I can’t wait to take him to his first practice tonight, after these one-on-one lessons.
The reason this is a Can’t Miss Moment is because our online business not only gives us the time to be able to do things like this for our kids, Anna Jo also takes one-on-one gymnastics lessons, but it also gives us the money to be able to afford them so we can help our kids have that unfair advantage, get that leg up on the competition, and push them forward in their life.
It’s just a door and an opportunity that’s open to us now that might not have been if we were not financially where we are or time timewise, where we are now because of our online business.
We love to talk about our Can’t Miss Moment with you guys each week right here on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, but there is one thing we like to talk about even more and that is the success stories from the members of our Flip Your Life community.
This week’s Success Story is our favorite kind of success story. It is about someone’s first sale. We got an awesome success story in our Success Forums this week from Debbie Talbert, and the title of that success story post is, “My First Sale.”
Jocelyn: All right, Debbie says, “I’m doing the happy dance over here in my office today because I made my first sale of my online digital self-coaching home study program. During my podcast interview with Shane and Jocelyn, they issued me the challenge of sending an email out to my list of 36 people announcing my Beta program. We have a paid Yes, plus two maybes. Proof: a teeny, tiny list of targeted people will include people who will say yes to what you have to offer.”
Shane: Oh my gosh.
Jocelyn: I love that lesson.
Shane: How awesome is that? Debbie got advice, took action on it, and realized those were 36 human beings? No matter how small your list is, those are real people, they have real problems that you can solve. She took action and just said, “This is for sale here buy it,” and someone did. Use that as inspiration, guys, everyone listening to this right now, whatever you’re trying to sell online, whatever it is, no matter how big or how small your list, put it out there. Let people have an opportunity to say yes so that you can make your first sale or your next sale too, just like Debbie did.
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 sign off today, guys, we like to close every show with a verse from the Bible. Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible, so we would like to share some of that with you.
Today’s verse comes from 2 Corinthians 9:8, and the Bible says, “And God is able to bless you abundantly, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.”
Take that to heart, get out there and do some good work in your online business, and be blessed.
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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