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Do you have something that you’re passionate about and want to build an online business on, but fear you might not know enough to actually do it?
Maybe you feel that you’re just not credible enough for people to pay you for what you have to offer online?
A lot of online entrepreneurs feel this — it’s called, “Imposter Syndrome.”
It’s exactly what you might be struggling with if you answered “yes” to our questions above.
Even after validating your idea and digital product, even after making sales and gaining customers, this is a problem that holds many online entrepreneurs back from growing their online business.
We will tackle this mindset issue in this week’s episode, as well as share the amazing success our guests have achieved in their online business within a short span of time despite their mindset hurdles.
Our guests in this episode are couple-preneur, Amanda and Joe Nibley.
Living just outside of Atlanta, they are parents to two young children and are both working in the insurance industry (yes, they have their day jobs, two children, AND an online business!).
Amanda has always had a passion for health and fitness, and because of that, they achieved a profound change in their overall health and lifestyle by changing their relationship with food.
After helping family and friends get in tune with healthier eating habits, they realized that they’ve found their calling and their passion to help others grew bigger and bigger.
And this is how they’re online entrepreneurial journey began.
It was this passion that gave birth to their online health and nutrition business!
Now, Amanda and Joe had transitioned into a membership site after doing some successful challenges for their niche, and earned over $3,000 on their membership launch!
Their membership site helps people cook and prepare healthy meals, learn more about clean eating, and living a healthy lifestyle.
They have helped their members tremendously, and Amanda even got a certification in functional nutrition just recently!
But even with their recent success, Amanda still talks about her mindset struggle and confidence issues regarding her expertise and passion.
Join us as we help Amanda and Joe tackle these mindset hurdles to take their online business to the next level.
We also share strategies for consistent content creation, as well as creating strategic result-oriented lead magnets.
So don’t miss it!
You Will Learn:
- How our guests were able to have an online business while both working a day job
- Dealing with and overcoming “Imposter syndrome”
- Roles in your business with your spouse (and the importance of having your spouse on board)
- The importance of consistent content creation
- Strategically creating results-oriented lead magnets and opt-ins
- PLUS SO MUCH MORE!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- FL 183 – How Sandra made over $700 a month in passive income while raising a newborn and fighting breast cancer
- The Flip Your Life Community
- FYL Live in Nashville
- Amanda and Joe’s website
Related:
- FL 192 – How to be Lucky
- FL 03 – How to Work Together, Without Killin’ Each Other
- FL 06 – 5 Tips for Getting Your Spouse On Board with Your Online Business
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!
Can’t Miss Moment:
Today’s Can’t Miss Moments is our daughter, Anna’s cheerleading competition in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
We have been doing all stars for a few years now. We’ve actually done two years of all-star dance starting when Anna was four, and now we’re doing cheer. She’s always kind of shown more interest in gymnastics.
She’s been in gymnastics since she was like three years old and she’s just always had a nice skill for it and also a love for it, so we decided this year we were going to do try all-star cheerleading.
And hen we say she has a love for it, I mean she is somewhere in this house right now doing cartwheels — that’s what’s happening. Because Anna Joe does a minimum of 4,000 cartwheels a day for no reason.
So she literally lives the Flipped Lifestyle. She really, really does. She flips her life every day.
Anyway, we decided this year we were going to try something new. We have a little local team in our area, and they have an all-star cheerleading team. And for those of you who might not be familiar with all-stars, basically what that means is that you go to competitions and you compete against other all-star teams. But the cool thing about our area, (Shane and I live pretty much in the middle of nowhere. This gym is a very small gym. It’s in an area with a very small population.) you wouldn’t think that this gym will be able to compete against these teams (from other States) that we compete against and yet we still almost always win.
So it’s a very competitive team. Shane and I are very competitive people. If we’re going to do something, we want to win. So it’s been a lot of fun for us just to have her be a part of that team. She loves it. She’s having so much fun in all-star cheer. The reason that is a Can’t Miss Moment for us is because when we were teachers, there’s no way we could have been able to do this. All-star cheerleading and any kind of all-star team is very expensive.
It requires a ton of travel and also a lot of time. If we were still teachers, we couldn’t have even gotten her to practice because she has practice at 4:00 and it’s like a 30-minute drive. There’s no way we couldn’t have even gotten her there as teachers, but in addition to that, there’s no we could have afforded it.
I love these Can’t Miss Moments, especially for Anna Jo, and stuff like that, because I can remember when Jocelyn and I got married, before we had kids, Jocelyn would always talk about how she wanted to give her kids opportunities to go do these activities and do these things that maybe some of us didn’t get to do when we were kids, and I always love how happy that, not only it makes the kids, but I see the joy that Jocelyn gets out of Anna Jo’s activities too. Just an awesome Can’t Miss Moment something that we never would have even thought possible if we had not taken action and started 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 Amanda and Joe grow their health and nutrition membership site.
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 again this week. Super excited to help another member of the Flip Your Life community take their business to the next level, and let you guys listen in so you can do the same.
Our guests today are Amanda and Joe Nibley.
Guys, welcome to the show!
Amanda: Hey guys, thanks so much for having us today!
Joe: Super excited!
Jocelyn: We are very excited to talk to you as well and it is great to have you today. We’ve read through your intake form a little bit, and there’s a specific reason we’re very excited about the show, but we’ll get into it just a little bit later.
Shane: We’re not going to tell you yet. It’s a little bit of a secret, but we’re super excited about it. And another reason we’re super excited to have you guys on the show is because we get to talk to you today, and then we get to hang out with you in Nashville in September because you guys are coming.
Amanda: September can’t get here soon enough. We’re so excited about that.
Shane: I know. I go into the Facebook group that we’ve gotten. I get giddy and I’m like, man, we’ve still got a couple of months left. It’s like Christmas. It’s taking too long to get here.
Amanda: It is, it is!
Jocelyn: All right, before we jump in and start talking about all that fun stuff, let’s tell everybody a little bit more about you guys. Tell us about you, your family, and your background.
Amanda: Yes. We’re Joe and Amanda Nibley. We live just outside of Atlanta, Georgia. We have two amazing kids. We have a two-and-a-half-year-old and a four-and-a-half-year-old, and we met, got married just over five years ago. We met about 10 years ago at work, a place of business that we still work today, and a few years ago, we profoundly changed our health– my health, my husbands and our kids– by changing the way that we were eating. After that transformation, I helped a few family members do the same thing and they saw profound impacts on their health.
I helped a few others as well outside of family, and then at that time the lightbulb really went off for me and I just thought, “Gosh, I really want to help others do the same thing.” I felt very called to do that. So after that point in time, I went back and got additional education and became certified in the area of functional nutrition. After that year, all while working full-time, I started my online business. This was just back really in November-December of 2017.
Today our business is a membership community, and I help others learn how to cook and prepare healthy, simple, delicious meals online through a meal planning service that I offer. Then we also have a private Facebook community to support everybody in the membership, and it’s going amazing. It’s been so great! We launched our first challenge in December after hearing one of your podcasts. I was actually inspired to do that after listening to your Black Friday episode about challenges.
We launched the challenge in December. We launched another one in January, and then started our membership in February. So it’s going great, and that’s where we are today.
Shane: Okay, first of all, what kind of nutrition is this, that you’re helping people lose weight? What are you focused on?
Amanda: Really the premise is just eating clean. It’s very much like a Paleo-style diet, helping people learn how to just get the junk out, get the processed foods out and get good quality foods in that are very nourishing to the body so that they can support themselves, and just feel really good and live a vibrant, healthy lifestyle. But I do it in a way that’s non-threatening and very simple. There’s a lot of information out there that can be very confusing for people to learn how to eat, clean and eat foods that are actually good for their bodies, so I hope to kind of break it down in a simple format and I provide all of the recipes every single week to everybody so that they don’t have to go searching for what they should be eating that is good for them.
Shane: So this is like keto-ish, low sugar, no processed foods, nothing junk, stuff like that, right?
Amanda: Exactly. Yeah. It’s very similar. Less on the keto front. I don’t focus on that too much. However, it is very, very low sugar, no processed foods, just focusing on getting good, clean fuel into your body in the form of food. Good quality fats, good quality protein, and then lots of the carbohydrates in the form of vegetables and fruits.
Jocelyn: On your form, you said that you guys work in insurance, which is cool. So I’m assuming that you have no formal background or education in this nutrition space.
Amanda: That is exactly correct. Health, wellness, fitness– they’re things that I’ve always been passionate about my whole life. I’ve always been very interested in that. I’ve always been called to help people. However, when I went off to school instead of following my passion and what I really enjoyed, I went to school and got a business degree because it was safe and it’s what the rest of my family members were doing and you know, I loved it, it was great.
I started my career in insurance, so I do have no formal training prior to the schooling and education that I just got in the last two years in the nutrition industry. However, it’s just been something that’s been burning in me all along. I’ve just kind of followed my dream and pursued since then.
Jocelyn: Yes. I just wanted to throw this out there for people who are out there listening saying, “Oh, nobody will believe me. I don’t know enough about my subject.” People, these people have no formal education.
Tell us about your business a little bit. We haven’t gotten into that yet. Have you sold anything?
Amanda: Yes, we have! We started the very first revenue generating product service that we offered was back in December. We offered a 30-day healthy eating challenge and at that time, we got about 26 members to join, and that went awesome. I knew I was going to relaunch again in January for another 30-day challenge, so we did that. We ended up getting 34 members the very next time, and that challenge went awesome. But it was about mid-December that I realized, you know what, this starting and stopping launching of these challenges is going to be difficult to sustain over time.
So, Joe and I brainstormed, and we came up with the idea to create the membership community. We were very resourceful. We bootstrapped it, and a couple of weeks we put together the membership community, and then by the end of January, very first week of February, we launched our current membership community and that’s what we have up and running today and we have just over 30 members.
Shane: And how much did you make on that first membership launch after the challenges?
Joe: That part was amazing! We did the launch on a live call with just the people inside the January challenge. Within about five minutes of introducing this membership, we got, I think, five people to sign up and everybody was annual. We sold that at 150 bucks a piece. But over the next week once we got up to about 30 members, the total revenue from the launch was just over 3,000 bucks.
Jocelyn: That is awesome!
Shane: And you just started doing this in November. It was like six months ago.
Jocelyn: And these people work in insurance, y’all! Insurance! Don’t say that you can’t do this because you can. I get really frustrated when people say they don’t know enough about something to do it, because this just goes to show you that you can make a business out of it.
Shane: You can just decide to be something else. Something that we’ve been asking people lately is, first, what do you want? And then we say, who do you want to be? You can’t let people pigeonhole you into, “I have a business degree, therefore I’m going to sell insurance.” You said, “No, I’m going to be the Paleo, clean-eating, keto-something expert because I did that, and I’ve helped other people do it.” And now you are that just because you decided to be that. And that’s pretty cool.
Jocelyn: And because you took action and did something. You guys just put the pedal to the metal and said, “We’re going to do this, and we’re going to make it work,” and guess what: you did.
One question that a lot of our listeners might have is, why did you decide to do an online business? I’m sure that people in your area saw you and the results that you were having and said, “Hey, can you help me to lose some weight?” What made you think, “Let’s take this online?”
Joe: It was interesting. So, when Amanda first started going to get her certification for nutrition, we had originally thought, “Yeah, it’s going to be a brick-and-mortar business, and we will work one-on-one with people in person, or maybe one-on-one with people over a Skype call or over FaceTime or something like that.” But even if we had a physical business like that, we knew we would have to have a website. So I sort of took the lead on figuring out how do you make websites and what all goes into that.
I started listening to a lot of podcasts and over time, throughout 2017, I went from one podcast to another until I finally listened to– it had to be Pat Flynn who had you guys on. And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I think these people are a lot like us. Maybe we should think more about having a truly online business instead of just having an online platform that supports a brick-and-mortar business.”
By the end of last year, we were thoroughly convinced that going strictly online was a smarter way to go because the impact that we had personally on changing our diets was so profound. Like Amanda said, we knew we wanted to help the most people we could. If we had that sort of one-to-one business, like a traditional practice, brick-and-mortar, there was only so much impact that we could have. Once we realize that, and once we realized, you know what, we can figure out how to run an online business, then that just seemed like the right way to go.
One thing that I think was a major turning point for us was just hearing you guys talk to so many of your members and they all had different businesses. They were all doing very different things, but everything seemed somehow to funnel back to a membership of some sort. I think before I really listened to 10 or 15 episodes, I was like, “Yeah, yeah, that worked for them. But how in the world could we have a membership?” It’s not in any way related to the stuff that we’re in. But figuring that out and like listening to you guys and having that lightbulb go off like, “Oh yeah, this could easily be a membership.” And then once we saw it, it was super clear. Before that I just thought there’s no way this could ever be an online business.
Shane: That’s one of the reasons that the most important courses inside of our training area is called, “The Membership Mindset.” It doesn’t really focus on the mechanics of a membership because every membership looks different. Now, all a membership is convincing customers to pay you every month forever – that’s what a membership is.
We help a lot of other people do different things like sell physical products or sell one-off information products, but we think that is critical because when you’re a couple and you got kids and you’ve got a house and you got cars, you need to know. You need to be able to look at your numbers and say, “I’m going to get paid next month. I’m going to have members actually come back, pay me again. It’s going to happen. I know that 90% of those people are going to renew and it’s going to keep happening month after month. I need that security.”
And that’s why we’re so focused on, get the membership right, get a recurring revenue, get some continuity in there so that you’ve got security and peace of mind. When you have security and peace of mind, and you’re not wasting all of your energy launching every other month, like you were doing with those challenges, then you can focus on being creative, serving your members, and helping as many people as possible.
Jocelyn: I love those reasons for starting an online business. I think that it’s much of the same reason that we started this business online because we wanted to impact as many people as possible, so I love that.
Let’s move into a little bit of struggles that you’ve had along the way. We all have struggles as we started our business. What has been your biggest fear, confidence issue, mindset struggle that you have overcome so far in your Flip Your Life journey?
Amanda: This is something that I’m still definitely struggling with and working through and it’s more of a mindset issue for me. It’s more of that imposter syndrome, and I’ve heard you guys talk about this before.
Within my membership community, I am very comfortable hopping into the community, talking to them live, answering their questions and just being really engaged with them and feeling very comfortable with it, but when it comes to my public Facebook page, I’ve struggled a little bit to do those live Facebook calls and just really put myself out there.
While I know that I know a lot and I can help so many people, it’s just really owning what I know and owning my expertise. But I just get so scared and just kind of freeze up when it comes to getting on publicly and sharing what I know and trying to help others outside of my membership communities. That, on top of also struggling a little bit with understanding and knowing that I have had a lot of success just in the last three months and it hasn’t been that long, but I do sometimes go back to, “Oh well, we haven’t had a single new member in the last month, so I must not be doing something right. I’m not growing. This isn’t going to work.” That’s not true, but it’s so hard to get that out of my head sometimes.
Shane: Amanda, you’re the kind of the public face, and Joe is kind of the back end. Is that how this is working?
Amanda: Definitely. Yeah, exactly.
Shane: That’s a cool structure for your team too, by the way. It’s awesome when you can have someone to help you do that. It’s cool that you all kind of have fell into roles early. I think Jocelyn and I did not do that early. That’s why we have seven websites and 14 businesses and like all these things going on, which was a bad, bad idea that we never recommend anyone do by the way.
It’s cool that you’ve kind of fell into that. This imposter syndrome attacks all of us sometimes. Even us, even now we have thousands of testimonials and we’re like, man, what? Because you always feel like, well people are looking for the PhD. They’re looking for someone who’s got the little letters after their name that proves that there’s something or someone and really the only person that cares about someone having a PhD is another PhD. Is another No one cares.
Amanda: Right.
Jocelyn: I think that a lot of times it is a self-confidence issue. We don’t really like to say that to ourselves. We don’t like to say, “Oh, well you’re not confident,” but really that’s what it boils down to because six years later, I’m still not comfortable and confident on video. I do it because I have to.
Shane: And I make you.
Jocelyn: But I’m still not comfortable or confident. I think for me, I don’t want somebody to call out something that I’m insecure about. It’s just one of those things that you just have to do it and just recognize that you’re going to have haters. We have them all the time. We had one this week, actually. What you have to focus on instead is the successes that people have had.
One thing that we like to do is we like to actually print out things that people write to us, like letting us know that our podcast has helped them or letting us know that our membership has helped them. Reading through some of those things will help with that, so maybe you even need to do it before you get on video. There’s also something you can do called affirmations. It sounds completely ridiculous. If you’re anything like me, I’m not a very woo-woo kind of person.
Amanda: Yeah, I love affirmations and meditation!
Shane: I’m woo-woo, Amanda. You’re my people. I’m a little woo-woo.
Amanda: I’m a little woo-woo, so it’s good.
Shane: Some people think you can beat imposter syndrome by, “I’m going to become the expert. I am going to be so powerful, that no one can ever criticize me, and they can’t doubt me. I’m going to have millions of people successful,” but it doesn’t matter. They’re still going to come.
Jocelyn: And the haters will always stay.
Shane: And Jocelyn and I, we still get it all the time. I am the lightning rod. I absorb all negativity so Jocelyn doesn’t need to see it. Our team is told, “If anyone says anything bad, send it to Shane because he kind of likes that and likes to fight with them, and Jocelyn does not.” So if you guys could do that, that’d be good too. And I caught something else that you said, too. You said, “I feel like I did something wrong because we haven’t had a membership sold in a couple weeks or something like that.”
You probably did. I’m going to be a little no sugar here, #nosugarcoating. You probably are not doing enough promotion, enough Facebook lives, enough emailing, enough promoting to where you’re getting comfortable with it. That’s why: One, you’re not getting comfortable with it. Two, you’re not selling things — is maybe you’re just not promoting enough.
Reps fix everything. That’s my football coach coming out. I email our list every single day. Every day. We do Facebook lives every single week. We do podcasts every week and the only reason we do it that much is so we can’t ever let momentum stop. Maybe if you did more stuff, you can totally overcome that imposter syndrome by, “I say so many things to my people so much. I say so many right things that one wrong thing is not going to bother me at all.”
Jocelyn: Consistent action is better than perfect action. You can even do things a little bit wrong, but as long as you’re doing it consistently, people are going to continue to see it over and over again, and that’s going to solidify your message in their mind and then they’re going to want to become a member.
Shane: When people try to become experts, they try to be so proficient, no one can criticize them. But here’s the 100% truth in life and in online business: consistency beats proficiency every single time.
Jocelyn: I would say to everybody, including you guys, embrace the hate. It’s going to come. If it doesn’t come, you’re probably not doing something right. Get ready for it. Know it’s coming and when it does come, just laugh about it. That’s what we do. Like when we got that message this week we were just like, whatever.
There’s a verse in the Bible that says– it’s in James, it says, “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds.” And I try to remember that because we are going to face trials in all parts of our life. When you face it in business, it’s a good thing. Consider it pure joy. Maybe even write that down. Put a little post it note.
Shane: Hate is pure joy.
Jocelyn: On your computer, consider it pure joy when you face trials.
Amanda: I’m going to stick that up right on the front screen of my MacBook.
Jocelyn: There you go.
Amanda: When we get off this call, but I’m so grateful that I’ve got my husband and my best friend as my business partner because he does push me to get out of my comfort zone, and do things. Just the other day, we were talking about how I need to go live more on my public Facebook page. I do need to start putting myself out there more so that people can learn who I am and get to know me and feel more comfortable with me.
I post very regularly, but I’m not on there live, doing videos. The other night I actually made this really amazing tomato soup recipe, and it was from all clean ingredients and Joe was like, “Amanda, you need to get on there and do a two-minute call. Show everybody what you’ve done. Tell them how good it is, give them the ingredients and then say, ‘Peace out everybody. I hope you liked this.'” Like that was it. And I was just like, “Oh my gosh, you’re so right.”
And you know, I was shaking guys, but I did it. I hopped on Facebook real quick. I did a live call, showed him, and then I actually got a ton of comments on that video. Everybody was like, “Oh my gosh, this sounds amazing. Thank you so much for posting this.” And I was like, oh, okay. I needed that. So Joe, he pushes me. I know Jocelyn always says like, Shane’s the one that’s pushing you off the bridge, but Joe’s doing that for me too and I’m so glad that I have him here.
But another thing that you mentioned a little bit earlier, just about having him be my lightning bolt to absorb things or my lightning rod, he really does that. A lot of the times in our membership community, Joe is a part of that and he sees everybody’s comments, but just yesterday I was sitting at my desk at work and doing my insurance stuff. I get a text message and it was Joe and I looked down and it was a screenshot of our membership community, and something that somebody had posted.
One of our members that’s been with us since December, and all that she posted was, “Hey y’all, I’m so excited today! I’ve got into a pair of jeans that I haven’t worn for two years, and I feel so good. Love you guys. Have a great day.” That was it. He sent that to me and he was like, “Babe, you’re doing so good. Keep it up! Look at this!” He does that sort of stuff for me and just continues to reaffirm that what I’m doing is the right thing, and that we are helping people and he’s just that little positive voice in the back of my mind when maybe I have some negativity rolling around in my mind, thinking that it’s not good enough yet or we’re not growing fast enough. That’s just not the case and I just need to get out of that mindset.
Shane: What’s cool about that is from a fear perspective, I got a message from a guy this morning and I sent this email out last night. Sometimes I just like throw down with our email list and I’m like, “Seriously y’all? What’s holding you back? Why are you not doing this? Tell me! I just need to know because I don’t understand it. I don’t get it.” So this guy writes me back and he goes, “Well–,” and he’s probably listening right now. He goes, “Well, I’ve got a 10-month-old baby and you know, my wife’s got the flu.” And it was like it was the most hilarious email.
Thirty minutes later, he emails me back and he goes, “Is there any way to recall this email? Because I reread it and man, it sounded so lame.” He goes, “I remember that podcast you guys had where that woman, that Sandra Lady, she survived breast cancer while having a newborn, and then I re-read my email and I’m like, ‘What is wrong with me?'” And he’s like, “I’m coming, I’m joining. Forget it.”
The only way to bust through that is to do it because if you sit and think about it and you don’t launch your community, you don’t make any money and you don’t get that comment that makes you keep going. And that’s where momentum comes from, is in the starting and the doing of the thing, not the doubting and making excuses for not doing the thing.
Jocelyn: And just remember that for every one hater you get, there are going to be like 90 amazing messages saying, “Thank you for being here. Thank you for doing what you’re doing.” And that’s what keeps me going. You know, I try not to focus on the negative. I focus on the positive and try to move forward.
Okay, so we talked about some mindset issues that you guys have overcome so far. Let’s talk a little bit about external obstacles you’ve overcome. Maybe things like not having enough time. Maybe you’ve come up against some technical things, or even like people in your life who are naysayers. Tell us about some outside influences that have tripped you up so far.
Amanda: In terms of obstacles and influences, this is going to sound strange, but we really haven’t had any major obstacles or outside negative influences. We’re so lucky to have the dynamic that we do. We’ve been here to support each other all along the way. Our family is extremely supportive of us. We love our jobs, we love the company we work for. Our coworkers are amazing. This isn’t anything that we’re stressed out about and trying to figure out how do we do this so that we can leave our jobs on this. We’ve really kind of had this peace in this time to be able to move forward and do things the right way.
But you know, I guess in the beginning, we were very resourceful. We didn’t know how to create a website or to find a payment system where we can take payments for people, but we just, we really bootstrapped it and Joe just did a lot of online researching, YouTube-watching, Flipped-Lifestyle-listening too and we figured it out. More so than anything, it’s been the mindset that’s been the biggest hurdle for us and time. We figured that out. We’re pretty organized people.
I get up really early in the morning, and I do my work before I go to my physical job during the day, and Joe does our online business stuff at night, so we tag team it that way and we get a lot of good hours in on the business. Yes, we might be a little unusual in that, there just haven’t been too many big obstacles facing us.
Shane: How old are you guys, first of all?
Amanda: I am 31.
Shane: Okay.
Joe: 34, last time I checked.
Shane: I’m a wise, grizzled old 40 now, so I’m going to take a hike. Here’s what’s amazing: it looks like you don’t have any obstacles. It looks like it, but you’re just like everybody else. You’re working full-time, you’ve got kids, you’re living life, handling all the responsibilities, but you have made a decision to do this and not just do it. Yeah, I’m going to try it. No, we have made the decision to do this. We’re going to make it a priority. We’re going to figure it out.
When I don’t know something, I’ll give it to Joe. When Joe doesn’t know something, I’ll give it to you, Amanda, and then boom! We’re going to get it done no matter what. Not everyone is going to get their spouse on board and make them work with them. It’s not going to happen. But what you have figured out intuitively is a team mindset. You’re working together to do something so even if your spouse isn’t on board with you, if you can’t build a website, go find someone to build you a website. You guys have overcome these obstacles because you’ve made them priorities.
You need to give yourself a little bit of credit. Don’t be like, “Oh, we’ve been lucky so far.” No, you made yourself figure it out.
Amanda: Right, we know it’s not necessarily because of luck. We’ve put a tremendous amount of work into this and it has not been easy by any stretch of the imagination. If we really are honest, it’s been very difficult, but we’re patient with one another. We have faith that this is going to work, and we just keep pressing forward because we know what we’re doing and what I’m doing to help people is really transforming their lives and that’s what is driving me at the end of the day. So, we’re just going to keep pressing forward and doing whatever we need to do to make this successful.
Joe: I just think that the fact that we both went through that transformation individually really helped us believe that this is the right thing to do and got us both really onboard with pursuing this.
And to your point, Shane, about priorities, when we got to the end of 2017, I think we actually listened to just about every one of your podcasts, and kind of exhausted all of the free content, so to speak. We just knew like we knew this was going to work. We knew online business was going to work or we were going to make it work, but we didn’t want to spend five years trying to figure it out.
We knew at that point, if we’re going to really make this work and take some shortcuts, that we have to join this community. We made it a priority for us financially to sign up with an annual plan, and then once we’re inside the community to figure out, well what else can we jump in on, and that’s why we’re going to the September live event and everything else.
I mean, we want to get there. We really look up to you guys as like a true role model. We’ve talked to you a lot of times, you just haven’t heard us because we’ve been talking to your podcast. But it’s amazing to finally be talking to you guys because we really do look up to you, and we want to flip our lives completely. We just want to get there faster and screw up less.
Shane: That is my new– I’m changing my sales page this week. “Get there faster, screw up less. Flip Your Life!” There we go.
Joe: A couple silly mistakes. When we first decided we needed a website, I’m not a techie guy, I’m not an IT guy, so I went and made a Wix website, which is not terrible. But there’s obviously a lot of restrictions on Wix, and eventually I figured that all out. We had to shut that Wix website down and then rebuild a WordPress website. But even when we rebuilt the WordPress website, we didn’t have a payment portal yet, so we were sending people invoices through QuickBooks.
Shane: Nice. That’s amazing!
Joe: Yeah, it was ridiculous. But I mean we were doing it because we were resourceful. We had no other options. We didn’t know how to set up a payment portal yet, so we’re like, well, we got to get people to pay us somehow. Send them an invoice and then send them an email when they don’t pay. And it was a lot of work, but it definitely made us appreciate some of the things that you guys teach people about how to set up a website and how to build a true online business that actually works.
Shane: That’s phenomenal. I love that you were invoicing people.
Jocelyn: I love people who just do stuff because that’s what we do. We don’t always care if it’s right or wrong. All you have to do is make more right decisions than wrong. If you’re 51% right, you win.
Shane: I love that you guys said, let’s jump into this and take the shortcut because it really is a shortcut and not just because of the training. But when you all of a sudden are in there with literally hundreds of people from around the world who are doing this, you start seeing things in other people’s discussions and you start avoiding problems before they even come up because you read about someone else dealing with an issue. It’s just in your mind. I’m always amazed at how fast people actually do make things happen when they make that leap into that mindset.
Jocelyn: Alright guys, I mean we have been just blown away by what you’ve done so far and we’re really excited for you to see you take the next steps in your journey. So with that in mind, what can we help you to take action on to help you get to the next level and continue to flip your life?
Joe: That’s exactly our question! We are about three months into having a membership, and we feel pretty comfortable running that business, so to speak, and it’s taken a few months getting comfortable. But now we’re comfortable and we’re asking ourselves, how do we take this to the next level? We feel really good about the product. We feel really good about the business, but it’s really kind of that marketing problem right now.
Like I said earlier, we just launched the website about five months ago. We’re getting about 500 visitors a month. Our email list is about 120 people. We have under 500 followers on Facebook. We’re only running one cold ad and one warm ad on Facebook, and we’ve got about 30 members. That’s kind of a rough feel for the numbers that we’re at right now, but we know we need to start growing website traffic. We need to get the email list bigger, and that’s what’s going to lead to us growing this business and we’re willing to do whatever it takes. So whatever content we need to make, whatever amount of time we need to spend, or if we need to put money into this, we’re willing to invest more money into it. But we just wanted to brainstorm with you guys about what stuff do we need to make, what should we be making more of and make sure we kind of have the marketing message correct. And it’s really amazing actually what you guys said at the beginning of this call, that you guys are now into keto. So it’s almost like you’re maybe our perfect avatar and if you could tell us, what can we do to sell you right now? What do we need to say? But I mean we just really want to get those ideas going, and then we’re going to go do it.
Shane: I’m a big believer in throwing mud on the wall. Mud on the wall is better than ideas on paper every day of the week. But eventually, you gotta start thinking about what mud you’re thrown on the wall. You got to be a little more strategic about it. And that’s kind of where you found yourself now is, okay, we’ve got to think about how we can find more of these people. It’s awesome too, that you guys have sold 30 members out of like a list of 120 people.
Most people are like, “I need a thousand people, I need–” whatever. That’s amazing, first of all. The second thing you have to do now is you’ve got to create consistent content all the time, probably more than you will in the future. When we first started doing even this podcast, we were doing the podcast and two Q & A’s a week to bulk up our content fast. We researched what we wanted to write those Q & A’s and things about, and get people to look through our questions and see what we wanted to air, because we really wanted to think about SEO, we really wanted to think about leaving bread crumbs, Hansel-and-Gretel style, behind forever for people to find us.
You’re going to have to go deep now into keyword research, asking those members that you’ve already got. You’re comfortable leading them. You’re going to have to get really comfortable going to them almost daily and saying–
Jocelyn: “What do you want to know more about?
Shane: Yes. “What do you want, what do you need?” And then when they tell you that, you go follow that up with research that creates a list of 20 possible blog posts, podcasts, or whatever you’re going to do for your content. I’m guessing videos and YouTube and stuff like that would be the right way to go because people want to see like the tomato recipe.
Jocelyn: Or maybe a combination of some.
Shane: Yeah, exactly, but you’re going to have to get really strategic and start cranking out content. Here’s the most important thing: every piece of content must lead to the sale of your membership. Basically, if you do a tomato recipe, it better be, “Here’s this video, I did this cool tomato thing. Oh my goodness, taste this, Joe. It’s delicious.” The video, right? But you do the video and then at the bottom it says, “Opt in for this recipe.” They opt in and they immediately get an email that says, “Get a recipe every day. Join my membership now!”
It’s got to be so overt and so streamlined and so simple out of the gate, that every piece of content is designed to get on your website, get an email, get a sale.
Jocelyn: That was an example. I mean, he’s not saying you need to do that exact thing. You need to see what your people want. And here’s another thing that I think is especially relevant for this niche. I want to make sure that you’re not educating people. You don’t want to tell people, “You need to eat this way because of all these reasons that have to do with health.” Those things are nice, but people want results. They don’t want to know about their health. They don’t want to take a vitamin. They want something that’s going to solve a problem.
Shane: “You’re going to lose 20 pounds and look a lot better in your bathing suit.” Or, “You’re going to lose 25 pounds and have so much energy, you could go to the park with your kids.” It has to be so results-oriented. It’s not, “Your triglycerides are going to lower in three weeks.”
Jocelyn: Yes, people don’t care about that. You have to solve a problem and something that people care about, and I think the best way to do that, especially in this area, is to go after people who are already looking for information. For instance, Shane and I now just started keto, which I told you earlier. When I went online I had no idea anything about it really except that a friend of mine lost like 30 pounds. So I’m like, “Yeah, that sounds good. I’m going to go check this out.” So I started looking around and did I find information? Yes. But the Internet marketer in me is going, “Why aren’t these people doing a better job of monetizing this?”
I went out and bought books from a bookstore instead of buying things online, and I’m an internet marketer. But it’s because nobody was doing good marketing. When I went to these websites trying to find information about keto, at the bottom, it should have said– or even at the top on the sidebar– it should’ve said, “Buy my keto starter guide!” or whatever, and I would have bought that. But nobody offered it to me.
Shane: Don’t show people what you know. No one cares, no one cares that you know how to make a tomato recipe, Keto or low carb or protein or whatever it’s called —
Jocelyn: Paleo.
Shane: — Paleo. They don’t care that you know this recipe. What they care is, this will be delicious and make you not hungry for the next six hours.
Jocelyn: And do they like you? That’s another thing. You’re very likeable, so you’ve got that covered.
Amanda: Thank you!
Shane: So this is the point in your journey where you’re like, okay, this works. People like this thing.
Jocelyn: I have results. I have people who have gotten results.
Shane: But I got to go roll out the fly traps, and get people stuck. So what do people want? Why do the flies go to the fly trap? Because they cover it in sweet sugar and tape.
Jocelyn: The beautiful thing is you don’t have to wrack your brain for this. That’s what I love about it. Just ask your audience, say, “What do you need more help with? What can I help you learn?” And they will tell you. We do this all the time. We’ve been doing this six years, and we still go to our audience and say, “Okay guys, what can we help you learn today?” And then we’re like, “Oh, okay, here’s 10 ideas, which one of these has the best traffic online?”
Shane: I did it this morning, I sent a message out. I said, “What do you want me to talk about today on a Facebook Live?” I’m going to pick three people, and talk about that because they asked.
Jocelyn: Yeah, just make it simple. Answer people’s questions. That’s all you have to do.
Shane: What was the success story that you talked about earlier?
Jocelyn: About the pants.
Shane: About the pants.
Amanda: Yeah. One of my members posted yesterday about how she got into a pair of jeans that she hasn’t worn in two years, and she did it while eating really good food that she really loved. She never felt hungry, never felt starved.
Shane: What a great blog post, how to get into jeans you haven’t worn for two years.
Jocelyn: Yes, and use those testimonials. When people give you testimonials, you latch onto those things, sister, and you talk about them. That’s what we do on this show. We talk about our members, and the awesome success that they’ve had, using principles that they’ve learned about from us, or that we have helped instill in them in some way. That’s probably why a lot of you guys are here right now because you’ve heard that.
Shane: What was the last piece of content you created?
Amanda: Actually, this just went out yesterday on my blog posts, and it’s something that Joe and I have been working weeks, hours and hours and hours on. I just created a Paleo quick start guide that really breaks it down easy on how to get started.
Shane: Is that a blog post?
Amanda: It is, yeah. If you go to my website, it’s my most recent blog post. I posted it yesterday.
Shane: Tell everybody your domain.
Amanda: The website is upleveltruenutrition.com, and my blog is there and I post every single Thursday. It’s usually a recipe that I post along with a little story that goes along with that. But yesterday what I posted was my five-step Paleo quick start guide. You can read the blog post, and it goes into some of the detail there, but then what I did was I listed five easy steps to get yourself started. But then below that, I ask people, “Do you really want to make a change?”
I throw in some pain points there, are some things that they might run into, and then I give them an opt in to download my five-step kitchen cleanout guide to make it even easier for them to make the transition and make the change. From there, once you clean out your pantry, okay, well now, you may be wondering, okay, what do I–
Shane: Okay, stop. Stop, stop, stop. This is the problem with this blog post. You’re trying to teach me everything about Paleo right now. This blog post is an opt in. This is you teaching what you know. What this should be is, “The steps that so-and-so took to fit into pants she hasn’t worn in two years.” And then you talk about your story, about how you lost 15 pounds, and then you show the story of how she got into her pants and she joined your community three months ago. And then you say, “Download my guide, my free guide,” and right in this blog post where it says, ‘Paleo myths’, what is the Paleo Diet? Five steps. That should not be given away on your blog for free. Nobody is searching for ‘load up on veggies’, which is the first step. What they are searching for is ‘how do I fit into my Levi’s?’
Jocelyn: The information you have is good.
Shane: It’s incredible, it’s incredible information. But the reason people won’t opt in, and the reason people won’t buy is because I got everything I need right now. Here’s what I’m going to do next week. I’m going to load up on veggies. Got It. I’m going to remove my gluten stuff. Cool. I’m going to add in healthy fats. Awesome.
Jocelyn: Don’t give it all away! Let people opt in.
Shane: Exactly. Sorry. I’ll stop right there. If I read this post, I have zero reason to opt in or buy from you because you just told me how to make my grocery list. You gave them the how instead of showing them the why and telling them the what, you gave it all away, and that’s why you don’t get as many opt-ins as you do.
Jocelyn: We heard at a conference once, and I really liked this. You give away the condiments, but you sell the hamburger.
Shane: Yeah, exactly. You’re giving away everything. This is a litmus test that I use now for our blog posts. I actually count how many times I say the word, ‘I’ or ‘me’ or ‘us’ first. And if it’s too many, I go back and rewrite it to make it more ‘You’ centered. And then I go back and say, “Could I make a three step plan out of this blog post?” Because if I can do it, then they can do it and they have no reason to give me money because I told them exactly how to do everything.
Now, sometimes you do want to tell them how to do stuff like your recipes. That’s how-to stuff you can give away because that makes them want more recipes that you don’t offer for free.
Jocelyn: Make sure those are Pinterest friendly, too. I hope you’re already doing that.
Shane: So to go back to what you need to do next, you need to strategically figure out how to make more content that shows results and shows people what to do but not how to do it. If you show them how to do it too much for free, then they’ll never opt in or give you any money. And that’s going to grow your business immediately. Also, you should not be spending weeks on blog posts. A blog post should be written in a day. If it cannot be written in a day, it’s too long. It’s too big of a topic and you’re way too into the details of how to do stuff.
You should be cranking out like two or three blog posts a week on very specific small things. It might’ve been, “Hey, here’s how to start Paleo. You’ve got to load up on veggies. There’s also four other steps, opt-in to get them.” And then you write five blog posts but you only give away one thing away so they have a reason to give you an opt in for more. And you get five blog post, five things you can Google, five other ways people can search you, five things to share.
Jocelyn: And then you can concentrate more on your other marketing. Alright, that was a lot of information in a little amount of time, and we are just about out of time unfortunately. But before we go, tell us one thing that you’re going to take action on like in the next 24 hours based on what we talked about today.
Amanda: In the next 24 hours, I am going back to that blog post that we just worked so hard on, and I am going to break it down. I’m going to take some information out of there and instead create an opt in to actually get the steps to go through the Paleo quick start. Then also break out some other information from there, like the kitchen clean out guide and turn that into its own opt in that I can divide and conquer, and get a few more blog posts out there, out of that one piece of massive content that I have there today.
Shane: That is perfect! But here’s what you could do, put the kitchen clean out guide inside your membership, and after they opt in for your quick start guide, say, “Hey, listen, I know you know you need to load up on veggies, but do you really know what to buy at the store? Hey, I know that you’ve got to get rid of the gluten free stuff, but do you really know what’s gluten free and what’s not? Well, I tell you all that in my kitchen cleanup guide, which is part of my membership.” And now you have got a draw into your buyer’s list. You can say, hey, they opted in. Immediately offer that. They’re already interested in that thing. Sell it to them. You don’t have to give that away for free.
Joe: That’s awesome, and this is a side note, Shane, but we literally have members go into the community. They are in the grocery store and they’re like, “Should I buy these eggs or these eggs?” And they send pictures, and within minutes somebody’s like, “Get those eggs!”
Shane: Exactly. And you can sexy all this up to, like, don’t put the five step Paleo quick start guide. It’s the ‘Fit into Your Jeans’ Quick Start Guide, right? And the kitchen clean out thing is, “Hey, we will go shopping with you. You don’t have to do it by yourself. We’ll go and you can post in the community, and the store to ask us if you should buy something.”
Joe: Get answers before you check out!
Shane: Oh, that’s brilliant! There you go. All you gotta do is follow this template with your content. Make it shorter. Tell them why. Tell them what. But sell them how. And you’re going to grow your business. But you’ve got to do it more. You’ve got to have a lot more content coming out. It’s got to be more consistent and you’ve really got to put the pedal to the metal and stop spending three weeks on blog posts.
Jocelyn: Guys, we are excited! You guys have a lot of good stuff going on. I can’t wait to see what happens when you start implementing some of these ideas. And more importantly, I can’t wait to see you post in the success stories forum to tell us about all the awesome things that you’re doing moving forward.
Shane: Alright guys, that’s all the time we have today. We are super excited for you guys. Super excited that you shared so much information with our audience. Super transparent today guys, and it just really helps not only you guys, not only us, but everybody else out there to figure out what to do next on our online business. Thanks again for coming on the show and we will see you in Nashville!
Joe: Thank you, guys. Can’t wait to see you!
Amanda: Thank you both so much. We can’t wait to get started!
Shane: Another awesome call with one of our Flip Your Life community members. To learn more about our Flip Your Life community. Head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can help you with your online business today.
Jocelyn: All right, next we’re going to move into our Can’t Miss Moment segment of the show and these are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our regular nine-to-five jobs.
Today’s Can’t Miss Moments is our daughter, Anna’s cheerleading competition in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
We have been doing all stars for a few years now. We’ve actually done two years of all-star dance starting when Anna was four, and now we’re doing cheer. She’s always kind of shown more interest in gymnastics.
Shane: And more talent. I’m not going to say that Anna has no rhythm, but she’s got no rhythm.
Jocelyn: So yeah, she actually improved a lot at dance but she has always loved gymnastics. She’s been in gymnastics since she was like three years old and she’s just always had a nice skill for it. And then also a love for it. So we decided this year we were going to do try all-star cheerleading.
Shane: When we say she has a love for it, I mean she is somewhere in this house right now doing cartwheels. That’s what’s happening. Because Anna Joe does a minimum of 4,000 cartwheels a day for no reason.
Jocelyn: And she just loves to– I always say she loves to ‘flip and flop’ and she thinks that’s so hilarious. She loves it when I say that.
Shane: So she literally lives the Flipped Lifestyle. She really, really does. She flips her life every day.
Jocelyn: We decided this year we were going to try something new. We have a little local team in our area, and they have an all-star cheerleading team. And for those of you who might not be familiar with all-stars, basically what that means is that you go to competitions and you compete against other all-star teams. But the cool thing about our area, Shane and I live pretty much in the middle of nowhere. This gym is a very small gym. It’s in an area with a very small population. You wouldn’t think that this gym will be able to compete against these teams that we compete against.
Shane: Like, from Nashville, Atlanta, and all these places.
Jocelyn: Cincinnati, we compete against people from Lexington. I mean we compete against all these different gyms, but yet we still almost always win.
Shane: Domination, baby. Domination.
Jocelyn: So it’s a very competitive team. Shane and I are very competitive people. If we’re going to do something, we want to win. So it’s been a lot of fun for us just to have her be a part of that team. She loves it. She’s having so much fun in all-star cheer. The reason that is a Can’t Miss Moment for us is because when we were teachers, there’s no way we could have been able to do this. All-star cheerleading, and any kind of all-star team is very expensive.
Shane: It requires a ton of travel.
Jocelyn: And also a lot of time. If we were still teachers, we couldn’t have even gotten her to practice because she has practice at 4:00 and it’s like a 30-minute drive. There’s no way we couldn’t have even gotten her there as teachers, but in addition to that there’s no we could have afforded it.
Shane: I love these Can’t Miss Moments, especially for Anna Jo, and stuff like that, because I can remember when Jocelyn and I got married, before we had kids, Jocelyn would always talk about how she wanted to give her kids opportunities to go do these activities and do these things that maybe some of us didn’t get to do when we were kids, and I always love how happy that, not only it makes the kids, but I see the joy that Jocelyn gets out of Anna Jo’s activities too. Just an awesome Can’t Miss Moment something that we never would have even thought possible if we had not took action and started our online business.
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!
Shane: Hey, y’all don’t forget, Flip Your Life Live, Nashville tickets are on sale now and we only have a few left. As soon as you hear this, go to flippedlifestyle.com/nashville to order your ticket and join us this September at Flip Your Life Live. That’s FlippedLifestyle.com/Nashville. We’ll see you there.
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