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In today’s podcast, we are bringing you a flipped podcast to help Brad and Laura take their business to the next level.
Each month we allow one of our audience members to call in and ask us questions about their online business.
We record the call and then share it with our listeners so everyone can learn from the consulting call!
In today’s podcast, you will learn:
- About Laura and Brad’s financial business called RichmondSavers.com
- How to increase opt-ins and optimize that
- The importance of VA’s, how to use them and trusting them with logins
- How to find balance in life between family and business
- Some tips for scaling a service-based business
- Advanced tips on how to get the most out of LeadPages
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Learn more about webinars
- RichmondSavers.com – Laura and Brad’s site
- LeadPages.net – for all your landing page and webinar need
- Chatroll – our chat platform of choice
- The Bottom Line accountants – for your online business financial needs
Can’t Miss Moments:
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey all on today’s podcast we help Brad and Laura take their online business to the next level.
SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast where life always comes before work. We’re your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Awesome to be back with you as always this week, Jocelyn is right here beside me. We are bringing to you a flipped podcast this week. This is where we allow one of our consulting calls, they call in, they get to ask us questions about their online business, and we try to help them take it to the next level. We let you guys kind of be a fly on the wall, listen in so that you can kind of get the knowledge bombs and the value bombs that we are going to drop on our guests today. You can benefit from it as well. Our guests today are Brad and Laura Barrett. They actually have an online business that is already operating and we are going to try to help them take it to the next level. Brad, Laura welcome to the show.
LAURA: Thank you.
BRAD: Yeah, thank you very much.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s great to be with you guys today. Tell us a little bit about your business and how long it’s been going on and just kind of give us a story about what’s going on right now with it.
BRAD: Yeah, sure thing. That’s sounds great. Thank you very much for having us on. We really appreciate it and we are big fans and yeah, we love what you guys are doing.
SHANE: It’s so weird that we have fans.
BRAD: You have thousands and thousands of fans.
JOCELYN: Something like that, yeah.
BRAD: It’s pretty cool. We have a website called RichmondSavers.com. We started it last May, so, May 2013. We started just as a traditional personal finance blog. Laura and I are both CPAs and just kind of passing it about personal finance and such, and just wanted to get our thoughts on paper, on digital paper as it may be. I guess we have actually pivoted now. We do a travel rewards coaching service. So a lot of people call it travel hacking, you might have heard. Basically, we’ve got some press for a Disney World trip that we plan for our family, which actually we just got back from a couple of days ago. We are in the New York Times, which is a pretty big deal and it just kind of made sense to pivot this side a little bit. Now, we are helping people basically travel the world for free or nearly free by using credit card sign-ups to get frequent flyer miles and hotel points.
SHANE: So your program teaches them how to do this. Its’ not like it shows them, do this, do this, save this many miles, boom. You’ve got a free trip basically.
BRAD: Yeah. That’s exactly right. So we offer information through the regular site, through articles and such. Then I offer the service where I actually work one-on-one with people because I don’t know if you’ve ever looked into the strategy or not but it’s pretty complicated. It certainly can be pretty daunting at first. I remember getting into it a couple of years ago and just being just baffled. I spent tons and tons of hours trying to figure it out, and finally we got the hang of it, finally got comfortable, and decided to move forward. But I remember what it’s like three years ago when I wished that I had someone to help me. The way the business works essentially is I offer my time for free. I jump on calls with people, I answer emails, but then we earn some money when people sign up for the credit cards through affiliate links.
SHANE: Laura, do you work in the business or do you have a full-time job and you just kind of support the website or what do you do?
LAURA: A little bit of everything. I help a little bit. I also work a little bit on my own as a CPA but I’m mostly home with the kids.
SHANE: Got it, okay. So you both are kind of working on this project together then?
LAURA: Yeah.
SHANE: Okay. How is your business then? You said you have been doing this for over a year now. You don’t have to give us any exact numbers but generally like kind of where you are at financially and what is your ultimate goal with your online business?
BRAD: Sure. We are doing rather well. We are doing certainly better than we could have possibly imagined a year ago. We are making comfortable four figures every month, which still sounds hard to believe for us. You said it’s hard to believe that you have fans where it’s hard for us to believe that we are making any money from this website.
SHANE: I know that feeling.
BRAD: It’s crazy. The site is certainly doing well but in some level, we still feel like beginners and maybe it is uncertainty, I don’t even know, some psychological issues or something, but it’s one of the things where we know what we want to do to bring the business. We want this to be our full-time job. We feel like we are really helping people and it’s kind of neat. People email me, “Hey, we just went on a dream trip to Paris and it cost us $100.” That’s unbelievable.
SHANE: I think we need to talk after this maybe.
BRAD: Sure thing.
SHANE: We will have an extra call after this. Let me sum this app before we get to our Q&A here. So basically you are making low four-figures a month, you see kind of maybe there is a light at the end of the tunnel like, “Hey, we might be able to do this full-time.” It still sounds like you are trading time for dollars a little bit and this isn’t as passive as you would like it to be basically.
BRAD: Yeah, that’s a perfect summary of it regarding that.
SHANE: Awesome. Let’s do this, let’s just jump into it then. Tell us your first question.
BRAD: Sure thing. Okay, I guess our goal as the program currently stands is to get people to sign up for this travel coaching service. We have visitors come to this site from Google, from other sites, whatever it may be. We want people to sign up. We really would love some tips; how to increase the opt-ins, how to optimize that. Is there any way to add some type of urgency or scarcity to it without really being disingenuous? In a perfect world, I’d love to be able to help everyone but to say, “Oh, this is only open for the next 100 people,” sounds, to me, disingenuous. I love for there to be some way to get people to really make a decision and realize, “Hey, we should sign up today” basically.
JOCELYN: Right. The service that you offer, this coaching, it is free. Is that right?
BRAD: It is, yeah.
JOCELYN: Okay. How are you currently doing that, like, how are you currently getting people to sign up?
BRAD: Yeah. I have, from your suggestion, we did it. So we have e-boxes, I guess below the post, below all our posts, we have a specific sign up page for the travel coaching like a landing page and we have sidebar and such. I’m not sure that I have ever gone through and really tested it or optimized it perfectly. It’s just kind of, “Hey, let’s put a button here,” type thing.
SHANE: One thing that comes to my mind is even if you have this system in place, it’s kind of hard. I see what you are saying because you could charge for your course and then only take so many clients, and I know you want to offer it for free but that might actually do the opposite of what you are thinking. It might make people say, “Wow, this is really valuable. It may be a $200 to get in this course, but it’s going to save me thousands. There are only so many spots, I better claim mine.” That might be something that you could do and it would also generate more revenue. But something that we actually looked at recently, we are going to the Philippines, to the Tropical Think Tank event with Chris Ducker next year. We were looking in kind of some travel hacking, to see if we could do it and there is really not a lot of time left for us to do that.
I wonder if maybe you could say, “Plan for your Disney trip in May, but if you don’t start now, you are not going to have enough time to do it,” and all of a sudden, now you’ve put the onus on people. I’m sure they are finding you may be from the search, looking for trips to Disney or whatever. So if they found you and they were looking for a trip to Disney and all over sudden you are telling them, “You can get this trip to Disney for cheap but if you don’t start now, you are not going to have enough time to save up the points.” That might be a way that you can create some urgency because they have a calendar, it’s on their mind, and they are thinking, “Man, I want to save all this money and if I don’t start now, I’m not going to do it.” Then it’s true, that might be a true thing.
You could just say like, “Wherever you are, like say it’s a… what month is this? I’m confused. It’s November? Is it December? Never mind, it’s December. Maybe you can say like, “If you don’t start planning for your summer vacation now, you are not going to have time to do it.” Then you could even have a countdown saying that “May vacations need to be planned if you are going to do this by x date,” You know what I’m saying??
LAURA: That’s a good idea.
SHANE: Right, then you are giving them some like realistic pressure because when they are thinking about their vacation. It’s in May, “Oh no, if I don’t start now….” So now you have some urgency in something and you could have a continuous clock running at all times.
LAURA: That’s a good idea.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I like that idea and I sort of agree with what Shane is saying too. I think maybe it might be worthwhile to consider putting a charge on your coaching because to me, totally free sort of puts up some red flags for me and that’s just, it may just be me, but it sort of like, “Well, what is the catch?” With anything free, there’s always a catch. I guess like maybe consider charging a little bit for the coaching. It doesn’t have to be much but sort of like as a barrier to entry and also to maybe put a little bit of scarcity on it, and also to compensate a little bit for your own time.
SHANE: It makes you legitimate too and like we have products, we have a course for Flipped Lifestyle and they are affiliate products within our courses because like you guys believe in your products, we believe that these are the right tools and you’ve got to have them to be successful. Even though we charge a premium for some of our courses, we still have affiliate products built into those. People are thankful for them because we lead them to these great tools, you know what I mean? I don’t think that people are going to be turned off by a cost. What we’ve always found is when we charge a good solid fair price for something, we sell more copies. We get more people in because if we assign value to our coaching then other people will assign value to it, and that will make them jump. It’s like Jocelyn said, if I see something for free, I may just pass it up because I don’t know anything that’s free, that might be shady. But if I’m like, “This guy is charging a premium, it must be worth something.”
JOCELYN: Don’t stress. Just listening to this myself, don’t stress about what you’ve offered in the past because if this were me on the other side of this call, I will be like, “Oh, but I’ve offered this for free for a year.” Don’t worry about that. You can still do free things. There are webinars out there where you could help people for free and that would be mostly just to get them into your sales funnel, like, to get them to eventually pay for your coaching if you decide to go that route. But don’t worry about what you’ve done in the past. Just move on and worry about the future.
SHANE: Brad, another thing is you guys could change your model just a little bit. You could offer a weekly webinar like on certain nights of the week, like, maybe Sunday night when you know a lot of people are home. That could be your urgency. You could say, you could only allow a 100 people into your webinar and you could say, “Sign up for this webinar now and I’ll give you the free checklist of things you need to do,” whatever, and then you have a webinar where you can sell your coaching. I’ll guide you through this process. You can show them in your webinar how complicated the process is. You can go like, “Guys, this is tough but I’m going to guide you through it.” So what happens is you’ve created scarcity to get people to your webinar because you are signing up for the week and then all of a sudden, you can move them into your coaching after you do your webinar.
BRAD: Yeah, those are great ideas. Thank you very much. We are furiously writing things down here, so thank you.
JOCELYN: Well, the good thing is this will be recorded, so you can always go back and listen back. Okay, I think that was a lot of ideas on one question. What do you have for us next?
BRAD: Sure, I guess the question would be how do you prioritize what you are working on? There are so many different hats you have to wear when you run one of these websites. I have all these plans that I love to do, a lot of the things you just talked about, right, they are certainly changing my plans – webinars, new courses, new articles so to say, speeches, lead magnets, all these things. It feels on some level like I have all these wonderful plans but nothing gets done. It’s always halfway or I’m shifting gears or something like that. It becomes difficult psychologically to work on the side because it feels like I’m treading waters, spinning my wheels having a new idea.
JOCELYN: Exactly. I’ll tell you, I think that every online marketer on the planet suffers from this because you hear all these great ideas, you see people doing all these cool stuff, and you just want to do it all because they are doing it and it is successful. It has got to be successful for me. We struggle with this a lot too and I think the most important thing is to have a real clear goal in mind. If you don’t know where you are going, you are not going to be able to print out a map to get you there. I guess this is 2014 so you won’t print a map, but you know what I mean. You can’t have a map to get somewhere if you don’t know where you are going. You have to know where you are going.
Another thing that you can do is to reach for low hanging fruit. That’s something that we try to do. If there is something you are already doing and it’s working well, build systems and extra things to go along with that. Don’t start making something totally new if you already have something that’s working. Make that thing work better.
SHANE: You don’t have to do everything Brad, Laura. You guys don’t have to do it all. I think that’s another thing. We all get caught up and you know there is a million different podcast. Everybody is telling you, “You’ve got to have a podcast.” If you don’t have webinars, you don’t have a YouTube channel, if you don’t have Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram. Everybody is telling you that you have to be on every single thing and that’s not possible, you know what I’m saying?
BRAD: Yeah.
SHANE: It goes back to that 80-20 principle, 20% of your efforts are probably making 80% of your rewards. If you can really zero in and identify what those are and only focus on those, like Jocelyn and I, we have very specific things we do and we split up. We don’t try to be on every single social media channel. Basically, Jocelyn handles Facebook and I handle Twitter and that’s all we focus on. Jocelyn does a lot with Pinterest but much more passive because Pinterest is more just sharing pictures and things like that. We are not trying to be everywhere on the entire internet. We do have a podcast and we do, do webinars, but we actually outsource some of those things and we had to, we just had to come to come to a point in our business where all those things that you listed like creating the lead magnets, editing your posts, transcribing your podcasts, there is no way you can do it all so outsourcing some things especially since you guys have revenue.
A lot of online businesses at first don’t have revenue. So they really can’t really outsource things. We understand that. We’ve been there but once you’ve started generating that money, it’s time to reinvest that money back into your products so it will grow. Don’t just sit on the money or spend the money or have the money. It’s nice to make that money but we put a lot of our money right back in, especially in the last probably four to five months. We’ve started really reinvesting back into getting help so that we can expand into these other things and get them done. We don’t edit our podcasts anymore. We just said that was something we needed to get off our plate. I was spending probably 12 to 15 hours, maybe like every two weeks editing all of our podcasts. I said, “I could be making new products, I could be finding, chasing down sales leads, I could be doing something else.” We actually hired that out and since we’ve done that it has generated ten times more income than we’ve spent on hiring that out. Don’t be afraid to outsource things to get yourself that time especially since you’ve already got revenue.
LAURA: Yeah. That was kind of our next question, like, when to hire a virtual assistant and that we have tasks we can outsource but we are uncertain about filling that person’s time which will then lead to more stress for us and…
JOCELYN: Yes. We have been through that also. As Shane just said, we have just started hiring some virtual assistants and it is a little bit tricky to sort of get them off the ground. What we do is we make videos for them so some of the tasks that we want them to do are things that we would have done ourselves anyway. We just record ourselves like a screen capture doing those tasks and that way, we can say, “This is what we want you to do” and they can watch it as many times as they need to watch it to get that task down. We don’t have to spend our time physically with them teaching them how to do something. That’s been really successful for us so far. That way, also, in case something happens, that virtual assistant quits or whatever, you have that video there and you can easily pass it on to someone else.
SHANE: It’s easier than you think to pick things. Here is what you start at – you start with a huge win. You’re not trying to hire a full-time virtual assistant 40 hours a week. You may need a collection of different virtual assistants. We have virtual assistance that only deal with our podcasts. They edit it, they make the transcript, and they make the blog posts for us, then we go back over it, but I’m not trying to fill that person’s time. I know that’s what they do.
We have another virtual assistant that manages my Twitter account and stuff for CoachXO.com or some of those other websites that we have. That’s all they do. So it’s more like we have built this coalition of three or four different VAs that are doing different tasks. I don’t have one VA that I pay $800a month and I’ve got to fill 40 hours a week of their time. What we do is we say, “What’s the need? I’ve got to get these 15 hours back I’m spending on podcasts. Let’s go hire a podcast editor.” Basically, they are all part-time. Does that make sense?
LAURA: Right.
SHANE: You can start doing it that way. If you’ve got one task that you would like to offload – maybe it’s something as simple as finding images for your website, maybe you just want someone to manage your Twitter account, whatever – you can go to places like oDesk.com, Elance.com and you can find one-off jobs. A lot of times, those one-off jobs will become people that become like recurring contractors for you and you don’t have to fill all their time at once. You’ll be shocked at how much and how easy it is. Once you get a VA or two, you’ll fill their time because you are going to look at things and go, “I shouldn’t be doing this or I hate doing this.” Every time you say that to yourself, you hand that to your VA and you move on.
LAURA: What about like trusting the person enough, you know what I mean, to give them logins or something?
JOCELYN: Right. That is definitely a concern that you may have. Definitely, make them their own logins. I mean, you would think that that’s a no-brainer but people need to hear that. They need to have their own login and sometimes it’s just a leap of faith. On our social media accounts, our virtual assistant has access to those and we haven’t had any issues so far. We have people who have logins to our websites and things of that nature and we’ve been pretty lucky so far. I guess it’s just having a little bit of faith that they won’t do you wrong.
SHANE: Another thing is too what we don’t give them, they never get access to financial stuff. They do not have access to PayPal, Stripe, or our bank accounts or anything like that. I would feel more comfortable hiring someone in person to doing that maybe but we do not give our VAs any information that they can get to our money. Like Jocelyn said, it is a leap of faith and sometimes we create these monsters that prevent us from taking action. This fear is, “I can’t trust anyone or I can’t fill their time.”
Really, it’s kind of like Timothy Ferriss says in the 4-Hour Workweek, “It’s amazing what happens when you just trust people to do their job.” Does that mean you are going to be totally immune from somebody screwing something up or maybe getting mad and doing something? No but really just like real life, 90% of the time, people do the right thing. They are in it to make money, you are paying them. They want to keep their job. Most of these people are out there doing their best and that’s the way you go through a service like oDesk or E-lance that has some kind of rating system or something where you can actually see what these people have done in the past.
JOCELYN: I was going to add on that too, don’t think that you have to necessarily hire someone overseas. I think that this is a misconception that a lot of people in internet business put out there. You’ve got to hire these people overseas. They are so inexpensive and so on and so forth, but I actually hire several American based special assistants in my business because it makes sense for me. I need someone who is in our time zone to answer my customer service request. It’s really important for me to be able to do that on my Elementary Librarian site. I also need a native English speaker. I have a personal assistant that I hire, virtual assistant, who is also in the United States and she handles a ton of stuff for me. I just give her a basic direction and she can take it and run with it. It is more expensive to do it that way but for me, it’s worth it because I know that it’s being done correctly. Just some things to consider as you are looking into virtual assistant.
SHANE: One more thing on this before I go to your next question, a lot of times, you will be shocked that there are people in your life that you can hire, we have a couple of friends that actually work with us, they partner with us. They take care of some of the tasks that we have on a contracted basis, they are not employees. We have friends and we know that one is a stay at home mom and her and her husband are very good friends of ours. We are like, “Hey, we’ve got some tasks that you could pick up few $100 extra a month. Would you all be interested in doing that?” Now we get to help our friends in our local community. They get to make money and they are doing those tasks that we wanted to do. It’s not just about hiring someone in the Philippines. Get out there and look around. Like Jocelyn said, there are American VAs. You may have people in your life that you can bring on for a reasonable fee to take some of those tasks off of you.
LAURA: Yeah. That’s a great idea.
SHANE: What do you got next?
LAURA: Maybe like the work-life balance, finding balance in your life with all the projects you have going on and the two young kids running around. We struggle with this and even though the business is on verge of being very successful, IT still feels like Brad is maybe taking time working on the family to work on the site or… you know what I mean.
SHANE: I know what you mean. We struggle with this too of course, everybody does. Anybody that doesn’t is being disingenuous, especially when you’ve got little kids. We have a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old.
LAURA: That’s exactly what we have.
SHANE: There you go. It is always tough to do that. What we’ve been successful at is really defining times of the day and being extremely committed to being focused during those times to whatever task we are doing. For example, we usually everyday work until 3 o’clock. Let me give you our schedule and you’ll see how it kind of falls. We get up in the morning and get our little boy ready for kindergarten. So we take Isaac, Anna comes with us, the whole family goes. We take Isaac to school, we hang out in the mornings, we have a good time. Then Anna, our little girl, she goes to her Mimi’s house for a little while because we choose to let her go over there for a few hours so we can be super productive. We do use child care because we have to be super productive for a few hours to get all those other hours back.
We drop them off. Most days, we’ll go ahead and bet our exercise in because we think we want to start today right. We go to the gym. We usually come home, we usually get home sometime around 10. We work from about 10-2:30 every day. We stop at 2:30, because Isaac gets off the bus at 3 and we’ve pretty much said that 3 o’clock to 7 o’clock is off limits. It’s completely off limits to anything but family time. That way, we know we have scheduled first time with our kids. If you’ve got a full-time job, it might look a little different. Say, you get off at 5 o’clock, you may just say, “I’m off work at 5 o’clock. From 5-8, I do not do anything but spend time with my family.” What happens is, if you schedule that first, what we’ve found is it kind of gives you deadlines. It forces you to do all of the other work in less time. It’s amazing what you can get done when it’s scheduled that way.
If you are spending from 6 o’clock to 9 o’clock right now on the website, if you designate that 5-8 I’m going to be with my family and this is it, all of a sudden, it took your three hours to get it done before, you’ll be shocked that you can get it done from like 8-10. You are going to be able to get the same amount of work done that you did in three hours before because now you are crunched. You have to get it done then because you’ve already committed your time elsewhere. Does that make sense?
BRAD: Yeah. That makes perfect sense. I find that the website work kind of bleeds into our regular life. I’ll get an email. I’ll run u and respond to it and it just kind of feels like I’m everywhere all at once. It just doesn’t work whereas if carve out a couple of hours on a Saturday for me to, “I’m going to work from 9-12 noon, it’s unbelievable how many things I can cross off the list.
SHANE: That’s right. Why are you doing this? It’s because you want your family to have a better life. You have to plan your schedule. It has to be family first even if you’ve got to be at work. People have to be at work 9-5. You’ve got to be there. Your boss tells you to be there but all those other hours are open until you write something in them. Write down that family stuff first, commit to it, and that’s going to force your hand in all those other areas of life. There are lots of things you can do too about the emails.
JOCELYN: Yeah. So what we did, we were finding that we were having a lot of trouble with notifications. That’s like our worst enemy. If our phone goes off, “Oh, we’ve got an email,” we’re going to run and check it. We have turned all notifications off of our phones. The only notification that I get is like for a text message. During those family times, my computer is closed, my phone is not beside me. If somebody really needs me, they’ll call or text but otherwise, we don’t look at any type of technology during that time because we know that that’s a trigger for us. If we start one thing, it’s going to be 10 other things. You have to be really intentionally about your time and it is so hard to do. I’m not saying that we are perfect at it, we are definitely not, but it is so, so hard and so I understand where you are coming from on that.
SHANE: You have to remember too, like this is something I heard. I can’t remember who I heard say this, but it really impacted me. Your email is nothing but a to do list for other people. If you think about that, every time someone emails you they are asking for a slice of you and your time and your effort and your energy. Basically, we said, “If we commit time to our kids and then we answer emails during this time, then we are allowing other people to steal time from our kids.” We just finally drew a line on the sand and said, “You know what, the email can wait.” I have never gotten an email that couldn’t wait 24 hours or 12 hours to answer,. There has never been a time when an email came through and it was like, “Oh man, I didn’t answer that and a car exploded” or something. You just have to really draw a line in the sand and say, “Even if I miss an opportunity, I’m, prioritizing this.” Once you latch onto that fact, you’ll find you’ll get all your other stuff done in less time. It will happen.
LAURA: That’s good.
BRAD: Thanks guys. Let’s move on, the next question just kind of switching gears back to the nuts and bolts of the business. I guess our business is really limited by two things – the number of customers or clients, whatever you want to call it that we have signing up and really my time to spend helping people. Clearly like you said before, trading time for money is not the ideal goal. My ideal goal is not to have to work 24 hours a day, it’s to somehow come up with the way to scale this, with a way to really assist people. I think the main reason I’m doing this is to help people and it feels wonderful, but there are limitations. I’d love to hear your thoughts on our best way to really scale a business like this, that’s service based but we’d love to help more people with the same limitations of time.
JOCELYN: That’s actually an interesting question because we actually have the same issue right now that we are also trying to wrestle with, so that’s an interesting question.
SHANE: Here is our plan of attack and I’ll kind of share it with you. I actually got some advice from Cliff Ravenscraft, he’s the Podcast Answer Man. We’ve been kind of asking him some questions about doing some different things in our business in some different areas. What he said was very, very poignant to me He said, “You need to do for a few what you wish you could do for everybody.” We wish that we could help every single person that comes through and wants to take advantage of our service. You can’t do that. There is no way you can possibly be everything to everybody because eventually, either you are going to fail or you are going to burn out, or something is going to go wrong or you’re going to hit over a ceiling where you can’t scale, you know what I’m saying?
I think this goes back to what we were telling you earlier. I don’t think you are valuing your time and information enough, Brad. I don’t think you guys are looking at it. I know you are giving away this free consulting and you know that there is money on the other side because of the affiliate sign ups. The coaching is just as valuable as the tools that you are getting affiliate sales off, if not more because these people would never be able to figure this out on their own without you. You have information that they need and that you owe to them. You want to help them have this vacation of their dreams for less money so I think that by just charging a premium for your services, it’s going to qualify your buyers better.
You are going to get on there. You are not going to have to worry about them signing up for your affiliate. If they’ve spent money for your premium coaching service then they’ve already spent money, they are going to have no problem spending more money to get the tools that they need to get this done. By valuing your own time it’s going to show other people that your time is valuable. If you don’t value your own time, then nobody else is going to either. You are just going to be constantly in this rat race of what to do. I think that you could increase your revenue right away by just charging for your service and that’s going to eliminate so many people that you have to talk to. It’s going to give you other time and energy back to really serve the people that hire you, does that make sense?
BRAD: Yeah.
SHANE: Another thing you can do to scale, we talked about webinars earlier. If you have a webinar you are going to prequalify a lot of people. Let’s say right now, I don’t know what the actual numbers are but this is just kind of general. Let’s say if you talk to 10 people, five people take action. Ten onversations with people, maybe it’s 30 minutes to an hour conversation. Let’s say it’s an hour conversation, you’ve spent 10 hours to get five people to convert. Why would you not just put all those people in one webinar, spend one hour. The same five people are still going to convert because you’ve given them the same exact information. You know what I’m saying?
BRAD: Right.
SHANE: Now you’ve eliminated nine hours out of your workflow to get the exact same results because you got them all in one place and you prequalify all those leads in your webinar. I think that that’s definitely something you can do as more of a group coaching model and a webinar based system. If you need to know any more about webinars, go to FlippedLifestyle.com/webinars. We actually have a video there that shows you how to set those up using LeadPages if you want to learn how to do that. That would be a great way to say, “I cannot meet with every person individually but I’ll meet with everybody on Sunday and anybody that wants to go a step further, you can hire me as a coach and then I’ll get the affiliate clicks after I teach you how to do the process.”
JOCELYN: That’s actually very similar to what we do with our business. We offer sort of a group coaching in our course. That’s another thing you could consider doing. I don’t know how often the information in this niche changes but you may want to consider doing a video course and then you could offer your services, say, in a Facebook group. That’s what we do. Shane and I go on every day and answer questions in our Facebook group and then you could also offer your one on one coaching like it’s a premium service. That’s what we do also. The way I look at it is if I’m going to trade time for dollars, I’m going to trade my time for a lot of dollars because my time is worth a lot.
I think that it’s just really, for you guys, I think it’s just a mind shift focus because your time is very valuable. When you are using time to help people with this travel coaching, that’s time that you are not spending with your family or not doing something else. Your time is at a premium so you just need to look at it that way, I think.
SHANE: I think what I sense from you guys too is, you are like, we’ve built this business on the affiliate sales and you are afraid of putting a barrier between the customer and those affiliate sales of hiring you for coaching, right?
BRAD: Yeah. That’s exactly right.
SHANE: So all you have to do is create a system to eliminate the people who don’t value your time because if they are not going to pay you for your time, those are the same people that come to your website and leave and don’t do the affiliate clicks. Does that make sense?
BRAD: Sure.
SHANE: Because there are a lot of people that come, everybody’s website has an X number of people that come and an X number of people that commit to the service, right? What you just have to do is get all those people in one place instead of talking to them all individually and all those same people are still going to go away because they were not going to spend any money either. They were not going to take action and commit to this process of having a great vacation for less money anyway. Now that those people are out of the way, all that’s left are the people that are willing to hire you for coaching and sign up for your affiliates. You are not losing anybody. You are losing the same people you would have lost in the first place because the other people want this to happen. They are going to make it happen. Does that make sense?
BRAD: Yeah, it certainly does.
LAURA: Yes, it definitely does.
BRAD: Yeah. I love the idea of like the group, the group coaching sessions, the group webinars because often, the same questions arise within reason. The vast majority of the questions that people have are the same.
SHANE: You can actually do the same webinar over and over if those same questions keep popping up again and again and again. You can just create one presentation. When you have guys that go out and speak, they are not writing a new speech for every spot on their tour or you got these seminar people that go out and give seminars, same thing. They are giving that same exact conversation to each group and they are just telling them, they are answering those main questions that everyone asks. Then they are having a follow up time where people can ask questions that might not have gotten answered. It’s not like you are going to have to prep this every single week. You could just make a really solid presentation and then each week or two, you get new people into the actual webinar and you just keep answering those same questions over and over and kind of prequalifying all these people for your product. Does that make sense?
BRAD: It certainly does. I definitely plan on making the videos, a course. I love the idea of still having the personalized service to some degree with the group webinar. That’s fantastic.
JOCELYN: Exactly, yeah. I think that that’s where you need to head over this business. I think you’ve got a really good thing going. You just need to figure out a way to make it scalable. I think we have time for one more quick question.
BRAD: All right. I think our last question was actually just about LeadPages, which I know you guys love. We took your recommendation and signed up for it. It’s fantastic. I feel like we are not getting the most out of it yet. It could just be that we are new with it or what not. Do you have any advance tips or anything that besides just the normal lead boxes or create a landing page for this, are there any like just quick tips that you can pass along or based on how we are utilizing it so far?
SHANE: Yeah. I think the biggest tip that we found lately is, and I’m not exactly sure how you are positioning like your email collection with lead boxes and things like that, but we have found just using a button instead of an email collector, I don’t know how you are doing it on your website but we have a button on our website over at FlippedLifestyle.com that says, “Click here to learn more” and then it pops up a box in the lead box. We use that and that converts like 80% for us on email collections. So that’s something that we do and then the biggest thing for LeadPages is I think people think that it’s just a static tool where you just make a lead page and it just sits there forever. But we use it for a lot of live coaching and things like that. You can host your webinars from LeadPages. Your participants can be chatting with you. You can be on a Google Hangout video and it’s broadcasting directly from your lead page. Then all those powerful tools like lead boxes and buy now buttons are right there at your fingertips because you’ve created basically a sales page that’s letting you interact with people live.
It’s an amazing tool and it does a lot of other things beside just create sales pages. What we do is we link LeadPages together. For example, if you click our lead box and then you give us your email, we redirect you to another lead page that is a sales page. That sales page has a button that says, “Click here to get yours” and it goes to the actual page where we have our prices listed. So we’ve started networking all of our LeadPages together to kind of take advantage of, lead boxes do something different than what LeadPages do. So we just kind of link all those together into their own little chain or funnel to create this conversion stream. We don’t just send people always to a thank you page. We use the LeadPages to build momentum on top of each other and that way, they are kind of working together and using all the tools at our hand.
Don’t just think LeadPages is something you can just create a static and it just sits there. You can house webinars, you can get emails, you can funnel them into a media app sales. There is a ton of other things that you can do if you get creative with how your LeadPages all link together.
BRAD: Yeah, that’s really cool. Just one last little add-on question to that with using LeadPages for the webinars. We talked a couple of minutes ago about having these group Q&As. Would people be typing in their questions, is there any way to get it so that people can ask their questions over the phone or through their computer or it is just easier to use, I think you guys have recommended Chatroll, right?
JOCELYN: Yeah. We use Chatroll during the webinar. I think it’s always a good idea to take some questions before the webinar like either via email or on Facebook or however. Just have a few questions so in case you don’t get very many questions during the webinar or maybe just have some questions that you know people are going to ask, I think that’s always a good idea.
SHANE: Also too, never try to run a webinar by yourself. We talk about this in an episode of our podcast. I forgot what number it is right now. If you go to FlippedLifestyle.com/webinars, we’ll have a link to the podcast where we focus on how to run a webinar. What you would want to do is you would give the presentation, Laura would run the chat room. That way you divide and conquer. There is no possible way that you can run the webinar and chat with people at the same time. It’s way too confusing. What we do is, say, I’m running a webinar for coaches. I will be presenting on the video. I won’t even have the chat box open. Jocelyn will be at another computer looking at the Chatroll and she will be taking questions, talking to those people like, “Hey, anybody have a question?” She’ll take those questions, we save them to a Google Document, and then we pull those up later in the webinar. They are all there spelled up for us, right there in real time.
That’s basically how you would do the Q&A part – you would give your presentation, keep your presentation 20-30 minutes, no more than that and really open it for a lot of interaction with the people that show up, answer their questions as they come through, and really let yourself be perceived as the expert and then especially the end of the webinar, pitch. You need a 10-15 minute pitch that says, “This is the best program going to teach you how to do that.” Don’t be afraid to sell at the end of your webinar. This isn’t just free information. The goal is to get people into your coaching and then sign up for your affiliate links so that you can make that money on the back end. Does that make sense?
BRAD: It does indeed.
SHANE: Perfect.
JOCELYN: All right guys. We are about out of time. It has been a great call. Hope that you’ve gotten tons of value out of it. We have really enjoyed talking to you all and learning more about your business. We hope that you guys do great and we wish you the very best.
LAURA: Thank you very much.
BRAD: Yeah. Thank you so much for the time and you really are such an inspiration to so many people out there, and thank you for all you do.
SHANE: Awesome guys, thanks. All right guys, that wraps up our interview with Brad and Laura Barrett. That was an awesome Flipped Podcast. Brad and Laura are so close to really hitting it big in online business and you can probably relate to that. Some of you out there are probably making some money online. You see the light at the end of the tunnel. It’s not quite enough to quite your day job yet but you know that it’s possible. If you apply some of the things that we talked to Brad and Laura about today, you may be able to take your business to the next level as well.
Before we wrap the show up, we are going to share with you our Can’t Miss Moment for the week. These are opportunities that we get to experience because we started an online business. We quite our jobs and were able to have the freedom to do a lot of things that we were not able to do before. Our Can’t Miss Moment this week is…
JOCELYN: On Friday, we went down to see our accounting team. We have a new accounting team and they actually specialize in online business. They are called The Bottom Line out of Knoxville, Tennessee. We live close enough to them that we were able to go and actually have a meeting in person this past Friday. It was just so much fun, we got together. We talked a little bit about accounting. We laughed a lot and we just had a great time just talking about online business and I think we were there like four hours but it didn’t seem nearly that long when we were talking about this stuff. It’s just really, really quick, it seems. We had a great time. We really enjoyed talking to them.
If you are looking for an accountant for online business, we would love for you to check them out at TheBottomLine.accountants. I didn’t know that was a thing, like, .accountants but apparently it is. Check them out if you are interested in finding accountants, they have been fantastic for us. Shane and I are pretty much the…
SHANE: Clueless.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we’re the non-accounting people ever, if that’s a word. They have really helped us to be able straighten everything out and they are so much fun. They are not the typical accountants that you would think of.
SHANE: They are not boring old men in ties. They are actually like amazingly fun.
JOCELYN: Yeah. We just enjoy working with them so much. We would love it if you’d check them out. It was just a great day. We went down and we had lunch together. We went shopping and it was just a lot of fun. So, that was a great day on Friday.
SHANE: Another great like kind of Flipped Lifestyle moment that happened that day too, Jocelyn, was like the night before, it was not great because actually my little boy’s ear was hurting. The night before, Isaac got a really bad ear ache so I had to stay up with him. We had to get him some ear drops and kind of get him to sleep. We were able to just get up in the morning. We took him to the doctor. We didn’t take him to school, we just went to the doctor with him and we took care of that and got him some medicine and stuff before we ran down for our meeting that we had scheduled with our accounting team.
It was amazing not only to have the freedom to be able to run down and hang out with those guys for a day but also to just get up without the stress or worry that we were able to take care of our little boy. We didn’t have to be anywhere. We could just take him to the doctor. We could make sure he was okay and then still be able to take care of anything else we wanted to do that day. That’s an awesome advantage of being in online business that you can just have the freedom to take care of your family responsibilities, take care of your personal responsibilities, to be able to control when you hang out with people or when you have lunch with people and things like that. It was just an awesome day all around and just a really good example of what the Flipped Lifestyle can provide.
That wraps up our show this week. If you would like to be a guest on the Flipped Podcast and get a free consulting call from Jocelyn and myself, you can do that and apply over at FlippedLifestyle.com/FlippedPodcast. We have a form there where you can tell us a little bit about your business and we may select you for the show. Make sure you tune in next week. We are going to be going over our goals for 2015 and giving you some tips and tactics that you can go into the New Year with to set your goals for your online business and make sure that next year is the best year that you’ve ever had.
JOCELYN: Alright guys, that is the end of our show for today. We hope you guys have a fantastic and very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. We will see you next week.
SHANE: Catch you on the flipside.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Natalya says
Dear Shane and Jocelyn,
thank you for everything you teach and share with all of us. Happy holidays to you and your children!
Terence Pera says
thank you Shane and Jocelyn for the podcast and i really enjoyed and learned a few things. Happy holidays.
Brad @ RichmondSavers.com says
Shane & Jocelyn,
Thanks again for having us on the podcast! Laura and I really enjoyed the conversation and we sincerely appreciate all the advice and assistance 🙂
We’re confident 2015 is going to be a huge success thanks to all this actionable advice, and we will keep you updated along the way.
Thanks again for all that you do — you are such a huge source of support and inspiration for so many of us.
Thanks,
Brad
Shane Sams says
It was our pleasure Brad!
Andrea Whitmer says
I just wanted to say that, having worked with Brad on his website, I can definitely see the value in the services he’s offering. If I knew I could spend $500 and save much more than that on a vacation PLUS learn how to continue saving on future trips, that’s worth it for me. Sure, some people wouldn’t be willing to spend the money, but as you guys talked about in the podcast, those people probably aren’t clicking affiliate links anyway.
When I think about what I would take away from a travel coaching service, the value is huge and you definitely have opportunities to monetize. Looking forward to hearing how it goes!
Jessica Stafford says
Hey Shane! Hey Jocelyn! Catching up on my Flipped Lifestyle podcasts here and saw the awesome shout out you gave us wrapping up Brad & Laura’s coaching call!
Checked out Brad and Laura’s website as well —- and, wow —- really loving what they are up to helping people travel the world for less! 🙂
Great advice all the way around. The call was great today. Great people. Awesome mission and business. Just can’t get enough of you guys…. ever.
So honored to serve you and have you as clients, so incredibly honored to learn from you about all this online business stuff. You keep it real. You keep it simple. You keep us all encouraged! 🙂 Thanks for all you do!