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In today’s podcast, we are going to show you how to take action in your online business.
It’s a new year and everybody is ready to do something new, but often times you just don’t know how to get started.
To help relieve the overwhelm and fuel your fire, we’re sharing 5 action steps to help you get the ball rolling.
You will also learn:
- Why you need to set realistic deadlines and stick to them
- How to stop chasing shiny objects and pick a topic
- Why accountability is so important
- Taking the next step by researching your topic
- The simple step that can help make creating your digital product seem less daunting
- How to take part in The Flipped Lifestyle challenge
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle
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
-
- The Flip Your Life Community
- Canva.com – Check out our tutorial for it here
- Amazon.com
- ScrewTheNinetoFive.com – Jill and Josh Stanton’s site
- BONUS: Our Keyword Research Video Tutorial
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 y’all! On today’s podcast, we are going to show you how to take action in your online business.
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.
JOCELYN: Hi guys. Thanks for joining us for today’s Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. I am here with Shane.
SHANE: Happy new year everybody.
JOCELYN: On a kind of dreary Kentucky winter day.
SHANE: It’s freaking cold. I got the heater on behind me. You’ll probably hear it. I’ve got this little heater that’s sitting literally 3 inches from my leg because it’s so cold in our office right now.
JOCELYN: And I’m wearing my robe. That’s our patented winter uniform here at the Flipped Lifestyle household.
SHANE: You get issued that whenever you become an employee over at Flipped Lifestyle.
JOCELYN: It’s our uniform,
SHANE: Right.
JOCELYN: So today we’re going to be talking a little bit about getting started. It’s a new year and everybody is ready to do something new, to take action, to work on your goals, whatever the case may be, and usually, the hardest part about that is just to get started to do something. A lot of times, people never get past that point. When you’re first starting out in online business, really in anything, you can get very, very overwhelmed because there’s a lot of things to do, you might not have time to do them all.
SHANE: You don’t know where to start basically.
JOCELYN: Exactly and it’s just very frustrating, so it may be your business, your next project, your next product, maybe you’re trying to start a website, whatever the case may be, we are going to give you today five action steps that you can start on today to get the ball rolling on your online business or your next digital product. Before we get into that, we are going to share a comment from Facebook.
SHANE: All right, today’s fan comment comes from Facebook. We’ve been rotating our comments from Twitter and Facebook, even our email, iTunes reviews to try to give all of our fans everybody out there who listens to the podcast the chance to kind of get their name and their comment read on the air. Today comes from Laura Sinclair. Laura writes, “Get started and keep grinding it out.” Those are your words, Shane, and right now, I’m living by them. You and Jocelyn rock. Thanks for all you guys do.” Thank you, Laura, for listening.
We get comments on our Facebook or Twitter all over the place every day. We try to read as many of them as we can on air. We can’t get to all of them because there are so many quotes but it’s just awesome to be able to interact with you guys on social media. If you have not done so yet, head over to Facebook.com/FlippedLifestyle and follow us on there to make sure that you are getting all of the updates that we come out with on Facebook. You can also follow us in Twitter over @FlippedLS. We are very active on both social media networks and we would love to talk to you guys on there.
JOCELYN: We do read every single one. I know a lot of times when if you leave somebody a comment, message, or tweet, or whatever the case may be, you might sometimes wonder, “Well, do they even see this?”
SHANE: Is that their virtual assistant writing me back? But that’s not the case.
JOCELYN: We really do. We read every single one and we try to reply to as many as possible. If you have not left us a message and iTunes review, whatever the case may be, we would love to see that and just hear the kind of feedback that you have about Flipped Lifestyle and what you would like to see us offer in the future.
SHANE: One of the things that we’re really big on here at the Flipped Lifestyle is taking action. We have a saying around here and it goes a little something like this, “It ain’t got to be perfect. It just got to be done.” We are big on just doing something in the online business. If we’re going to make a new product, we want to get that product done as fast as possible, get it into the hands of the people that are buying it, and then get that feedback. If we want to start a new website or start a new blog, we want that thing up as fast as possible even if it’s not perfect. A lot of times, I’ll send an email out and if I think it needs to go out right now, I don’t even proofread it, which drives Jocelyn absolutely crazy.
JOCELYN: Yeah especially when you spell your wife’s name wrong.
SHANE: I did spell Jocelyn’s name wrong in a post the other day on Facebook. She got pretty mad about that but most of the time, we’re just getting things out there, getting it done, throwing that mud on the wall, and sometimes, you have to just take action on small things to get something done. If you tell yourself, “I’m going to write this 100-page epic ebook.” That’s not really something you can totally take action on this minute, today right now. You might say, “I’m going to write the first page of my ebook today.” That’s something that you can do. That’s a quick win, that’s breaking things down into small parts and getting something done whether it’s perfect or not.
What we’re going to give you now, these tips, these action steps, these are things that we think you could do today. If you’re sitting on the fence and you have not started with your online business or if you’ve got an online business and you need to take it to the next level but you’re kind of stuck in a rut, the tips that we’re going to give you today are action steps for the new year that you can put into place, put into practice, get going right now, and you’re going to get a quick win and you’re going to build momentum into that next big thing that’s going to really take your business and your lifestyle to the next level. Jocelyn, what is our first action step that our audience can take today?
JOCELYN: All right, the first thing that we are going to talk about when we’re talking about tips for getting started is to set a date for completion. Maybe you’re working on a digital product, maybe you’re trying to decide on a niche to go into. Whatever the case may be, you need to set a date when this is going to be done.
SHANE: And that’s it whether you know what it is or not. If you don’t know what your topic is going to be on your book, on your niche website yet, it doesn’t matter. Say, “I’m going to have my project done quickly” and then you’ll worry about how you’re going to get that done later. We’re saying set a date right now that you’re going to set a goal that is going to be finished by.
JOCELYN: Depending on the project that you’re working on, you need to set a realistic finish date for that project. If you are maybe writing an ebook that was, say, 50 pages, you might want to make that date 6-8 weeks out from where you are right now. If you’re trying to choose the name of the website, that’s something that can be done in, say, a week. It’s just important to go ahead and set that date, get it on a calendar, make sure it’s not too far out. You don’t want to see that date way out there and think, “Oh, I have forever to get it done” because…
SHANE: Procrastination.
JOCELYN: Yeah in the human brain, I don’t know, I think that there’s something to it like we will wait until the last minute. So don’t set it like six months out unless it’s a really big project and you also don’t want it to be too soon. You don’t want to say you’re going to finish a 50-page ebook by next week because that’s not very realistic.
SHANE: You’re setting yourself up for failure if you do that.
JOCELYN: And the most important thing is just like we always say, it doesn’t have to be 100% perfect. Don’t get caught up in, “Oh my book needs to be proofread” or “I have to have the perfect cover. I just don’t love the way this looks.” I’m talking to myself here too because I’m really bad about doing this but just get something out there. If somebody writes you back and says you have a spelling error on page 34, well, fix it. It’s not the end of the world. Just get something out there, get something done. Once you get the ball rolling, you’ll find that it’s a lot easier to keep it rolling after you get started.
SHANE: We actually did this recently with a project that we’ve been working on with some friends of ours, Jill and Josh Stanton, over at ScrewtheNinetoFive.com. We are actually planning with them. Is this the first time we’ve ever talked about this on the podcast?
JOCELYN: Yes, I think so.
SHANE: We’re actually preparing to have a live event with them. We’re going to keep the date and time under wraps a little bit for right now but we’re actually planning a live event but before we plan anything about this thing, we set a date for it. We said, “We’re going have this event on this date and we have to be completely prepared for this event by this date.” We didn’t know what the event was going to look like. We didn’t know what the venue was, we didn’t exactly know what we’re going to do at the event but we just said, “You know what, we’re going to set a date. We’re going to complete this. We’re going to be ready for it. It’s going to go on sale this day, and we’re going to be done preparing this day. We’re going to host the event this day and we will figure out the details now between now and then.”
Setting that deadline kind of puts it over your head and now you have to finish it. It’s like a finish line. When you see the finish line, you’re going to go toward it. If you’re just running forever and you have no goal or destination in mind, you’re probably going to give up sooner rather than later. By setting a date, a concrete time when something has to be done whether you know what that something is or not, you’re going to kind of put that into motion. So go grab a calendar right now. Hit pause on this podcast if you’re at home or at work or whatever.
JOCELYN: Not if you’re driving.
SHANE: Not if you’re driving. That will be bad but hit pause if you’re listening to this somewhere else. Pull out the calendar on your phone or whatever and pick a date, maybe 8-12 weeks out and put, “I will finish something by this date” and whether that something is a website, a digital product, whatever, do it that way.
JOCELYN: And be looking for more details on this live event. That will be coming out very soon so be on the lookout on our email and our social media.
SHANE: All right. The second tip that we’ve got, the action step that you can take today, something that you can finish before you go to bed tonight is to pick your topic. Now if you don’t have an online business or you’ve not started a website or anything like that, what we’re saying here is choose your niche. Go in and find something that you are either an expert at or you’re really good at or you’re very passionate about and say, “I’m going to start my business around this topic and that’s it. It’s going to happen today and it’s going to happen by this date that I said in the first action step.”
Pick something that you want to go after and make that your goal and attack it. If you’ve already got an online business, then pick the topic for your next digital product. What are you going to offer your audience? What are you going to give to them? What are you going to provide for them? What problem are you going to solve? What question are you going to answer? Choose a topic before you go to sleep tonight and make that your goal to build your business around it or to produce a product about it in the future. A big problem with entrepreneurs is usually, focus. We all have great ideas. We’re always chasing shiny objects all over the place.
JOCELYN: Some of us are.
SHANE: Jocelyn doesn’t. Jocelyn is laser focused.
JOCELYN: Most of the time.
SHANE: Most of the time until I distract her with my chasing shiny objects. We have all these ideas, all these projects. We always think, “Oh, I can make this product. This would be great. I can make this product. I think this would sell a lot. I can make this product. It will make a ton of money” and then we paralyze ourselves and we have no clue what to actually work on. You need to pick something and do it. There’s no way that you can know which idea is the best one until you execute on it and take it to the next level and you get it done. So before you go to bed tonight, pick that one thing. Pick that subject for that digital product. I don’t care if you have to list them all on a piece of paper, you number them, and you have like a tournament where you’re flipping coins to pick the idea. It doesn’t matter to me how you do it. Close your eyes, spin the paper around, put your finger down, and pick. Did you hear me hit the table with my finger right there?
JOCELYN: I did.
SHANE: I’m doing lots of hand motions right now because I’m pretty fired up. You just got to pick something, find a way to do it. Hand the piece of paper to your spouse and say, “Which one of those are my best bet?” and let them pick for you, but do something to get everything else off your plate except for one topic and go after that.
JOCELYN: And then you have to stay laser focused. Put on the blinders. Do not worry about the other 10 items on that list. Worry about the one thing that you chose. Once you chose it, there’s no turning back. Just keep on going. Head that direction, do not look back. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
SHANE: And also remember, you already set a date that you’re going to complete this by. Let’s say that you picked six weeks. “Six weeks from now, I’m going to have a digital product done” and today, you’re going to pick a topic and you say, “This is what my digital product is going to be about – period.” All you have to do now is commit the next six weeks to get that product finished and then see what happens. It’s only six weeks. If it doesn’t work, you’re going to be able to start a new digital product and attack one of those other ideas in six weeks, or if it does work, you can create a new digital product in six weeks and build on your success. The key here is before you go to bed tonight, this is a new year. This is a new you, this is a new time. You’re looking toward your future trying to make it better but you’ve got to have direction. You’ve already got a deadline, so pick a direction. Do that today, find your topic.
If you need a little help doing that, go to the show notes for this podcast. This is FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast25 and I have a video there that will help you do a little keyword research. It’s basically quick and dirty. Just get it done, keyword research that will help you narrow down your topic. It will show you how to use some different tools online to see if people are searching for your idea if it’s viable to even do that idea, what to do with that, but that will kind of help you narrow it down, narrow your focus. If you just watch that video, it’s about 20 minutes long. By the end of that video 15 minutes later, you’re going to pick your topic and you’re going to be ready to move forward on your new project.
JOCELYN: Okay, so we’ve talked about setting a date for your digital product completion. We’ve talked about picking a topic if you haven’t gotten to that point or if you need to make a new digital product. The third tip that we have for you today is to tell someone. Accountability is so important in anything that you do in life but especially in online business. If you’re out there floating around by yourself in online business, maybe someone in your family is not very supportive of what you’re doing in online business or maybe you just have a lot of things going on and you just need somebody to really be able to count on and to ask you questions about what you’re doing toward your online business.
This is so very important. You need to do this as soon as you have your topic picked out. You need to start talking to somebody about it, say, “This is the product that I’m going to create. This is the date that I’m going to have it created by and I need you to hold me accountable. I need you to ask me questions each week, each day, whatever timeframe that you deem necessary to do.”
SHANE: It would be great if you found someone who is an entrepreneur or someone who is also into online business to be your kind of accountability partner and kind of keep your feet to the fire, but you may not have those kinds of people in your life. Some of us, like we live in a very rural area, there’s not a lot of online business gurus roaming.
JOCELYN: Pretty much any that I’m aware of.
SHANE: I’m not sure if some people here know how to use the internet, let alone do an online business, so we don’t have that entrepreneurial mastermind group that meets every week in person.
JOCELYN: Locally.
SHANE: Locally, right exactly. So we actually had to go out and find people to do that. We’re a member of some Facebook groups where there are entrepreneurs in there. We have some friends who that we’ve met at live events. You’ve got to go out sometimes and seek out these kinds of people and maybe your partner is not someone you’ve ever met but you just talk online in these Facebook groups and you’re just posting updates on your accountability. Maybe that’s one of the things you do today to find that accountability.
Go log into Facebook and type up in the search part and look “online business” or come over to Flipped Lifestyle. Come over to our Facebook page and say, “Guys, I’m doing this” or head over to the show notes at FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast25 and tell us in the comments, whatever you need to do to find some kind of community where you can tell someone and make it real, and you know this person knows about it. You know they are watching you to see what you’re going to do. That’s going to remove that chance of failure because you don’t want to let that person down. You don’t want to be a failure in front of them so it’s going to give you that extra incentive to do that. It’s kind of like when you’re going on a trip and you’re like, “I’m going to eat good for the next 10 weeks because I’m about to go on a trip and I’m going to be walking on the beach.”
JOCELYN: It sounds familiar.
SHANE: We’re doing it right now actually because we’ve got a big trip coming up so we’re trying to get all in shape for that. If someone knows you’re going to that trip or if you know it’s going to happen, you’re going to be a lot less likely to fail.
JOCELYN: If you don’t have an accountability partner, it’s just like Shane said, go on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast25 and just put it out there in the comment section.
SHANE: Not the show notes because those are the whole thing.
JOCELYN: Yeah. Okay, sorry. Put it on the comment section. Just throw it out there and say, “Hey, I’m looking for an accountability partner. This is my business and I would love it if someone was interested in working with me” and maybe they can contact you. I wish we could be the accountability partner of everyone who listens to this podcast but…
SHANE: That’s very hard.
JOCELYN: Unfortunately, it can’t happen but there are lots of people out there just like you who also need someone to hold them accountable. So head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast25 and find an accountability partner today.
SHANE: One of the biggest things that we find in our Flip Your Life course is people love the material. They get so much done and they roll through their digital products and they get them created but almost to a person, people tell us the best thing about it is the community. Each Flip Your Life class gets put into a Facebook group. It’s a private group only for people who are in the course and they work with each other. They talk to each other, they help each other, they like each other’s work. They share their cover pages, they share their chapters when they are done. People proofread for each other.
It’s just amazing watching the accountability that goes on and so many people tell us, “I’ve had these ideas and I’ve tried to get started two or three times in the past but I did it this time because I had people walking alongside me. Today, as soon as you pick your topic, as soon as you set that date of completion, go find someone that will motivate you to succeed, that will hold you to be accountable and will tell you when you’re messing up, “Hey, get back on track so that you can chase your dreams a little bit.”
All right guys so after we’ve set a date, we’ve picked the topic, and we’ve told somebody about it. Those three things, you can get that done in one day, like tonight before you go to sleep. Those things can happen but then after that, you got to keep the ball rolling and keep momentum. Our fourth tip is to do more research on your topic. This is not something that is going to require you to be creative yet. You’re not going to have to dive in and fight through writer’s block and get stuff on paper, but we’re going to set ourselves up later for success by doing some research on what’s out there already in the market.
The best place to do that is on Amazon. If you can find something on Amazon, chances are, if there’s a book, a video, or if there’s something already out there about your niche or about your topic, that means there’s a market. That’s a good thing. Don’t look at that as “Oh, there’s so much competition. That’s not what that means. That means that people are out there buying it and if there are a lot of different products about your subject, that means that there are a lot of people out there buying it and all you have to do is get your stuff in front of them.
We’re going to go to Amazon and you can do this just sitting around while you’re watching TV, while you’re hanging watching the game with your friends, whatever. Go to Amazon.com and look up your topic, whatever it is. I might go look up football or coaching defense is what I would look up basically because I’m a defensive football coach. I’m going to look at all the books about my topic. Make sure that you filter by books. You don’t want all of the other junk in the way. You definitely want to look at the actual books that are on the market because we’re going to take a look at these books and see what other authors are writing about because what they are writing about is what other people are buying them or it would not be in the marketplace.
Go to the books, pick one that you think is related to your topic or something like that, and open it up. Amazon lets you look inside and you can see the chapter titles of books. What happens is when you look at all these titles and you look at all these chapters in these books, you can see all the different subtopics that people in your niche are writing about. So take a piece of paper and start just looking through maybe the top 10 books about your topic and write down every single chapter title that you can find. Write it out word for word and have all of these on a sheet of paper that you can look at. Then go get a few highlighters. Go get a yellow, blue, red one.
Get a couple of different colors of highlighters and start highlighting all those titles that are related to the same color. If I’m looking at something and I’m like, this chapter is how quarterbacks should throw the ball and another chapter is how quarterbacks should handoff and how quarterbacks should hang on to the football when they are running it, then I’ll highlight everything that’s about quarterbacks in yellow. The next thing might be how wide receivers catch a pass, how wide receivers block. I might make that blue. I’m going to start grouping all of these different subtitles, these chapter titles in all these books that I researched into kind of categories.
Now that you’re done, take those categories, like outline your book with them. Pick 10 categories that you can write about in your niche, reword them, make it your own. Don’t ever copy anybody’s title but now you’ve got solid ideas. You see what is on the market. You see what is selling to buyers in the market, you know what’s in those books, and you know the categories of things that they are talking about, and you know what you can write about those topics and you’ve already basically got the chapter outline of your book written. That is going to make it so much easier when you actually start creating your digital product to go in and see, “Oh I need to write about this, I need to write about this. I already know the topic for chapter 1, the topic for chapter 2.”
It’s easy, it’s free, it takes you about 30 minutes to an hour, and it’s a way to take action and basically get your digital product outlined, like your modules, maybe your video course is going to have 10 courses and each video module is going to be about something different. Those chapter categories, those things that people in the marketplace are already selling, those can be the topics of each module in your video course or the chapters in your ebook. So get on Amazon.com, look up books that are already in your space, and figure out what they are writing about and then translate that into something that you can create into a digital product.
JOCELYN: I just want to throw in there on that same note, Shane was talking about how if there are a lot of books on your topic, that’s actually good news because people are looking for that particular topic but also don’t get discouraged if you look and maybe there are only one or two books. It’s just my Elementary Librarian product. There were pretty much no products that I could find or very few and that has been such a successful site for me. Don’t be discouraged if you get on there and maybe there are only one or two books on that topic. That is what we call opportunity, my friends, so don’t be discouraged about that.
SHANE: If you do find that there’s not a lot of stuff on Amazon about that, then you flip over to Google, you type in your topic, and you see what blogs have been written about it. You see what YouTube videos there are about it. Somewhere out there, there’s probably content about your topic. Nobody is inventing anything new under the sun these days. Someone is talking about it so if you need to do a little research and you can’t find anything on Amazon, just head over to Google, check that out, and you’ll probably find some stuff to help you outline your digital product. Don’t overcomplicate this stuff. Basically, just see what’s out there and figure out how you can add to the discussion.
JOCELYN: So we are to tip #5 and tip #5 is to start your digital product. I know it sounds difficult. It sounds…
SHANE: So scary.
JOCELYN: It’s very, very scary but you have to do it. If you don’t do it, you’re going to be at this exact same place in 2016 and nobody wants that. Let’s make this thing a success. Let’s get the ball rolling today. There’s no reason not to. So what you need to do is just give the project a title.
SHANE: And it’s a working title. We’re not talking about, I carved this in stone and it’s the 11th commandment title. It’s a working title. It can change later.
JOCELYN: I’m pretty sure your keyboard does have a backspace key.
SHANE: You can delete this, I promise.
JOCELYN: It’s really okay. Give it a title, list out some subtopics for maybe chapters of an ebook, some headlines that you want to hit, just general bullet points on your topic, and start making the book. Start it out easy. Do what comes easy first. You can find a cover photo. There are lots of different places that you can do that. I recommend Canva.com and we will put a link to a tutorial that I made on Canva on today’s show notes. That will be a great place to start with making a cover. Write an About the Author page.
SHANE: Anybody can write about their self. You don’t have to write about your topic and sound like an expert at first. You can just say, “Shane Sams is the author of this book. He is from Kentucky and he coached football for x years. He did this and he did that.” I can write about myself. You can write about you. Every book, even digital product has an About the Author page. Every blog has an About page so start with writing about yourself and then that will kind of get your writing blood flowing and you can go into the actual topic.
JOCELYN: These things are pretty easy that we’ve talked about so far. I mean, everybody can write themselves, everyone can find images. You can create the title, look for a couple of things to write about. The next things get a little bit more technical. You need to set up a copyright page and this is fairly easy. Just find a book, find something out there online that shows you how to do that, like a template, and pretty much just put your information in it.
SHANE: You can get a book off your own bookshelf and flip over to the first couple of pages and just copy the copyright page word for word and where the publisher is, just say your company published it, where the author is, change it to your name. You pretty much have a copyright page for your book that way.
JOCELYN: Once you get those things done, the next part gets a little more involved and that is you’re going to take your chapter titles, put one on each page, and start writing notes underneath each one of those. It may be something that you like to handwrite. As much as I adore technology, sometimes I like to just write things out on a notebook. If that’s you, that’s totally cool. I have a friend that I met at a live event and she actually likes to doodle her notebooks. They are like all fancy looking and they have all these nice little drawings on the sides, artistic people unlike me.
SHANE: We don’t do that. We don’t draw, no. Art and math we’re pretty bad at so we kind of avoid those two things basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah but if that is your thing, do it. Do what makes you feel comfortable when you’re trying to write down ideas for your book and if it’s something that you like to do on a computer more then write it on the computer. Do what works for you but start making some notes. Does it have to be in perfect book form? No.
SHANE: No paragraphs, no sentences. You can write bullet points, anything you want to do.
JOCELYN: Don’t stress out about it. Just start writing some ideas down because the thing about it is, if you get ideas down, you have more done than you have done right now. So just get some bullet points down. You can refine everything and flush it out later. Before you know it, you’re going to have a book. I know some of you may be thinking, “Oh, they make it sound so easy.” It really is.
SHANE: Yeah, it’s just work.
JOCELYN: Don’t let your fears overcome you. It’s just like, somebody wrote an iTunes review recently and I couldn’t find it just right this second but it said something like, if you can’t start an online business by listening to Shane and Jocelyn, you’re not trying.” I love that review so much because it’s really true. I’m not saying that like it’s a pat to the back to ourselves but if you are willing to put the work in, if you’re willing to do the things that we’re asking you to do, you can get this thing off the ground. We believe in you. We’re so passionate about this and we just want you to be successful.
SHANE: A lot of the people out there that are in the online marketing space overcomplicate things because they want to sell you something. They want to sell you some big course that de-complicates the thing that makes it complicated. The bottom line is putting the information that you know into a media that other people can consume, like an ebook or a video, and then getting it to those people out there. You just have to get something. We DIY everything around here. We record videos with a Wal-Mart camera. We record our podcast on our computers and edit them on software that came with our computers. This is not something that we’re sitting here in this massive studio and we’re having all these stuff in preproduction and we’ve got people helping us to it. We just create content and we create as much content as possible because it’s easy to talk into a microphone. It’s easy to just sit and type on the computer that you already own. If you can just do it, you’re giving yourself a chance to succeed.
Jocelyn and I say all the time to people that we meet, one person asked. We have a course called Flip Your Life where we help people kind of create digital product and a guy asked me one time, he said, “So this guarantees I’ll succeed.” We’re like “No it doesn’t because 1) you have to have a good idea and 2) you have to get it done.” So nothing can guarantee that you succeed but the only thing that will guarantee failure is not trying. If you do nothing, if you go another year, if you just sit here for another year and you say to yourself, “I’m going to do this. I’ve got an idea. I’ve got an idea,” then in one year, you’re going to have an idea and that’s all you’re going to have, but if you’ll just commit to taking action, any action, set a date, pick a topic, look at Amazon and write down some chapter titles, outline them in a book format and start writing whatever, just write random thoughts under each topic.
If you start doing that then eventually that process is going to gain momentum, it’s going to start rolling downhill, and by the end of the project, you’re going to look down and say, “I’ve got an ebook. Now all I’ve got to do is go find somebody who is willing to buy it.” If you don’t do anything then this year is the same as last year, the same as last year. Next year will be the same, the same, the same. You’ve got to take action and it’s the whole point of today’s podcast. Do something. As soon as you stop this recording, as soon as you’re done today, get out there and do something. Set your date, pick a topic, do something that’s not even on our list. We’re not saying we have a monopoly on great ideas. Go register a domain name. Do something like that. It doesn’t matter where it is. Register your own name. We own ShaneSams.com and JocelynSams.com. We don’t even use them but we registered them because we thought we might need those for our personal brands someday. Do something to get the ball rolling and get your online business off the ground this year.
JOCELYN: Okay guys, we’ve thrown a lot of stuff out there today but I hope that it was really good stuff and very helpful for you. Let’s recap the five steps that we talked about and these are things that we actually want you to get done before our next podcast. That means you have one week, seven days, to get five things done.
SHANE: There you go. You got to get it on the calendar.
JOCELYN: Can you do it? This is the challenge.
SHANE: The Flipped Lifestyle challenge the gauntlet has thrown down. There we go.
JOCELYN: That’s right. I see some kind of like hashtag or something going with this.
SHANE: We’ll figure that later.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so #1 is set the date that your digital product will be completed. This is so easy. It requires a calendar. It should take approximately five minutes. #2 Pick your topic. You can do this. You know the things that you know about, pick one, and run with it. #3 Tell somebody. You must have an accountability partner. It’s so, so important in any kind of goal setting.
SHANE: If you need one, use us. Head over to Facebook, head over to the show notes, leave us a comment.
JOCELYN: #4 We’re going to do some topic research. Go out there. See what other people are doing in this niche. See what you can do to make a comparable product.
SHANE: Do that on Amazon.com, head over, and start looking at book titles. Find the chapters, move forward.
JOCELYN: #5 Start your digital product. Get the skeleton finished. You can do this. You’ve got seven days. Get it done.
SHANE: If you spent one day on the cover, one day on the About page, write about yourself, two paragraphs, tell them who you are, and you copied a copyright page from a book and just changed it to your information, and then you put 10 pieces of paper with 10 topics on top of it for your chapters. Boom, that’s it. The skeleton is done. You’re finished.
JOCELYN: So the Flipped Lifestyle Challenge, seven days, five things to do. Let us know how you’re doing. Come over and talk to us on Facebook, on Twitter, on the notes for podcast25. We want to know where you are and if you are getting this done, not if you are getting this done but that you did get this done because you can do it. We believe in you.
SHANE: All right, we’re going to wrap up the show with our Can’t Miss Moments and we have an awesome one this week. This was really fun. We actually just did it this morning and it was really, really cool. It’s something I’ve never done before because as teachers, we used to be teachers. Jocelyn and I both worked at school all day. We rarely got to go and experience our own children’s school life. Jocelyn, tell them about what we did this morning.
JOCELYN: This morning, we went to Isaac’s school and we read books to his kindergarten class. It’s something that his teacher had sent a note home about just about reading Christmas stories and…
SHANE: Seeing adults read other than their teachers what they wanted basically.
JOCELYN: And we volunteered to come in and I brought some of my favorite books. They are Robert Sabuda pop-up books and we can put a link to some of those in the show notes just so you can see what they are. They are fantastic books. They are very elaborate pop-up books. I can’t even really describe them. It’s something that you just need to see but they are so, so cool. If you have a kid in your life who does not own one of these books, you need to have one because they are so neat. At any rate, I read the books there and Shane took some pictures.
SHANE: Kids were captivated. It was just awesome.
JOCELYN: And our little boy, Isaac, he was so excited that we were there. Without online business, without doing what we do every single day, there’s no way that we would have been able to do that and it was just such a good morning. We just enjoyed it so much.
SHANE: I stood by the kids. Jocelyn read the books being the librarian. She can read upside down while she’s reading to the kids. It’s absolutely amazing. So she was reading the books to the kids and the kids were captivated. I was standing by Isaac and kind of helping him some of his little buddies, little boys were kind of laughing and stuff and I was helping him with crowd control but Isaac, all of sudden, I looked down and he hugged my leg and he started kissing my leg. When I looked down at him, he just looked up at me with so much love in his eyes and he was just so happy that we were there. He basically just said, “I’m glad you’re here.” It was just awesome to be there for him and to know that his dad was standing by him and his mom was reading to him, that we were a part of his life and that we could be there for them.
That’s why we are so passionate and just so excited for you because we know this is possible and online business is for anyone. Anyone can do this but everyone won’t. What we really want you to challenge yourself with today is, are you going to be in a position a year from now to control your destiny and make Can’t Miss Moments of your own? You have to take the first step on this journey. It’s not easy. It took us two years to really get successful online. We were able to quit our jobs in just over a year and then about a year later, we were able to really start making it in online business. If we had never started, then we wouldn’t be where we are now. Ask yourself where you want to be in a couple of years. Is it where you are now? If it’s not, then you need to take action. You need to get started and there is no better day than today.
JOCELYN: That’s all we have for you guys this week. Take action. We believe in you. You can do it. We will see you next week.
SHANE: Catch you all on the flip side. See you later, bye.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Janelle says
I just finished listening to this episode and I am looking for an accountability partner. I have written a Spanish activities book, have the website up and will be adding a podcast soon. I have gotten a podcast successfully launched in the past and will be doing that again now. I am currently looking for someone to bounce ideas around with. I can offer you the same. If you are looking to get a podcast up, I think I can help you with that. Even if you are more experienced than I, I still think I can offer value to you, a fresh set of eyes at the very least, but I do have lots of good ideas. Let’s get a few of us together, even if we are in different types of businesses and get 2015 off to a great start!
Shane Sams says
Awesome Janelle! Flip Your Life is about to open back up in February! If you need a mastermind, one tier has that as an option 🙂 https://flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife
Liz Fulcher says
Hi Janelle,
I would love to be your accountability partner. I have a young podcast (7 episodes) and several online projects in the pipeline for 2015. I’m a fantastic starter (like Shane), but not a great finisher (like Jocelyn).
I have your email address which I got from your website (NICE site!) and will contact you today. Let be finishers Janelle! 🙂
Liz
Sonny says
I will create a product by Feb 28. There I wrote it. Now off to go do it. Get in contact with me if you’d like to help keep me accountable. Thanks!