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In today’s podcast we are going to show you how to create and sell digital products to make money online.
Creating digital products is our preferred way of making money online for several reasons, so in this episode we’re going to share the why and how of making and selling digital products.
You will also learn:
- What we think is the first thing you should invest in in the beginning
- Why using the right technology and services can make running your business much smoother
- The controversial thing we believe was well worth the investment when we first started
- Why we think attending live events is so important
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
- Logonerds – for cheap logo design
- Odesk – a great outsourcing tool
- Flipped Lifestyle Resources – for all our favorite plugins, equipment, etc.
- Tropical Think Tank – Chris Ducker’s event that we are attending this year in the Philippines
- Join us in San Diego for our first ever live event with Jill and Josh Stanton from Screw the Nine to Five
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 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.
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all, on today’s podcast, we are going to talk about the best ways to invest in yourself so you can be successful online. [spoiler]
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: Hey guys, welcome to this week’s Flipped Lifestyle podcast where we’re going to be talking about spending your money wisely and investing in yourself.
These are two things that we’re really, really passionate about and we’ve learned so much about in hindsight just from the different things that we’ve done along the way to invest in our business and to invest in ourselves.
We’re going to share with you today a lot of things that we have learned from this process of being in online business for the past three years. But first, we are going to share a comment from our blog.
SHANE: Each week, we try to share something from our audience, whether it’s a Facebook comment, a tweet, an email, or an iTunes review, and this is the first time we’ve actually pulled something from our blog. We get lots of comments on our blogs. We’re one of the few people I think left that still have comments on their blogs. We don’t use any fancy system or we’ve not gotten rid of our comments.
We love having comments and discussion in the show notes of our podcast and in all of our blog posts. Today, we have a great compliment from Patrick Roden and he left this on a blog post over at FlippedLifestyle.com.
Patrick writes, “Shane and Jocelyn, what you’re doing matters. You will never see the full ripple effect for good from your efforts. Just know it’s there. Thanks for being so inspiring and generous with your insights.”
When I read that post today, it really made me really like tear up a little bit and I thought, “Man, that is what it’s all about. That is driving home our goal for this year of helping 1,000 families change their lives.”
It’s just awesome to get that confirmation that what we’re putting out there is making a difference in people’s lives. Patrick, thank you so much for that comment and we appreciate all the kind words, all the questions that you send in for our Q&As, and everything you do to communicate with us.
We strive to be as accessible as possible so please do not ever be afraid to contact us. If you want to do that, you can go over to our blog and you can leave a comment at FlippedLifestyle.com. You can send us a tweet over on Twitter @FlippedLS, which is our Twitter handle over there or you can even go to our Facebook page and leave us a comment at Facebook.com/FlippedLifestyle and we would love to read something that you comment or post on the air, and also email you back and get back to you with any questions that you may have.
Thanks again for all your great comments. They really, really motivate us to keep doing what we do.
JOCELYN: And we do read every single one. I tell you guys this all the time but we really do. We love to hear from you and just knowing what you’re doing, how our content has helped you, it really fuels us. It keeps us going so thanks for doing that.
All right, let’s dive on into today’s topic and it is about investing your time, money, and resources. Those are some really big fancy words that people throw out there but we are going to keep it simple today. We’re just going to talk about our experiences and how they have changed our online business and how they have made it better.
There are a lot of things to invest in out there. Pretty much anything that you purchase is an investment. It could be considered that. That’s just something to think about as you go into anything is what are you investing in.
You can invest your resources in your website, in content creation. You can invest resources in being an affiliate from someone and earning a percentage of sales. You can invest in the stock market. You can invest in somebody else’s platform like Facebook or Twitter. You can invest in advertisement or you can invest in yourself and that’s what we’re going to be talking about mostly today.
You can create your own products instead of being an affiliate from someone and keep 100% of the profits or mostly, minus PayPal fees and a few things like that. You can invest your money in your own business instead of somebody else’s and that is what we always try to do here at Flipped Lifestyle.
SHANE: When we first started out, we tried to do a lot of affiliate sales. We tried to advertise products from Amazon. We even tried Google AdSense and things like that, and those were all okay but we quickly realized that when we were doing that, we were actually investing in someone else’s brand and in someone else’s products so we kind of stepped back at one point and said, “Well, wait a minute, why are working so hard for other people? We’re already doing that at our 9-5 jobs and we quit those so let’s go invest in ourselves, in our own products, and we’ll make more money that way.”
So that’s one reason why we do not do a ton of affiliate sales because we think that putting that time and effort into our own products is what’s going to make us the most money.
JOCELYN: And there are different strategies out there. I mean, there will be people that argue that affiliate marketing is the best thing ever. That’s fine if that’s what you want to do but for us, we prefer to spend our time building our brand and our platform that we control ourselves.
The bottom line is that we have always been the most successful and made the most money when we concentrate on what we are doing ourselves.
Today, we want to help you figure out the best way that you can invest in yourself, in your online business, and in your brand. Today, we’re going to tell you three of the best investments based on our experience that you can make for your online business in your first couple of years as an online entrepreneur.
SHANE: The first thing that you should invest in your online business when you first start out or maybe you’ve been doing this for a few months and you’re ready to take it to the next level, the very first thing that you should invest in is training to beat the learning curve.
You’ve got to go out and invest in ways to learn things faster so you don’t spend hours and hours trying to figure something out. Basically, you can sit for a day and spend eight hours trying to figure things out, like if you’re trying to figure out how to make a plug-in work or you’re trying to figure out how to install something, or even figure out how to adjust the colors on your themes or whatever. You can sit and stare at your screen for eight hours or you can go pay a little money, watch a 30-minute video, and do it step by step and get it done.
It’s very true in online business that training is often the difference between like victory and defeat. It’s kind of what is going to set you apart from somebody else because many people sit and try to bootstrap it, try to do everything for free, trying to figure it all out, and they spend hours and hours and hours trying to do something that is actually pretty simple if they had just good instruction on how to get it done.
They get frustrated and they struggle, and they end up quitting because they spent all of their time and energy trying to figure out some simple thing that someone knows how to do, that someone can show them what to do and get it done, but they decided they were going to go at it on their own and be stubborn and they just didn’t finish it. So they just end up quitting because they didn’t have time to make their blog post, they didn’t have time to write emails, and everything kind of just collapses and falls apart.
Basically, you can just try to do something for free, try to take eight hours, and spend all of your time and energy on getting it done or you can go find a course, spend $97, watch a 60-minute how to video. You can be done, move on, and be working on something else in their business.
More people quit out of frustration for this reason that we find than anything else and really, it’s because they are too scared to invest money in themselves to get the training they need. They try to do it alone and they end up just quitting.
JOCELYN: And we’re talking to ourselves here too. I mean, we did this for a really long time. We tried to do everything ourselves. We didn’t want to spend any money because we were thinking, “Oh, we’re not even selling anything yet and we can’t buy anything because we just can’t afford it.”
We started looking at our lives and our finances, and we talked about this a lot of times in the past. We started looking at all the little extra things that we were buying just in our lives. Maybe we were going out to dinner three or four days a week because we worked all the time. What else do we spend money on, I mean, all kinds of crazy stuff.
SHANE: Yeah. We had cable. We were paying $100 a month for cable and we weren’t even using it basically. Jocelyn was buying clothes for Isaac and Anna. She’d find something she really liked but Isaac was like 4 and the outfit was for when they were 6. She’s like “He’s going to look really good in that when he’s 6” but we’re dropping like $60 on it.
JOCELYN: It wasn’t that much. They were on sale. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
SHANE: They are always on sale.
JOCELYN: We were buying things like video games that we didn’t really need because we don’t have time to play them and things like that.
SHANE: Touché.
JOCELYN: The point is, there’s always something in your life that if something is important to you, you’ll find a way to make it work and that’s pretty much what we did. We just evaluated what we were spending our money on, how can we move that money that we’re spending to things that could help our business move along. That’s really what the point is, is that if you are serious about this, you’ll find a way to make it work.
SHANE: I was in a forum the other day, a message board, and somebody was like, “I just can’t justify the price of this thing. It’s $19 a month and I just can’t justify the price because my online business isn’t making money yet.” I got on there and I was like, “You’re really just afraid to invest in yourself. You’re afraid you’ll fail and you’re afraid to bet on yourself.”
I always tell people, if you’re afraid to bet on you, then so is everybody else. Nobody is ever going to give you money if you won’t spend money on yourself. He came back on and he was like, “Man, you’re totally right. I just realized, I was paying $15 for World of Warcraft for like five years a month just to play this stupid video game and I’m worried about $19 a month for something that’s going to take my business to the next level.”
We really, really want to stress that it’s important that you find ways to buy trainings, even something that is like $47 that will show you to set up a blog. If that saves you eight hours of time, then find a way to do it because time is so much more important than money and look at the things that you spend your money on every month in your life.
There’s got to be something that you can kind of divert toward these trainings to save you time, to save you money in the long run. If you are more successful six months early because you invested $100 in some training modules or $1,000 in a big course that’s going to carry you through the next six months, if that’s going to make you a year ahead of being able to quit your job, if that’s going to make you double your money six months sooner, there’s absolutely no reason not to do it.
Don’t sit at your computer and be frustrated. Don’t sit there and try to figure everything out when someone has already figured it out. Just go pay for the courses and invest in yourself, and learn the things you need to get your online business off the ground.
JOCELYN: Okay, so we talked about investing in trainings to beat the learning curve and that is so very important. We’re going to move on next to investing in technology and services.
We’ll start out here by talking about your actual equipment that you’re going to use to create your online business. When we first started out, our computers were not the greatest. We bought like Black Friday specials. I had a couple of refurbished machines that I would buy, just look for deals on computers and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that but…
SHANE: The problem was our refurbished deals were 3 years old. We were getting these older computers that were kind of old. Jocelyn’s would actually overheat and it would almost like, we thought it was going to catch on fire and sometimes it would just shoot a little thing will come on and say, “Thermal shutdown imminent” and then computer would just turn off basically.
JOCELYN: Yes so we kind of learned that it was really important for us at that point we were in our business to upgrade some of our technology. We have done that. We’re not telling you that you need to go out and buy the state of the art machines. If you have the money, by all means, you should do it but if you don’t right now, just get something that will work and look and evaluate the types of things you’re going to be doing.
For us, it was really important to have a lot of speed in our computers because we do a lot of video, we do a lot of audio, things like that, so we needed a lot of speed in our machines. That’s just something that you need to look at when you’re starting out.
SHANE: The big thing is, you don’t want to be having shutdowns and blue screens of death and things like that. That’s not to knock on any specific brand of computer. We had Microsoft computers probably for the first two years that we started out in business but your computer does have to function correctly. It has got to be smooth. You can’t have your computer freezing up for 20 and 30 minutes and hope to possibly be able to succeed online. You’ve got to make it work.
We had someone in our course, one of our Flip Your Life courses, and they had really old computer. They kept having problems, things were freezing, and they couldn’t load things up, some online tools. She was like, “I just don’t know if I can do this.”
We were like, “Look, just go to Wal-Mart and buy a new computer. Find one for $200 but at least it’s new, at least it’s clean. At least it’s fresh. She went out and did that and once she got the computer situation fixed, she hit the ground running. The frustration was gone, everything worked, and she could actually make some headway in her online business.
Don’t just sit there and play with bad computers. There are a lot of inexpensive options out there and you can upgrade your equipment for probably less money than you think.
JOCELYN: Yeah. Now is actually a great time to look. It’s right after the holidays and there’s probably lots of kind of deals going on. If you’re in need of a computer, if you’re sitting there and waiting for 10 minutes for your computer to boot up, then you probably need to invest in a new computer if you’re serious about this online business.
The next thing that we want to touch on is website design. This could possibly be a little bit controversial but for us, Shane and I are not website designers by any sense of the imagination. We’re just not good at that.
SHANE: Not at all.
JOCELYN: When we were starting out, we did invest in having a website created for us. We wanted something that was very professional looking and something that we knew was going to work and we weren’t going to have to be fooling with it all the time and trying to make things work in it. That was something that was really important to us when we were starting out.
Also logo design, that’s something that we’re not very good at. So we decided to outsource that as well. That’s not to say that that’s something you have to do but if that is something that is important to you, your website to look really good and that is important to me, then you might want to invest in that upfront.
SHANE: We’re just talking mainly, we’re not just saying website design and logo design here. We’re saying services. If we had wanted to make our logo, we probably could have but we would have spent 3-5 days trying to get this perfect logo and get our logo with the right color and mess with Photoshop, have to look up a YouTube video to figure out how to do it and things like that. But the problem is, we didn’t have time to do that. We needed to be writing content and we needed to be focused on building an audience.
So we went to LogoNerds.com, paid $27, three days later, they sent six logos. I looked at the one I wanted and I said, “I’m down to these two but can you change this?” They fixed it, boom.
For $27 and zero time invested, we had a logo for CoachXO.com. It’s so simple to go out and find the services that you need. If you can’t get a plug-in to get installed right, go to oDesk.com and find someone that knows how to do it, pay them $25, and get it done. That $25 to save you eight hours of messing with a plug-in is going to come back to you a hundred fold once you start making money.
JOCELYN: Shane said earlier and I’m just going to echo it again, time is more valuable than money and I know right now, if you’re starting out and you don’t have a lot of extra money, it probably doesn’t seem that way and I know it’s hard to hear but the thing about it is, everyone has money. You have to choose how you want to spend it.
Again, I’m going to say it, if this is important to you, you will find a way to make it work. What is your priority? The sooner that you learn this, the better off you’re going to be in your online business. We are giving you a little bit of tough love here but this is what you need to hear because this is what we needed to hear three years ago and we didn’t have anybody to tell us.
What you need to be doing is you need to be spending your time doing what no one else can do and that is creating content. You are an expert in whatever you’ve decided to create your online business in. That’s something that no one else can probably do.
You need to be writing blog posts, you need to be creating products that you can sell in your website and let somebody else worry about the other things, let someone else worry about the logos and the website design. Unless this is something that you do by trade, it’s probably better off left to professionals.
We know people who have worked for days, weeks, months, and I’m including myself in this, trying to find the perfect color scheme, trying to design the perfect logo and the perfect theme for the website and making sure everything looks just as beautiful as possible. That sounds nice but if you’re spending months doing that, when are you going to have something available to sell? You are going to have the most beautiful website in town but what good is that if you don’t have anything available to sell on it?
SHANE: Imagine if you own a real-life business, like in the real world not on the online world. Let’s say you’ve got a store and you’re selling, I don’t know, I’m going to make up something, knives. You have a knife store. A big knife guy right here, right? Not really.
Let’s say you’ve got a knife store. So you’ve got this store, you’ve got this great idea, and you’re going to fill this thing with these collectible knives and everybody in town just love these knives. They are always buying knives. Let’s say you go outside and you’re like, “I’m looking at my wall here, I wish my wall was silver because knives are silver.” Go with me here. Follow on.
JOCELYN: This is derailing.
SHANE: This is derailing off the tracks. So I get this silver paint. I’m trying to paint walls. So I’m painting silver and this guy comes in and he goes, “Oh man, you’re opening a knife store. Can I go in and buy a knife?” You’re like, “No, I’m painting my wall silver. Can you not see I’ve got better things to do than sell you knives? Wait, there’s no knife in there. I didn’t even order knives but I’m painting my walls silver.”
So the guy leaves. You keep painting. This next guy comes, “Oh a knife store. Can I go get a knife? I need a knife.” No, I didn’t order any knives. I’m kind of painting my walls silver.” You just sit there for three months hand painting all your walls silver. That makes absolutely no sense. No, you hire a painter. He paints your walls, you go inside and stock your shelves with knives and start making money.
It’s the same thing online. If you’re sitting there trying to just figure out the perfect color for your links and you’re trying to get your background to be the perfect shade of eggshell instead of white, then what’s going to happen is your business is going to collapse because you’re going to get frustrated, you’re going to get sick of messing with it, and you’re not going to ever create enough content to make any money.
JOCELYN: You’re also going to wonder, where did all my time go?
SHANE: Right.
JOCELYN: I’ve got this lovely website with the perfect font and the perfect color and the perfect logo but I have nothing to show for it. That’s why we want to concentrate on letting the pros do what they do best. You do what you do best.
SHANE: Yeah and the thing is when you start out too, if you invest in your technology and you invest in your services, you’re not going to be able to invest in getting everything done. Most of us don’t have enough money to do that but if you can just get the most frustrating things off of your plate by investing in your technology.
If your computer works, it’s not the best computer in the world but it works and if you can just say, “Oh man, I don’t have time to do a logo” so you hire out your logo for $25, then you get all that eight hours back and you write nine blog posts in that time, you’re going to get so much further ahead and succeed so much faster than we did because we’re looking back and we’re saying this because we made a mistake and didn’t do this. If you do that, once you start investing in your technology and services, your business is absolutely going to work and the frustration is going to go away.
JOCELYN: If you’re interested in finding out the kind of equipment we use like computer equipment, hardware, also a lot of the different plug-ins and services that we use online, you can head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/Resources. Everything on that page, they are all products and services that we have personally used and that we really like.
If you’re looking for something in your online business and you’re wondering if somebody has used it or if somebody likes it, head on over to our Resources page and just check it out. We have a lot of different things there and you can see what we use and what works for us.
SHANE: Once you’ve invested in some online courses and training material, once you’ve got technology up to speed and you’ve maybe outsourced some of the services that you need to kind of get some things off your plate and take away some of that frustration, there’s one more thing that we really highly recommend that everyone does and we actually tell people to try to do this in your first year of online business and that’s attend a live event.
We did not attend any live events probably for the first year and a half of our online business but when we first went to our first live events, the results after it were absolutely insane.
These events can be expensive. You do have to put some money down. You’re going to have to travel and things like that but it’s almost like that is like going all in when you’re playing a game of poker or something.
Like you’re putting this money down and you’ve got this date on your calendar and it kind of becomes this like line in the sand where you’re like, “Okay, I’ve got to get everything done before this so that I’m prepared when I go to this live event to learn as much as possible, to get the answers I need, and when I leave the live event, I’m going to be motivated to take action on all those things that I did and just make something happen because I don’t want to look foolish after the live event and I don’t want to waste my money or feel like I’ve wasted my time. I want to use that information to take things to the next level.
JOCELYN: And it’s also a motivating factor before the event because you don’t want to show up at the event and have a barebones website and no product to sell. When you want to get there and have people go to your website and be like, “Oh wow yeah. You’ve been selling this for however long. This is really good and they can give you some constructive criticism to make it better and live events for us have been a total game changer. I wish we would have done it a lot sooner.
SHANE: It’s not that we just came to the live events and made more money. It was like, some things you do, like you save time or you make a little bit more money because you’ve got extra time, but going to live events kind of became these magnifier on all of our business.
Like we were making a comfortable income, we had already quit our jobs, we were pulling in five-figure months before we went to our first live event. We went there and it was a very small event, 25 people, and we were there to ask experts our questions and to get feedback from this mastermind group on what we should do and the next steps of our online business. We had some very targeted questions.
We have worked really hard to build a foundation of our business before the event so that we knew exactly what we were looking for when we got there. When we got to the event, we were making five-figure months.
The month after we went to our very first concentrated, intimate live event for online business, we made $140,000 in 30 days. We had a string of six-figure months after that and all that was from momentum gathered from this event. Now it wasn’t just because of the questions we got answered or it wasn’t just because of one magic tip that we’ve got at the live event. It was more just the experience of preparing for the event, being focused in the event and taking action after the event that really built this huge, surging growth in our online business.
Live events are amazing because you realize that you’re not alone. We live in a very rural area so there are not a lot of people around us that do what we do.
JOCELYN: Or any that we’re aware of.
SHANE: Or any that we’re aware of. We’re still looking. We need to put a little paper up on a couple of telephone poles or something. “Entrepreneurs lost, need found call or whatever” but those events surround you with those like-minded entrepreneurs that you may not have in your life that will motivate you and kind of you can see like, Man, they are making it, so can I.”
They get you motivated before the event so you’re prepared or a ton of fun when you get there especially the smaller ones. We don’t really go to the huge events because we don’t feel like we get much out of just being, I don’t want to go see a key note speech and be one of the 1,000 people in a room. I want to be in a room with 25 people there to make more money and to build a business.
We kind of stick to the smaller events and you come out of them with so much energy and just motivation and focus. It’s almost impossible not to take action on the things you learn when you’re there.
JOCELYN: Just like Shane was saying, don’t focus on only the huge events. I’m sure they do have some benefit. We actually have never attended one. We went to, I’d say, a medium-sized event.
SHANE: And the reason that we didn’t go to large events, we have not done it for online business but we have been to large events like for education. We might go to things for teachers or I’ve been to a lot of football, I went to a football clinic one time with 10,000 coaches there and it was terrible.
The best football clinic I ever went to had like 15 guys that showed up and just talked about football all day. That’s why we avoid those large events because we’ve done them in other areas and they just were not very beneficial at all.
JOCELYN: We love the smaller events because everyone there is focused. Everyone is heading in the same direction. The good thing about it is everyone has put down the money to be there so everybody is fairly serious about what they are doing.
It’s so much fun when you get there. I mean, you talk to people when you arrive. You talk about online business. If you love online business and I assume you do because you listen to our podcast, you will love an online business live event. We had so much fun at the ones that we have been to.
The best part about it was that we got to meet people, we got to form mastermind groups that was so powerful. We still talk to several of the people that we met at our first live event today. We work with them very closely and they are some of the people that we run strategies by. It’s just so beneficial to meet them in person.
It’s also beneficial to meet the organizers at the event. A lot of times, they might be big names in online business and it’s never a bad idea to get in front of some of these people and to have them know your name and be familiar with your business. That is just so, so powerful.
These small events, about 25 to maybe 200 or 300 people will be a good sized event to try to do. They just offer so much more bang for your buck. Sometimes they are a little bit more expensive but they are so beneficial because you get to really get in there and talk to people. People will leave that event knowing your name, knowing your business, wanting to work with you in the future, wanting to offer their expertise in exchange for yours and it’s just such a beneficial relationship after you go to one of these small events.
SHANE: Small events open a lot more opportunities than large events as well. When you go to a large event, you’re going to run into people and you’re going to get some of the benefit of finding friends and things like that, but if you really want to make it, you’ve got to be able to get in there and rub shoulders with some experts.
You’ve got to get in there and meet, like Jocelyn said, people who are serious and willing to throw down money to be at those events because those are the people that are going to be able to help you online. Some of the events we went to, we’ve meet people like Pat Flynn, Chris Ducker, John Lee Dumas. Rich Brooks, all these people and those people now know us. They know our names. We’ve shook their hands. They’ve invited us on their podcasts. They have retweeted things we put on Twitter. They’ve liked and shared things we do on Facebook.
You’re just not going to get that when you show up at a key note speech and you hear somebody and influence or talk. That’s great. You’re going to learn from that but the benefit basically just comes from what they said, You’re not going to absolutely have that relationship which might pay some dividends later and open some doors, and have some opportunities.
Make sure that you’re getting to live events. They don’t have to be huge. They don’t have to be hosted by the most famous people in the world, they just have to be beneficial, value packed, and somewhere that you can get to and then you can get your business to the next level.
JOCELYN: Again, we highly recommend these small events. If you’re looking for an event to go to, invest in the small events. You will be so glad you did. We went to a really intimate event and then we went to a slightly larger event a few months later.
SHANE: About 300-350 people. It was good.
JOCELYN: We liked it but the small intimate event just set the bar so high. It was just so hard when we went to the other event. We were like, “Oh wow.” That was okay but it was just wasn’t as value packed as the other event.
SHANE: And we’re willing like we throw down some money for some of these events now because those are a little bit more expensive. Like we’re going to Tropical Think Tank which is Chris Ducker’s event, and that’s in the Philippines. But it was only for 50 people and we knew that if 50 people were willing to get on an airplane and fly halfway across the world, and pay a pretty premium price not only for airline tickets but the event itself to go there and to put down, that is going to be a seven-day event where you’re going to give a week of your time to go mastermind with these people.
We look for events where we know people are investing in themselves. We know that people are saying, “I’m all in. I believe in my business. I’m serious because those are the people that we want to learn from. We don’t just want to learn from people that showed up at a place that had 10,000 and it cost $50 to go there because most of the people are dabblers. They are not really serious about the event. Find something where you can look at it and you can go, “Yeah, those people are for real. Those people are going there to get something done and I’m going to get something done and take action with them.
All right, so one more time. We’ll just kind of a little recap of today’s show. Our three tips in investing for investing in yourself in your first couple of years on online business are, #1 you need to get the training you need. Don’t waste eight hours figuring something out when you can pay $50 and learn it in 30 minutes. Time is always more valuable than money even when it doesn’t feel that way.
#2 get the technology and services that you need as soon as you can afford them. Find ways to get your computers and everything up to par without having to drive yourself crazy because your computer keeps freezing and shutting down.
#3 we want you to go to live events. Figure out where you can go, somewhere that you can travel to, get around serious entrepreneurs, get help from people who have been there and done that, and make sure that you are surrounded by people that are going to make sure you succeed in your online business.
JOCELYN: If you are looking for some training to help you get started, we do have a course that helps you to create your first digital product and that course is called Flip Your Life because that’s ultimately what we want everybody listening to our podcast to do.
We’ve been doing this course for a while now. We are always amazed at the high quality products that our participants are able to create. We’ve had a lot of people in the course that have already started selling their products. We’ve gotten emails thanking us for creating the course, for walking people step by step through this process of creating the digital product, getting it ready to sell online, creating the process just to sell it online and we are just so proud of all of the participants that have been through so far.
If you’re interested in participating in our Flip Your Life course, you can head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife and we hope that you will join us.
Also, because we’re such big believers in the power of live events, we have decided to host a live event ourselves. We are so very excited about this event. We are actually joining together with Josh and Jill Stanton of ScrewtheNinetoFive.com. We are hosting a live event called the Flip Your Nine to Five Live in San Diego, California. It’s going to be March 28 through the 29th.
This is actually mine and Shane’s birthday weekend. We hope that you can join us celebrate our birthdays and also just to connect with other online entrepreneurs and people who are ready to take their online business to the next level. We wanted to do this because we want to do for others what live events did for us. If you want to join us, head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/Live and grab a space before they are all gone.
SHANE: The cool thing about this event and doing it with Jill and Josh is that we actually met Jill and Josh last year at a live event, at the very first live event we ever went to. We struck up this great friendship. We were both on kind of the same trajectory and the same path, and so you can see that the growth and the things that come out of masterminds last long after the event when you show up live and do things. You just build these relationships that keep opening doors and opportunities.
Now we are recording this podcast a little bit before the launch of the live event in San Diego so by the time this airs, there probably are only going to be a couple of tickets, if any, left so head over to FlippedLifestyle.com/Live and check if there are any tickets left. Try to grab one of the last tickets before they are gone and if they are sold out when you get there, make sure you go check and see if they are, but if they are sold out, we will have a form where you can sign up and be notified where and when our next live event mastermind experience is going to take place.
JOCELYN: All right, so next we a re going to jump into our Can’t Miss Moment segment of the show. This is where we talk about things that we might not have had the opportunity to do if we did not get started in our online business. This is really the reasons that we do what we do today. My Can’t Miss Moment for this week is my little boy a few days ago, he got sick at school and of course that’s a Can’t Miss Moment.
SHANE: He threw up in the bathroom.
JOCELYN: Yeah and the school, they called us and we were able to drop everything that we were doing, we went to get him, we had to rearrange our schedule for the rest of the day, we quit doing what we were doing, and we took care of our little boy. That’s really what it’s all about for me. I didn’t have to ask somebody permission to leave work. I didn’t have to worry about getting a substitute because I was a teacher. I just stopped what I was doing, we took care of our little boy. That’s just so, so powerful for me.
SHANE: Mine was actually this morning. I was eating breakfast and I was just sitting there with Anna. She was watching a cartoon on her iPad and kind of just laughing and talking about it with me. I was sitting there, we were eating our food. I looked over and I saw the clock and the clock was at 9:30. It was just so powerful to me in that moment. I just looked back at Anna and I took a picture of her because she was smiling at me and she was trying to stuff this enormous spoonful of cereal into her mouth, and she’s really little, so. I took a picture of her and we laughed.
We had a good time and I just thought to myself, “Man, where would I be at 9:30 if we had not started an online business? What would I be doing right now if we had never went all in and sacrificed and made this thing happen?”
I’d be sitting in a classroom or I’d be sitting in an office or doing something else. Whatever I would be doing, I would not be there relaxing with my breakfast, a cup of coffee, and my little girl. That was my Can’t Miss Moment for this week, just being able to eat breakfast with Anna, take my time. It was 9:30 and I had nowhere to be but where I wanted to be. It was just an awesome, awesome feeling.
JOCELYN: All right guys. That’s all we have for this week. Thanks as always for listening. We hope that we gave you some great ideas on how to invest in yourself in 2015 and beyond. Remember that you can find the show notes for this episode at FlippedLifestyle.com/Podcast29. We appreciate you guys so, so much. See you soon.
SHANE: Catch you all on the flipside.
JOCELYN: Bye.
SHANE: Do you need step by step instruction? Do you need us to help you create your digital product and get your online business started? Well, you can do that. We actually now offer a course called the Flip Your Life e-course where we show you how to create your first digital product in 29 days or less.
All you have to do to get more information on this program is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife, and that’s all one word, and you can check out everything that we do in that course to help you get your digital product created for sale online even if you don’t have a website. That’s FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. You can check when our next session is starting at that link. [/spoiler]
Jessica says
How do you find out about the small live events that you mention in this podcast?
Shane Sams says
We find them by listening to podcasts, groups on facebook, and generally being connected to our industry influencers. Listen to a few podcasts you like, many will host live events!
Miika says
Thanks for the great tips and motivations! This really gave me the courage to invest and also look at my online venture more like a real business. I start to understand that I shouldn’t be afraid to spend a little money to make a little more money (hopefully a lot more) and that’s how it is in all business. Thanks!
Laura says
Thank you so much. I have listened to all of your podcasts and this episode was one of my favorites. You mentioned taking courses to help you if you get stuck on something rather than wasting your time figuring it out. Where do you find these courses?
Shane Sams says
Thanks Laura! We find them through friends online, podcasts we listen too, blogs we follow. Many of your favorite online personalities will speak in various places, you just have to hunt around for the schedules. You could also search for them. We are planning a few more ourselves, we may be in your neck of the woods sometime soon 🙂