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In today’s podcast we are helping Chris and Rikka Brandon take their online business to the next level.
Chris and Rikka are working on building their online job recruiting website and we’re sharing how to find out if an idea is viable, how to drive more traffic and how to build relationships with your audience so they buy.
You will also learn
- A little bit about Chris and Rikka and how they got started with GetUHired.com
- How Pay-Per-Click ad campaigns can be useful and should you be using them
- How to build relationships with your audience that won’t be a massive time suck
- The best way to drive awareness to their site
- How to automate social media and save time
- How to determine if your idea is actually viable
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
- Check out their site GetUHired.com
- The Flip Your Life Community
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 help Chris and Rikka take their online business to the next level. [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 back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We are very excited this week to bring you another Flipped Podcast. This one is with Chris and Rikka Brandon. We’re so excited to have you guys on today. Thanks for being guests on our show.
RIKKA: Thanks for having us.
SHANE: All right guys, tell us a little bit about yourselves and what you do now, like for a living, kind of where you’re from and just the nuts and bolts of kind of where you are in life.
RIKKA: Okay, I’ll start. Obviously this is Rikka. I have been an executive recruiter since 2001. I have owned my own business since 2003. I have been doing it a really long time and just sort of ready for a change. We spent the last year living in Mexico because we are in Moorhead, Minnesota which is right across the river from Fargo, North Dakota and it gets cold. The winters get long and so we moved to Mexico last year and that really lit the fire for the flipped lifestyle approach. Chris?
CHRIS: I was a Unix system administrator and then I was a team lead before. Rikka convinced me that I should quit my corporate life and move to Mexico for a year. And then now that I’ve come back, I’ve actually gone back to where I used to work as a consultant. So I’m still, you know, being a consultant is nice but I’m still kind of looking for the not going to an office every day from 8-5.
SHANE: Sure. Rikka, what is an executive recruiter? What is that? What do you do?
RIKKA: Basically, when companies do need to find somebody with really specific skills and talents, they call me and I find it. I have been really heavily focused on building products and building materials, manufacturers, and distributors, which is a mouthful, but basically, that means windows and doors, cabinets, flooring, anything like that. If you are looking to hire in that area, I’ve been doing it forever. There’s only about 20 of us in the nation that focus on it so basically, companies pay me 25% of the expected annual compensation for people I refer and they hire. On $100,000 job, my fee is $25,000.
JOCELYN: Right and that is a nationwide thing?
SHANE: It is actually international. I have clients in the Cayman Islands. I do a fair amount of in Canada and a little bit in Europe. Hardly any of it is local. It’s all over the internet and the phone which is why we could move to Mexico when I had a thriving a business.
JOCELYN: Right and that’s what I want to clarify for our audience that you have had an online business for quite a while, right?
RIKKA: It’s funny, I’ve never really thought of it as an online business but in fact, it was. It’s just a really high end service so yeah, it was pretty much my website and the phone as how people learned we existed.
SHANE: So people basically hired you kind of like on a contract basis, right?
RIKKA: A lot of it was contingency based so that meant if I didn’t find somebody who is awesome, they didn’t pay me a fee. So that meant I was on it all the time. My person has to be good enough not only for them to hire but for them to write me a pretty big check for the privilege of hiring them and nothing, there’s no refund. It’s replacement guarantee if it doesn’t work out in the first 90 days but it’s definitely a pay per performance structure that I happen to be really great at. I love it and it is a great game, but it has been a decade, well, it’s over a decade now. I’m ready for the next challenge although as we move through with Get U Hired, I find that it’s irritating from being a veteran entrepreneur to a newbie again.
SHANE: So what is your online business that you’re trying to start now that we’re going to talk about today, like you just said, Get U Hired. What is the exact domain name and what are you trying to actually build as an online business like with digital products and stuff?
RIKKA: Okay, the actual domain name is Get U Hired, and it’s U the letter U not Y-O-U, so GetUHired.com. Basically, what it is, is taking all of the advice and experience I have with resumes, interviewing, and knowing what hiring managers are looking for, and putting it into accessible information for people who are looking to make a change with their job, either to get promoted or change companies entirely because people, you know, job hunting is an event, not an interest.
If you’re happy at your job, you don’t care about your resume. So it’s sort of one of these things that hits people and they don’t do it very often. So some people, they might interview every five or six years, so obviously, you’re not going to be great at it when you do it occasionally.
What I’ve done over the years is really kind of refined my ability to help people put their best foot forward and really show up and represent themselves well for the opportunity. We’ve distilled that into things that you can do online through audio.
A lot of it is me explaining what they are looking for and why they are looking for it and how you can best put yourself forward. That’s where we really got the idea of it because I’ve helped so many people get hired over the years and then when we did the SEO research, it was sort of mind blowing. How to write a resume had 74,000 searches a month and how to write a cover letter had tens of thousands of searches a month, and all search stuff like that, interview questions and how to answer them, that long tail keyword had over 40,000 a month. There’s clearly a need. People are looking for it.
CHRIS: And I think also just clearly, I mean, people are always changing jobs or trying to find a job.
JOCELYN: Right.
RIKKA: So that’s kind of what we’re hoping to do.
JOCELYN: Okay, so Chris, what is your role in the business currently and how are you guys looking to sort of flip your life?
CHRIS: Since I have IT background, like, I have been doing a lot more IT backend like WordPress and those types of things, very different technology than what I’m used to. The WordPress stuff I get but I’m trying to learn a lot more of like the more backend type stuff.
SHANE: So basically, Rikka will be kind of the face of the brand while you are in the background making sure that everything functions and works correctly. Okay, awesome. All right guys, let’s take what we just talked about and let’s jump into your questions and see if we can help you kind of take this thing to the next level. What’s your first question?
CHRIS: Our first question is with regards to PPC ads. We’ve with this, I was trying to launch it. Before we have our site fully up and running, we were trying to get some sales, get some proof of concept, I guess, essentially. So we had a product sales page. We ran some ads directly to it without any luck and then we did some opt-ins. We ran people to the opt-ins and then put them into an email campaign, which also had not very much luck. So anyway, I was kind of wondering if you guys have thoughts on PPC campaigns and like do you use them.
SHANE: Okay and you’re talking about pay per click ads, right? Now, are you using like Google or Facebook? What were you using? Where were you paying for this traffic? Where you paying for it at?
CHRIS: Google and then Bing, Yahoo.
SHANE: Okay so this is like search engine stuff basically.
CHRIS: Right.
SHANE: Okay. I think that pay per click advertising is a good thing. We’ve used it in the past and we’ve had some success with it, but it all boils down to this, like, you can get people to come to your website with pay per click ads, right? That’s kind of actually the easier part is to drive the traffic with that money but you’re not going to make sales unless you have some kind of relationship with those people.
All the gurus out there seem to say that. “Oh, we’ll just put them in this launch sequence. 70 emails later, they are going to give you all their money.” That is totally, 100% not the case. It’s not true. I’m sure if some people have had some success out there selling their course on, I don’t know, How to Dream Better or something, but in real life, in real niches where you’re really trying to sell products, we have not seen that as true. You can’t just put people in an auto responder.
People have to be introduced to your brand. They have to go in, they have to learn about you, they have to fill you out, see what you’re about, kick the tires a little bit, and they really have to kind of have some kind of connection with you before they are going to buy.
I know that’s weird in your case because you think people are like, “I’ve got to get a job in the next seven days” and this is like an event thing, right? I still think that you can kind of condense that relationship building down into a period of time that might be more like personal and specific, even with those pay per click ads. If you’re just driving people to an opt-in and it’s just barely going to an auto responder to get them to that sales page or if you’re driving people directly to a sales page, you’re probably not going to have a whole lot of success with actually getting people to give you money upfront.
CHRIS: Right.
RIKKA: That’s kind of what we felt. We started to build out the website because at least there are some blogs that would demonstrate I know what I’m talking about and if my style is for you because I’m a pretty straight shooter and maybe you don’t like that. Maybe you really think you should have a 17-page resume.
So some of that it is you need to decide if you like me or not and so kind of on that question, we’re going to have some Evergreen blogs and I think I have about 15 done right now. Is that something where you think we’re going to need to have the ongoing or maybe like a Q&A type thing on related stuff as kind of ways to build that relationship? Just some ideas you guys have on building that relationship that isn’t a huge time suck because we both have full time other gigs that we’re kind of doing this on the side of.
JOCELYN: Right. I think what I would do is the content that you’re already written, maybe put that in your auto responder and that’s how people can sort of get to know you. I mean, they can also come there via search traffic, which is important, but I think that getting people with your pay per click ads into an email opt-in where they have some type of magnet there that something that they would want. Maybe it’s something about writing a resume, something that will be applicable to job hunters.
Once you get them there, get them at your auto responder where they can get to know you and then hopefully later, once you build that relationship, you can sell them something down the line.
SHANE: So basically when you set up the auto responder, don’t set it up like all these launch things that people say. Your auto responders should not have an end game of getting people to a sales page. That’s going to happen organically when people know you and they start looking for how you can help them.
Our auto responder basically is just all of our podcasts for Flipped Lifestyle because we know that if people get into our brand and hear all these free content that we’re giving out and they get to know us, then they will know that we’re here to help them. That’s what we’re here for and we don’t really even have to use our email list to sell anything because we just use that to build that relationship with people to let them know how we want to serve them. It’s kind of a mind shift. When you look at your email list, don’t make it like, “I just have to get the email. I’ve got to launch them and if they don’t buy something in seven, I’m going to unsubscribe them and move on.”
RIKKA: Right and it’s probably for most people, it’s somewhere between 90 days to six months of that kind of the “I need a job or…” For some people, they have a job, they heard about it from a buddy and they want to write a great resume and submit it tomorrow, so some people are going to move super fast.
SHANE: Right exactly.
RIKKA: But most people are slower than that.
SHANE: So you’re going to have time to build that in and get your content in front of them, and let that relationship build. Also too, don’t just give all your content in your email because no one is going to read that.
Truncate it a little bit and have them come back to your website so they are constantly poking around seeing what you have to offer, checking out your resource pages and then finally, they are going to look at your course and start thinking about it because you’re giving them so much help and you’re taking them to a certain point in the process where eventually, maybe 30, 40 days in, they jump in. Now you can help them in the next 30 days and kind of go with that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I would like to see you maybe do some type of a video course, sort of like what we’re doing with Flipped Lifestyle. We run ads on Facebook to get people to opt in to our six free video series and I think maybe that could be really successful for you.
SHANE: You take them to a certain point in the process where you can help them but then when you know they need you, there’s a certain point where they are going to need you. You can get them through the basics but then there’s going to be a certain point where people give up or fail. That’s where they need the expert.
Then that part is where the relationship has been built because you’ve already helped them to a certain point and now you can move them on through your sales funnel, which I hate that word because it feels like you’re just hurting people basically. You know what I mean? But you can get them to a point where now they are ready for your expertise to come in because they’ve got the basics out of the way.
RIKKA: Right and I think the differentiator of Get U Hired is the fact that I’ve placed over 400 people, hired over 500 as a hiring manager, HR manager. You can hire a resume writer, you can do a resume template but if you don’t know how to make your experience look good, sound good, and present well, it doesn’t matter. So the differentiating point for us is I can teach you how to look at your experience in a way that translates great to a resume and to an interview.
SHANE: Right but that’s going to take time. When they pay per click, they click to your ad and they land on your page, they don’t know that. Your first paragraph may say that but they’ve got to learn that over time and then they are going to trust that expertise.
RIKKA: And I also think they sort of need your experience by sending the resume out and getting a bunch of echoes. The person who sends out one resume and gets a job offer doesn’t need this course. It’s the person who is like, “Why am I not getting anywhere because I’m a smart, talented person but I am not getting called back on jobs I’m clearly qualified for.”
JOCELYN: Exactly and that may be something that you put on your ad copy like, “Are you tired of getting rejection letters” because I know I was. When I was looking for jobs like way back after college, I could have wallpapered my wall with them seriously. That’s what your language needs to say in your ad. Okay, we need to move on here and we’re going to move on to question #2.
RIKKA: I guess one of the main questions is what steps you think we should take to drive awareness to the site? We’re looking at using SEO provider. Obviously we’re using the pay per click. I’m kind of not super in love with the idea of social media because it becomes a bit time consuming, but what are some of the ways that you guys would think for a brand like you had to be a good use of our energy and efforts to drive awareness to it?
SHANE: Okay the first thing I want to say is like I love that you guys are clearly not scared to spend some money up front because I think that’s a reason a lot of people actually do fail and it’s not about spending millions of dollars and thousands a month on advertising but you’re already in a good mindset because you’re not afraid to invest in yourself and that can actually speed up some of that.
You know that time suck that you just said with like social media and things like that, you can use money to kind of automate a lot of those processes to free you up and do some other things. I would say the biggest thing that you need to do is just get your content in front of people. Your intake forms that we have everybody fill out for the show, you talked about how you initially were just taking people to a sales page or you were taking people to an opt in which had a couple of emails and they ended up in the sales page.
I would completely reverse your thinking on that. I would just really promote that content especially when you see stuff that kind of takes off like maybe you do share something and it gets a few things on social media. I would shift your focus toward your content and getting that in front of people.
We’ve never hired anybody, we’re not big believers in SEO and making everything perfect and getting all that organic content out there because Google is eventually going to find you. It doesn’t matter how good your copy is. It doesn’t matter how many SEO plug ins that you put in. I’ve just never heard someone actually tell me, “You know, the difference in my business is when I got that SEO guy to come in and clean up my copy.” I’ve never heard anybody say that, ever.
JOCELYN: Well, I think maybe like three years ago, it was a different story but things have changed so much with Google. I just wouldn’t put so much investment and time into that personally.
SHANE: Right. I mean $400. You were talking about there’s some service you found I guess for $400 a month. Listen, $400 a month, if you can get opt ins for $2-$3, like if you can get an actual lead that signs up for your email list, that’s 200 or 300 emails a month that you could collect and that’s a lot of money to be able to invest in something as simple as you’re making sure I’ve got the right keywords on a page.
CHRIS: Right, I guess for you, do you think like just creating a certain amount of content, like more and more content, is that the best way?
SHANE: Oh yeah. Here’s the deal, every time we make content, more people see it than saw it last week. That’s just the way it is. We’ve started probably five really successful website businesses that have made money now. It’s almost like this rinse and repeat kind of process.
Every time we’ve seen it where we’ve created good content, it doesn’t have to be 17-page epic post or anything. We try to write 3-5 paragraphs. We get our point across. We niche our content down. I would never write a blog post like How to Write a Great Resume. I would write something like what to include in the first reference at the top of your references or something. It has got to be really niche topics and all these posts, all these content because you’ve got a better chance of getting found in Google and getting ranked for those.
RIKKA: And so the SEO provider that we’re looking at, it’s kind of beyond the keywords. It’s more of we write a 10 tips to ramp your resume type thing and then they take and make about seven sort of related blog posts on it, so it is kind of that mass content production of 7-10 additional, sort of like blog post a week based off that original content but sort of skewed for different keyword launch or keywords that are like it.
The SEO is really kind of a content producer as well. So anyway, I’m just wondering if that changes how you feel about SEO if it is sort of producing more content. And also on that, the ads are super cheap, the pay per click. Right now, I think our average cost actual lead opt in was about $1.
SHANE: I think there’s better ways to batch content. I think that you can do things like record video or audio, have that transcribed, break it up into four part series and things like that. I think that’s a much better way to batch content instead of just repeating yourself. If you want like How to Write a Resume or How Should I Write my Resume or I want to write a Resume, How do I do it. Instead of making seven blog posts that are all kind of related that are the same keyword or different keywords, you can get a lot more out of it if you just create more authentic individual content and I just don’t think, I’ve never heard anybody in my experience say that kind of strategy really was the ultimate thing that drove them and took them to the next level, but I do think that you need to go to social media. Jocelyn was going to talk to you about that because there’s ways to do it without it being a time suck.
CHRIS: Okay, so a quick follow up, do you guys have with your process like try to do certain number of posts a week or like once you get to x number of posts on your site, that’s kind of really when you see the traffic?
JOCELYN: Right. I try to do like one post a week for Elementary Librarian. It’s going to take you a while. I’m just now, well, I’m almost three years in now but it took me about a year to really, really grow the site and most of that was organic.
Had I known then what I know now, I would have used social media like so much more. I just feel like such an idiot because I didn’t do this. Shane and I have been doing some different Facebook course material that we purchase from different people out there and we’re just like, wow, I mean, why didn’t we know about all this? We kind of did but we really didn’t. It has really been making a big difference.
We’ve been doing some tests just on social media, just with a couple of ads based on some things that we’ve learned and we have just been amazed at the kind of leads that it has given us and just what it is doing for us. It has been pretty amazing.
It does take some time to do but really, like the ads part of it, is the more simple part. If you’re trying to engage on organic audience then yeah, it does take a lot of time and it is kind of a pain if that’s not something that you want to do. For me, I kind of enjoy it so it’s okay for me. But if you’re just going to run ads like on Facebook for example, you can even run what’s called unpublished posts that don’t even go to your page. They just get shown in the news feed of people that you target. I think that’s pretty cool.
SHANE: And also, you can avoid the time suck in two ways. There are so many tools out there to automate your social media. We do get on our social media accounts and interact with people, especially on our older niches like our coaching sites and even the Elementary Librarian or some of our teacher sites, I will go in like the first day of the month and I will post all of my posts for 30 days. It takes me like two hours. That’s all automated and it’s off my plate and I don’t have to mess with it unless I want to go and reply to people who respond to those messages.
Also, the advertising, if you get a couple of really good ads set up in the unpublished posts part of Facebook, those will run on the background. You’ll never see them and they will just continuously build leads. We began a huge conversion rate on getting emails from a Facebook ad recently and we’re only paying like $1.17 per email. If we can sell one course for $500 or one year of lesson plans for $500 for paying $1 for somebody, then we can get that return on investment quickly. If you’re willing to push money at it and you’re willing to sit down like an automate, it takes time to save time. You’ve got to spend it upfront but if you can just automate all your social media, it’s going to become much less of a burden and then you’re going to get a lot more return off your investment from doing it that way.
RIKKA: And we definitely can. We have Hootsuite and we’re transitioning to Spread Social and stuff. I don’t know if you guys are aware of Tailwind App for Pinterest but that’s pretty awesome.
SHANE: I would also recommend too one more thing on this before we go to your third question, on social media, don’t try to be everywhere. I know everybody wants to have YouTube channel, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. You really got to figure out where your audience is and dial it down to the two social media networks where 80% of your target audience is and only focus on them.
We do not do anything outside of pretty much Facebook and Twitter. We make all of our images pinnable but we don’t sit on Pinterest and try to optimize that or we don’t go over to LinkedIn like on any of our sites because we don’t have time.
So dial it down and try to pick the two. It could be Youtube and Facebook for you guys. I don’t know exactly where that ends up being but find where your people are and get rid of all the other social networks and get all your time invested in that so that you can really maximize that and it doesn’t feel like a burden.
CHRIS: With Rikka in the past on some of our other sites that feels like it got to be on all of them and that gets to be, I think it’s definitely overwhelming is when you’re…
RIKKA: Yeah and when you’re trying to be all things to everyone, you fail. So then it’s like it becomes a burden instead of like it being fun and interesting to answer questions, it just feels like you had another thing on the to do list that’s super hard to track an ROI on.
JOCELYN: Exactly, yeah. That’s a good point. I think it’s definitely something to explore for you guys. You just have to figure out which way you want to go and just put it all in. Don’t try to scatter everything out. All right, let’s move on to question #3
CHRIS: Obviously many people search for resume and interviewing advice but easily get discouraged when people don’t purchase your product from our PPC ads and stuff. How do you know the viability of your product?
SHANE: Let me ask you this, have you had any sales whatsoever of your stuff, of the new thing?
CHRIS: No.
SHANE: Okay, how long has it been out?
RIKKA: It has been so partially executed that I can’t even really answer that. I think it would feel better saying we haven’t sold any when the website is up and we’re doing it, but let’s say that maybe 100 people have seen the landing page and not buy, would that be a safe guess?
SHANE: Right, okay. That’s really not too big of a sample size so you really can’t, don’t judge it by that yet. I know it can be frustrating up front. I mean, Jocelyn and I literally like I went all in on our first site and I worked on that thing, oh my God. It doesn’t even exist anymore but I worked so hard on that site and tried to optimize it and do everything right.
I probably went three straight months and barely even get any traffic. Finally, one night, we tell the story all the time, we got one ad click for 11 cents but it took me three months of gut wrenching torture, work, sacrifice and blood, sweat, and tears to even get that 11 cents. But let me tell you something, when we got the 11 cents, I went absolutely berserk.
JOCELYN: Yes, it was just really a turning point for us. We were like, “Wow, people can make money online. We can do this while we’re sleeping.” So that’s pretty cool.
SHANE: I would say this, you have a very small sample size. There’s only about 100 people that have seen the sales page. We’ve talked about this earlier, you’re probably not executing that sales funnel – I still hate that term. I’m going to make up our Flipped Lifestyle term for the sales funnel because it just sounds…
RIKKA: The nurturing, the nurturing funnel.
SHANE: The nurturing path is what we’ll call it. The Flipped lifestyle path but like you kind of try to just force feed people this course and they are not buying because there’s no relationship, they don’t trust you yet, they don’t understand how qualified you are to teach them, don’t get frustrated by that.
The best way to qualify what you’re doing is to look at what the competition is doing. It’s not like in the real world where you want to be like something different than your competition necessarily or you want to do everything contrary and kind of like make yourself totally stand out.
You kind of don’t want to reinvent the wheel. You need to go out and probably find gurus or somebody else that’s doing exactly what you like to do and you know that they are selling their product, like you can see a community that’s built around that and look for people like that. If those people exist, then that kind of qualifies that that market does exist and that your product is viable on the internet because if somebody else can sell it, then you can sell it.
You just have to find an audience that identifies with you instead of them. Does that make sense? Then go over to Amazon or something, maybe even find books and see what they are talking about. Look at the chapter titles in those books about finding a job, about going through interviews and things like that, and then compare that to what you’ve created in your course and then your sales copy.
Make sure your sales copy is saying the things that people are looking for to make sure that you’re resonating and communicating that to the people who actually do land on the sales page. If those things are viable and you believe in your product, then really, it’s just about putting your nose to the grindstone driving through the hard part where you’re not making sales and once you get one, you immediately get on the phone with that person and call them and say, “I want to talk to you a little bit about this product.”
JOCELYN: I’m really big on asking your audience. You do have a small audience right now. I think you can even go to them and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about offering this course.” Maybe they don’t even know that you offer a course. Maybe they don’t remember. Maybe say something like, “I’m thinking about offering this course. I’m wondering if a few people could give me some feedback. I’m going to give you the first module for free if you will respond to these email,” and just see how many people will come back to you. How many emails do you guys have right now?
CHRIS: 100.
JOCELYN: That’s fine. I mean, that’s a good starting point. I think if you could just send them an email and say, “Hey, I want to open up a dialogue with you. What are the biggest problems you have? What struggles are you facing?’ People talk about that all the time but it’s really true. That’s how we get information from our audience and that’s how we decide what products and services that we’re going to offer.
SHANE: I would tell you what I would do right now. I would take an email and I would send an email to all 100 of those people. I would say, I would set up like some way to automate it. We have a thing called acuity scheduling where we open dates up on the calendar and people can come in, either get on the podcast or do consulting or whatever. I would set something like that up maybe and say “In the next 24 hours, I have eight spots available for free 20 minutes of consulting.”
I would send that to your email list and I would say, “The next eight people that get there first will get 20 minutes of consulting and I’m going to give you my course for free.” I would immediately schedule those out, talk to them, take as many notes as you can, asking them about their pain points. Don’t just send an email and do a survey. Let’s get some people on the phone because in the long run, that’s only going to take you about four hours out of your life to do, right?
RIKKA: That’s a great idea. It’s a really great idea.
SHANE: And then give them the course. Give them the course and say, “I want you to go through this.” If you can get two or three of those people a job, you’re going to have great testimonials immediately.
That’s going to help you have some social proof right on your sales page but then also, you can analyze the people that failed or you can look and ask the people like, they can ask you questions like, “I don’t understand this. Why do I need this module? Why do I need this part of the course?” That’s going to give you that validation that everything you’ve been looking at to try to figure out whether or not this product is viable or not or if it’s something people would pay for.
JOCELYN: The bottom line is you technically, most of the, I guess, experts say that you should convert at 5-10% of the people who see your sales page. Now you have a super small sample size so that’s probably not going to work for you right now but if you start growing your audience and if you’re not getting that conversion rate, then something’s wrong. It might be something in the sales page, it might be the price, it might be the offering. Something is not right.
SHANE: Now you’re going to be able to have real people to tell you what the problem was because once they take it, now you can go back and say, “You think it’s awesome, why didn’t you buy it in the first place?” They are going to tell you and then you can change it and now you can relaunch it to those other 92 emails and hopefully with the tweaks, fixes, and the input, you’ve validated it and now you can kind of reposition that and make a sale.
RIKKA: All right, that’s awesome. That feels great. All the advice feels very authentic and on target for what feels more like us, I think, too.
SHANE: Awesome guys. Listen, we are probably going to have to wrap it up at that. I think that was a great discussion. I think there we had a lot of higher level discussion in this episode, just some great stuff out there for people that kind of understand how to break it down, really look at their business.
Also too, I want to give you guys a word of encouragement, don’t get frustrated. I know it’s so easy because we all work so hard on this but there’s always a point where there’s like a little dip and you’re like, “Can I really pull this off?” All of a sudden you get one sale and then two come in, then five come in, then 20 come in.
It really can turn around just like that and all of a sudden, you start making this money. I tell everybody I know this because I’ve had people ask me, “Hey, if we jump in your course, we’ll be making money like you in three months, right?” We just laugh. We’re like, “It took us three years to get where we are.” I’ve never met anyone who is successful online that did not a minimum of 18 months to two years to really get their feet under them. But once you do, once you get over the hump, it’s just all downhill from there. It’s amazing.
JOCELYN: Just to close it up, I mean, I would just say to prioritize and I think that a lot of people kind of miss that step like we tried to do everything all at the same time. I would just really put some priorities out there.
Decide what your goals are, what your long term goal, what’s your short term goal and how am I going to get to each of those goals. It sounds so like elementary and simple but seriously, that’s what we do all the time. We are constantly reevaluating our goals and what we should be doing to get there. It has made such a tremendous difference.
SHANE: You can even give yourselves some check points besides money. I know money is the ultimate thing but maybe you need to say, “All right, let’s get eight people signed up for the free course,” and that’s a big win, that’s a quick win. Then you say, “All right, now, let’s get them through this course in the next 30 days.” You put the whip to them and get them go through it fast. Now you say, “Let’s get our feedback for 15 days and evaluate it and then let’s launch this thing.” So in 60 days now, you’re going to relaunch it to those other 92 people with the feedback from the eight people. Does that make sense? So now you’re good to go.
JOCELYN: Your next goal might be okay, let’s get another 100 people on the list, however we’re going to do that. Is it pay per click, is it whatever. That could be your next goal possibly.
SHANE: That’s going to bring into much more tangible and you’re going to hit those checkpoints. It’s not going to be as frustrating because there is going to be a sale somewhere in there and that’s going to lead to the next one, the next one, the next one, and the next one.
RIKKA: That’s awesome. Thank you so much.
JOCELYN: All right. It was great call. We appreciate you guys being on the show, so very much and we hope that you guys out there in internet land enjoyed it as well.
SHANE: All right guys. That wraps up our interview with Chris and Rikka, another Flipped Podcast in the books. So happy today that we were able to help another family with their online business and help them flip their life. Speaking of flip their life…
JOCELYN: Don’t forget that we now have Flip Your Life open for everyone. We just had it open for a small list earlier and now, it is open for everyone. So if you’re interested in checking out our Flip Your Life eCourse, you can head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. We hope to see you there.
SHANE: It will help you create and sell digital products just like we do and we’ve also got a very active and vibrant online community. There’s a private forum on Facebook, a private group just for Flip Your Life. We’ve got a ton of people in there, dozens and dozens of families and they are going through the course, and if you want to do that now for February, head on over and sign up. Until next week, we will, as always, catch you all on the flipside. See you later.
JOCELYN: See yah, 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 eCourse 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]
Crystal Foth says
Hi Guys!!! I just loved hear you chat! Best of luck Rikka on the business moves. Hugs from So. Cal!
Rene says
Hi Shane and Jocelyn.
These podcast where you are helping another family with their online business is beginning to have more meaning to me now. At first it was definitely not for me but now I feel differently because I am thinking of trying to create an ebook and an online business myself. Listening to your podcast more often has given me a whole new mindset. I now have thoughts about building a business. This is something I never thought of before, ever. Wow. It really is incredible.