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Hey y’all! On today’s podcast we chat with Flip Your Life Community members Steve and Rebecca Newlin. A few years ago Rebecca got into raising kids. But not the human kind of kids – goat kids! Raising goats became more than a passion for Rebecca. As she got more into the goat raising community she started becoming a known expert in the field. When Steve and Rebecca started goatfarmers.com they built an audience and people started asking them questions about raising goats. Then, Steve heard the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast and thought, “I wonder if a goat farmers membership might work.” And, after that the Goat Farmers Community was born. On today’s show Shane is going to help Rebecca and Steve create an amazing member area where goat farmers from around the world can learn, connect, and talk about their kids. Plan a launch that will flood goat farmers into their new membership. And, set the price for their goat farming membership along with a launch discount offer.
Rebecca Newlin used to be a nurse and has a lot of experience working with pediatrics. Switching from human kids to goat kids was actually not that different if you ask her. At the time the Newlins only had about 2 acres of land and Steve did not want any goats at all. Of course that didn’t make Rebecca’s desire to have them go away!
In 2014, When they were coming back from a trip to Cape Cod Rebecca found a Craiglist ad for 2 Nigerian Dwarf kids for sale. As luck would have it the listing location was on their way home. After a trip to Target to get pet crates they set it up go pick up their first goats Mollie and Fergus.
The process of having goats includes breeding goats. Sometimes you end up with too many and have some available. So their first real experience with business side of having goats was when they had extra kids and would sell them to people looking into raising goats too. Their biggest concern was making sure the goats ended up in homes where the owners were not only good to them but knew how to raise them right. The Newlins started going over those peoples’ farms and help the new owners set up for the goats needs and teach them everything they needed to know. Those owners had tons of questions and realized they had no idea how to really get started. After answering the same questions time and again the Newlins realized an easy way to get all those questions answered was to create a website (it was bascically their version of a blog for farmers). Even though they had a website they never expected to fully emerge themselves in the online business world – but 6 years later here they are!
Their website started growing and tons of people were finding it! That is when the Newlins realized they could help a lot more people than just the people they selling goats to.
What You’ll Learn:
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Your new road to retirement. (6:20)
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Show “behind the scenes” of your membership. (7:50)
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What do you do next? (10:00)
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Don’t be too focused on content. (15:00)
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Success leaves clues. (25:00)
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Stop your limiting beliefs. (32:30)
Show Notes
Your new road to retirement. (6:20)
Steve has been thinking about how he can retire for several years now that he would like to use an online business to help him retire. Of course he knew he needed to find a niche first. Steve had been helping Rebecca with the goats every day and would come back inside still wondering what he could do for an online business idea. It was right in front of him the whole time!
Don’t overthink it! You’ve heard us say it time and time again – use your God-given talents and experiences. They are unique to you and God gave them to you for a reason, use it!
Show “behind the scenes” of your membership. (7:50)
Rebecca and Steve started dipping their toes into online business with their website which more like what we know as a blog. Then, Steve wanted to start taking pictures and video. Rebecca didn’t love it at first because working with animals (especially in South Carolina heat) wasn’t the best for pretty pictures to say the least.
Those same pictures that showed the reality of the work they do is exactly what makes them unique and sets them apart. This is true in every business! Everyone wants to see behind the scenes. The people that are willing to show that are the 10% that succeed. The ones that don’t show those raw parts of your business are usually the ones that fail.
This is also the part that truly helps people the most. Let’s forget all the mechanics behind Steve and Rebecca’s membership. They love goats and love helping other people love goats. They love teaching people how to do what they do because they want to make sure those goats are taken of the right way. You can’t show the “sanitized” version of caring for a baby animal. That won’t help anybody.
What do you do next? (10:00)
Up until now Rebecca and Steve had only had a blog. Now, they have content in their website, lead magnets, and they have an awesome domain name. They have been making their site free until their launch which they are hoping to start getting beta members into and monetize starting August 1st. They are tracking their email list to start growing it and running Facebook ads targeted just at people who homestead and are into goats. Those ads are doing pretty good! They are getting between 5 and 10 new subscribers to their email list every single day. It’s so successful that they are almost at 1,000 email subscribers!
Now that they’ve got the email list growing they are working on getting their social media following up. Only enough, Pinterest has been their most successful social platform. They are at the point now where they are determining their next step. They had been thinking about what they can put out there for sale. But, thanks to us they are laser-focused on the Flip Your Life Community, watching our courses, using Kajabi to get everything started.
Here’s what we recommend:
- Steve and Rebecca spend time moving the membership and launching the website. Then start talking about the membership.
There’s a golden rule in all marketing: You can only sell one thing at a time. If you try to do two things at once you lose half your conversions on both of them.
- The goal needs to be through this email list and the following they have on social media – they need to take a week to talk about all the new stuff in the membership and let their farmers see that. Steve and Rebecca doesn’t doesn’t have to sell them anything. All they have to sell them is to look at the new place they’ve created.
3. They have a waiting list button that says something like, “The Goat Farmers’ Membership Community is opening up. Click here to get on the waiting list.” It builds up momentum. The week before they open their membership they start hyping the membership. They send an email every day saying, “this is coming soon. Here’s what’s in it.” Each time they reveal new little things inside.
- They take a week to sell the beta group. Say they have a limited number of beta members they are letting in. (25 or 50 or whatever number they want to let in).
This way they are only selling one thing at a time. Because if they go out and launch all these options all in one fell swoop leave too many options and people who are overwhelmed don’t buy anything. Space it out a little bit and take your time to get to right.
Don’t be too focused on content. (15:00)
As far as the actual membership itself goes the biggest thing in any membership is the community. Especially with memberships like Steve and Rebecca’s where your niche is very spread out. Ex. There probably aren’t many goat farmers around Steve and Rebecca. That means they have to reach out to other goat farmers around the world through their online business and community.
Before Steve and Rebecca found the Flip Your Life Community they were joining other goat memberships and taking other peoples’ courses. What they found was that the other memberships in their space were like talking heads. They would talk about things and not demonstrate them.
Don’t be too focused on content – right now that’s what Steve and Rebecca are doing. All the content they have planned is great but it’s all things that can be copied. All a competitor has to do is say, “oh they film their goats. I’ll do that too.” What can’t be replicated in a membership is Steve, Rebecca, and their community.
What Steve and Rebecca have to do is focus on the community element of their membership. We always have to have a blueprint. Steve and Rebecca should let their Goat Farmers’ Experience be the blueprint in their membership because you always have to have a step-by-step path for people to follow.
The worst thing you can possibly do in a beta group is focusing too much on your content. This may be surprising but when we launched the Flip Your Life Community we didn’t have any content! It was just us talking about how there would be other family-focused entrepreneurs in there. So the thing now for Steve and Rebecca is figuring out how to make their community more than just being able to log in and talk to people. They need to lead the spotlight into the community led by real goat farmers because that is what is really going to sell it. If people see that Steve and Rebecca are there for them they will connect with people in the membership community at their level. They won’t watch your courses, they won’t always opt-in, but they will connect. Humans are born to connect with other people.
Success leaves clues. (25:00)
Steve and Rebecca have a unique issue. They have two different online businesses one that sells goats and one that doesn’t. Due to newer laws and regulations you can no longer advertise selling animals over Facebook. Steve and Rebecca want to bring everything to one website.
Success leaves clues that’s another pillar in our core values. Normally when we listen to people tell how they’ve gotten to ether story we can figure out the clues that led them there.
Here’s two clues I heard:
- Steve and Rebecca got all their help on Facebook and they connected to a lot of people through that platform. They need to have a paid Facebook group for paid members.
There is no reason not to have a paid Facebook group for their community. The two online businesses can work parallel. You can use an internal community with forums. Then you have an external paid Facebook group. This is not a free group. We’ve all been in free Facebook groups and they are disasters and no help for anyone. There is a way to do a paid Facebook group to make it extremely valuable – that means it points back to your community.
Steve and Rebecca need to start a paid Facebook group and only let new members in. A tactic that we use in our Facebook group is that it is a hub. We’ve only been doing this for about 4 months now. We started a Facebook group for the first time after 5 years in the Flip Your Life Community. We have clear lines of what our forums and our Facebook group is for.
The Facebook group is our secondary line of communication to our community and a way to connect our community to each other in an easy way. The Facebook group is for news and announcements and what is going on in the community. If someone leaves the actual membership we leave them in the Facebook group because all the value is in the community.
When someone needs a question answered they have to go to our forums or we will not answer it.
- Peta shut-down selling goats through Facebook. Sometimes your greatest weaknesses can be your strength.
I’m sure when that started happening there was a ripple through all farming. This creates a good pressure point. They could simply put, “no goat sales in this community.” All of a sudden they become an endearing way to say their community is ethical and good. Then you avoid all the people that would try to shut you down. At the same time it laser-focuses what Stave and Rebecca are doing.
If they wanted to leave a place for farmers to buy and sell goats they can do so in a forum. This forum would have to be off of Facebook obviously but that doesn’t mean that they can’t have a place inside their membership for it. Steve and Rebecca make it part of their community and make people pay to get into it. That forum would probably be their most popular with their farmers and could even be a whole different tier in their membership!
Anytime something like that happens in a market where something gets cancelled or boycotted it can live somewhere else. That is part of a problem that Steve and Rebecca can then become a solution to!
Stop your limiting beliefs. (32:30)
When Jocelyn launched elementarylibrarian.com she had only been an active librarian for 2 years, headed into her third. She was young and couldn’t find resources. These other librarians that had been doing this for years had never created a product that the market was demanding. Jocelyn didn’t just become an elementary librarian, she become the elementary librarian. She had her resources in 15% of all US schools! It all came from Jocelyn’s pen, notes, and her mouth.
Steve and Rebecca have to let go of their own limiting belief. First thing you have to realize is that everybody in your space in probably a beginner. They are usually always behind you. The community opens up though to allow even the people with more experience than Steve and Rebecca to come in because people that enjoy the same things want to be around others that do too!
All you need to do is facilitate the meal, the table that everyone can gather at. That’s what makes you a leader – not the experience!
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