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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about four traps that people fall into when starting out in online business.
When first consuming education and getting started you’ll often hear conflicting or focused content that is trying to drive you to a product or course.
This has caused a lot of stereotypes that keep far to many people from succeeding simply because they have the wrong expectations.
You will learn
- You don’t actually have to “be everywhere”
- Why starting an online business isn’t really free
- How “free” is actually holding you back from succeeding.
- The art of working on the right things instead of just working really hard.
- Why there are no magic bullets for success in online business.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- The Flip Your Life Community
- Evan Burse – The Cartoon Block
- Pat Flynn “be everywhere”
- Flipped Lifestyle Podcast #14
- Myth of the Zero Cost Online Business
- Jessica and Cliff Larrew – Selling on Amazon
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
One hour after my very first, paid e-book offering went out, I had a 15 dollar sale. Now the whole truth is, 24 hours later, three books have been sold and that is super-awesome too. Just to share the big win and acknowledge the win in process of getting things done and being consistent till things play out. Thanks so much to Shane & Jocelyn and those of you in the Flip Your Life community who inspire me to keep moving forward to flip my life and my service-based business upside down.
Jessica
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Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
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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’re going to tell you the truth about four online business myths.
[spoiler title=”Click to View Transcript”]
SHANE: What’s going on guys, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It’s great to be back with you on this Tuesday. There are a lot of myths and false assumptions about starting an online business that we hear every single week. People will write us, and they’ll have preconceived notions about what it takes to start an online business. Maybe they’ve found some “guru” or somebody else that’s told them, you can do this, this, this and this and it’s all a pie in the sky and it sounds great. But then they get into it and they realize, ‘Wait a minute, something’s wrong here, I don’t think that person told me the truth.’ A lot of people say you have to do this or that and a lot of people make it sound really simple to get started online and the truth is, online business is difficult. Online business is time-consuming, and yes, it even takes a little bit of money. So, today we are going to cut through all of the myths that some people put out there to make online business sound so easy-peasy and we are going to tell you the truth about those myths and try to guide you in the right direction to set you up for success, let you know what it really takes to make it online and then we are going to go over some instructions to help you do that. But first, Jocelyn is going to read a success story from a Flipped Lifestyle listener.
JOCELYN: All right, today’s success story comes from Jessica Stafford and she says, “One hour after my very first, paid e-book offering went out, I had a 15 dollar sale. Now the whole truth is, 24 hours later, three books have been sold and that is super-awesome too.” We agree, Jessica.
SHANE: And ‘super awesome’ is in all caps in the success story that she sent us.
JOCELYN: Yeah, you should probably read these. It’ll be a little more dramatic. “Just to share the big win and acknowledge the win in process of getting things done and being consistent till things play out. Thanks so much to Shane & Jocelyn and those of you in the Flip Your Life community who inspire me to keep moving forward to flip my life and my service-based business upside down.”
SHANE: That is an awesome success story; Jessica is a super-active member of our Flip Your Life community where we have a private, Facebook group set up for everyone who is in our Flip Your Life program. And she created her first e-book offering and it’s amazing to see when people are consistent and they get through this program and in 29 days, they’ve got this product in their hand. They’ve got their first e-book or whatever it is and they put it out there and all of a sudden, bam, she made three sales. So that’s the thing, if you are sitting there with an idea right now, and you’re trying to figure it out and you are looking for your success story, you just need a plan to get it in place and that’s what Flip Your Life does. If you want to learn more about our Flip Your Life program that Jessica went through and that all of these success stories go through, to make those first sales, to really take the next step in their online business, you can find out all the information about our program at Flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. That program is open now all the time. We’ve got it set up where you can come in and join. We’re not doing it month by month anymore, we’ve got all of our systems in place now and we are ready to just take people in. You can get started instantly today with all of the videos and maybe in 29 days, you will be selling your first e-book just like Jessica. All right, let’s jump into our discussion today and we’re gonna start this podcast off with a huge warning. So, if you were watching this visually somehow, there would be a big, red, hazard, nuclear, skull-and-crossbow and flash, flash, flash telling you –
JOCELYN: I told you, he is dramatic.
SHANE: I’m very dramatic so I’m gonna go with it. All right, so this is the warning, sirens going off or whatever, you know, when you get into online business, when you learn about this world and you are trying to start out or even when you’ve been doing this for maybe three or four months and you’re really listening to every podcast you can, you’re looking up videos on YouTube, you’re attending webinars, you’re just consuming so much information, when you hear all of these high-level people that have been in internet marketing for a while, and they are interviewing all these “experts” and people that have got it figured out, you’re going to hear about tools and webinars and products and you’re gonna hear about how you have to be on YouTube, and you have to be on Facebook, and you got to be on Twitter, and you got to be on Pinterest, you got to be on LinkedIn, you just have to be everywhere. You got to do all these things and use all these tools and buy everything right now. You have to remember that people are out there telling you, “you have to do these things” – I’ve done a lot of air quotes already in this episode. I got my air quote going on this morning.
JOCELYN: Right.
SHANE: Jocelyn hates air quotes. All right, so basically these people are trying to sell you something. You know, the person that says, ‘Oh, if you don’t have a YouTube channel, you are never going to make money online. I mean, video is the next wave and it’s where it’s at and if you are not doing YouTube, you might as well just pack it up, and quit and go back to your nine to five and forget your hopes and dreams.’ You know, those people are trying to sell you probably a course that starts YouTube video channels. I’ll tell you right now, Jocelyn and I, we got a couple of videos on YouTube but have we ever – have you logged into our Flipped Lifestyle YouTube or –
JOCELYN: Probably not.
SHANE: No, ever. Yeah, we don’t have a LinkedIn, we don’t have all those things and we are just fine. We work at home, we make our money, we make our living. So, always remember, when someone tells you, ‘It’s the next big thing’ or ‘You have to do it’, then it’s probably because they’ve got a course and that is what they are the “expert” in.
JOCELYN: And that’s not to say that everyone out there online is a scam artist because there are some real genuine people out there who are really trying to help people get started and they’re not just trying to push their next product. I mean, we all are, we all have to make a living, we have to pay for food and bills and things like that but, I think what we are saying here is just to be careful.
SHANE: You don’t need all the courses. Like, if your brand is about video – like we just worked with a guy named Evan Burse and he has a Facebook page and a website called ‘The Cartoon Block’. He teaches people how to draw on video so if he was starting out, he would need to know how to make a YouTube channel, how to make a video course but he might not need something like our course on e-books. He might not need to make an e-book. You just have to look at all the things out there and remember, you don’t need all of those things. You need the things that are the best for your brand and that’s going to take us into our first myth. The first myth that we want to tell you the truth about today is that you do not have to be everywhere as fast as possible. You do not have to be in every single place online, every single social media network and just plaster the internet with your brand. This is a very false statement for people who are beginning. Later on, in your brand as you grow, you are going to have to expand and there’s going to come a point where ‘be everywhere’ is going to make a lot of sense for you. But the truth is that you really need to be somewhere before you can be everywhere and one of the best guys out there is Pat Flynn and Pat Flynn says this; he has a great philosophy called ‘Be everywhere’ and that is a strategy of being in a lot of different channels. But I think people misconstrue what he’s saying. He doesn’t mean the first day that you start out, you should go out and say, ‘Okay, I’ve got this checklist of these 14 social networks, I’ve got to have YouTube set up, I’ve got to have a blog, I’ve got to have a website, I’ve got to do all these things and I have to do this by the end of the first week’. That is not what ‘Be everywhere’ means. You want to expand but you have to start in one place. For example, Jocelyn and I, even today on Flipped Lifestyle, we have our blog – we don’t try to create a video channel and blog every week and do all those things. We have our blog where we post our podcast, we have a Facebook and a Twitter. That’s it. We just started an Instagram account, we are going to start using that a little bit more but the only reason we’ve started using Instagram is because we can link it to our Facebook and our Twitter so we can take those pictures and share them two places at once so it kind of saves us time instead of adding something else. I think people try to do this early on and that’s why a ton of people fail. You may be feeling this right now, you may be totally overwhelmed by everything you are trying to do. You are trying to record a video, write a blog post, get your podcast done, share on Twitter, share on Facebook, pin your posts, go to LinkedIn, connect with five – you’re trying to do all of these things and you really don’t even have an online business yet. So, don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by trying to be everywhere as soon as you start your online business or even six months into your online business, you still shouldn’t be trying to be everywhere.
JOCELYN: And unless you have a team of people under you, this type of thing is just impossible to keep up. You can’t do it. It’s just not humanly possible. So trying to put all of that extra stress on yourself to be on all these social media channels, to have a YouTube channel, to have a website, to have a blog, to have a podcast, all of those things are just too much when you are starting out and it’s even overwhelming for us. You know, we’re just starting to get a team in place that helps us to do things and that’s going to allow us to be in more places but we still can’t do it all.
SHANE: When you see people who have all of these channels and all of these things, always remember, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. If someone has a YouTube channel and it’s really professional and they have a podcast and they are on all of these social media networks, here’s what’s really happening: number one, they’ve got a team that’s coming in, recording their video, editing and posting it. Their podcast, they are recording it but then they are turning it over to and editor and someone who writes their show notes, and some else who transcribes it. Their social media is probably automated with a tool like Meet Edgar or Buffer App or they may even have a VA checking their post and responding and it might not even be them. Some of it is probably them but more than likely, they have an infrastructure in place. Jocelyn and I are doing the same thing right now. When we record our podcasts, we do a bunch of them in one day and we put them in a Dropbox folder and we have a great editor who comes in and takes care of the audio. He has a person on his team that writes the show notes, they outsource and get our transcript written, they make the entire post. All we do is check it and publish it. Our social media, I’d say, is at least 50%-60% automated. Even our Twitter and our Facebook, we do have scheduled posts, we plan out what we want to talk about during the month and we’ll go in and do that at the beginning of the month and then we’ll check in about every other day with some things that are really going on in real-time but that allows us to free up some time. So, when you hear all these things and you look like, ‘Man, I’m so frustrated, I can’t do this’ that’s because that infrastructure, that team has not been put in place over time.
JOCELYN: And we would rather you start out and be successful in one or two areas than to try to do 50 areas and completely fail.
SHANE: So, myth number one is, when you start an online business, you have to be everywhere as fast as possible. That is not true. The truth is, you have to be somewhere before you can be everywhere. So embrace that truth, pick that one thing that you like to do. If it’s a blog, if it’s a video, or if it’s audio, do a podcast, or do a video, or do a blog. Don’t put ‘and’ in there. Pick the social network that you are most active in whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Choose that one thing, spend about three months doing that, what you do best, what you like best and I promise you, you’ll be much farther ahead in your online business than if you try to be everywhere upfront.
JOCELYN: All right, and that brings us to myth number two and this is one we hear all the time. This myth is that it is free or costs almost nothing to be successful online. This is just not true. It’s just like anything else in life; you have to put some kind of investment in to be successful. You can start out for free, they are a lot of free things out there but your progress and the success you’re going to have based on those free things is going to be limited. You’re going to have to pay for tools that work. Free tools, you know, they are fine to start out but they are going to be limited and it’s just like a lot of the free things that we see out there. There can be problems with it; like a lot of the free themes, they can have advertising included that you don’t even know about, that you agree to in their 14-page terms and conditions that nobody reads. So you just have to be very careful about things like that. They seem really good on the surface and like they are really gonna work but, a lot of times we’ve seen people fail. Another point about this is, if you put money into something, you have an incentive. It makes you want to work that much harder because you’ll want to get your money’s worth out of it. If you get something for free, you know, you may or may not go through with it, or make it successful. And it’s just like we are getting ready to start some challenges for Flipped Lifestyle and we are going to charge for those and you know, there may be people out there that say, ‘Oh, you know, why are you charging for this?’ And the reason why is because, if you have something in it, if you’ve made a little bit of an investment, you’re going to put that much more effort into getting it done. If we just gave it away for free, ‘Yeah, whatever, I’ll look at it when I have time.’ But if you put a little bit of money into it, that’s going to make you look at it and make you want to succeed that much more.
SHANE: So basically these challenges are like, we take something that holds people back or a fear like maybe time-management, you know, people always say to us, ‘I don’t have time to start an online business’ that’s not true because when we start an online business, we had as busy as schedules anybody could have. Working full-time jobs, raising kids, all of the responsibilities of everything in life and we still made it work and we created this 21-day challenge to prove to someone, if you go through this, you are going to find hours upon hours every week that you’ve got, that you could put into investing in your future in an online business. And we thought about ‘Hey, let’s put these out and let’s just let people jump in them’ but when we kind of tested this a little bit, people would go through like five or six days and they would just quit because it was free. They didn’t care. It wasn’t even on their radar. They had no skin in the game, you know what I’m saying? So basically, if we charge for them, if we say, these are 20 bucks or whatever, if you put a little money down on it, you don’t want to waste your money, you’ve invested in yourself and you are going to make sure you finish that challenge and you’re going to have a much greater chance of success. It’s the same thing with your online business. If you’re just putting all these free tools together and doing this and doing that, and you are kind of dabbling in here and kind of dabbling in it there, you don’t have any vested interest. You don’t have any skin in the game. So basically, it’s easy for you to just say, ‘It’s not hurting my wallet, it’s not hurting me anyway. I’d rather have my time, I’m just gonna go watch some TV or something else.’ But if you’ve put a couple of hundred bucks into your online business this month, you’re going to sit down and work because you can’t waste that money. Your budget would get busted if you did that every single month. That’s why this myth is so dangerous because people always say, ‘Use my free tool’ do this, do that and really it’s just not gonna work. Once you put it all together, things are going to start conflicting, you are going to kind of back yourself into a corner and you’re not going to be able to take your business to the next level. A great example of this is advertising; a lot of people really push the idea of organic. ‘Just write as much content as you can and if you build it, they will come.’ The search engines will find you, you’ll build authority over time and it’s – everything is just going to be fine. That’s cool, you can do that, we did that with some of our sites but the problem with doing that is, that takes forever. I mean, it’s going to take you six months, a year before you gain any kind of traction in your niche and you’re not going to be able to consistently keep up the energy and go forward with your online business if you are trying to grow everything for free and organic. ‘If I can just get to 500 blog posts by next year, I’ll make it.’ Well, the truth is, you are going to quit in three months because you are going to be so tired of making contents seem absolutely no return where if you had just took 50 dollars or something in ads this month and drove people to your website and got those great eyeballs that are in your audience looking at that digital product you made for 25 bucks, you’re going to start making sales and that’s going to give you that motivation to keep moving forward.
JOCELYN: Just start out small, you know, it doesn’t have to be a ton of money; that’s not what we are saying here. Even if you just put a little bit into ads, into some kind of a tool that you need, whatever amount of money that you are putting in, that’s going to help you to get a greater return in the end.
SHANE: One of the most popular podcasts that we’ve ever put out was the Flipped Lifestyle podcast #14 and you can find that at Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast14 and it’s ‘How to start an online business in one hour a day for 100 dollars a month’ and then podcast 15 is actually part two of that episode. We show you how you have to spend money and you got to spend time. But you can do it in a smart way and if you pick the right tools early, you know, you don’t have to buy every single tool. There are some good, free tools, there are some good, free plugins but we basically go through all of the things that we think you should go ahead and invest in early on and we wish that someone had told us to invest in when we were starting our online business and that’s going to get you a little bit farther ahead in the game. But like Jocelyn said, you can do this for 100-200 dollars a month. We are not saying go break the bank and throw a thousand dollars at a business that doesn’t even exist, but you are going to have to spend money online.
JOCELYN: And we wanted to mention a good post on this too; this is actually my sister’s blog Nutsandboltsmedia.com; it’s called, ‘The myth of the zero-cost online business.’ So, if you want to check that out, we’ll put a link to it in today’s show notes. It’s Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast43. All right, so myth number two, again, is that it is free or costs almost nothing to be successful online and we are here to tell you the truth today that is not free. Sometimes, it’s not even cheap and there’s no way that your website or your business is going to be very successful unless you invest money to make it work.
SHANE: All right, myth number three about starting an online business is, ‘All it takes is hard work and hustle and you’ll make it.’ It does take a lot of hard work but the problem is, you can work really hard and fail. If you are working on all of the wrong things, if you can work on your business every single day, if you are doing all the things that aren’t helping you progress and get closer to making sales, you’re probably not going to make it online. A lot of the people telling you starting out really start with things like ‘Oh, your website, oh, here’s how you make your logo, oh, here’s how you do this.’ We just helped someone make a launch with a blog that was literally – had no posts on it, had a very small logo up in the left-hand corner, it was basically just a place to drive people to get into this video course and it made 10,000 dollars in 24 hours. So, if that person had spent six months creating this website that was beautiful and awesome and blah-blah-blah, then it would have taken him six months and never would have made a dime. But what we told them, we were like, just make up a website, put it up in like two days, get it up as fast as you can just to host these videos that you are going to sell. You can go back to make blog posts and stuff later. Work on the right thing, work on the product and how you are going to introduce that product to an audience. Those are the right things. You’re basically working smarter, not harder that way. I think a lot of the gurus really stress hard work and hustle is all you need because it gives them kind of a scapegoat when something doesn’t work out or their training didn’t make you money right away. It gives you a way to just say, ‘I’ll work harder, here’s the next course’ or whatever. Hard work is a part of this. We’re not saying that, we work very hard, we still work very hard every day. Even when you create “passive income” – there’s some more air quotes going on. I got some serious air quote issue going on today. Even when you create passive income streams, you are still going to work to keep all of that going but you’re also going to have to work smarter. You’re gonna need to get the right tools, you’re gonna need to understand what you need to do next, you’re going to have to have a good plan and you’re also going to have to have a very good idea with a well-defined audience. Hard work can solve a lot of problems and it is a key ingredient to everything else but you’re not – this goes back to kind of myth of the zero-cost business; you can’t just work your way for 18 months, never spend a dime, never have a plan, never do anything and hope to make it online.
JOCELYN: And this is actually something that we have to remind ourselves of too because you can get caught up in a lot of little things. ‘My website doesn’t look exactly the way I want it’ or ‘we have to make sure that these 18 things are in place before we can do this next thing’ and this is something that we have to go back to again and say, ‘Okay, what’s really important? Is it really important that our website looks a certain way or that, you know, we don’t have all of these other things in place first?’ No, what’s really important is that we get products ready to help our audience solve their problems and that’s really all our audience cares about. They don’t care about all of the little things that keep us busy and take up our time. We need to have our time being spent taking care of their problems and that is what we always have to go back to or thinking about moving forward in our online business.
SHANE: So basically you got to work smarter, not harder; you do have to work hard but just working for work’s sake, I mean, you might as well go get a corporate job and work 60 hours a week if you just want to go work your skin to the bone. The goal is to not be busy; it’s to work on stuff and get it done that actually moves you toward where you want to be in your goals. So the myth here is that all it takes is hard work and hustle and grit and just stay busy and keep pushing and you’re going to make it. But the truth is, just working hard is not going to make this happen. You can work very hard and you can fail online. If you are working on the wrong things, like logos and web design and ‘I got to write 400 blog posts before I ever create anything to sell’ and you’re not paying attention to the right things like getting proper training, getting the right kind of tools and creating products and like Jocelyn said, solving your customer’s pain points and problems, then hard work is not going to dig you out of the hole. You’ve got to do the right things in the right order, plus work hard on top of it to make it happen.
JOCELYN: That brings us to myth number four. Myth number four is that there is a magic formula or a magic course or a magic program that’s going to guarantee your success online and this is definitely not true. Yes, there are guidelines that you can follow, there are best practices and there are certainly courses or programs that will help move you in the right direction but what you have to remember is that every one starting out has different needs. We all have different niches, we have different customers, we have different problems that we have to solve for people. So, it doesn’t matter what somebody’s sales page says, nobody has all this figured out. You see things all the time, ‘This is the guaranteed way that you can make 5,000 dollars from home with little investment’ things like that. It just goes back to what you always hear. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. So just always remember that when you are looking at things and you’re starting out in online business.
SHANE: We get emails all the time too and we send these emails back like some people will say, ‘Hey, I saw Flip Your Life, I like what’s in it but I’m kind of in this place, do you think this will be right for me?’ And we email them back and we straight up say, ‘No, you do not need to spend your money on this. You need to go here and get this next training because you are either farther ahead or what we’re teaching is not gonna help you in the kind of online business you’re in.’ Every program is not right for every kind of business. We teach people how to create e-books and how to create e-courses: digital products. But we have some friends, Jessica and Cliff Larue who teach people how to sell physical products on Amazon. So, if someone wanted to start a website and kind of get into the Amazon side of things and they sent us an email and said, ‘Hey, will this help me?’ No. Our program is not some magic pill that shows you how to start an online business and it’s going to work in all cases for all markets and all avatars. That’s just not true and anyone that says, ‘This is the way to do online marketing’ don’t believe that because there is no one way. We know so many people, we’ve met so many amazing people doing so many crazy things online. Things that blow your mind how people can even make an income on the internet. There’s a thousand different ways to skin a cat and you got to figure out how to skin your cat. You got to figure out what works for your niche and what works in your marketplace. So, be very critical of programs you see. Is it what you want to do? Do you want to write an e-book? Well then Flip Your Life would probably work for you. Do you want to do an e-Course, it might work but if you wanted to sell physical products online, our systems might work a little bit for you but it’s probably not the best way to go. You need to go somewhere else. There’s no one-size-fits-all course that totally shows you how to start the online business and it’ll work for everything.
JOCELYN: So the myth is, there is magic formula that guarantees success and the truth is, that there is no one way. Every single niche is different, every customer base is different and you can absolutely succeed as long as you take action doing something. Just experiment and keep following a plan that works for you and that’s really all there is to it. It’s no secret formula, there’s nothing magical about it and you don’t even have to do everything right. I mean, we are a perfect example of this.
SHANE: We do everything wrong – we did everything wrong for two years.
JOCELYN: According to all the people out there, who are experts in internet marketing, they would look at our business from before and say, ‘What are you doing?’
SHANE: We actually went to a live event once and we were like – before we were like talking to him about this that and the other, we were like, ‘Yeah, we don’t have an auto-responder, we are not doing this, we are not doing that, we are not really following up, we are just launching things and blah-blah-blah’ and they basically laughed at us. And then they’re like, ‘How much do you make?’ And we were like yeah, and they’re like, ‘Oh, well you make more than me.’ It’s like we were doing everything wrong and we were still making more than everybody in the room. So you don’t have to have everything in perfect order to make this work. You just have to keep doing something and keep finding those spots along the way that fit your business.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we’re a perfect example of this. You don’t have to have all the puzzle pieces in the right place. You just have to do something. Get the puzzle started, get it outlined. You can fill in the rest of it later.
SHANE: All right so real quick, I want to just read through the myths again and give you these truths so you can really take these to heart and start looking at your online business in a different way and maybe start figuring a new plan out. Like Jocelyn said, take all your puzzle pieces – you’re trying to build your puzzle like the guy before you, the guy that says he’s “made it” and maybe if you can look at these myths and take hold of these truths, you can see your puzzle and start putting it together the correct way for you and actually make your online business go to the next level. All right, myth number one is, ‘You have to be everywhere as fast as possible.’ That is not true. The truth is, you have to be somewhere before you can be everywhere. So maybe scale back your online business a little bit to be less frustrated. Myth number two, that it’s free or costs nothing or almost nothing to be successful online. That is not true. The truth is, it is not free. Sometimes it’s not even cheap but you will not succeed unless you invest your money in your business. Don’t think in terms of ‘I’m spending my money’ think investing your money and you are eventually going to have to invest in your business to make it go to the next level. Myth number three is ‘All it takes is hard work and hustle and you got this.’ That is not true. The truth is, you have to work hard but it’s not going to work without a good plan because if you are working on the wrong things and you’re working really hard on making that logo perfect, or your website look good, and this that and the other, and you are not paying attention to the right things like your product, your message and your audience, you’re not going to succeed. It’s not just hard work. It’s hard work plus a solid plan. Myth number four, ‘There’s a magic formula, this is the program that guarantees success for everyone in every niche.’ That is not true. The truth is, every niche is different. Your business is different from our business. There are best practices but don’t fall into the trap of someone that said, ‘I made this much money so I guarantee you will too’ because it’s probably not gonna work. You have to put the pieces together for your niche and your business to make it work.
JOCELYN: All right, we hope that that helps you to be able to get past some of the myths about starting an online business and helps you to move forward and really take action and get to that next level because we know that you can do it. We’re gonna move into our ‘Can’t-miss Moments’ segment and this is where we talk about things that we have had the opportunity to do that we may not have been able to do before we started out in online business. So we’ll start with Shane today.
SHANE: I think my favorite moment from the last week or two was taking Issac and Ana to get their haircut in the next town over. We live in a small town so, you know, if you got to go anywhere, you got to go the next town or you know, there’s a haircut place or a restaurant there, whatever. So we drove over to the next place; they got like kids’ barbershop or whatever and you go in and there’s ‘Thomas the train’, a motorcycle, a race car and they get to sit in these little cars like the games we find outside of a grocery store or something. But they get to sit in these while they are getting their haircut and it’s kind of a fun place. It’s painted like kids colors, there’s a fire engine in there that they can go sit on and all kinds of stuff like that. But the reason this is my can’t-miss moment, one, it was really fun just taking the kids to get a haircut and just having fun with them and hanging out but the second part was, there was nobody in the barbershop because online business and working for ourselves allows us to choose to do things in what we call off-peak times. So, like if we want to go to the haircut, you know, everybody goes and gets a haircut after work or whatever so it fills up, and it’s full, and you’re waiting for an hour to get your kids a haircut and everybody is screaming and hollering. But like we can go at like 1:00 in the afternoon or right when they get out of school or something like that. We can just grab the kids and head down there and there’s nobody there. We do this all the time when we go on trips; we always travel and we go on trips from like Tuesday to Thursday if we can because everybody else is at work instead of the weekends where everything is packed and you just can’t move. We get to do things when nobody else is really around. So, love to be able to do that and that’s my can’t-miss moment. It’s just having the freedom to go and do things like chores in a more efficient way because we get to choose to do them when nobody else is really able to do that.
JOCELYN: My can’t-miss moment for this week is actually dressing like Ana, my little girl, because she loves to wear what she calls ‘mommy-and-little-girl’ dresses. I know that these moments are not going to last long so, I have been buying a lot of mommy-and-little-girl dresses.
SHANE: We’re going to have an intervention pretty soon because you know –
JOCELYN: Yeah, Shane, he gets a little upset with me sometimes because we get lots of packages in the mail pretty much daily –
SHANE: And they are not cheap folks. Let me tell you something, I promise you, if we were not doing our business that we are doing now, we would not be able to afford the dresses that she’s buying for her and Ana.
JOCELYN: Exactly. I do trade them though, so at least I can justify it that way.
SHANE: Right, keep telling yourself that.
JOCELYN: I have, what I like to call, a healthy enthusiasm for children’s clothing.
SHANE: Or an addiction to children’s clothing. Like any down-time we have, I look over and I’m like, ‘What are you going?’ And she’s like, ‘I’m not buying a dress’ or I’m not doing this or that. That’s her hobby; finding children’s clothes and buying them.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so online business, it helps me to feed that healthy enthusiasm.
SHANE: Addiction, yeah.
JOCELYN: Right. So, that is my can’t-miss moment for this week and if you want to see a picture of me and sister in our mommy-and-little-girl dresses, you can head on over to Flippedlifestyle.com/podcast43.
SHANE: All right guys, that’s all we have for this week. Hope that helped you take your online business to the next level. Have some amazing content coming up, we’re going to start talking about sales funnels next week. Get a lot of questions about that, complicated topic, we’re going to try to do what we can to break it down and help you set up simple sales funnels and simple email auto-responders that will take your online business to the next level, create passive income and help you start making more money online. Till next time, as always, we will catch y’all on the flip side. See you soon.
JOCELYN: See ya, bye.
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Joey says
Great episode! I’m an obsessed perfectionist who is working very hard on things that pay nothing to me (keep tweaking codes for my website, etc…). But, by listening to your podcast repeatedly (FL 39 especially), I think my sicky mindset has been slowly improving lately. Thank you for the good influence you’ve been providing! I’ll get my first free eBook done soon.
Rob says
Shane and Jocelyn, I really appreciate you two. Your down-to-earth style is so refreshing. Your honesty and genuineness is really inspiring to me, in a world full of big-shot online entrepreneurs. You don’t hype stuff up, you just say it like it is.
You two help me feel like I can make it in online business.
Thanks for all you do! And this was a great episode, too!
Damon says
Hey Shane and Jocelyn,
I just wanted to say, thank you.
FL 43 The Truth About 4 Online Business Myths#3 Working smarter not harder hit home. Sometimes I get caught up working really hard work, learning so many new things that I get off track not focusing on the things I really should be working on. Keep up the great content and the inspiring positive attitude. Cheers.
-Damon
Damon says
Hey Shane and Jocelyn,
I just wanted to say, thank you.
FL 43 The Truth About 4 Online Business Myths#3 Working really hard will get you there.
The art of working on the right things instead of just working really hard hit home. Sometimes I get caught up working really hard work, learning so many new things that I get off track not focusing on the things I really should be working on. Keep up the great content and the inspiring positive attitude. Cheers.
-Damon
Shane Sams says
You are welcome! 🙂