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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about 6 specific things that might be stopping you from actually making your online business work.
When talking with hundreds of people trying to start online businesses we’ve definitely seen the same roadblocks coming up again and again.
Once you understand these foundational elements you’ll be able to start to take the RIGHT actions toward creating a website (online business) that actually generates revenue.
You will learn
- Why you should focus on your audience and not your idea.
- Strategies for how you can test your digital product ideas.
- The importance of the product first mentality.
- Why you shouldn’t “copy” someone else.
- Embrace the brand of you.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
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
Hey guys! I just finished my first eBook. It felt so good. My plan for tomorrow is to make my lead page and it live before I got to sleep tomorrow.
Amy (from our Flip Your Life Course )
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s show, we’re going to tell you six reason why your online business may not be working.
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.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast,. Always great to be back with you again this week. You know we get a lot form messages from people out there going, “oh my gosh how did you guys make it work? I have been trying this online business thing for months and months and I can’t make my 11 cent moment happen. I can’t make my money online. I feel like I am pouring a lot into this and nothing is coming back out of it and my online business is failing or my online isn’t working. What am I doing wrong?” so we wanted to take this opportunity and go through here and first I will give you some encouragement and say listen it takes time. Don’t give up. There is probably a few tweaks you can make and you are going to start experiencing more success. You might not just be hitting the right thing or you’re prioritizing the wrong thing that you are working on. And we are going to focus this podcast on identifying six reasons,. Six things that you might be doing in your online business that may be preventing you from becoming successful, maybe stopping you from going to the next level. It’s always important to point out these road blocks. If you know what they are, if you know what’s holding you back, you can eliminate them from your workflow and maybe start taking that thing and making that successful, making that first money online and start moving towards your dreams. But before we do that, Jocelyn is going to read a success story that comes from one of our Flip Your Life members.
JOCELYN: Alright this is from Amy and she is in our Flip Your Life course. And this says, “Hey guys! I just finished my first eBook. It felt so good. My plan for tomorrow is to make my lead page and it live before I got to sleep tomorrow.” Way to take action. Good job Amy.
SHANE: Online business is a series of things that small things that add up to big things. And in our Flip Your Life course, we really lay it out that you have to finish your product first. Then, you start creating the sales pages and then you start working on the marketing, the advertising and all of that. And we love to see people taking action. You know these success stories are not always about making that next buck or whatever it is. It might just be getting that product ready if it’s going to help people. It might be completing that sales page you have been working on for six weeks and you just haven’t quite finished it yet. So we just want to give a big shout out for Amy and say good job for her for creating her eBook and for all of you guys out there who are listening right now, way to go for whatever action you took last week to make your online business move forward and try to get to the next level. If you would like some help with your online business, head over to Flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We would love to have you a part of our community just like Amy so that we can help you take those next steps and show you how to go along the way to make your online business a reality.
JOCELYN: Alright. So with Amy’s success in mind, let’s go ahead and jump into our content and these are reasons that your business may be not working the way that you think that it should and you want to have this kind of success too just like our success stories do but maybe there is something that’s holding you back. So today we are going to go through with some reasons that you may not be having that type of success that you want to have. The first reason is probably the most important reason and we see this time and time again with people that we coach, with people in our course and that is that you do not really understand your avatar or audience. A lot of times when we get into online business, we want to base our business on your ideas or my ideas instead of what an audience actually wants.
SHANE: You’re so focused on the things that are going around in your head and you are saying, “oh I have got a great idea, what a great domain or I could create this product and people are going to beat a path to my door” but a lot of times that it is not your idea that is going to actually make you money online. That might be what starts the process, but and start making you look for that market or looking for that audience but usually what you have in your head is not exactly what other people would want.
JOCELYN: And mostly that stems from not really understanding or fully defining your ideal customer. And we actually talked about this quite a bit n a podcast a little while back and that was podcast 41 where we talked about the Flip Principle. And if you haven’t listened to that you can head on over to flippedlifestyle.com/41 and check that out. But basically what it means is that without an audience that’s defined, you’re going to have a really hard time even coming up with content or products or anything to fit someone’s needs. If you are just trying to say everyone on earth will be interested in this product well that’s probably not a good start or all women or all men. That’s not defined enough. You have to have it a lot more defined than that.
SHANE: You should never jump in and make like a 20-video ecourse just because you think that’s an idea. You’re going to waste a lot of time and nobody may want that. I got to go back to those days when I was thinking about like football coaching. I wanted to create my first football site had a real general thing and it was just like and I want to create a thing where coaches can learn about football. You know, that was not defined. I mean that was so general that nobody knew what was even in the website to have to offer. So until I finally said I want to find football coaches who were between 29 years old and 38 years old who only coach on the defensive side of the ball, have linebackers every day at practice and want to run this specific defense that I run at the high school level, not youth, not pro. When I defined my avatar, my audience to that degree, then I knew who to look for. I went out and found those people, I asked them exactly what they needed to solve their problem and most people told me practice scripts. I never in a million years would have thought people wanted practice scripts. I thought people wanted playbooks or videos that showed them drills. But when I found my avatar, when I defined my audience I asked those people. I am like, man I know how to run this defense, I know what I need to teach to the kids I am not able to make a plan to get that in before the first game. Eureke1 I went out and made that. Boom! Dropped it on them and I made $7,000 the first time I ever launched it. That happened because I had a well-defined audience and I switched my mindset from hey I have a great idea to hey what do you want. Once you figured that out and you find that audience, it’s a lot easier to move forward in your online business.
JOCELYN: And when you really pinpoint that specific person, it can be gender, an age level, something that they like. When you really narrow it down that way it makes your life so much easier. You are not constantly guessing what should I be doing next. You are going out and finding those very specific people and they are telling you what they want next. So that is probably the biggest thing that we see going on with people when they come to us and they are just like my website is not working, nine times out of ten just about it’s because they do not have this avatar or perfect customer defined. On my Elementary Librarian site I thought that lesson plans would be a good idea and the reason I thought that is because I really was my target market or my avatar. I was looking for people who were exactly like me but I didn’t want to spend my time making an entire year of lessons plans without knowing for sure that other people were looking for it. So what I did is I made a month, I gave that away and then to the people who joined my list, I sent them an email and said hey do you guys want to see more of this and I got a lot of validation that way. And so that’s how I knew to continue on making my product. You can spend a lot of time on a really great product but if nobody out there is looking for it, if it’s not solving somebody specific problem then you are probably wasting your time.
SHANE: I have seen time and time again on coaching calls, people call us and they are like, I made this 20-video ecourse, I think it’s really, really great but man nobody is buying it and I am like, okay why did you make that course. And they are like, well I thought it would be a good idea, it sounded good. That doesn’t work. That’s why nobody is buying it. Like with Jocelyn’s lesson plans she went out and said, what do you want and are you willing to pay for it and they said yes, well that is a no brainer to make that product. Now, if she had spent a year making a year of lessons plans beforehand and nobody wanted them then she never would have gotten that year back. So big thing right here is you probably just need to pause this podcast right now if you have got an online business and you are being so general that you can’t write a sentence like I wrote earlier about that football coach and you can’t identify the people that you are talking to in your audience, nothing else we say in the next couple of podcast is going to make any sense because you don’t know who you are selling to and you don’t know what they want. Always remember It’s what your audience wants, it’s never what you want. Do you want your website to be blue? Well if your audience wants your website to be orange, you better have an orange website. That’s the bottom line. Never make it a personal thing and you take it so personal that you have to do it your way, always serve the people that are your customers then you will be alright.
JOCELYN: Alright, the second reason that your website may not be as successful as you would like is because you are thinking about product first. Your content I mean that’s great and you definitely need content to get out there and have people find you like organically, things like that but that stuff really does not matter if you don’t have something to sell. You can make brilliant blogpost that get shared the world over every single day but if you don’t have something to sell in your website, guess what you are not going to make it online. So that’s sort of a harsh reality that we want you to know and that’s why we always stress in all of our courses that you have a product first.
SHANE: I think this mindset comes from a lot of what’s taught out there and I am not saying anything bad about anybody that is teaching this or any of the tools that we are talking about here but a lot of people are like well you got to learn how to write good sales copy and you got to get these tools to help you write good sales talk. We talk about leadpages all the time because we love that tool. But the bottom line if you spent a month learning how to write great sales pages, and in that month, you buy a tool like leadpages where you can create the most fabulous sales page sin the planet, well you don’t have a product to put on your sales page so you really don’t have anything for it. Why did you make the sales page? Same thing with content. A lot of people have a lot of courses and things like that that teach you how to make good content, teach you SEO strategies, show you how to share that on social media—tons of people teach how to use social media. Those are all components but if you are just sharing content with nothing for sale, you don’t have a business, you have got a hobby. So either your blog is a diary and a hobby that you are just keeping up telling people about a subject or it’s a business where your product is up and you are using that content after the fact to promote your product, to support your product, to get people to come to your website to buy your product. So you should always think about your product first, find the avatar like we said in part one, ask them what they want, create the solution to their problem that you can have it for sale and then go back and create content around that to support it to draw in more people who are your avatar so that you got something to make money online.
JOCELYN: And this is not to discount great content, I mean you do need to have great content on your website.
SHANE: Right. It’s just the order of it; what comes first? It’s eh chicken or the egg but in this case it’s definitely we know which one comes first, the product comes before the content.
JOCELYN: But if you are here listening to this podcast, chances are you want something more. You don’t want people just coming to your website just to feel good about themselves or to get something great to read or listen to or whatever.
SHANE: And that will be a part of your message. That’s a part of it. That’s a huge part of our message that’s why we give so much away for free because we want people to have access to things like our podcast where we are going to introduce them to things. But when it comes down to teaching something and if we want to make a profitable business we are going have to go in and make a detailed time consuming course that people want and that product is going to come first because without anything to sell, we don’t have a business. We are not able to make any money online.
JOCELYN: At the end of the day, you have to be making money or it’s not a business. So years ago, when I worked in the corporate world, I had a marketing job and so what I did is I will put together like brochures and catalogs and all those types of things and I will go to different trade shows and events around the country even some round the world. We did all those things so that we can promote a product and that product was dishwashers.
SHANE: Big dishwashers, not like dishwashers in your kitchen. This is like in the back of restaurants. Like giant robots that nuc all the germs off of plates and stuff like that.
JOCELYN: But the thing of it is, is my job wouldn’t have existed if somebody wasn’t there like actually creating and putting together the physical dishwashers. So without that, my job could have been pretty much irrelevant. And so that’s what we are trying to say here is that you have to have your product first or you can’t go into all of these marketing and sales because it’s not going to exist. Having all those things in place, you know if I would have been marketing these dishwashers and then somebody come to our trade show and said, hey you know this stuff like looks great but where are the dishwashers? Oh yeah, sorry guys those haven’t been made yet.
SHANE: But we got a sweet catalog. Look at this. This is what it’s going to look like, I promise you that, you what I’m saying? Check it out, you want this? There is nothing for actual sale at the trade shows so how are you going to make any money?
JOCELYN: So in a corporation, I didn’t have to worry about how the dishwashers were made. I didn’t have to worry about actually selling them or they are working sales a few years later but when I worked in marketing, I didn’t have to worry about that quite so much. I had to worry about one thing and one thing only. But in your online business you have to worry about how all the pieces fit together so that you can eventually make it work altogether.
SHANE: So the morale of the story here is you have to prioritize and in any business, how you make money at the end of the day is what everything else should lead to. So you start with the finisher mind that finishes your product. Get your product done because you talked to an audience and asked what they wanted. Just like the dishwasher people know that restaurants wanted these dishwashers so they made that dishwashers so they made that dishwasher and then they went back and created marketing material to tell people about the dishwasher that they created already and sell stuff to close the deal and get those dishwashers into those restaurant. You have to take your digital product and make it get something out there that you know solves people’s problem is what they are asking for and then you start the marketing, the advertising and the sales process. So think avatar, audience first and then product first. If you get those two things right everything else should really fall into place.
JOCELYN: The third reason that your online business might not be as successful as you would like is because maybe you are trying to copy somebody else. And a lot of people do this but there is a truth about online business and that means that your number one selling point of your products or this website is you. People come there to hear unique voice and to really get your perspective on things. That’s the reason that people want to come to you is what differentiate you from everyone else. You know everyone has something about them that’s unique; maybe it’s your voice, maybe it is the way that you write, maybe it’s something you do in video. Everyone has something that differentiates them from everyone else. Don’t try to hide this but rather put it out there and be proud of what makes you different and unique. Alright, think about how you are listening to us here on Flipped Lifestyle podcast. There are lots of people out there who teach about online business. But you’re listening to us because you like something about you or you identify with us in some way. And the same thing is true in all of the dish markets. If you just copy somebody else’s look and feel or voice and you are not really showcasing what’s really unique about you, people can see right through that.it seems very sterile or hollow. And you know we really want to embrace who we are here. We don’t care that we have a southern accent. I mean that’s fine.
SHANE: A bad southern accent. And even worse a Kentucky southern accent which is like even worse than a normal southern accent amazingly.
JOCELYN: And we don’t really realize when we record but when we listen back we are like whoa.
SHANE: Man, we really stress those vowels. We forget geez at the end of words all the time.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so don’t do that. I mean be who you are. I mean that is going to really shine through and it’s going to make people become attracted to you. I saw something yesterday that Chris Ducker had posted and it was a little graphic and it has said, your vibe attracts your tribe and that’s really true.
SHANE: If you go back to even like the way we talk and sound funny like we hear a lot of people all the time like form the south and other parts of the country like New York people where they have really strong accents that are different than other places in the country and they are like, I could never do a podcast, can never be on video because of the way I talk. Well you know there are millions of people that talk just like you do. There is like 50 hundred million people in the south. So just because we have a southern accent that doesn’t mean we should hide it. We should embrace it, we should move forward and say hey there is going to be people that relate to us because we are from where they are from instead of people that might live across the country or some other place. So you consider as a weakness or anything like that that may be unique to you, they may be exactly what makes you stand out in the crowd and draws people into your brand. There is a whole slew of reasons why you shouldn’t copy other people. For one thing if you copy somebody else’s likeness or the way they talk or the look and feel or even the exact format of their podcast or whatever. Why would the person in your audience choose you over the person you are copying? The person you are copying has been around longer. They are already doing it. They are already being successful. So if I got you as the imitation, as the copy of the other person, why would I not just choose the original person because they were doing it first. They are probably doing it better. No you need to embrace you. You need to embrace the business of you. You are the brand. Whatever your [product is, the only thing that separates it from everyone else in your market is that they are doing their product and you are doing your product and that’s what is going to relate to other people. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, you can do things in a similar way. Even when we do things like if we explain how to do a webinar, you know there is only so many ways you can put a webinar together and it follows a basic formula but we can explain it in our own way. We can use our own language. We can make it simpler. It’s our voice doing that that’s’ what is going to draw in your audience. People want to deal with people who are authentic, with people who are being truthful, who are being honest and stand out because of that authentic. Just look around all the forums and all the message boards and just watch the ads on your Facebook feed. When you see all these people doing the exact same things as other gurus or rather experts that were doing it way better, you never click on those because they are saying the exact same words or just copying and pasting ads in to the wrong ad campaigns. So there is no reason to go listen to those other voices when you are already getting that information from somebody else.
JOCELYN: And people always worry about like making mistakes or being vulnerable out there in your brand. We make mistakes all the time and that’s okay.
SHANE: that’s makes you even more likeable, yeah.
JOCELYN: People want to know that you are a real person and you do things that are just like them. And so many of the emails that we get, people are like I appreciate that you’re normal people and we are. I mean we are people who like to sit down at the back porch and drink tea like everybody else. Everybody does that right?
SHANE: Even our blog and things like that. Like we don’t strive for perfection and polish. Like a lot of other people do, not because we think there is anything wrong with that. Because that’s just really not us. We are just kind of laid back and we just like our stuff to kind of get feedback from our audience and as long as they like it and we don’t really care what everyone else is doing in the online marketing space. We are just are ourselves and we want our personality to shine through and everything we do whether it would be the design of our website, in our courses, anything we make even here on the podcast. So if you are trying to really mimic other people, if you are trying to copy people, if you are using some of their terminology in your language to try to sound like them, if you are trying to name your domains like other people name domains, if you are trying to use the same colors and the same layout, even if you are mimicking their logos, stop it. Be yourself. Make things like you would make them because that originality, that individuality is the only thing you have that really sets you apart in your market and it’s the only thing. You can’t replicate someone else and they can’t replicate you. So take what you are, put it out to the world and find the people that are interested in what you do.
JOCELYN: Right we are about out of time, for this week so you will have to tune in next week for the part two of this podcast where we talk about reason three through six that your online business may not be as successful as you would like.so be sure to tune in next week next week for that. But before we go we are going to talk about our can’t miss moments and these are things that we might have missed had we not started our online business or if we were doing our 9 to 5 job still. Alright our can’t miss moment this week is our daughter and going to our babysitter’s house. She is four and she is doing this new thing where she tries to surprise people.
SHANE: Everyone, at all times. Always hiding, lurking somewhere.
JOCELYN: Both of our kids are doing this.
SHANE: Actually back almost give me a heart attack there. I tripped over a chair, killed myself because she jumped out and went and surprise! Just freak me out and scared me to death.
JOCELYN: So they are really into surprises right now and our little girl she likes to surprise our babysitter every morning. So basically even though our car is sitting in the driveway.
SHANE: And the dogs are barking at the door because they have two little puppies in our house.
JOCELYN: She thinks it’s a total surprise when she gets there. So what we have to do is we have to get out of our van and she rings the doorbell and goes, the both of us have to go hide besides the house until our babysitter, Mimi, opens the door and pretends there is no one there which we jump out and says surprise.
SHANE: And we have done this every day consecutively now for about two months.
JOCELYN: So it’s not so much of a surprise anymore but Anna still thinks it is a lot of fun.
SHANE: And the reason this is awesome as such as a can’t miss moment is because we used to work 9 to 5 jobs. We had to be at work really early and I just remember total chaos every morning. You have no time to breathe, no time to enjoy life, you had to get to work so it’s basically a drive by dropping off. You are just like throwing the kid out the door to get them in as fast as possible and get to work. There was no enjoyment. There was no happiness. There was barely a hug and a kiss goodbye in the morning but now we can play these games, Jocelyn and I have plenty of time. We’re not at rush, we are not in a hurry. The most we ever have to be at the morning is we go to the gym sometimes after dropping Anna off and then come home and work. But this morning we are just laid back, relaxing. I took some pictures of them playing surprise. I filmed them one day doing it too because 20 years from now I want to remember this moment when Anna used to do this. It was just so awesome not being stressed and being able to slow down and knowing we are in control of our lives and that we have worked so hard to get here and we can just reap that benefit of enjoying what’s happening around us about being of such in a rush and in a hurry all the time.
JOCELYN: Yeah it’s a lot of fun. We still get tickled about it even though it happens every single day. It’s still just fun just to know that we can do that and you know we don’t have to be in a hurry. It’s just a lot of fun. They are really HRNM.
SHANE: So go back and listen to this podcast again, take these three things this week over the next seven days before part two comes out. Evaluate how you’re looking at your online business. Do you know your audience and your avatar? Do you have a product? Have you thought product first or are you building everything else first? And is your authentic voice coming out. See if you can correct one or two of those things in your business. Maybe you are doing two of them right but only one of them is a little off base. Take action this week, look at those things, see if it doesn’t help your business become a little bit more successful immediately and you can kind of correct some of these problems and maybe someday you will be able to do what we did when you work hard, get it right, quite you’re your job and you will be able to experience more of those can’t miss moment as well. Until next time. We’ll catch you on the flip side. See you next week.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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