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In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about defining your target audience, so you can properly target your advertising, pricing and positioning your product.
A lot people struggle to figure out pricing and product positioning when they first launch their business.
We’ve found that a lot of the time it’s because you haven’t properly defined your target audience, and really found the right prospects to go after.
In this conversation we help Karen and John really define exactly what they’re selling and who they’re selling it to, making a pivot from what they originally thought.
You will learn
- How we leveraged SEO to build our audience.
- Why we would be buying ads from day 1.
- How to target a great audience on Facebook.
- How to set pricing for your product.
- Should you do memberships or one time payments?
- How to sell to school districts. (or any government entity)
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Google Adwords Keyword Tool
- Jocelyn’s website Elementary Librarian.
- Podcast on Paid Traffic
- Rick Mulready and Facebook Advertising Course
- Our Last Live Event
- Fresh Books
- Gravity Form
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!
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’re going to help Karen and John take their online business to the next level.
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: Hey y’all, welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast! We have got another flipped podcast for you today; that is where we bring in an audience member and we give them a free consulting call and help them take their online business to the next level. And we let you guys listen in so that everyone can learn from the information that we share. Today’s guest is Karen Aachen [phonetic] and her brother, John Hodgeden, [phonetic] I hope I said that right. Karen, John, welcome to the show.
KAREN: Thank you.
JOHN: Thank you for inviting us to the show.
SHANE: We have a brother and sister partners in crime here today, so let’s keep the sibling rivalry down a little bit. First of all guys, tell us a little bit about your online business and what you are trying to do to make money online.
KAREN: Okay, this started about ten years ago when I had come out of a position where I was teaching social skills for a year and then I went into teaching a regular classroom and realized that teachers really need to incorporate both social skills training in as many lessons in the classrooms so it’s kinda seamless in the way they teach because it has really been my belief that ability may get them to the top, but it takes character to keep them there. So we wanted to train students in character development as well as self-managing skills.
SHANE: And what level are you teaching at?
KAREN: Well, actually my first year teaching, I was in the high school level which gave me the impression that really you need to prepare them in the elementary level, and that is where I am now. Most of what I do is laying that foundation in elementary.
SHANE: So you are trying to teach social skills, classroom management type stuff, and you are trying to create resources for elementary teachers to use this in their existing curriculum for their kids; right?
KAREN: Yes, in a way that – one of the problems that teachers have is when they try to discipline or correct behavior, they run into conflicts with parents. This whole program has gone through the mind set of what would I as a parent want a teacher to do, interact and train with my child. So what has happened is the lessons that we use, the strategies and techniques, the parent training as well, and they are very supportive of this because this is what they would want as well for their children.
SHANE: Awesome.
JOCELYN: Okay and I just wanted to ask, is this something that you are currently doing as a day job and you have just brought it online. How did you get to this online business?
KAREN: Well, it started – this is – once I got into the classroom, I incorporated this as a way of teaching. And I moved to another district and I was doing what I normally do and the principle came and asked me if I would do a training session for the campus. I didn’t have anything written down so I could kinda pull things together so I spent a lot of time. And so originally, it was called ‘Building Custom Kids’. And so I did the training, it was received very, very well, and so I started drumming up some workshops, I did teacher-training at University of Texas for three years, I am still a full-time teacher. I am still doing this in a classroom.
SHANE: So basically now, you have realized that okay, you could do workshops and trade time for dollars, or you can put all this training on the internet and every teacher in the world can access it basically and benefit from it; right?
KAREN: It’s a passion to want to share. Everywhere I have shared this, it has helped teachers stay in the classroom and I think one of the things that has helped me realize the impact of this was when I had a veteran teacher came to me and said, “I am ready to quit, I might get fired, I’m having problems with some parents, can you help me?” And just totally turned her career around where she couple of later, retired very positively, she also has done workshops with me, and it’s just a fun way of teaching that puts the teacher in charge while they are training their students to be in charge of themselves.
SHANE: I love how you are trying to take something that you’ve seen work and you just are passionate about sharing that with other people; that is amazing. John, what is your role in the business? It sounds like Karen does most of the content; what are you doing with her in this business?
JOHN: Well, I start off – in 2007, I helped her do a website for her ‘Building Custom Kids’ and she had already worked on a workbook for the ‘Building Custom Kids’ program and then last year, I had an accident, I was sidelined for a few months, and I ended up working on her workbook and converting it to the new format which is entitled ‘Creating a self-managed classroom.’ So I did a lot of the re-working; it’s all her content but I did a lot of the repackaging and then, I’ve been working with her this last year to develop her video training program.
JOCELYN: Okay great, so you guys have a good framework in place it seems, so let’s go ahead and move into your questions for us today.
SHANE: Real quick before we do that, is the business making any money online right now or are you just getting – you know, just yes or no, are you making any money right now?
JOHN: No, not at all, we are at a point where we are ready to launch, we got a couple of hurdles that’s why we were so delighted to hear that you’d be able to offer some advice. We were at the point where we needed to launch.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that sounds great; we’re looking forward to helping you guys. So, let’s get started with question number one.
JOHN: Yeah, the first thing I want to know is how you were able to build such a – your program, what seemed like a very short period of time?
JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s a great question and our growth really at first, was very organic. I really didn’t do a lot of paid advertising, like with Elementary Librarian because honestly, I really didn’t know what I was doing. So, you know, just put this thing out there and I actually relied a lot on SEO, Search Engine Optimization strategies because at the time when I built my site, that was before Google made a lot of changes and so I wasn’t doing any, you know, what they call ‘Black Hat’ or whatever, you know, I wasn’t doing anything like that. No, we’re not trying to trick them or anything like that but we were just really careful to use good keywords when we were writing our blog posts in our website and things like that nature. And that really helped us out a lot at first.
SHANE: What we did was, we really got into the Google AdWords keyword tool and we don’t really do SEO, like on-page SEO stuff, we use SEO more to just see how people are searching, what are people looking for. Like if you went to the Google AdWords keyword tool, and we’ll put a link to that in the show notes, you can see exactly what people are looking for. So, if an elementary teacher goes on to Google and types in, ‘Classroom management for my fifth grade class’, you can actually see how many times that gets searched for a month and the importance of that is this, you got to go find out how your audience or your potential audience is using the search engines, and you got to create content to reach them. And then once you get the people into your content, they are going to share with other people. So take Jocelyn’s website, the Elementary Librarian site, we did a lot of research when we first started that site to see exactly what people were looking for; ‘library’, ‘lesson plans’, ‘lesson plans for the library’, all these different permutations of how librarians are actually searching for this information and then we went and wrote blog posts that talked about library lesson plans. We would write another one called ‘lesson plans for the library’, and anything else that we could find, like ‘centers’, that’s a big thing for library where there’s different activities going on at different tables. So Jocelyn wrote a post about centers and what happened was, the first few people came in, Jocelyn then got her product into a few hands and then they came back, gave us feedback, Jocelyn made a new product, got it back into their hands and then they told someone else, and then they told someone else, and then they told someone else. But the key is getting those first few people in the door, getting that feedback, and creating lots of content. We created – how much content did we create in the first? I mean, it was unbelievable.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I probably have hundreds of posts on my Elementary Librarian site and that’s how a lot of people find me. They come in on these posts about things that aren’t necessarily related to lesson plans, but guess what, if you come to my site, you’re gonna see some type of advertisement for my lesson plans.
JOHN: You are using a landing page to get their information, or they are just contacting you as a commenter on your blog?
JOCELYN: Well, yeah, typically what happens is they will land on a blog post, like say they were searching for ‘accelerated reader party ideas’, that was one of the blog posts on my site, I will have that article there for them which is totally free to view, but then, I will also have some type of advertisement to my own content on my site. So they will click that ad and you know, they’ll get either my free sample or they can click on to buy now.
SHANE: So basically, the moral of the story is this, you have to create content with a strategy; a lot of people fail online and they don’t gain any traction because they just start writing content, whatever is on their mind. But the problem is, the way you say something or the idea that you come up with, it might be a great idea to you but it might not exactly be how your audience phrases that. So, you need to do a little research, and plan out your content over time to help your organic growth happen faster. Now on top of that too, we would not actually say to totally do that upfront anymore. If we could go back in hindsight, we would be buying ads. We would be buying Facebook ads from day one; a lot of people go into their first business and they say, “I don’t have any money, I’m bootstrapping this, I’m just going to –” “I can’t afford to run ads, so I’m just going to try to do it all organic.” Well, it took us two years to build a business that way. I wish that someone had came and smacked us the first month we were in business and said, ‘If you have any extra money, you spend it on advertising towards your target demographic and get them to your site and you are going to grow so much faster.’
JOHN: My second question was going to be about the interaction of your Facebook page with your website and how you use that to drive traffic to it. And are you using just the ads or are you using boosted posts, or does it matter which one?
JOCELYN: Okay, we do use advertising on Facebook; Facebook is the primary social media network that we use and there’s a good reason for that. A lot of the people who work at schools, you know, it’s like people who are our age, some are a little bit older, and I mean, most of these people are on Facebook. A lot of them are also on Twitter, but that hasn’t been as good for me. So we do stick to Facebook – I do not boost posts typically, I like to create posts that are not necessarily seen by my page, so I don’t actually post them to my page. You make them what’s called a power editor and this is kinda some advanced stuff but it’s very beneficial. You can make those go out to an email list, you can make them go out to what’s called a look-alike audience; so that means people that are similar to other people who are either on your email list or on your page, and you can get so specific. I mean, you can target certain age groups, you can target people who are teachers, that in my opinion is the best thing to do. I mean, you can boost posts to your existing audience if you have a good existing audience but if you don’t have a huge audience, Facebook ads in my opinion, are definitely the way to go.
SHANE: It used to work on Facebook like this, like we used to build ‘Likes’, like you would pay to build ‘Likes’ and then you know, so you try to get 10000 ‘Likes’ by people that were in your audience, or your target teachers; are you following me right now?
JOHN: yeah.
SHANE: And then what you would do is you would have this big audience, so you could boost posts and you could target your ‘Likes’ with ads and that would get your ad price down. But that is not exactly how it works anymore on Facebook and in all actuality, we don’t even try to build our Facebook page, we don’t try to build the ‘Likes’, we don’t try to do any of that because like Jocelyn said, you can go in and make a Facebook ad, and just target directly to the people you want to talk to without having to build that audience in the first place. So like if you are trying to target this classroom management product at teachers, then you can just go in and say, ‘I want to target teachers’, let’s say the people that are probably gonna have the most trouble in their classroom are new teachers, you could go in and create an ad that targets people from 23 to 32, right, catch a lot of new – and have an ad that says, “Are you a new teacher struggling in the classroom management or whatever? Check this out, I got some tips for you” and you can just target them. You can just go straight and pick elementary teachers, you can target people that are members of like unions, like the – what is it, the Teachers’ Education Union, [Crosstalk] yeah, you can just go in and find the demographic and straight show them ads. And what happens is, they’ll click to your sales page and there’s a ‘Like’ button on that ad. So you are going to build audience that way anyway but you don’t want to go in and just boost posts, it’s not gonna help you do anything because those people who liked your page were probably just liking it in passing anyway. You are much better off in any kind of advertising but especially Facebook to go in and create an actual ad, pick your demographic and just let it run. Don’t actually try to grow your likes on your Facebook page or anything.
JOHN: That’s great advice; [Unclear 0:13:59] getting that done, so certainly start doing that.
JOCELYN: We talked about this a little bit on our last couple of podcasts, about paid social media advertising; so if you have not listened to those, I really recommend that you do that. We will put links to them in today’s show notes page if you have not done that.
SHANE: Okay so did that all make sense?
KAREN: Yeah.
JOHN: Yeah.
SHANE: Okay, awesome and one more thing for that real quick too, we do not actually teach Facebook advertising, but if I was going to recommend somebody to check out, it would be Rick Mulready at rickmulready.com. He has a podcast called, ‘The art of paid traffic’, he has a really, really good course on Facebook advertising and it really explains like how to set up your ad campaigns, how to use all the backend stuff; it really is worth every penny. We actually did purchase that and we have been through it and looked at it and if you are going to learn how to do Facebook ads, beat the learning curve and go jump on his beginner Facebook ads course and you’ll have it all figured out like, within a week.
JOHN: All right.
KAREN: Sounds good.
SHANE: And Rick did not pay us to say that. We really just like the course. All right, guys, what’s the next question?
JOHN: I have heard you on one of the podcasts, that you appeared on talks about pricing and I think at that time, you had just increased your pricing on your product. That’s something we struggle with also is, how do we price our product especially since we are really not selling it yet, have the confidence to price it.
SHANE: Karen what would you pay; what do you think your course is valued at? Like, what would you pay for it if you could have had the course that you have created like when you first started teaching?
KAREN: Well, I did have some experience because when it was under ‘Building Custom Kids’, I actually did several workshops at different districts and actually when they bought the book and they did the three-hour training, they were paying like 2500 dollars and I had three like that. And one summer, I had a couple of others but there were many of those times where I felt, ‘wow, we’ve arrived’ and then it was like nothing. Like nobody called and so we had workshops.
SHANE: ‘Cause you ran out of people that knew about it basically?
KAREN: Exactly.
JOCELYN: Right. And that was going to be my question; is your product going to be more targeted towards districts or towards individuals because that’s going to make a big difference on your pricing.
KAREN: Well, I would say, I think the way we have it set up now, more individual, because what we are trying to do is with this program, it’ll keep teachers in the classroom feeling confident about what they are doing with parents, with instruction, and especially with discipline and more for the individual and we set it up as online training with modules and they can earn professional development credits. That way it needs to be made user friendly; it’s very hard if one person could go and do all the workshops and training. This is the way we felt we could reach more.
SHANE: Okay.
JOHN: Well, it’s also a huge problem for the administrators and the principals that [Unclear 0:17:08] only half of – or almost less than half of new teachers make it to their fifth year in the classroom and that’s a result of two things: lack of training and lack of support [Crosstalk]
SHANE: Listening to this, this is so funny because at our live event in San Diego last week, we had a very similar – it wasn’t like the same kind of subject matter, but it was a person who was in education, who was coming out and trying to target someone kind of in a leadership aspect, not quite classroom management or things like that, but it was still the same thing. It was training, the individual was getting the benefit but what we kind of talked about with her and what I’m really feeling like here is, I think, you need to be targeting school districts and I think that people can come in to the program. I think teachers are going to like this; you could have two kind of ad campaigns running: one that targets ads and another one that can maybe – have another avenue target school districts because number one, school districts have money, that’s where the money is, and number two, the teacher might not be totally looking at this as their number one priority or they might not understand that it is their priority. They might be looking at new lesson plans, or other things first if they get to it or maybe if I just had better classroom management, I’m not sure – when I was a teacher, that’s not something that I sought out. But I do know it is a huge emphasis for principals, for vice-principals and school districts, and it would be a lot easier maybe to go out and find ten school districts to pay you 2500 dollars, what’s that 25000 dollars? Is that the math there, something like that; than it would be to find 2500 teachers to give you 100 dollars. So you may need to look at your market here and say, ‘Who is actually going to go out and buy this?’ And if you already have this, you already have the social proof, you already have the proof in the marketplace, you have school districts that have paid you to do the live training, so you can actually find testimonials of school districts, superintendents and principals that come in and say, ‘Listen, we brought her in and she did this’; and then you bring on the individual teacher that said, ‘Oh you changed my career because of this training’, but now you got this thing that you can sell straight to school districts for a huge price.
JOCELYN: Yeah, just wanted to throw in a couple of things here; I do agree with what Shane is saying, I think that the pain is greater for school districts and school administrators than it is for teachers. I mean, day-to-day, I think it is a great pain for teachers, but when they are sitting around at home like using Facebook, they are probably not thinking about that a whole lot. So I think you may be better off targeting those administrators or districts, and you know, another thing that I want to throw out there is that I hear this all the time, people are like, ‘I don’t know how to price my products, I don’t want to make them too high’ especially in education, because you know, in education we don’t have a ton of money and things like that. But the truth is, I have sold so much more since I have raised my prices up. You know, people just have a higher perceived value when your prices are higher and don’t say well, people aren’t going to pay this because I have people pay it almost every day. So don’t think that way. I just wanted to thrown that out there and one other thing that I like to do with my pricing is that I like to justify it in some way and what I mean by that is, I had a different amounts of – like there’s a semester, there’s a full year, and there’s like a deluxe package that has a printed book and in each of those packages, what I do is I break it down by lesson plan. So if you buy the deluxe package for instance, it’s less – it’s around a dollar per lesson plan. If you buy the second package, it’s like around 1.50; if you buy the first one, it’s around two dollars. You see what I mean?
KAREN: Right.
JOCELYN: So I like to have some type of justification for my pricing and I think that helps in the marketing.
SHANE: Also too, there’s one more thing here like I think in your case, because someone has paid you to do something live, we had another client that created a course about drawing and I asked them, when we were building his product, I said, ‘How much would you charge for this an hour?’ He created like 30 – something like 30 videos and they all added up to like five hours of training. So he was like, ‘I charge 200 dollars an hour to teach this one-on-one.’ And I’m like, okay, well, you’ve created five hours of video, that’s a 1000-dollar product. Now go sell it for 200 dollars and just say, ‘It would cost you 1000 dollars to get this live, but you can get this for 200’ and that was the price point that he started at. And the reason I share that story is this, we – no expert, nobody that’s even in online business can tell you exactly what your first price is gonna be. What you are gonna have to do is grab a price that you think is fair, you know, if you training was 2500 dollars live, and you target maybe schools, or something to do the video course only, well, maybe you charge 500 dollars and then market it that way. It’s 2500 dollars for me to show up and do this live, but you can get the training for your entire school district for 500 dollars or 1000 dollars. But you are going to eventually just have to pick something and do it and I think that’s a step that a lot of people mess up ‘cause they are like, what’s the price, I need advice, I need this. Really you just got to try something and see if anyone buys it and then go back and reevaluate it and say, ‘Well, a ton of people bought it, let’s raise the price’ or ‘Nobody bought it, but a lot of people saw it, so maybe it was the price, let’s try a different one.’ So just grab something out there once you settle in on this demographic, and just charge it and just see what happens ‘cause you can always change it. Remember, it’s always just logging in, backspace three times, new numbers. That’s the only thing you got to do. To change your price on the internet, it’s not a big deal so make sure – you make sure you know who you are targeting first; I’m not sure if it’s the teachers, it might be school districts but once you settle in on who you really want to target, just put a price out there and see what happens.
JOHN: Yeah, it seems like it’s easier to reduce the price than it is to increase it after you [Crosstalk]
KAREN: Well, initially I did a lot of this for free, and it was the principal that I was presenting at her school that told me that, you really need to put a price on it and she is the one that really encouraged me to set like a 300-dollar training fee. And then when they purchased the books for everyone on the campus, they bumped it up to 2500 and I was really shocked at that time. But the feedback I was getting from my surveys was that it was an excellent product, in that it was things that people would be able to immediately use in the classroom.
SHANE: Then you need to – I’m telling you right now, I really think that you are thinking about the individual, but I do not believe that that teacher is your market here. You had a principal who you were doing something for free walk up to you and say, ‘please charge us money for this.’
KAREN: Right.
SHANE: That is a huge signal that your content – and then that happens, sometimes you have to pivot what you think your product is going to accomplish because the market tells you something different, and as soon as you catch that signal, you need to go after it especially since you’ve had success in the brick-and-mortar real world doing this, you probably need to go to the principals. They are going to give you – go get feedback right now from what people have paid, maybe the free people, and say, ‘What is this worth?’ and kinda average out all of those responses. That is your first price and then we are going to – you are probably going to target principals for this and school districts.
KAREN: Okay.
SHANE: All right, what’s your next question guys, if that’s all you have for pricing?
JOHN: well, Shane we were talking about how to deliver the product. We got a new training course which is a one-shot product; you buy the course, take 22 lessons, it sends you a certificate of completion. And the other way to deliver is to have people sign up as members. If we were going after the school administrators instead of the individual teachers, what makes more sense? Or does something completely different need to be done?
JOCELYN: Right, I think that if you are going to target school districts, I mean, they have money, they can write purchase orders, they have it, they are already – you know, they have their budget at the beginning of the year. That needs to be a one-time purchase and that’s the way I choose to run my business. I do not do any memberships at this time on Elementary Librarian and I just choose not to and there’s a lot of reasons for that. The first reason is because to me, it’s a pain in the neck, you know, if people cancel their membership in the middle of the year, you know, depending on what kind of membership plugin you are using, or what kind of membership system, you may have to go in and manually cancel that. You know, if their credit card is declined, you may have to go into manually cancel that, and just headaches. ‘I couldn’t get logged in’, ‘I forgot my password’, all those types of things are headaches that I personally don’t like to deal with. So, if you don’t have some type of customer service in place to deal with that, that is just asking for trouble. So that’s my opinion on membership sites and like I said, because you were still – if you were going to sell to school districts, I would not recommend one.
JOHN: Yeah. We are selling a video training program, we sell it to the school district for specific teachers; like they have 50 teachers, we sell them the program for those specific teachers, where they would have their own login as part of a bulk sale and then the next year, they may have new teachers coming in that would be buying the program for the new teachers.
SHANE: Yeah, you would probably at that point like you can – yeah, you would probably have to resell that one year at a time. Like, I don’t know if a lot of school districts would actually sign up for a recurring purchase unless it was on a real short term contract for like three to five years. So you are probably gonna have no choice at this any way, [Unclear 0:27:12] education where it works but you would just resell it to them again for a higher price or a different price. You would add value maybe and try to upsell them to a better product. Maybe you can open more so you are still selling a membership site because people have to log in and out. But like you said, it’s one price, you get all the money upfront, it’s a bulk entry, you just take care of all the logins, at onetime everybody logs in and sets it up and then next year, you already have a client that bought from you so you have somebody else to immediately market to. That’s the best client, somebody that’s already given you money. Right?
JOHN: Right.
SHANE: So you could go back and resell the product again. Another thing about membership sites too is, a lot of people really like membership sites, a lot of people really hate membership sites and it really just is always back to what is your market going to do. So if I have an individual teacher that can’t afford 500 dollars a year, they may have a lower barrier to entry if I have a membership where they can pay 50 dollars a month. Over time, they are actually gonna to pay more but people on an individual level, you know, want that small fee that they can pay once a month over time. But a school district is just straight up, “Let’s just write a check and get it over with and get this product.” So I think that’s what you are going to have to do in this situation, it goes back to that target demographic like if you are going to target the schools, then you are probably just going to have to go after that one big hit like Jocelyn said, and we see it every day. We’ve had school districts come in and order her product, you know, for every school in their district and spent 9000 dollars at once and on the individual level, you know, we have members that come in and they pay 50 dollars a month. So it just depends who you are targeting there but the big advantage of not having a membership site, or at least having an option to pay all at once, is that you get all the money upfront too. Like if I have a history site and it’s 600 dollars spread over 12 months and they are paying like a membership fee every month, I would much rather get that money upfront because I think the average or something like that of people cancelling a membership is three months. So if I am only charging 50 dollars a month and they pay 50-50-50 then they quit, the average person quits around three or four months, I’m gonna get 150 dollars whereas I would rather just have someone pay up front and have all the money up front. That way if they fade out and if they stop using my product, they have already paid for it. Does that make sense?
KAREN: Yeah, that makes sense.
SHANE: Yeah, so basically look at that demographic; if you really slant towards the school district, the principal level, I think you want the big ticket. There’s no reason not to get all that money up front, especially since the government is going to guarantee that it’s paid for.
KAREN: Sounds good.
JOHN: How do you get them – you are selling to the school districts, what’s your best option for selling to the districts?
JOCELYN: Well, you definitely want to make sure that the set purchase orders and this is something that kinda confuses people a lot. So I’m gonna just quickly tell you how you can do that and it’s a lot easier than what you might think.
SHANE: And this would work for anybody selling anything to a government entity because almost government entities use these purchase orders. So basically what I do is I have a form on my website and it says, ‘Do you want to use a purchase order?’ I have that person fill out the entire form, and I use FreshBooks and it will actually integrate with a plugin. I have a plugin called Gravity Forms and it integrates with the FreshBooks’ accounting software. Their information that they type in goes directly into either an estimate or an invoice, whichever one they choose. Some districts have an estimate first and other ones can use just the invoice. So I have them fill that out and the next thing that I do is I just kick out that invoice to them. It doesn’t happen automatically, you have to do it manually but pretty much all that school district needs is just an invoice, and they need proof that you’ve delivered the product. If you have those two things – you will need to have a purchase order number as the seller, and what I do is I actually make them send an image of the purchase order so they can actually either scan it, they can take a picture of it with their phone, or they can fax it to me because school districts still do that. So those are three different ways that they can get me the purchase order. The next thing I do is I deliver their product, I send them an invoice again and I get my payment.
SHANE: So basically the purchase order, the reason it’s awesome dealing with schools and doing these purchase orders is this, people can dispute payments, and they decline, or their card’s declined, all these things happen with individual payments but at the school district level, if they give you a purchase order, they don’t give you your money upfront, but they give you a contract with the government that guarantees will pay. Period. If you deliver the product, they are giving you your money. So that’s another reason why it’s good when you are dealing with a government entity that you accept these purchase orders to do that. Now how do you get into the school district; it all is based on your target demographic. When you came on to this call, we were talking about targeting elementary school teachers but we kind of are looking at that, well, maybe that is not exactly what you know, they are looking for and then we realized you were already selling this workshop thing to school districts. So, who’s purchasing that? Well, you said it in our call, the principal, was talking to you about charging for that. The principal’s bringing it in to their school districts. The principal is talking about it with their school, their superintendent is coming down and doing that. So what you have to then, is find out where can you get to that target demographic. Are they searching for it on Google, is it something that you’re going to have to direct market to the school? Maybe you can do that. it’s really easy to get all the addresses and phone numbers and things like that of school districts so it might be something that you can hire a VA that – a Virtual Assistant that goes on and just looks for all these school districts and emails them or sends mail to them about your product. But you have to go find where they hang out. I don’t think necessarily Facebook marketing comes back into play here unless you are going to target somehow, school principals, so that they can see their ad and they can get the message to their school district. But you are going to have to figure out where your audience lives and if your audience are school board members, superintendents, principals, then you are going to have to get online and kinda research how to get to them.
JOHN: Well, that makes sense.
KAREN: Yes, it does.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that was a lot of information; how do you guys feel about what we threw out there?
JOHN: Yeah, I think there’s some redirection that we need to do but I think this is great advice, stuff that we can actually do get the thing kicked off.
SHANE: And one last thing here just to throw out to everybody listening, and I think it’s so funny how this conversation played out, the most important thing out there is not just your product, or what you are doing online, or how you are going to create systems to that many online, you have to know your audience. Your audience and your avatar, the person you are trying to sell this product to, that product solves a problem, you’ve got to find that person with that problem; that is the most important thing you can do in online business because once you find a person with a problem you can solve, they’ll buy your solution. You know how to create the solution, all you have to do is figure out the price and then find someone with that problem and you are good to go; okay?
KAREN: Sounds right, yeah.
JOHN: Sounds like a plan.
JOCELYN: All right, we are unfortunately out of time, we have enjoyed talking to you all so much; thank you Karen, thank you John, for being on our show today.
KAREN: Thanks so much.
JOHN: Lot of great information, really appreciate it.
SHANE: All right guys, that wraps up our consulting call with john and Karen, we are so happy that we could help then to figure out what to do next in their online business, and we would love to help you figure out what to do next in your online business as well. All you have to do to get help from is go to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and there you can join our membership community where we help hundreds of entrepreneurs every single day, take their online business to the next level. Once again, that’s flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We would love to have you as a member of the Flip Your Life community and a part of our online business family. Until next time, we will see you all later.
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