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Deb made the switch to online business 3 years ago, but has found herself trading time for dollars and wants to shift out of that into an online business without an income cap and strict hours.
We’re going to talk about the first steps to getting started so Deb can get her site for mompreneurs off the ground and start building an email list and creating income.
We talk about if she should focus on affiliate products or create her own membership site in the beginning.
We also talk about the importance of scheduling your time so you know when you should be working on content and when you should be working on products.
It’s about coming up with a strategy that let’s you focus and understand where you should be.
You will learn
- How you can leave a time for dollars job in the real world for one online.
- How to build a great lead magnet to build an audience.
- How to generate income quickly with a new website.
- Why we’re not a fan of affiliate programs.
- How to structure a membership community from the beginning.
- The value of a great community.
- How to prioritize between free content and paid products.
- The importance of scheduling your time.
- How to get your blog done quickly using transcriptionists.
- Do you have enough content to start your membership site?
- The value of having a plan before starting a membership site.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
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!
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 podcast we help Deb start an online business teaching mompreneurs how to work from home.
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; great to be back with you as always this week, to talk about online business and flipping your life upside down. We are super-excited today because we have a Flipped Podcast where bring on one of our Flip Your Life community members, and we give them a free consulting call to help them take their online business to the next level and we share that call with you because a lot of the questions that people ask us will apply to your online business as well. So, we want to make sure that everybody has a chance to learn from today’s consulting call. Today’s call is Deb McGranaghan; did I say that correctly?
DEB: Yes.
SHANE: I got it right; I practiced before we got on here. That’s pretty big time. Alright, this is Deb McGranaghan, she is a Flip Your Life community member; Deb, welcome to the show.
DEB: Thank you so much for having me Shane; nice job with the name.
SHANE: We are bad with names and math around here, and apparently previously we were really bad at online security before we got hacked. So we’re a work in progress here at the Flipped Lifestyle.
JOCELYN: So let’s not talk about all the things we are bad at.
SHANE: Let’s talk about some things we are good at.
JOCELYN: So Deb, tell us a little bit about you, tell us about your family and what’s going on with you.
DEB: Well, I live in a tiny, little town in New Hampshire that no one really knows where it is.
SHANE: We know all about small towns in the middle of nowhere.
DEB: We have that type of life, my husband and I have been married for about 18-and-a-half years and we have a three-and-a-half-year-old who is standing right next to me requesting more juice as we speak.
SHANE: Pour the juice; keeping it real here at the Flipped Lifestyle.
DEB: So yeah, while I was on maternity leave, I decided that I didn’t want to go back to a regular job so I started a virtual assistant business. So that is my – I call it my day business now and I built that while I worked the first year that she was alive and had the newborn and it was crazy and nuts. And then I left my job in about September of 2013, started doing my VA business full-time and I’ve been doing that ever since.
SHANE: So is this the business that we’re going to talk about today or are we going to talk about another kind of angle that you are going to go online; what are we going to talk about during this consulting call?
DEB: It’s actually a new angle. One thing that I discovered in the last three years is, running a business from home as a mom with a small child at home, is a bit of a struggle.
SHANE: Sure.
DEB: And it brings up all sorts of mindset issues and then there’s the scheduling issues and just all sorts of challenges that I know that every single mompreneurs that’s ever done this has gone through. So, what I want to do is create like an online resource for people in that situation, different technology tools, different personal development mindset resources, kind of things to help mompreneurs along that journey.
SHANE: Okay, so like an all-in-one resource for mompreneurs basically?
DEB: Yes. I am a bit of a personal development and information junkie so I thought I could utilize that and curate all of that stuff and what’s worked for me and what’s worked for other mompreneurs that I know and –
SHANE: And you are going to be keeping your virtual assistant business; correct? This is going to be a part of it or would you like to shift away from that eventually?
DEB: Eventually I would like to shift away from it because right now I’m still tied to a lot of hourly stuff and scheduling around when other people need things done. So it’s definitely better than being at a regular job, clocking in for someone else, but I would like a little bit more freedom and a little less of an income cap.
SHANE: That’s a great point. Online business – I don’t see anything wrong, but you can trade one time-for-dollar job in the “real world” for an online time-for-dollar job if you are not careful.
DEB: Exactly.
SHANE: So we are going to talk about more like passive type stuff where you can kind of invest time and make more money at it later basically.
DEB: Awesome.
JOCELYN: Alright Deb, so let’s jump into your questions; so what is your first question?
DEB: So my site is completely brand new; like right now I literally have a home page and an about me page. So, I’m working on my free offer first, was my plan, and I’m debating what I should have for my free offer. I was thinking of creating like a resource guide for busy business moms or maybe something about time-management hacks for busy mompreneurs. I like the idea of the resource guide but I was thinking of having a resources page on my site so I don’t know if there was maybe one would be more appealing than another.
SHANE: Let me ask you this because you are a mompreneur, you pretty much are the avatar here, so what’s one thing you wish you had known when you started your virtual assistant business that you would love to go back and tell yourself, grab yourself by the neck and start shaking yourself like, “Do this today!” Like what would be like a simple tip for that? I think Jocelyn has an idea too, but I would just like to know what’s on your mind about that.
DEB: Honestly, it’s really hard to pinpoint one thing because I feel like they were so many challenges. I guess, the time thing is definitely a big one and that has been a big one amongst the mompreneurs I have talked to, just figuring out how to schedule everything, how to create boundaries when you have your family and your business all in the same room.
JOCELYN: I think that that’s probably your answer. You know, when you are thinking about making an opt-in for your website, you need it to be some kind of pain point and something that can be solved relatively quickly, and that’s what a lot of people miss a lot of times. They want to give people all of these things that sound really nice –
SHANE: And huge and long and –
JOCELYN: – “15 potential ideas for an online business for busy moms” you know, that sounds nice but how has time to read that? I would rather read three ways that I can make time to have my own online business.
SHANE: Yeah, and I wonder too, along those lines, the biggest challenge for us as parentpreneurs, mompreneurs, dadpreneurs whatever is our kids. What do we do with our children, especially small kids; Ana, Joe just started preschool but even before that, we had to make a decision, where was she going to go during the day so that we could actually work because you can’t get tons of work done with your kid there. Like you said, they come up for juice, they need something – our little girl has started climbing up the inside of door frames so I’m just waiting like right in the middle of a podcast to hear a crash and leg snap out of her kneecap or something like that. So, I wonder if you could do like a real quick resource like, “Five ways to work when you have young children” or “Five ways to get work done when your kids are still at home” and maybe you could come up with solutions and you know, start off with like, “Hey, you don’t have to feel guilty, you have to work around this, you can’t get work done, you need some time to do this” and maybe you could talk about childcare and give ideas where their children could go during the day, maybe you could talk about what to do when kids are home; just a small, maybe two-page resource guide for busy moms, like Jocelyn said, who want to start an online business. But focus on that – these are mompreneurs, what’s the biggest challenge to a mompreneur? Getting work done with the kids in the house.
DEB: Yeah.
SHANE: So maybe that will be a great free opt-in; I think moms would jump all over that, especially mompreneurs that haven’t started yet because they are like, “Man, I would love to do this but –” I got to wipe noses and clean up cheerios and pour juice.
DEB: Right, how can I possibly do that?
SHANE: Yeah, so that to me, would be a really quick, easy pain point to solve because you can just give them some really quick ideas like watch a movie or you know, have them play games, give them something to do, this, that or the other, use childcare, here are some ideas and that way, it’s a problem that needs solved and you can pretty much solve it quickly for them with just a few ideas on a PDF.
DEB: Awesome, I really like that idea.
JOCELYN: Okay, let’s go ahead and jump into the second question.
DEB: So the second question is, what would you recommend as far as an income source to focus on first? Should I focus on like affiliate stuff or a quick product or e-book as far as starting – I want to be able to monetize this fairly early on. I’m still giving free content blog posts and such, but just kind of figuring out what to focus on first with that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I would definitely not go the affiliate route; I’m not a big fan of the affiliate programs personally, I just don’t like to split revenue with somebody.
SHANE: We don’t like to share.
JOCELYN: It just gets into a lot more complicated stuff, you know, what if somebody returns it or what if this happens or what if somebody is marketing you in a way that you don’t like –
SHANE: Yeah, we’ve heard horror stories about that too; the gurus make it sound so awesome, “There’s a JV opportunity” I don’t know, but everybody we meet in person, it doesn’t really work out as good as it sounds basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I just really don’t like opening myself up to that personally and there are a lot of people out there doing it, a lot of people doing it well but it’s just not something that I have ever wanted to do or really recommend for people if you don’t want to open up all those relationships with a lot of different people. I think for sure, that you need to start out with some quick-win opt-in bonus like we were just talking about, and I would even venture to say that I would start out by making it a membership site.
SHANE: Yeah, what you could probably do, because the biggest thing I think that moms are going to want from your product here, I mean you are a mompreneur, you’ve got the chops, you’ve got a successful story, it’s a really interesting dynamic here because a lot of people that come to us have never done anything online. But even this Virtual Assistant business, that’s got a lot of online components; yes, it’s some time for dollars and some things like that, but you have proven that you can make money online, that you can start a business and that you are a mompreneur. So I think that access to you and direction would be the first things that people would want. So maybe you could create a membership community and do some kind of small product to kind of see that membership community where people could come in and say like maybe it would be like you know, your course could be something like you know, your first month as a mompreneur, and what you need to do in the first month; go back to yourself the avatar and say, “What would I have done in the first month? I’ve got a kid, maybe I’ve got a job, I’m going to start this, you know, business as a mompreneur, whatever it is, what are the first five things they need to do?” And you do like one a week but two in the last week to really, you know, ramp up the value. So people could join and then come in and then get started but then you are there for them to continue paying you monthly and you end up – and they can ask you questions, like what can I do next. You can go ahead then and once you get a few people in there and then create that next step course and add value each month moving forward. But I think that would probably get you started really fast, as to build a community around yourself and your expertise that you already have as a mompreneur.
DEB: I really like that idea because that’s – one big thing I want to do is create a community because being a solo entrepreneur is isolating and being a stay-at-home mom can also be isolating. So I think that community thing has been very helpful to me so I really like that idea of building that right out of the gate.
SHANE: And also like we’re parents too and we work at home and so like our only real interaction 90% of the time is with each other or our kids and you need that outside influence especially where you need advice about business and things like that. And you’re a member of Flip Your Life, I mean, you see what happens in there. We’re there; it’s not like – I mean, we got training modules that get everybody started to do things like that, but at the end of the day, if you get stuck, you can ask us a question and that would be what this would be for the mompreneurs. You’re a mom, you’re in this boat, they know they can trust your opinion because you are where they are or were, and they have somewhere to go when they need help. That’s the primary reason a community exists and also too, people think they want stuff – so they think they want like how to start a website or how to start a business or but what they really want is a helping community and they don’t realize it until they are actually in a community.
DEB: Right.
SHANE: But once they get in there, they don’t want to leave because they have what they need, they found the answer to their questions. So I think that will be a great first step for you to create that community. You can even do a paid Facebook group at first as long as you have a plan to move it to an onsite forum later. Does that make sense?
DEB: Yeah.
SHANE: You don’t want to stay on Facebook; it’s a terrible way to manage content and also, what if they shut you down? What if Facebook just decides to turn your groups off?
DEB: Right.
SHANE: So, yeah, I think that will be a great way for you to get started quickly.
DEB: Awesome, I love that idea.
JOCELYN: All right, let’s go ahead and jump into your third question.
DEB: So my third question is, given that I am kind of – I am kind of building this business along side of my regular one like I did the last time, how should I split up the time that I have between creating blog posts and free content and then creating paid content and then promoting?
JOCELYN: Okay, we’ve actually talked about this on a few podcasts before, and really more from the standpoint of starting out from the very beginning. But if you have an hour a day, you know, I think that really starting out, that you should be probably about 50-50 as far as free stuff and paid stuff. You don’t want to completely neglect your paid products because you want to be able to offer your audience something if they are coming to you. But at the same time, you need free stuff get them in. So I think from the very beginning, you need to split it up a little bit and as time goes on, you need to put most of your time into one particular project.
SHANE: Yeah, I think that what you could do though is you got to batch your time. You can’t say like, “Okay, I’m going to write a blog post and then work on my paid product.” What we’re saying when we are saying ‘split the time up’ is, okay, you’ve just got an about page, you’ve just got the website, you’ve just started. You have nothing there, so you gonna have to have something there to even show that it exists.
DEB: Okay.
SHANE: So you might want to take – like let’s say the first week, you know, let’s say you have an hour a day for five days, maybe those first three hours, right now at this moment, this week, you create content, free content, but you do it in short bursts and you create like let’s say one blog post every 30 minutes. That would be six blog posts, and then you schedule those out six weeks in advance. Now, you have invested time in your free content and that’s going to happen once a week, no need to rush, people think they have to launch a hundred blog posts at the first day; that is not true. It’s going to take time no matter how you do it; so schedule those first six blog posts out, you are done for the first week but now for the next five weeks, you can work on your product. You can build your membership form, you can start your Facebook group, whatever you do to make money. So by investing your time, by saying, “Okay, I’m going to focus on both, I’ve got this many hours, I’m going to take the first half of the hours and schedule my content far into the future” and that’s going to bank my time and leverage my time to give me more time to work on these paid products and marketing later. Does that make sense?
DEB: Yes, it does.
SHANE: So go ahead and seed your blog. We shoot for – with the hack we are so far behind, it’s ridiculous, but like we shoot to be eight weeks ahead at all times from free content because if we can get all of our content done in one week, then that gives us seven weeks to take care of our members in our communities, does that make sense?
DEB: Yes.
SHANE: We can focus all of our time on those people that pay for access, and for help, and they need us, and we can still make sure we are serving as many people as possible on our website in our free content; okay?
DEB: Okay.
SHANE: So take your time now, this is still a product-first mentality too; I want to point out, ‘cause a lot of people might be listening to this saying, “Wait a minute, you are always telling me to do the product first.” Well, we are, we are prioritizing the product because we are investing some time into our free content upfront to leverage more time to focus on product and marketing later.
DEB: I see.
SHANE: So that’s what you should do; go ahead and batch your content and then focus everything into your product.
JOCELYN: So you are actually still splitting that time up as you are doing it in a very targeted way.
SHANE: Yeah, strategic, basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, you are being strategic and you need those doors into your website so that people can find your paid content.
SHANE: Yeah, and a lot of people, I think this is where they get overwhelmed because they try to do a blog post and work on their product, do a blog post and work on their product, and they try to do their podcast, and they try to do this and they try to do that and they – but you can’t do it that way. It is absolutely impossible and that’s why most of the people that fail, that we see try to start an online business, are trying to halfway do everything instead of getting something done and moving into the thing that matters basically.
DEB: Yeah, I’ve heard the episodes where you had the “one hour a day” but then I’ve heard you say to stay focused on the paid product first so that I why I wanted to ask the question.
SHANE: Right, I guess that is confusing how we say that, but there’s things you have to do every day. I get up every morning and I check our emails; you got to check emails, that’s not necessarily working on our product but if I can batch every one of those emails and get them done, then the rest of my day, it’s off my mind. I’ve got all my will power, all my energy, all my focus, I can work on making money. So you get the things out of the way that have to be done, you got to have content but just shorten it up, batch it up, spread it out and if it takes you an hour to write a blog post, well, just split it up into part one and part two and now you got two weeks. And then once you are far enough ahead, you’ll be easily able to create that product that your people need.
DEB: Awesome.
JOCELYN: Yeah, being strategic is just the most important thing. You have to be strategic about everything; like when you answer emails needs to be in your calendar, when you work on your blog post needs to be on your calendar. All of these things need to be in place; too many people wake up every morning and think, “Oh what am I going to do with my day?”
SHANE: That doesn’t work. You can’t just wing it; you know what I mean?
DEB: Right.
JOCELYN: Alright, so let’s move on question number four.
DEB: Perfect; I wanted to get your feedback on having like an audio version of my blog as well as a written version because I personally love audio, I listen to podcasts and audiobooks all the time because it’s easy to do when I’m doing other things. So I’ve been trying to appeal to myself as my target market; would that be a smart thing to add or is that just taking on way too much too soon?
SHANE: Why don’t you flip the script here? There’s two ways to win; you can invest time and money, that’s it, that’s the only way to win online. There’s only two paths to victory. You can spend a lot of time and crush it, or you can spend money to ramp past the time and at the end of the path, both paths, the end is money. If you are going to do an audio blog, where I assume you are going to write the blog post and then read a version of it for people to listen to, why would you not just speak the blog like a podcast format, but it’s just you with an outline going over your thoughts and then have it transcribed? If you do that, you are going to be able to create content ten times as fast. It takes about three times as long to write a blog post as it does to speak a podcast or an audio blog and have it transcribed and Google doesn’t know the difference when it searching your blog post. It’s very cheap and inexpensive to get a good transcription. If you were gonna do like a 15-minute audio clip, that would probably cost you about ten bucks maybe. So basically you could talk for an hour in six ten-minute posts, go get a transcriber to transcribe those for you, find some pictures and you’ve got six blog posts in an hour. So I would recommend if you want to do that and if audio resonates with you but you don’t want to do it like a podcast, you know, if you don’t want to do that and you could create like an outline real quick of whatever you want to talk about for that post and speak it into a microphone and then turn that over to a transcriber, put a picture at the top, put the transcription as your blog post and then you got the audio clip to add to that be an enhanced version. They can listen to it or read it and you can go ahead and put that ahead on iTunes. So for 15 minutes, you can have a blog post and a podcast done. So I think if you are going to do that, you should do it backwards and speak it and have it transcribed. It will cost you 50 bucks a month, but you’ll save probably ten hours of work trying to write those blog posts. And Kate did this, Kate Erickson, she has her Kate’s Take audio blog –
DEB: That’s what gave me the idea.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I mean, that’s totally a viable solution and if audio is something that appeals to you and you want to use it, then definitely you could use that to your advantage.
SHANE: And here’s another thing too, I mean you are the avatar and I think you are probably right but if I were you though, I would still pull people because it’s never about what you prefer. In some ways it is, but it is always about what your audience wants and maybe the mompreneur actually at the end of the day when she’s about to collapse reading her iPad when her kids go to sleep, or her kids laying beside her, maybe she can’t listen, but I mean, you still have both options available that way but maybe they like the blog better. I think you’re going to have to poll your audience but if you want to start out to get some content quick, just record it transcribe it, it’s 50 bucks. How much is your time worth? Would you pay 50 dollars a month to have ten more hours a month? I think most people would say yes, and that will let you focus on your product more.
DEB: Yeah, and I was also thinking that I could utilize Periscope with this as well and get that extra exposure and make it – like my Periscope video be where I can pull the audio from or something like that.
SHANE: That’s interesting.
JOCELYN: Yeah, you could definitely do that; the only thing on Periscope you have to be in mind, if you have people coming in and you are being like, “Hey john [Crosstalk] or whatever, I mean, you do have that but yeah, I mean I think that Periscope can could be a good thing for you if you could find a good transcriber who kind of knows how to edit those little things out.
SHANE: We thought about doing that, we do a lot of audio transcription, that’s just mainly how we create content and we do quite a few Periscopes, and we usually get into some deep conversations with people on those recordings. I could definitely see there’s value in being able – that’s a triple-whammy if you could do a Periscope, take the audio, stick it on a podcast, take the video, stick it on YouTube and then transcribe it. You are starting to produce some serious content for just whipping your phone out in rush-hour traffic basically.
DEB: Right.
SHANE: I would say be careful with Periscope though; I think a lot of people are jumping on the Periscope bandwagon, we use it, I’m not bashing Periscope, anybody out there please don’t tweet me about how much Periscope is a game-changer and all that good stuff, but I think that a lot of people are really getting too wrapped up in it and I don’t see a lot of strategy. I don’t see a lot of people collecting leads on Periscope, I don’t see a lot of people with any direction on Periscope, and I don’t see a lot of people selling on Periscope quite frankly. So I don’t know if I would even worry about that right now; the “big dogs” don’t even really know how to use Periscope right now but –
JOCELYN: They are mostly telling people how to get more followers on Periscope –
SHANE: – which does not get you more money by using Periscope. So I think you should just focus on audio recording, getting blog posts out, build your home base first and maybe two or three months from now, once you’ve got a product, once you’ve got some content, you can start thinking about adding Periscope to it later. Alright, so I think we have rocked through these questions; like this has gone fast.
DEB: I know.
SHANE: Time flies when you are having fun, Deb. All right, so what is question number five?
DEB: Question number five was actually about membership sites and how much content would be good to have in it – which you probably touched on this already, before starting the membership site model, how much should people expect to see in a startup membership site?
JOCELYN: I mean, you can have a minimal amount of content getting started, you can even start the membership site up with a beta group and not have very much content at all, and just sell it for a really reduced price, get people in, see what they need and then make things to meet those needs. I would say that’s probably the way that we’ve been most successful creating pretty much anything that we have ever done.
SHANE: So basically you can pre-sell it. You can say, like we talked about it earlier, let’s just go through what we’ve talked about today. So you’ve got your lead magnet, you get them on your email list and you communicate with them and you find out needs and wants and things like that, and then you can say, “Well, if my membership community existed in its perfect form today, these five things would be in it and people could join and communicate with me.” So then you create a sales page and you list all of those things, and you say a time schedule that they are going to be created. So let’s say, “I am going to open this up, the first 50 people get in for 19 dollars a month but it’s going to be eventually 49 dollars a month –” or whatever, and so you open a beta group, you get in cheap, guaranteed for life, just to get some people in there and break things and play with your content and stuff like that. Then you just create it as you go and you let those people that get in that first beta group, they join and they basically tell you as you are going along, if you are on-base, if you are off-base, if they need more help and less help in certain areas and you could just pre-sell it. So I guess, the moral of the story is, you really don’t need any content; you might need a plan of what you are going to provide or you might want that first thing that’s there, you know what I’m saying, so people can jump in and they actually have something to do. Our first membership that we ever sold, the funny thing is, the only thing that you could do when you first signed up for it was listen to a podcast and – what was the worksheets that we had in there, those two worksheets the very first day – was it the time-management thing?
JOCELYN: Yeah, probably the time-management sheet and the goal-setting.
SHANE: That’s right, that’s what it was. So basically when you signed up, you could listen to our podcast that was already for free, and then download these two worksheets and that was what we gave people to do the first two weeks while we created the next piece of content that we had mentioned in our sales letter; does that make sense?
DEB: Yeah.
SHANE: And it sold out in a day. It completely sold out and we only had like 300-400 emails at the time, so it was like a really, really successful thing and we have done that every single time since. So maybe that first product is all you need plus a place to where people can go talk and all of a sudden, you’ve got a paid membership community.
DEB: Very interesting.
SHANE: People don’t come for stuff, that’s the kind of theme for today. They think they want the stuff, like we said earlier; the stuff gets them in the door but basically what people need is answers. They need help. You can create enough training modules to answer every single question about something but if they’ve got someone that they can go to, that’s not a robot, or an automated call, or Google, they are always going to choose a human and if you are the expert that can provide them the guidance they need, they are going to choose you; okay?
DEB: Yeah.
JOCELYN: And there maybe there are some people out there who are a little bit confused because we’ve talked about membership sites on our podcasts before and we haven’t always had a very favorable opinion of them; but things have changed a whole lot –
SHANE: Dramatically.
JOCELYN: – since then and we are going to be talking about that in some of the upcoming weeks.
SHANE: Yeah, we went to a mastermind event, some people showed us what they were doing and we were confused a little bit about how the membership model worked. We thought we knew how it worked and once we studied it, we were like, you know, there’s something to this. Basically a lot of people are down on memberships because they think well, people are joining and they’ll quit. But they only quit if you are not providing value. They won’t quit on you just because they get bored or whatever. They will but it’s because it’s your fault. If someone says, “Oh no, I started a membership site and everybody quit in three months” well, probably they were relying on content and stuff, the stuff ran out and they weren’t in their membership site taking care of people. So if you are in there taking care of people and constantly adding value, people wills stay around.
DEB: That’s awesome; awesome advice.
SHANE: So let’s ask you this; we always close all of our – Deb had submitted about five questions, we usually take about five questions on these calls and I think man, those were some great – I got excited when I read your questions because I was like really fired up about those. I thought we could just – those were some things that we get asked a lot and we knew that it would clear up for people. But like we always talk action steps because we throw a lot of information out during these flipped podcasts, so what do you think the next step is for Deb? The next step is the only step that really matters. How are you going to take the information from today, what’s the very first thing that you are going to do to move your business forward?
DEB: I think the first thing I am going to do is to get my free offer done, and I loved your idea of keeping it simple ‘cause my resource guide that I was thinking of doing had like 40 different resources. But I was gonna have to do a write-up on each one and it was going to be – so I love the idea, just a couple of pages, on how to manage working with young kids at home, I think that’s awesome because that’s something that everyone in my situation is struggling with. So that’s step number one so that I can start collecting emails; I have someone to market the next the next thing to.
JOCELYN: Exactly, and just remember that those 40 things you were thinking of, those will make great blog posts; so don’t give up on that entirely. Use it in a different way.
SHANE: It’s just your strategic plan for your content creation for the next few months basically.
DEB: Right.
SHANE: Alright, the next thing you should do is go to the Flip Your Life forums and post your action plan so we can hold you accountable. That’s what it’s really all about because we are going to be watching you now. You don’t get to be on the podcast and get off the hook right after we hang up.
DEB: I know. I’m counting on that.
SHANE: That’s exactly right; put it out to the world. When tens of thousands of people hear your goals, you better follow through.
DEB: No pressure.
SHANE: No pressure. All right guys, that wraps up our call with Deb; five amazing questions from the lady out there getting it done online, moving forward in her online business. I think a big moral of the story from this call was definitely don’t trade time for dollars, be strategic and take that next step to really solve problems for the people that you are trying to reach. If you do that, you will experience a lot of success online and if you need any help with your online business, if you would like to talk to Jocelyn and myself about your online business, head on over to flippedlifestlye.com/flipyourlife. We would love to have you as a member of our online community, we get in there every single day, really grassroots stuff and we help our members take their business to the next level and flip your life. That website again is flippedlifestlye.com/flipyourlife. We hope to see you in the forums. Until next time, catch you on the flip side.
JOCELYN: Bye!
Deb McGranaghan says
Thanks so much for the great advice, Shane & Jocelyn! It was great to get to talk to you guys. I have my freebie up on my site and 2 blog posts so far. Of course, it would have been nice if I had shared my URL in the interview (rookie mistake!). If any moms here want to connect, they can find me at http://www.debmcgranaghan.com. 🙂
Shane Sams says
Awesome chat Deb! You are amazing!