Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
In this episode, we discuss some of the myths of online business.
We cut through the junk and let you know the truth about how online business can make money.
One of the most important places to start is figuring out who your customer is and where you’re going to find them.
You truly need to know and understand their problems and be able to effectively deliver solutions that work.
Promoting products online means providing value.
Spend time investing in others and as you do you’ll receive knowledge and information that others are giving in those same communities.
To have a profitable and effective product it honestly has to be good, otherwise it’s simply a waste of time. If your product solves a real problem that people are looking for a solution for then your promotion will be easy.
You will learn
- Promoting Digital Products
- Who are you selling to?
- It’s not all about the copyrighting
- Guest Poster on someone else’s Blog – Be Strategic
- Be a Guest on a Podcast
- Join Influencer Communities
- What does providing value in Social Groups look like?
- Connect with people in real life
- What to do and not do on your sales page
- What is your offer?
- Honest Solution – Be Ethical
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- FL 34 Episode
- FL 35 Episode
- FL 36 Episode
- FL 37 Episode
- Sales Funnel Episode
- Free Email Templates
- Finding Your Ideal Avatar
- Football Defense Site
- US History Teachers
- Flip Your Life Community
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Tanya, who was on the podcast recently and she is also a member of our Flip Your Life Community. She says, “On Monday, I added the low cost introductory offer and reminder emails to my autoresponder sequence and so far I have 13 sales and one upsale to my membership. I am so excited about this. It is so fun to see that it is working. And the real bonus is that I am hoping these sales will continue since everyone will be getting the autoresponder emails at different times depending on when they came into my list. Of course the ultimate goal is to get more people into my membership so hopefully that’ll pick up a bit but for now I am happy with one since Monday. Shane and Jocelyn the training on sales funnel was excellent!
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.
This week’s can’t miss moment was taking our kids trick or treating early! We got to trick or treat from 3 to 5, and then stay home to give out candy!
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 talk about the right ways to promote your online business and what not to do.
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 again this week. Last week in the Flip Your Life forums, we put out a little survey, one of the benefits of being a member of the Flip Your Life community is that we often go to them to get advice on content on what they want to learn, and that is kind of how a lot of the information that makes it to the public podcast. And we asked recently what they wanted to hear about for the rest of the year on the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and a lot of our members really wanted us to get into promoting digital products, promoting their membership areas in the membership communities and just getting out there and trying to find people to buy the things that they were selling. We’ve already done a few episodes on this subject, episodes 34, 35, 36 and 37 where we talked a lot about the nuts and bolts of promoting digital products online, how to get out there and find people to buy what you were selling. Today we are going to take a little bit of a different slant on this, and we are going to kind of show you not only what to do to get your word out, because it doesn’t matter what you create if nobody actually buys it. You got to go out and find an audience, got to go find customers that are going to give you money for what you are selling. But we want to talk about some of the myths and some of the things that a lot of gurus and a lot of people out there promote and tell you, “how you’ve got to do it online, how you’ve got to sell things.” We want to cut through the junk, and we want to get to what’s really important. We want to dispel a couple of myths about promoting your products, and really tell you the truth of how an online business is successfully built. Bur first, Jocelyn is going to read a success story from our Flip Your Life community.
JOCELYN: All right, today’s success story is from Tanya, and Tanya was on our Flipped Lifestyle podcast just a few weeks ago, and she is also a member of our Flip Your Life community. She says, “On Monday, I added the low-cost, introductory offer and reminder emails to my autoresponder sequence and so far, I have 13 sales and one upsell to my membership. I am so excited about this. It is so fun to see that it is working and the real bonus is that I’m hoping these sales will continue since everyone will be getting the autoresponder emails at different times depending on when they came into my list. Of course, the ultimate goal is to get more people into my membership so hopefully that will pick up a bit, but for now, I’m happy with one since Monday. Shane and Jocelyn, the training on sales funnels was excellent.”
SHANE: And what’s awesome is that she is using a lot of the tips that we use in our email templates; she got 13 sales on what some people call a “trip wire” we call it an introductory offer, which shows you people that will actually pay for your product, and then the upsell they go on after that work and then she got people into her monthly membership which is not only a sale, at the point of purchase, but it’s a recurring revenue. It’s something that is going to keep coming in month after month, and now her automation is taking over all of those people who bought that introductory offer are going to be able to try to see the same sequence that got that first upsell, and hopefully she can just start stacking on top of that.
JOCELYN: If you would like to listen to our sales funnel podcast, or get our free autoresponder templates, you can head on over to today’s show notes; just add flippedlifestyle.com/podcast67 and we will have links to all those in there for you.
SHANE: And the most important thing about Tanya’s story is she took action. A lot of people listening to podcasts, and I know you probably listen to quite a few podcasts, but Tanya came on the show, she took what we were telling her to do, and she took action. She put it together, she made it work and bam, 13 sales, plus she got a recurring membership sold just from those tips. You’ve got to get out there and put this stuff in place if you are going to make money online. So, that brings us to our topic today, which is going to be promoting your products and then when we say digital products, we want you to be aware that we are talking about anything that is sold information product online; e-books, YouTube videos, e-courses, membership sites, anything where someone is on their computer, consuming that content, that is what we are talking about today, promoting digital products. And before we get into any discussion on promotion, we always start with people, we always start with your customer, your avatar; this is probably the most critical component of starting your online business, figuring out who you are selling to and finding that person online.
JOCELYN: And this is probably the thing that people, for lack of a better word, mess up the most when they are trying to start an online business. We see time and time again, people say, “This thing is just not working for me” and I would say probably at least seven times out of ten, it’s because they don’t have the right avatar or the right customer targeted.
SHANE: Or they are trying to pick some – like a too general or a broad of an audience. Like someone, just the other day, we were working with them a little bit, they were talking about this is what they wanted to do, they wanted to teach people do this and do that, and I’m like well, who are you trying to actually teach this to and she just said, “Women.” That’s all she said. It was just women. Like all 50% of the human race, women; and that is not an avatar. When you are picking the person that you are going to sell your product or your idea to, you have to think like them, you have to know them so intimately that you can actually hear their thoughts. You know where they are going to go to find help, you know exactly what their favorite social network is, you know the words that they are using and searching for in Google to find the answers to their problems. You know the videos and the types of things that they are watching on YouTube. You know what scrolls through their Facebook feed and makes then stop and watch something. When we are talking about an avatar, we are talking about your audience, we are talking about your customers; you have to know them so intimately that you understand what hurts them the most, what they are most afraid of. You know their main problems and the most importantly, you have the solutions to those problems.
JOCELYN: If this sounds familiar, maybe you don’t know exactly who you are targeting and you need some help with that. We are not really going to get into that in today’s podcast, but we did record an entire episode about finding your ideal avatar, and that is podcast 41. So, you can head on over to today’s show notes, flippedlifestyle.com/podcast67, and you can find a link to that podcast.
SHANE: All right, so once you know your avatar, once you know who you are selling to, now it’s just about taking the solution, the product, whatever it is you’ve created, and getting that in front of them. But it’s not just about getting in front of them; you don’t want to be annoying or an idiot or jumping up and down, “Look at me” and just spamming up Facebook groups. And it’s not about writing copy that just tricks people into buying your stuff or giving you as much money as possible upfront. That is not going to create a stable, long term, profitable and growing online business.
JOCELYN: Like a lot of times, people out there think that there is a magic pill, or there is a certain, step-by-step formula that you have to follow to get all of this done, but that is not true at all. So, today we are going to tell you about a few strategies that you can use to get your content, or more importantly your products in front of the right people. So, the very first thing that you can do, this is like old as time, I think probably as old as the Internet; you can be a guest poster on someone’s blog. So, maybe there’s somebody out there who has a great following, the people are really in line with your interest or your thing that you are trying to sell or promote, and that is the very first thing that you can do.
SHANE: And don’t think that this is – you know, a lot of people don’t talk about guest posts on blogs anymore, but this is something that still exists, and we always are looking for people on our education sites to write content for us, to go out and create those blog posts so that we don’t have to do that. So, people who own established sites are always looking for people to contribute content. This is something you can definitely do, you are going to have to put some legwork in to find these people, but you can go out and find blogs and find websites that are bigger audiences that are aligned with you, and get on those blots. They want people to come and do that.
JOCELYN: And you don’t have to be strategic about it, I mean, you can’t just go the biggest player out there and say, “Hey, I want to be a guest poster on your blog” because their team of VAs is going to give you canned response A) “Thank you for your interest on posting on our blog. We do not accept guest posts at this time.” So, don’t try that, that’s probably not going to work. You’ll probably be better off with somebody who is maybe an up and coming person, and who needs some good content on their site, and maybe doesn’t have the money or doesn’t want to outsource their content to a paid person. So, that might be where you would start out first if you wanted to try guest posting. All right, in addition to that, you can also apply to be a guest on a relevant podcast. Podcasts are huge right now and you can go to iTunes and look up your keywords and you can find a podcast on pretty much anything that you can imagine. So, go on to iTunes, see who’s out there, who is podcasting regularly, who could you possibly apply to be a guest on their podcast, and the same thing applies for the mega stars in your niche. Probably you are not going to get on their podcast, there’s a possibility and that doesn’t mean that you can’t try, but look around at some other people out there as well. Don’t always concentrate on the number one person in your space.
SHANE: And also too, another side note here is, don’t just try to get people on your podcast. I know that a lot of people think they are just going to start an entrepreneurial podcast, I’m going to go people to come be on my podcast, and then that person is going to share them like crazy. That is not probably going to happen, and if people come on your podcast, they might retweet it once or something like that, and you might get a little bit of traffic on it, but they are not going sit there and promote your podcasts over and over again. But if you go and get on other people’s podcast, you know that they are going to promote that because that is their platform, and they are going to be out sharing that and doing those things. We have always gotten a lot more traffic spike on being on other podcasts than we have for having those people on our podcasts. We did a little experiment for a couple of months with our Expert Q&As; we just wanted to see – we had a lot of friends that we thought could come on and provide some valuable content for the Flipped podcasts. We are actually not doing those anymore because the experiment was to see if people would share those, and while the guests did maybe send out a tweet or send out something like that, there wasn’t the promotion we thought there would be when we had those guests on. So it became not worth our time. It’s much better for you to be on someone else’s show than it is for you to bring then on your show. When they come on your show, they are just trying to get in front of your audience. It’s the same thing the other way; you need to go get in front of new people and a new audience that might discover you though those other interviews.
JOCELYN: And when we talk about these things, like being a guest blogger or being a guest on someone’s podcast, it’s not necessarily all about personal promotion. You want to make sure that you are providing amazing value for these people’s audiences. You want to make sure that you are offering them some type of giveaway or an incentive for checking out what you have to offer; and this is typically a not strings attached type of offer. Aside from maybe collecting their email address, give something away to them that they just can’t believe is so good. We’ve done this several times on podcasts that we have been a part of, maybe you started listening to our podcasts because you heard us on someone else’s podcast, and hopefully it’s because we gave enough value to make you want to come back and check us out. Another thing that you can do to get in front of more people is to join influencers, communities or social media groups, and this is something that has really started exploding lately. I’ve seen people create groups just all the time now, and that is great and I know that they are working really well for a lot of people, but the one caveat is that you do have to be an authentic community member. What that means is to be a real person. I have said this so many times lately, I get so tired of joining people’s groups like on Facebook, and people log on there and they want to vomit out these 2000-word blog posts that they copy and paste off their blogs –
SHANE: To every group they have joined in the last 30 days.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and of course I’m a member of several internet marketing type groups, and Facebook will show you on your newsfeed if you are a member of multiple groups, and somebody who is a member of all of those groups, if they post in them, sometimes you’ll see it. So, what you’ll see is that you’ll see the same person posting the same thing in like five different groups, it is so annoying. Like who is reading that? Who is reading 2000 words on Facebook? It’s just ridiculous and they do it under the premise of, “I’m providing amazing value –”
SHANE: “I’m trying to inspire you with my story.” And that is such a lie; they are really just trying to say, “Look at me, look at me, look at me! How can I siphon some people out of this group and into my product line?”
JOCELYN: And I have no problem with people coming into groups with the intention of getting people to purchase something from them; I don’t have a problem with that. I have a problem with your methods of doing it. If you are coming in, it’s just like if you went into a party, you wouldn’t go into somebody’s party at their house and say, “Hey guys, I got this great offer, let me tell you about this in 2000 words.”
SHANE: Or you went and say, “Hey guys, this is a great party, but I got this other party like three doors down, and I would love for you to come to my party instead of this party.”
JOCELYN: Again, I’m going to say the exact same thigh here as I say in the next ten houses –
SHANE: Then you go next door and you say, “Hey guys, I got a party” and then you go next door and you say, “Hey guys, I got a party and if I can just steal just five partiers from all those parties –” Jocelyn and I don’t party very much so I don’t know how we got off on this analogy.
JOCELYN: No, we are not very big partiers unless party means like –
SHANE: Hanging out with kids and napping, that’s about it.
JOCELYN: But yeah, so, if you wouldn’t do that in the real life, why would you do it on a Facebook group? So, instead of doing that, maybe you could come in and provide some value. It’s like in this one group that I’m in, there’s a girl in the group and she is just really just a rock star as far as like Facebook is. She comes in, she gives a piece of value – the other day, she came in and she told me one sentence, well, actually the entire group, she put in the group, one sentence about Facebook ads and I helped full thing about them that I didn’t know and it was like probably less than a hundred words.
SHANE: What was that? What did she say?
JOCELYN: She said that if you see an ad in your newsfeed, you could click on it and on the right hand side, there’s a little dropdown and it says, “Why am I seeing this?” So, typically you will like things or you will have interests that are similar to your niche, whatever you are trying to sell, and what you can do is, you can see people who are advertising in that space, who they are targeting.
SHANE: So, you can see basically how you got targeted.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so you click on “Why am I seeing this?” and it will say, you are seeing this because you liked whatever page –
SHANE: And then you go and create an ad that targets those same things if you are in the same space, that’s genius.
JOCELYN: Exactly, and that is something so simple but it blew my mind because I didn’t realize that, I didn’t even know that you could do that. And so then, I was like, hey this person is really smart, like I wonder what else she knows about Facebook, like what else could she teach me. So, then, I go over to her page and this is a person who is actually not selling anything yet. So, I say to her in the group, I’m like, “Listen, you need to be selling something like yesterday because I will buy it.” That one little piece of value, those few words, like a couple of dozen words that really made an impact on me. So, I’m still talking about it right now.
SHANE: And then what do you – like when I see those big, epic, like “This is my story of the last miserable time in my life and how now I’ve made it out like an angel” or whatever, I just scroll through it –
JOCELYN: I completely ignore then.
SHANE: – and read through it or like click on that person and say ignore you. So, don’t be like a tool in Facebook groups. When you are in forums, don’t just post links back to your site, they used to do this all the time in my football groups; I would start groups and I had like thousands of football coaches in there, and dudes would just start coming in and like dropping you know, links straight back to the – acting like it’s really important, but then they would just talk about how they won all these games and they would send something back that they were selling. And I’m like, what are you doing dude? You didn’t help anybody; you are just trying to pitch this.
JOCELYN: And most people, I mean, most groups don’t allow links dropping anymore, so a lot of people aren’t doing that, but what they are doing is, they are coming on and they are putting these big, epic blog posts, or what they think are epic blog posts into these groups, and nobody cares. It’s just noise. So, do what you would do at a social gathering, at a party which here’s the introvert talking about social gatherings and parties, but you wouldn’t go into a party and do that but you instead, you will come and talk to people and say, “Hey, how’s it going” and you would strike up a conversation, maybe you would have information that that person would need, maybe they would have questions for you, you will answer their questions, it’s a two-way exchange. You don’t come in, drop a blog post and leave. That is not authentic community. What people want is someone to talk to them, someone who understands our pains and frustrations and more importantly, somebody who can solve them.
SHANE: It’s just like a network; you are building relationships and you will eventually get business from those relationships, but you are not just constantly like selling in all of these groups. So, the moral of the story here is, when you go out to promote yourself as a guest blogger, when you go on people’s podcast, I guess when you have people on your podcasts, all these Facebook groups that you are joining, all these forums that you are talking in, all these blogs that you are commenting on, remember, you are there to demonstrate authority, you are there to be an active and authentic community member, you are there to provide value so that people will recognize you eventually and say, “Wait a minute, if this person is making this much sense just talking about it, I wonder what else they know” and then they’ll seek you out for a purchase.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and if you are authentically delivering really great value, people are going to seek you out. You don’t have to drop your link, you don’t have to beg them to buy something, they will beg you to sell them something. This just happened to me; like I said, a few minutes ago. I am begging this person to sell something because she provided such value for me totally for free that now I want to buy something from her. So, that’s the kind of community member that we want o see people become.
SHANE: And in a related point to this, it is not just about online; I think that when people get out to promote their digital products, to promote their membership areas, to promote all these things that they are selling, they think it has to be a guest blog, they think it has to be a relevant podcast or something like that. It doesn’t have to be. In reality, getting out and making live connections in your niche is probably just as or more important than getting out there online and promoting because when you go meet these people in these communities in real life, when you go meet people in your space, they have connections, they can refer you to places, they can actually shake your hand and hire you, and make a deal with you. So, don’t think that when you are promoting your product, it has to all be online, and all be Facebook ads, and all be guest blogging; you need to go out and meet real flesh and blood people who are in the niche you want to be in, and build a relationship that is going to lead to more business online.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I can honestly say that of all the things that we have done probably in the last three years, the live events were the most beneficial and influential in our online business; do you agree with that?
SHANE: Yeah, every dime we have ever spent, nothing has returned more than actually going and meeting real people who are in the niche or in the space that we are actually in.
JOCELYN: Going to live events has really just – I mean, I would really venture to say that it’s changed our lives; I mean, do you think that it has –
SHANE: I don’t even think that we hang out with like – we don’t even hang out with a lot of people in person anymore that is not someone we have met at a live event. Like all the – it’s like our entire circle of friends and circle of people that, you know, we work with or mastermind with or influence with, and the last three years has completely shifted to all new people because we have went out and met with likeminded people in our niche, in our space. Sometimes there are direct competitors; like Jill and Josh Stanton from ‘Screw the Nine to Five’ teach the exact same thing we do, but they are our business BFFs. Another guy that I mastermind with almost every day is Joe Daniel from footballdefense.com; we sold the same playbooks, but we still talk to each other every single day and we helped each other promote. If we found coaches that use the same playbooks, they’d buy mine and I’d say, “Hey, go check this one out too” and we started promoting that. So, all the business opportunities that come from live events, really take your promotion of your digital products to another level.
JOCELYN: So, we really highly encourage you to seek out live events in your space and to go to them like immediately. Don’t wait, don’t wonder if it’s the right thing to do, it is an amazing thing to do and it will really change your business.
SHANE: And another thing is too like phone calls; like Jocelyn – we have customer service to deal with it but when Jocelyn really first started getting into elementarylibrarian.com, she had a forum on her thing where people could physically call her, so she could try to talk to them and see what they needed and make sales. So, don’t discount human contact with your promotion. I think a lot of people are like, “I just want to set it and forget it.” It doesn’t work that way, the rules of business still apply, you got to make contacts if you are going to promote your stuff, get referrals and really push yourself out there. All right, so we kind of talked a lot about – I turned more into like an etiquette lesson on how to promote your content out in the wilds of the internet basically.
JOCELYN: Internet marketing, you are doing it wrong.
SHANE: If you are out there spamming everybody, stop it. It’s not working. I want to shift gears here and talk about some of the things that you are doing on your sales pages and your copy of your emails and things like that. A lot of the other gurus out there, it seems like everything is, “Man, if you just had a great headline, you would have sold a million dollars” or “Oh, if your sales page copy was just perfect like mine” or your video, “If you just set these five things in every video that you ever made, you’d make millions online.” And I want to kind of push back against that and maybe all the things that you are hearing on these websites and these other courses, and say that your headlines and copy, they matter but they don’t really matter that much. They don’t matter how you think they matter. Search matters, the language you are using, the avatar, you want to e using the same words that they are using in your copy, you want to talk about their problems, like they talk about their problems but your catchy headlines don’t matter, your flashy pictures that you are using in your ads, they don’t matter, you know, the word that you put in on your button, on your opt-in, “Join” or “Learn more” or “Check it out”, or if it’s a ‘buy now’ button, “Instant access! Get access now” like none of that is going to move the needle enough. What color you pick for your button, you know, orange or red, is not going to matter that much in the grand scheme of things. What does matter is that you have the right audience and you are solving their problem. That’s what matters.
JOCELYN: And that you are solving a problem; there are so many people out there, even in our community or other communities we’re a part of, they are not solving a problem and therefore they are not selling anything. You must solve a problem.
SHANE: And that relates to a deeper issue too; “I’m just going to create as much content as possible” what is your content doing? Are you just sitting there becoming a Wikipedia, are you becoming a dictionary for a subject or does every word, every piece of copy that you use on your blog, on your email, everything lead to the solution of a problem for your avatar. Your offer is all that matters, your product is what matters; if your product is terrible, no amount of marketing tricks will save you no matter how well you do it, no matter how perfect you think your copy is, or how catchy your headlines are. If your product at the end of the sales funnel is terrible and doesn’t solve a problem, you will not make any money online. So, I guess, when we talk about promotion, you have to have a good product to promote, or all this other stuff that you are doing is just a mess of noise. If you get your product right, if you get your offer right, then promotion and marketing becomes easy because all you have to do is go honestly to a person and say, here, is the aspirin for your headache. If you find someone with a problem, if you find a good avatar, you create the solution and you will be able to sell them the solution very easily. Copy and colors are probably you know, this is totally just pulling this out of my head, but like that is probably 5% of the equation. I’ve seen some terrible sales pages that have converted like crazy. I know a guy that made 30,000 dollars using the 2015 theme in black and white, with nothing but a PayPal button on his page because his product was ridiculously perfect. It was the solution for an exact problem that an avatar had.
JOCELYN: Now that being said, there are probably people out there that are copy and color do matter because such and such said, that blah-blah-blah. Well, listen, if you are getting millions of page views a day, and you split test, and the green button works better than the red button, then yes, it’s going to make a difference in your bottom line. But if you are getting hundreds of page views a day or –
SHANE: And you are making zero sales –
JOCELYN: – dozens a page views a day –
SHANE: – it’s not going to move the needle folks.
JOCELYN: – it does not matter.
SHANE: Your product is the vast majority of the equation, but I think what people do is, they make excuses. It’s easier to blame your theme, it’s easier to blame your colors, it’s easier to tweak a sales page than it is to step back and look at your idea and look at your problem honestly, or look at your solution honestly and say, “Is this really what my people want?” or “Is this really a problem that is bad enough that people will pay to solve it?” Yes, you need to explain the benefits in your copy, yes, you need to get your point across in a clear and concise way, but if your product is not converting, it is probably not the button. It’s probably not the headline in your ad that got them there; in fact, that might be the problem because you are over promising in your ad and you are not delivering when they get there. So, you need to really focus all of your promotion, you need to step back like you know, a 10,000-foot view and I want you to start at the product. We always say to start at the product. Before you plan your promotion, you have to look at your offer and you have to make sure that it is actually solving a problem and work backwards. I think so many people who start an online business, they want to start at the end, they want to start with their ad, they want to start learning how to do Facebook ads, they want to start with learning with how to make a great headline, they want to start with getting people to open your emails, they want to start with all this stuff that gurus talk about, but they never start with the product. And if you start with the product and work your way backwards, your promotion is simple. Like just the other day, I had an ad that I created for the US history teachers product, ushistoryteachers.com, I basically made an ad with a dude sitting in a teacher’s desk and it said three words, “Free lesson plans.” That’s it. There was no gauchy headlines, there was no “Best day of your classroom ever” none of that bull crap; it converted like crazy, the ad made money hands over fist and I’m going to turn it on to – it’s the beginning of a marketing funnel that I know is going to sell because the product is perfect and I just had to clearly tell them what it was. So, take a step back, look at your stuff, all that other junk is 5% equation folks; you got to get your product and your avatar right if you are going to make money online.
JOCELYN: And just remember that you heard it here first; there’s no magic pill –
SHANE: You probably did hear it here first, online.
JOCELYN: There are no magic systems, there’s not a magic, step-by-step formula that is going to show you exactly what you do, you start here and you end here. If it were that easy, then every person would do it.
SHANE: If it were that easy, we would not have this podcast. I would just keep repeating the magic formula on random products until we had so much money, we bought an island next to Bill Gates’ or something.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s what people are trying to sell you, so don’t listen to that.
SHANE: Don’t listen to that.
JOCELYN: Remember that every niche is unique, all the problems are different, every sales funnel is unique, your pitch, your keyword is probably unique; if you are looking for step-by-step, A to Z, somebody to hold you by the hand and show you something that works every time, you are not going to find that anywhere. And in fact, online business might not be for you.
SHANE: I think a lot of people, when they come into the Flip Your Life membership, they are a little shocked because we teach things and do things little bit differently inside our community. We focus on next steps, that is the number one priority in our life when we are in there coaching our clients and our community members is when we say, “Okay, where are you now, and let’s get the product done first and then let’s see what we do next” because we have to look at every individual situation day by day, and see what happens next because we don’t have an A to Z, 1 to 100 step-by-step plan. We have training videos, but that is just kind of there when you need it, almost like you go pull the Encyclopedia book off the shelf and you look at what you need. The main purpose that we are all there for is to say, here is what we are, how do I step forward. And I think the problem with that mentality is, when people come in they are kind of shocked, but then they love it because they are like, ‘Oh my gosh, this actually answered my question.’ They hear other people teaching like it is just so spammy what a lot of other people teach when they teach about the headlines, they teach about getting people to open your emails, it’s almost like people are – it’s almost like sales professionals are trying to teach how to trick people on to clicking on your ad and – “Then after we trick them to clicking on your add, we’ll trick them into giving you their email, and then when we get their email, we’ll send them emails and then it’ll trick them into giving us money. They got to give us as much money as possible, we got to get as much upfront because we don’t know if this person will ever come back, because once they realize that they have been tricked, they are going to go away.” And that is what how most internet marketers teach this, but that is not how it really works. It sounds good to say, “Follow my magic system and it will work for you.” It sounds good to say, “In three easy steps you can be number one” but it’s really not the way it is. So, don’t get down on yourself if you are out there promoting things and it is not really catching on and it’s not really clicking like you thought you would, or like someone told you it would or like the systems and the things you hear say you would. Step back and honestly evaluate your business; do you actually have an avatar that is narrow enough to sell something to? Do you actually have a product that can be successfully promoted, and then are you promoting it in an honest way that goes out there and tells your avatar, “Hey, I can solve your problem” if you are not doing those things, that’s probably why your promotion isn’t working. If you are focused on all those little nitpicky things like we talked about, that is probably why your promotion isn’t working. Go out and find an honest solution to a problem, promote it in an ethical way, and you’ll probably make a lot more money online.
JOCELYN: And make it so valuable that people want to share it without you asking them to. That is really the key to this whole business. All right guys, that was a lot of information in a little amount of time. We hope that that helps to answer some of your questions about how to promote your materials online, and how to get them in front of people in the best way. So, now we are going to move into our ‘Can’t-Miss Moments’ segment of our show, and this is where we talk about things that we might not have been able to do before we started working in our online business full-time. And this week’s can’t-miss moment is Halloween with our children. We were able to go pick up our kids, they get home at about three o’clock off the bus, so we picked our children and also a little friend of ours, and we were able to get them off the bus, we went downtown, all of the downtown merchants had a trick or treat. So we were down there and we were one of the few moms and dads who had both children down there, and we were all hanging out together and just having a great time on Halloween.
SHANE: Cool part for me was that we could just go do trick or treating before like seven o’clock at night, we just went and took the kids trick or treating, got all their candy loaded into their bags, they had a blast and then like we were home like 4:30 or something like that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, it’s great for us because our kids are still really little of course, and they get tired after a full week of school. So, we didn’t have to go out after dark, or really late when they tired. We were able to do it at three o’clock, we went from three to five, we finished trick or treating –
SHANE: Before everybody else got off of work, basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and it was a good time.
SHANE: And the kids got to give out candy, which I think they actually enjoyed more than actually getting their own candy. They got to sit and man the door, and basically hand out candy as the other trick or treaters came. So, instead of waiting till six o’clock, getting off work and not being able to do that, they got to go trick or treating, have a blast, get in their costumes, and they got to experience giving out candy and I got to watch the University of Kentucky football game because we went out trick or treating. I’m just saying that might have came into the decision-making process, but we got crushed.
JOCELYN: Priorities people.
SHANE: It was probably a bad decision to stay at home and watch that game. All right guys that is all we got for this week, tune in next week, we’ll have some more information about online business, we want to leave every show with a power verse from the Bible, Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration from the Bible, and we wanted to share you some versus that inspired us, with you. Today’s verse is Proverbs 22:1 and it says, “A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches and favor is better than silver or gold.” A great reminder of where our priorities should be in our online business. Thanks again for listening. Until next time, get out there, take action and flip your life. We’ll see you next time.
JOCELYN: Bye!
Sam says
Excellent information, thank you for showing me how to boost my income.