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Today’s guest Jeff Twiddy, is a member of our Flip Your Life Community.
Originally a Football High School coach and Geometry teacher, he started a personal training business helping high school students who wanted to play college football.
He has two online businesses — one for high students wanting to play college football, Game Plan Your Future, and the second which we’re going to focus on today, Geometrycoach.com where he sells teaching plans online and has a membership.
Jeff started listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast two years ago, and since then he made over $20,000 in online sales. Now he’s ready to take it to the next level!
We are going over how to attack holiday sales online – Black Friday, Back to School, Winter Holidays – first thing to identify your avatar and what applies to your audience.
One idea we go over is to offer new packages, special annual prices, 6 month prices, and include bonuses that won’t be there later on.
You can also have massive benefits is having your email list vote and whichever option they click on they receive the discount they chose and, “Everybody Wins”.
We’ll also cover how to organically grow online from market places and bring people back to your own website.
And finally, we discuss how Jeff could be using webinars. We talk about converting off of automated webinars, once you do a few live ones how you can create a presentation going through some of the FAQ.
You will learn
- Process Jeff went through
- Mistakes Jeff made initially
- Black Friday Online Sales
- Important to invest your time
- How to grow organically online
- Best ways to benefit from a webinar
- How to convert your emails better
- Pay attention to the timing of your avatars
- Splinter out your free offers
- What is a nurture sequence?
- Adequate number of people on your list for your niche.
- Don’t forget to look at things realistically
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
- Jeff’s Game Plan Your Future
- Jeff’s Geometry Coach
- Our Interview on Smart Passive Income
- Elementary Librarian
- History Website
- Ever Webinar Software
- Flip Your Life Community
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
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If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Jeff take his 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: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast; great to be back with you again this week. Super excited because we have a Flip Your Life member on the call today and we are going to bring a Flipped podcast to you; this is where we bring in a Flip Your Life community member, and we give them a consulting call, and we let everybody else listen in so we can all learn from the discussion and move our businesses forward and take them to the next level. We got a great guest today, a man after my own heart, guy loves to coach a little football, his mane is Jeff Twiddy. Jeff, welcome to the show.
JEFF: Thanks Shane.
JOCELYN: Yeah, and a Wildcats fan too, right?
SHANE: They are a Wildcats fan, I hear.
JEFF: Oh yeah, absolutely. My whole family is from Kentucky.
SHANE: So basically how you get on this show is guys, you love University of Kentucky and coach football, you’re on. You’re in. All right Jeff, tell us a little bit real quick, before we get started, about yourself, where you are from, where you are at now and a little bit about what you are selling online.
JEFF: When I graduated, I got blessed with having the opportunity to coach football, you know, Canton Kim Lee High School, which is you know, home of the whole Pro Football Hall of Fame. So I spent seven years there coaching football, teaching math, and during that time, I went back to school, got my master’s degree, and decided that – I had a family and all that, so I decided that I wanted to try and find sideways to make more income. So, I started doing personal training and educational consulting for like high school student athletes that were going to play college sports, particularly football, and I kind of grew that business, non-internet based and in the mean time, I started to create a website to kind of just put – because I got tired of every time I had to interview or go through the college planning stuff with some of my clients, I had to like go over it every single time with them like in person, like you know, normal consulting. So, I decided to put some of the stuff online. So, I looked into how to make a website, and can do all this stuff and the long story short was, you know, through that process, I started out you know, listening to Eventual Millionaire and then I heard Pat Flynn, and then I heard you guys on Pat Flynn’s show Smart Passive Income and I was like, well, dang, he does exactly what I do. He goes out rides his tractor, he mowing the grass, he listens to podcasts, he’s a football coach and I’m like, I got to keep listening. So, I’m not joking, I listened to all of the podcasts at least three times because every time I go back and listen to him again, I find something else, like a small detail that I can tweak on my site to – but through that website, my company was called Game Plan Your Future, and you know, once I got that kind of automated, like I set it up like people could book consulting calls online, they can book their personal training sessions online, and then all that good stuff and it started to grow, and then it started to produce some pretty good side income. Well, then I decided to create a playbook just to see if I could make something that was – because I was still doing the consulting, so it wasn’t like you know, I was still getting paid hourly.
SHANE: It’s just time for dollars, it’s another nine to five.
JEFF: Yeah, absolutely. I was working 80 hours a week instead of 40, that’s what I was doing. So I decided to see if I could create this thing; so I had an e-book, I put that on there to use that to get people to opt into my list, and then you know, I created a playbook. I run a really unique spread offense, I guess, you would call it, and I created that and I made it a video course. So, like literally the whole thing, if you were actually at the football clinic, like you get the playbook and everything, and I put that up online and it did really well. That was kind of my first taste of okay, so you know, you can do this stuff, I made pretty good money really fast, but I found that you know, once – those were all one-time customers because what they had, I made the mistake of giving them life-time access to everything. So, every time I updated –
SHANE: Yeah, we made that mistake many times too. We made that mistake as well, my friend. Not anymore. It doesn’t happen anymore.
JEFF: Right. So, that’s like still up and running and you know, quite a few times a month, like four or five times a month, somebody purchases my course or my playbook, and you know, consulting calls and whatnot, I still have you know, personal training clients and that’s more so because I love doing it after football season, I just enjoy it. So, in the mean time, like once I got it all set up, I’m like what am I going to do next? So, I had taught geometry for seven years, and I decided to make a website called Geometry Coach, and it’s very similar to your US History site and whatnot, and I used all your guys’ templates and everything that you explain to us on the podcast. I put it all to work and in two months, in the first two months, I made a little over 3000 dollars. And since April of this year, with my just online stuff, so not like booking clients or whatever, because I also put on my camps for high school athletes football camps, just including the sales that were the online stuff, I made over 20,000 dollars since April of this year doing that.
SHANE: That is awesome.
JEFF: And that is strictly online.
SHANE: And what’s great here is like I hear two things: number one, I hear you taking ridiculous action. Like you are legit just listening to the podcasts and going and doing what it says, and like – but you are putting it into play, and so many people just listen and they don’t do that.
JEFF: Right. I mean, by no stretch of the imagination am I saying it was easy. Like, I started this process two-and-a-half years ago; when I first built the website, it was just to send people to it, it wasn’t modified in any way, shape or form. So, until you know, like I said, April of this year is when I really started to monetize the internet part of it. I had – it took me two years to learn how to do all that stuff, you know what I mean? So it is very hard work.
SHANE: A lot of people think they are in a – like you said, you have listened to the show, you listen to it three times, you are listening to all of this information and you are taking action on it and it’s taken you two years. A lot of people think, ‘Oh I heard a great podcast with an inspirational story, I’ll just go buy a course and learn how to do this in 30 days and be a millionaire’ and that is just not how it works.
JEFF: Yeah, no.
SHANE: But what we are at, what I am hearing is, so the goal here right now is, you’ve realized that there is a cap kind of on the playbook, you’ve realized some of this other stuff is time for dollars, and even though you have got some of it automated, you are still trading time for dollars, but this Geometry Coach site, where you are selling resources to these geometry teachers, lesson plans and stuff like that, this is what you want to do to say, hey, wait a minute, this is the make money while I sleep, this is the creative that will sell for ever, this is that automated – I’ve got to keep promoting it, I’ve got to keep advertising it, I’ve got to keep the content rolling, but I can get these customers in, they can pay me and we can keep going basically.
JEFF: Right. And I mean, it’s truly like the membership for teachers is like it’s amazing because I’m thinking about, I think I said it before, but think about how long, the first three years of teaching, it took us to make all our lesson plans, the work sheets, the tests, the quizzes, I mean literally everything; even just the simple things like being able to play a video when you are not feeling good, or you got to grade papers because you got to sub or something like, literally everything is automated and in there and it’s like a click away. I just couldn’t imagine like –
SHANE: If I had what I made for History Teachers when I started History Teachers, I might still be teaching because – probably not, if I knew what I knew now, but it’s just, like you said, and that is that value that you are providing and that membership that is going to keep people paying recurring because there is always something there for them you know, the next day to do that. Okay, so we are going to focus totally on the geometry site today on the call; correct?
JEFF: Right.
JOCELYN: So, I guess my question would be, what is your goal with the site? I mean, obviously to keep growing it.
JEFF: You know, my ultimate goal is to have it so, you know, my wife doesn’t have to work anymore and then if at some point – I am probably always going to work, I am always been coaching football and Shane, you know that’s a –
SHANE: That’s an addition.
JEFF: – fulltime job, yeah, so I mean, it’s one of those things where I want her to not have to work, like where she can just you know, be here or whatever she wants to, or taking care of the kids and whatnot, and making sure that things aren’t missed because again as a football coach, your time is – you miss a lot of things in all aspects. So, basically to me, I just want her to have more freedom so that you know, we can spend more time together because right now, we are both working full-time.
JOCELYN: Right, exactly. So, what is your first question for us today? How can we help you to grow this thing and hopefully get her to quit?
JEFF: Well, the first question pertains to how to deal with holidays? Like Black Friday is coming up and Cyber Monday and Christmas and all this stuff, how do we best automate it or build momentum going into those holidays? I mean, should we do sales and whatnot because like, you know, I think like what I charge for the membership is already like lower than the value that you get, without question. Just like you said in the beginning, your most valuable asset is your time. I mean, to me, there’s – do I set up a sale, do I you know, just promote it in ways that – get them in front of more people, do I spend more ad dollars on it, I guess, how do we attach holidays is the question.
SHANE: I think that everybody in their niche has to look at what I call their ‘avatars calendar’, and say, when are these things. Like, you are talking about Black Friday sales, we talk a lot in education about like back-to-school sales in January and August because you go back to school twice, football – you go back to football, you want to be selling stuff in May and June because July is when people actually practice, they have made their decisions by then. So every niche has its own calendar basically. So, the first thing I did was identifying that, and I’m going to let Jocelyn take this one because she is the Black Friday wizard in this family, but I wanted to say one thing that I noticed in your quote there, you said, you think your price is low enough or whatever, before we move any forward, if you are thinking that your price is so low that you don’t want to discount it anymore, you are not charging enough. And I think that you probably need to raise your price immediately to something higher. You at least need to have a list price to have what – like let’s say that you wanted to get 39 dollars a month out of a membership, well, you should be selling it for 59, so that when you are ready to do big sales, you can lower it without hurting your bottom line. So, your normal price might need to go up. Now let me pass this over to Jocelyn, so she can tell you about how to do things like Black Friday and like sales that are based on the calendar.
JOCELYN: Yeah, Black Friday has always been really big for me as far as the Elementary Librarian site goes; I’ve had a lot of great success on Black Friday sales, so I definitely recommend to do it. I like what Shane was saying about you might have to go ahead and increase your price now, so that you can later discount to the amount that you want; and another thing that you can do to keep people from getting mad, like I’m assuming that you have like an email list, do you use like AWeber or something?
JEFF: Yeah, AWeber.
JOCELYN: Okay. Well, AWeber right now, does not really have a great ability to be able to exclude customers; you can do it, but it’s a lot of manual work.
SHANE: They are about to introduce tagging to allow you to see like which people on your email list have brought, which people have taken certain actions, so that when you do sales, the people that bought at a higher price don’t actually see that.
JEFF: Right.
JOCELYN: But if they do, and it does happen, like I use Infusionsoft now, and it still happens even with Infusionsoft, so it’s going to happen, but if people get mad, one thing you can do is offer packages that you’ve never offered before. So, maybe instead of offering a discount on your monthly membership, maybe you offer a discount on a yearly membership –
SHANE: Or a six-month membership or whatever.
JOCELYN: You see what I mean?
JEFF: Yeah, that’s what I did for my email.
SHANE: Yeah, so alternate products [Crosstalk] that are not publicly ever available might be a thing that you hold back and save for those special times. You see what I’m saying?
JOCELYN: You can also do it another way; if you don’t want to discount the price you can include bonuses that may not be included later.
SHANE: Right, and Jocelyn has a great strategy, where she sends people and she lets them kind of vote on what they want. So, tell him about how you do that, like basically everybody wins. Everybody wins a discount.
JOCELYN: This is more of a strategy if you see one off products; I mean, you could do it with memberships as well, but what I would do is I would send an email and I would say, “Okay, here are three options, these are some things I am thinking about discounting for a Black Friday sale. Which one do you vote for?” So, I’d have like three pictures that would have three links to my site, that when they got there, would say, “Thank you for voting” and then in AWeber of course, it will segment based on who clicked on which link. So, then guess what, everybody wins. I sent them all a discount for the product they wanted.
SHANE: And like this translates pretty good actually to a membership model like you just said, like monthly quarterly annually. So you can even say, I’m thinking of having a Black Friday sale, which would you rather see a discount on; which is a better payment plan for you and I might discount that one and put monthly, quarterly and annually? Let all the people click what they want and then send the discount to all the people that wanted a monthly, their budget, they think that monthly payments are better. So you say, here, 20% off of the monthly pay. You just send everyone the message talking about what they want, and you give everybody not only the payment plan they want, but also the discount that they were looking for anyway. They have raised their hand before Black Friday and said, ‘I want this one’, so give them that.
JOCELYN: And I’m interested in purchasing something more importantly.
SHANE: Exactly.
JOCELYN: Click something in that message, they are interested in purchasing it.
SHANE: So you have segmented your list, and they have told you exactly which products they want the discount on; you give them the discount and there you go. So, the key point there though is, I don’t like lowering prices, but I do like moving products and especially on membership prices, don’t necessarily worry about what people come in at, it’s how long they stay because the lifetime value of somebody at 29 dollars or 34 dollars or 39 dollars is always more than zero dollars. If they don’t purchase, you don’t get any money, but if they do purchase even if it’s at a lower price than what you normally charge, and you keep them around for two years, then you’ve made 300-600 dollars. So, lowering your price is good; I would raise your price right now by 20 dollars on your site, right now, today, and then when Black Friday comes, you can offer a discount to what you were offering it for before today.
JEFF: Okay.
SHANE: Makes sense?
JEFF: That makes sense.
SHANE: All right, what’s your next question Jeff?
JEFF: Next question was, like trying to find because like up to this point, like the way my growth happened so fast was like I use Pinterest and Facebook ads. I got in put the Pinterest program for buyable pins or whatever, but as far as organic traffic is, Teachers Pay Teachers and Ed Moto and Utopia and Reddit and all these other educational websites, like how can we be visible, or organically grow through them as referral sources?
SHANE: Yeah, there’s a lot of secondary markets in every industry and what Jeff is talking about here is this website is called Teachers Pay Teachers, where people sell lesson plans, but teachers pay teachers takes a big cut, Udemy, where people sell online courses, that – you know, every niche probably has some kind of marketplace. So, what we are talking about here is how do we go to those marketplaces, but bring people back to our own online business. So Jocelyn, why don’t you tell him how you do it with Elementary Librarian, and then I’ll tell him how I do the same thing with History Teachers because I think we have different approaches a little bit.
JOCELYN: The way, in my opinion, is to keep doing what you are already doing; to keep investing money in those relevant ads on Facebook, on Pinterest, maybe if you have new videos, you can put those on YouTube, I think that paid traffic is always going to bring you a better return than –
SHANE: The existing marketplaces.
JOCELYN: As far as organic traffic, I mean, I mostly just use like the materials on my website. So, it might be free resources, might be a blog post, that is how I get most of my organic traffic. Now, does that mean that there are no other ways out there? Of course, not. I mean, there’s dozens of ways that you could do it; it just really comes down to how much time investment do you want to put in those things because we talk about it all the time, but it basically comes down to a question of time or money. Are you going to spend money to get people there faster, or do you want to spend more time to bring people organically in, a little bit slower, but you know, all that information is still there. You could also do that with a VA, that’s something else that you might consider doing.
SHANE: But people do use these, when you are first starting out, something like Teachers Pay Teachers, Jocelyn gives away a lot of free resources on Teaches Pay Teachers.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I had no paid resources on teachers pay teachers, it’s only for lead generation.
SHANE: So basically she puts free stuff up there and just leaves it behind, but once people open the documents, it says, “Come back to elementarylibrarian.com.” So that is one strategy for using existing marketplaces. A lot of people do this on Udemy; they’ll have a course, the course is free, but at the end of the course, if you want to learn more, come to my website and we can sell that. That’s a great strategy – it’s like leaving breadcrumbs, you know, Hansel and Gretel, leaving them behind you basically. Now my strategy on US History Teachers, which is just one of these existing marketplaces is different. I actually put my lesson plans on there, but I charge a fortune for them. Like, it’s probably ten times more expensive to buy a lesson plan in that marketplace, than it is to come to my site. I do have freebies there as well, like Jocelyn is doing, but my thought process is, if I find – it’s like a trip wire or it’s like an introductory offer, if someone buys that lesson plan for, you know, 15 bucks on Teachers Pay Teachers, I’ve clearly identified someone who really wants to buy a lesson plan ‘cause they spent so much money on one day. So, then what I do is, everything in that packet is modified to get them back to my site where I say, “Hey, why pay 11 dollars a day or 12 dollars a day when you could pay 29 dollars a month?” So basically, this was 15 bucks, this was awesome, this was great, man, I had a great two days teaching those lessons, how do I do this more? Oh, man, I can go over there and join for a fraction of the cost. So that is kind of the two strategies that you can use in existing marketplaces, all free, or a bunch of free and a bunch of really expensive stuff, and then show them how awesome it is, but get them to come take the deal, which is back with you. Okay? Makes sense?
JEFF: Okay, thanks.
JOCELYN: Okay, what else can we help you with?
JEFF: Okay, so the whole webinar thing, I haven’t dove into it yet; I did a pre-recorded webinar on the football site and I should – like had my eyes wide open after that because that is probably the number one source for selling our playbook is the webinar replay that I have on there, where all I did was live through one of the concepts of an offense in a video course and, but people just downloaded it and having to opt in and they wind up buying the whole course, because they see how good the one section was. So, I haven’t actually done a live webinar, and if you think this is something where they need to be live, or could I just create courses for – and give away like the courses on different pieces on the year in geometry and whatnot? I’m having trouble deciding whether it’s worth doing the live webinars and I’m sure it is, but again, I’ve just never done it.
SHANE: We always say this; we use automated webinars, not for Flipped Lifestyle, Flipped Lifestyles are always live, but we do use them for our education sites because we choose to make those businesses passive. We want them hands off. But that being said, you will always convert double or triple on a live webinar than you could ever convert on a non-live, pre-recorded webinar. The reason is this –
JEFF: Wow.
SHANE: Yeah, it’s a always a lot more, it’s double; now the difference is, if you can spend money on ads just pay enough ads to make up the difference, but if you want people to really convert, you are going to be there live and the reason they convert better is because you can do something live that you can’t do on a pre-recorded webinar. You can future pace, at the end of the presentation of the content, you can take questions and show people what life is going to be like after they give you money for this solution to their problem. You can answer those direct questions; there are ways around this, you can kind of think up these questions ahead of time, but that interaction in the last 15-20 minutes of your webinar, is going to convert a whole lot more sales than you ever could in another way. People are going to say, what about this, what about this, how many work sheets did I get? How many days does it cover or whatever. You can answer these in-person, specific questions that put a face with the product and you are going to convert a lot more sales that way.
JOCELYN: But, with that being said, you can also convert off of the automated webinars and once you do if you have a live webinars, you sort of know what questions people are going to have, typically about the same. So, what I do on Elementary Librarian is I just put a little presentation at the end of the content that I am teaching and I sort of go through some of those frequently asked questions and show people into the membership community, and things I know they would typically ask. So, you know, I like the automated webinars for Elementary Librarian because it’s not a time investment that I have to put in.
SHANE: Yeah, so basically it’s the niche. If you were talking to me right now about your football coaching stuff, I would 100% say to do it live every time you got the opportunity, because I think that that’s what converts that market. If it’s an education thing, I think that, just knowing your are live, knowing your lifestyle, and everything you are trying to accomplish, I think that you might do a couple live, like for back-to-school type stuff to record these things and then like Jocelyn said, go ahead and automate them because let’s say you convert 10% on a webinar, are you really going to be mad if you convert 6% on the automated webinar that you are not doing anything and it just keeps replaying every week?
JEFF: Yeah.
SHANE: It’s kind of just what do you want to have –
JOCELYN: Yeah, and I don’t call them webinars for education, I call them e-courses –
JEFF: Yeah, I call them web clinics.
JOCELYN: Yeah, exactly because people in the education field, they don’t really understand what a webinar is; like it doesn’t really translate to anything that they know –
SHANE: And also don’t ever – Jocelyn is really adamant that she doesn’t ever say they’re live.
JOCELYN: No, I never ever say it’s live.
SHANE: You don’t want to give people, you don’t want to lie. Like some people put a VA in the chat room or put fake chats, you can buy fake chats –
JOCELYN: Oh, you can do that, but I don’t do that.
SHANE: Yeah, it’s a video, you can watch it, instead of a chat room, you can put comments below it so people can leave you questions and you can come and answer them at another time, so there’s a lot of things –
JEFF: That’s a good idea.
JOCELYN: Yeah, the software that I use, I’m sure somebody is probably wondering this out there in Flipped Lifestyle land, it’s called Ever Webinar.
SHANE: It’s pretty good, it takes a little while to set up, but once you got it, it kind of rolls and they do convert a lot better than sales pages. The conversion rate is a lot higher on these webinar type events, than it is on sales pages and so-
JOCELYN: That particular software, it integrates with a really large variety of service providers. So a lot of different email providers, CRMs, I mean, it integrates with a lot of different things. So, basically just a value judgment to wrap up this question; if you want to put the time in, maybe upfront you do want to do some live ones, but just record those and go and make those automated so you can kind of turn the systems on in the background, get a little Facebook ad pointing over there, get people registered for this event or webinar. They come, they watch the video, it converts whatever it converts and it’s just like a sales page at that point. It just tries to raise the conversion rate. Okay?
JEFF: Right.
SHANE: Did we overwhelm you? You took a deep breathe right there, Jeff.
JEFF: I was trying to write some of this stuff down while you guys were –
SHANE: Well, don’t forget we are recording it.
JEFF: Sure. I mean, I think it goes back to what we talked about at the beginning of the podcast, if we both wish we would have had our resources when we first started teaching, and the money would have been worth the time that we saved. So on the same note with like the webinar stuff, I might as well do them live and then you know, just instead of creating – I don’t know how to say this, but instead of creating it like I did in my web clinic in like stopping and go and putting all the pieces where I wanted to making sure it’s perfect, just doing the live webinar and then send ads to that replay afterwards, it’s kind of like double-dipping anyway, and that makes way more sense.
SHANE: That’s right. And then you take the video also and you make it an email opt-in somewhere on your site. Like whatever you talk about in that session, you just put a little button on your sidebar that says, ‘Hey, get my free video content on X subject’ and bam, the little pop-up goes in, you just redirect them to a page and now you’ve created another opt-in, and then take it and put that webinar ‘cause you are giving content and stick it in your member area. So that one hour work can create a forever webinar, a piece of content for your member area, an opt-in and a blot post, all at once by one hour of work, and eventually you can just stop on the live ones.
JEFF: That’s awesome.
SHANE: All right.
JOCELYN: Okay, I think we have time for one more question, so what do you have for us?
JEFF: Okay, the last question is, like I have – like Shane you gave me the goal last week to hit 100 opt-ins by Friday, and I think I’m like 20 away right now, but with my autoresponder series, I have only actually made like one sale from my autoresponder series and they are getting opened, so I’m not sure – I’m sure it’s people wanting the free lesson plans and then from there it will take time for them to go through those, they’ll probably teach the whole thing, and then you know, come back later. But my question is, with the – I think I have like ten, you know, emails on my autoresponder series right now, and they are just – I don’t feel like they are converting, but after we spoke and I’ve been in the community for you know, a little while now, I’m starting to see that it may be a longer process, and I just may need to make my autoresponder series longer because I’m giving them so much in my free opt-in that it’s going to take them a lot to get through the whole thing.
SHANE: Right. How many emails – well, let’s not get into numbers, that doesn’t matter, here’s a good thing to remember about all online marketing: the farther removed you are from the conversation with the person on the other end, the less it’s going to convert and the longer it’s going to take them to convert. So, your email autoresponder is going to convert less than an email that is instantly about a sale for 24 hours because you are communicating with them in real time. That is going to convert less than a webinar that you are at live, or you are talking to them. You see what I’m saying?
JEFF: Yeah, that makes sense.
SHANE: So really is a longer process from your autoresponder. Your autoresponder is probably only going to convert two to three percent, I mean, that is just a really good conversion rate for just the autoresponder coming out once a week. There are some ways to up that, like timing of your emails; like for example, on my US History site, I’ve got a big, ninja campaign set up where here’s what happens. So let’s say you come in and you download a Civil War lesson plan, I’m going to time it. That’s the free one you got. I want to time that where the next thing you get is the next thing you teach. So what I do is, I look at my avatar’s calendar, whatever it is, and I’m like, when would they probably be teaching about reconstruction, which is the next thing in American history, which is after the Civil War. So, I’m thinking, it takes about five days, it gets you through the Civil War, maybe next Monday they are going to be teaching about this, so I’ve got – I’ve set it up for whenever you download that, the following Sunday you get an email that says, ‘Hey, hope you like last week’s; here’s a membership that – we also have tests but they are only available in our membership, check it out.’ So now I make a pitch based on what they just downloaded. If they don’t download it, then the next email they get is Monday, ‘Hey, by the way, are you teaching reconstruction? Here’s another freebie.’ But it’s only one day, it’s just enough to get them through one day. So you might have a timing issue with what you are offering people, like you said, maybe they are not done teaching that other one, maybe you want to up that autoresponder a little bit.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I would sort of splinter that out a little bit to what you are offering for free because that is what I found too with Elementary Librarian; I was giving them a month of lesson plans, but maybe instead I should have given them a little bit of this and then a few days later, give them a little bit of something else.
JEFF: Right.
SHANE: Maybe you give them that first lesson –
JEFF: Like bring it out a week at a time or something like that?
SHANE: Yeah, give them a week, but don’t ever give them a full lesson after the week. Give them parts like, hold some back.
JOCELYN: Yeah, ‘Would you like to see the rest of those lessons? Click here to join our membership.’
SHANE: Yeah, so you might get the full week of lessons –
JEFF: That makes sense, that great idea.
SHANE: For example, like the third thing they get is not a full lesson; it might just be the PowerPoint, or it might just be the bell-ringer, the opening activity, it might just be a little quiz; but that way, they have used all of it and they know how cool it was that day they didn’t have to go through that rigmarole two hours to plan, but now they are just getting the pieces and they are sitting there going, ‘Man, I really with that I had the whole thing. I might as well go join.’
JEFF: So what do you think, with the first one, like on the original opt-in, we give them just a week or a unit, or –
SHANE: I go a week.
JOCELYN: Yeah, like a week and then like follow up; in my autoresponder for Elementary Librarian, I have – I give them the free stuff, I give them the free resource guide that has links to all of my free materials on my site and then after that, I invite them to the webinar, or the e-course about library centers, then I start going into what I call ‘frequently asked questions’ and basically there are ways to overcome objections that people might have to purchase things.
SHANE: Yeah, and then what I do is, like in this funnel I got set up is, I’d say, ‘Here’s the first day of lesson.’ So the Civil War is like nine lesson plans and then study guide and a test, and you could do with any niche. Don’t zone out if you are out there and if you are listening and you are hearing teachers talk. This is called – like Jocelyn said, splintering and fragmenting your offer, holding enough back to make them to join. So, I’ll give them the first day of that six-day unit, and then I’ll pitch them on the test to get them to join, but they missed them on the days, but then the next free thing I give them might still be the first day’s – from the first lesson plan of the next unit, but it’s not the whole thing. I’m slowly taking things away from them, until they are like, I got to go get the rest of this stuff. You know, I made this stuff and I deserve to be paid for it, but I want to give them quality and let them know what it is first, and then get them to pay for the rest of it later.
JOCELYN: And if you find that people still aren’t purchasing, then what needs to happen next is they need to go on what’s called a ‘nurture sequence’ and that means that you continue to send them free materials throughout the year just to remind them that you are still there, and that your membership is still there. And so when they go to these pages on your site, like for free materials, you need to have an advertisement to your own products there so that people say, ‘Oh, there’s the membership I’ll think about joining.’
SHANE: And also too, a big mistake people make is that I go back to this timing of the calendar that nobody really talks about; like you got to think about real human beings on their side thing and look when your emails are going out. If you are sending an email out on the tenth, if somebody is getting an email on the tenth, that’s probably not an email that should be selling something, you know why, ‘cause they got paid on the first, paid their mortgage, bought their groceries, bought all their food, went to the movies, paid their cable bill, went to the ball game on Saturday, and they are out of money until the 15th. You know what I mean?
JEFF: Yeah, absolutely.
SHANE: You got to think about when people get paid and stuff like that because if someone has no money, it doesn’t matter how bad they want their product, but if it is at a time when they do have money, you know, they want to spend on that, they can make their choice, either I’m going to join this membership and make my life easier, or I’m gonna go spend it on the ball game whatever.
JEFF: All right, that is excellent.
SHANE: So be thinking about timing, that might be an issue, and also too, you’ve only been at it for a few months, you are really not gonna know what your conversion rate is or isn’t for about six months to next summer.
JOCELYN: And you need to make sure that you have an adequate number of people on your list and that varies from niche to niche, but I hear people say all the time, they’ll hear like 50 people on their list and they’ll be like, ‘My list just isn’t converting.’
SHANE: And they sold like four. Like what are you talking about?
JOCELYN: That’s because you don’t have enough people on there. I know that to be statistically significant and yes, this is like nerd talk here, I remember this from like Economics or something, to be statistically significant, you need to have at least 400 people. So, until you have at least that many people, don’t freak out if your list isn’t converting at what you think it should.
SHANE: I had a guy – a buddy of mine, I was talking to him the other day, and he’s into online business and he was selling – we helped him create a pre-sell for a course, because he wanted to validate it with money and that’s what you do; so this thing was 497 dollars, so it wasn’t cheap. This wasn’t like some little thing, the pre-sell was that much, the real deal was going to be like a thousand because it’s really valuable content, and he’s like “Man, I’m like disappointed, I only had 11 sales.” I’m like, that’s 11 sales, 500 bucks, I wish I was that disappointed. But he said, you know, I thought it was going to tell me he had 5000 people on his list or something stupid, he 126 people on his email list. He sent an email to 126 people and 11 people converted.
JEFF: Wow.
SHANE: That’s what I’m saying, like every niche is different; everything is so variable driven online that you just got to really look at the reality. I think it’s amazing and awesome just because I know more of your day than we are sharing online, but I think it’s good that your email list converted a sale by itself. That’s a huge first step. You know what I mean?
JEFF: Right.
SHANE: You didn’t have to be there. You didn’t have to do anything.
JEFF: Right.
SHANE: So take that as a win, figure – maybe reach out to that person and say, ‘Hey, what made you buy this?’ and get some data from them so you can kind of maybe you know, focus on what converted them, focus on who they are, learn more about your avatar, maybe tighten up who you are targeting, and that will probably make your email list convert a little bit better.
JEFF: Right absolutely. And I mean, like you had made a comment earlier about the splintering thing and how it pertains to any niche, I mean while you were saying all that, I was thinking about a million ideas how I could actually do it for football to my other website.
SHANE: You can get away like a drill, and be like, this drill makes you better at this defense, you know, there are so many ways to do it, and it works with anything. It doesn’t matter what your niche is; like if you are giving away, I don’t know, let’s look for a random example –
JOCELYN: Garden vegetables recipes.
SHANE: Garden vegetable recipes, you see what I’m saying?
JEFF: Right.
SHANE: What you do is you only give away the hors d’oeuvres and the cookbook has all the dinners. You see what I’m saying?
JEFF: Yeah.
SHANE: The membership has all the – and then the membership has all the videos that show you how to cook them. So you have given away a little bits, they can go make these quick wins, delicious vegetable recipe hors d’oeuvres and then they get used to that and they go, ‘Well, I wonder how good the dinner is, so let’s go buy the dinner.’ You know what I’m saying?
JEFF: Yeah.
JOCELYN: All right, well unfortunately we are out of time, but what is – we always ask people at the end of our calls, what is the one thing that you are going to take action on, based on what we have talked about in the last –
SHANE: What are you gonna do in the next 72 hours.
JEFF: Well, the splintering thing for sure, especially with the teachers stuff and you know, like is said, I’ve listened to all your podcast three times and every time I get something new, and that right there was like I mean, phenomenal advice.
JOCELYN: And that is what we love about what we do.
JEFF: It turns it into like real people, you know what I mean?
SHANE: That’s right.
JEFF: It’s just like you have it less automated and more like real-world, how can you help. Even though we know the stuff is great on the inside, you know, to them it’s just something they see online until they make it real.
SHANE: Exactly.
JOCELYN: And that’s truly what we love about what we do. I mean, just one little thing that you can pick up either from our membership, from our podcast, just whatever it is, it’s just like a domino effect and we just love what we do [Crosstalk]
SHANE: Sometimes it just takes that one little nugget like that to unstuck – you clearly have an autoresponder that is working ‘cause someone bought something and people are opening the emails, and maybe that one little nugget, maybe you were just giving away a little too much for free so there was no reason to join so fast, maybe that draws people in a little quicker, makes things convert a little bit more –
JEFF: I 100% think that’s what it is.
SHANE: Love it, awesome. All right, Jeff, thanks again for coming on the show man, awesome story that you have got there, great goals, and it’s just amazing to see people who not just consume information and not just constantly listen to things, but take action on what they are hearing. If you would like some more help with your online business, you can get some help from us at flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife. We would love to have you in our community, there are hundreds of entrepreneurs in there taking action every day, and we would love to help you too. We’ll see you next week and until then, get out there and take action and flip your life.
JOCELYN: Bye!
Misty says
Great info here and great hustle by Jeff. He asked about reaching out to places that are not marketplaces, but still have authority in the niche, such as edutopia or edmodo… do y’all recommend connecting with those places? If so, what’s the best way? Thanks S & J!