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Rebecca is a nurse and assistant professor who started a blog about Evidence Based Birth after going through a difficult experience giving birth herself.
She has been able to not only make money online, but provide valuable researched based information that any parent can understand.
As a clinical researcher and teacher, she is able to translate research material to improve childbirth for women around the world.
Rebecca has already done well with the product launch model and wants to transition to a recurring membership based business.
60% of her audience are professionals wanting to have access to continuing education to her most popular product. Considering this, we discuss strategies she can use for her content.
Since launching a membership site just four months ago, Rebecca has gained 180+ members.
One thing she needs to start doing is to have every piece of content have a pathway from outside of the membership back to her membership offers.
You will learn
- How to create multiple pathways to your membership
- Take your business to the next level
- Don’t be intimidated by a membership model
- Why It’s Important to Poll Your Target Audience
- How to Have Confidence in Your Online Business
- Be able to Predict Your Online Income 6 months out
- How to get more email subscribers to members
- Why you should be using Ads
- Webinar Training Forum Available to Flip Your Life Members
- What Future Pacing Is
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!
Thank you for listening!
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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’ll talk about transitioning Rebecca’s childbirth website from a launch model to a recurring revenue business.
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, it’s great to be back with you again this week, excited to have another Flip Your Life member on the call today. This is a little bit different call, we’ve got someone who came to us with a successful online business, but she wanted to transition into a more sustainable, growing, recurring revenue based business, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today is how you can move making money online into something that might be a little bit lower energy, and a little bit easier every month, you know, a little bit less stressful because you’re not waking up every day going ‘Where’s my next sale coming from?’ Our guest today is Rebecca Decker, Rebecca welcome to the show.
REBECCA: Thanks. Thanks for having me, I’m excited to be here.
JOCELYN: Yeah, awesome. So, tell us a little bit about your site and a little bit about you and why you decided to jump into this business.
REBECCA: Sure, so as Shane said, my name’s Rebecca Decker and I am a nurse. I also have my PhD in nursing, and I work as an assistant professor in a university, and about four years ago this April, I was inspired to start a blog about childbirth and just kind of on the limit of the moment, I told my husband ‘I’m starting a blog’ and he’s like, okay, you know, I’ve never done anything like that before, so.
JOCELYN: He was a lot nicer than I was when Shane said we were starting a lifestyle.
SHANE: Jocelyn said, get out of here, you’re crazy.
REBECCA: Well he was like usually when Rebecca suggests something or says she’s going to do something, it’s a pretty good idea, so he trusted me and I registered the domain name evidencebasedbirth.com and just to give you a little bit of a background, when I had my first baby, I was a PhD student at the time, and I was a nurse and I was a little bit surprised and kind of taken aback by the care that I received. There were things that were done to me like, you know, I was told, you’re not allowed to get out of bed, so I couldn’t even walk to the bathroom to use the restroom, like they made me lay on a bed pan. They wouldn’t allow me to eat or drink, I went 24 hours without any food or liquid, which they said, well we’ll just give you the fluids through the IV. And so it was just kind of a miserable experience and after that whole experience, some time went by and I was like, you know what, I’m going to start looking at the research and see what happened to me, and like because I teach evidence-based practice which is practice based on research.
SHANE: Right.
REBECCA: That’s the gold standard in health care. I was just kind of curious like these things that happened to me, like was there any evidence to support the use, their use in me, because I was a totally healthy person with no complications, and I was totally taken aback and surprised when I found out, you know, almost everything that had happened to me during my labor and child birth has been shown by evidence to either be not helpful or actually even harmful to pregnant women who are healthy.
SHANE: Wow, that’s crazy, really when you think about it.
REBECCA: Yeah, so I was just you know, kind of blown away, because I entered this kind of, you know blank slate. I didn’t have any biases, I was just kind of like, whatever you know is best – do to me whatever you think is best, I trusted the health care workers, and so with my second baby, I just decided you know I kind of made a list of everything that I felt was evidence based or that for me is a healthy, low risk women, I would need, and had a really amazing child birth experience the second time around. I had a midwife, she was amazing, and I left that experience feeling just completely empowered, like from my fingertips to my toes, and I really believed that I can do anything.
SHANE: Cool.
REBECCA: I just, I mean it was, I vividly remember there, like laying there thinking if I can do this, I can do anything and so that a couple months after that is when I started the blog. My purpose was to basically take research evidence out of the medical journals, they’re locked behind a pay wall, and translate it and synthesize it, put it all together in a format that just a normal parent could understand.
SHANE: Yeah.
REBECCA: And there was really, you know, very little like that out there at the time, so what I was doing, proposing to do was you know fairly new and my husband and I kind of joked, because we’d always wish we could come up with a some kind of a business idea because he has his MBA and we used to brainstorm. I remember we – his family lives in Michigan, we’d be driving from Kentucky to Michigan trying to think, well what business idea can we come up with for you to start.
SHANE: Been there before, many times.
JOCELYN: We’ve been there many times.
REBECCA: We could never think of anything, and then all of a sudden this just like, it came to me and I really felt called and it didn’t have anything to do with creating a business. I just – I really wanted to make an impact, I wanted to change the face of maternity care, because it’s not just a problem here in the United States, but maternity care has major issues in other countries around the world.
SHANE: Sure.
REBECCA: I wanted to make a difference that’s why I started the blog.
SHANE: And it’s very interesting because like, we hear this, a lot of people that come to us who have already made money online and just wanted to take it to the next level, right? Like usually it starts out like that where you get into something and it evolves into something that is profitable based on something that you’re not only interested in, you know, we don’t want to just focus totally on the passion here, but you had expertise, you went and researched it, and you built a knowledge base that made you a valuable asset to someone else who is looking for this information which thus becomes something profitable at that point.
REBECCA: Right, yeah, so yeah, this was definitely – you know my background is clinical research, that’s what I do for a living, so I can read research studies and I do a really good job of reading them, you know, summarizing them –
SHANE: And translating them to your user, basically.
REBECCA: And translating them, yeah, because I’m also a teacher and so it’s easy for me to teach you know research, but at a language that regular people can understand. So, that, you know, for me too, the purpose again like I said it wasn’t to create a business or to make money, it was really – my entire purpose with this is to change maternity care and improve other women’s childbirths and of course to do that, I have to make the website sustainable.
SHANE: Exactly.
REBECCA: And, so that is you know, you do, there’s a cost to having as many website visitors as I do, so.
SHANE: Some people get mad at people who charge for things, but I always tell everybody that comes to us that number one if you’re giving time which is part of your life away, you should not ever feel bad about accepting money in return for that, because at the end of the day, we all got to eat and we all got to stay dry and we all got to stay warm in the winter time. And you got to charge for stuff and if you – and if you’re going to be able to keep giving all of this stuff away, and if you can help people along the way, that’s great. There’s no problem with that, it’s a reciprocal relationship.
JOCELYN: And you are correct that it does cost a lot to deliver this free information. As you start to get more visitors, you have to have bigger servers, you have to have –
SHANE: Have more tools to be able to promote stuff.
Jocelyn: You know faster website, things like that and that all comes with a price tag and as much as we would all love to just give all of our information away to whomever needs it, it does cost something and somebody has to pay that bill.
SHANE: Okay so let’s shift gears here a little bit. So, real quickly, tell us business wise, kind of how your model was, and then we’ll talk a little bit about how we’ve switched you kind of to your recurring membership model and talk about growing that. So, real briefly, like where were you like before? How did the business evolve? How did you monetize? What were you selling? And things like that.
REBECCA: Okay, so I didn’t even think about monetizing until about a year-and-a-half into the website, and by that point I had a pretty big audience and I, fortunately somebody gave me the advice to start an email list, so I collected a couple thousand email addresses.
SHANE: Awesome.
REBECCA: And I asked my audience if they were interested in taking a class for me, and I still remember the Facebook thread on that was just like boom, you know, like hundreds of people saying yes, yes, yes, count me in. So, I went ahead and one of the things that these people want, most of the people that follow my website, I would say about 60% are professionals, either nurses, midwives, childbirth educators, and they all need continuing education.
SHANE: Okay.
REBECCA: So, I applied to become a continuing education provider so that I could offer those CEU certificates, and created my first one-off course and it did really well. I didn’t really do any marketing other than sending out two emails to my audience and it did really well for a first launch. It was a really – it was like, I think I charged 27 dollars for it, I hosted it on Udemy.
SHANE: Okay.
REBECCA: Because that was the easiest way.
SHANE: Sure.
REBECCA: And I think I was able to keep like 97% of the profits.
SHANE: Awesome.
REBECCA: And so yeah, that was my first class and then I ended up, really saying I think three more short classes that were about two hours long each, or two contact hours each, and they each one successively did better. So, that’s where I was about a year ago, I just launched my fourth class and it did really well, it was a – it was like a lower-priced product, it was priced at 49 dollars, but it did really well. So that was the last major course that I released, and then most of my income actually comes from PDFs.
SHANE: Right.
REBECCA: So, 95% of my content is free, that’s one reason I’ve never felt bad about charging for my work, because I give away so much value for free. But if you want to – any of my blog articles, you can pay for a printer-friendly PDF of the full length article that you can take to a doctor’s appointment; a lot of nurses like to use them at their nurses’ station for the patients who have questions.
SHANE: Right.
REBECCA: So, part of, if you buy the PDF, I give them copyright permission to use it with their clients.
SHANE: Cool.
REBECCA: So, that’s been the other income stream for the –
SHANE: So, in reality, what we – to sum all that up, you know we don’t have to share numbers, but you were doing pretty good with it, and it was all one-of products, that’s what we’re talking about here. We’ve shifted away from one-off course, one-off PDF, to more of a sustainable kind of membership model, for your doulas and nurses and people like midwives, people like that.
REBECCA: Yeah, and I was actually inspired to do that by listening to your podcast. So – and that’s part of the reason why I joined the Flipped Lifestyle community because I listened to the podcast. When you were talking about switching your recurring, to recurring model, and I told my husband, he was on a road trip, I was like – I texted him the link to your podcast, I was like you have to listen to this.
SHANE: That’s awesome.
REBECCA: This is what we need to do, because I’ve always been intimidated by the membership model, I just thought it sounded like a lot of work to –
SHANE: It’s actually less, you know.
REBECCA: – constantly serve your customers, yeah.
SHANE: Right, it’s actually less energy, less work, and it’s more sustainable, both not only from a financial standpoint, but from a burnout and an energy standpoint, because when you’re launching or selling one of, you’re constantly creating, constantly thinking, constantly trying to figure out what’s going on, and in the back of your mind you’re always stressed out going, ‘Well what if no one buys tomorrow?’ Whereas, if you build a customer base that you serve continuously, you know, it’s like momentum, it’s a lot harder to get the boulder moving than it is to just keep it rolling, you know.
REBECCA: Yeah, once I had that change in mindset, I was really excited about it, because I was like now I can just really serve my, you know –
SHANE: Exactly.
Rebecca: – these people, my members, and not focus on getting new members but really just focus on serving them and fostering their growth. And so as I’m also an educator like that was really exciting to me.
SHANE: And what’s cool is what – something you said that was very interesting, because you know, part of this stress and energy of anything when you’re selling something, is that kind of awkward phase of ‘Hey, give me money and I’ll give you stuff’ right? But in a membership model, that agreement goes out the window because you never have to talk about it again. They keep paying and you just keep serving, and you don’t have to worry about constantly selling and hoping someone gives you money because you’ve already had that conversation, they’ve joined your community, and it just continues after that. So, let me ask you this, let’s just – some real general members here, like how has your membership launch gone? How have you – you don’t have to talk about prices or anything, but like how did it go when you switched to a membership model and like how many people responded? And like how has that kind of changed your dynamic and your business with how you emotionally relate to your business?
REBECCA: Yeah, and so, yeah one of the things I wanted to say is part of the reason I needed a lower energy model is because I do work full-time and so you know this website really only – I really only want to spend about 4-6 hours per week on it because I really need to be devoting my energy to my job. So, the low energy model worked, I created it and I did an early bird kind of thing, although it wasn’t early bird pricing, it was like, you can get in now or you can wait until January; and so this was at the end of October, and all I did was send out one email and then another email at the end of the week and I got 118 members.
SHANE: That’s crazy, that’s awesome.
REBECCA: Most of them were annual, which I was surprised, I think I gave a little, you know, a pretty hefty discount on the annual, which is why they picked the annual, and yeah, I mean I was just like shocked by how many people registered. I did at the time have an email list of about 8,000 people.
SHANE: Right, and that’s good though, you know, like you put in the effort ahead of time to build the audience to go figure out what they wanted, you polled them, and that’s why you had such a good response because you were so in tune with your avatar, you know.
REBECCA: Yeah, and I think a lot of them had already been taking courses from me, so it was really appealing to them to know that like all of the courses moving forward would be under the same umbrella, and they’d have access to me in the forums, and I was going to do monthly training sessions, so they were all really excited.
SHANE: Cool.
REBECCA: So, then I closed it off, kind of for the holidays to kind of rejuvenate and to serve those people because they were you know, the first group and I really wanted to focus on serving them. We did some training sessions, I spent a lot of time in the forums, and then I decided this January, to kind of do a little bit of a more exciting launch where I really promoted the membership. So, my cousin is a videographer, he filmed me doing four, kind of, promotional teaching videos and I did a 7-day process where I released a video about once every other day.
SHANE: Great, that’s a great strategy.
REBECCA: And then on the last day – I got that from that, from the, from watching Jeff Walker’s free videos; I never signed up for his class but I’ve watched his videos and I’ve read his book.
SHANE: Sure.
REBECCA: Jeff Walker Launch.
SHANE: Yeah, ‘Launch’ is a great book.
REBECCA: Yeah, and then at the, on the fourth video, it was basically welcoming them to join, and it was interesting in the beginning, it was just a little bit of a trickle, but I think I’ve learned over the years that my audience, a lot of them are really busy, and so they’re a little bit of procrastinators.
SHANE: Sure.
REBECCA: So, last night I sent out the final email and that’s when 95% of people joined. So, during this launch it was a little bit smaller than the October launch, but I got 40 additional annual members and 21 monthly.
SHANE: That’s awesome.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I would say that’s very successful, I’ll be very happy with that.
SHANE: Very happy.
REBECCA: Yeah, so I have a total 182 members right now, 65 of them are monthly.
SHANE: And that’s really just in about four months, you know what I’m saying? Like four or five months. So, that’s, you’re now in that phase of layering, you know, and the cool part about it is, you know, before, every month you’re waiting for someone else to buy more stuff, the individual one-off things, but now you have a baseline where you know each month is going to be at least this based on, you know, your churn rate and how many people are coming and going into the funnel, or maybe cancelling and coming back in. People are going to cancel, that’s the way it is, but you never start at zero. Every time you add a layer, it gets bigger and bigger, and removes more and more and more stress from you on having to make more sales, you know.
REBECCA: Right, and one of the things that hasn’t happened yet that I’m excited about is I think I posted in the forums, I wasn’t sure if I should do group discounts or not for the membership; I’ve done that with almost all of my one-off courses where if you buy as a group you get a significant discount.
SHANE: Like multiple midwives come together in a community or nurse or whatever.
REBECCA: Yes, yes. So, right now the groups, their deadline is next week, so I don’t know how many of them will sign up, but right now we have about 15 groups ranging from anywhere from like 5 to 30 group members per group.
SHANE: That’s awesome.
REBECCA: Yeah, I’m really excited to welcome them.
JOCELYN: Do you find that most of your annual subscribers are paying through a business account or is it mostly personal do you think?
REBECCA: My guess is a lot of it is business-related because most of these people this is their profession, so it’s tax – a tax write-off for a lot of them.
JOCELYN: Right, because I’m just wondering why you have such higher annual member.
SHANE: Annual rights, yeah.
JOCELYN: That’s a little unusual. However, for my Elementary Librarian business, which is also a lot of business-to-business sales.
SHANE: About 50-50, yeah.
JOCELYN: I’m about 60-40 annual.
SHANE: And there’s some good things and bad things too, like before, we’re going to jump into a Q&A session here in a second because you just laid out a great framework, and I want to say right now before I forget to do it like, we’re so proud of what you’ve done because, not only the work you got involved with us, but just to – it is a little leap of faith, to jump into this revenue model because you can drop your revenue a little bit at first, but now you’re seeing that benefits of lower energy, sustainability, building layers over time, and a year from now if we can get you to 500 or 1000 members, totally different ball game of where you were before in your online business. But it’s just very – it’s very interesting when you talk about monthly and annual because there’s huge advantages to both, like annual memberships are great because you get more of the money upfront, so it takes away some of that risk from the churn of people cancelling, but we actually also, like we look at our monthly and annuals completely separate because we know our numbers so well, like we know exactly percentage wise, pretty much what’s going to cancel, what’s going to come in and renew, what’s going to come in new from our sales finals. We know our numbers so well that we can literally predict six months out how much money we’re going to make now, and you talk about an advantage for planning and investing in your business, maybe hiring assistants or virtual assistants, maybe hiring you know, webmasters or things like that. It gives you so much more confidence and power to be able to say, I know that I’m going to have this many members paying this much a month. This many might leave, but this many might going to come back in, and I know I can predict that, so I can now invest in my business and advertising and other things because I’m confident that the money’s going to be there. And that’s some of that even more peace of mind you’re going to get moving forward as you start planning on how to grow this business, you’re going to have the confidence to be able to say, hey, I can do this without jeopardizing anything.
REBECCA: Right, and I’m just so excited because there’s so many more things I can do –
SHANE: So, much.
REBECCA: With this kind of dependable income, I mean I already have several virtual assistants but I’m excited to bring on, you know, perhaps another researcher and to really work on just getting this information out to as many people as possible and making the website, you know, even more impactful.
SHANE: And we’re going to jump into some Q&As here; I think what we’re going to find too, now that we have got the momentum, we’re going to be able to really look at your business on this call, in the forums, and over the next couple of months and say, where is all the low-hanging fruit? We can – there’s going to be more people on your email list that are going to buy, how do we get them to convert and there’s going to be all kinds of strategies that we can do to bring in new people to expose them to your content which is really beneficial not only to them and their life, but to their business. So, with that in mind, what is your question now maybe next to try to grow the business from a recurring stand point?
REBECCA: Yeah so, I’m really interested in how to keep growing. I think it’ll be better for the existing members if we have more members joining because it’ll make the forums more interactive and more exciting and you know, really just get as many people as possible, like educated on these concepts that I’m teaching. So, yeah, I guess that’s my next question is kind of like now that this launch period is kind of over, I’m going back to regularly scheduled programming, you know I email my list about once a month.
SHANE: Right.
REBECCA: I’m coming out with a big blog article in March, all about a really controversial topic about pregnancy over the age of 35.
SHANE: Controversy is always good for sales.
REBECCA: Yeah, so one of my thoughts, well I’ve already got a class created on that, that I’m going to add to the membership, so I’m kind of thinking what’s the best way to, you know, promote that when the blog article is released?
JOCELYN: I’m thinking what I would do is probably make a training for the people in your area already, so that way members will access to it, but then also present that as a webinar.
SHANE: Yeah.
JOCELYN: Have you done webinars before?
REBECCA: Yes.
JOCELYN: Yeah, so I might present that as a webinar to known customers and that way you can sort of do a pitch for the membership area as well in that. I think that would be a really big win for you, especially for the kind of controversial subject.
SHANE: One of the things that’s really important like with the membership model, that’s probably even more important than like the launch model is, you have to tie everything together now. So, like if you’re going to make a training for your community, like you said you were going to do just now, right and then like, then you’re going to make like a blog post that’s controversial about that thing, well you also have to think in terms of everyone that lands on that site is going to read that article. They need an opt-in that’s related to that article. They need to be retargeted to make sure that they’re getting ads when they come to your post from your email list or however they get there, right, or if someone shares it and they click on, and then you have to have a sales panel specifically to get them through that new training course. So, whereas for the launch model, you might have opt-in or two on your website, people can come in, they can consume something and get on your email list and it’s more general. You need to be thinking now of pathways, every piece of content that becomes a part of your membership has to have a path from outside of your membership to it. So, how many courses do you think you have in your membership now?
REBECCA: Right now I have one 8-hour course that’s like my big flagship course, and then 1 have one 2-hour course, and then I have two more that I’m going to be adding that I’m going to be renewing, you know, or making new, and then this additional one that I’m coming out with. So, I guess it’ll be a total of five.
SHANE: Five, okay, so what we need to do now going forward is, every one of those topics within that membership area now is a part of the whole, but they each need a path coming in. The best example of this is like an octopus and like, we’ve used this example before like your membership is the head of the octopus, right? And as you reach each tentacle out is a path that you know reaches out and grabs the little fish that likes that thing. So, whatever the topic is on one of your courses, it needs a full sales funnel into the general membership, because the goal is they come to the piece of content, right, they consume it, then they get the lead magnet, but then they have specific emails that are more guided directly into the whole course; but you say this course exists within the membership, you can get it and everything else for this monthly cost. Does that make sense?
REBECCA: Yes.
SHANE: So, I think that with your strategy, because you’ve done webinars before – webinars are a great starting point in any sales funnel because you can run ads to get new people to the webinar which gives you their email address, right? The webinar is the ‘What this course is about’ but the course is the ‘how’ so they have to pay for the ‘how’. So, we can start at a webinar, if they sign up on the webinar list, they can come watch the webinar, you can pitch on the webinar, and you can follow up with everyone who signed up for that specific webinar about that specific topic and literally lead them to this new training course, but they have to join the membership to get the new training course. So, I think that’s your strategy going forward is how can I create multiple paths to multiple segments of my avatar who might be interested in this specific topic, but then sell them the membership at the end instead of just that one thing.
REBECCA: Okay.
SHANE: Does that make sense?
REBECCA: Yes, it does. And I’ve done webinars for, but not really to sell anything, just you know as a perk for my audience and I’ve had a lot of really great engagement, but what would you recommend for learning more about how to do a webinar when there is a product that at the end is a – that you’re promoting?
SHANE: Well, we have a webinar training forum and we had been also thinking about promoting webinars in the forums. We’re also going to add soon, a webinar training, how we do webinars. We have a very specific template and format that we follow; basically here’s the gist of what we do, number one, we teach actual content. Like it should be– the quality of your webinar should be like something you could put in your membership every time you do one, and it’s a course basically in itself. So, maybe like this could be like if you’re going to make an overview video of your course and it would be good enough to show them exactly the steps or what to do but not exactly nitty-gritty how to do it, you got to have really high quality content on your webinar or nobody’s going to watch it. The second thing that we do at the end of our webinar is, we always future pace; this is where it becomes a sales pitch instead of just content. You have to show people not just the content that they want to get, but what life is going to be like for them after they join your membership and after they have access to that content. So future-pacing is a huge, huge, huge deal within your webinar, and then you have to kind of get over the fact that you are going to be asking for money live. That’s a big block that people have, but if you strategically plan your webinar to where everything leads to that point where you’re asking for you know, the membership sale, it’s not as weird when you get to the end of it.
JOCELYN: I would even recommend possibly considering recorded webinars for you and the reason being is that in niches that are outside of like the online business space, people don’t really understand that webinars are supposed to be live, like on Elementary Librarian, I just call it a training and I actually put that inside my auto-responder so they sign up for the training and that training has a sales pitch at the end for people who are non-customers. So, it’s just a way to repurpose that content and use it over and over and over again to continue to get leads and potential customers.
SHANE: So, what you could do Rebecca is like take all courses, create a webinar that starts the path to join your membership, do those live the first time, record them and then set up those trainings as an automated webinar where you just run ads into the automated webinar, and then they watch the video, they get their freebie, and then they get the email to try to convert sales. And that way once again you’re taking energy out of the process, you don’t have to do a lot of webinar every time to give the same content and get them to the same place.
REBECCA: Okay.
SHANE: I’ll actually also too, I’ll post in the forums later, I’ll give you my slides that I have and I have notes in all of my slides. I’ll just go post them tonight into the forums so you can go kind of pull up my slides. It has what this slide should do, what the purpose of this slide is, and I’ll just let you have a copy of one of the ones that we’ve used for previous sales webinar and you can just download that in the forums and you’ll be able to kind of template everything out. So you’ll know when to pitch, when to future-pace, how much content to deliver, and also the purpose of each piece of content because every slide in your webinar should lead people to a sale. That’s what a webinar is for, is to get conversions so, you got to kind of think about it. You do want to deliver as much content as possible, but the end goal has to always be in mind in every single slide that you create, and I’ve already got that listed so I’ll get you a little head start there on that, okay?
REBECCA: Okay. Sounds great.
JOCELYN: All right, so we’re about out of time, but you have one final question for us that maybe we can help you out with before we go.
REBECCA: Sure, so my PDFs that I sell on my website, they’re part of the membership, but you can also purchase them individually and as a group package and I think I’m going to talk to people in keeping that available, kind of as like just a resource for people who aren’t ready to join the membership yet, but may in the future.
SHANE: Right.
REBECCA: But my question for you is kind of, should I create kind of an auto-responder series so that when people purchase the PDF, they then get you know, here’s, these are also included in the membership, here’s a discount to the membership because you’ve already paid for this one PDF.
JOCELYN: Yes, and what I would do is the same thing that I do on Elementary Librarian; if they continue down the path and they still don’t become customers, you can continue to send them another PDF say like one a month or every other month –
SHANE: On a related topic or something.
JOCELYN: – just to kind of keep them warm and opening your emails.
SHANE: Yeah, I think what that becomes for you is like an introductory offer, right, like you’re going to have a lot of people get on your email list; we all – everybody gets people on their email list, then there’s a smaller percentage that will spend some money, and then a smaller percentage of those people spend a lot money.
REBECCA: Right.
SHANE: So, I think what that definably does is, you need – that needs to be flagged and tagged. Anyone who buys those things, we got to make sure that it’s probably a paying customer and a higher priority lead that will join your membership eventually than someone who’s just on your email list.
REBECCA: Right.
SHANE: So, they probably do need some kind of different auto responder that’s more geared toward, hey join our membership, hey join our membership, because they’ve already spent money, they already want the content so they’re all probably willing to move forward. The one problem I would look at for you is, you’ve got to have some way to separate people who are just maybe the patient who’s going to the doctor with this – armed with this PDF from the midwife or doula that really wants to get into your community and learn how to do this as a part of their job, you know.
REBECCA: Right, and I recently switched to a convert kit and it’s really easy to have people to have people click on a link and tell you which you know, category they fit into.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that’s perfect.
REBECCA: So, I’m excited about using that.
JOCELYN: And I would really use tags to my advantage, you know be sure to tag your customers, be sure –
SHANE: Just then know who to pitch to, you know, your PDFs can become just one-off products for those people, and then your midwives and your doula community, or whoever, they have a different kind of email coming to them for that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we don’t always recommend continuing to have one-off products, but in this case I think that it makes sense.
SHANE: Okay?
REBECCA: Yeah.
SHANE: Right, we’re very proud of everything that you’ve done. Your story’s been amazing to hear coming in and going out. Once that ball starts rolling, I have no doubt that you’re going to continue with all of your success and we’re going to grow this membership into something that can be sustainable, that can grow, and just will be there for you, you know, down the road and not take so much of your life away that you can’t focus on everything else. We always close all of our shows with an action step; so, what do you think is the next step for you and what’s something that you can kind of get started in the next 48 hours or so that will kind of take your business to the next level?
REBECCA: Well I think for me, I mean really it’s just about serving my clients, so I, in serving my audience and you know, women who come to my website, because I feel like the more I serve you know, the bigger the website grows and I just really want to make a difference, so the one action I’m working on is getting my next big blog article up there for the public to benefit from.
SHANE: Awesome.
JOCELYN: That sounds great Rebecca, we appreciate you being on the call today, and we can’t wait to hear from you soon in the forums and see where this thing goes.
REBECCA: Thanks guys.
SHANE: All right guys that wraps up another call to our Flip Your Life community members. If you’d like to become a member of our Flip Your Life community, head over to fliplifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can help you with your online business as well.
JOCELYN: All right, next we’re going to move into our can’t-miss moments segment and these are things that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at a normal, 9 to 5 job.
SHANE: This week’s can’t miss moment was our little girl’s birthday party; it’s one of the coolest birthday parties we’ve had. Anna just turned five recently and this birthday party was really cool because we have actually have a local place that’s kind of like build-a-bear and we rented out the entire build-a-bear store to have Anna’s birthday party and we got to bring in all of her little friends from school, from church. They all came, their parents came, we had a big room in the back so everybody got to sit around and talk while the kids played, and what was really cool is that all the kids got to make their own stuffed animal and we made sure that every kid that came to the party actually left with like a little build-a-bear type thing. So, it was really awesome that Anna got to have an awesome party with, you know, 20 of her friends and they all have, we’re just having a blast. There was this little dance room that they were all dancing in, like they had like a little disco ball in there and this big picture like – they can stand in a picture frame to get all their pictures together and Anna said that she had basically the fun-est birthday party ever and it was really cool that we were able to provide something like that for her.
JOCELYN: And in the past when we still worked at school, having a birthday party for both kids was really difficult for us, financially, because as you know if you’ve had a birthday party recently they are very expensive. I mean, even just the basic birthday party can cost a lot of money and usually I would try to let each kid have one like every other year so that we can stagger them out a little bit. But recently, thanks to online business and the freedom and the extra income that it has allowed us to have, we’re able to do those types of things more often. We’re able to celebrate the kids and you know, it’s not just about what you can give them, but it’s also about experiences and this was a good experience for all of her little friends and also the parents who came too. Everybody had a great time and that’s just part of what we do now. So, it was really cool to see that and to be able to experience that.
SHANE: And it was really cool also on this one, like Jocelyn talks a lot about blessing other people; we always try to kind of wrap everything we do up and how can we help other people, but normally you know you go to a birthday party, you bring a present, everybody goes and they leave. But this was really cool because we were able to literally give every kid that came, they left with something. So, you know, some of the kids in our kids school might not be would always afford things, and it was really cool just seeing the smiles on little kids’ faces as they left with their little toy. And then a couple of the parents actually even came up to me like ‘This is awesome, I’ve never been to a birthday party where my kid got a gift’ and I thought that was pretty awesome too. Before we go today, we like to close every show with a verse from the Bible. Today’s Bible verse comes from first Thessalonians, chapter 5 verses 16-19, the Bible says, “Be joyful always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances, this is the will of God for your life.” That’s all the time we have for this week. As always guys thanks for listening to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast and until next time, get out there take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We’ll see you then.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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