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Teaching in public schools, Marnie was shocked when she realized most middle schoolers were reading two levels below what they should have been for their age.
With determination to figure out how to increase their reading levels, she began private tutoring.
She was so successful with this showing great improvement from the students after only 12 hours of sessions.
With her expertise in teaching students how to read, she created a free online training model that guides volunteers on how to improve the reading skills of kids, reaching to about 1,000 schools.
Now, she is building her own online professional community for classroom teachers to teach their students how to read through her website, Reading Simplified.
As she gains about 2 email subscribers a day, we help her navigate where she should begin.
Should she focus on getting to know her audience through webinars ? Or should she solely focus on her membership site before any further engagement?
Find out on today’s episode!
You will learn
- Why to separate the avatar from the individual with the money.
- What comes first – membership site or getting to know your target audience.
- Pre-record your webinars as free content and content for your members.
- Keep the ‘how’ for members only.
- Use a survey to discover what your target audience is looking for.
- How to advertise in the teaching space.
- What Tasks to give a Virtual Assistant.
- Facebook Likes Don’t Equal Any Value
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 help Marnie take her education 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 with you again this week, super-excited to have another Flip Your Life community member on the show so that we can help them build and grow a sustainable online business. Our guest today is Flip Your Life member Marnie Ginsberg, Marnie, welcome to the show.
MARNIE: Hello, so good to be here; you guys rescued me from the online startup pit of despair.
JOCELYN: That is something we like to hear.
SHANE: I need to put that on our sales page somewhere. “Join our membership and you’ll be pulled from the depths of despair.” That’s awesome.
JOCELYN: That’s pretty sweet actually. All right Marnie, so tell us a bit about you, who you are and what you do online.
MARNIE: All right, I’m in Madison, Wisconsin with a husband and three girls, so those are my – probably my most important roles in my life and it’s especially time-consuming lately with all the club sports for the older girls.
SHANE: We feel your pain. Swimming and dancing is like – that’s our pit of despair right now. Eight hour swim meets to watch my kids swim for one minute.
MARNIE: I know; and professionally I have been teaching in the public schools, and I actually started back in the late nineties, and I was surprised to discover in those early years that my middle school students were reading two years below grade level. I set out to change that, but really had no idea how. After lots of searching, I eventually found a technique that worked even for the weakest reader in my class. A sixth grader, initially not able to read even Doctors Seuss and after finding a system that worked, I got hooked and began private tutoring and learnt a lot through those years of tutoring. Most of the struggling readers I taught and got to grade level in just about 12 hours of instruction. But I still dream of having a broader impact, so I went to the University of North Carolina for a PhD in Literacy and along the way, I was able to develop and early reading intervention at UNC that helped kindergarten through second grade teachers teach one struggling reader at a time. It also included a coaching model that used webcams, and that university-based research resulted in pretty significant gains for students and was in a number of journals, and yet I realized from firsthand experience that research journal articles themselves don’t have much impact on daily classroom practice.
SHANE: That’s right.
MARNIE: So, more recently, I developed an online training model for a nonprofit that will eventually be in about a thousand schools, and that program guides volunteer members to teach students considered at risk, how to improve their reading. And so across all these different environments, I keep learning how to shed aspects of professional development that can make it very cumbersome or time-consuming. So now, I’m building an online professional development community, mainly for classroom teachers that hinges on just three main activities to teach reading simply, so we call it ‘Reading Simplified’.
SHANE: Okay, so let me ask you this real quick, I got a couple of questions to follow this up with, like, when you worked with this company, like there is nothing proprietary here that they own now, like it’s still your methods, you’re just helping them?
MARNIE: Exactly, it’s a nonprofit and we work that out so that’s good –
SHANE: So you own all your IP, that’s the main thing.
MARNIE: Yes.
SHANE: And if I’m not mistaken here, currently your avatar is the person that is teaching the reading?
MARNIE: That’s right.
SHANE: And also strategically just from knowing your business in the community forums, you are also targeting a lot of your content that way too, like trying to get those reading teachers – writing articles that they might find and be interested in to do this or whatever.
MARNIE: Exactly.
SHANE: Okay, I know your questions because we have submitted them ahead of time, but I want to pause here before we go forward and talk a little bit about your avatar.
MARNIE: Sure.
SHANE: There is an important issue here that I think that everyone needs to be aware of, is that sometimes the avatar and the person with the wallet is a different person, and there can be a disconnect there when you are trying to sell stuff online because you might know who wants your stuff and who your stuff is best for, but that might not be the same person that pays for the stuff. An example of this would be like even like our education businesses, like Jocelyn sells to librarians, but a lot of times the schools buys the stuff for the librarian. So there has to be a mechanism in place to communicate that; like I would – Jocelyn taught reading in school, so I mean, wouldn’t you say that Jocelyn someone buying that would probably be the school, buying that for the volunteers?
JOCELYN: Mostly likely; I mean, not necessarily in all cases, but it could be a situation where that could be happening. Do you find that that being relevant for what you are doing so far?
MARNIE: Well, it’s early days because I don’t have a product –
SHANE: Right, you’re working on that.
MARNIE: – I get – from conferences, I get teachers interested in pursuing more information from me and I give them some of the early resources that I have. So, I’m imagining that my avatar is kind of like I was back in the nineties, when I had to figure out how to teach reading and I just did it on my own. My district didn’t help me and I paid for, you know, the training, and I pursed that myself.
JOCELYN: Right, my guess was that you’ll have a situation that is similar to mine in that I do have a lot of individuals paying monthly, but then I also have a lot of institutions paying annually.
SHANE: Yeah, so let’s just keep that in mind as we go through these questions; I want to keep a little bit of an open mind here between the avatar and the person with the money, so that we can really dial in on how – not only – you got a product first of all, I want to tell you that, we just got to get it created.
MARNIE: Exactly.
SHANE: Your reading methodology and these trainings is it. So, what we got to figure out is, is this a reading coach, is a school going to buy this on a school-wide level which, I think, might be an amazing thing, or are we giving this to people who want a tutoring program at home for their kid or something who is struggling reader. I don’t know, but let’s just keep that in mind. We know what the problem is and we know it does solve the problem, let’s just make sure we got the right person in mind as we go through your questions, okay?
MARNIE: Mm-hmm, thank you.
JOCELYN: All right Marnie, so let’s get started with your first question.
MARNIE: So, I was thinking, I would be using routine, free webinars to build my email list and lead folks to my membership site; just starting out, I have about a hundred subscribers, I’m getting two new ones each day, I wonder if I should start these webinars now to build my list, get to know my audience and get better at webinars for when I am ready to launch my membership site or should I just drop everything and get the membership site ready first?
JOCELYN: Okay, this is a ‘what came first –’
SHANE: The chicken or the egg.
JOCELYN: Right, so I would say, first of all do you have lead magnets?
MARNIE: Yes.
JOCELYN: Okay, so you do have lead magnets and these webinars would also be lead magnets.
MARNIE: Right.
JOCELYN: So for me, I think that you could probably work on the webinars and what I would do is pre-record those, so not only do you use those as lead generation, but you also use them inside of your membership area.
SHANE: Yeah.
JOCELYN: And this is what I do with Elementary Librarian; I just pre-record the webinar, I have it available to non-customers, but for my customers, I also make it available just without the sales pitch.
SHANE: So, what you can basically do is, you can kind of do both of these at the same time; like if you are gonna create like a – I mean, however your training works, are your videos going to be like PowerPoint instruction or is it going to be like you physically on camera working with a reader or –
MARNIE: Right, it’s a combination of the narrated PowerPoint and the videos of me and student.
SHANE: Demonstrating what the PowerPoint talked about basically.
MARNIE: Exactly.
SHANE: Well, what I would probably is just go ahead and create the PowerPoints and we are gonna create those videos and then like Jocelyn said, then you just – don’t do like all the PowerPoints and all the demonstration at once. Get all the PowerPoints that you plan on doing first, put those in the membership area and then you can release that video, each video individually on webinars and just let people watch those PowerPoints to get emails. And now what happens is this: publically all those instructions and PowerPoints are available, right, then you go back and you add your working, actually demonstrating with the reader, the actual techniques, that’s what you keep inside your membership area. So, in effect, you’ve released the what, “This is what you do. Oh, by the way, in my membership area this is how you do it” and you kill two birds with one stone.
MARNIE: I think I might kind of modify that where I would have like a snippet of the video, because that’s very powerful I find from the conferences that I attend, but not giving it all away like you recommend, and there’ll be more in the membership site.
SHANE: Exactly. You could totally do that; like you could – like if there’s ten steps, you release the first three in your webinar and say, ‘Hey, if you want four through ten, join now.’ So you could totally do that for – and you’ve already got a hundred emails you said; correct?
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: I would also – the first thing I would do, before you go into that product, go ahead and send them some kind of survey and ask them about what’s going on, so that gives you a little more guidance while you are creating the product. Product first though, think about the product.
JOCELYN: You need to know what people want to see for trainings also, so I will be talking to those people and say, ‘Here are few things that I am considering creating for training, do you have any suggestions of things you would also like to see?’
SHANE: Yeah, I would also suggest too, like part of those webinars, like we said, we determine we will keep some of it in the forums of course, but like, you also need specific examples for your webinars, of a kid you’ve worked with. You know, like this kid, we’ll call him Jim, that’s not his real name, but he was this kind of reader, we did this thing, I’m talking about the webinar today, and within a week, he had improved this much or whatever.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: The webinar is going to be much more about – maybe 20 minutes of content and 10 minutes of proof and then a pitch, whereas inside the membership area, we don’t have to show all the proof, we just have to show the techniques because the proof is what is going to get them in, not what is going to keep them there.
MARNIE: Perfect.
SHANE: So, this is so bizarre for us to say this, you kind of were doing everything at once, but you are just doing it in a really, really, really smart way where you ask them what they want, you create that, but then you use the product as part of your free content strategy.
MARNIE: Right. Well, and I like the pre-recorded part because that won’t take too much of my time and so I can still be building the membership site.
SHANE: Jocelyn is exclusively pre-recorded on her Elementary site.
JOCELYN: Yeah, when it comes to education, it’s not like the online marketing field where people know that webinars are supposed to be live. People in the education field, they don’t really care; I mean as long as you don’t say it’s a live webinar and you don’t show up, I mean, that’s a little bit different, that would be misleading, but if you tell people that this is a training, then it really doesn’t matter if it’s pre-recorded or if it’s live. I have people watch my pre-recorded training every single day and I make sales off of it every single day. So, I definitely recommend looking into pre-recorded webinars.
SHANE: And a real quick tip just because it’s education and teacher type space, another great thing you can do when you are advertising these is teach something productive about reading, make sure it is content-rich, and if you do that, you can say things like, hey, everyone who comes to the webinar will be given a certificate that you can try to get some PD for this, Professional Development, and that is a huge bonus for this. We don’t do it necessarily, but we know some educators that do do that in that space, and 30 minutes of PD is 30 minutes of PD and if their board will accept it, why not?
JOCELYN: I do the certificates on Elementary Librarian –
SHANE: Oh you do? Yeah. So that way it draws them in; good bonus.
MARNIE: Brilliant.
JOCELYN: And they will typically share that with other people –
SHANE: To come to the PD, so that will give you a way to get to those emails. That’s the most important thing.
MARNIE: Very cool and then they can get that when they stay to the end.
SHANE: What you do is, you have it set up where anyone who signed up for the webinar, what you do is, you send them the certificate after they showed up basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, if you use certain kinds of software, I use one called EverWebinar, if you use that software, it knows whether they stayed till the end or if they left halfway through or whatever and I always send those certificates request link if they stay all the way through.
SHANE: And you can DIY it too, you can make like a special page on your website that is not like public, and at the end of the webinar on the video, you say, “Go to this thing to get your certificate” therefore there is nowhere to click on, it is just nobody will know it unless they actually stayed till the end.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: So, it rewards the people that actually stayed through your pitch. Don’t ever give that away until you have already made your pitch –
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: – because they are going to hang on for it.
MARNIE: That’s great.
JOCELYN: All right, let’s move on to your next question.
MARNIE: Okay, I’ve posted about five, lengthy, almost epic blog posts now, and my organic traffic is still practically non-existent. For instance, I have a bounce rate of 80% and 500 monthly visitors, but almost all of them seem like random hits from spammers. So, how much content do you have to have available on your site before you can use those site statistics to judge whether or not your content is relevant and good?
SHANE: How old is your website?
MARNIE: Well, it’s been up available for over a year, but I only started putting out blog posts in December.
SHANE: Okay, that’s what matters, hold on December –
JOCELYN: Yeah, Google is not gonna start linking you until you’ve been around a lot more and are updating a lot more frequently.
SHANE: Yeah, that’s about two months ago; from some perspective of when we are recording this, and I think that this is a common thing, like people get way, way, way too caught up in these numbers especially early on. I’ll be honest with you, we’ve in business for four years now, and I rarely look at our statistics. I rarely look at our traffic, I rarely look at like, hits and clicks and engagement; I like I have structured times where I might do that, like every two weeks, but in general, the only statistic I care about is how much people bought that day.
MARNIE: Okay.
SHANE: So, like, you are way too young and early in the process here to even worry about traffic because you’ve got six months of content creation, six months – you got to get your product done, you have so many more important things to prioritize right now. I would not spend one minute looking at statistics for the next six months until you get the real things that matter in place, like you offer, you get people on your email list, and you start creating content – create a consistent schedule, release a blog post every week, stop writing epic blog posts for one thing –
MARNIE: Yes.
SHANE: – yeah, just batch them, release them once a week and let’s work on things that matter and not worry about the stats.
JOCELYN: The most important thing right now, as far as blog posts go, you need to get them regularly scheduled; that’s what Google likes –
SHANE: Consistency.
JOCELYN: – you need to do some keyword research; inside our membership area, there’s a keyword research video that shows you how to find what people are searching for in your space. You can also ask our audience, that’s a great idea, what are things you want to learn about –
SHANE: You got a hundred people there waiting to give you answers.
MARNIE: Yeah.
JOCELYN: Make a list and start writing them, but don’t write them one a week, you need to write like five a day and schedule them out. So that way, you can free up your time to work on other things.
SHANE: Yeah, so the moral of the story here is, way too early in the game to even worry about that; you know, it was 13 months before we made any real money, you know what I mean?
MARNIE: Mm-hmm.
SHANE: – and really could think about like saying, ‘Hey this is a real business, we can quit our jobs’ and stuff like that; 18 months before we felt really stable. So regardless of when you started the blog, you are only two months into your content generation and we’ve got bigger fish to fry.
JOCELYN: And don’t waste time writing these eipc blog posts either; I know people say to do that and you know what, that’s fine, but you don’t have to do that. 200-400 words is perfectly fine for a week to week blog post.
SHANE: If you are writing blog posts that are that big, those are probably multiple blog posts, to be honest with you.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: Like for every topic there’s probably five bullets under that topic, each bullet should be its own blog post so that you have more chances to write more pages in Google.
MARNIE: Oh okay; well I can be happy about that; I got a couple out there, like my key – I don’t know, my key selling –
SHANE: Tell-Google-what-your-site-is-about posts, basically.
MARNIE: Yeah, so now that that’s done, I can do the short ones.
SHANE: Yeah, for sure.
JOCELYN: Yeah, exactly, and you just have to remember that those are doors and chair websites so just make sure that when people land on one, they understand what your site is about even from a blog post page. It’s really important, we’ve been talking about this to some of our one-on-one clients recently. You need to make sure that the purpose of your site is very obvious [Crosstalk] what page someone might land on.
SHANE: Yeah.
MARNIE: Okay, good advice.
SHANE: So don’t stress.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: Don’t look at your traffic, it’s totally irrelevant right now.
MARNIE: That’s good; good to know.
SHANE: All right, let’s jump into your third question here.
MARNIE: Okay, so I’m looking to the future and I’m wondering if you had a fledgling membership site – my future, your past, if you had a fledgling membership site and a new virtual assistant for five hours per week, what would you most likely have him or her do?
SHANE: What do you think Jocelyn? Did you just hire a VA?
MARNIE: No, I’m not there yet, but I want to –
SHANE: It’s on your radar?
MARNIE: – yeah, where should I start planning what I have to do that I should pass off?
JOCELYN: The first thing that I had a virtual assistant do for me is customer service, but since we don’t have a ton of customers right now, that is probably not going to be the best use of someone’s time. So, I mean, for you, I might even think about hiring someone to write some articles for you –
SHANE: That would be a great use of your money.
JOCELYN: – free up your time to work on other things, more specifically your paid product, that’s more important to get out there and to be working on. So, instead of spending time working on these little things, you could maybe work on some of the bigger things and the way that I did this starting out, is that I would pay people in my audience to write blog posts for me. So, I would put out there, “Hey, I’m looking for someone to write an article, I’ll pay you, say 25 dollars per article if anyone is interested.” And I had a few people jump onboard and say they were interested in that. So that might be an easier solution for you than like hiring someone even on a part time basis.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: Here’s how you evaluate this; like basically you look at all the things in your business and you think about the things that are going to make you the money first. If there is any task in your business that is preventing you from doing the actual tasks that help you make money, then that is what you should outsource, that is what you should delegate.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: So if you are looking at something like okay, right now, just looking at your situation, you’ve got to get this product done; that is mission critical because that is what is going to make the money.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: So what prevents you from doing that? If it’s installing WordPress plugins or something like that, then that should be outsourced. If it’s creating your website, then that should be outsourced. If it’s “Oh man, I got to write some blog posts to keep some content coming out” well, what if I just created some topics and hired someone to write me eight of them, that buys me eight weeks so I can work on my product. So, always evaluate your business from the top level down and say, what is going to make me money? That is what I should do because I’m the business-owner and everything else should be put in one or two piles, either ‘delete it’ or ‘delegate it’ at that point. So, also I like to look at things that we are doing in our business; if I do something three times, if I ever do any task three times, that is immediately something that I look for our team and say, “Who can I give this too?” If I do it once, okay, I’ll do it. If I do it twice, well, maybe it was just a fluke and it came up twice. If I do it a third time, it’s definitely probably going to come up again over and over, so that is something I am immediately going to put on the delegation list as soon as possible.
MARNIE: Mm-hmm.
SHANE: So start evaluating all your tasks; a great way to do this is just get a bunch of post-it notes, like a pack of post-it notes, clear your kitchen table and write down everything you got to do and put them on ‘Delete’, ‘Delegate’ and ‘Do’ columns and say, what is really relevant? Like for example, here’s at task I can show you right now, looking at all of your statistics every day. We are going to put that in the ‘Delete’ column and throw that post-it note away.
JOCELYN: You know, what’s funny is that we, even now, don’t really look at those numbers, rarely ever.
SHANE: So, that’s a task that we are going to delete, but now eventually when your business grows big enough, you can put that under someone else’s column and they can look at the stats and just give you a report. And then you look at all the tasks that you do two or three times a week, that goes under the ‘Delegate’ which might be the VA for five hours a week you are going to hire, and then you look under the ‘Do’ that is the most critical things that you have to do. Also too, only hiring a VA for five hours a week, that is going to limit the tasks that you can give that person. We have fulltime virtual assistants that only work for us. So, vetted these people, we hired these people to keep them long-term, they are more capable than someone who might just be picking up normal things. So, whereas one VA could do legitimate customer service, talking to customers, another VA might only be responsible for helping someone with their password or something.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: So, you are going to have to evaluate the skill set of what you can actually delegate to this person before you can do that.
JOCELYN: And you might just baby-step into it; you know, some of the other ways that is talked about by maybe just hiring an article writer or some other task in your business –
SHANE: You might just get something like say you got your plugins and all that stuff or change the colors on your website and that gets on your nerves, that might be something like you get a company like wpcurve.com, they do small WordPress jobs, 79 bucks a month. That’s cheaper than a VA. So, start looking at some of those solutions as well, as you are figuring out what you want to outsource to free up your time with your product. But where you are at and where a lot of our listeners are at right now that are listening to the show, you probably don’t need to hire anyone right this second, just stop doing anything but creating your product.
JOCELYN: Yeah, you could a lot of things just by batching content and having laser focus towards creating your product. I think you could go a long way just doing those two things. I don’t think right now is the time to hire a VA and in fact, I don’t really recommend that anyone hire a virtual assistant until you can make a list of things that they would be doing on a normal basis and that they could like actually put times to and that is what I do; Shane and I kind of fight about this a little bit, because he just wants to hire a bunch of people.
SHANE: I just hire everyone; I hire all the people.
JOCELYN: Yeah, I’m like, “No, we have to have these people things to do.” So, I would recommend having a very concrete list of things for them to do before you try to hire one.
SHANE: Also remember that – I know you listen to podcasts, you hang out with us in the forums, there’s other people in the forums that have virtual assistants, that’s a common, you know, thing that we all talk about in the community, but where we are and where you are is a little different.
MARNIE: Very.
SHANE: Like, there’s tasks in our business that if we didn’t do them, tens of thousands of people would notice immediately. Right now, while your audience is small and while your hits are small, you can kind of, put some things on the backburner right now to focus on more important things without hiring anyone.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: Like, you could take a couple of weeks to make your product and then go back and make sure your plugins got updated, no big deal.
MARNIE: Right.
SHANE: So, don’t stress out about it, don’t think you have to hire a VA; if you got some things that are getting on your nerves, by all means get one because it is not super-expensive, but just make sure you know exactly what they are going to do because you evaluated all the tasks in your business.
MARNIE: That’s good advice; I really like the process you suggested. I know I wasn’t going to do that now, but I am having ambitious hopes that if fill the membership with a few people, I just don’t want to be a crazy lady.
SHANE: Oh no, you want to reinvest immediately, the first money that you make for sure into something like that for sure.
MARNIE: Okay.
SHANE: All right, I think we got time for one more question Marnie, so do you have anything else that you need some help with in your business right now?
MARNIE: Well, I was just playing around with Facebook and I found out that I could get ‘likes’ for a quarter a ‘like’ and that was kind of fun, but I don’t know if that is of any value.
SHANE: No.
JOCELYN: No.
SHANE: That is not of any value.
MARNIE: Okay.
SHANE: That is no value at all.
MARNIE: Okay.
SHANE: The only thing that you should ever be trying to get is conversions.
MARNIE: Could you not retarget back to them or they still like a very iffy audience –
SHANE: No, you should never ever buy ‘likes’ you should never, ever buy any kind of engagement like that. We don’t focus on our social media followings at all because I can go target any audience I want in America when I’m ready to send to a sales page to buy something. So there’s no reason to invest in building an audience.
JOCELYN: Well, because you built it on that platform; if you pay for a Facebook like, then Facebook owns that like. You can’t contact that person how you want to contact them because Facebook doesn’t allow you to do that. So, that is why we don’t recommend buying ‘likes’ ever. If you want to get people to sign up for your email list, that’s a conversion and that’s fine, I don’t have a problem with you paying to do that and the side benefit of doing that is that people will also like your page.
SHANE: Yeah.
JOCELYN: So you can get some ‘likes’ from paying for conversions but we always recommend paying for conversions than likes.
SHANE: There is a difference between social media following like ‘likes’ and traffic; buying ‘likes’ doesn’t buy traffic; that buys Facebook more traffic ‘cause that’s people engaging on their platform. There is nothing wrong with buying traffic, that’s people who actually come to your site to get targeted, but whenever you run an ad on Facebook, there is always a ‘like’ button for your page with that ad. So when you are buying traffic, like you got an actual thing that you are bringing people to, that is fine, but you’ll get likes from that because some of those people will like your page and click your link. But you never just want to try to buy likes and build your social media following, don’t ever do that.
MARNIE: All right –
SHANE: Buying traffic is okay, but don’t even pay a dime for traffic until you’ve got something to sell, because why do that? You are not investing in anything. That would be like me going and buying a newspaper ad that I’m gonna have a cook-out and everyone just come and eat my food. You know what I’m saying? Now, if they were coming and I was like, selling steaks, well, come on over, backyard’s open. But I’m not selling anything so there’s no reason for me to buy the advertising to get everybody to come over; okay?
MARNIE: Mm-hmm, that’s good. Well, so I can just work pretty rapidly on that webinar and be advertising that way.
SHANE: You want to work on the product. Work on the thing you want to sell and simultaneously create the webinar content.
MARNIE: Right.
JOCELYN: Exactly. You always want to be moving towards an opt-in to lead to a sale. That’s the most import thing. So, with all those things in mind, I know we kind of threw a lot at you during this 30-minute call, but we always ask our Flipped Podcast participants for one action step that you are planning on taking saying the next 24-48 hours to move your online business further.
MARNIE: I think I can survey my small audience and get a better sense about how I should market to them and what I should create and that will lead me towards the webinar and the product, which I need to be laser-like focused on.
JOCELYN: That’s right; I like to hear you say that, that’s my favorite thing, laser focus.
SHANE: That is perfect. And if you want to create the survey, like type up a bulleted list, head over to the forums in Flip Your Life and we’ll check it out for you to see if you are leaving out any questions that might be important for your audience, okay?
MARNIE: Excellent, thank you.
JOCELYN: Of course. And you know, I think a lot of times people, they sort of underestimate their small audience, but of even a few hundred people, if even ten of them write you back and give you some ideas, that gives you a solid direction to go on. Don’t discount that small list because their opinions are very important. They signed for your list for a reason, so let’s use that feedback and make something productive out of it.
MARNIE: Mm-hmm, I understand, that’s good.
SHANE: All right, Marnie, thank you so much for being on the show today, we can’t wait to see what you do next and if you need any help, we’ll be over in the forums.
MARNIE: Thank you, both.
***
SHANE: Super call today with one of our Flip Your Life community members; we would love for you to be a member of our community as well. If you would like to join our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can show you how to join today.
JOCELYN: It’s now time to move into our Can’t-Miss Moments segment. These are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at a normal, nine-to-five job.
SHANE: This week’s Can’t-Miss Moment is taking our kids to the matinee of Kung-Fu Panda 3. Our kids have really been looking forward to this movie and we got to go on a weekday to a matinee, so of course, nobody was at the theater. We had the entire theater completely to ourselves. I think our kids think we rent the theater out just for them because whenever we go to the movies, there’s never anybody there because we always go to the matinee.
JOCELYN: As an introvert, that is something that is really important to me because I have my own personal space, so –
SHANE: Even for me, there’s a space between us sometimes at the movie – no, I’m just kidding.
JOCELYN: Yeah, that is actually a good idea. So, I don’t really like going to the movies a lot of times just because there’s so many people, it’s so packed, but just doing what we do and when we have a snow day or something special, it’s nice to be able to just go and take our kids and do fun things with them and that is something that we probably wouldn’t have been able to do before we started our online businesses. So, that’s pretty cool.
SHANE: And I love going to the movies; it’s one of my absolute favorite things to do because of course, the extrovert loves being in the crowd of people, but I do really cherish the times that we get to go with the kids when nobody is there because, you know, we get to kind of prop our feet up, we get to hang back and do whatever we want in the movie theater and we can just kind of watch the show, spread out, throw our jackets everywhere, eat pop corn and have a good time. And I love doing it on snow days because it’s just no one else is really out and about, we can take the kids to lunch; we like to say, when our kids have a snow day, we get a snow day. So, we just shut everything down when they are home and that is a great time. Before we go today guys, just want to share a Bible verse with you; Jocelyn and I draw a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible and we want to pass that along. Today’s Bible verse is one of my favorites and it comes from Ecclesiastes 11: 4 and the Bible says, “He who observes the wind and waits for all conditions to be favorable will not sow, and he who regard the clouds will not reap.” Now, what this Bible verse is saying guys, it’s a very fancy way to say, it ain’t got to be perfect. You can’t wait around in your online business for all conditions to be favorable. You can’t wait for the right opportunity for the clouds and the wind to blow by the perfect chance. You just have to take action. So, go out there and sow the seeds and get ready to reap the harvest. 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 and do whatever it takes to flip your life. We’ll see you then.
JOCELYN: Bye.
Jodie says
Just wanted to say thanks – loved this episode ! I’ve just made the decision to automate my current training webinars and use everwebinar so was really pleased to hear Jocelyn mention she uses it. I like to give PD certificates to so I think using the ‘only those that stayed until the end’ tact is great. Do you still send these out manually to the registrants though or can it be set up automatically?
i’m a bit concerned about whether my audience (early childhood educators) will still pay for the webinars if automated but at moment they do purchase recordings so I guess not much different and it will save me so much time!
Really get so much value from your podcasts guys as it is so nice to be able to make the connections with other entrepreneurs trying to develop in the education field as it is often so different to the online marketing etc world. Love what you have achieved, thanks for sharing.
Good luck Marnie – so many opportunities for your focus area, sounds like a lot of doors opening for you up ahead 🙂
Jocelyn Sams says
Hi Jodie! Look up Youtube videos on Google Sheets and Autocrat. It’s how I use automation to send the certificates. 🙂