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Learn how a flamenco dance instructor took her business online
The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast brings on our members from Flip Your Life online community, this week we are talking with Rina who has been a flamenco dancer for over 20 years.
She also teaches out of a studio in LA in the evening and thought she could try and figure out a way to market flamenco dancing online so she would have more time at home with her young children.
Rina started a membership site where she delivers coaching videos to other teachers on how to teach Flamenco she currently has 33 members.
We walk through strategies she can begin implementing to convert more of her target audience into subscribers as well as how to split her time between her members and promoting her content to get new members.
Answering her questions we help Rina understand that while growing her email lists it is important to focus on quality customers over quantity asking her current members and email subscribers why it is they are a part of her online community.
You will learn
- How to grow your membership community online.
- What to focus on to expand your email list.
- Facebook is not the end all for advertising.
- YouTube is a great platform to give your instructional videos to your audience for free.
- How long should your video be online to convert them into customers.
- Ways to strategically get in front of your target audience.
- Quality over Quantity will always be better when comes to your customers.
- Why it is important to batch your online content.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show
Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family!
Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!
Can’t Miss Moments
Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family.
You can connect with S&J on social media too!
Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show!
If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week!
Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! On today’s podcast, we help Rina take her Flamenco dance website 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 everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be back with you again this week. For those of you who may be new to our show, the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast is a little bit different. We do not bring guests on our show and Jocelyn and I, most of the time, don’t cover topics. We actually bring on members from our Flip Your Life community. This is our coaching community for online entrepreneurs. We help them live, on air, with their online business and then we share those recordings with all of you out there who are listening today, to help you with your online business from that discussion. We are really excited about our guest today, her name is Rina Orellana, and I totally said that correctly and I am very proud of myself for that. We just want to welcome her to the show. Rina, welcome.
RINA: Hi, thanks for having me. I am excited to be here.
JOCELYN: Yeah, we are very excited to have you on as well. You’ve been a member of our Flip Your Life community for a little while now, and we are excited to have you here today. Tell us a little bit about you and what you do online.
RINA: Sure, I am a flamenco dancer. I have been dancing for over 20 years and I have been teaching in Los Angeles for the last 12 years or so and performing. I have my own dance company and I teach out of a studio. I also have unmarried, and I two kids, so I get to be at home with the kids during the day. They are ten and eight years old, but doing the mommy thing during the day and then the flamenco thing at night was pretty exhausting. Now that they are a little bit older, I wanted to expand more, but teaching more at night just wasn’t feasible. I finally thought, well trying something online, and all last year, I was looking at different ways of starting some sort of online marketing something. Then never really considered flamenco, because I thought who would want to do that? But then I started listening to you guys and thought, well, maybe people do. So, you helped me create the site and immediately I had people join, but now I’m at a standstill and just wanting to see how I can reach more people.
SHANE: Awesome. I think out of all the episodes we have done, I don’t think anyone has ever started any online marketing podcast with “I am a flamenco dancer.” That’s amazing really because it’s one of those things, like we used to tell a story; we knew a guy who painted gourds, like the actual fruit, but he had a business. That’s how he made his entire livelihood because lo and behold, 10,000 times a month, people search for painted gourds and order them online. Now I can add to that story. If you are a flamenco dancer or a gourd painter, yes, even you can start a membership site and create an online business.
RINA: Totally.
SHANE: All right, so what you said, just a couple of follow-up questions here, I mean, it was very interesting – how many members do you have right now because we help Rina start her membership site, where she can deliver coaching videos, like how to do flamenco dancing to people. How many members do you have right now?
RINA: Right now I have 33.
SHANE: That’s amazing and that actually is something that stood out to me because we find that people, when they start, you know, we put everything in place, we get everything ready and then we do a quick push, and we move to get people in. We find that somewhere between 30 and 60 is that okay, we’ve got it started and let’s regroup and grow point. It’s very interesting that you see that little plateau right now.
RINA: Right.
SHANE: The cool thing is though, when you get to 60, there’s a big growth, when you get to 100, there’s more growth, and it starts building on top of it and each niche is a little different. First of all, congratulations because I know just starting from nothing and then moving to a 30-something person membership with month recurring revenue, that is awesome. It is just amazing that we have watched your progress and you have done such a good job, which is taking action. You should be commended for that and I’m positive that we are going to grow this thing even bigger.
RINA: Thank you.
JOCELYN: We say that all the time; I don’t think sometimes people are happy enough with how far they’ve come and you have come a really long way, so that’s awesome. So, let’s talk about how we can help you to grow this even further. Let’s jump into your first question.
RINA: Well, my goal is to get 100 members by summer and I know the first members that I got, they knew me from my blog. I have a blog for the last several years and they joined my list from there. The new members were from that blog and some of the subscribers are even former students of mine. What would be the best way for me to grow my list then, since I wanted to expand more? Should I focusing more on Facebook ads that would lead to my blog post in hopes that they join my list? Or should I focus more on creating some sort of a webinar?
SHANE: It’s very interesting. I think we need to back up a step here because we know for sure that the best content for you is video because you are teaching dancing and things like that. We can work lead magnet strategies like that. Even your blog posts can have a video component where people can see the instruction. I think that’s the most important thing. Once people see you teaching it on video, it is not a huge leap then to say, “My membership has all these videos like this, but more. So let’s go get more of that.” I think the best thing to do is to get people to content, where they can see you teach, and then we’ve got to figure out the best ad platform for you. Facebook is great, but I don’t want anyone to ever think Facebook is the end-all and be-all of advertising. Search is such a huge thing for really specialty niches because when someone wants to learn how to do the flamenco dancing thing, they are going to go search for ‘Flamenco dancing lessons’ or ‘Flamenco dancing instructional videos’ or something like that. So I think that we might want to explore multiple pads here and figure out where we can get your instructional videos in front of the most people. Does that make sense?
RINA: Yeah.
JOCELYN: I think maybe even a YouTube channel could be a win in this. Maybe you could have some free videos and say, “If you would like to learn more about this particular dance move or this particular dance step, check out my website and sign up for my email list.”
SHANE: YouTube has an advertising platform of its own. You can create flamenco dancing videos and then you can literally go into YouTube and target other dancing videos in flamenco or that are related to that style because I know in dance, everything is kind of related to whatever. I’m sure there’s parallels or horizontals and vertical things that you can go after this say, this is like flamenco or someone who likes this would also like flamenco. What’s the famous flamenco dancer’s name that we talked about in the forums the other day with you?
RINA: Carmen Amaya.
SHANE: Carmen Amaya; you can target anything on Facebook about Carmen Amaya because I’m sure he’s in tons of different videos –
JOCELYN: We’re talking about YouTube right?
SHANE: YouTube yeah, that’s what I meant. Go into YouTube and you can target hit any video of Carmen Amaya, and they would see your add before or after those videos. So that’s the big thing we have to figure out right now is, how do we get in front of more people that we know are interested in flamenco?
RINA: And I actually have a YouTube channel with some free videos and some traffic gets to my site, but not a lot. I just have to figure out a way to optimize that and definitely look into the advertising.
SHANE: It’s more videos than money is going to be the thing that fixes that problem.
JOCELYN: I think you also need to be more intentional; I actually have not watched your YouTube channel, but like you just need to make sure you are always saying, “Hey if you want more free stuff, go join my list” and there should be a link there for people to join your list easily.
SHANE: The thing about online marketing that is really different is, people consume content so fast on online, that – people are just ADD and scatterbrain when they are using the computer, because they got 16 tabs open, Facebook is binging, Skype is ringing, and then they are still trying to look at what they are trying to watch on YouTube. You have to be the person that distracts them in the direction you want them to go on everything you do. If you just have videos on YouTube, that’s fine, but do you have call-outs? Do you have links in the description? At the end of your video, have you got a set up to show them where to go next, to tell them what to do next because if you don’t tell them what to do, they are going to do something else.
JOCELYN: Or they are going to click to another video or something like that. So you got to give them something easy to do. We also need to check the length of the video. Usually three to five minutes is the standard for lead generation.
SHANE: Yeah, a powerful strategy that you could use, because you have videos in your membership area, is – people do this all the time for exercise videos or yoga or everything else, they’ll take a video that’s like say you got 15-minute video on a certain kind of move in flamenco or whatever, they’ll take like the first four of five minutes, or maybe the first part of that and then at the end of it is a bumper video that says, “Hey, I hope that got you started in this skill or technique. If you want to watch the rest of the video, click the link below and I’ll tell you how you can do that.” What happens is, you give people a taste of what it is. They get started, but to get to the next step, they are going to have to follow through with going to your sales page or some kind of –
JOCELYN: Or maybe you picked in the rest of it for free, if they sign up for your email list.
SHANE: Exactly. And you could even do that – that way you don’t have to create a bunch of new stuff. You can just go back to your old videos and repurpose the first few minutes of all of those videos as basically lead generation for you.
RINA: That sounds great, yeah, I like that.
SHANE: And also too, like 100 members by summer, I think you can do that, but we are going to have to move on to the next phase. We have kind of gotten your list to the point where we got the seed going with these 33 members, we are going to have to start reinvesting some of that into our ad budget because no matter if you are going to do webinars or blog content, we are going to find the people and then pay to get in front of them. That is going to be a huge part of this, driving them to this content. It’s the only way to grow your business. At a certain when with you plateau, you can go out and try and try and try and feel like you are hitting against the wall, sometimes it’s because the system is rigged that way. Facebook, Google, they all know that they make their money by getting your advertising revenue. So the game is telling you at this point, there’s more people, but it’s going to cost you to get in front of them and you just want to get it strategically where it doesn’t become cost-prohibitive.
RINA: Right okay.
SHANE: What sounds better to you? Do you want to do webinars or do you want to drive them to content and a constant way to find that system?
RINA: Well, I think with the webinar part, I would definitely have to be –I can see how it can just be a pre-recorded class since it would be built on [Inaudible 0:11:58] little bit difficult to videotape a live class in dance studio, just to have everything sound and look okay. So I could see how a pre-recorded webinar or workshop would be good, but also like repurposing a lot of content or the videos that I do have and creating smaller snippets of it, put those on YouTube or wherever else sounds good to me, kind of like a two-pronged attack.
SHANE: Another thing you could do is have the – if you are going to do this in an automated way, what do we use, Ever Webinar?
JOCELYN: Mm-hmm.
SHANE: Yeah, you can set up automated webinars so your entire sales funnel could look like this: you could have a video on YouTube that’s like the first five minutes of one of your lessons. Then you would use your advertising budget to target other flamenco videos to make sure your stuff is coming up. Then it says, “Would you like to watch the rest of this lesson? Click the link below,” which goes to a page that collects emails. It’s like, all right, here’s this email. To watch the rest of this video, put in your email address and then they’ll be sent to a page that is basically your automatic webinar where you give them that one lesson. You give them the rest of it and then at the end of that, you say, “I can show you how to dance like Carmen Amaya. All you have to do is join my membership, I’ll work personally with you, you can record videos, post them in the forums, I’ll review your technique,” blah-blah-blah all the sales stuff. That’s the way your sales funnel would look from advertising to the free video to the lead magnet, which is the rest of the video and then they pay you to get access to all of your other content. So does that help with the plan going forward – and we can flesh this out in the forums in the community.
RINA: Yeah that sound great; it just makes my head spin, but in a great way.
JOCELYN: Well, I was going to say, I don’t even know for sure that you need to use Ever Webinar at this point. I think you could even go to like a private YouTube video or private Vimeo video. It doesn’t have to be that complicated.
SHANE: It could just be a hidden page on your website with the free video and a sales button at the bottom.
RINA: Oh okay.
JOCELYN: So don’t get too caught up in all these system and things like that.
SHANE: Yeah, the main thing is that you just want to get them to a video and get their email.
JOCELYN: Let’s just fix those YouTube videos and make it where it’s sort of in a progression rather than they just watch it one time and move on.
RINA: Right okay.
JOCELYN: So let’s move on to your second question.
RINA: Well, I guess it’s like a second part to that whole Facebook thing; so is growing the list more important than getting sales? If I do focus on growing the list, what would I do to generate sales? Would that be ads on Facebook targeting past visitors and then sending them to a sales landing page?
SHANE: The chicken and the egg.
RINA: Yeah.
SHANE: This is a really tough question because just the way that online marketing is presented, to us, we are always really focused on quality over quantity. I would rather have ten people join my email list next week and five of them buy our product, than to just throw a bunch of money and content and time out and get a thousand followers and email subscribers, but none of them buy. So, I think what you got to do is just focus – don’t focus so much on growing the list, focus on finding the customers that will buy your stuff.
JOCELYN: The right customers.
SHANE: Yeah, that is what you are looking for. If you look at it from kind of that angle, you are not going to get caught up in oh so-and-so’s list is bigger than mine or my list isn’t converting like theirs is and things like that. We have always had crazy high and different numbers than everybody else because we are more concerned with who is on the list than just getting people on the list.
JOCELYN: We don’t have the biggest list.
SHANE: But ours is very profitable.
RINA: Right.
SHANE: So that’s what you got to look at here is, the offer is there, you got the membership, you know it sells, those 33 people, we’ve got to find more of them. So, I think what you need to focus on is, who are these people, learn more about them – I think the YouTube angle is a really good angle because if I was going to learn how to break-dance, I would go and watch break dance videos on YouTube.
JOCELYN: I think what I would do is just take her current email subscribers and ask them how did you find me? How did you discover my materials?
SHANE: Yeah, especially the members too because they have already given her money.
JOCELYN: And I think that you are going to start a trend and I think that Shane’s right, I think it probably will be video. So, once you do that research and you find out, let’s just abandon everything else for right now and go all in on that.
SHANE: And also too, to answer this question, the only thing that matters is converting a sale and you work – you have to work backwards from there and you’ll eventually get to growing your list. If you think about why these people – all right, I have a product, why did those 33 people, why did they give me their money every month to watch my videos and take my lessons, why did they originally sign up? How did they originally get to the sales page? Why and how did they give me their email? If you work backwards, by the time you figure out all these steps from your product, the list is going to grow because you are going to know exactly what to release for free, exactly how to advertise it and exactly how to target it. So, even if you only have a few people growing your list, all those people are going to be really high converting prospects.
RINA: Right.
SHANE: So, focus on that more instead of focusing on – I can get more emails, I can start an ad and I can get a thousand emails; now can I sell my product to all those emails? Maybe not. So let’s keep an eye on that quality over quantity and I think it will be easy to grow the sales while the list grows right beside it.
RINA: Okay, that’s good.
SHANE: All right, what’s your third question?
RINA: Basically needing help with dividing my time.
SHANE: We all need that.
RINA: Yeah, so there’s like taking care of my members, which means producing more videos and then there’s taking care of the subscribers who aren’t members, with new content. Then there’s finding new people to join my list or with the membership site, and so I just get bogged down and I just feel like I’m spinning plates every day without like a real plan of how I should be dividing my time.
SHANE: Yeah, the funny thing is, intuitively, you actually just told us the priority list because we push membership sites now. We want people to build recurring, stable, low energy income that they can count on month to month. This whole launch model and living on the big spurts just doesn’t sustain your personal life or your business for very long. So, when you are thinking about it like that, you have to say the most important thing in your entire revenue stream is your retention. If you’ve got holes in your bucket and you keep pouring water in the top which represents your members, it’s all just going to keep pouring out of the bottom. You got to keep all the holes plugged up first. In your priority list, your members come first because they have already told you, they want to be there and they are giving you money. Then you want to take care of the people who have given you other forms of currency, like your email subscribers or your podcast listeners, and then you want to worry about finding new people. That’s kind of how we kind of split things up. If we were going to divide it into fours, two out of the four would be for members, one out of the four for subscribers, one out of the four for finding new people. That’s kind of how you kind of organize that. Now from a time perspective, what we do is, we chunk things. So, we might have a couple of weeks of promotion but then we’ll have like four weeks of taking care of our members and then we might have a week of updating some emails or some systems or something like that. We break it up into different weeks and stuff like that.
JOCELYN: We talk about it all the time that you need to be batching content, so what I would do is, I would spend maybe a couple of days making member content for a while, then spend a couple of more days working on promotion or advertising or something like that. If you batch, you get everything finished at one them and then that frees you up to do other things moving forward.
SHANE: There are going to be times where you have to step back for a few days from your members to take care of other things. Don’t feel guilty about that. Prepare for it, batch communications, batch conversations starters, create systems that make it easier for you to take care of your members during that time so you don’t have to worry about it. Just always remember that you are going to come back to them as soon as possible because you don’t want to lose customers you have already earned.
JOCELYN: Even on days when you are working on something else, it’s just like us: I go into our forums for at least 30 minutes every morning. That’s my routine, that’s what I do every single day. Now I might be working on other stuff the rest of the day, but I always go in and take care of them first.
SHANE: And like today, this is a big take-care-of-members week for us; today we have already talked to a couple of members on podcasts, we have done a member call, we have probably both spent at least an hour in the forums, and we worked with members of our team on upgrading and improving systems within our membership. So this was not just a 30 minutes, post your answer time, this was a probably four or five-hour day that we dedicated to only members.
RINA: Right.
SHANE: But tomorrow we will be in the forums for 30 minutes, we have other things planned throughout the day because we are creating a new webinar sales funnel, so we are going to have to work on that tomorrow. You can’t do everything every day, it’s not possible. Another strategy that we use is, we worked backwards again. What’s the most important thing? Our members. We thought to ourselves, how can we take care of our members better? We can talk to them. How can we do that? On 30-minute calls. Now, how can we use that time to get more subscribers and get more members? Easy, we will talk to our members, record them and make that our podcast now. You can kind of work backwards from your members, like okay you have new lessons that you want to provide for your members every month to give them new content; that should become the next thing that goes on YouTube and in a free webinar and in a new email funnel. If somebody searches for a skill, teach that skill for your members and then repurpose that content to take care of your subscribers and to get new customers. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel for all three levels of your business. You can repurpose things
RINA: I love that. You just make it one clean line of movement for creating content; I like that.
JOCELYN: Yeah, exactly, and that is really what will start to move your business forward. You see, when you start learning that I need to do one things and make it work for multiple things. That’s really where you are going to start to notice a big difference.
SHANE: Every time we come up with a new idea, we take that idea and we don’t start with the email list, we don’t start with lead magnets, we don’t start with sales funnels, we always say, “What’s next for our members?” and then we say, “Once we create that, is there a way that we can create it that allows us to release some of it free on the blog?” That draws in more members who will want to get the rest of that content and then we say, “Now how can we create an email sequence that is totally related to this? How can we create an ad that will drive people to a webinar, that will lead then to this one piece of content that will convince them to buy the rest of the stuff we sell?” Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. We made that huge mistake when we started out, especially with Flipped Lifestyle, I mean, we would do, okay what are we going to talk about on the podcast this month? These four things. And then we are like, what are we going to do on our webinar this month? It was another thing. What are going to create a sales funnel around? Let’s make up a new sales funnel around this. We were like so overwhelmed and we finally just said no. And then one month we created an email webinar, like an email marketing webinar and then we created three podcasts that talked about what was in that webinar, and then we created a lead magnet for all those three of those podcasts and that webinar that was the same. It just changed everything to help us move forward in our business without spending so much time.
RINA: Yeah, and it makes so much sense.
JOCELYN: Yeah. I mean, it all goes back to just make your content help your users and first that goes to your subscribers or customers, and next it goes to people who follow you. So, if you are creating content that helps them, that answers their questions, then you are probably answering other people’s questions as well and you are not having to reinvent the wheel every time that you need to make some new content.
SHANE: Yeah, and also too, don’t feel bad about it because it’s not intuitive because it’s not what most people say you should do online. People are always saying, “Oh just create as much content as possible. You always got to be releasing content, new content, share this, share that, start 15 social media networks,” you know, everybody online pushes us in so many different directions that we lose track of that linear, most important thing, which is take care of the people that are giving you money and sell more. So, it’s not intuitive to think that way, but once you figure it out, the whole thing falls into place and it’s like dominos that you can just push down.
RINA: Yes.
JOCELYN: Okay so you seemed a little overwhelmed.
SHANE: It’s amazing what three questions can do to someone.
RINA: No, I mean, in my head it sounds like it all makes sense. I totally understand it, it makes sense, it sounds fabulous and just trying to think okay, where to start.
SHANE: I’ll tell you exactly where to start: in the Action forum in the Flip Your Life community with the next step.
JOCELYN: Exactly, and in fact, we always as people, you know, based on what we talked about today, what is the one thing that you are going to take action on, say, in like the next 24-48 hours based on what we talked about today?
RINA: I would say actually just getting classes or videos, instructional videos that are in my membership site and creating a little snippet one or two minutes, to create make that as a lead magnet and put that on YouTube and then also as a blog post as well.
SHANE: That’s great. That’s perfect.
JOCELYN: I think that sounds great; I think that once you start doing that to all the content that you already have out there, you are going to see a big increase. Just be more intentional about asking people to come signup on your list or join your community.
SHANE: So go and find that video and go make a post and an action plan, and let’s focus on that for the rest of the week. We’ll help you with any of the particulars about like how you can make that, where should it point, what should the page look like and do, and then once we get that in place, we’ll get that done this week and then next week, we can move to the next step. Eventually, you will have a whole sales funnel created around that one piece of content.
RINA: Right, fabulous.
SHANE: All right, well, thank you so much for being on the show today; we hope that helped and we love learning about flamenco dance through Rina Orellana on the Flip Your Life community. So thanks for being on the podcast today.
RINA: My pleasure, thank you.
JOCELYN: It gave me the opportunity to look up things about flamenco dance so I could post them in reference to things you had asked about. So that was fun too, but thanks for being on today.
RINA: Thank you.
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SHANE: What a great call with one of our Flip Your Life community members, we’d love to have you in our Flip Your Life community as well. If you would like to become a member of the Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can help you with your online business too.
JOCELYN: All right, next we are going to move into the Can’t Miss Moments segment of our show. These are moments that we were able to experience that we might have missed if we were working at nine-to-five jobs still.
SHANE: This week’s Can’t Miss Moment is Ana Joe’s final dance competition. She is just now wrapping up her first year on a traveling dance team. It was a lot of fun; we have spent many, many, many, many hours watching dance competitions. It’s one of those sports where you go and you watch six hours of competitions and your kid gets to do it for four minutes. It was an awesome experience and Ana Joe had a lot of fun.
JOCELYN: And it’s a Can’t Miss Moment because we were able to stay in the place where the dance competition was. It was extremely expensive because it was a very busy weekend, and a lot of the parents that we danced with, they were not able to stay there because it was so expensive. So I was just thankful to be able to stay in the same place. Her competition this time was super early in the morning; we had to be there at seven o’clock,
SHANE: There was like two hours of make-up and prep before this.
JOCELYN: And it was just really nice to be able to be in the same place and thanks to our online business, we were able to that.
SHANE: And it was cool for the whole season because we both got to go to every single event. We never had any kind of time conflicts that prevented us from watching Ana during her dance competition. We got to go to every single one of them and we are really thankful we got to do that. Before we sign off, we like to close every show with a verse from the Bible. Today’s Bible verse comes from Philippians 4:6 and the Bible says, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving present your request to God.” And we want to point out on this episode with this verse, one thing we do do in our Flip Your Life community is, we have prayer threads every week. If you need some prayer or you love for us to pray for you, let us know that we would love to do that for you. Don’t be anxious. Go to God and he will take care of anything that is bothering you today. 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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