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Need ideas on how to establish your online brand using organic traffic and Facebook ads?
Listening in on today’s episode might give you ideas as we help our guest take her business to the next level.
Our guest on today’s podcast is Karim Morato, one of our Flip Your Life community members.
This dynamic homeschool mom and certified Spanish teacher, aiming to have more time to focus on her children, created an online Spanish curriculum membership for homeschoolers – primarily those between 7th to 12th grade.
Señora Morato has been teaching Spanish for over 16 years. Her passion in teaching students a second language, along with the fulfillment she gets from seeing them appreciate a new culture, has driven her to explore the online arena even further.
Through her online curriculum she enables these curious minds to learn and understand Spanish right from the comfort of their home.
Building a solid membership is a labor of love.
There is no instant way to do it, but there are limitless ways to get to it – we help Karim find the one most suited for her and her audience.
In this episode, we share our marketing strategies with her to get things flipping to the next level.
You will learn:
- How your WHYs help you stay focused to your goal.
- The advantage of getting information from more experienced sources.
- How progress follows those who take the leap of faith.
- Refine your target audience by investigating where the profitable traffic is.
- Ramp up your network by reaching out the similar sites/blogs.
- Investing on organic traffic.
Links and resources mentioned in today’s show:
- Flipped Lifestyle Community
- ElementaryLibrarian.com
- Bilingual Avenue
- HomeSchoolSpanishCurriculum.com
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 Karim take her homeschool Spanish website to the next level.
Shane: 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? Alright, let’s get started. What’s going on everybody? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast! Great to be back with you again this week. For those of you who may be new to our show, this is a little bit different than the other podcasts about online business, instead of bringing on guests to promote their latest book or talk about their latest website, we bring on our members from the Flip Your Life community and we help them with a live consultant call on the air to take their business to the next level, and we let you guys listen in so that you can apply the lessons learned to your own online business. We are super excited for our guest today, she is a Flip Your Life member and she actually was just a participant in our monthly mastermind. Once a quarter we take about 10 of our members into a private mastermind and really dive deep into their business with them. Our guest today is Karim Morato. I hope I said that right. Karim?
Karim: Perfect.
Shane: Say it with your Spanish accent because…
Karim: Karim Morato.
Shane: Oh, that is so beautiful.
Jocelyn: Yes, it’s so much prettier that way.
Shane: My Kentucky can’t speak accent was awful and I just butchered it, but that was beautiful the way you said it. Awesome.
Jocelyn: Alright. Karim, we know quite a lot about you because we’ve been working with you for a while, but quickly tell the audience a little bit about you, your background, and your online business.
Karim: Hey everyone! Well, I created an online Spanish curriculum membership for homeschoolers – especially 7th to 12th grade to be more specific. And basically, I’m trying to help students and parents to complete their language requirement, in this case, will be Spanish.
Shane: So basically, everyone can take Spanish in high school and then get that credit for college or whatever they have to do to graduate. So basically, you become the child’s Spanish teacher at home.
Karim: Yes.
Shane: And they get to do all the lessons on your membership site.
Karim: Yes. Well, homeschoolers, they get a curriculum. They study their subject most of the time in an independent way. So, I am basically gonna be the tutor or the teacher, not just of the student, but also for the parents if they need help.
Shane: So basically, you help provide support for the student to learn the language and then also for the parents to get them through all of the curriculum.
Karim: Yes and that’s my challenge. I’m creating video tutorials for every single concept for level 1, 2 and 3. So students can have a teacher and somebody to interact.
Jocelyn: Alright. Awesome. That sounds like a great product.
Shane: That’s an awesome product. Yeah, there’s a lot of kids out there homeschooling that need this product.
Jocelyn: So, Karim we always start with why in everything that we do in the Flipped Lifestyle. So, tell us a little bit about why you want to flip your life with online business. Are there any can’t miss moments that maybe you’re currently missing? And are you currently unhappy in your career? Or you know, what you do in your day-to-day life… Basically, what is your why?
Karim: That’s a very interesting question because I’m a little bit complicated.
Shane: It’s always complicated. Right?
Karim: I am a homeschool mom, but at the same time, I also teach in the public school. I have been teaching for 16 years, two classes every year, I take two classes or three classes. So, I have kept myself at home, homeschooling, but also in the workplace.
Shane: Okay.
Karim: So, last year I went back to school for a masters in curriculum and design. And I realized, “Wow! I need a change.” I am ready for a change. I want to change the way I do things – to teach – so I can be more at home. My kids are reaching an age that is going to be teenager years and I realized I need more time. I thought I was going to have more time for the world, but no, I realized I need more time at home. So, that was an inspiration for me to change, but then, when I started looking for opportunities, I realized I needed a business background and this is where you guys came into place.
Shane: Yeah.
Karim: I have a strong educational background, but my business background was not really well. So, this is how I found you guys.
Shane: That is an awesome way. I love it when people focus on time. I find that people who come to us and say, “Man, I just need more time to live a life with my kids. I need to be there for them,” they’re the ones that really are motivated and passionate enough to take it to the next level. A lot of times we’ll see people come to us and say, “Well, I just want to make $5000 in 3 months,” those are the people who usually back out and don’t succeed. So, you’ve got some great whys there that you’re grabbing hold of. Also, it is true that you need experience and help when you’re setting up an online business, because a lot of us are so focused on our specialty in our career –
Jocelyn: Yeah.
Shane: – that we don’t realize there’s a lot of other moving parts built around that, and I think you’ve seen that during the mastermind last month of how many moving parts there actually are in the business.
Karim: Yes and that’s true, and it’s hard to find someone that you want to partner with that share the same values that you have, and In this case, when I found you guys I was like, “Wait a minute! These guys are the real deal.”
Shane: Thank you.
Karim: I don’t usually pay for anything. I try to save money and try to read and educate myself, that after two months of just listening to everybody flipping their life, I’m like… No, I can’t do this anymore, I’m just going to join and I even joined the mastermind not even knowing what is this mastermind about.
Shane: I know. When you signed up I was like, “Who’s that?!” like she just jumped in feet first, that’s awesome.
Jocelyn: You know, we love people who are action takers. So, we love working with you. So, that’s awesome.
Shane: But isn’t it amazing though, when you invest in yourself and you do take that huge leap of faith.
Karim: Yeah.
Shane: Look at the progress you’ve made just in the last few weeks, it’s unreal because you put yourself out there and did that.
Karim: Yes and that’s true, I think, belonging to the membership… for me… also was something that I even had to fight for because when I wanted to join you guys were not accepting any more members. So, I was like, I’m gonna keep emailing until they say yes and I think that’s why finally one day you’ve gone, “Okay Karim, just follow this link.”
Shane: Yeah. I remember we had it closed ‘cause sometimes, you know, we try to control the influx so we can serve as many people as best as we can.
Karim: Yeah.
Shane: And I got that email and I was like I think she’s serious, I’m gonna send her an email. So –
Karim: Yes.
Shane: – I was like, I like opened the backdoor so you can sneak in, but I closed it again real quick.
Karim: Yes and then once I was there it was a tremendous eye opening experience, but then I had realized, I felt like the mastermind, I was moving like maybe 30 miles per hour –
Shane: Yeah.
Karim: – afterwards it has been like 80 miles per hour.
Shane: Oh, that’s not right. Exactly, it gets intense when we get down to the nitty gritty.
Jocelyn: Yeah, I love yours because you came in with pretty much –
Shane: Nothing.
Jocelyn: – just an the idea.
Shane: You had nothing. You didn’t even have a website.
Karim: Uh huh.
Jocelyn: No, she had an idea.
Shane: Yeah, that’s right.
Jocelyn: And you’ve just really thrown your inkling out there –
Shane: And it’s incredible.
Jocelyn: – and got your site up now.
Shane: I think your website’s prettier than ours. I swear it is.
Jocelyn: Yeah. That’s probably true. So, alright… Well, Karim let’s help you to take your online business to the next level. What is the biggest challenge that you’re facing in your online business right now?
Karim: What I need from you guys is an idea of how you will handle the marketing strategy for my business. So, I’m brand new, nobody knows me. So, what will be your marketing strategy if you were on my shoes?
Shane: I think, the first thing that I tell everybody to do usually is we have a well defined avatar here, we know who we’re looking for. We’re looking for the homeschool parent of the high school aged child who needs help with their Spanish curriculum. So, we’ve got a really good idea. What we have to do now is investigate, where are those people already hanging out online. You don’t just start an ad to every person in the United States with a high school kid, maybe we’d go on Facebook and we look for groups of homeschool parents who are in co-ops, maybe we’d look for those different organizations – just support groups for homeschoolers or homeschool Spanish, things like that. We look for similar podcasts, we look… similar pages and websites about your topic and maybe, we’d look online and we see what searches people are making. There’s probably people searching for Spanish homeschool curriculum, and once we get the grouping, we have an idea where that traffic is already flowing, that’s traffic that we need to jump in front of.
Jocelyn: And also, you’d like to take advantage of free opportunities. I think that there is a twofold way to do this: you do it both organically and also paid. If you’re going organic, the good thing about education is that there are a lot of free things out there, that you can offer your services as well. So, look for opportunities to give somebody something for free that would get them interested in your paid offer. So… For instance, I have a lot of things for Elementary Librarian on Teachers Pay Teachers. I don’t actually sell anything on there, I just put them on there for free, basically just to get awareness for my product. So, you might want to consider doing something like that. Also, I found a lot of wikis, that’s W-I-K-I, and there are a lot of those in education and also other areas too that you can get on there, sorta like wikipedia. You can edit the wiki and you can add in some of your free resources there. Again, just to help gain awareness of your brand and your site. So, that’s definitely some good free ways to do that.
Shane: People think it all has to be online and we’ve talked to you a little bit about this in the mastermind, I think that major traffic strategy might just be reaching out locally where you are for people to actually come in to your membership. We talked about finding all the homeschool co-ops that are physically within 30 minutes of where you live, and go to them and say, “Would you like to be a beta member? Would you like to present this to all of your homeschool parents?” and say, “Hey! This is an awesome resource, I’ll give you a 50% discount.” Anything you can do to see those first members into your membership. Let them get in there, start the conversation, start breaking things and finding all the holes. Reach out locally and go physically to people, I’m sure as a homeschool mom, you know homeschoolers –
Karim: Okay.
Shane: – go to those people and say, “I want you to be in on the first person in my membership.” Now, don’t do it for free, that’s a huge mistake is to say, “I’m gonna let the first 20 members into my membership for free.” I know it’s a huge mistake because we did that, and it was disastrous for us and for them. Most of the free people never followed through. They didn’t take advantage of the resources, but when people paid for… they assigned value to it and they really used it to do whatever they were needing to do. So, tell these people you’ll give them a great discount because we have to have some sale. You gotta say, “This is going to be $50 a month, but I’ll let all the parents in your co-op in for 25.”
Jocelyn: And I was also going to suggest that you look into local conferences for homeschoolers, that maybe within say like a hundred miles of you. This is a really good opportunity, you might get even get a booth, you could offer to speak at that –
Shane: Oh, that’s a great idea.
Jocelyn: – and that’s something that I’ve done in the past for Elementary Librarian that works really well. It’s a good way to get your brand in front of a lot of different people, and then you can offer those people a special incentive as well.
Shane: And also to reach out to partner with people in your space. I think that people are kind of afraid to this sometimes, because in the offline world it’s very competitive and if the guy across the street is selling similar stuff to you it’s kind of a rivalry or competition. We’ve talk about Marianna Du Bosq who runs the Bilingual Avenue podcast, she would be someone you could maybe talk to and you all could share ideas, maybe come on each other’s podcasts, write blog posts about each other. See if you can go into other places where there are already Spanish speaking people or Spanish speaking homeschoolers and get yourself in front of these other audiences and reciprocate that by, you know, bringing that person into yours and create like a symbiotic relationship. We do that all the time, we go on a lot of people’s podcasts because they need content, they need guests and we want to get in front of people who maybe have never heard our message. So, don’t be afraid to reach out to your competition, because that will let you build your audience faster, just make sure you’re making it beneficial for both parties. There’s more than enough abundance out there for everyone online to succeed and also, to help each other and collaborate.
Karim: That’s how I find you guys. I listened to two or more other podcasts.
Shane: See, if we had never went out into that person and went there then you wouldn’t have heard us, and also too, that person reached out to us and come on their podcast, so it just works both ways.
Jocelyn: I just wanted to say we’ve thrown out probably like 20 ideas in the last 5 minutes.
Shane: That’s true.
Jocelyn: To everybody out there, you can’t do all of the things.
Shane: Right.
Jocelyn: We’re not trying to say, “Okay, you start this today and in 14 days you need to have all these things in, okay?” That’s not the way that it works. You have to take all of the things that we just said, think about which one is really going to move you ahead in your business and you need to concentrate in maybe like two or three.
Karim: Yeah. So, in this case, are we concentrate on finding the Facebook groups? I think that’s something that I could do. I could also go to the local co-ops, and also I repay to homeschoolers association of Virginia for the newsletter, I pay already space to be in the newsletter.
Shane: That’s awesome. Yup.
Jocelyn: That’s good.
Shane: Paid advertising is a great way to reach people, because there’s no barrier to entry, ‘cause they’re going to accept your money. That’s why we love paid advertising, because it’s faster than trying to do everything organically, you know.
Jocelyn: And honestly, if that’s within driving distance, I would recommend going.
Shane: Yeah.
Jocelyn: Being somewhere out and live, there’s just no substitute for that. I mean, it’s amazing to get out there actually in front of people. Maybe do a session or something, give them some strategies of how they can incorporate homeschool Spanish and then, “Oh by the way, I have an entire product to help you with this.”
Shane: Yeah. I’m thinking what we’ve really discovered is every niche is so individually unique. You need to kinda step out your business a little bit and look at it from a 10,000ft view and say, “What’s something unique about my space that I can get into?” Maybe I could go to a co-op and do a lesson and then, everyone posts Facebook pictures and shares it, maybe that’s a thing you could do. There’s all kinds of little things about your niche that no one else will understand and if you could make yourself step outside of that, and think outside the box a little bit you’ll discover a strategy that will work for you, but will totally 2X your business that nobody could ever even think about besides you because you’re in it.
Karim: Yeah. That sounds good. I like the way you say about going into the co-op and say I can do like at the beginning of the year, like a free session to hands orientation, how to help the kids succeed in their language class.
Shane: Sure.
Karim: I think that’s a good deal.
Shane: That’s also a great opportunity, a righter way. People always ask us like, “How do I get testimonials? I don’t have anybody.” ‘Cause we always tell people, you know, testimonials sell things more than anything does. Well, okay, go volunteer to teach at a co-op and then ask people at the end and say, “Hey! Could I record you? Could you just tell me what you thought about my lesson?” And then they’ll say nice things about you, BAM! You got testimonials, you don’t have to sell anything, because they’ll say, “Oh! This was a great lesson. Karim did an amazing job working with the kids and she’s just awesome.” That’s a testimonial about how you teach, you teaching on video, you got a testimonial for your product. So, there’s all kinds of outside the box things that I think you’re gonna be able to do to be able to take it to the next level pretty fast ‘cause you’re a hustler, you’re gonna go work and I know it’s gonna happen.
Karim: Thank you.
Shane: Alright. Well, let’s… I think we’ve got time for another question here. So, do you have any follow up questions that you need to ask about your online business?
Karim: Yes. They say you eat an elephant one piece at a time. So, have to do so much mileage… at the same time, create videos, facilitate forum, monthly blog… what will be a workflow model or idea based on your experience that you can give me, in order for me to open a membership… to maintain a successful membership?
Shane: The good thing about yours is your product is not complete, but it’s rolling out.
Karim: Yes.
Shane: You got some of it done, you got plenty to sell, it’s… you know, you have the first steps and you can make that over time. What I usually tell people to do is batch your content first. So, the reason we do that is because you have to spend some time to save time later and prevent stress. So, if you’ll go ahead and say, “Hey! I’m gonna post every week.” I’m gonna just take one full week and I’m gonna write 6 blog posts, they’re gonna be about 500 words maybe less, maybe 300, they’re all gonna have one picture and I’m just gonna get these scheduled right now. If you’ll do that, it will take all the pressure off of you in the next 5 weeks from relying about if your blog is gonna come out, you’re not freaking out. So, we always batch content. Jocelyn and I, yesterday, batched parts of our podcast for 12 weeks, because we know that the next 12 weeks we have a lot of travel coming up. So, we said, “Let’s spend time to save time,” and then after we get all that batched and it’s ready to go, we can focus on the things that really matter – the marketing – making new videos for your new membership area, serving the customers that are going to be coming in to your community. So, I think that’s the next step I would do, for you is just to batch that content.
Jocelyn: I think that you need to figure out what you really want and break that down into small steps to getting there, and basically, you just put the blinders on. It’s all about focus. You have to focus on the things that you want and the steps that is going to take to get there.
Shane: Once you create a plan, don’t doubt yourself. Just put it in the action plan from and say, “This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to batch content this week,” and then like Jocelyn said, “I’m going to do A, B, C after that.”
Karim: So… will be making my schedule and deciding what is it that I want to do.
Shane: Yes.
Karim: And then make a list.
Jocelyn: It’s really that simple. If more people would do that simple thing they –
Shane: What do you want? And then do it.
Jocelyn: – Yes. They would really just make things happen. Well, I think that some people just get bogged down and a lot of unnecessary things. So, we need to be wrapping this up ‘cause we’re about out of time for today, but before we go we want to know what are you going to take action on, based on what we talked about today in the next 24 to 48 hours?
Karim: I’m gonna start listing the Facebook groups organizations and contacting the group person, and then I’ll also going to look into the local co-ops and contact their main person.
Shane: That is an awesome thing to do and I know that Karim is gonna be successful, because man I just watched her work for the last 4 to 6 weeks, and she is taking huge strides and as we get closer to school starting back and people start thinking about homeschool and curriculum, I think they will be definitely knocking on your door. So, Karim, thank you so much for being on the show today and make sure you take action and put that in the action forum today, so we can hold you accountable. Okay?
Karim: Gracias. Thank you so much!
Shane: Another awesome call from one of our Flip Your Life community members. To learn more about our Flip Your Life community, head over to flippedlifestyle.com/flipyourlife and we can help you with your online business today.
Jocelyn: Alright. Next, we are going to move into our Can’t-miss Moment segment of the show and these are moments that we were able to experience recently that we might have missed if we were still working at our regular nine-to-five jobs. Today’s Can’t-miss moment is Anna’s dress rehearsal. She takes a ballet class each week and also it’s called, Tumblebugs. It’s like a little girl gymnastic class, and they are getting ready to have their annual recital this week and we had a dress rehearsal for that. We had a really good time. We got her dressed up and we bought her a lot of little fancy hair bun maker type things to get her all fixed up. She got to wear makeup that’s one of her favorite things, so she was very excited about that. She wouldn’t show me anything up to this point because she said it was a surprise for the recital, so I finally got to see what she’s been working on all this time. Recital time really just reminds me of where our family is now compared to where we were before, because before we started doing online business I wouldn’t even think as teachers we would have been able to easily afford this. Dance is not an inexpensive thing to do, especially when you consider that a lot of the kids were in multiple songs and they had to have multiple costumes, and all of those things really strike to add up. So, it is pretty difficult to do when you’re working just a regular job, especially us two teachers because we didn’t make the most money to begin with, and we’re just truly blessed to be able to have these types of experiences with the kids, and just to know that we don’t have to worry about will we be able to afford this or that anymore thanks to our online business.
Shane: Before we go today guys, we wanna share a bible verse with you. Jocelyn and I close every single one of our shows with a bible verse. We get a lot of inspiration and motivation from the bible, and we want to share some of that with you. Today’s bible verse comes from I Corinthians 9:24 and the bible says, “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize?” Run in such a way as to get the prize. Make sure that you are giving every ounce of effort, that you are dedicated to making your online business work and run that race in such a way that you will get the prize and everything will work fine in your online business.
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