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In today’s Q&A, we help you understand how to manage multiple sites in multiple niches.
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Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to Q&A with S&J.
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? All right, let’s get started.
What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Q&A with S&J Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. It is great to be with you today of all days because it is Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all of our listeners out there!
JOCELYN: Merry Christmas y’all!
SHANE: And we are here bringing you great content even though it is Christmas Day. Don’t worry, though, we are not working on Christmas Day. We have prerecorded this and scheduled this so that you guys would have something to listen to because we know a lot of you are off work today. We are glad that we can provide that content for you when you’re at home.
Our question today comes from Eric Gale and Eric writes:
“You’ve mentioned that you were involved in a number of niches – coaching, Elementary Librarian, Flipped Lifestyle, a history site, and I think there are others. How do you manage multiple sites in multiple niches? From content creation to managing the store and aspects, how do you handle all of that work?”
That is a great question, Eric, and we do not recommend upfront that anyone start a lot of different projects at once. This is something that I struggle with because I like to have a lot of, is it irons in the fire? Is that how you say that?
JOCELYN: Yeah or shiny object syndrome.
SHANE: Shiny object syndrome, that’s what Jocelyn says that I have because any little shiny object that flashes in front of me, I surely chase it. But we do not recommend that you do that. We do manage multiple projects because of the way our business grew. I started a site, Jocelyn started a site and as we mastered and perfected those websites and we created systems and we hired help us to manage those things. We started adding other projects kind of on our plate but we don’t recommend that anyone do that at the beginning.
At the very beginning, you should start one project, work it through to completion, and see if it works or if it doesn’t. At some point, if it’s failing, you can quit that project and move on to something else, but you want to give everything a little bit of time to make sure you can do it. We highly recommend that especially for the beginner or people just starting out, if you’ve already started two or three websites, go ahead and put two of them on pause and focus on one that seems to be gaining traction through completion. That’s going to really help you be more successful.
Now if you do have multiple projects, the only way that you can actually manage as many things as we are doing is to hire out help. We have virtual assistants all over the world that we’ve hired over the past, I don’t know, four, five, maybe six months that have been helping us do some things like managing our social media accounts in some ways, creating products, or even posting products onto our stores or our sales pages. All these little tasks, answering emails, things like that that take away from us our time from creating content, we actually outsource all that material. So Jocelyn and I are not like superheroes that are sitting here doing all of these, working 20 hours a day and sleeping four hours a night.
JOCELYN: Definitely not.
SHANE: Not that. We have kids. We have a life. We are not going to spend our entire life working. We are going to have plenty of free time to do whatever we want and we do that by hiring out people to help us manage all of our projects.
JOCELYN: Once your site is off the ground, you will be able to kind of put things into buckets, I guess you would say, things that only you can do and then things that other people should be doing for you. That’s exactly what I did with Elementary Librarian. I pretty much did everything myself for almost two years including all of the customer service emails and just all the little nuts and bolts that go into running a website.
SHANE: Which left Jocelyn stressed out 90% of the time basically.
JOCELYN: Right. So once my site was pretty successful though, I was able to hire someone to take on that customer service role and my virtual assistant answers about 90% of the questions that come into Elementary Librarian now, which is fantastic. She also takes care of a lot of other little issues for me. The only thing that I do on that site now is product creation and answer an occasional question that maybe she doesn’t know how to answer. That is how we are able to do that.
As far as managing the store and things of that nature, we are actually in the process of moving over to Ontraport where everything is going to be managed together. We have not finished that process yet but hopefully, that is going to help a lot because it is a little bit confusing and overwhelming to have multiple stores which is what we do right now. Once we get that process into Ontraport, I think that our lives will be a little bit easier.
SHANE: So the main thing is just automation. There’s no way you can manage multiple projects at any given time because there are only so many hours in a day. Unless you’ve got the resources to really bring on help or buy tools or systems that you can put in place to help you automate some of your tasks, it’s going to be very difficult to do what Jocelyn and I do over time.
Also, Jocelyn and I have a very unfair advantage where we’re working together as a husband and wife team. That’s why we always recommend that anyone getting into online business needs to approach their partner and say, “Hey, join me in this because two heads are better than one.”
The Bible says in Ecclesiastes that two are better than one because they get a good return on their labor. We think that being a couple and being in this together allows us to do more than double the work. We can specialize. If Jocelyn needs me to edit a video for her, I’m really good at that so I do that for her. If I need something proofread for me, Jocelyn is way better at paying attention to details than I am.
JOCELYN: #truth.
SHANE: #truth, so she will take care of that for me. We can kind of specialize in tasks and become more efficient and get a lot more done because we’re working together as a team. If you’re working solo and if you’re just starting out and you don’t have a lot of extra money to hire help, you really need to focus on one project into completion. Is that the one that’s going to work? Maybe not. Is that the one you’re going to be doing forever? Definitely not, but you need to focus on one project through to completion before you start on all these other tasks.
Don’t get caught up in people who have podcasts like other experts that are doing a lot of different things and a lot of different projects. It looks on the surface like we’re handling everything but almost everybody in our situation has helped behind the scenes on the back end doing things for them.
JOCELYN: Okay Eric. I hope that that helps. I hope that that helps all of you out there who are looking at several different niches. I know you have a lot of ideas but you have to channel all of your energy into one idea especially at the beginning.
SHANE: If you need some help narrowing down your focus on your niche, we actually do help you do that in our Flip Your Life eCourse and if you want to learn a little bit more about how all that works, you can go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. We help you narrow down a topic for your first digital product and see that project through to completion so that you can get that done, and that’s pretty much what our course is all about is helping you find that focus and helping you finish what you started on that first digital product.
JOCELYN: So if you’re interested in that course, head on over to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife for more information. That’s all we have for you for today. We hope you all have a great day and a Merry Christmas.
SHANE: Merry Christmas, guys. Thanks. Bye.
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