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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Matt overcome the fear of putting his private life online when starting his online business.
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Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You’re listening to a Q&A with S&J.
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: Hey guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J mini podcast. Today’s question comes from Matt; and Matt writes, “How do I get over my fear of putting my life out there for others to see? I would have no problem sharing and selling my e-book to random strangers, but to think about my friends and family finding it and reading is horrifying to me. I know this is something I need to get past but your story is so real and I’m just finding it difficult to even think about doing what you guys do.”
JOCELYN: All right Matt, this is actually a common concern that a lot of people have and it is something that bothered me when we first started our online business. It’s not that I was doing anything wrong or had anything to hide necessarily; it’s just that I really didn’t want to put everything out there for the whole world to see. So, one way that you can do this, is to just use your first name. So, for a long time, on my Elementary Librarian site, I was just ‘Jocelyn’. You could be ‘Matt’, you could be ‘Matt B.’ or whatever your initial is and that would be one way of getting around everyone knowing exactly who you are.
SHANE: You can even use an alias in your brand. Like my name was on a lot of my products on my football coaching site but a lot of people just knew me as ‘CoachXO’. I created like a persona on my podcast, the ‘CoachXO’ show and basically people would write in and be like, “Hey Coach XO, I got a question for you about football.” So you could even do something like that where your brand kind of becomes the identity of the website and maybe you are not so front-and-center. Another thing that I think is important to realize too is that this is a fear because we’re scared; it’s like public speaking. You are scared to get up in front of people especially people you know. You don’t want them to understand exactly what you are doing and things like that but you don’t have to share this with people in your personal life. We don’t put all of our Flipped Lifestyle stuff, we don’t share Elementary Librarian, or history or coaching or all of these little businesses that we’ve got set up. We don’t ever share them on our private Facebook walls or our private Twitter accounts. We only talk about them in the space where they exist like on the Flipped Lifestyle Facebook page or actually on our website. Now, a lot of people have figured out what we do and they’ve found our websites and they’ve looked at our products and things like that. We do know people that have bought our products from us, we know them in person. So, there is definitely going to be some crossover but it’s not going to be this thing where everyone in your life is going to totally go in and read your e-book. They might not even be in your audience. If you’ve got an e-book about starting a food-truck or something like that, if no one wants to do that, they have no reason to read your book. So, don’t really worry about people in your life finding all of your stuff and keep up with all the minute details of your online business because that’s probably not going to happen.
JOCELYN: To most of our friends or family who know us on social media, we very rarely talk about any of the things that we do on there. If you are my friend on Facebook, there’s probably, I’d say, at least 50% of my friends who have no idea of what we do. They probably still think I’m a teacher.
SHANE: So the moral of the story here is, this is one of those ‘worst fears’ exercises. You said it was horrifying to you; well imagine the worst possible thing that could ever happen. If someone finds your e-book that they know you in your personal life, and they go and they round up a hundred friends and sit and make fun of you all day at the coffee shop, and then they all march down the road to your house and they stand outside of your house laughing and pointing at your window. And that’s so ridiculous when you put that out there and say it but it’s a good exercise to do because that’s not going to happen. No one is really probably going to say anything. If they do say anything, it’s going to probably be positive and most of the people in your private life are just going to go on and be like, ‘Huh, that’s interesting.’ And what we’ve found especially about online business, people don’t understand it. People have no clue what you actually do when you sell digital products online and it’s so hard to explain to them how you make your money that a lot of times their eyes gloss over and they just walk away confused. So, if anything, you’re just going to confuse people in your life and they are not going to judge you for what you are doing but you don’t have to put yourself out there and totally be the brand if you don’t want to. It’s your online business; you can make it whatever you want. Ushistoryteachers.com a new site that I’ve got coming out this summer, there is no identifier on there. No pictures, no names, no anything. It’s just a branded website; almost like a company that has products for sale. So, we chose to do that one that way. There’s a million different ways to present your brand online without having to share everything that you do on Facebook.
JOCELYN: There is a point that you have to realize that whatever you put out there online, may eventually get back to somebody that you know and you have to just eventually be okay with that and I think as time goes on, that gets easier to do. I hope that was helpful for you and anyone else out there who is worried about this problem because we do hear this from time to time and it is something that people face. So good luck to all of you guys out there and we will see you next time.
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