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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Hannah understand how we explain to people what we do and how we make money online.
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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 the Q&A with S&J, we are recording our podcast from 30,000 feet above the Philippines right now; we are about to land, we’ve managed to record three or four of these for you guys and we’re gonna roll them out over time. Always batch your content, we always want to stress, if you got the podcast stuff out, record four of five podcasts. If you got the blogging going, do three or four blog posts and we are batching content right now on the airplane. We are sitting up in business class, it’s only a few people around and couple of them are asleep. So we kinda moved seats where nobody can hear us record. We are going to knock out another Q&A today. Today’s question comes from Hannah and she asks – this is a great question; she says, “When people ask you guys what you do, what do you say? How do you explain what you do in your small town? How did you explain when you quit your job, what you were about to get into? Do people even get it?” That is an awesome question because every internet marketer that we talked to, whether it’s from Pat Flynn to the people in our mastermind groups, it’s really hard to explain to people what you do because people are so used to ‘No, I’ll go get a job. I work for someone, I trade time for dollars.’ And it’s a really confusing subject when people start talking about how you make money online.
JOCELYN: It’s especially hard where we live because we live in a really small town, and what we do is just far off of most people’s radar screens. I mean, they don’t even know that this world exists. So, a lot of times when we are talking to people, they’ll kinda look at us like we have three heads. So, it’s very interesting and we have to try to put it in terms they’ll understand and so normally I say to people, ‘We sell digital products’ and they look at me again like I’m crazy. Then I’ll say, you know, ‘like e-books, sort of like Kindle’. Usually people will understand what Kindle is so they can sort of, understand what that means when I put it that way. But it is really hard, and being from a small town when people do understand what we are doing, you know, we have a lot of people who want to meet with us all the time and like, you know –
SHANE: Show them how basically.
JOCELYN: Yeah, everybody wants to know how we do it and can we show them step-by-step. And you know, we love to talk about this stuff as you know, but it’s just really hard because we can’t meet everybody for an hour, a week, or a day, or whatever.
SHANE: And actually that’s exactly why we created Flip Your Life originally because we helped a couple of people around here when we first started out and they had some success and made some money online with some digital products. The word spread, and just so many people kept asking us and there was just no way that we could meet with everybody. And I kinda felt really bad about that at first and got some – I’ve actually mentioned this before, I got some great advice from Cliff Ravenscraft the Podcast Answer Man, he told me, ‘You know, Shane, you got to do for a few what you wish you could do for many’ or you got to reach more people in a different way because there’s no way you can keep meeting with people for two hours at the coffee shop over and over again. And that’s originally why we came up with Flip Your Life was just to help all the people around us. We can put all of the information in one place; they could go there, they could look at it and they could go through the process step-by-step. It would be just like us teaching them but we wouldn’t have to actually be present because there’s no way that we can help all those people. So the creation of Flip Your Life was in direct response of trying to help people understand exactly what we did. I actually tell people that people give us money to email them stuff and that usually – instead of the “three-headed monster” look that Jocelyn is talking about, that usually at least gets a little bit of a nod and then they’ll say something like ‘What do you mean?’ I’ll be like, ‘Well, you know like a PowerPoint; well, I can make a hundred slides to teach somebody something and then I’ll send it to them. So basically we’re selling knowledge, we’re selling information’ and that kind of – people still get it and they kinda shake their head like ‘Oh okay’, and then they usually, 90% of the time, just roll off and do that. Back to your question about how do we – how did people respond when we quit our jobs, people thought we were absolutely crazy. This was just coming out of the recession, we’re 2008 to about 2011, it was really bad in the country. Jocelyn and I had good jobs, we were teachers, very stable; I had tenure so basically I couldn’t I could be fired until I did something stupid and people were like, ‘Why are you quitting your job? People would kill for that job.’ And it’s like Jocelyn said, people were not aware of this world. That’s why they don’t understand it when we try to explain things to them. They just don’t get it and they don’t know it’s there and so they can’t really comprehend it. So when we quit our job, people called us stupid, irresponsible, they called us foolish. I probably literally only had one or two of my closest friends that really, really supported what we were doing online.
JOCELYN: It was definitely hard when we were starting out and if you are having that problem right now, you are not alone. If people are looking at you like you are completely nuts, we understand. I mean, we’ve been there before. So don’t lose heart, just prove them wrong, keep working hard and prove that you are right.
SHANE: There’s a great quote that I heard one time and I don’t even know who to attribute it to and I’ve seen it a hundred time and it says, “First they’ll ask you why, but then they’ll ask you how.” So when you go out there and people are doubting you and they’re like, ‘You’re crazy, you can’t make money on the internet, why are you doing this?’ Keep working, keep working and when you make your money, and when you make enough where you are paying your mortgage, you’re making your car payments, and you got all this extra money or, you got a better life for your kids or you do get to quit your job like we did, then that same person who was asking you why or being like ‘You’re crazy’, they’re gonna come back and they’re gonna say, how can I do that too? It happens every time and we see it over and over again. I’ve actually shifted here in what I say to people now; I always like to tell people like what our goal is now. Like I say, ‘We flip people’s lives.’ And then they’re like, ‘What are you talking about?’ I’m like, ‘Well, we take people’s lives, we turn them upside down. It’s like flipping a house, you take what they are now and you show them this world of online business, and we make it better. We show them how to make extra money, we show them how to gain more freedom and margin in their lives and that’s what we do. And that’s kind of like – I’ve kinda shifted to like, you know, they’re not gonna get it anyway so I’m just gonna blow their mind with as much stuff as I can say until I peak their interest enough where they are gonna explore it and learn it. I don’t want people to walk away confused; I want people to walk away with hope and inspiration and say, ‘Man, if they did that, maybe it’s possible for me to do that’. So that’s kind of our shift now, we don’t try to say, you know, ‘We’re online entrepreneurs, and we like to work with WordPress and get back into the CSS every once in a while’. We don’t do that, we try to inspire people, we try to be as clear as possible because at the end of the day, we want as many families to change their future as we can possibly reach. So that’s kind of our approach towards telling people what we do.
JOCELYN: Thanks for your question Hannah, hope that that helps some of you guys out there who may be struggling with this right now.
SHANE: All right guys, we have to buckle up because we are on our final approach to Cebu City and we are going to go and enjoy a fun week of masterminding and talking about online business. So until you hear from us again, get out there, take action and flip your life. We’ll see you later.
JOCELYN: Bye!
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