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In today’s Q&A, we are helping Kenneth figure out if webinars are worth it and what passive income truly is in comparison to time for dollars.
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Resources Mentioned in this Episode
- Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas from Entrepreneur on Fire
- Flip Your Life Program
- Podcasters Paradise
- Webinar on Fire
- John’s book “Podcast Launch”
- Leadpages
- Chatroll
- Chatwing
Let’s dive into this week’s question!
JOCELYN: Hey y’all! You are listening to an expert Q and A with S and J. Today’s expert is John Lee Dumas of the Entrepreneur On Fire Podcast on entrepreneuronfire.com.
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.
SHANE: What’s going on guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle expert Q and A. Jocelyn and I always stressed there is more than one to skin a cat. We do not have all the answers so sometimes when you send us a question we got to go out and find that answer. We bring in an expert. We make sure you’re getting great information to take your online business to the next level. One of our favorite expert is back on the podcast today. It is none other than John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire. John what is going on man?
JOHN: I am just excited to be back and I don’t know the smoke signals have started.
SHANE: That’s what I am talking about. Last time you were on there was a bonfire. I thought there might be nuclear bomb dropping on us today man. We are just setting the world on fire with the expert Q and A. Awesome. Okay. Let’s just into our question for today’s podcast. Jocelyn?
JOCELYN: Alright. Today’s questions is from Kenneth Harrell and Kenneth says I constantly hear experts like you guys say I should host a webinar but why? Isn’t a webinar live? Why do you want to trade time for dollars? I thought the goal was passive income. What makes a webinar worth my time and effort?
SHANE: So we’ve got two great questions here actually, a hidden one and a real one. The first one is why a webinar is worth it. The second one is this mythical passive income and how it works and it’s just you turn it out and you set it and forget it forever. So John you can get the tough love stick back out this week and talk to our guest here about webinars and passive income.
JOHN: Yeah I need the tough love stick again so thanks for passing it over the airways I am definitely holding it with two hands.
SHANE: Swinging for the fence.
JOHN: Yeah swinging for the fence. Kenneth, let me kind of breakdown what time for dollars is first. I think that’s kind of an important thing that you are missing here. Time for dollars is saying, hey listen I am going to do X for X as far as like I am going to spend one hour doing this per $20 in return or I am going to coach you for one hour for $350 in return. That’s trading time for dollars. Webinars are completely different in so many ways but I’ll start with just really the biggest way and that is with the webinar you can scale and leverage infinitely. Now for me, I do webinars every single week and actually in 2014 I did 60 live webinars for Podcasters Paradise alone not to mention about another 20 or 30 for Webinar on Fire. And so what I love about webinars and why it’s just the opposite of trading time for dollars is just you can have an unlimited amount of people on that webinar so what you’re doing is you’re saying I am going to give this presentation. I want as many people as I can drive via organic, maybe it’s your podcast, your blog, maybe it’s your social media post, maybe it’s Facebook, Twitter, YouTube advertising. Any number of ways, I am going to drive as many number of people as I can to this live webinar and then I am going to present, add value and then offer a solution or a VIP solution or an up sale at the end of that webinar for people that want to join. So a great example would be my Paradise webinars where I give 45 minutes of just pure value, how to create, grow and monetize your podcast. After 45 minutes, people can leave and they have just gotten a boat load of incredibly valuable information. I have given them a gift, my book podcast launched. They are off to the races but those that are like wow I loved this and I know that I want more that I share with them the details of Podcasters Paradise and to the 200, sometimes 300 sometimes 500 people from around the world that are joining me live on these weekly webinars a percentage are always taking that jump on the Podcasters Paradise and every single webinar that we did in 2014 generated at least $20,000 and some of them generated as high as $80,000 given how many people are actually are on that webinar. What’s so scalable about webinars is number you have an unlimited number of people that can join you so that’s the unbelievable thing about having live webinars. Number two is you can continue to leverage the time that you initially invested that 45 to 60 to whatever minutes and offer a two, three, four-day replay or take that live webinar as I have also done and turn it into an automated webinar that plays and that streams three times every single day at 11 am, 3 pm and 8 pm local time for whoever wants to sing up for it. So those are just a bunch of options that you can do and why webinars are so scalable and so leverage able and why they are the truly anti-trading time for dollars. Not to mention just all the additional benefits for that. Number one you’re building a massive email list. When you have people that are joining the webinars you are collecting their emails but you can continue to market to them down the road, to provide value to them down the road, to provide a conversation with them down the road. However, you want to treat that, they have opted into your webinar list, you can continue the conversation with them which is incredibly powerful. Again leveraging that one 45-minute live webinar you did that one point. Number two, you can really just have a lot of engagement on those webinars. People feel like it’s an event they show up, they are engaging with each other people. I have had that have formed masterminds and accountability partners and meet-up groups from within the webinar chat. I mean it’s just exciting that you can provide that kind of venue for people that all have a like-minded interest if it’s in the webinars or f it’s in the podcast. Because those are the two webinars that I do one on webinars and one on podcasting. So there are just so much infinite scale and there are just so much infinite value that you can provide in a webinar that had just really blows my mind and I know that we have another part to this question but I kind of like to hear maybe you add a little bit to that Shane and Jocelyn because I know that you guys had done that as well.
JOCELYN: Yeah absolutely and I wanted to add you’re talking people meeting in your webinars. We actually met our accountants on one of your webinars.
SHANE: We did. We totally did like about a year and a half ago. We were in a car driving to Atlanta and we were getting ready to start hosting our own webinar and we were just kind of sampling other people’s webinars to see how they were doing theirs just to get some ideas as we were putting ours together and we started talking with some random person down on Oxford, Tennessee and long behold they had an accountant firm that only dealt with online entrepreneurs and we were like oh really. Well, I’ll be back and give you call since we are like an hour and a half away.
JOCELYN: So they are now our accountants.
JOHN: That’s awesome.
SHANE: I know man, great yeah. And Jocelyn has had a lot of success son webinars too.
JOCELYN: I have had quite a bit of success doing webinars from my Elementary Librarian site. I did I think a series of six or seven doing our product launch they were all lives.
SHANE: One of it has 600 people on it. Yea, 600 people.
JOCELYN: Yeah it was crazy and I just had no idea that this could even be possible but I mean I have had very successful both in attendees and also in sales.
SHANE: Thousands of dollars.
JOCELYN: It’s totally worth it. If you can get it together and really provide value for that audience and keep them coming back then you can definitely make webinars work for your business.
SHANE: When you get an online business and you quit your job and people started seeing that, we always get this question, hey can I go to coffee and pick your brain for a minute about stuff? You know what I mean? We get that like all the time. Especially we live in a town with like 10,000 people so they see at church, we can’t even get out of the door sometimes. What happens is I created a webinar to that scenario is we love to help people. I would love to go sit down and talk to that one person in a coffee shop for an hour and explain to them how this works or what they want to learn. I can’t do that but I could rent the coffee shop have a 100 people come in and deliver the exact same message to all 100 people in that coffee shop. That’s a webinar. You are just doing at your desk at your house. Time for dollars do I trade one hour to help one person or do I trade one hour to help 100 people. That’s the power of the webinar.
JOHN: And it’s a set dollars amount too. The webinars you go in there saying there are 600 people in this live webinar like the amount of render that I can generate is unknown but it’s a massive opportunity and that’s huge sale. What I also love and this is something that I am sure that both you guys have experience multiple times is how much your public speaking improves just by doing webinars and then that again is leverage able and we are always about leverage but that is leverage able across all different planes. So now, when I get up on stage and speak I am so much better because of the 60 plus live webinars I did for podcasting in 2014 alone. You know when I am doing my podcast now and I am interviewing other people, I am such a better host because if the webinars that I have done because you need to think on your feet because there are live presentations and they help you get over the fear that everybody has of public speaking, That’s a massive benefit to doing webinars.
JOCELYN: Absolutely.
SHANE: I like them too because it’s amazing what you learn like just in that quick flash. We have communities built around Flip Your Life and Jocelyn’s elementary site and my coaching site. They give you feedback and you’re like I need to make a product about that but when you are in a webinar, people know they are only going to be in an hour and they are just throwing bombs in that chatroom. Do you know what I mean? So you can like go back and scan through that and you go whoa that’s a great idea. Ten people asked if we do this, there might be a product there, let’s outline it and presell it. Do you know what I mean? So you get just tons of ideas and feedback on webinars that is real-time emotional and bam they are just right in your face.
JOHN: Let me flip this real quick. So what do you two use for your webinar platform?
SHANE: We use lead pages and Google Hangouts. We do a very simple setup where we have got chat roll which is like you get an embed code you put your chat box in your lead page and we run it right through Google Hangouts and send them to a page a lead page that shows the video. We got a simple chat room and we got one button that says call to action and that’s pretty much how we do it.
JOHN: Now what are your major inbound methods of getting registrants?
SHANE: Usually Facebook ads like we’ll run Facebook ads like we’ll run Facebook ads, we’ll retarget people that are already on our email list, we’ll upload our email list into Facebook and that we’ll really attack people that are either on our audience, that retargeting to go to our website or that are already on our email list. Because those are the easiest people that ask to get into the webinar.
JOHN: Love it. I mean that’s just a home run. When the method that you describe to do webinars there are so positives to it. Number one, it’s essentially free. If you have lead pages, it is free and if you want to add the chat roll it’s like $25 or $50 per month to have that chat. There is also chat options that are free like Chat Wing and Tea Chat and other things as well that are completely free. So you can do the type of webinars that Shane and Jocelyn are talking about completely for free which is exciting. Because both you and I use the same method, we just have that webpage that you’re having like say EOfire.com/podcastwebinar. That’s where we host all of our podcast. So I can drive an unlimited amount of people to that page. The 20 minutes leading up to it by just posting social media posts or doing a last minute email blast, there is no people having to like signup for a go to meeting and get special codes, there is none of that. It’s just an open fun form.
SHANE: We do ours like mine is coachxo.com/webinar or elementarylibrarian.com/webinar because then we can on the webinar you’re like hey right now before we start, bookmark this page this is where they always will be. You know what I am saying and then you don’t have to worry about it and more people show up. Real quick b4efore we close this call. I like to talk about passive income just a second. People think that it is just set it and forget forever. But I think that people get confused about like passive income really is. What is your like nutshell, elevator pitch definition of what passive income is John?
JOHN: So to me passive income in a nutshell would be that I am generating revenue when I am not actually doing the work to generate that revenue. So how I basically will say that is basically saying I woke up this morning and over the night there were three Podcasters Paradise sales. Those were $1,200, so while I was sleeping $3,600 came into Entrepreneur on Fire. I was not physically working for that I was sleeping while that happens but now the work that went to setting up the systems to create those sales was anything but passive, it was very passive and very hard work. The thing about passive as well that I think really needs to be clarified is that passive doesn’t mean set it and forget it, it means set it, tweak, iterates, pivot, adjust, improve, you always need to be doing these things. The Facebook ads always need to be adjusted. The call to action on your podcast in your webinars always need to be adjusted. You always need to be improving the systems along the way because it does everything that you’re setting up, every system that you have has a shelf life. In order to elongate that shelf life or to improve the actual products or service, the systems that you have. You’re always having to be working on it so it’s never one of these things where you’re setting something up. I can set something up right now and I can go Bali for the next year. For the next three months, I’d make great money with the systems. Months three through six, definitely less, but in six through 12 you can continue to see a tail off because I wouldn’t actively improving the system. If you are not improving the system, it’s getting worse, period. So that would be my quick nutshell explanation.
SHANE: That’s awesome. I that’s where people get confused because of the word. The word passive is correct because you’re not doing anything at the time that money come in. but it’s investing to make money passively and then finding money new ways to invest to make money passively. My favorite story of passive income was we were at SSC tournament. We were sitting there watching the game. It was half time, had my feet propped up, Kentucky was crushing somebody like always.
JOHN: Except the championship game?
JOCELYN: Yeah, yeah. Let’s not talk about that.
SHANE: Yeah never happened, I don’t agree. But somebody bought something at halftime so I am like man I have got my feet propped up watching the Wildcats crushed Arkansas and I just made $500 but like you said we made the courses. Everything was setup to do that and it won’t work in a year from now. We have to change something. So awesome. What a great discussion man. That was an awesome talk about webinars and passive income.
JOHN: Yeah I loved it and you open a can about college sports. I am not going to say anything about basketball. I mean that is the season behind us but I do because I have as much pride in my school as you do in yours. Providence College is national hockey champions. So proud in that.
SHANE: I love it. I love me some hockey. That’s great man. They were in the tournament. Providence was in the tournament. They have got some shots for the basketball boot around ball.
JOHN: Yeah. Well we actually got great news is that our number one best player Chris Dun who is the number one point guard in the country did not go to the draft, in fact it is a lottery. He is coming back and it’s going to be a great season.
SHANE: Awesome man. We’ll listen man thanks again for being in our Q and A. great answers. As always guys. Listen to what these guys are telling you. Everything they are saying it’s true. We have seen it. We know it and apply these things to what you have asked us and you will take your business to the next level. So until next time get out there and take action and flip your life.
JOCELYN: Bye.
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