In today’s Q&A with S&J, Lisa Rung-Kolenich asks us:
“My life’s changed from living the artist’s way, and I would like to help others find their creativity. In a recent podcast, you talked about how people pay you to save money or make money, or to save time. I’m not sure how this fits into either of those. Also, you had talked about finding an avatar that is already looking for what you have rather than try to convince someone that they are your avatar, or to start doing whatever it is you are trying to do. I don’t have a website yet. Just an Instagram account. I’m struggling with this as I was thinking my avatar is someone who thinks they aren’t creative, but wants to be.”
Shane: What’s going on, guys? Welcome to another Q&A with S&J. We are sitting in the airport heading back from a conference, and we thought we would take this opportunity to answer a few questions from our patrons, the people that support us over at Patreon. Let’s see, Jocelyn. Go ahead and read that question for today.
Jocelyn: Alright, today’s question is from Lisa, and she says, “My life’s changed from living the artist’s way, and I would like to help others find their creativity. In a recent podcast, you talked about how people pay you to save money or make money, or to save time. I’m not sure how this fits into either of those. Also, you had talked about finding an avatar that is already looking for what you have rather than try to convince someone that they are your avatar, or to start doing whatever it is you are trying to do. I don’t have a website yet. Just an Instagram account.” And she says, “I’m struggling with this as I was thinking my avatar is someone who thinks they aren’t creative, but wants to be.”
Shane: Basically, what she’s saying here is, in a recent podcast– and we will try to put that in the show notes– we talked about the reason most people will pay you: number one is to solve a problem for them. Number two, usually that involves saving them or making them money, or saving them or creating more time in their life.
Jocelyn: And not always.
Shane: Not always.
Jocelyn: There are exceptions to this always.
Shane: Right, exactly. But in general, those are the reasons people hire people online to fix something for them. What she’s saying is, she wants to help people find their inner creativity, and is that really something that people would pay for, and are people even looking for that. There’s two big things that matter in this situation.
Jocelyn: The first thing is, is what you’re trying to sell what we call an aspirin or a vitamin? What that means is, is it something that is painful to people? Are people trying to stop the pain? If you’re trying to stop pain, that means that that’s an aspirin type problem.
Shane: And you’re going to anything you can to get a hold of that thing. If you’ve got a headache at midnight, and you wake up, you’re going to get in the car, and you’re going to drive to the store to find that aspirin to make that headache go away because you can’t wait until morning. It’s urgent right now.
Jocelyn: For instance, on Elementary Librarian, I sell lesson plans to save people time. The reason that they would purchase my lesson plans is to stop their pain of having to work on school stuff while they are at home.
Shane: Like, for two or three hours every night, they get to spend time with their kids instead of do that. They’re sick of doing that, so they go find a solution for that problem, and they pay for it.
Jocelyn: With my lessons plans, there are two certain standards. What that means is, there are certain standards that we have to follow as teachers, and those lesson plans have the standards inside. If I tried to sell my lesson plans as, “These are the greatest lesson plans ever,” they have these standards, and they’re great. Your students are going to love them. Those things all sound nice, but they’re just additional benefits to the product.
Shane: It’s like, when you take a vitamin, you might feel better, and you might take your vitamin. But if you wake up at midnight, and you don’t have any vitamins, and you said, “Oh, I forgot my vitamin, I’ll get it later.” And then you forget it the next time you go to the store. You don’t care because it’s a vitamin.
Jocelyn: In a perfect world, to sell them as products, either online or in the real world, you need to make sure that you’re solving a problem that is an aspirin problem. One, that people are going to pull out their wallets immediately, not think about, like, “It might make my life better.” It’s just like, I love the health and fitness industry. They don’t sell, “Oh, feel better,” and, “Exercise or diet is going to help you feel better, it’s going to increase your energy.” That doesn’t sell products.
Shane: No, you’re going to lose 50 pounds, like right now. You’re fat and you need to lose weight. That’s basically what they say.
Jocelyn: When you look at their ads and all that, they offer 6-pack abs, lose ten pounds in ten days, or whatever. That’s the kind of language that they use. When you think about your online product, or any product, you need to think about that type of language. What are people really looking?
Shane: Are people looking for this? I don’t know. To me, it sounds a little flighty. “Oh, I want to be more creative.” They may be searching for that. Someone may be typing into Google. “I want to be more creative, and I’m willing to pay for this.” They’re looking for something to teach me to be creative. You’re going to have to research that to find out, but you need to really check if that’s true.
Jocelyn: I would say that maybe, if you’re teaching them to be more creative so they can use that creativity to create things to sell on Etsy for instance, that could be a market. I’m just using that as an example.
Shane: Right, but it might not be just someone sitting around, wanting to be more creative at home as a hobby. That might not be enough to make people pay. And the second part of your question– you can totally hear the Korean Airlines trying to find their last passengers as we’re talking– as we talked about finding an avatar, you want to find someone already looking for what you have rather than convince them to be your avatar. That’s true for everything: you want someone who has already made the decision, that they really want to be more creative. They’re in the search engine actively looking for products that will help them be that, or maybe they’re joining Facebook groups about being more creative. You’ve got to find people who have made that decision. You don’t want to be going up to someone and convincing them, “Hey, your life would be better if you were just more creative.” We find this a lot in online business. A long time ago, many years ago, we stopped trying to talk people into doing online business. We only talked to people who have discovered online business, have decided it’s for them, and want to take the next step. I could talk to a hundred people who’ve never heard of online business, and maybe one of them will say, “That’s for me.”
Jocelyn: And it’s so easy for us to talk about it, and people to say, “I want that. I can’t wait to start that.” But how many people are actually going to do that?
Shane: You have to find someone who is actively looking for your solution. Don’t try to convince people that they need your solution or you’re probably not going to make much money.
Jocelyn: Alright. If you enjoyed this Q&A, you can ask us your own question. If you support us on Patreon, you can go to flippedlifestyle.com/patreon, and you can check out how to support us there. We also have a weekly podcast, The Flipped Lifestyle podcast, and it comes out every Tuesday.
Shane: And don’t forget to hit subscribe so that every time we release a Q&A with S&J, it will notify you in your e-mail, and you can check out the video, and learn a little bit about online business. See you next time.
Jocelyn: Bye.
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