The Flipped Lifestyle Podcast

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to avoid one of the biggest causes of procrastination in business, shiny object syndrome. Too many people don’t make progress in their online business simply because they never truly finish a project. In this conversation we’re going to talk about 4 critical strategies for prioritizing what to do so you can get more done and avoid the mistakes we made when starting out with our online business. [Tweet "If you have 10 websites and none of them are making money you probably have shiny object syndrome."] You will learn Why shiny object syndrome is a great way to feel busy. (but not make money) The reason you need to finish one project before starting another. How we’re using the AAA strategy to streamline our production. Why you need a mastermind. The importance of systems to decide what you need to be working on. How to use voting and surveys to improve sales and product ideas. Why you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Get in touch with us Pat Flynn’s episode we mention (AAA) Elementary Librarian US History Teacher Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle I was listening to your podcast from last week on my run today and it inspired me to share a couple of sacrifices I have made lately to fund my online business. I figured I wouldn't be doing any triathlons for a while so I sold my vintage, 2002 Trek Time trial bike last week. Yesterday, I cancelled my satellite radio subscription, $300; you are so right, in the long run, these won't be missed. I need to invest in the tools to make this online business thing happen. Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too!   Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! On today's podcast, we're going to tell you how to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome in your online business. [spoiler title="Click to View Transcript"] 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 podcast; great to be back with you again this week. Last week, we talked a lot about overcoming perfectionism in your online business, how you cannot use perfectionism as an excuse for procrastination. Jocelyn said that was her big thing that she had to struggle with, she had to fight with; this pursuit of perfectionism and how it holds her back sometimes in online business. This week, we're going to flip the script and we are going to come after one of m...

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how to avoid one of the biggest causes of procrastination in business, shiny object syndrome. Too many people don’t make progress in their online business simply because they never truly finish a project. In this conversation we’re going to talk about 4 critical strategies for prioritizing what to do so you can get more done and avoid the mistakes we made when starting out with our online business. [Tweet "If you have 10 websites and none of them are making money you probably have shiny object syndrome."] You will learn Why shiny object syndrome is a great way to feel busy. (but not make money) The reason you need to finish one project before starting another. How we’re using the AAA strategy to streamline our production. Why you need a mastermind. The importance of systems to decide what you need to be working on. How to use voting and surveys to improve sales and product ideas. Why you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip your life program Get in touch with us Pat Flynn’s episode we mention (AAA) Elementary Librarian US History Teacher Shane's site CoachXO Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle I was listening to your podcast from last week on my run today and it inspired me to share a couple of sacrifices I have made lately to fund my online business. I figured I wouldn't be doing any triathlons for a while so I sold my vintage, 2002 Trek Time trial bike last week. Yesterday, I cancelled my satellite radio subscription, $300; you are so right, in the long run, these won't be missed. I need to invest in the tools to make this online business thing happen. Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! On today's podcast, we're going to tell you how to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome in your online business. [spoiler title="Click to View Transcript"] 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 podcast; great to be back with you again this week. Last week, we talked a lot about overcoming perfectionism in your online business, how you cannot use perfectionism as an excuse for procrastination. Jocelyn said that was her big thing that she had to struggle with, she had to fight with; this pursuit of perfectionism and how it holds her back sometimes in online business. This week, we're going to flip the script and we are going to come after one of my biggest struggles and that is, Shiny Object Syndrome.

In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how to set up and run a successful affiliate program for you online businesses digital products. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Ejunkie Clickbank Gumroad Jocelyn's website Elementary Librarian Shane's website CoachXO Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey ya'll! 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to today's Q&A with S&J where we have a question today from Valerio. We're not sure how to say that. SHANE: V-A-L-E-R-I-O Valerio. JOCELYN: I think people put crazy names in here just so we can – SHANE: I think you guys are using fake names. Jocelyn is right; you guys are putting in fake names just to hear us stumble across them. So, Valerio. JOCELYN: Yeah, it's going to get worse now. Okay it says, "I know that Shane has a friend who also sells e-books for football coaches and they are both affiliates for each other's products. How do you set up these affiliate programs? How do you generate the code, that then you would get to your affiliate person so that he/she can promote your product to his/her audience. Do you do it with E-junkie or ClickBank and are there other methods you recommend?" SHANE: All right, this is a great question and this is another one we get all the time and basically what an affiliate program is, is if I have a friend who is in a similar niche to me, like my buddy sells football playbooks just like I do; well, he might not want to write the same playbook that I do. So I'll just say, 'Hey here's my playbook, you sell it for a hundred dollars and I'll give you forty percent of it.' He's my affiliate. So he's gonna go out and find new people that might not be in my audience, they are going to buy the product, he get's forty bucks, and I get sixty bucks but I make a sale. I don’t get the whole hundred dollars but I do get to make a sale that I might not have made if I was not using an affiliate program. You do do this with E-junkie or ClickBank and really all that happens is, you basically upload your digital product and the service that you use, whether it's a shopping cart, E-junkie, ClickBank or something else, just gives you a link and you give that link to your affiliate partner. This can also be automated like you can put some code on your page and people can sign up for your affiliate program and it will automatically generate them a link that they can use to sell your product and all the link does is it sends them to a landing page and it tracks the customer from their website. So, if they buy, in your data and in your sales reports it'll say, 'Oh, by the way, these ten were sold by your friend as an affiliate so you owe them x percentage or whatever it is.' So any shopping cart you use, anything online you are using like E-junkie, ClickBank, Gumroad probably does this; whatever you are using to take payments for your digital product is probably going to be able to set up an affiliate program where you can go out and find people to sell your products for you. ClickBank is a great one to use starting out no matter what you are using because you can go and set that up and there's like a marketplace on ClickBank.com where people can look for affiliate products. So, if I am a football coach and I am like, I want to see if there's any football playbooks out there, oh look, there's five guys out there that have uploaded these pl...

In today’s Q&A, we are talking about how to set up and run a successful affiliate program for you online businesses digital products. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Ejunkie Clickbank Gumroad Jocelyn's website Elementary Librarian Shane's website CoachXO Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey ya'll! 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, welcome to today's Q&A with S&J where we have a question today from Valerio. We're not sure how to say that. SHANE: V-A-L-E-R-I-O Valerio. JOCELYN: I think people put crazy names in here just so we can – SHANE: I think you guys are using fake names. Jocelyn is right; you guys are putting in fake names just to hear us stumble across them. So, Valerio. JOCELYN: Yeah, it's going to get worse now. Okay it says, "I know that Shane has a friend who also sells e-books for football coaches and they are both affiliates for each other's products. How do you set up these affiliate programs? How do you generate the code, that then you would get to your affiliate person so that he/she can promote your product to his/her audience. Do you do it with E-junkie or ClickBank and are there other methods you recommend?" SHANE: All right, this is a great question and this is another one we get all the time and basically what an affiliate program is, is if I have a friend who is in a similar niche to me, like my buddy sells football playbooks just like I do; well, he might not want to write the same playbook that I do. So I'll just say, 'Hey here's my playbook, you sell it for a hundred dollars and I'll give you forty percent of it.' He's my affiliate. So he's gonna go out and find new people that might not be in my audience, they are going to buy the product, he get's forty bucks, and I get sixty bucks but I make a sale. I don’t get the whole hundred dollars but I do get to make a sale that I might not have made if I was not using an affiliate program. You do do this with E-junkie or ClickBank and really all that happens is, you basically upload your digital product and the service that you use, whether it's a shopping cart, E-junkie, ClickBank or something else, just gives you a link and you give that link to your affiliate partner. This can also be automated like you can put some code on your page and people can sign up for your affiliate program and it will automatically generate them a link that they can use to sell your product and all the link does is it sends them to a landing page and it tracks the customer from their website. So, if they buy, in your data and in your sales reports it'll say, 'Oh, by the way, these ten were sold by your friend as an affiliate so you owe them x percentage or whatever it is.' So any shopping cart you use, anything online you are using like E-junkie, ClickBank, Gumroad probably does this; whatever you are using to take payments for your digital product is probably going to be able to set up an affiliate program where you can go out and find people to sell your products for you. ClickBank is a great one to use starting out no matter what you are using because you can go and set that up and there's like a marketplace on ClickBank.com where people can look for affiliate products. So, if I am a football coach and I am like, I want to see if there's any football playbooks out there, oh look, there's five guys out there that have uploaded ...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Steve discover the right path for his online business and how to make that compelling enough to convince his wife it’s possible. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode Flip Your Life Program Podcast Episode #6 Shanes website for football coaches Jocelyn's website for librarians Let’s dive into this week’s question! SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We are your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip you lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright. Let’s get started. What is going on guys? Welcome back to another Q and A with S and J mini podcast. Our question today comes from Steven and he writes in via email. He says: I really want to get started on online business. I have a lot of interests but I am not sure if they would make a good online business. I am trying to figure out whether I have ideas for an eBook or have the writing skill to get the reader even interested in my product. I would also like to really convince my wife this digital product idea can work. What advice would you have on getting people behind this idea? JOCELYN: Alright Steven that is a great question. And one that I have actually gotten several times recently. So I just wanted to let you and everyone else out there know that the thing you want to look for when you are considering making a digital product is what kind of problems are you solving for an audience, or what kind of problems can you solve for an audience? What is keeping up at night and how can you help? How can you solve their problem? That little test is going to help you to evaluate each of your skills and how they might translate into a future online business. So the question is, do you have a skill that might translate well over to an online products like for example, Shane and I, we use our day job skills as teachers to create products that solve problems for teachers. Maybe it is not something that you do like for your job, maybe it’s a hobby that you have or an interest and a lot of people that they can’t make these types of things into a business but you absolutely can as long as you are solving someone’s problems. SHANE: And you font have to be like some rocket science or a PhD or the authority in a field you really only have to know a little bit more than the people behind you. If I know how to set up a website, then theoretically I can create a course to teach people how to make a website that don’t know how I am expert enough, I already know how to do that. I was not the greatest football coach that ever lived but I had a lot of experience over ten years and I created this very specific defense that a lot of people wanted to learn that defense who are either just getting into coaching or maybe they have some experience and they are switching over to my defense. So I was able to take my interest to football, turn that into a digital product and I was able to teach that to other people. I wasn’t the football authority in the country but I did know a lot about that defense and there was a lot of people behind me that didn’t know so much about it. JOCELYN: And you know sometimes there are people out there that say I just don’t really have any skills or any interest and that is just not true, really for anybody. Everybody out there has something they are good at or something they really enjoy and if you are having a hard time coming up with something for yourself ask somebody who is close to you. What is something that I know about that I can maybe teach you how to do or show you how to do or that you think other people might want to learn how...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Steve discover the right path for his online business and how to make that compelling enough to convince his wife it’s possible. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! Resources Mentioned in this Episode The Flip Your Life Community Podcast Episode #6 Elementary Librarian Let’s dive into this week’s question! SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We are your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip you lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright. Let’s get started. What is going on guys? Welcome back to another Q and A with S and J mini podcast. Our question today comes from Steven and he writes in via email. He says: I really want to get started on online business. I have a lot of interests but I am not sure if they would make a good online business. I am trying to figure out whether I have ideas for an eBook or have the writing skill to get the reader even interested in my product. I would also like to really convince my wife this digital product idea can work. What advice would you have on getting people behind this idea? JOCELYN: Alright Steven that is a great question. And one that I have actually gotten several times recently. So I just wanted to let you and everyone else out there know that the thing you want to look for when you are considering making a digital product is what kind of problems are you solving for an audience, or what kind of problems can you solve for an audience? What is keeping up at night and how can you help? How can you solve their problem? That little test is going to help you to evaluate each of your skills and how they might translate into a future online business. So the question is, do you have a skill that might translate well over to an online products like for example, Shane and I, we use our day job skills as teachers to create products that solve problems for teachers. Maybe it is not something that you do like for your job, maybe it’s a hobby that you have or an interest and a lot of people that they can’t make these types of things into a business but you absolutely can as long as you are solving someone’s problems. SHANE: And you font have to be like some rocket science or a PhD or the authority in a field you really only have to know a little bit more than the people behind you. If I know how to set up a website, then theoretically I can create a course to teach people how to make a website that don’t know how I am expert enough, I already know how to do that. I was not the greatest football coach that ever lived but I had a lot of experience over ten years and I created this very specific defense that a lot of people wanted to learn that defense who are either just getting into coaching or maybe they have some experience and they are switching over to my defense. So I was able to take my interest to football, turn that into a digital product and I was able to teach that to other people. I wasn’t the football authority in the country but I did know a lot about that defense and there was a lot of people behind me that didn’t know so much about it. JOCELYN: And you know sometimes there are people out there that say I just don’t really have any skills or any interest and that is just not true, really for anybody. Everybody out there has something they are good at or something they really enjoy and if you are having a hard time coming up with something for yourself ask somebody who is close to you. What is something that I know about that I can maybe teach you how to do or show you how to do or that you think other people might want to learn how to do? That’s probably the best way to get an idea for an ...

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how perfectionism can hold you back from launching your business and start building for the future. People have used perfectionism as an excuse for not getting started for far too long in the world of online business. We love seeing people move forward, and getting over this “excuse” is critical for so many people just to make those first $10 or even $100. You will learn Why the little things might not really matter to your audience. A story of how not being “perfect” can still play out ok. Why you should not make the changes first. Practical ways to overcome perfectionism Why you need to only focus on what you’re the very best at. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Flip your Life Program Join us LIVE and in person - click to learn more! Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle S&J, I sold three courses at 97 dollars so far and counting. I can't thank you guys enough. This is a complete game changer for me in believing in my product, voice and message. Now I just have to tweak my Facebook ads to get the pearl website click down. I already paid off my coaching call. You guys rule. I'm so stoked right now and I cannot wait to see what's next. Thank you, Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey ya'll! On today's podcast, we're going to help you stop pursuing perfection and move forward in your online business. 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 Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you again this week. We are going to tackle a subject today that is kind of a universal struggle for everybody that gets into online business; we hear so many people talk about this topic that we thought it would be great to just go into a full-blown podcast about it and see if we can help people move forward in their online business and that topic is perfectionism. It's trying to make everything just right, getting everything perfect before you launch. Writing the perfect email before you put it into your auto-responder sequence and how perfectionism is actually really, really bad for your online business and you've got to deal with this if you are ever going to be successful online. But before we do that, Jocelyn is going to read a success story from one of our audience members. JOCELYN: And by 'some people' in that little speech, he means me. SHANE: Jocelyn is the perfectionist; I have never struggled with perfectionism but Jocelyn does. We'll talk about that later. JOCELYN: Okay,

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about how perfectionism can hold you back from launching your business and start building for the future. People have used perfectionism as an excuse for not getting started for far too long in the world of online business. We love seeing people move forward, and getting over this “excuse” is critical for so many people just to make those first $10 or even $100. You will learn Why the little things might not really matter to your audience. A story of how not being “perfect” can still play out ok. Why you should not make the changes first. Practical ways to overcome perfectionism Why you need to only focus on what you’re the very best at. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show The Flip Your Life Community Join us LIVE and in person - click to learn more! Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle S&J, I sold three courses at 97 dollars so far and counting. I can't thank you guys enough. This is a complete game changer for me in believing in my product, voice and message. Now I just have to tweak my Facebook ads to get the pearl website click down. I already paid off my coaching call. You guys rule. I'm so stoked right now and I cannot wait to see what's next. Thank you, Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too!   Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey ya'll! On today's podcast, we're going to help you stop pursuing perfection and move forward in your online business. 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 Flipped Lifestyle podcast. Great to be back with you again this week. We are going to tackle a subject today that is kind of a universal struggle for everybody that gets into online business; we hear so many people talk about this topic that we thought it would be great to just go into a full-blown podcast about it and see if we can help people move forward in their online business and that topic is perfectionism. It's trying to make everything just right, getting everything perfect before you launch. Writing the perfect email before you put it into your auto-responder sequence and how perfectionism is actually really, really bad for your online business and you've got to deal with this if you are ever going to be successful online. But before we do that, Jocelyn is going to read a success story from one of our audience members. JOCELYN: And by 'some people' in that little speech, he means me. SHANE: Jocelyn is the perfectionist; I have never struggled w...

In today’s podcast we’re going to help Janelle start selling her digital products on her website subdays.com. Janelle has a product and a vision for her online business but has some questions to really kickstart her growth so she can stay at home with her son. She has great questions about everything from social media advertising to how to position herself as an expert. You’ll definitely be able to get some value from these common questions we hear about launching your online business. You will learn The actions Janelle needs to take to start generating sales for her products. How to start growing your email list with Facebook ads. How to balance the paid vs free content on her site. The art of pre-selling your product. Why you should always be working on your brand and your content. If you need ISBN numbers or not on your products. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Janelle’s website subdays.com Past episode about Social Media advertising What a LISTSERV is Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! You can connect with S&J on social media too!   Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast we are going to help Janelle take her online business to the next level. SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We are your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip you lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright. Let’s get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys welcome to this week’s Flipped podcast. We are very excited this week to have our listener Janelle Afasiab. I hope I said that right Janelle. She has actually asked a question before. I am pretty sure we butchered that name before so we are really excited to have her today. We have a New York to Kentucky connection today so this is going to be an interesting call. We got the north and the south but we are super excited to her. SHANE: And no fighting we are not going to fight. There is no north and south fighting tonight, alright Janelle. JOCELYN: So we are very excited to have you today Janelle you have some great questions and I know that ty will really benefit out listeners out there. So let’s start out and go ahead introduce yourself and tell us about your family and your online business so far. JANELLE: Okay, well my name is Janelle Afrasiab. And I have been married eight years and we have one son. He is about five weeks away from turning three and my husband is currently at home right no babysitting. We don’t have much family here on New York. I am originally from North Dakota. I don’t have much family out here so getting a babysitter is a little bit more difficult. I am a former high school Spanish teacher and what I have done is I have taken my activities that used in class, put them into a book and now I am trying to sell and market them. SHANE: Awesome. And do you work right now? JANELLE: Just a stay at home mom. SHANE: Okay. So tell us a little bit about like why you want to ...

In today’s podcast we’re going to help Janelle start selling her digital products on her website subdays.com. Janelle has a product and a vision for her online business but has some questions to really kickstart her growth so she can stay at home with her son. She has great questions about everything from social media advertising to how to position herself as an expert. You’ll definitely be able to get some value from these common questions we hear about launching your online business. You will learn The actions Janelle needs to take to start generating sales for her products. How to start growing your email list with Facebook ads. How to balance the paid vs free content on her site. The art of pre-selling your product. Why you should always be working on your brand and your content. If you need ISBN numbers or not on your products. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Janelle’s website subdays.com Past episode about Social Media advertising What a LISTSERV is Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Thank you for listening! Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s podcast we are going to help Janelle take her online business to the next level. [spoiler] SHANE: Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast, where life always comes before work. We are your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip you lifestyle upside down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? Alright. Let’s get started. JOCELYN: Hey guys welcome to this week’s Flipped podcast. We are very excited this week to have our listener Janelle Afasiab. I hope I said that right Janelle. She has actually asked a question before. I am pretty sure we butchered that name before so we are really excited to have her today. We have a New York to Kentucky connection today so this is going to be an interesting call. We got the north and the south but we are super excited to her. SHANE: And no fighting we are not going to fight. There is no north and south fighting tonight, alright Janelle. JOCELYN: So we are very excited to have you today Janelle you have some great questions and I know that ty will really benefit out listeners out there. So let’s start out and go ahead introduce yourself and tell us about your family and your online business so far. JANELLE: Okay, well my name is Janelle Afrasiab. And I have been married eight years and we have one son. He is about five weeks away from turning three and my husband is currently at home right no babysitting. We don’t have much family here on New York. I am originally from North Dakota. I don’t have much family out here so getting a babysitter is a little bit more difficult. I am a former high school Spanish teacher and what I have done is I have taken my activities that used in class, put them into a book and now I am trying to sell and market them. SHANE: Awesome. And do you work right now? JANELLE: Just a stay at home mom. SHANE: Okay. So tell us a little bit about like why you want to get in to online business. Why do you want to flip your life?

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Beth Anne figure out how to simply sell digital products on her Wordpress website. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Best way to sell digital products on your Wordpress blog."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Beth Anne Aretto E-Junkie Gumroad Easy Digital Downloads Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey guys! Welcomes to today’s Q and A mini podcast. I still have no voice so apologies for that. Today’s question is from Beth Anne Aretto. I hope I said that right Beth Anne and she says that: I have some digital products I want to sell but I haven’t figured out the best plug in or way to do it on my WordPress blog, what would you recommend? SHANE: Alright. There are a lot of different ways to sell digital products online. If you are just selling PDF or something like that probably the easiest solution is something like ejunkie.com or gumroad.com. Those are services that basically let you go in and you can log in to your system. They let you upload your product to their servers and they will basically give you a piece of code that you can copy and paste anywhere on your website and when people click that little button or the sales button it will pop up and it will handle the transactions for you. You usually have to link those to your PayPal account but both of those services have really good instructions on how to do that. It’s not really hard. You just go on to PayPal. There is like a big key that you copy and that you paste that in to Gumroad or E-junkie and you are off to the races. I actually use E-junkie with coachxo.com because I don’t have a lot of products on that site. If you have something like 10 to 20, maybe less than 10 let’s say that—if you have 10 to 20 products, something less than that, E-junkie or Gumroad is all you need. All you have to do is go upload the product, set the price, copy and paste the code into your blog post or over in your sidebar and you are ready to sell and deliver those digital products. So if you want to get started as quick as possible that’s what I would do. I would just go and do something simple. Don’t worry about setting up a big plug in and doing all that. That will get your product for sale ASAP. But if you get quite a few products or you know you product vine is going to grow or if you need to track that better and you want to like really look at your sales report and see what’s happening, you might need an onsite solution and Jocelyn actually uses one for her Elementary Librarian site. JOCELYN: Yeah I have a lot of products on that site and so I decided that I was going to get a plug in and the one that I use on Elementary Librarian is called easy digital downloads. There are actually a charge for it. I am not exactly sure of the price. I want to say it’s under $100. There are several different extensions that you can add on to it and basically those are just extra little things that give it different functionality if you want it to do a variety of different tasks. But you can start out the very basic thing. That would be a great place to start. JOCELYN: A plug in like easy digital downloads is good if you want to have just a one-time cost. Products like E-Junkie or Gumroad, the more products you have the more they are going to charge you for their services. I think it’s like a monthly fee. Is that right? SHANE: Yeah it is. Yeah JOCELYN: Yeah so if you know that you are going to have a lot more products or you’re eventually going to have a lot more and you don’t want to pay that monthly fee you may want to go with a plug in type service. I’ve really like easy digital downloads. It’s really easy to use and you basically just upload your files in,

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Beth Anne figure out how to simply sell digital products on her Wordpress website. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Best way to sell digital products on your Wordpress blog."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Beth Anne Aretto E-Junkie Gumroad Easy Digital Downloads Let’s dive into this week’s question! JOCELYN: Hey guys! Welcomes to today’s Q and A mini podcast. I still have no voice so apologies for that. Today’s question is from Beth Anne Aretto. I hope I said that right Beth Anne and she says that: I have some digital products I want to sell but I haven’t figured out the best plug in or way to do it on my WordPress blog, what would you recommend? SHANE: Alright. There are a lot of different ways to sell digital products online. If you are just selling PDF or something like that probably the easiest solution is something like ejunkie.com or gumroad.com. Those are services that basically let you go in and you can log in to your system. They let you upload your product to their servers and they will basically give you a piece of code that you can copy and paste anywhere on your website and when people click that little button or the sales button it will pop up and it will handle the transactions for you. You usually have to link those to your PayPal account but both of those services have really good instructions on how to do that. It’s not really hard. You just go on to PayPal. There is like a big key that you copy and that you paste that in to Gumroad or E-junkie and you are off to the races. I actually use E-junkie with coachxo.com because I don’t have a lot of products on that site. If you have something like 10 to 20, maybe less than 10 let’s say that—if you have 10 to 20 products, something less than that, E-junkie or Gumroad is all you need. All you have to do is go upload the product, set the price, copy and paste the code into your blog post or over in your sidebar and you are ready to sell and deliver those digital products. So if you want to get started as quick as possible that’s what I would do. I would just go and do something simple. Don’t worry about setting up a big plug in and doing all that. That will get your product for sale ASAP. But if you get quite a few products or you know you product vine is going to grow or if you need to track that better and you want to like really look at your sales report and see what’s happening, you might need an onsite solution and Jocelyn actually uses one for her Elementary Librarian site. JOCELYN: Yeah I have a lot of products on that site and so I decided that I was going to get a plug in and the one that I use on Elementary Librarian is called easy digital downloads. There are actually a charge for it. I am not exactly sure of the price. I want to say it’s under $100. There are several different extensions that you can add on to it and basically those are just extra little things that give it different functionality if you want it to do a variety of different tasks. But you can start out the very basic thing. That would be a great place to start. JOCELYN: A plug in like easy digital downloads is good if you want to have just a one-time cost. Products like E-Junkie or Gumroad, the more products you have the more they are going to charge you for their services. I think it’s like a monthly fee. Is that right? SHANE: Yeah it is. Yeah JOCELYN: Yeah so if you know that you are going to have a lot more products or you’re eventually going to have a lot more and you don’t want to pay that monthly fee you may want to go with a plug in type service. I’ve really like easy digital downloads. It’s really easy to use and you basically just upload y...

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Ashlyn discover if she truly needs a website or can get started without one. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Don’t get caught up on the little things, focus on the big picture."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Ashlyn Leadpages Let’s dive into this week’s question! SHANE: What’s up everybody? It’s time for another Q and A with S and J. Our question today comes from Ashlyn. And Ashlyn writes: I am about whether or not I should start a website immediately. I know it’s possible to sell products and collect emails through lead pages but I am worried that if I don’t have an email address like Ashlyn@flippedlifestyle.com, for example, my emails will get filtered as spam because I am most used likely used Gmail or something like that. What do you recommend? Okay, first we’re going to talk about whether or not you need a website and then we’re going to back and Jocelyn is going to talk about a little bit about how emails work and what Ashlyn is talking about here about getting our emails that she sends to her audiences getting filtered as spam. We do not recommend that you start a website at the very beginning of your online journey because you can really bogged down in getting your website correctly, learning how to use WordPress, writing content for your website, getting everything fixed just the way you want it, trying to find a logo—it can take you three, four months and all of the sudden you look up and you have been doing hours and hours of work every single week. You have been staying up late until midnight every night trying to get your website perfect and after three or four months you don’t have anything to show for it. You have never made a dime, you don’t have any products and your audience is not really growing and you are kind of burned out and people give up and quit. We see that happen over and over and over again. So if we were going back and starting completely from scratch with all the knowledge that we know right now, we would always started creating a digital product first and learning the processes of selling that product to people like setting up a sales page, taking payments, how do I get this thing to be automatically delivered so I don’t have to sit here and email every single person that orders from me? How do I market this on social media? Can I run ads? You can do all of those things without a website. That’s exactly what we teach in Flipped Your Life: How to Create a Digital Product. We go through the process of selling a digital product, creating a digital product, taking payments, automating delivery and marketing it using different channels like social media or advertising. Now, that being said, once you learned how to do that, that’s going to take about a month to learn that process but you actually can sell something. You have your infrastructure built where people who find your content can buy it and give you money for it and you can create those passive income streams. At that point, a month or two end of the process, now you are going to go in and create a website where your actual products are going to live. You can start making content but those first people that get there actually now have something to buy from you. So we believe that the first month, maybe the first two months of online business should be spent totally on research, creating products and building an infrastructure for sales and marketing and then you are going to create a website where your brand is going to live and all that’s going to happen like you are going to have my slip or email address, Shane@flippedlifestyle.com and all those things. JOCELYN: As far as your email goes Ashlyn, you can definitely start out just using a Gmail address or your Yahoo,

In today’s Q&A, we are helping Ashlyn discover if she truly needs a website or can get started without one. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Don’t get caught up on the little things, focus on the big picture."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today’s question from Ashlyn Leadpages Let’s dive into this week’s question! SHANE: What’s up everybody? It’s time for another Q and A with S and J. Our question today comes from Ashlyn. And Ashlyn writes: I am about whether or not I should start a website immediately. I know it’s possible to sell products and collect emails through lead pages but I am worried that if I don’t have an email address like Ashlyn@flippedlifestyle.com, for example, my emails will get filtered as spam because I am most used likely used Gmail or something like that. What do you recommend? Okay, first we’re going to talk about whether or not you need a website and then we’re going to back and Jocelyn is going to talk about a little bit about how emails work and what Ashlyn is talking about here about getting our emails that she sends to her audiences getting filtered as spam. We do not recommend that you start a website at the very beginning of your online journey because you can really bogged down in getting your website correctly, learning how to use WordPress, writing content for your website, getting everything fixed just the way you want it, trying to find a logo—it can take you three, four months and all of the sudden you look up and you have been doing hours and hours of work every single week. You have been staying up late until midnight every night trying to get your website perfect and after three or four months you don’t have anything to show for it. You have never made a dime, you don’t have any products and your audience is not really growing and you are kind of burned out and people give up and quit. We see that happen over and over and over again. So if we were going back and starting completely from scratch with all the knowledge that we know right now, we would always started creating a digital product first and learning the processes of selling that product to people like setting up a sales page, taking payments, how do I get this thing to be automatically delivered so I don’t have to sit here and email every single person that orders from me? How do I market this on social media? Can I run ads? You can do all of those things without a website. That’s exactly what we teach in Flipped Your Life: How to Create a Digital Product. We go through the process of selling a digital product, creating a digital product, taking payments, automating delivery and marketing it using different channels like social media or advertising. Now, that being said, once you learned how to do that, that’s going to take about a month to learn that process but you actually can sell something. You have your infrastructure built where people who find your content can buy it and give you money for it and you can create those passive income streams. At that point, a month or two end of the process, now you are going to go in and create a website where your actual products are going to live. You can start making content but those first people that get there actually now have something to buy from you. So we believe that the first month, maybe the first two months of online business should be spent totally on research, creating products and building an infrastructure for sales and marketing and then you are going to create a website where your brand is going to live and all that’s going to happen like you are going to have my slip or email address, Shane@flippedlifestyle.com and all those things. JOCELYN: As far as your email goes Ashlyn, you can definitely start out just using a Gmail address or your Yahoo,

In today’s podcast we’re going to talk about more about how you should be using paid advertising on social media. In our opinion paid advertising is one of the best ways to kick start your growth, you can’t just sit back and hope for organic growth. Honestly, you can’t afford not to be using paid advertising! [Tweet "You can’t afford not to pay for social media advertising "] You will learn Why paid advertising is the best way to boost your launch. A great idea for getting some “seed” money to get started. Invest up front so you can live the way you want in the future. Why you should just get something out there, so you can test results. That you should start with leads not sales. Links and resources mentioned in today’s show Last weeks “part 1” episode Start your first digital product Enjoy the podcast; we hope it inspires you to explore what’s possible for your family! Listen to what others are saying about Flipped Lifestyle Hey guys, I just put my Digital Product I mad in Flip Your Life on sale today...and made my first sell!!!! So excited, thanks S&J. I would have never finished without you guys! Byron Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air! Can't Miss Moments Each week Jocelyn and I share moments that we might have missed if we had not started our online business. We hope these moments inspire you to see the possibilities and freedom online business could provide for your family. You can connect with S&J on social media too!   Thanks again for listening to the show! If you liked it, make sure you share it with your friends and family! Our goal is to help as many families as possible change their lives through online business. Help us by sharing the show! If you have comments or questions, please be sure to leave them below in the comment section of this post. See y’all next week! Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below! JOCELYN: Hey ya'll! On today's podcast we're going to finish our chat about how to use paid advertising on social media. [spoiler] 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. JOCELYN: Hey guys, thanks for joining us for today's Flipped Lifestyle podcast; we are going to be continuing our discussion on paid social media advertising today. We started out last week telling you our first three tips about paid social media advertising and they are, to know your objective, know your audience and know your ads. So, if you missed that show on last week's broadcast, you can head on over to Flippedlifestyle.com/Podcast36 and you can check those out. But before we get into the other tips on paid advertising, Shane is going to share with you a success story from one of our Flip Your Life students. SHANE: We get a ton of emails each week about people using our tips and tactics that we talk about on our podcast or on our Flip Your Life course to really take their business to the next level, maybe it's kind of like having an a-ha moment or even making sales. So we decided a couple of weeks ago, that we'd be started sharing these with you because they're really motivating to us and we want it to motivate you guys that are out there trying to get started in this online business stuff that there are tons of people out there doing this. It is possible and people are having real success because they are...