In today’s podcast we are going to show you how to create and sell digital products to make money online.

Creating digital products is our preferred way of making money online for several reasons, so in this episode we're going to share the why and how of making and selling digital products.

You will also learn:

What exactly is a digital product

The different types you can create

Why we prefer to make money from digital products vs. other revenue streams

How to create your very own digital product

The best ways to accept payment for your products

How to deliver your digital product automatically

Where to sell your products

The best ways to promote your new product

Our bonus tip!

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

Click here to leave us an iTunes review and subscribe to the show! We may read yours on the air!

 Links and resources mentioned in today’s show

Flip Your Life eCourse

Enter for your chance to win a free membership to our Flip Your Life eCourse

Dave Ramsay's premium podcast and membership site

Fiverr.com for quick jobs

Turn your Google doc into a PDF for free!

Make screen captures using Camtasia for PC or Mac

Have live meetings with Google Hangouts and they automatically load to YouTube

Paypal, Stripe or Square - payment tools for your digital product sales

E-junkie or Gumroad- delivery services for your online products

Leadpages - sell your products off them

Bluehost, HostGator or Fatcow - hosting services for your website

AWeber - for easy email marketing

BONUS: Our FREE 6 part video series on How to Create and Sell Digital Products

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!

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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 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.

Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!

JOCELYN: Hey y’all, today, we’re going to tell you how to create and sell digital products to make money online.[spoiler title="Click to View Transcript"]

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. It’s great to be back with you all again this week. It is really cold where we are right now.

JOCELYN: Really cold.

SHANE: Really cold, it was like 4 degrees when we took Isaac to school this morning and bundled up Anna and got her out the door. Man, we are absolutely freezing. We’re sitting here in flannel pajamas and robes. We’re so cold right now.

JOCELYN: That’s our typical uniform.

SHANE: That’s right, that’s our uniform for the day but we are going to keep this thing rolling and even though it’s cold outside, we’ve got a hot topic for you today. See what I did there, Jocelyn?

JOCELYN: That was great.

SHANE: That was not great. All right, today we’re going to talk about creating digital products and selling them online. That is our preferred method for earning an income on the internet.

We think it’s the best way to do it. It’s focused on you. It lets you really highlight your expertise and you can really focus on your pa...

In today's Q&A, we are talking about how we really feel about SEO and ranking keywords on Google. We share some important lessons we've learned about being successful in your niche - Hint: it doesn't have much to do with Google!

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:

USHistoryTeachers.com - our new site

Our Keyword Research Video Tutorial

Have a Question? Ask it here!

Let’s dive into this week’s question!

JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.

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, welcome to today’s Q&A mini podcast with S&J. We have a question today from Greg Robinson and it says:

“I’m in a competitive niche. How can I start ranking in the Google search results for my target keyword?”

All right, Greg. I’m going to let you have it. Anyone who listens to this podcast very often knows that I’m not a big fan of search engine optimization. It’s not that I think it’s completely irrelevant but Google has gotten a lot smarter and actually, all of the search engines.

The most important thing to remember is that you need to write for human beings not computers and search engines. Just keep that in mind as you’re writing your website content or anything that has to do with your keywords. Now Shane knows a lot more about keywords and things like that than I do so I’m going to turn this one over to him.

SHANE: Like Jocelyn said, you can’t gain Google. So no matter how good you think you can trick the system and write your copy to end up on the front page of Google, if people click it and come to your website and it’s robot speak, then you’re probably not going to keep those people and turn them into customers anyway.

There’s really no sense in getting caught up over ranking for an exact target keyword. The days of the exact matched domain where there’s one keyword that you’re really trying to focus on and if you could just rank for that one

keyword, “It’s over, I’ve got it. I win,” that’s pretty much gone. That’s over with but you really need to just focus on is writing a lot of content, writing the best content that you can and you’re going to start ranking for more and more keywords in the search results. It’s not about getting that one keyword, it’s about writing so much content that you have a lot of chances to rank in the top 10 for a lot of different things on Google.

For example, we have a new website. It’s called USHistoryTeachers.com and it’s set up to provide lesson plans and study guides and tests, things like that for History teachers to use in their classroom. Now, the “keyword” would be US History teachers. That’s who I’m targeting that’s who I want to come to the site, that’s kind of the word I guess that I wanted to focus on on that website, but 99% of the traffic, the keywords that come up in Google, when someone searches for something and it shows up in those results, 99% of the time, it is not US History teachers.

It’s something else like World War II lesson plan, or civil war battles, or something like that. It just depends on what they are looking for at that time and I have hundreds and hundreds of posts on this website and every time in words and in sentence on your webpage, when you’ve got like two words together or three words together, those are all keyword phrases.

Google knows the combinations of words in your website so the more you write, the more naturally you write, then Google is going to start ranking you for tons and tons of keywords and you don’t have to focus on that one perfect specific thing to kind of win the day.

In today's Q&A, we are talking about our experience working with virtual assistants - or VA's as they are commonly referred to. We will also be sharing a few resources you can check out to start hiring your own.

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:

Today's question comes from Rhonda over at MultitaskingMaven.com

Find a VA using Odesk or Elance

Listen to Chris Ducker's podcast New Business Podcast

Try a service like Virtual Staff Finder

Handy tools for communication are Google Docs, Skype, and even Google Calendar

Make videos using Camtasia for PC or Mac

Have a Question? Ask it here!

Let’s dive into this week’s question!

JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.

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 up guys? Welcome back to another Q&A with S&J, awesome to be back with you again today. This is the mini podcast where we answer your questions. We love getting questions from you guys.

That’s one of our big goals is to always to be accessible to you and to help you get those questions answered in your online business. So we are here for you guys. All you have to do is send them in.

Today’s question comes from Rhonda and her website is MultitaskingMaven.com. Don’t forget guys when you do submit a question, we are happy to read your URL on the air. We’ll always check the content and make sure it’s nothing profane or indecent, of course, but just send us your URLs and we’d be happy to share those with our audience and maybe we can get help you guys get a little traffic.

Rhonda writes:

“I am interested in learning more about hiring a virtual assistant or a VA for short. You have mentioned VA services in a few of your podcasts. I would love to hear a podcast about your VA experience. Where did you find your virtual assistants and how do you communicate with them?”

We don’t want to go into a whole podcast about this, Rhonda, but we thought we’d take a few minutes here to kind of let you know about our virtual assistant experience. It has been a very good one so far. We were very lucky early on. We found some great virtual assistants that completed the task that we needed them.

I used oDesk to find my first virtual assistant and actually my best virtual assistant. oDesk is kind of a marketplace where you can find people that are freelancers online. There’s another one called Elance.com. Those are two great places to find virtual assistants. My virtual assistant, my primary one lives in Bangladesh and he handles all of the backend stuff - shopping carts, building web pages. He helps me organize all of my memberships sites and he just does al lot of that busy work that I do not have time to do. He helps me filter spam comments and all those things.

The rates are extremely affordable when you’re hiring someone from like the Bangladesh or the Philippines or somewhere like that, $2, $3, $3 an hour over there is really good money. He lives very comfortably. I pay him probably, I think he’s up to between $3 and $4 an hour right now and he does about 20 hours a week of work for me, but that’s really good money for him where he lives and the economy is just the way they work. He does a good job and it’s a way to get very inexpensive help very quickly.

Another great place, now oDesk is kind of a crapshoot. We’ve also hired people on oDesk that have not been very good. So it’s kind of you’re rolling the dice a little bit when you’re trying these websites. You really got to do your due diligence, interview your VAs, check on all of their references, and make sure you know their background.

In today’s podcast we are bringing you a flipped podcast to help Joe and Heather take their business to the next level.

Each month we allow one of our audience members to call in and ask us questions about their online business.   We record the call and then share it with our listeners so everyone can learn from the consulting call!

In today's podcast you will learn:

About Heather's blog for women and why Joe wants to pivot from 9-5 into an online business

How they are learning more about the internet using Jill and Josh Stanton's Screw U program

The best way to divide up business tasks when you're first getting started

A few ways to narrow down and identify your ideal customer avatar

How to create balance between work, family and growing your online business

How to stand out amongst all the noise and create a brand that people will notice

Tips on choose which products to start creating, and which to put on the back burner

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!

 Links and resources mentioned in today’s show

Flipped Podcast - Apply for your free consulting call

Check out Heather's site Sassy Inspiration

Podcast 26 - Back to Back Flipped Podcasts

Screw the Nine to Five - Jill and Josh Stanton's site

LeadPages - for all your landing page needs

Ontraport and AWeber - mail service tools

Start with Why by Simon Sinek - Jocelyn's favourite book

CoachXO and ElementaryLibrarian - our sites

Flip Your Life - our first and ever evolving e-course

Pat Flynn and Chris Ducker - two our of favorite online voices

Join us in San Diego for the Flip Your Nine to Five Live event March 28-29, 2015

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!

Share on Facebook

Share on Twitter

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 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.

Can’t listen right now? Read the transcript below!

JOCELYN: Hey y’all, on today’s podcast, we help Joe and Heather take their online business to the next level. [spoiler title="Click to View Transcript"]

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 up guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you as always this week. We have got another Flipped Podcast for you. We’ve been having so much fun recording this podcast we’ve decided to try to start airing a couple a month now. So we’re actually going to bring you another Flipped Podcast. That’s back to back.

We had one last week with Glen and Annmarie Evans. This week, we are welcoming Heather and Joe Filipowicz, I’ve been practicing that name for a while now, to the Flipped Podcast. Guys, welcome to the show.

HEATHER: Thank you for having us.

JOE: Thanks.

JOCELYN: We’re really excited that you’re here and for you to tell us a little bit more about what you do. So tell us.

SHANE: I originally was not excited to say your name on air, though until you explained it.

HEATHER: My story is I loved him very much to take the last name, and I do.

JOE: That’s very true.

JOCELYN: Yeah,

In today's Q&A, we are covering what sort of disclaimer (aka. terms and conditions) you should be including on your website, products or any other service for your own online business.

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:

Podcast 11 - How Online Business is Helping us Pay Off Bills

Podcast 13 - Answering all your online business accounting questions

The Everybody Loves Raymond episode I'm referring to

Have a Question? Ask it here!

Let’s dive into this week’s question!

JOCELYN: Hey y’all, you’re listening to Q&A with S&J.

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, welcome to today’s Q&A with S&J. Today’s question is from Scott. We really like this question, Scott. He said:

“Just listened to your episode about your duct taped car. You guys are making so much money online, why don’t you just buy a new car? How can you possibly have debt and a crappy car if you’re making thousands of dollars online?”

SHANE: That is a good question, Scott. One we asked ourselves for many months after we’ve started making a lot of money online. The good news is since that episode where we were talking about our goals, we wanted to share a few things that we wanted to do in our life, goals that we set when we first started out online.

I think some people confused that episode. They thought those were our current goals but we were just reviewing the goals that we set before we made it online to let people know what we wanted to accomplish. That car actually no longer has duct tape on it. It was fixed and I actually gave that car to my nephew. He just turned 17, I think, and he’s now driving. He did not have a car so we gave him that car.

We bought a new car. We bought a brand new 2015 Town and Country. It was like $35,000. We paid cash for that so we actually are spending the money that we’re making now and we have upgraded our vehicle very much so. It’s an awesome car. The kids love it. So we have already taken care of that, but we do still have some debt and we do make a lot of money.

What’s important to remember, and I think a lot of people kind of get disillusioned about online marketers because they are like, “Wow, that person made $100,000. They are rich” or whatever. But what people don’t’ realize is that the government takes a lot of your money. If you make $100,000 and you live in the United States of America, you’re going to pay 30% of that off the top not counting anything else like sales tax and things like that that comes out of your money. Just because you’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars, which we have done this year, that doesn’t mean you get to keep every single penny of it.

JOCELYN: Yeah, a lot o f people have that in their mind because they are used to like a typical paycheck. When you receive a paycheck from an employer, all of the deductions have already been taken out like your federal income tax, your state income tax, social security, all those types of things. When you work for yourself, you have to take all those things out yourself and it is a pretty large chunk of money.

This is actually, 2014 was our first year of being an LLC, Limited Liability Company. We’re just kind of waiting to see how everything shakes out this year, making sure that we have enough to cover our taxes and the liabilities that we have to the government and things that we can get in trouble for if we don’t pay.

SHANE: We don’t want to jail basically so like we’re hoarding our money. We’re not paying off our house yet. We’re not writing that check for all that debt because there’s an awesome episode.