Hey y’all! We’re so pleased you dropped in to check out our Q&A with S&J. If this is the first time you’ve been here, make yourself at home and enjoy!

This is Q & A Saturday where we answer one of your questions. We wanted to do this because we get a ton of questions from y’all and we know that if one person has a question, lots of others do, too.

Every Sunday at 8pm EST we will open a post on our Facebook page and each week we will take questions from there. Every Thursday and Saturday we will be airing a new Q&A mini podcast with the answers. This will let us have more interaction with you guys and answer all those questions so you can get down the path we went down to build your business.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Flipped Lifestyle Keyword Video

Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing

Hostgator - hosting for your own website

Let’s dive into this week’s question!

JOCELYN: Hey all you’re listening to the Q&A of 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? Let’s get started.

JOCELYN: Welcome back to our Q&A podcast where we answer one of your questions each week, actually two and today’s question is from Marty and Marty says:

"If you’re creating an e-book that does not have a huge list of follow-up topics, would you suggest self-publishing on Amazon or creating your own sales page and doing your own self?"

SHANE: There are a couple of advantages and disadvantages to both. If you publish on your site, the huge advantage is that you get to keep all of the money so when you sell something for $10 you’re going to get to keep all $10 of that. If you’re going to sell on Amazon you’re going to have to share at least some of the revenue with them. I don’t know the exact percentages but I do know they take a portion of your sales and I know at their highest tier they pay out 70% so at best you’re going to get $7 out of your 10 but I think that’s only for people who sell exclusively through Amazon so I would say it’s a higher percentage they take if you’re just selling on the Kindle store, you might lose upto 40 or 50%, I’m not sure but I do know that Amazon is going to take a good chunk of your money.

The big advantage of Amazon is when people are going to look for a book, they’re going to the Kindle and search for a book. I believe in your email you said your topic was “how to negotiate car sales” so if someone is on Amazon looking for that topic then there are good chances that your book would come up and you might get more exposure that way. However, your website is still going to get exposure from Google. Someone’s going to search for that topic on Google and you might do some good SEO and get your website in a way that it shows up in search results so you’re still going to get that exposure but that is definitely a limiting factor if you don’t have a large audience, that might be a reason you use Amazon to do that.

JOCELYN: I would say you could do both. A lot of people use their entry-level product on Amazon to get people to be aware of their website so that’s definitely a viable strategy if you want to try that. I would definitely recommend starting a website or sales page using some of the language that some of the people in your target audience will use and you can find that by using the Google keyword tool and we actually did a video about that a while back and we’ll put that link for you in our show notes today for the Q&A number 11, but I would recommend definitely doing that. Figure out what your audience is looking for and use that kind of language in your sales page and see what happens.

SHANE: If you go on Amazon and post on Kindle don’t forget you can still do both. I think it’s called their independent publishing program.

In today's podcast we're showing you how to create more content in less time for your online business.

We know that it can feel overwhelming and daunting to create content when you first get started, but there are some simple strategies you can use to make more in less time and still have it be high quality.

You will learn:

What "content" really means

How to plan out your content with an editorial calendar

Why batching content will be your saving grace

How to promote your content

The importance of curating other content

Optimize your content with images

FREE BONUS: Canva Tutorial

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

LeadPages

Dropbox

Canva

Canva Tutorial Blog Post

Elementary Librarian

Examples of Countdown Timers

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!

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 listen right now? Read the transcript below!

JOCELYN: Hey y’all, on today’s episode we’re going to tell you how to create more content in less time for your online business. [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.

JOCELYN: Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Today, we are going to be talking about content creation. Content creation is a lot of work. For those of you who have already started an online business, it might be a little bit overwhelming for you. It does take a lot of time and there is really nothing worse than working on a blog or in our case, a podcast that needs to come out in a couple of days - not that we’ve ever done that before.

SHANE: A few times here and there.

JOCELYN: So in today’s show, we’re going to be talking about some strategies for creating more content for your blog or website in less time but first, we want to read an iTunes review.

SHANE: And today’s iTunes review comes from Rock and Roll Rider. He says, five star review, as always, “Finally, a business podcast that’s not about some entrepre-jock jet setting around the world.” He writes, “I love podcasts and I’m an entrepreneur so you think that I’d have plenty to listen to, but here’s the thing, I’m also a husband and a father. Most business podcasts are all about getting 400 million people on a webinar or travel hacking your way to West Africa to learn SEO secret from exotic jungle cats. I’m a real person with a real family who became an entrepreneur so I could see more of them. I’m working to live not living to work and this podcast honors that and gives me great advice, kudos to you two.”

So anybody that works exotic jungle cats into our iTunes review, you are automatically on the podcast. Thanks for that review. We appreciate it. If you’ve not left us a review yet, go ahead and do that. Head over to iTunes. Leave us a review, tell us what you think of this show,

Hey y’all! We’re so pleased you dropped in to check out our Q&A with S&J. If this is the first time you’ve been here, make yourself at home and enjoy!

This is Q & A Saturday where we answer one of your questions. We wanted to do this because we get a ton of questions from y’all and we know that if one person has a question, lots of others do, too.

Every Sunday at 8pm EST we will open a post on our Facebook page and each week we will take questions from there. Every Thursday and Saturday we will be airing a new Q&A mini podcast with the answers. This will let us have more interaction with you guys and answer all those questions so you can get down the path we went down to build your business.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Elementary Librarian

Let’s dive into this week’s question!

SHANE: Today’s question comes from Janelle Afrasiab.

JOCELYN: Sorry, we completely butchered your name, Janelle.

SHANE: Janelle A. is what we’re going to go with, I guess.  Janelle writes:

“I have written a book of Spanish activities.  There are 180 activities in total.  If I were to give away a sampling on my website, how many do you suggest I should include or should I give away one free with every episode of my podcast and then I’ll have 180 podcast ideas?  What do you think?”

JOCELYN: All right, Janelle.  There are a lot of different ideas or theories about how you should give things away on your website.  For me, what I have always done is kind of err on the side of giving extra things away for free.  For example, when I sold my first year of lesson plans on my Elementary Librarian site, I gave away all of the activities for free and I did that for a reason.  It was because I knew that if I have free activities, people would continue to come onto my website and ultimately, that is my goal with my materials.  I want you always coming back to my website.

When I give something away to people, in fact, I don’t even attach it to an email.  I make it a link to a page on my website so that people are always coming back and engaging with my content on my site.  In that regard, that means that someone might actually come back and maybe they will see one of my advertisements for my products and theoretically, maybe they might buy it.  So that always gives you an opportunity to have people coming back onto your site and potentially purchasing one of your paid products.

SHANE: The rule of thumb generally too is give away something that will blow people’s minds, something that will make you stand out from the competition.  You said you might want to give away one per podcast, I can see that you could talk about these activities in your podcast but I’m not sure if you want to just trickle little bits of information like that out.  Jocelyn gave away, when we first started, an entire month of lesson plans for librarians and when I started out, I gave away an entire playbook which that’s usually what most coaches sell is their playbook, a paid product.

I think with something like this, you’ve got to look at it and say what am I going to give away that is going to get someone to give me that email address?  Would you go to a website and for one activity, would you put in your email address just to get that one activity?  That’s kind of the question you have to ask yourself.

To specifically answer your question, I think that maybe you could take like 20 of the 180 activities and put them into an eBook and that might be a great opt-in you could say, “Hey, check out this activity.  It’s one of 20.  If you want all 20, give me your email” and then once you get those emails, you know they liked your activities, so maybe then you could put the other 160 into a book that you could sell as an additional product.

JOCELYN: As far as your podcast question, I think it’s a good idea to give things away in your podcast from time to time but maybe not every single activity.  You could mention, “Hey,

Hey y’all! We’re so pleased you dropped in to check out our Q&A with S&J. If this is the first time you’ve been here, make yourself at home and enjoy!

This is Q & A Thursday where we answer one of your questions. We wanted to do this because we get a ton of questions from y’all and we know that if one person has a question, lots of others do, too.

Every Sunday at 8pm EST we will open a post on our Facebook page and each week we will take questions from there. Every Thursday and Saturday we will be airing a new Q&A mini podcast with the answers. This will let us have more interaction with you guys and answer all those questions so you can get down the path we went down to build your business.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode:

Studiopress.com - Genesis Theme by StudioPress.  The theme we use on ALL of our websites.

 

Let’s dive into this week’s question!

JOCELYN: Today’s question is from Bruce Cook and it says:

“What themes do you recommend for your WordPress website?”

SHANE: All right Bruce.  There are ton of options out there for themes.  There are all sorts of different frameworks and it seems like you can just find a theme anywhere all over the place, but the one that we have settled on for all of our websites is called Genesis.  Genesis is basically a theme or framework that sits on top of WordPress, and then you can go buy what’s called Child Themes to manipulate the look and feel of your website from a website called StudioPress.com.  Genesis is amazing.  It just has awesome code.  It’s so clean.  It never breaks on you like some of the free themes do and we just love it because it makes everything so simple and we know that our website is always going to work.

Also, it’s mobile responsive.  A lot of traffic that we get comes from mobile devices - people on their phones, people just out and about maybe on their iPad or a tablet, and what responsive means is that Genesis will always kind of fit whatever screen it’s on.  So when it’s on a PC, it’s going to look good.  If it’s on a tablet, it’s going to look good.  If it’s on a phone, it’s going to look good.

Genesis is the theme that we recommend to everyone because we tried a lot of themes.  We’ve tried Thesis. we’ve tried dozens of free themes and we just don’t feel like any of them ever could stand up to Genesis when it came to functionality, good code, and just how well it worked.

JOCELYN: Genesis does have a cost to it.  It’s around $60 to buy the framework but you can use it on unlimited sites.  So if you have more than one website, you can certainly use it on all of those.  There are tons of Child Themes out there and a Child Theme basically just means that it is a theme that works with Genesis to make your site look different.  You might not necessarily know it by looking at our sites that they are all the same theme but each of them has different Child Themes, so just something to think about when you’re looking around.

We’ve used a lot of different kind of themes as far as when we started our websites and Genesis has definitely been our favorite.  The theme that we use on Flipped Lifestyle is called Sixteen Nine and it is mobile responsive.  Some of the Child Themes are not so you do have to watch when you’re choosing a Child Theme for Genesis to make sure that that Child Theme is mobile responsive.  It is so important.

We went to a conference recently that said that up to, I think it was like 60% something of website users were now accessing it now on their mobile device and of course that would be different for every kind of website but it is so, so important that you have a mobile responsive site.  So definitely keep that in mind as you’re choosing a theme.

SHANE: One thing that we want to put on here too is don’t settle on a free Child Theme.  If you’re just trying to learn WordPress and you want to throw a theme on there, just play around with a free theme, that’s fine but free themes are free for a reason,

In today’s Flipped Lifestyle Podcast, we are helping Jeff and Stephanie Jones take their business to the next level.

Jeff is a musician who found himself spending most of his time away from his wife and children, so he wanted to make the transition into online business to be home more often. Stephanie got her beginnings a few years ago, but took a break and is now looking to get back in the swing of things.

You will learn:

How Jeff & Stephanie made the move into online business

How long they've been in business and why they want to flip their life and give up the "security" of teaching and spotlight of being in a rock band

What's better; a static webpage or a blog-style

What sort of product should they offer as a free opt-in to grow their email list

Is it worth re-launching a website or just letting it sit there

What's better; starting off with a service like eJunkie or implementing an online store

What topic is recommended for a webinar

Links and resources mentioned in today’s show

TeachingWithPassion.com - Stephanie's website

CustomStix.com - Jeff's website

eJunkie - the online shopping cart service we use to sell digital products

LeadPages - our favorite tool for creating amazing web pages to sell our digital products and for hosting webinars

Aweber - the best product on the planet for building your email list

Easy Digital Downloads - Jocelyn's favorite shopping cart solution

Launch by Jeff Walker - Great book on how to do a launch

Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook - Gary Vaynerchuk's book on how to sell online

Can’t Miss Moments This Week

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!

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 listen right now? Read the transcript below!

JOCELYN: Hey y’all. On today’s Flipped Podcast, we help Jeff and Stephanie Jones 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 going on guys?  Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast.  It’s great to be back with you again this week.  I am Shane Sams and Jocelyn is right here beside me.

JOCELYN: Hey!

SHANE: And today’s podcast is a Flipped podcast where we bring in people who are new to online business and we do a free consulting call on the air and we kind of let you guys listen in so that they can ask us questions about how they can take their business to the next level and you guys get to kind of hear our answers and apply that to your own online business.

Today’s guests are Jeff and Stephanie Jones and they have an amazing story of how they got into online business and some awesome goals that they are setting out to achieve online with their online business.  So let’s jump right into our interview with Jeff and Stephanie, and we will be back after we talk to them on the call.

So guys introduce yourselves to the Flipped Lifestyle audience and tell them about how you met, how long you’ve been together, how many kids you got, and things like that.

JEFF: Okay.  Well now the stories might differ a little bit on how we met.  Anyway,