Welcome to the FlippedLifestyle.com

Hey y’all! We’re so pleased you dropped in to check out our podcast and blog. 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.

Let’s dive into this week’s question!

JOCELYN: Today, we are here with a question from Brittany Field and this is a question that I actually have myself sometimes. Brittany says,

“How do you deal with copyrights and all that legal stuff? If I put out a digital product, won’t people just copy or share my stuff? How do stop that from happening?”

Great question.

SHANE: Our answer for that is you can’t. We do not try to stop it. First of all, it’s like the actual legal stuff, of course we’re not lawyers or attorneys but we’re just telling you what we’ve discovered as we researched all these topics, your content is always protected by copyright. Even if you don’t put the copyright or the “©” at the bottom of your work, the way the law works is if you write something and it’s an original idea or whatever, you’re protected by US copyright law.

If someone is stealing your stuff or redistributing your stuff then theoretically, you could sue them and go after them for that. You just have to prove that it was original and you would probably win. You’re always protected by the law in this instance but here’s the problem with digital products. If I email you a PDF, it is very easy for you to just email that PDF on to someone else. How do you keep that from happening and still run a profitable online business?

Well, you really can’t keep people from sharing but what we have found is this, it doesn’t really matter. People don’t really share your stuff and distribute it all across to every single person in your niche or industry that would need your stuff. We have people all the time, like, I have football coaches. Football coaches love to share information. I’ll send them playbooks and things like that and at first, I was like, “Man, what if he just gives his playbook to everybody else?”

But there are a couple of reasons why that doesn’t really happen. 1) Usually the first person that gets your digital product paid for it. More people than not will pay for your digital product and when people pay for something, they are not as likely to just distribute that for free to everybody and anyone that they can see it for. They are not going to just give it out because they paid their hard earned money for it and they’ve got it.

Even if they do share it, if you create your digital product correctly, it’s actually a good thing if you spread your message that way because you can put links back to your site, links to other products in that digital product, and it can actually be a way to market and drive traffic for future sales.

JOCELYN: Not that we are condoning the practice of sharing people’s copyrighted information. We do not.

SHANE: Right, we don’t want people to share it. We don’t want that to happen but as a protection for yourself, just make it where people can link back to your site.

JOCELYN: There are a couple of things that you can do to kind of discourage people from sharing your digital content. The first one is to create terms and conditions that people need to agree to before they download your product. This is really important. If you’re not doing this, you need to start doing it immediately. I have one that basically says that you are granted the nonexclusive use of ...

Welcome to the FlippedLifestyle.com

Hey y’all! We’re so pleased you dropped in to check out our podcast and blog. 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 every week we will take questions from there. Every 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 through to build your business.

Let’s dive into this week’s question!

SHANE: Our question today comes from Lindsey from Melbourne, Australia.  Lindsey, I could not pronounce your last name. I’m so sorry, but it will be in the show notes over at www.flippedlifestyle.com/QA03.  Lindsey asks,

“How did you get people to find your website in the beginning?”

That is a great question that we probably get every single day because building traffic is very frustrating especially at the beginning when you don’t have an audience and you’re just starting out.  But we did a few things at the beginning that really helped us kind of accelerate the process of getting traffic to our website.  Jocelyn has got some great strategies and I’m going to turn it over to her first to let you know what she did with www.elementarylibrarian.com.

JOCELYN: When I started out with my website, I really didn’t know where people were going to find it.  I started writing blog posts and there were a limited number of people that found me through the blog post, which is great, but of course when you start your site, you want to have more people find you - the more people, the better.  I just went out and I started searching.  I had some particular keywords in mind that I wanted to rank for but I figured there was probably not a real good chance that I was going to rank there at the very beginning.

What I did is I just searched for my keyword and since I couldn’t be in the top 1, 2, or 3, I looked at the sites that were in those spots and if it was possible for me to do so, I would put a comment, like if it was a blog, I would put a comment with my URL.  It wasn’t a spammy comment like, “Come check out my website now.”  It wasn’t something like that.  It was actually relevant to the content that was contained in that particular page and I just included my URL.  You will be surprised at how much traffic came from just that strategy.

Also, I would look for things like wikis.  I’m in the education field from a website and so there are a lot of wikis out.  Basically, you can just add your information onto the wikis.

SHANE: And a wiki is like Wikipedia but they make them for all kinds of different topics.  There are lots of different wikis like for libraries, social studies, or cars, whatever.

JOCELYN: Right and so I just went on there and I added my information where it was relevant.  I got a ton of traffic off that.  Another thing that I did really from the very beginning was I really used Pinterest to my advantage.  My audience is largely female.  I would say probably about 90-95%.  Also, there are teachers.  Teachers are really big into Pinterest and I just went on there, made some nice art, pinned it on Pinterest, and my thing spread like crazy from that.  Those were just a few of the strategies that I used on my Elementary Librarian site.

SHANE: What I did on CoachXO to make my audience grow is we like to always tell people, like when they ask us, “How do you get traffic?”  You go get it.  You’re not just going to be able to create a blog post and all of a sudden, it organically becomes the most popular thing on earth.  You have to go find your audience.  Like Jocelyn just said, she recognized early on that her audience were using wikis a...

Welcome to the FlippedLifestyle.com

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

In today’s podcast we are going to be speaking to some experts about the accounting and business aspects of selling digital products online.

We aren't experts so we thought we'd bring on a Josh and Courtney Bauerle from CPAonfire.com. They are going to be answering all your questions  and a few on how they make running an online business work like:

How they met and how they balance working together from home every single day without killing each other

Why Courtney chose to be a stay at home mom

Should you hire a bookkeeper right off the bat or do it yourself

Should you pay yourself right away or wait, and which is best when it comes to tax season

What's the difference between an LLC and an S Corp, and which should you choose

How do you include Virtual Assistants when it comes to taxes

Whether or not you have to charge sales tax on digital products

Josh's top tips for those starting out

Courtney's number one tip for being in a relationship with an entrepreneur

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quickbooks

Freshbooks

Josh's spreadsheet template

CPA on Fire

If you enjoy this podcast, we’d be so thankful if you’d leave us a review on iTunes!  Click this link to leave a review on iTunes.

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.

 

Last week we traveled to Portland, Maine to participate in the Agents of Change conference!  It was a blast, and Portland was beautiful.

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. [spoiler title="Click to View Transcript"]

What’s up, guys? Welcome back to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast. We had a ton of email questions from you guys lately about a lot of different questions about online business and we’ve noticed a trend that many of them are about finances like business structure, bookkeeping, how to set up your online business, what you should do with that.

And a lot of those questions we haven’t emailed you back yet because we are not experts at those questions and in fact, we struggle with a lot of those questions like what’s tax deductible, how do we set up our business, how do we pay ourselves, things like that.

We have actually just hired accountants for ourselves because all of the business aspects of going online is very confusing. It’s so different than a brick and mortar business. We decided to bring on an expert or two and let them talk to you about the accounting aspect and the business aspect of internet marketing and selling digital products online.

We decided to bring on some experts today, people that deal with this kind of information every day in their business and kind of answer your questions about accounting and bookkeeping. Our guests today are Josh and Courtney Bauerle. You may know them as the CPAs behind John Lee Dumas’ Entrepreneur on Fire in his monthly income reports. Josh and Courtney, welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast.

JOSH: Thanks for having us.

COURTNEY: Thank you.

SHANE: Let’s start with some more like, before we get into the accounting questions and all the questions from our audience, let’s talk more a little bit about you guys. Tell us a little bit about yourself and kind of how your business works what you do for a living?

JOSH: Yes, we live in a small town in Ohio.

Welcome to the FlippedLifestyle.com

Hey y’all! We’re so pleased you dropped in to check out our podcast and blog. 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 question 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 every week we will take questions from there. Every 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 through to build your business.

Let's dive into this week's question!

JOCELYN: Today’s question is from Travis Clay. Travis would like to know:

“What kind of computer did you use when you first started? Do I really need a high powered computer or Mac? Why did you guys switch?”

Click here to see a bunch of computers that will meet your needs (on Amazon)

(Don't spend over $500 starting out, you don't need THAT much computer to start an online business)

SHANE: When we first started out, we used very cheap computers. I had an Acer, I don’t even know what the number was, 7200 maybe, was that what it was? I have no idea. It was $270 and I got it at Wal-Mart. That’s the first computer that we started our online business on, where I started our first websites on. It was fine. All you really need, 90% of your work is going to be done through a browser. We use the Chrome browser from Google. We love the Chrome browser. There are a lot of extensions that give it added functionality and it just works.

It’s a lot better than using Internet Explorer or any of the other browsers out there. You really just need something that can do that. Are you going to get into some things later? Yeah, you’re going to do some editing maybe of some audio or some video, but most of your normal inexpensive computers that you can get from a department store will do that. My Acer was fine. It worked great at first and it really did everything that we needed to do. What did you have when we first started out?

JOCELYN: I think we’ve had a lot of different kinds of computers. The computer that I was using most recently before we switched was HP and I actually got it from a Black Friday sale. That’s a great time to shop for computers. There are two really good times that I found to shop for computers. One is during back to school time, like in July, and the other one is at Black Friday.

You can get some really great deals on computers. I think I got mine from www.walmart.com but you can also check out www.amazon.com. Look for great deals. RAM is really important especially if you’re going to be doing a lot of video or audio, or if you’re not really sure what you’re going to do in the future, it’s always a good idea to have as much RAM as possible. That’s one thing that you can look for.

You can also look for good deals on refurbished machines. My last HP was a refurbed machine and I think I paid maybe a little over $500 for it, but it did have 8 GB of RAM, which at that time was pretty good. That’s mostly what I look for when I’m looking for a computer.

SHANE: Yeah and you really don’t need a high-powered machine especially if you’re just starting out. Maybe you’re just starting a blog or you’re just using WordPress. Even if you’re just creating digital products, I mean, really, all you need to be able to do is get on that Chrome browser, use the Google Docs software, and you can make e-books and Google Slides or their Google Docs. You can just make everything there and just save it as a PDF. That really doesn’t take a lot of processing power.

Even doing like a podcast, it would take a little longer maybe to process everything when you convert the file to MP3 or whatever but you can do most of the things that you need to do online with a...

Welcome to the FlippedLifestyle.com

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

This is a new, special podcast episode and it's all about answering your questions. We wanted to do this because we get a ton of question 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 every week we will take questions from there. Every 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 through to build your business.

Let's just dive into this week's question!

SHANE: Let’s get straight to our question today. This is an awesome question from Luke Duban. His question is:

“When working with AWeber or MailChimp, or any other email collection program, what address do you use at the bottom of your emails to comply with spam regulations and still keep your home address private? I know you guys work at home and don’t want to broadcast your private address to your list for security reasons. What address do you use to get around this?”

That is a great question, Luke, and when we first started out, we had that question as well because it was a little scary when we signed up for AWeber because they wanted a physical address to put at the bottom of all our email addresses. Of course we don’t want people showing up at our front door. That would be scary. Basically, we didn’t want to use our street address on our AWeber page.

The reason that they make you do that is because there is actually a law and it’s called CAN-SPAM. I don’t know if that’s the official name for the law but that’s what it’s called. The government actually requires a valid physical postal address to appear on your emails. If you don’t do that, you can actually be fined up to $11,000 per violation. It’s a pretty serious law and it’s designed to stop all of the spam and things like that that are coming through on all of our emails on a daily basis.

There is a very specific reason for that especially if you live in the United States or if you do business and email people in the United States why you have to have that address at the bottom of your location. But, as Jocelyn is going to explain, you do not have to use your street address.

JOCELYN: When we first started, I did use my street address because we didn’t have any other option at that time. As my site got a little bit bigger, I started thinking, “This cannot work.” We looked into some different options of what we could do to not use our street address but to still comply with the rules.

It turns out that you can use a Post Office box in the bottom of the email. That is what we do. A Post Office box is relatively inexpensive. In this area, I think it is maybe around $100 a year. I’m not exactly sure of that figure. It’s fairly inexpensive and if you are pretty sure that your business is going to continue to grow, I would definitely invest in a Post Office box.

SHANE: It’s super low cost to go get a Post Office box and you get a lot of advantages from using a Post Office box as well. It makes your business seem more legitimate because you’re going out and you’re spending a little money to have your own mailing address. People are going to like that better when you have to mail things or they have to mail you things. Also, it separates your business from your personal life.

We always recommend doing that. You should have separate bank accounts for your business. I don’t care if you’re bringing in $5/month or $5,000/month. You need separate bank accounts. Even a PayPal account that is set up just for your business and your mailing needs to be separate as well just so you have that distinction between your personal life and your Post Office box.

Welcome to the FlippedLifestyle.com

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

If you enjoy this podcast, we’d be so thankful if you’d leave us a review on iTunes!  Click this link to leave a review on iTunes. Each week we will be sharing some of your kind words, like this great review from K Murphy:

In today's podcast we are going to be answering one of our most asked questions, and that's how to get more traffic to your website.

An online  business isn't any good if no one comes to your website, so we are going to share our top 6 non-SEO tips to drive more traffic to your site:

The truth about SEO and why Jocelyn thinks it's a dirty little word

How to find your top competitors and use their comment sections or forums to link to your site without being spammy

Use Facebook groups to find your audience and interact with them

Do the little things because they have a big impact and make people want to come back to your site

How to use Twitter the right way

How to use smart marketing tactics to build your audience and get higher engagement

Why you need to pay for traffic sometimes

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.

Resources Mentioned in this Episode

Sitemap Plugins

BONUS: The Flipped Lifestyle Guide to Daily Traffic Domination

Click Here to Download Your Guide to Daily Traffic Domination

Transcript

JOCELYN: Hey Y’all. On today's podcast, we are going to tell you how to get more people to come to your website. [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: Hey guys. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. Today, we’re going to be talking about one of the most asked questions, one of the things that we get the most emails about probably and that is traffic. No, we’re not talking about traffic outside driving around the road because we don’t have a lot of that here in Kentucky.

SHANE: We have a lot of traffickers on there.

JOCELYN: Maybe a little bit of that. We are talking about traffic on the internet. How do you get visitors to your website? A lot of people talk about SEO and those three letters are just sort of like a dirty word for me. I just don’t like SEO. I mean, there are principles that are definitely important and SEO, which is also known as Search Engine Optimization if you’re just now starting out. SEO is really not as important as it used to be.

SHANE: It’s really just like a trick. SEO is like, “How can I trick the search engine? How can I convince that my site is better just because I position words in a certain way or use certain words?” Google is very smart.

JOCELYN: I’ll tell you a little secret and that is that I really pay very little attention to search engine optimization tactics. I think that people get a little bent out of shape about that because we’ve actually gotten several emails with SEO tips and things like that for our site. I appreciate people taking the time to do that. Thanks for doing that but really, we don’t care.

SHANE: Yeah, all we care about at the end of the day is finding our audience and touching base with them and speaking the language that they speak. You can look up keywords and things like that. We do believe that you need to look over the keywords a little bit just to see how your audience speaks, what language are they using to try to search for their problems,