FL305 - How to Launch Your Product When You Have a Small Audience

In today's episode, we help Pat successfully launch a membership website.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jocelyn Sams: Hey y'all. On today's show we help Pat successfully launch a membership website.

Shane Sams: Welcome to The Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. We're a real family that figured out how to make our entire living online. And now we help other families do the same. Are you ready to flip your life? All right, let's get started.

Shane Sams: What's going on everybody? Welcome back to The Flipped Lifestyle podcast. It is great to be back with you again today. Super excited to help another member of our flip your life community start, build, and grow their own online business. Excited to welcome Pat Eardley to the show today. Pat, welcome to the show.

Pat Eardley: Thanks for having me.

Jocelyn Sams: We are very excited to talk to you today and I can't wait to see what is going on with you and your business. But before we get there, let's talk a little bit about your background and what led you to kind of pursue online business.

Pat Eardley: Currently, okay, so maybe I'll back up and tell you background. So I am from Virginia and I live in Charleston, South Carolina. So like the best place on earth, I believe. And I've lived here for about 12 years. And my background professionally is human resources. I've been in HR for a little over 20 years. So mathematically that means I started when I was about five years-old.

Jocelyn Sams: Of course. Yes.

Shane Sams: Of course you did.

Pat Eardley: And so I have an HR consultancy. I've had this business for 10 years now. This year makes 10 years. And it's myself and I have two employees. But it's just not scalable. We truly are trading dollars for hours. You can say that you're not because there's some automated components, but it really is trading dollars for hours. So that really made me look into online business. And is there a way to scale it by having an online component to the business?

Shane Sams: So what exactly is... So you own the business, right? So yourself-

Pat Eardley: I do.

Shane Sams: So you're kind of in the flipped lifestyle, but your business dominates a lot of your time because you are trading those time for dollars. Correct?

Pat Eardley: That's correct.

Shane Sams: So you're looking at the other direction.

Jocelyn Sams: Well, let's first of all explain HR. Like that's human resources-

Shane Sams: For sure.

Jocelyn Sams: ... For people who have never been in corporate or maybe they just don't know that.

Shane Sams: And what is an HR consultancy? Like what do you? I know there's HR people that work in corporations that handle human resources, and when employees have problems or something like that. But what does an HR consultancy do?

Pat Eardley: So what we do is we help small businesses. So typically if you have less than 100 people, you don't have an HR person on staff. It doesn't make sense to have an HR person full time or even part time for that matter. Financially it doesn't work. So what we do is we help small businesses manage the HR component, which is like hiring, firing, the onboarding, the off boarding. What happens when there's bereavement and someone needs an extended amount of time off? Or there's an injury at the workplace? Or maybe it's just annual reviews, like doing that on a regularly scheduled basis. A disciplinary action conversation. Those are the type of HR things that frankly, business owners did not get into business to do. They don't want to manage that stuff.

Shane Sams: But they can't afford to basically have someone do it for them. So you're like an HR mercenary, right? It's like a horrible way to say that. But people go out and they're like, "Man, I really wish someone would take all this HR off my plate, but I can't afford to hire anyone. But maybe I can hire Pat and her firm and they'll take care of that." So really you're pretty much maxed out on how many businesses you could ever personally serve because you would have to hire someone else to add more businesses. Because there's only... Like if you're having these HR meetings, and disciplinary meetings, and hiring, and firing. There's only so many hours in the day. So basically in your business now it runs up to a cap, correct?

Pat Eardley: You're exactly right.

Shane Sams: Like a time.

Pat Eardley: There is a cap. It will cap out. And the only way to, I don't know, get beyond it is to hire more people.

Shane Sams: Right.

Pat Eardley: That's not of interest to me. I don't want to have 20 employees.

Shane Sams: Exactly. So you've got the two employees you do now, did you hire them to add more businesses or do they just support you with the businesses that you serve?

Pat Eardley: One supports, one adds.

Shane Sams: Gotcha. Okay. So basically one was for growth and one was for support.

Pat Eardley: Yeah you're right.

Shane Sams: Okay, cool.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. So you're doing this consultancy, you have your support people. And now what is this going to look like as you transition it to an online business?

Pat Eardley: Yeah, so the online business. So the business is MyShiftHR.com. So my brick and mortar, if you will, I'll just refer to it, the consultancy as a brick and mortar. That's actually called Shift HR, like shifting car gears.

Shane Sams: Like S-H-I-F-T.

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Because you have to have a change in order to have a difference. Right?

Shane Sams: For sure.

Pat Eardley: So Shift HR. So My Shift HR is the online product. And what that is, is there is a forum for business owners to be able to ask those questions that they don't necessarily have anyone to talk to about, and they don't want to pay $200 an hour to talk to a lawyer about them. There's also a component where we'll have trainings from other professionals, like maybe it's an insurance person or maybe it's a payroll company talking about new changes, laws, best practices. And then the heart of it is the HR portal. So the portal will be where they can get forms, documents, policies, procedures. They can write an employee manual, they can write an operations manual all from this portal. And the portal is a white label. Like it's not mine.

Shane Sams: Right.

Pat Eardley: But I am a reseller. So that'll be white labeled and it is already to Shift HR. And you would be subscribing to that whole thing I just described.

Shane Sams: So white labeling basically is someone has made this product but you get to basically lease it and put your branding on it, your stuff, and people can come in and it looks like all of your stuff. But all that legal stuff, documents and things like that come from somewhere else that's already created, correct?

Pat Eardley: You're correct.

Shane Sams: All right. So this is interesting. So basically there's gaps here is what I'm seeing. So if you don't have 100 employees or more, you're not going to hire an HR person. And then I assume then there's a gap somewhere between like 30 and 100 people where you could hire a consultancy. But then like maybe people who are like one to 30, one to 50 employees they want to still do it themselves because they can't afford to hire the consultancy or the HR person. So their goal is just to at least do it as painlessly as possible. They don't want to come up with procedures, they don't want to figure all this stuff out. They just want to go somewhere and say, "This is my problem. Where is the solution?" And the solution would exist somewhere within this HR portal. Was that what the online business is?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. You're on point, you're spot on.

Shane Sams: The difference is there's do it yourself, right? And then there's do it for you. But in the middle is do it with you. So this is a very like do it with you kind of membership. It's like, "Yeah, here, just read this document. It'll help you hire somebody. Read this document, watch this course. It'll help you deal with the workman's comp claim." Or something like that.

Pat Eardley: Yeah. And Shane that was good. I'm going to borrow that, that do it with me. That's good.

Shane Sams: Yeah. I'm pretty good at writing descriptions for businesses. I've done this a few times.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay. Pat. So in your podcast intake form that you fill out before you come on the show, you told us that this is a brand new business. And I'm just wondering what you have done so far? I know that you have a website. So tell me a little bit about what is already there.

Pat Eardley: So yes, the website is done, the portal is there. Really what I'm trying to do now is building the followers, right? Building the list because it is a different client than what we would be after in the consultancy. Because in the consultancy we know that there's a minimum amount that that client or that prospect is okay with spending.

Shane Sams: Right.

Pat Eardley: But this is someone who's at a lower price point, they need a lower price point. So I think that right now I'm trying to figure out like how do I get to those individuals? How do I target them?

Jocelyn Sams: And I know that you're thinking about membership as far as like your product. Do you have anything prepared for that? Like is it ready to go basically is what I'm asking?

Pat Eardley: Yes. Yes. To answer the question. It is ready to go.

Shane Sams: Okay. What fears and mindset issues are like holding you back then right now? Is it just confusion? Is it just, I don't know how to reach these people. Is it just they're so different because we're not marketing to the same people in the consultancy. If it's ready to go and ready to launch, like what's kind of holding you back right now then?

Pat Eardley: I think it's a few of those things you just said. I'm a little fearful because it is a different client and I'm not sure where to find them. I don't necessarily think they're on LinkedIn. They may be on Facebook, they may be on YouTube. So I'm trying to figure out what is the right avenue to take to find them. And then secondly, how do I communicate what the site does.

Shane Sams: Right.

Pat Eardley: With HR I will go to events and I'll tell people, "Oh, I do HR." And they think, "Oh payroll?" And I'm like, "No." And they're like, "Oh, benefits?" "No." So how do you teach the audience what you do? And I'm thinking that that's via video. That's what I'm thinking.

Shane Sams: Well that could definitely be the platform. And it's really interesting the fear, you said like, "I don't know where to find these people." It almost sounded like deep behind your voice it was like, "Do they even exist?" Right? Because you've had success finding clients in the, we'll say 50 to 100 range, right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: So where are all the people in the one to 25, or one to 50 range, right? Because you've never had to go out and find those people before. But I would actually say there's probably way more people like that than there are in 50 to 100 employee range. Right? So they're there. It's just a matter of finding them. And usually the best way to find people in your niche is to search for people who are searching for symptoms. Right? So like a lot of times we'll say, "What is a symptom of a problem they're having?" Because they don't know... Let's say there's someone with five employees, they just started hiring, they've made a bunch of mistakes, they have no clue how to manage all these people. Right? Like Jocelyn and I-

Jocelyn Sams: Oh are you talking about us?

Shane Sams: Yeah we're talking about us. That was us. We started hiring people. We had no clue what was going on. We had no clue how to manage anything like benefits or onboarding. I didn't even know there was a thing called onboarding when we first hired our first employee.

Jocelyn Sams: Well there's not a class in college called How To Effectively Manage People. Or maybe there is, I don't know. My degree-

Shane Sams: Wait a second I know that.

Jocelyn Sams: ... Is literally in management and I fail at this.

Shane Sams: Yeah right. And it's like all the HR stuff, they don't... No one would know the technical terms of onboarding employees that you've hired recently, right? Like no one's going to know. They're going to be like, "God, this person I hired didn't fit their job." Or something. Right? Like, "I can't find a A+ employee." Right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: So that's the best way to do it is to figure out the symptoms of the problems that they are having, and then figure out the language that they're using to talk about it. And that will at least tell you what they're searching for.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And honestly, I would venture to say that most small businesses aren't really thinking about this. They're not sitting back and going, "I really need an HR person to help me out." What they're thinking is, "Oh gosh, somebody just filed a workman's compensation." Or whatever it's called, workers comp claim, "And I don't know what to do."

Shane Sams: So the way you can word this to like catch people and your lead magnets and stuff, is you can use have you ever statements, right? These are powerful statements, especially for email lists, or even if you're involved in online Facebook groups and stuff like that. You can say, "Have you ever had an employee file a workman's comp claim? And you had no idea what to do?" Right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: Or, "Have you ever hired someone but couldn't figure out how to teach them how to do their job?" Right? That's onboarding. We know that word is onboarding, but that is not a word in the vocabulary of the pizza guy who's got five employees, a cook and a couple servers, right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah, you're right. They're just saying, "How come they don't get it?"

Shane Sams: Yeah. Like, "How come you didn't do your job?" They don't know. You could walk up to that guy and go, "Could you show me your SOP's for making pizza and getting them to the table?" And he'd be like, "What's a sops? What's a sop? That's what you do with a rag when you spill out water. You sop it up."

Pat Eardley: That's so good.

Shane Sams: You know what I'm saying? He doesn't know what a SOP is. Right? But like I didn't know what an SOP was five years ago. But you could say to somebody, "Do you have a checklist that the pizza cook needs to follow?" But that's a system and procedure. We know that, HR helps with that. We have onboarding and stuff like that. But they don't know that. Right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: Or like, "How do I get health insurance for my employees?" Like that's a question that someone... So that's the kind of mindset shift you've got to have when you have the curse of knowledge. You've got 20 years of experience. You've been doing this since you were five years-old. Remember? All that information is in your head and you know all these jargon's and terms, and things that people need to know. But what you need to look for is the question that they're asking. Okay? So that's where you got to go to find your audience is the symptoms. Think about the symptoms, research keywords in Google. Because everyone goes and tries to solve their problem with Google. Right? They search there before they search their own brain. We can start looking there for some of these symptoms that people are having. Then My Shift HR is going to cure it for them. Okay?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: All right. So you have your platform, you have your product ready, which is awesome. That's one of the things that we are really big on, having your products ready to go. So that when your audience starts coming they will have something to purchase. So let's talk about audience. Do you have an audience? Have people started coming to your site and do you have social media followers? Do you have an email list?

Pat Eardley: I do have an email list. I probably have about 45 to 50 people on that email list.

Shane Sams: Awesome.

Pat Eardley: I don't have what I would say an audience on social media because I don't have like a Facebook page that is the My Shift HR Facebook page. But I do have a Shift HR Facebook page. So I guess that would be a question that I'd ask you. Do you guys feel that I should... So the flip your life live training that you've been doing Shane. One of the, I think it was the first training you said that you set up your businesses separately. And I'm wondering should I do that for this? Like should there be a Facebook page for My Shift HR? And whatever other social media avenue I choose, should that be separate from Shift HR? Because I haven't done that. I haven't done anything in that realm yet.

Shane Sams: I totally would separate them completely. Because the one big thing that we've already determined for sure is this is a totally different market segment, right? Like this is not the same person necessarily. And you're going to need some way to filter them like, "These are the people who might be candidates for my consulting. These are people who are candidates for the do it with you online training." Right?

Pat Eardley: Yes.

Shane Sams: Yeah. You need to separate everything and keep... We will even separate things like products. We have our flip your life community with all of our trainings, we have our forums, we have our two Q&A's that we do every month, Jocelyn and I do Live with our premium members inside of the flip your life community. Right? But we have another product, it's a print newsletter. It's all about marketing and promotion. It comes every week to your mailbox. Okay? I have that completely separate. It's a separate payment processor. It's a separate everything because that's a different avatar, and that's a different segment than the actual flip your life community, right? The flip your life community is really focused on starting, building, growing, getting those first 50 customers, right? Getting those first 50 people to pay you $50 a month and make that first good chunk of change. And then it's time to really market and promote it. And that's what my newsletter is, Prolific Monthly. But we separate products even, if it's got a different segment you need to have some separation between it, you know what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: I could start a Facebook group for my marketing newsletter because it talks about different things than are talked about in building your website, getting your courses done, creating your content for the first time. And if there's a line between brick and mortar and online, and the markets totally different, yes you need to totally separate that. Now you can see the other one though. You can be like, "Hey, everybody who follows me right now on this page, if you have less than 25 employees, you've got to check out my new page." You see what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Okay.

Shane Sams: That's the market delineation there, right? That's 25 to 50 people, somewhere in there. We know that's the gray area, right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: If you can get them over to move over to the new place, then you're going to have a lot easier time marketing your stuff and you're not going to overwhelm them with, "Hey, I've got a consultancy package open if you've got 90 employees." And then they're like, "Well this isn't relevant to me." Right? But this other one would be. So yeah, I would totally, always have something separate.

Jocelyn Sams: And let's talk a little bit about your content strategy. What are you doing as far as content? Are you blogging, are you podcasting? Are you doing videos? What does that look like?

Pat Eardley: What I've been doing is Facebook Lives.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Pat Eardley: I will post a statement or a question and see what feedback I get from the question. And then that opens the door for further communication. But what I found to be most successful is Facebook Lives.

Shane Sams: Okay. How many people follow your page right now? Are you doing Facebook Lives on your personal profile page? Or are you doing-

Pat Eardley: Yeah. No. I'm doing Facebook Lives on the Shift HR page.

Shane Sams: Okay.

Pat Eardley: But so that was the question you just answered about like I probably should make that separate. Or I should do the Facebook Lives on the Shift HR page and point them to My Shift HR.

Shane Sams: How many people follow you there? Is it a big following? Is it a little following? Is it? How many people are there? Give or take.

Pat Eardley: I don't know. Let me... 1300, 1200. Something like that.

Shane Sams: Oh wow. That's really good. That's really, really good. So you've got a lot... Yeah. You can keep doing them there. But here's the problem with building Facebook's platform instead of your own platform. That'll show up in their news feed. Maybe. Maybe you can put some money behind it and boost the Facebook Live so more of your followers see it. Right? But really it just disappears into the nothingness of the social media noise factory. Right? Like when you're done with it. And you're not getting any Google search traffic off of that. You're not getting any traffic on any other platform. It's just there, which is okay. But I think we need to... To build your audience, you're going to have to expand out and you've got to get search and social traffic. And this is where a lot of people make a mistake because they'll do one thing and then like they never get found in Google.

Shane Sams: And they're like, "Why does no one ever find me?" And I'm like, "Well because they search for things that you're interested in. And you're not there. You're not in the search results." So I wonder if you couldn't even like do your Facebook Live there, right? And then like you said for a while, you could start pointing people to your other place. You know what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Yeah.

Shane Sams: Or you could start a group. Just say, "I've got a group for people who are less than 50 employees." Right? And like attach the group to the page so the page can stay brick and mortar, and the group can be kind of your online component or your avatar. But then you could download that video, right? And then upload it to YouTube.

Pat Eardley: Okay.

Shane Sams: And then people could find you on YouTube. And then you could take that YouTube embed, right? And you could do a blog post and you can embed it at the top of the blog post, write some notes, and start getting search traffic to your new website, right? So you don't have to do a lot of extra work, but you just need to give yourself a better opportunity to be found in more places. You could even take the audio off that same Facebook Live, and you could launch a podcast. And like you just use the audio, it doesn't matter, right? You're still telling people about your group, you're still telling people about your freebies on your email list. But now that one Facebook live creates YouTube traffic, creates traffic from podcasts, it creates a blog post. And it's not really that hard. You're just downloading, uploading, downloading, uploading. That's it. That's all you have to do.

Pat Eardley: Okay. Right.

Shane Sams: And you can give yourself a lot better chance to be found.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And it will be awesome if you could teach one of the people who are working with you, or you can even hire someone to do this relatively inexpensively to explode that content out. You can find someone and just say, "Okay, I need this video uploaded here. I need it uploaded here." And put together some simple procedures for doing that.

Shane Sams: Yeah.

Pat Eardley: So here's a question. So when would you guys say that for videos, home should be YouTube?

Shane Sams: I think so because YouTube is a search engine. It's the second biggest search engine on the planet, right? So if you're going to do video... Now, the problem is, it's not a problem. But the thing is you've got people engaging with your Live videos on Facebook, right? So like you kind of have, it can start, it doesn't matter where the content explosion starts from. I can light the wick to the dynamite at the end or in the middle, it's still going to blow up, right? So it doesn't matter. So you can start on Facebook, get your engagement, that's going to get your questions and stuff like that. But it's like you can't hide that content there on Facebook. Everything eventually falls off the bottom of the newsfeed, right? What we need is content that can be found in organic search results.

Shane Sams: Okay? So like YouTube, people search for, how do I follow a workman's comp claim? Wouldn't it be nice if you had a video called How To File A Workman's Comp Claim If You Don't Have An HR Person, right? And then you do a video on Facebook Live, people ask you questions. Then you take that video and put it over here. Now you write a blog post called that. So now if someone searches for that in YouTube, they find you, if someone searches for that over in Google, they find you. If someone is on your Facebook page, you can boost the post and now they can find you through some paid advertising. Right? And then at the end of that article on your website, you have, "Hey, get my free checklist for filing a workman's comp claim. Opt in now."

Shane Sams: On YouTube, "Click the link in the description to get my free opt in for how to file a workman's comp claim." Like you see what I'm saying? Like you're giving yourself an opportunity to be found where people are looking for the answers to their questions. Okay? And it doesn't have to start anywhere. It's more like a circle. Like there's Facebook on one spoke of the wheel, there's Google on one spoke of the wheel, there's YouTube on the other spoke, maybe Twitter's on the other spoke. And you're always just constantly referring to everything all the time, and sending people through all of your stuff. That way they follow you everywhere. And you've got a better chance to like talk to them.

Pat Eardley: Right.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. And the good your content strategy should be pretty easy as far as knowing what to talk about because you've been doing this a very long time, which means that you have lots of good questions and you have insight as to what people might need to know.

Shane Sams: And she's doing Facebook Lives with feedback so she has people literally asking her questions. Like every question is a blog post or a YouTube video.

Jocelyn Sams: And at the end of your video say, "Hey guys, I'm doing a series. And I would love to know what you need help with. Type your questions in here. And I'll answer them on a future Live video."

Shane Sams: So let me circle this back around to why this is important for your launch strategy because we really want... You've got a product that's the most important thing. You have a product and some people paying attention to you, right? So like you got a social media following, you've got a small email list that could definitely be launched right now for beta. Like, "Hey, this things open. Go try and buy it." Right? You could totally ask people to do that right now because the product's ready? Right? So as a launch strategy though, what you have to do is build audience. And you build audience with content. That's the only way you can build an audience online is with content, either your content or participating in other people's content, right?

Shane Sams: If you were to go on an HR podcast and they had business people listening about HR, that's content you're creating to get in front of new people. If you create organic content regularly consistently produced blog posts or YouTube videos, whatever it is that's going to build your audience. And then you're always asking for the opt in, that's going to slowly, organically build up enough people where you start filtering them through the machine to get into your sales pages and all that stuff. Now if you want to just immediately go after a bigger audience with some paid advertising, then the best way to launch a membership or any kind of product like this is consistent weekly webinars.

Shane Sams: You would basically go find, remember those words we talked about that people are searching for in the language that they're looking for those symptoms. You would go to Google, you would go to YouTube, and you would do some research using tools like the Google AdWords keyword tool or VidIQ.com for YouTube. And you would see what are people looking for? You would find some of these words, show ads to those search results to let people sign up for your webinar. You could have a webinar that's called How To Handle Human Resources When You Have Less Than 25 Employees And Can't Afford An HR Professional. Right? Something like that, just really direct.

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: And that's like an opt in. So, "Hey, I'm having a free training this Thursday or Sunday." Whatever day you do it. "Come sign up for it. I'll send you an email to remind you." They opt in, you do the webinar, you put your thing at the end of it. Okay? So there's your two big strategies that you've got to flesh out now. You've got to have a prolific and consistent content schedule, right? Where you're repurposing and reusing this on different platforms. That's your organic strategy. And then you've got to have a paid strategy and the best way to do it when you've got a product is just buy traffic to your opt in page, get them to a webinar and pitch it live.

Shane Sams: We'll do it live. If you do it live, you're much more likely to sell a few people in. But you also, right now need to send an email to those 42 people and say "The doors are open. Come to the grand opening. This is going to be XX dollars, but I'm only going to charge you X dollars if you join now for a beta. Come in and break stuff." See what happens, right?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Right.

Shane Sams: You've got got an email list. And I would do a Facebook Live launch. I would hype it up like, "I'm going to do a Sunday night Facebook Live launch." You've got 1300 people. I bet all 1300 of those people are not consulting candidates. I would say some percentage of those people that follow you right now are definitely in this target market, right? One to 50 employees, let's say.

Pat Eardley: Yeah, right.

Shane Sams: So you need to do a Facebook Live and open the door. You need to send an email and open the door and let people know that you have something for sale. Because someone might buy it. You just have to ask them to buy it right now.

Jocelyn Sams: Okay Pat, this might seem a little bit overwhelming, right? So what are you thinking right now?

Pat Eardley: Well, there's a ton of information, but it's good information. So the question that popped up in my mind when Shane, you were talking about doing a Facebook Live and then uploading that to YouTube, and then turning that into a blog. Should blogs be separate from your membership site? Should they be a separate URL altogether?

Shane Sams: Not really. No. It's just like your web... No. You use blog on your website, you know what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Okay.

Shane Sams: You're just creating content. You need organic content to go to your website. You need search traffic, right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: So you have your blog on My Shift HR, right? That's the one that's got the membership on it, correct?

Pat Eardley: Yes, yes.

Shane Sams: You just do the blog there. And then at the end of the blog you point them to an opt in. And at the end of the opt in you point them to the sales page for your membership.

Pat Eardley: Okay, that's great. I knew that you could do blogs for a typical website. But I just didn't know if that same rule would apply for a membership site. So thanks.

Shane Sams: What platform are you using on it? Like where? Is it hosted on a WordPress website? Like what-

Pat Eardley: Yes it is. WordPress.

Shane Sams: Yeah, you can just go ahead and make posts and they'll appear organically in the background.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. So I think what maybe you're trying to ask is should the membership site be separate from your website? Is that kind of what you're saying?

Pat Eardley: No, no. Okay. So Shift HR is a separate website. And that does have a blog on it. But I didn't know if you could actually, if you should, like what the rule was for putting a blog on a membership site.

Shane Sams: Oh there's no rules. There's no rules.

Pat Eardley: Okay.

Jocelyn Sams: You're like there's no rules.

Shane Sams: Yeah. There's no rules. We just make up the rules as we go. Basically, here's the deal. If you don't blog weekly at least, or if you don't do something on your website weekly, nobody's ever going to find your website.

Pat Eardley: Yes.

Shane Sams: Because every blog post, every podcast, everything you do on your website is a breadcrumb to lead Hansel and Gretel back home. Right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: If you're not throwing breadcrumbs, then the witch gets Hansel and Gretel and you don't, right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: So it's like you've got to go out and create content of some kind. You're doing the same thing on YouTube, but here's the problem. If you ever look up and you say, "I'm building someone else's platform, not mine. Then you don't control your platform." Like you can make your YouTube channel. And it's very unlikely. But what if they shut your YouTube channel down? Then you lose all your traffic. What if Facebook and their infinite algorithmic wisdom shuts down your Facebook page? You don't get to talk to those 1300 people anymore. Right?

Pat Eardley: Right.

Shane Sams: But you just never know what's going to happen with that stuff. But you do know what's going to happen on your website. So you want the search traffic coming there. If you do anything content driven on any other platform, the goal is to drive them back to your place because you own your place. But you have to create content there. You know what I'm saying?

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Shane Sams: And the only gray area is what contents free and what contents not. But you've already kind of figured that out.

Pat Eardley: Yeah. And I think your point about converting the videos into a blog is great because like I hate writing. I used to literally write an article every month for the local paper about HR. And I didn't enjoy it at all. So I think-

Shane Sams: In online business you don't have to do anything you don't want to do.

Pat Eardley: Yeah.

Jocelyn Sams: Yeah. That's the awesome thing about it is like you can build it whatever way you want to. So if you really, really love speaking and doing video, then find a way to make it work to take it to other platforms. Okay, Pat. Well it has been so much fun talking to you today and I can't wait to see what happens next in your business. So before we go, we always like to ask our guest, what is one thing that you plan to take action on in the next little bit based on what we talked about today?

Pat Eardley: Well, I think that what I need to take action on is definitely getting more content out there. It's pretty overwhelming. And I know like this is you guy's every day. But for a newbie I'm like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much to do." But I think just simplifying one, and then figuring out like, "Okay, just start with content and then you can convert this to that. And then you can convert that to that." It's really not as hard as it seems.

Shane Sams: You just have to take the next step. Like that's where people get overwhelmed as they zoom back too far. Right? If you think to yourself, "Oh, what's the next year of content going to look like?" Yes, it's overwhelming. But if you think, "What's my next blog video going to be?" Then you just go do your video and then you make it a YouTube video. And then you make it a blog post.

Jocelyn Sams: And if you ask the people on your videos, you don't even have to think about what the next one's going to be because they'll tell you.

Shane Sams: And I want to challenge you to do one more thing launching this product. Because launching a product has this big mythical almost like storytelling aura about it. I'm going to launch my product, right? If I can go to your sales page right now, you've already launched, it's available. It can be bought, right? So it's not about launching your product, it's just telling people that it's for sale. You need to email your list as soon as we hang up, "This is open, go buy it. Here's why you should buy it." And now you're launched. Okay? Never hold back telling people that you have a product for sale. It needs to be on the front page of the website, like a little ad for it. Right? So I would really encourage you in the next 24 hours too, to email those 42 people and do a Facebook Live about your membership. Tell people about it. You never know, there might be 10 people there begging to give you your money. Okay?

Pat Eardley: Yeah. Thank you.

Shane Sams: All right guys, that wraps up another great talk with one of our flip your life community members. I cannot wait to see what happens next as Pat launches her business. If you need help launching your very own online business, Jocelyn and I would love to help you do it inside of the flip your life community. All you have to do to learn more about our community is go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife. We have all the training you need to get started with your online business. We've got all the community support you need to hold you accountable, and help you take your next steps.

Shane Sams: And Jocelyn and I will be there to help you all along the way. Go to FlippedLifestyle.com/FlipYourLife, and who knows you may be on a future episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast. We are about out of time, but before we go, we love to close every episode of the Flipped Lifestyle Podcast with a Bible verse. Jocelyn and I get a lot of our inspiration and motivation from the Bible. And we love to share these verses with you guys so you can get that too. And we're super excited because today our guest Pat has a Bible verse that is special to her. So Pat take it away.

Pat Eardley: Well, the Bible verse that I want to share is Jeremiah 17, 7, and 8. And most people have heard the first part of this verse, but I don't know if anybody out there is like me, but sometimes I struggle with fear. And this verse has become my life verse to help me to not struggle with fear. So it says blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord and whose trust is in the Lord. For he will be like a tree planted by the water that extends its roots by the stream and will not fear when he comes. But its leaves will be green and it will not be anxious in a year of drought nor cease to yield fruit. So when life gets hard, sometimes we want to just kind of recoil and not fight. But this verse helps us to know that God's got it. And we just need to be strong and fight through it.

Shane Sams: Oh I got chills. Wow. What an amazing Bible verse that Pat shared there guys. Look, it's really important in your life, in your business to plant those deep roots, get through all those anxious times because there is great hope, and awesome stuff on the other side of those trials, those tribulations, those hard things, those overwhelming things that we all have to fight through on a daily basis. And what a great reminder it is to get through that stuff. That's all the time we have this week guys. Thanks for listening. Until next time, get out there, take action, do whatever it takes to flip your life. We'll see you then.

Jocelyn Sams: Bye.

Links and resources mentioned on today's show:

• Pat's Website
• Flip Your Life LIVE 2019 Tickets & Registration Information
• Flip Your Life community
• PROLIFIC Monthly

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