#322: A Realistic Way to Develop Passive Income Streams as a Writer (with Shane Sams)

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level.

And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there.

Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With well over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries, one of the biggest advantages of being a self employed creative professional is that you generally have much more freedom and flexibility than you do when working for someone else. As an employee, you can choose whom you want to work with, what projects you take on, when you work, and how much of a workload you take on and at any given time. Now, of course, it doesn't always work this way. Sometimes we have to take on less than ideal projects and clients to keep the lights on. Sometimes clients we thought were going to be wonderful to work with end up being terrible people. Sometimes our workload is a bit much, sometimes it's not enough. Now there are many things you could do to minimize these situations. We spend a lot of time in this podcast and in newsletter my discussing those. But there's one other strategy that can help and it's one that most writers and copywriters don't pursue. And I'm talking about developing passive income streams that complement your core freelance business. I started developing multiple income streams in early 2008. That was about two years after quitting my day job and going completely on my own. It started as a way to diversify my income and in my case it involved selling digital products. That's how I got started. And then over the next nine years, those passive income streams turned into my core business. So as you can imagine, I'm a big believer in developing passive income. I have a lot of knowledge in this area and I'm not a believer necessarily because I think it could turn into your main thing. I mean, in my case it happened that way. But I'm a big believer because of how as a freelance writer, copywriter, marketing strategist, how it can add diversity to your income and reduce your overall business risk. Having steady revenue outside of my client work coming in the door every month was very reassuring. I loved it. Think about this. How would your decisions about what clients or opportunities to accept, how would those be different if you had a steady stream of passive income coming in every month? I bet they'd be very different. So that's what we're talking about today. My guest is Shane Sams Shane is a former high school teacher and football coach who along with his wife has created a passive income empire that has enabled them to quit their day jobs. And they actually did that many years ago. They're not new to this game. They've been doing this for a long time. And in this conversation, Shane talks about how he and his wife were able to build and grow a very reliable income stream. And in the span of just a couple of years, he talks about all the mistakes they made early on, how they learned from them, and he details the best model for building a reliable income stream. We get into the nuts and bolts of this, which I thought was super helpful. I found the discussion to be fascinating and inspiring and I urge you to give it a listen even if you're skeptical about the subject. In fact, on that note, I have one quick, very important comment. When Shane's team approached me about Shane coming on the show, I was very skeptical myself. I almost deleted the email. There's a lot of nonsense going on in the make money online industry. There's lots of get rich quick claims, tons of scams, too many bad people who don't really do what they're teaching. In fact, they're just making money teaching people to do something that they've really never done themselves. So my initial reaction was not very positive. But I started looking into what they were doing, I started looking into the business and I was actually very impressed. I still, however, made it abundantly clear to Shane's team that I wanted to portray a very accurate and realistic picture of what passive income is about, what it takes to succeed, and the hard work required to get it off the ground. And Shane, I got to tell you, he really came through. As you'll see, he's very open, very authentic. He talks about openly about all the mistakes he and his wife made, all the failures. And he'll be the first one to tell you that this takes a lot of work, a lot of patience. The income may be passive down the line, but there is nothing passive about the work. You have to put forth for months, sometimes, sometimes years for it to really, really pay off. So I wanted to be totally real with you guys, tell you how I approach this. And I got to tell you, this conversation is going to be worth your time. It's again, even if you're a little skeptical. So with that, let's get to the interview.

Shane, welcome. Great to be talking with you.

Ed, it is good to talk to you. I love when I'm talking to a guy named Ed because my Middle name is actually Edward. So I'm kind of an Ed myself. My friend. Good to have you everybody. Good to be here.

I love it. It's a one syllable name. Sometimes people ask me to spell it.

Yeah, right, right. Just in case there's two Ds. Just in case there's two Ds.

Just in case there's two Ds. Because you know, that's a thing. Right. So good. So we're kinder spirits. I excited to talk with you because I have. There are a lot of people in my audience who are really thinking about alternate income streams. You know, in a way they have alternate income streams that they have several clients as opposed to one employer. Right. But it's. They're still depending on doing writing and they would love to have something that's a little bit more consistent, that adds diversity to their income. So I know this is going to be a very well received show. But before we go there, I think it's important for people to know a little bit about your story because first of all, I think it's fascinating where you guys started and kind of what got you to where you are today.

Sure, man. Well, my name is Shane Sams. I'm actually from Kentucky. Southeast Kentucky born and raised remain today. And I used to be a schoolteacher in southeast Kentucky. I actually taught for 10 years. I was a US history teacher and a football coach and that my wife was an elementary school librarian. And honestly, Ed, I would probably be in the exact same place today if something had not happened to me and my family. One morning I was dropping my son off at daycare and he told me one of the workers was scaring him. And I asked him, why is the worker scaring you? And my son told me that she locked him in the bathroom and turned out the lights and left him there for a long time. Now, I didn't know what he was talking about at this, in this moment, but we found out later that there was a lot of horrific like abuse and punishment going on at this daycare center that actually got the place shut down. But in this moment, all I knew was that my son was telling me that something was wrong. So I tried to call my boss to get the day off work. And the long story short of it is my boss told me, is your son in danger? And I said, no, not right this second. He's with me. I'm taking him to this other place. And she said, well, I know your son needs you, but your job needs you too. And I'm going to need you to handle your personal problems after work. We don't have any subs. I can't watch your class. You're just going to have to stay here today. You're going to have to go stay at school. And that was the moment that I realized I had traded away all of my freedom to somebody for a paycheck. I did not have control of my income. I did not have multiple income streams. I had one income stream, which is never safe. And I realized this person had all this power over my life. So that's what kind of sent me down the rabbit hole of looking for something else. Looking for an alternative, provide income for my family over the next few months. Dude, I tried so many different things, man. I even at one point wanted to be a handyman. Like, I was like, jocelyn, here's what I'm gonna do, man. That's my wife's name. I said, jocelyn, I'm gonna go get a hammer and a tool belt, and I'm gonna go knock on everybody in our neighborhood's doors, because all I need is 50 people to give me $50 a month, and that'd be $2,500 a month. That's all I make as a teacher. So I'll just quit my job and I'll be a handyman. And my wife looked at me and said, shane, your first clue should have been, you don't have any tools. Like, you're not very handy. Like, you're not very handy. You can't be a handyman unless you're handy. And I was like, you're right. Okay, that's a good point. Fair point, right? So I started looking for other alternative ideas. And I just so happened to stumble across this podcast one day. I was looking for businesses, and I heard about this guy named Pat Flynn. I don't know if you've heard of him before.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah. He's got. He got a podcast called Smart Passive Income, and he had basically started creating digital products to help architecture students pass the architecture licensing exam. And he basically built a little audience with some content. And he started doing this thing called email marketing, copywriting through email. Unbelievable, right? And he started writing these people emails. And then in one of the emails, he sent a sales email out and he said, if you will pay me $19, I will send you a study guide that will help you pass this test. And in that very first month, the story that he said on the podcast was he got 400 and something people to pay him. So he made $7,900 to send 400 different people the same PDF via email. And all it took was an email that he wrote out.

That's life changing them to buy it. That's life changing. At that point. Yeah.

Blew my mind, dude. It blew my mind. I was actually mowing my grass and I just jumped off the lawnmower. Almost flipped it. I swear when I was running it, I was so excited about it. So I started talking to my wife about getting into an online business. Maybe we could create digital products. Maybe we could take things we already knew, take things that we had experienced, maybe even took like our passions or hobby, something, and we could put it online and we could come up with something to sell like that. Now, my first couple attempts were disastrous, dude. My first ever online business was called toddlerapocalypse.com and I thought I was going to become. I thought. No, I swear to God, man. I thought I was going to become like a dad blogger because I thought my kids were hilarious. And I thought I was hilarious. I could write really well. So I was like, you know, all my kids, everyone's gonna laugh at my kids. And it was a disaster, man. Like, nobody came to it. Nobody thought it was funny. And it was just not good. It was a terrible idea. And then I started another website. I was like, well, what did Pat do? Pat took something he already knew about. He didn't just try to make up something from scratch. So I had this other website. It was called us historyworksheets.com and it was this spammy 1990s looking website. This was about 2012. And like, I had a. I was trying to give away free worksheets to history teachers or social studies teachers. But I surrounded it with all those little, like, ads that would say, like, download, look at this. And they're like flashing. I was hoping that someone would click the wrong link and I would get some commissions off of it, you know? It was awful, dude. And nothing happened on that site, man. I sat there for like two or three months and I was about to give up. I really was. And then one night, somebody clicked an ad and I made 11 cents. I made a dime and a penny, baby, on the Internet, right? And I started celebrating that with my wife. Oh, look at this. I did it. I created something on the Internet and money came back and my wife and I sat down. I was like, wow, this is proof of concept. It really is. Like, there's 8 billion people on the planet. Sure. Where you can get, you know, 10,000 of them to give us 11 cents. Let's do this right. So we started talking about ideas for an online business. And what we came up with was something bigger in scope. We said, hey, why not? Instead of give away worksheets, why don't we charge people for lesson plans? My wife was a librarian. Librarians have a really hard job because they have to teach multiple classes. They have multiple preps every day. And we said, let's create elementary librarian lesson plans, put them out in the world. We'll charge people 50 bucks a month to get access to these lesson plans that we're going to create once and just leave them up there forever, and then we'll try to make money that way. So Jocelyn started a podcast, like me and you are podcasters. She needed to create some content out in the world. We started a little baby email list. I actually, the first course I ever bought on online business was on email copywriting so I could learn how to be an email marketer.

Interesting.

And we wrote this little email sequence and we said, hey, we've got these lesson plans we're going to make. We're going to pre sell these for 50 bucks. If you want to get in here and do this, click this button and buy it now. And I think our email list at the time was about 250 people. But it's like your show. It's really curated to a very specific niche. It was elementary librarians. And the very first launch we had, we made $2,500. And we're like, oh, my gosh, that's way more than 11 cents. And we just kept going. And everything was podcast and email marketing, every bit of it, the whole way. And we started growing this membership. By November that year, it had grown to $5,000 a month. By July of the next year, it had grown to 15,000amonth. In August of that year, it was $36,000. And by that time, we had launched a second website. It's called us historyteachers.com and then I also launched a website selling playbooks to football coaches. So we were testing our methods in multiple domains. And then in September, actually of 2013, we were able to quit our jobs because we were making more in a month than we were making in a year as teachers. So we said, we're out of here. And what got me to where I am now with Flipped Lifestyle, which is my brand, where I teach other people how to start memberships. Like, this is, A friend of ours just asked us, hey, what are you doing? That looks amazing. Like, do you think I could do that? Do you think I Could have a second stream of income or maybe even quit my job. And we're like, sure, her name was Lindsay and we just showed her how to make money online. And wouldn't you know it, a few months later she quit her job just using the stuff we had taught her. So as that grew, we started doing a couple beta launches and flipped. Lifestyle really exploded and it became the main thing we do today. We help people find and use their God given gifts to make money on the Internet.

That is amazing. I just love everything about that story, especially the fact that, look, this wasn't easy. You made a few attempts early on that went nowhere.

I like to call them disastrous dumpster fires, but you know, attempts. I appreciate that you're keeping it on the down for me, so.

Well, I had the opposite scenario. My first one took off and then I was overly confident. My second one was beyond a failure. But it's not about me, it's about you.

I bet that one hurt worse though, Ed. That had to hurt worse.

You know, it hurts so bad because you know, your confidence is so high. So let's talk a little bit about this model because I really want to unpack this a little bit. I think many people in my audience are familiar with a digital product, right? It's an ebook, it's a course, it's a coaching program, it's not a product. But you mentioned something, you mentioned membership sites and I think this is what you are mainly focused on, membership sites and communities. Why don't you define it for us and then give us a couple of examples of what that looks like inside, under the hood?

Sure. I mean a membership is a combination of coaching and courses. So you're going to have courses inside of your membership or resources training, something that people can consume. Like on demand. Right. You have to have that on demand component, so you're not always there. And then of course there's going to be access to you or access to coaches you hire. Like I have a team of coaches now in my business, plus they get access to me as well. But in a membership, what you're really doing, the simple component of it is, is you're giving your customers access to each other. So this is usually done in simple ways. It's either done through like a forum or like some kind of like circle where people can log in and there's like a membership area where they can talk to each other, almost like a newsfeed or a forum or something like that. And then usually it's just done through live group calls. A Lot of ours, we just use Zoom's webinar software and we'll have like Q&As, right? Just a simple Q and A where I'll come on, there'll be, you know, dozens of people on there and they can all ask questions in the chat. We'll rapid fire those questions. Or you can even do Zoom hangouts. We have like a Zoom and people just hang out. And what's really powerful about the membership model is, you know, people will come for content. They will. That's their first thing they're looking for when they go online, like on Google or something. They're looking for a solution to a problem. So if you've got a solution to any problem that you've solved for yourself, you can help somebody else who's in that situation get out of it. So they're going to look for that, but when they find that, they're going to be able to either consume that or they're going to get bored and not consume it. And then they're going to quit your membership. So what we do is we give them access to each other through these group calls. So now you have this synergy built where you've got hundreds, dozens of people doing things together in these group environments. And that's really what keeps them paying in the membership month after month and year after year is access to their friends, access to their community, access to the leader or the leader's lieutenants so that they can get the answers that they need. So it's that human connection that really sets a membership apart from other, like digital products or even a coaching product. And I really believe this, this is something I'm teaching right now in our membership is community is going to become, I think, the most valuable asset on the Internet in the next 10 years with chat, GPT and all these different AI program. And there's a lot of courses and trainings and questions that are going to be answered by artificial intelligence, period. So, like, some of that is going to kind of go away. But if you can connect other humans with humans and you can connect humans to a mission or to a culture, or you can connect humans to a leader, someone that can help them, then you're going to be able to build some really incredible memberships. Like we've got one guy, he's a buddy of mine named Joe Nicoletti, and he was trying to build a membership. He already had a course, but it was the same thing. People would take the course, then he'd have to sell more courses. But he was like how can I get these people, Shane, to keep paying me month after month and year after year? And we sat down and we looked at, like, what the biggest need was for his audience. Now his audience is all writers. They use this software called Scrivener. I'm sure you've heard of it being in the writing industry. So he teaches people how to use Scrivener. That's his course. But all these writers that were buying Scrivener had a problem. They were missing their deadlines. They weren't hitting their word counts, they were doing. And I was like, why did they miss their word counts? And he said, well, because they're all alone. They're just sitting around by themselves on Saturday night trying to finish up some writing, and they're bored and they're procrastinating and they're just not doing it. And I said, well, why don't we put them together? We'll do writing times. You can get on Zoom, because every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday at 12 o' clock noon, we're all going to meet and we're going to write together. And then I had Joe order like a giant hourglass. And when he got there, he was like, hey, everybody, welcome to the Unchained Rider community. Here's what I want you to do. I want everybody to type your word count in the chat. And everybody would type their word count in the chat. And then I said, now we're going to write those words and I'm going to sit here and write with you. So he turns the hourglass over, plays some music, hits mute. And they're just watching him type on the screen for an hour. And he got 600 people to join that and pay him every month just to write with Joe. Right. So, like, building a community creates incredible value in people's lives. And you can build a community around anything, anything at all. We've seen people do it in everything from backyard chickens to playing guitar. So communities and memberships are super valuable.

So if I heard you right, there are at least three components, Right? So there is the information, insights, strategies, tactics, et cetera. That's what the first thing people come there for, Right. Because that's their immediate problem, or that's what they think is their immediate problem. But then the community, the membership, also has an access to the coach or the expertise, right?

Yes.

And then there is the community. So they come for the information.

Yep.

Then they get the insights and the help and advice and guidance, and then they stay for the community that's been experienced as well.

They realize they're not alone. That's exactly right.

Exactly. But it's hard to sell that upfront. It's one of those things that you don't. Maybe the way I've done it is I kind of. I don't really talk too much about it. I downplay it a little bit because I want to delight and surprise them with the community element. That's what they say.

We talk about it, but, like, the main thing I focus on is, like, you know, it's problem, agitate, solve. Right? You know what I'm saying? It's like, if I have a problem, like, for example, like, let me give you an example of somebody from our community. So there's a guy named Kenny Triano, okay? And he came in and he was like, I love chickens. I absolutely love chickens. I raise backyard chickens in San Diego. I'm an expert at breeding and keeping chickens alive in the backyard in suburbia without driving your neighbors nuts. Like, that's what he does. He's just really good at that, Right? And he was like, there's a problem, though. A lot of people get into this, you know, backyard chicken stuff, right? Because there's a lot of people that do this, actually. It's a big thing. And they get into this and they realize, oh, my gosh, my chickens, like, die. They get unhealthy in small environments. They are not bred well. Right? And he's like, I want to help people do that. So backyard chicken farmers are always trying to figure out how to breed and raise their chickens better. So he has a training. That's what it's called. It's called bread to Perfection. So he has a podcast, he has a course, he has training on raising chickens. But then at the bottom of that, he's like, hey, all your neighbors hate you because you have chickens. Wouldn't you like to hang around with a bunch of other people who are like you, raising chickens in their backyards? So it's actually a part of the pitch. It's actually a part of the sales. That way they know, oh, this is cool. Now. They don't realize that that's the part they're going to like the best until they get in there. But they see it and it's like, oh, man, I get to be with other people like me. So it's actually part of the pitch. I actually tell people about it up front, for sure.

That's cool. Okay, so on that topic, let's talk about topics not to get too meta. There are topics that tend to do better than Others for membership communities. What do you advise people to do to kickstart the brainstorming process?

Yeah, yeah. So there's any topic will work. I've seen people like, again, do things from guitar lessons, teaching flamenco dancing. We had one guy that came in and started a membership for raising Venus fly traps because that was his thing. Okay, so, like, anything will work because there's 8 billion people. You only need 200 people to pay you $50 a month, and you're making $120,000 a year. That's $10,000 a month. So it's not like you have to have some massive influencer audience or any specific topic that works. We've seen it all over the place.

Are there topics. Because you mentioned 50 is a kind of a price point. I know it's arbitrary, but are there topics that, you know Nobody's going to pay 50amonth for versus some that. Oh, absolutely.

Even more, I have not seen many that people won't pay $50 a month for unless it was specific to the business model. Like, we have a friend named Aaron Chase who built a membership about. It's called $5 dinners. So for $5 a month, you get like a grocery list and recipes to make a $5 dinner for a family of five. Right. So she has this gimmick that she's kind of going with, you know, but she's got like, she's making $25,000 a month on that. Like, she's got like hundreds and hundreds of people paying her five bucks. Right. So we're looking at scale is what we're looking. She just. It's a grocery list, you know, and then she does another thing with like, freezer meals or something like that. I don't know what it is, but she's got all kinds of, like, cooking stuff. And then I've got people in our community that charge a thousand dollars a month. It depends what the. That's more Avatar. So I think we're getting ahead the cart before the H course. It's like, come up with your idea first and then figure out the avatar that has that problem and then figure out kind of what their socioeconomic status is. Because you're going to market to a farmer different than a pharmacist. Depends what you're kind of selling at that point. So going back a step to the brainstorming part, like you said a second ago, we always tell people to get a post it pad, like get three post it notes and lay them out in front of them and write three words on it. Love, lived and learned. Okay? And the first category is all your passions and hobbies. Love. That's the things you love. Like, it doesn't matter if it's stamp collecting, playing guitar, coaching football. Like, whatever it is, just write down all the things you love. I actually do somewhat recommend in this space too, that people stay away from their job in this category. Like, even if you love being a copywriter, you love business writing, and you love all that stuff. Think of something else. Think outside the box. You're more than just a copywriter, right? So, like, think of all those things. And the second category is learned. So in the learned category, that's things you've actually been trained to do. Sometimes think about. That's where you think about things that you've been paid to do, like copywriting. Like, mine was US History lesson plans, or I did football playbooks. I had been taught how to do that. I had learned how to do that. I knew how to present that out to the world. College degree, whatever you got, just write that in that category. The third category is lived through. This can be anything. This can be anything. Good, bad, ugly, something that you could mentor someone else in because you've been through it. Like, we had a student named Robin, and Robin had breast cancer, and she survived, but a lot of her friends who she was doing chemo with passed away while she was doing treatment. And she had survivor's guilt. She felt bad that she was the one that made it through. And she spent like five years of her life in deep depression with survivor's guilt and lost that whole window of her life. So in that, she went back, and now she helps women who are coming out of breast cancer get through survivor's guilt faster in her membership. That's how she does. That's a lived experience that you've gone through, parenting, anything like that. And just start laying out, post it notes under each category, and you'll find. You'll find 20 ideas. Then all you have to do is go down and kind of research them a little bit and figure out which one you want to attack, but really lean into what you want to do. Like, I wanted to sell football playbooks because I love football. So that's one of the ones that we chose to go after. So once you see all your ideas on the table, it's just deciding which one you want to do and then following the process to see if it works.

So just pick one basically one that just really calling to you and you.

Know, and yeah, because you don't know, there's no way that you can. We have some research tools, we have a method that we use to research things where you can kind of see if it's making money for other people, which is a good thing. You want There to be competition because if there's a market already you can just go get your piece of the pie. But you really never know like what's going to work. We've seen some weird ideas. There was this lady named Teresa Perleighburg that came into our community. She was on one of our calls one day and she's like, shane, I've got an idea for my online business. I've been working through that training and I've got an idea. And I said what is it? And she said, well, I do this craft called needle felting. Needle felting, it's kind of like crochet but you take sheep wool and you turn it into stuffed animals. And she lifted up like this giraffe or something and I'm like so you're a needle felter? And she goes well not exactly. I also like to dye my own wool. I actually get the wool and I dye the wool myself and then I needle felt it into these stuffed animals. And I'm like so you're a wool dying, needle felting, stuffed animal enthusiast? And she goes, well, not exactly. I also like to shear the sheep myself. I like to hold the sheet down, get the shears, take the wool off and pull the wool, dye the wool and needle felt it into a stuffed animal. And I'm like wait a minute, so you're a sheep shearing, wool dying, needle felting, stuffed animal enthusiast? And she's like well not exactly. I also love to raise the sheep myself from birth so I know the sheep that I'm sharing. I am a farm to stuffed animal needle felter and I do the entire process. And she's like I want to teach other people like how to do this whole process. Do you think there are other people out there that would do this? I'm like, well there's 8 billion people on the planet. Surely there is another sheep farming, sheep shearing, wool dying, needle felting, stuffed animal enthusiast out there somewhere, right? So let's try it, let's see what happens. And she goes out and man, she built this into. She has over 400 people paying her $50 a month. She's making $20,000 a month just on that side of her business. It got so big that not everybody wanted to raise the sheep themselves and shear them. So she actually started providing the wool in A subscription box on top of the membership for her students. She would send them kits. She had so many clients, she ran out of sheep to shear. So she had to go to her neighbor and get another sheep farmer to help her fulfill all of this subscription box. And this thing got so big, right, this sheep shearing business that she actually, her and her partner bought a school like an old elementary school and they turned it into like the cafeteria and stuff into an event center. And they turned all the little rooms into bed and breakfast. And now people like fly to North Dakota so that they can practice being a sheep farming, sheep shearing, wool dying, needle felting, stuffed animal enthusiast with Teresa Perleigh Berg in person. So it's like that. There's no way you could predict it. There's no way you can predict what works. You just got to try it and then trust the process. Like toddler apocalypse was a disaster. But I learned how to do all the components of my blog, of my email, of my stuff I learned through that first experience. And that gave me the foundation to launch something more successful later.

Which goes to show don't see that as a flop or as a failure. That's where you got that was a training ground and then foundation friend. I mean, you know, don't scratch off ideas that you feel are way too narrowly niche and find fact. I think that example speaks to the fact that sometimes the most narrowly niched ideas are the best because they're so focused, you know, you're not diluting your message or your audience.

The second idea that we made money off of was a playbook website for football coaches. And I had this website, it was called Coach Xo. And what it was all about was at first it was I was trying to write about everything. I was trying to write about like offense, defense, special teams, like everything. And then I realized I was it's just too broad. There was nothing. I was like, what in the world am I even going to sell these people? It doesn't even make sense. You can't sell everything to everybody. So I actually ran a very niche defense at my high school because we had really bad players. We had to cover up a lot of weaknesses and we had to like just bend, don't break, don't die and then pick our point, our parts. But it was called the 353 defense. It's not a defense that most people run. So I actually narrowed down and started this other website called353defense.com is it only had like 500 searches a month on the Internet. There was not like a big bunch of people looking for this. But I don't. It didn't matter to me. I only needed a hundred of those people to pay me every month. And if I could dominate that one little space, then I would make money online. So then that, that launched. We made over $7,000 on it at launch because it was so niche. It was a playbook, it was an installation manual, it was a weightlifting manual. It was how to build your team into this defense. And I marketed it in our, all of our emails and stuff. As you don't have great players, let me show you how to win games anyway, right? This defense can do it. So I didn't need everybody, I didn't need all the people. I just needed people that wanted to win more games with lesser athletes and didn't have a defense to do it. And that's the one that we used.

I love it smacks of. Reminds me of Moneyball, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So good stuff. So let's talk a little bit about building an audience. Right? So we've kind of skirted the issue a little bit, but you talked about a podcast, you talked about other ways of finding, do you build an audience first and then you create the membership and the products? Do you do that along the way? What is the model? Because we know that we have the idea, but how do we attract an audience who can then be viable customers for us?

Yeah, I mean that to me, that's like saying, like, because if you don't, if you do it the other way, if you build a big audience. I've seen people do this like, we've got a student, her name's Nicole, and she wanted to help nurses pass nursing school. So she wanted to start a membership for nursing students, right? Well, she went out and created an audience. She was like, nursing students, nursing students. She's on TikTok, she's doing dances, she's. All the nurses are following her. And you know, she built this big email list of a bunch of nurses. Here's the problem though. It was her product was much more for people who were going back to school as a second career nurse. Like a non traditional type student. Right? It was someone who could go out and get the job and they were trying to change their family's future with a new career and all this other stuff. It wasn't for the freaked out 22, you're playing guitar, coaching football, like whatever it is, just write down all the things you love. I actually do somewhat recommend in this space too that people stay away from Their job in this category. Like, even if you love being a copywriter, you love business writing and you love all that stuff, think of something else. Think outside the box. You're more than just a copywriter, right? So, like, think of all those things. And the second category is learned. So in the learned category, that's things you've actually been trained to do. Sometimes think about. That's where you think about things that you've been paid to do. Like copywriting. Like, mine was US History lesson plans, or I did football playbooks. I had been taught how to do that. I had learned how to do that. I knew how to present that out to the world. College degree, whatever you got, just write that in that category. The third category is lived through. This can be anything. This can be anything. Good, bad, ugly, something that you could mentor someone else in because you've been through it. Like, we had a student named Robin, and Robin had breast cancer, and she survived, but a lot of her friends who she was doing chemo with passed away while she was doing treatment. And she had survivor's guilt. She felt bad that she was the one that made it through. And she spent like five years of her life in deep depression with survivor's guilt and lost that whole window of her life. So in that, she went back, and now she helps women who are coming out of breast cancer get through survivor's guilt faster in her membership. That's how she does. That's a lived experience that you've gone through parenting, anything like that, and just start laying out post it notes under each category, and you'll find. You'll find 20 ideas. Then all you have to do is go down and kind of research them a little bit and figure out which one you want to attack, but really lean into what you want to do. Like, I wanted to sell football playbooks because I love football. So that's one of the ones that we chose to go after. So once you see all your ideas on the table, it's just deciding which one you want to do and then following the process to see if it works.

So just pick one. Basically, one that's just really calling to you and you know.

And yeah, because you don't know, there's no way that you can. We have some research tools. We have a method that we use to research things where you can kind of see if it's making money for other people, which is a good thing. You want there to be competition, because if there's a market already, you can just go get your piece of the pie. But you really never know like what's going to work. We've seen some weird ideas. There was this lady named Teresa Perliburg that came into our community and she was on one of our calls one day and she's like, shane, I've got an idea for my online business. I've been working through that training and I've got an idea. And I said, what is it? And she said, well, I do this craft called needle felting. Needle felting, it's kind of like crochet, but you take sheep wool and you turn it into stuffed animals. And she lifted up like this giraffe or something and I'm like, so you're a needle felter? And she goes, well, not exactly. I also like to dye my own wool. I actually get the wool and I dye the wool myself and then I needle felt it into these stuffed animals. And I'm like, so you're a wool dying, needle felting, stuffed animal enthusiast? And she goes, well, not exactly. I also like to shear the sheep myself. I like to hold the sheep down, get the shears, take the wool off and pull the wool, dye the wool and needle felt it into a stuffed animal. And I'm like, wait a minute, so you have sheep shearing, wool dying, needle felting, stuffed animal enthusiast. And she's like, well, not exactly. I also love to raise the sheep myself from birth. So I know the sheep that I'm shearing. I am a farm to stuffed animal needle felter. And I do the entire process. And she's like, I want to teach other people, like how to do this whole process. Do you think there are other people out there that would do this? I'm like, well, there's 8 billion people on the planet. Surely there is another sheep farming, sheep shearing, wool dying, needle felting, stuffed animal enthusiast out there somewhere, right? So let's try it, let's see what happens. And she goes out and man, she built this into. She has over 400 people paying her $50 a month. She's making $20,000 a month just on that side of her business. It got so big that not everybody wanted to raise the sheep themselves and shear them. So she actually started providing the wool in a subscription box on top of the membership for her students. She would send them kits. She had so many clients, she ran out of sheep to shear. So she had to go to her neighbor and get another sheep farmer to help her fulfill all of this subscription box. And this thing got so big, right, this sheep shearing business that she actually, her and her partner bought a school, like an old elementary school. And they turned it into like the cafeteria and stuff into an event center. And they turned all the little rooms into bed and breakfast. And now people like fly to North Dakota so that they can practice being a sheep farming, sheep shearing, wool dying, needle felting, stuffed animal enthusiast with Theresa Perleigh Berg in person. So it's like that. There's no way you could predict it. There's no way you can predict what works. You just got to try it and then trust the process. Like toddler apocalypse was a disaster. But I learned how to do all the components of my blog, of my email, of my stuff I learned through that first experience. And that gave me the foundation to launch something more successful later.

Which goes to show don't see that as a flop or as a failure. That's where you got that was a training ground. And then foundation friend. I mean, you know, don't scratch off ideas that you feel are way too narrowly niche. In fact, I think that example speaks to the fact that sometimes the most narrowly niched ideas are the best because they're so focused. You know, you're not diluting your message or your audience.

The second idea that we made money off of was a playbook website for football coaches. And I had this website, it was called Coach Xo. And what it was all about was at first it was I was trying to write about everything. I was trying to write about like offense, defense, special teams, like everything. And then I realized I was, it was just too broad. There was nothing. I was like, what in the world am I even going to sell these people? It doesn't even make sense. You can't sell everything to everybody. So I actually ran a very niche defense at my high school because we had really bad players. We had to cover up a lot of weaknesses and we had to like just bend, don't break, don't die and then pick our point our parts. But it was called the 353 defense. It's not a defense that most people run. So I actually narrowed down and started this other website called 353-defense.com is it only had like 500 searches a month on the Internet. There was not like a big bunch of people looking for this. But I don't. It didn't matter to me. I only needed a hundred of those people to pay me every month. And if I could dominate that one little space, then I would make money online. So then that, that launched. We made over $7,000 on it at launch because it was so Niche. It was a playbook. It was an installation manual. It was a weightlifting manual. It was how to build your team into this defense. And I marketed it in our, all of our emails and stuff. As you don't have great players, let me show you how to win games anyway, right? This defense can do it. So I didn't need everybody, I didn't need all the people. I just needed people that wanted to win more games with lesser athletes and didn't have a defense to do it. And that's the one that we used.

I love it smacks of. Reminds me of Moneyball, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

So good stuff. So let's talk a little bit about building an audience. Right? So we've kind of skirted the issue a little bit, but you talked about a podcast, you talked about other ways of finding. Do you build an audience first and then you create the membership and the products? Do you do that along the way? What is the model? Because we know that we have the idea, but how do we attract an audience who can then be viable customers for us?

Yeah, I mean that to me, that's like saying, like, are you going to write an ad or an email for a product? And when you don't know the product, the product always has to. You got to know the product. You got to know what you're selling. So I think you build a minimum viable product first. That's the way we teach it, like in our blueprint. It's like idea avatar. Who has the problem? Then we're going to make the product. Now, I don't mean you're going to make the final product. I don't mean you're even going to make the courses or trainings or whatever that go in the product. So when we launched ElementaryLibrarian.com we said, okay, let's create the outline of what we're going to do. Let's go make the first, like, week of lesson plans. It's all we're going to make right now. But then let's spell out, like, what the first month of lesson is going to look like. Right? So minimum viable product. If you went in there as an elementary librarian, you'd have the first week. But we were making week two, three, four, and five as we went. We're just trying to stay about a week ahead of all of the librarians that joined. All right, so we want to know what the product is first. We want to make that, keep it simple, and then we start building an audience specifically targeted for that exact product that is going to emerge from what we've already planned. Because if you don't, if you do it the other way, if you build a big audience. I've seen people do this like, we've got a student, her name's Nicole and she wanted to help nurses pass nursing school. So she wanted to start a membership for nursing students, right? Well, she went out and created an audience. She was like, nursing students, nursing students. She's on TikTok, she's doing dances, she's all the nurses are following her. And you know, she built this big email list of a bunch of nurses. Here's the problem though. It was her product was much more for people who were going back to school as a second career nurse. Like a non traditional type student. Right. It was someone who could go out and get the job and they were trying to change their family's future with a new career and all this other stuff. It wasn't for the freaked out 22 year old who was just trying to get an A. Right? That's not what it was for. So she built this big audience, but she couldn't really sell them her product because there was a disconnect in that. So she had to go back and rebuild a new audience of the right people because she didn't build her product first. She just said, I'm going to just go get a bunch of nurses. Okay? But if you know what your product does and you know who it's for, then you can make content that will actually draw the right person in. So it's going to save you a hundred times more time than just going out there and trying to, you know, I'm going to do a podcast every day and see how many people I can get to follow me. That doesn't make sense. Do one piece of content that leads to an exact person, to an exact product and you're going to be more successful. So, you know, if you're doing guitar lessons, for example, we got a guy named Kevin that does guitar lessons. Make the guitar lessons first. Like his guitar lessons are all like the Eagles and like Van Halen and like, you know, these old school 80s and 70s bands. Well, who's he going to draw in now? Oh, I'm going to go after the empty nester in their 50s and 60s that always put off guitar and loves this kind of music. So now his public content is like, learn how to play Hotel California. And he's already got it synced up through the entire funnel because he worked backwards from the product. So that's how we teach it.

So create the Product.

Yep.

You know, all the other minimum viable. Minimum viable, viable product. Right. You don't want to spend on this.

No. Because you don't know what. You don't know if it's going to work.

We're rapid prototyping here, just like building software. Right. So we want to make sure that we're learning as we go build it, and then create the audience and then get feedback and then adapt and refine as you get the feedback. So let's talk a little bit about audience. What are some. You know, I'm going to teach guitar lessons. And I know my avatar is people in their 50, men in their 50s and 60s who always put this off. How do I find these people? And what kind of content do I create on a regular basis for free to make sure I keep attracting that audience?

So, like, I mean, I really believe there's only like three ways to build an audience, and that's either with a podcast, a blog, or a YouTube channel. Right now, I mean, I think you've got to either create audio, video, or text. I'm not sure about blogging as much anymore. I think that's becoming harder. Podcasting and YouTube is really a great place to build your audience and go out and build some content and make it happen, because you can truly. Like, right now, we're having a conversation. Like, you can see expertise on both of us. We're talking, we're doing the different things. It's intimate. Like, we're probably in the car with somebody right now. We might be in the bathroom with somebody right now listening to this. Who knows, right?

Yeah.

Like, so you don't know what people are doing. Like, so they're everywhere. And also with video, you can really demonstrate things like Kevin, that guy I told you about, the guitar, his name's Kevin Depew, is a website's called Relax and Learn Guitar. He has a YouTube channel, and he grows all of his through YouTube. And then I have another guy named Evan burris. He does YouTube a lot. He's an artist. He actually used to draw the Incredible Hulk from Marvel. Literally was the guy coloring the Incredible Hulk green. Right. And he didn't want to work at Marvel anymore because he was working like 90 hours a week. And he said, this is ridiculous. I got to. I want to go home and see my family. I want to start an online business where I'm getting people who love superheroes together, and I'm teaching them how to draw superheroes so they can make their own comic books or whatever they want to do. So he has this thing called the Cartoon block, and he's on YouTube and he was like, well, Shane, I've got this course that's teaching people how to draw. I don't know, Captain America or whatever. Right. So what do I put on my YouTube channel? Because won't they just know how to draw Captain America if I do that? Not right. So what we did was. We did a. He would do. What's it called? Fast motion. You know, like what? You know, like fast motion animation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's just turned the speed up on the camera. He's drawing it really, really fast. And then he'll stop every once in a while and give a tip. Like, well, when you're drawing Captain America's nose, do this. And then he goes really, really fast again and he draws a bunch of more stuff. And then it stops again. He's like, now when you're drawing Captain America's chin, you do this. And then. So he doesn't give away the whole thing. Right. He doesn't do the entire thing like that. He just gives away that. And he's like, hey, if you want to really learn how to do this, come in my membership and not only will you be able to be in there, but you'll be able to post your artwork and I'll be able to look at it. I'll be able to help you with some tips. There'll be other artists in there. We can all talk about your art and your drawing together. Kevin teaches whole songs on YouTube. Like, he'll say, hey, you know, come learn. I don't know if this isn't one of, like, Guns N Roses of the Guns N Roses Patience. And he'll teach you how to play that. Right. But then he might say, I'll teach you how to do the whole album inside my membership. You know, I would do. On US History teachers, I would always. My content was giving away, like the first day of a unit because it takes about two weeks to teach, like the Civil War. And then I know they're going to take that and they're going to have such a good time. That first day, they're going to be like, I want more of this. And then I'll have more inside. I don't get too caught up on what content to give away for free. Mainly because anything you could ever give away, content for free is out there already. Any. All content is on the Internet somewhere. Well, you're.

For people to know.

Yeah. Because what you're selling is curation. You're not selling content the content itself is not the product. It's the organized plan of how to succeed with that content and solve a problem that you're selling. It's that curating it into an organized system. That's what people actually are paying for. Like, you can go find everything I teach about online business. I got hundreds of trainings that I've created over the last 10 years doing this. You can go find all that somewhere by somebody else.

It's all out there but aggregate value and aggregation, right? Not only aggregation, but hey, it's all out there. I have it aggregated here and I've cut it down to what you really need right now.

And I'll help you, and I'll help you find it. I'll be your tour guide. Yes, I'll be your tour guide.

And we got all these people who think just like you and want the same thing. And there's ability element there it is. Well, this is important. I want to make sure we put it together for everybody that what you.

Just said is the perfect. That's what the domino, like the content might be the first domino that pulls them in. But then you're like, oh, wait, this is way better than just content. It's a community, it's coaching, it's content, it's curation, it's a membership. Wow, that's amazing. I would argue, I definitely pay for this every month.

Shane. I would argue that it's more and more free content out there. It actually makes us even more valuable, which is counter to what most people would think, because when there's more content, guess what? There's overwhelm. And overwhelm is a killer. What people want is. I'm so overwhelmed. I don't want to have to sort through this myself. I want the easy button. Right?

That's exactly right.

Net it out for me. So a little bit more on content. Let's say I have a YouTube channel and a podcast. And what is the whole call to action? How do I peel off a certain percentage of viewers or listeners into subscribers? That's what you want. You want people to opt in to your list so now you can educate them and make them offers.

Yeah. So our content, our funnel works like this. Basically, it's. Our content has one goal. Get people to give us their name and email. That's it. Like, I don't really always. Sometimes I will. Maybe at the very end of the podcast, I'll drop an ad that says, go join our membership. Right. Just because it's at the very end. And I figure if you stayed all the way to the end of the show. You're one of our most loyal listeners. You may be ready to make the leap. But most of our ads on any of our content is always, hey, we have a free thing that you can get on our name and email with. Once they get on our email list, then we basically we're a daily email come. I love to email every day. I love the email Monday through Friday. Give them a lot of valuable stuff. We have lots of content from our back catalogs. I want to make sure people see old podcasts and then plus we do like free challenges every month or do like a four night challenge of helping people like find their idea for an online business, stuff like that. So we're always trying to get people into there. And when they get to the email list, we'll either make them offers or we get them to a live event kind of thing. We make them an offer there. So that's our funnel. That's straight up how it works. Just a nice standard. I'm gonna make content every week, I'm gonna get them on my email list. I'm gonna email them every day. Once a month, I'm gonna have a big live event like a webinar or challenge, and we're gonna offer whatever it is we sell. So that's kind of how we teach it.

Love it. Love it. Let's talk a little bit about one of the challenges that many people in my audience face, which is time constraints, right? They're running a business, they got four or five clients. Many of them are book solid from, you know, a big chunk of the month. And, you know, it's, I get it, I want to do this, but, you know, my guaranteed income stream has to take precedence and priority. How do I turn this into a real priority? How do I build this thing? How do I get this thing off the ground? And we can talk a little bit about some of the technical aspects later. But that's a big obstacle.

Sure. I mean, I would just like a little bit, I would call people out because I do this all the time. I teach live workshops and I have this little activity where I make people like we give them this grid and it has 168 squares on it, right? So we have 168 squares to represent the 168 hours in a week. And then we go through and we put like the non negotiables on it, right? We put like sleep work with boundaries. Come on, people. Some of you are just sitting there playing on Twitter instead of Working. And you said you worked five hours. I know you are right. Like what are you doing? I have them look at their screen time on their phone to see how much they've been scrolling on TikTok, right? And we go through this and we look at all the non negotiables, family time, stuff like that. Nothing entertainment, nothing fun like that. And we always find a couple white squares at the end of it. We're shading them in and by the end of it there's like five white squares that aren't taken. Like what are you doing with that? Five hours? That is plenty of time. A week, hour a day or maybe blocking off five hours on a Saturday morning to go out and build, you know, some kind of online business. When me and Jocelyn, my wife, started our business, we were school teachers working full time. I was coaching football, she was a librarian working admin type tasks. We had two little kids that were not self sufficient, but we worked on our business for about three hours a week and took us about 13 months because we only had three hours a week to work on our online business to get there. If you got more hours, you're going to get there faster, right? But you do have time and if it's important to you, you'll find a way. If it's not, you'll find an excuse. We have to make time. We can't just find time. So that's the first thing I always want to do is just call out everybody's mindset and dare you to get out a box of crayons and draw 168 squares and really get honest with what you're doing with your time. But the cool thing about this type of business, which I guess your audience will probably know this because in copywriting, like if you're doing an email campaign, you're going to batch the emails and schedule them, right? A lot of the stuff that we do to build this kind of business, you can batch like you could take a week and record 12 podcasts and schedule them out for the next 1112 weeks and then you don't have to work on that audience generating activity while you're doing all your other copywriting, you're doing stuff like that. You can batch stuff ahead of time, right? You can repurpose content a lot. Like if you record like me and you're recording this video right now, like I can see you. Do you use this video anywhere or do you just use it on.

No, just use the audio or it's just, it's a little weird or when we can't see each other, you know, when we record. But yeah, I just use it.

Like you could, you could take this video and this could be your YouTube channel. So now you got YouTube and a podcast, growing your audience, right? You can use chat, GPT and AI to get the transcript off this and you can throw a blog post up on a website that.

We do. That we do, yeah.

Yes, There you go. So getting smart with your time, using the technology to batch things and really being really efficient with those few hours you got, that's. That's the only way to do it. There's only two ways to be a successful online entrepreneur. You roll up your sleeves and you open your wallet. That's it. So, right, so maybe using some of the money to hire people to do the editing and stuff like that that you're making from your full time gig to be able to like explode your time a little bit with some of the money you've already got. But just using these tips and tactics, man, like anybody can find a way to do it if you really want to do it. And I would actually really encourage everybody to do it because we all saw from the pandemic, from the economy in the last couple years, like, things can change dramatically when it comes to, like copywriting, marketing, spend anything in any industry. So having multiple streams of income with multiple customers everywhere, right? Like if you have a hundred different members in your membership, you got a hundred people from a hundred different places, but not all going to quit at once creates a lot more stability and security than just, you know, losing your biggest client or something like that.

Absolutely, man. If you had $5,000 a month coming in that you can really rely on, that takes a lot, that takes a lot of pressure off your appliance.

I learned something, dude. In my first year in business, I realized something. We always get into businesses like I want to, you know, if I can make a million dollars, wouldn't that be a great ceiling? Like, wow, a million bucks. Like, we're always looking at that top number, what's possible when really anything's possible. But when I realized, I remember when we hit a thousand members for the first time in one of our businesses and I was like, oh my God, that's our floor. Like, I can predict that 90 something percent of those people will pay me next month. I know what I'm gonna make next month and the month after and the month after. My floor is higher than everyone else's ceiling. And then the ceiling can be whatever you want because you're not Freaking out about not having money the next month or when that next contract ends. So yeah, memberships are the way to go, man. It creates such a consistent, stable, predictable income for you.

I love it. I love it. Real quick, before we move to kind of the last piece, I'm assuming that you could start very low budget, scrappy. You don't need when you start and you have zero audience. You don't need to do Facebook ads, you don't need to do paid ads in order to kind of feed the funnel initially. You could just start with free content, YouTube, a podcast, for example, and just trust that the right people will find you.

Yeah, I mean, I would definitely say you need a home base. Like we use Kajabi for our website. That's what the software we use. It can host your products, it can do all these things. Like I do think you need to host your own little place. So something you're going to spend, I don't know, 150 to 250 bucks a month on different software that you need to kind of do things efficiently. Then you want to take that stuff and also put it on YouTube to pull back to that website. Well, back to that sales funnel. But dude, you could totally start right now. If I was starting over right now, I would have a YouTube channel that went to my website and then I would repurpose the audio from my YouTube videos on podcasts, which stuff like Kajabi can actually launch your podcast for you. And yeah, just make content over time.

Have both of them going to the website. Have both of them going to the website. And then you have an opt in, right? You a lead magnet that's attractive to that audience. People opt in. And then right there your website would run on Kajabi, right? So then your membership would also be inside Kajabi in that kind of. That everything's all that's right all in one place.

Keep it as simple as possible. It's like a good sales letter. Just let it be in black and white, baby. Just let it be in black, white. You don't need a bunch of fancy stuff.

I love it. And I know you've really done a good job of simplifying this, but it can still feel overwhelming for someone, right? It's like because you start thinking about all the things you got to do. Where would you suggest people start? And I know one of them and I'll tell you, people got to go to your website. People got to go to your website. I think you have a free, like topics or ideas brainstorm. So what Would you suggest if you net it out, somebody wants to start, what would you tell them to do?

You always start with yourself and that means you've got to find your God given gifts and ideas. You got to get that out there and into the world. So you got to figure out what do you have to offer the world? What problems can you solve? So we do have a special training. That little activity I told you about earlier, I've got a full training where I teach it in my workshops. If you go to, let's see, I think it's flippedlifestyle.com ed not edd. We know how to spell it now. Earlier today, flippedlifestyle.com f l I p p d lifestyle.com ed for ed and you can get my idea training where I'll actually guide you through that entire process. But there's another training there as well where I help you research the idea you think you might want to try. That way you can see if it's making money on the Internet. Like we have a three step process we go through to test it to see, hey, someone else is making money with this. This is making money online. I've just got to go get my piece of the pie. So go to fliplifestyle.com ed I'll help you find your idea, I'll help you research your idea and then we'll show you what the next step is. And for anyone getting overwhelmed, remember you can't do anything but the next step. So your next step is just to find your idea for an online business. Once we've got that, we'll take you down and show you the next step to keep it simple for you and stop that overwhelm.

You don't have to see the whole staircase, right? Just the next step.

That's right. Man.

So I love it. Shane. This has been awesome. But I'm inspired. I mean I have, I've had an online business forever, now I'm inspired. I'm thinking of ideas and things that I could do. So I know that you've inspired a lot of people here. I appreciate you coming in, giving us your sharing, your wisdom, your ideas, your story. Thank you. And I encourage everyone to check it out. You got the URL. We'll put it in the show notes.

Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book Earn more in less time. The proven mindset, strategies and actions to prosper as a freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com where you will also find the detailed show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.