QA 47 – Do I Need to Create A Website to Sell Online

In today's Q&A, we are helping Ashlyn discover if she truly needs a website or can get started without one. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "Don't get caught up on the little things, focus on the big picture."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Today's question from Ashlyn Leadpages Let's dive into this week's question! SHANE: What's up everybody? It's time for another Q and A with S and J. Our question today comes from Ashlyn. And Ashlyn writes: I am about whether or not I should start a website immediately. I know it's possible to sell products and collect emails through lead pages but I am worried that if I don't have an email address like Ashlyn@flippedlifestyle.com, for example, my emails will get filtered as spam because I am most used likely used Gmail or something like that. What do you recommend? Okay, first we're going to talk about whether or not you need a website and then we're going to back and Jocelyn is going to talk about a little bit about how emails work and what Ashlyn is talking about here about getting our emails that she sends to her audiences getting filtered as spam. We do not recommend that you start a website at the very beginning of your online journey because you can really bogged down in getting your website correctly, learning how to use WordPress, writing content for your website, getting everything fixed just the way you want it, trying to find a logo—it can take you three, four months and all of the sudden you look up and you have been doing hours and hours of work every single week. You have been staying up late until midnight every night trying to get your website perfect and after three or four months you don't have anything to show for it. You have never made a dime, you don't have any products and your audience is not really growing and you are kind of burned out and people give up and quit. We see that happen over and over and over again. So if we were going back and starting completely from scratch with all the knowledge that we know right now, we would always started creating a digital product first and learning the processes of selling that product to people like setting up a sales page, taking payments, how do I get this thing to be automatically delivered so I don't have to sit here and email every single person that orders from me? How do I market this on social media? Can I run ads? You can do all of those things without a website. That's exactly what we teach in Flipped Your Life: How to Create a Digital Product. We go through the process of selling a digital product, creating a digital product, taking payments, automating delivery and marketing it using different channels like social media or advertising. Now, that being said, once you learned how to do that, that's going to take about a month to learn that process but you actually can sell something. You have your infrastructure built where people who find your content can buy it and give you money for it and you can create those passive income streams. At that point, a month or two end of the process, now you are going to go in and create a website where your actual products are going to live. You can start making content but those first people that get there actually now have something to buy from you. So we believe that the first month, maybe the first two months of online business should be spent totally on research, creating products and building an infrastructure for sales and marketing and then you are going to create a website where your brand is going to live and all that's going to happen like you are going to have my slip or email address, Shane@flippedlifestyle.com and all those things. JOCELYN: As far as your email goes Ashlyn, you can definitely start out just using a Gmail address or your Yahoo, whatever it is that you have. You know, it is always better to have a domain address eventually but sta...