QA 53 – How to get over the fear of making your life public online

In today's Q&A, we are helping Matt overcome the fear of putting his private life online when starting his online business. Do you have a question you want answered on our podcast? We would love to help you! Click here to ask your question! [Tweet "There's a million different ways to present your brand online without having to share everything that you do on Facebook."] Resources Mentioned in this Episode Elementary Librarian US History Teachers Let's dive into this week's question! JOCELYN: Hey y'all! You're listening to a Q&A with S&J. Welcome to the Flipped Lifestyle podcast where life always comes before work. We're your hosts, Shane and Jocelyn Sams. Join us each week as we teach you how to flip your lifestyle upside-down by selling stuff online. Are you ready for something different? All right, let's get started. SHANE: Hey guys, welcome back to another Q&A with S&J mini podcast. Today's question comes from Matt; and Matt writes, "How do I get over my fear of putting my life out there for others to see? I would have no problem sharing and selling my e-book to random strangers, but to think about my friends and family finding it and reading is horrifying to me. I know this is something I need to get past but your story is so real and I'm just finding it difficult to even think about doing what you guys do." JOCELYN: All right Matt, this is actually a common concern that a lot of people have and it is something that bothered me when we first started our online business. It's not that I was doing anything wrong or had anything to hide necessarily; it's just that I really didn't want to put everything out there for the whole world to see. So, one way that you can do this, is to just use your first name. So, for a long time, on my Elementary Librarian site, I was just 'Jocelyn'. You could be 'Matt', you could be 'Matt B.' or whatever your initial is and that would be one way of getting around everyone knowing exactly who you are. SHANE: You can even use an alias in your brand. Like my name was on a lot of my products on my football coaching site but a lot of people just knew me as 'CoachXO'. I created like a persona on my podcast, the 'CoachXO' show and basically people would write in and be like, "Hey Coach XO, I got a question for you about football." So you could even do something like that where your brand kind of becomes the identity of the website and maybe you are not so front-and-center. Another thing that I think is important to realize too is that this is a fear because we're scared; it's like public speaking. You are scared to get up in front of people especially people you know. You don't want them to understand exactly what you are doing and things like that but you don't have to share this with people in your personal life. We don't put all of our Flipped Lifestyle stuff, we don't share Elementary Librarian, or history or coaching or all of these little businesses that we've got set up. We don't ever share them on our private Facebook walls or our private Twitter accounts. We only talk about them in the space where they exist like on the Flipped Lifestyle Facebook page or actually on our website. Now, a lot of people have figured out what we do and they've found our websites and they've looked at our products and things like that. We do know people that have bought our products from us, we know them in person. So, there is definitely going to be some crossover but it's not going to be this thing where everyone in your life is going to totally go in and read your e-book. They might not even be in your audience. If you've got an e-book about starting a food-truck or something like that, if no one wants to do that, they have no reason to read your book. So, don't really worry about people in your life finding all of your stuff and keep up with all the minute details of your online business because that's probably not going to happen.