by: AskPat 356 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 356 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.
All right, now let's get to today's question from Phil.
Phil: Hey, Pat. How are you doing? Phil here from the UK. Big fan of yours of corse. You actually inspired me to start my own blog a couple weeks ago, which can be found at SelfDevelopmentJourney.com. I'm wondering with everything you've learned along the way on your own journey, what are the five key things you would recommend a relatively new blogger like myself does? I'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Phil. What's up? Thank you so much for the call. Appreciate it. So congratulations on your new journey, your new blog. I'm going to give you five key things that I would recommend to anybody that is new to blogging. And actually, this is a great refresher for everybody no matter what stage they're at, because these are very foundational items that are often forgotten, especially when things like social media get kind of in the mix. Those are very exciting things, especially because we can get immediate feedback from things like that, where you might post a tweet and you might get people retweeting or favoring those things. And that's great. It's great to get that immediate feedback, but those core foundational items in social media is not in that core foundational list that I'm going to give you. These things are really important.
So, the first thing that is the most important thing when you have a blog: A blog is for what? It's for written content and other forms of media as well … but just make sure whatever you publish on your blog, that it's just amazing, unique content; something that's going to be completely helpful for whoever your target audience is. Whether you are pulling from your personal experience as well, Phil, and that's great, because it's your own experience and nobody is like you, and that's where a lot of people have an advantage when they create a personal brand. Because nobody is like you, we're all 100% original, or we should be, and being yourself is the best way to do that, as my good friend Chris Ducker from ChrisDucker.com would say. He has a whole presentation about being original, and talks about that a lot and using that to your advantage.
So, that's one thing you should do, incorporate yourself into your content, but also make that content completely unique and very, very valuable, where as if anybody were to come across it, they would be silly not to continue to read it all the way through, to save it, to bookmark it, to share. It would be silly not to do those things. So that's the kind of approach you want to take. You want to become the ultimate resource for your audience, and that is done through the content that you publish.
Number two. You want to also write amazing content; not just post it on your own site, but to guest post on either sites or write on other major media sites, such as, there are a lot of different magazines, for example, Huffington Post and Entrepreneur magazine and whatever niche you are in. Those are the magazines and the online journals you want to be writing for. Medium.com is another one that's good for anybody in any niche, and so I know I said “neesh” and “nitch.” Phil's from the UK; okay, anyway. Check out Episode 145 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. You can visit that at SmartPassiveIncome.com/Session145. That'll take you to a blog post, which will walk you through exactly how to become a contributing writer on a larger media site. And that was a guest interview with Kimanzi Constable, a former bread delivery man who just is crushing it now; he's amazing. So that's, again, Episode 145 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. That'll walk you through how to cut in front of the line, in front of a lot of people who are trying to get on those larger media sites, and it's working. I've been getting a lot of tweets and messages and emails from people saying that Kimanzi's stuff works. So, again, SPI Episode 145. So that's the second thing you should do, guest post, write and create some valuable content on other sites.
The next thing you want to do is build relationships. So however you end up doing this, maybe through social media or through emails or through your blog content or even in conferences if possible. Build relationships with other people in your space. I don't believe that anybody else out there in the spaces that we were serving with others are competitors. We're friends; we can help each other out. You provide value for them, and they'll provide value to you. They might end up liking your stuff and linking to you on their particular post or mentioning you on their particular podcast episodes and vice versa, and when you are working with somebody else, you have that “blogging buddy,” if you will. You can both grow much faster, and it might be difficult to find somebody right away. But again, you'll just have to, like you would build a relationship normally, kind of take it slow. Introduce yourself, try to provide value, and you don't want to rush into things.
And again, those are the things that have the biggest payoff, is having those relationships with other influencers, by far. I mean, it might take a little bit of time but that's what's going to skyrocket the success of your site more so than anything else really. And I mean, SCO takes time. It takes time to build a following on social media, but it doesn't take much time relatively speaking to befriend somebody and have them really help you out in one way or another—befriending not for the purposes of them helping you out, but just for the purposes of you actually building a real relationship with them and having you both grow together.
The next thing would be to when you are starting out—this is very important, and it's also your advantage when you're just starting out. You don't have a large following, you don't have a big email list, and hopefully you would be building your email list, but you do have the easy opportunity to reach out to people who are first-time readers and subscribers to your site, to really give them their opportunity to talk directly to you, whether through email or even a Skype call every once in awhile. When you can talk to people in your audience directly, which a lot of people cannot do, or they don't have the time to, or their audiences are already too big, that'll help you stand out. That'll help you understand more about who your audience is and also what else you can do to create valuable content for them, whether you post that on your own site or on somebody else's site. You are hearing directly from the person, that the typical person that you are going to be serving and who are serving, and when you hear directly from them what they need or what their struggles are, you are more easily able to create solutions for them, and also give them those solutions in a way that they can relate to those things, and you speak to them in their own language, and that type of thing. It's very important to keep track of how they say things, and when you have real conversations, not just surveys, but actually one-on-one conversations, you can continue to ask more questions to kind of dig deep and figure out what else you can do to serve them. You're going to get some golden information that you can use to help create the content on your own site.
And finally, the last thing, and this is the most important thing. It's not a thing you do. It's just something you have to be, and that is be patient. You have to be patient with your blog. It's going to take time, and I know you want to rush into things. And it's great. You want to publish content, and that's exactly what you should be doing, but a lot of people do that and they expect even within a few months to see some results, and those results might be kind of sparse, and there might not be much traffic, and it's okay. It's going to take time. If you followed all the other things that I mentioned, it's going to happen. It's going to take a little bit of time, though. Both of my most popular websites, Smart Passive Income or even Green Exam Academy, which couldn't be more opposite from each other, they both took over a year to get to a point where things started to take off and it sort of started to grow organically.
So, it's going to take some time, but if you are dedicated to what it is that you are doing, and you are dedicated to building relationships, it's going to happen much faster for you. But again, be patient, and you are going to go through tough days, days where you're like me and you're going to hit that “publish” button and be like, “Why am I doing this? Who's reading this? Nobody is reading it?” Well, don't feel bad. That's just part of the process. It's almost a way of having the universe test you to see if that's exactly what you should be doing, and if you can plow through that, you will be rewarded for it.
So, keep going, Phil. Thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it, and all the best of luck to you and your new blog. And for everybody else out there that had a brand new blog, I wish you all the best of luck as well. I want to thank Phil for his question, and also, Phil, we are going to send you an AskPat T-shirt for having your question featured here in the show. As well as, I want to thank everybody else out there who's asking questions, because you have an opportunity to be featured here on the show, and when you ask a question simply by going to AskPat.com and sending your voicemail question through the Speakpipe widget there. I mean, obviously this show wouldn't be available or exist without all of the questions.
So, I appreciate all of you so much, and I'm getting to as many of them as I can, and as a five podcast per week schedule. Five episode per week schedule.
Awesome. Thanks so much for listening in today. I really appreciate it, and here's a quote to finish off today, and that is from Farrah Gray. He says, “Build your own dreams, or somebody else will hire you to build theirs.” Boom. Love it. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat. Thanks.