by: AskPat 747 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everyone? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 747 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today, here in the last day of November, before we hit up December, my birthday month, and closing in on the end of the year this is so crazy.
All right, sweet, now here's today's question from Ryan:
Ryan: Hey Pat, my name is Ryan. I just want to start off by saying thank you for all you do, and that I feel inspired and energized every time I listen to you. I have a website at doingwhatever.com and also a YouTube called Doing Whatever where I focus mainly on DIY projects and things like that. My process goes like this: make the project, film it, put it on YouTube, and then in the video description I say: “For more information on this project, check out the project article on my website” and I leave the link below. But the project article on my website doesn't seem to offer any added value. I basically tell a brief backstory of why I wanted to make that particular project, and then embed the video in the article. If I have downloadable plans for the project or Amazon affiliate links I'll link to those as well, but those links are also in the video description on YouTube. So again, no added value. So my question is this: what else can I put in the article that would add more value beyond the video on YouTube?
Thanks Pat, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Pat Flynn: Hey Ryan, thanks for the question, I appreciate the kind words. And to help you out I'm going to reference a number of different videos that I have been experiencing and looking at in the past that really compel me to get onto that person's website.
So for example, I want you to think about somebody who's doing a cooking show for example, which is very similar to sort of your DIY stuff because you're putting ingredients together, and you're creating something. What a lot of food bloggers are doing who are utilizing video, is they are demonstrating and showing the cooking process and whatnot, and they're then listing in a very convenient, downloadable . . . And the download part is very important because it offers more value, it's perceived as having more value. Plus people can get on your e-mail list from there, but anyway they're offering up the recipe there and all the exact measurements and whatnot, and special things related to those ingredients that you have to lookout for and those types of things. So I don't know necessarily how much detail you get, Ryan, into all the different parts and components, but that is something you can offer and would be of huge value, that would be amazing because people would want to download those things, perhaps they could even . . .
Here's another idea that just came to mind, back when my buddy Corbett Barr who blogs and has a business over at Fizzle.co along with Chase Reeves and a few other people, he had a website called Think Traffic back in the day. And instead of offering for a lead magnet for his e-mail list, he offered access to his toolbox. And what his toolbox was was simply a list of all the PDF files and resources that he has ever used and are very helpful for people who are getting started with getting more traffic to their website.
So you could do something similar Ryan, so instead of giving people the call to action to come on the website to get, you know, even just the download of the list of things that people need for that particular project, and the steps in the convenient form, maybe they get access to the toolbox which has all of the other projects and all of the lists of other DIY projects. Which would be downloadables or just information on a particular website, or perhaps just a directory to all the other stuff. So there's a lot of things you can do there to give the perceived value to a lot more credit, by still offering the same thing.
Now another thing you could offer which could be really fun for people to get access to, and I know this is a big compelling offer on YouTube and it doesn't even cost any money, is . . . because the fact that YouTube you can't have people with these kinds of projects share photos, and in this kind of situation with the DIY stuff, it's very, very compelling to see what other people have done and how other people have used those instructions, and are using your instructions, and actually creating their own stuff.
So what you can do is one your own site Ryan, you could make it compelling to come and visit because people would want to see how other people have done. So you could offer up: “Hey, why don't you submit your project or you can upload your project in the comments section, and we can all see how each other do?” So that's a great possibility. The community aspect, I mean especially with, when you start to build a fan base, and you start to become known as a brand or a personality online, you know, people want to come and meet with other people who are following you. So offering that up on the website would be very helpful too.
And lastly, I'm going to take some advice from Jadah Selner and Jennifer from SimpleGreenSmoothies.com. So in a similar way with the food stuff which is similar to your DIY stuff, you know, they're helping people craft their own smoothies and whatnot, they have a huge following on Instagram, over 200,000 people, probably more by now. But one thing they do to get people back to their website is to have people signup specifically for a challenge. And what their challenge is is a 30 day green smoothie challenge where they then give people the recipes in an e-mail sequence after people subscribe on a set date. And then they get the e-mails they go through the challenge, there's a community aspect to it as well to keep people focused and energized. You could do something similar too, so giving people a challenge is great, I did this recently for getting people from zero to 100 subscribers on their e-mail list and for whatever reason just having a challenge on all those call to actions and all those things, maybe the building of something, maybe you take an entire month and make it be a particular theme.
So maybe it's “DIY smart home month” or whatever. And then you kind of for 30 days give people an e-mail every day or every week for example, to complete a project, and people would want to come back to your website to check in with the community, to get more instructions, to ask questions in they need help, and I think that would be a compelling way to get people from those YouTube videos for that challenge into, not only your website, but your e-mail list too, because they'll want to signup for the challenge and on YouTube you're not sharing necessarily the entire list of ingredients there. But you're getting people to understand that there is this challenge and that there are other things available on the website.
So yeah. So hopefully you can run with some of that Ryan. Thank you so much for the question, I wish you all the best and we're gonna send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
Thank you so much and here's a quote to finish off the day by C.S. Lewis and that quote is: “You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream. You are here.”
All right guys, I'll see you in the next episode and take care. Bye.