AP 0181: How Do I Know When My Audience Is Ready to Buy a Product from Me?

AskPat 181 Episode Transcript

Pat: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to episode 181 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from Hamza, but before we get to that, I just want to say, hey, if you're interested in building a website from scratch, I've done it a couple times live on the website at SmartPassiveIncome.com and shared every bit and part of it—from how I selected those niches to building the websites to creating content to monetizing both of those sites. Actually one in the security guard training industry and the other in the food truck industry. If you go to NicheSiteDuel.com you could check out all the free content there. All the reports and data and analytics that go behind each of those websites that are still running, still up, still generating positive income. Again, that's NicheSiteDuel.com.

Now, let's get to today's question from Hamza.

Hamza: What's up, Pat? My name is Hamza and I'm from BarcabyFans.com. I have my blog, share podcasts, videos, articles, interview, and too much more. My blog is about football in Barcelona and it has around 180 million football fans around the globe. Pat, my question is, how do you get to know that your customers have started trusting you? Or you can think that . . . I'm asking, how do you get to know what is the best time for you to launch your product on your own blog? I'm asking this because my blog is just a freebie. People just come around to watch football—any news or article or podcast and then just leave. So when do I launch a product on my blog? And to achieve or keep doing it and your dream support for every blogger around the world. Just keep doing good work. Take care.

Pat Flynn: Hamza, I thank you so much for the question and also for the kind words at the end there. I truly appreciate it. A don't worry, I'm going to keep doing what I do here because I just love it. I love doing this. I love getting questions like this, not only because the questions are great and they're really helpful for everybody else out there, but just the fact that you are on the other side of the world and you are listening to AskPat, which just blows my mind. We all have the ability to reach people around this world and change lives. Hopefully the answer to this question will help you and everybody else out there listening.

So, how do you know if your audience trusts you and how do you know if it's time to launch a product? These are fantastic questions and I think it can be a very difficult thing to answer because it's hard to know if you don't get to talk to your audience. You're going to have to interact with your audience in one way or another. Not necessarily through comments or discussions on social media, which will help and that's how you can build trust, but through certain actions that your audience might take over time. So, there's a lot of things that will help show you that you have trust from your audience. Then we can get into the products and stuff from there as well. These things sort of overlap.

The first thing I want to share is, build your email list. If you're not building an email list, you definitely should and I think what you're doing for the Barcelona football club is really cool. I follow soccer, I know my dad follows soccer, and Barcelona is always up there in the rankings and stuff. It's a great football club. A lot of views and discussions and things about that I'm sure there's a ton of content that you're writing about. While doing so, that alone is helping you build trust, but you want to have your audience complete these tasks that are a little bit more than just reading. Clicking on something or subscribing to your email list is the one I was leaning toward. If you can get your audience to trust you enough to subscribe to your email list, you know that they've trusted you enough to subscribe to your email list. Whether you give something away on the other end, or you just say, “Hey if you want updates to your email inbox.” They're going to trust you because people don't just give away their email addresses. Right? So that's one way to know you have a little bit of trust.

Then you can actually start having conversations with people over email. A lot of people don't actually do that with their email lists. It's a fantastic way to build trust because when you think about it, you know, email is very personable and when you have the ability of using something like AWeber or MailChimp or another email service provider. You have the ability in one fell swoop to send an email to all of your subscribers and continue to build those relationships and build on that trust that you've already earned from them right there on your email. Not one-to-one, but one-to-many. Although, to the person on the other end, after sending that email to it does feel like it's one-to-one. That's why it's so powerful.

Another good tactic you can use which will help you discover what products you could potentially share is to think about the products you would like to promote and eventually create in whole. You can sort of validate those products and earn even more trust from your audience by taking little tiny parts of that product and giving it away for free. Not only to provide value to your audience, but it'll help get them to take a little bit of action in terms of downloading it, understanding more about what you have to offer beyond just the content. Giving them experiences beyond just reading content and leaving, but they're actually downloading something and reading it on their own. That helps. Also, the more that you test those things, the more you'll understand, “Okay, what did people actually like? What are people talking about? What are people liking the most?” You can run surveys, which I think is what you should absolutely do as well just to see what people are looking for, what people want and what people need. That stuff will help you along the way for sure.

So parts of whole products, give those away for free. For example, if you are thinking about writing an ebook. I don't know what that ebook would be about. You'd have to test that by doing these types of things, but the first chapter you just give away for free. Even before you finish the entire book, maybe you just give away the first chapter to give people a preview. To get people excited. To get people on your email list, but also prove to yourself that, yes you have something worth continuing on and doing. That would be a good way to go about it.

You could also promote products as an affiliate. What's cool about that is you don't have to spend time creating those products. You could actually test product ideas by hooking up with other companies that may want to get in front of your audience and promoting those products. That might be a great way to not even have to worry about creating products immediately, but just focusing on products that are already there that could provide value to your audience.

For Barcelona football club, there could be some memberships, for example, that already exist that people could sign up for where they get behind the scenes access to the football club or stories of some of the players and things like that. That's something a lot of people might want to pay for. Not everybody, and you have to think about this too. Not everybody in your audience is going to respond positively or are even going to be interested in it. But, it doesn't take that many people in your audience to really do some good for you in terms of your income and also the value that you're providing to certain segments of your particular audience.

So think about that, but those are the things that I would do. Start to build that email list. That helps you build trust. Start to tease people with a little bit of these potential ideas that you have. Even doing things like, “Coming Soon” type promotions or “Early Bird” type stuff. Promoting affiliated products, just again to test the waters with your audience, but also to potentially make some money at the same time.

So, Hamza, I hope that answers your question. Thank you so much for sending it in. An AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed—actually flying—your way very soon. You'll get an email from my assistant with more information about that in the next coming weeks.

For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. And I also want to remind you, if in case you don't remember, to make sure to go to NicheSiteDuel.com if you want to go check out the case studies that I've done on the two niche sites that I have that are now making money. One of them has been up for over four years, doing really well. Another one I just created last year and I'm continuing to add new reports to those over time. So again, that's NicheSiteDuel.com.

Thanks so much, and let's end with a quote from Malcolm Forbes. He says, “When you cease to dream, you cease to live.”

Cheers. Thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.