AP 0155: How Do I Blog for an Industry I’m Not In?

AskPat 155 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey. What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 155 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.

We have a great question from Chris, whose accent I love, but before we get to that we're going to talk about a sponsor, which is FreshBooks. FreshBooks.com is an awesome site. It's the easy to use cloud-accounting solution helping millions of small business owners including myself save time with invoicing, keeping track of money coming in, money going out. Anything and everything to do with financing, you should have organized in something like FreshBooks.com. If you actually go to get FreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did you hear About Us” section, you get a free trial. Just check out exactly how easy it is to use.

All righty. So now let's get to today's question from Chris.

Chris Lines: Hi, Pat. My name is Chris Lines. I'm a music composer based out of the UK. I've got a question about the direction of my content. My ideal customers are games developers. Although I know a little bit about that side of things, I wouldn't feel confident blogging about the particular problems they're facing in that area because my area is music and theirs is games development.

I imagine this would be similar to a graphic designer, say, who wanted to attract local garage owners. He could only blog about graphic design, which garage owners might not be that interested in and it wouldn't be appropriate for him to start blogging about the problems of running a garage or fixing cars. My ideal is to attract potential clients, warm them up a bit, and also to demonstrate my authority and expertise in my area. So any advice would be great. Thanks for your help, Pat. Love the show.

Pat Flynn: Chris, thank you so much for the question. I'm going to approach the answer in a couple of different ways because I'm not exactly sure exactly what your end goal here is. What I do know is that you're a music composer, which means you're awesome and secondly that you're targeting gaming developers. Now, I'm not exactly sure if you just have this sort of passion for gaming and maybe you don't know much about developing games, but you want to target that particular audience in terms of helping them create games and helping them do other things in terms of just creating an overall game and talking about that industry. I don't know if that's what you want to do or you want to target them in terms of providing services related to what it is you're an expert in, in music composition.

I hope that it's the latter because gaming developers I think are so involved with their code, with their program, with the storyline of their games that they forget exactly how important the music is and if they had somebody there who could be the expert to teach them how to integrate music properly, to teach them perhaps the history of music within video games and what works during a video game, I think that would be incredibly insightful and that is, I feel, the correct connection between your world of music composition and the world of gaming. There's definitely a lot of overlap there.

I'm just immediately thinking about some of my favorite childhood games and I can instantly think of some of the music. We all know Mario Brothers, right? That's Mario Brothers. Then you have one of my all time favorites, Bubble Bobble. I can go on for days. Tetris. I can seriously go on for days, but you see how excited I'm getting about music, and yes I do have a little bit of a musical background. I know people who just blast Final Fantasy music in their cars. Music is so important for gaming and oftentimes it's what can help people remember what the games are, or just that a great game is only great with great music. So I think that's the connection there, Chris.

I would advise you to see what you can do to connect with other developers in terms of providing consultations, providing information, free content, paid content, courses perhaps or even soundtracks that are available that they could purchase. I don't know if you wanted to go that route. But they can purchase music from you that they can then put in their shows or their games. I don't know why I said shows, but you know what I mean?

There's so many opportunities there. I wouldn't just start completely fresh and talk about that sort of first thing I mentioned, which was just trying to get into that world without anything to offer them. If you're going to get into a market, you need to offer them something. You have something I believe that a lot of gamers would absolutely want, knowledge about what kind of music should be in their game. That's your answer right there. When you reach out to other gaming developers, it might seem like a stretch at first, but if you perhaps establish a little bit of authority by creating some content that dives deep into existing music within games . . . You know what would be really cool? If you took a video game and then you added your own soundtrack to it and compared and contrast and just showed the difference. I mean, geez that would pretty awesome I think, and it would show just how important music is. If you share those things with gaming developers it might go viral on that community and you can share some tips and tricks with them and give some direction to them for free through blog posts and even podcast episodes where people can listen to music or videos of course or through consultations and paid gigs and things like that.

So, Chris, I hope that answers your question and I hope I understand that correctly. I would love to hear more about this and if you want to keep talking about this and anyone else out there wants to keep talking about this, I recommend using the hashtag AskPat155. Again, that's #AskPat155 for Episode 155. If you have any tips for Chris, remember he doesn't feel confident blogging about games. Well, you're not going to be blogging about games hopefully based on what I just mentioned, you're going to be blogging about the music within games. I think that will open up a whole new world for you and give you the confidence because you know that that's something that these gaming developers, that's knowledge they don't have.

Chris, thanks again for the question. An AskPat teeshirt is headed your way. Look out for an email from my assistant very soon about that. 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. You can ask right there on that page. I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com. I seriously wish I knew about FreshBooks.com when I first started because I did everything by hand or not by hand, but using Excel. It took a lot of time not to mention gave me a bunch of headaches, especially around tax time. With FreshBooks, it just makes it so easy to print out all the reports you need to send invoices if you're collecting payments from clients. They have a mobile app so you can check on your business at all times. Again, if you go to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section, you can get your free trial.

Now, as always I'd like to end with a quote. Today's quote is from Don Schultz. He says: “Social media creates communities, not markets.” Social media creates communities not markets. Cheers. Thanks so much and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.