AP 0428: Can I Build an Online Business without a Niche Site?

AskPat 428 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 428 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 Rachel, but before we get to Rachel's question, I do want to thank today's amazing sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com.

They saved my life, and they're saving the lives of over three million small business owners. When I say saving the life of, what I mean is really helping to organize the mess that business finances can become. It's incredible because you're hopefully making some good money and you're gonna be spending some money. You're also gonna be invoicing, and FreshBooks makes it super easy to help you get a hold of all that and just control it. They connect with a lot of other third-party things that you probably use already right now to make it easy for you to keep track. Then come tax season in April, which is . . . It's almost the end of the year now, which is crazy. It just makes it incredibly easy for you to figure everything out. It's one of those tools that, if you have in your back pocket you feel safe. It's that peace of mind. If you check out FreshBooks, you can actually go to FreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section to get it for 30 days for free. Again, that's at FreshBooks.com/AskPat, enter “Ask Pat.”

Alright, here's today's question from Rachel.

Rachel: Hey Pat, this is Rachel Ferguson. I am new to the online marketing and passive income, and I actually just had a quick question. I am not 100% interested in creating a website or a niche site, but I would like to build my email list to be able to market different products through something like ClickBank or ShareASale, and I was wondering, what is the best way of doing that without having to actually have a niche website or a blog? I want to just market the products and maybe build my lists and create a sales funnel that way, but not necessarily having a niche site where I am becoming an authority for the specific products. So, if you could help, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Hey Rachel, thank you so much for the question today. I love this question because it helps me hone in on exactly what really matters. If you're trying to build an email list, that's great. An email list is fantastic to have, and I love that you're thinking about that already. But without a website, without any content marketing behind it, a place for where people can go to, you're losing out on potential SEO. By not having a website that is something people can engage with, and learn things, and be educated and inspired, and perhaps entertained from, it's gonna be a lot more difficult to get people to get on that list.

Now, that's not to say it's impossible, but it doesn't take a ton of work for you to build something that is actually useful, that can help convince people that you are the real deal, and that they should subscribe to that email list, because that's a big ask of people. It's a big ask to get people to subscribe to an email list. Now, I'm imagining ways that this could be done without that and like I said, it's not impossible. So here is just my made-up strategy, just right on the spot here, of something that could possibly work, and something that I would test out if I were you. I'd love to hear everybody else's thoughts about this as well. You can use the hashtag #AskPat428 to continue this conversation on Twitter and we could follow that there.

But anyway, this is what I would do. I know this can be done actually, because of Glen Allsopp from Viperchill.com. I believe he has a course or a lot of content on his blog about doing such things. Now, I don't know if that means he doesn't create a website at all. I think he does. Obviously you need some sort of lead capture methods, so perhaps you could get hooked up with LeadPages and create a landing page that you can drive Facebook traffic to. That would help, in terms of traffic generation. If you write good copy and you have a good ad, you can bring people to that particular page, where they can then subscribe. You need to convince them to subscribe. So, it might be perhaps giving away some sort of guide or toolkit, or something of value to that particular audience.

This is the big thing that's gonna help you determine whether or not this is gonna succeed, and that is whether or not you can hone in on an audience and find out exactly what their needs are and get them to subscribe to your list. That's really what it comes down to because if you just start with the products on ClickBank, if you just go to ClickBank and Neverblue, and CJ which is Commission Junction, and all these other affiliate sites, if you just find a product you like and try to make people fit into that, it's not gonna work out so well for you. It's gonna be difficult. There's gonna be a lot of competition out there already. But if you figure out a way to get your own voice, your own spin, to something unique that you have to offer a particular market, a particular audience, honing in on a certain kind of person with a certain kind of problem, then it's gonna be much easier for you to A, target those people, B, speak to those people in their language, through that research you're gonna learn what that language is, and C, deliver a solution.

That solution could be a product on ClickBank. It could be a product on CJ, and maybe that's where you start your research, but I wouldn't just try to make people fit into a product. I would make a product fit with a certain kind of people that you begin to build a list for and understand what their true problems are and you get to build these solutions. Maybe it's not an affiliate offer. Maybe it's something you create on your own, after you find out more about this particular audience. Maybe it's a private deal that you make with a company that you know that can help these people, not through any of these affiliate sites, which do take a cut off the top of course, but maybe it's a private deal. Maybe you've discovered that there's two companies out there that can really, really make a difference for these kinds of people that you have subscribing to your list, and then you can create a certain kind of deal with them where you get paid per lead, paid per referral, paid an affiliate commission, what have you.

It can be done, but like I said, it's much easier if people know who is on the other end of that email. There's a couple of things here. One, you're gonna have to do a lot of work to get people to be convinced enough to subscribe. You're gonna have to offer something of great value right up front in some way, shape, or form. You're gonna have to convince them with some great copy on Facebook because they're not gonna know who you are, they're not gonna hear from you from anybody else, they're gonna see an ad, cold. Number two, you're gonna have to really, really work on your email marketing, your copy, and all those sorts of things.

I recommend, everybody, make sure you stick around because on Smart Passive Income in October, we're talking all about email marketing. Everybody on the SPI podcast, all the blog content, and even SPI TV videos, are all about email marketing cause that was the number one thing. People actually wanted to learn more about from me in my recent survey. So, I'm giving it to you. Now, like I said, you're gonna have to work on the funnels, and all those sorts of things, and literally draw it out on a map, go email by email exactly what you want to happen, the flow people go through on the site after they subscribe, and you'll see if this works or not. What's cool is you can test this. You can build these systems, and you can test it out really small, phase by phase. You can literally just build a landing page, begin to collect email addresses, and see if you can get X number of subscribers.

If you can't, then you don't need to work on the email marketing for those. You don't even need to figure out what products are gonna be there for them because you can't get people off of Facebook into your email list. So again, then you can work on the email funnels into a product, getting people to click on a product page. Then, you can just do some more research to discover whether or not they purchase or not, or maybe there's some products you can create on your own, or other things that you could do, coaching, consulting, things like that.

So Rachel, I hope this kind of has the gears spinning. But honest, it's not impossible, but it is much easier when you build a brand, you prove yourself, you build a website, doesn't have to be a personalized website, like SmartPassiveIncome.com, where everybody knows it's Pat Flynn behind SmartPassiveIncome.com. But for example, SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com. It has the information that people are actually looking for. It's built off of content marketing, and then people go and they click on the ads, or they subscribe to the list and then we promote them to . . . We give those leads to certain security guard companies, and so on, and so forth. Those things can happen, but it's a lot harder without that content marketing behind it, and you're gonna have to do some really decent high converting ads in order to see if this is actually viable or not. But like I said, you can split it up into phases and see if it's gonna work before you move onto the next step. That's how I would do that.

So Rachel, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate that. Again, like I said to everybody else out there, I would love to hear what you thought about this answer. #AskPat428 on Twitter. I appreciate your time and attention, so Rachel we're gonna send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For everybody else out there who's still around, thank you so much for listening in. Go to AskPat.com to check out some of the other episodes and also, you can ask your own question right on that page too.

I also want to thank FreshBooks.com for making it incredibly easy for all of us to manage our finances. They serve over three million small businesses, and they can serve you as well with your income, with your expenses, with invoicing. They just make it incredibly easy, so you can focus less on the headache of trying to manage your finances, cause that's FreshBooks' job, and focus more on growing your email list, building relationships, marketing, content generation, all those sorts of things that we need to do. So to check out FreshBooks for 30 days for free, go ahead and go to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask  Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Again, that's GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat.”

Thanks so much, and here's a quote to end the day. It is another commencement speech quote from social entrepreneur, Melinda Gates at Duke University. She said, “If you make the moral choice to connect deeply to others, then your computer, your phone, and your tablet will make it so much easier to do. I want you to connect because I believe it will inspire you to do something, to make a difference in the world.”

Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.