hosted by: AskPat 571 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to episode 571 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.
All right, here's today's question from Rayleigh.
Raylee: Hi, Pat. My name's Raylee Milton. I have a Facebook page where I have 177,000 fans. We have a website, we have ebooks, we have downloads. We have new people signing up for our newsletter on a regular basis. The problem is is that we hardly have any conversions. The amount of revenue that is brought in from the business is zero to hardly anything. There has been some revenue from time to time, but I just feel like it's been so slow. We didn't just start this yesterday; it's been a period of three years. I'm wondering what you would suggest if you have been building a smart passive income for several years and it's just not taking off. Tried numerous different marketing things, different ideas. What are we doing wrong?
Pat Flynn: Hey, Raylee, thank you so much for the question. Congrats on getting a Facebook page with that many fans. Very cool, and it seems like you're doing your best to build your email list. I think that's great; I think that's the first step. I'm glad you're already taking that step. Here's what I would do. If you're not converting anybody, if you aren't making any money from what you've built already, it's obvious that you just don't know what it is that they actually want. The more you can understand what it is that they need help with and how you can better serve them, the more likely it is that you're going to have something that will make sense for them to actually upgrade to and purchase and get involved with.
So, here's what I would do. How do you find out exactly what your audience wants? There's a resource out there that is, I would say, required reading for all entrepreneurs out there, especially those who have this problem. There's a lot of people, so, Raylee, first thing, you're not alone. There's a lot of people who have built large audiences who just aren't making any money at all, probably haven't even made any dollars except through advertising. A lot of YouTube celebrities, for example, they have millions of subscribers, and they're just not doing anything with that. They've built a large following through just the random funny videos that they do, but then nothing else.
So, in that regard, you're ahead, because you're collecting emails, and that's the first step, so that's great. Utilize that email list and use that in combination with the resource that I just mentioned. It's called Ask by a man named Ryan Levesque. It's one of the top books that I could ever recommend to anybody. I had him on my podcast, actually; let me get that episode for you. Ryan L-E-V-E-S-Q-U-E and Smart Passive Income, so that is Episode 178. Go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/Session178, and he has this thing called the “Ask formula.” In that episode, we talk about how I use his formula. We actually go over some of the survey questions that you can ask and how that process works and how you can use that to create different buckets in your audience and serve them different products.
That's the other thing here. You have 177,000 followers. Not all of them need the same thing, but you need to find out what is the most pressing issue that you can provide a solution for. You're coming up with all these ideas, which is great, but are you validating those ideas? Are they actually in alignment with what it is that they need help with? Are they saying that they need those things or are they actually purchasing? I think it's obvious that it's the former, and you need to find something that they would actually pay for. My book Will it Fly? is also a great resource for this. That, in conjunction with Ask by Ryan Levesque, would be huge, I think, so that's what I would do. I would highly recommend getting Ask, reading through that. It's a very quick read. You can actually skip halfway through—he actually gives you this option in the book, like, “Don't worry about how this all came to be. Go to this part and this is where you can actually start taking action.” Just skip that part, you can read that part later, and Ryan gives you instructions in the book for that.
Will It Fly? will help you test those ideas that you've come up with, to make sure that you have paying customers. Take a small sample size of your audience, and, because you have a page, you have a huge advantage. You can target people with Facebook advertising. When you come up with the solution that—you don't even have to build it yet, you can validate it, the idea, before you actually build it, to see if it's something people will actually buy. You can take a small sample size of your audience and see what happens there. You can test, you can talk to them, have conversations about those things, and then figure out why aren't they converting and, if they do convert, then you go full-scale, then pump it to the rest of your audience. That's what I would do.
Raylee, hopefully that answers your question. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Again, those two resources I highly recommend are Ask by Ryan Levesque and Will It Fly? by yours truly. If you want to check out the audio book for that, you can go to WillItFlyBook.com and check out the Audible selection there. If you're on Audible already, you can check it out there, too.
Raylee, because your question was featured here on the show, we're going to send you an AskPat T-shirt for having your question featured. For everybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like here on the show, just head on over to AskPat. You can ask right there on that page. I also want to just thank you for being awesome, for listening all the way through this episode. I appreciate you guys, seriously.
Here's a quote to finish off the day, like I always do, and this quote is from Victor Kiam. “Even if you fall on your face, you're still moving forward.” Love that. Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Bye, everybody.