by: AskPat 395 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 395 of AskPat, thank you so much 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 Paula but before we get to Paula's question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is LegalZoom.com, which you've heard me mention here in the show before, helping you with all your business formations and things like that. I've done that in the past myself, with LegalZoom.com. They're great. Did you know that this month is National Make A Will month at LegalZoom.com? So you could do the right thing and make sure that the government doesn't decide what happens to your property and minor children in case something terrible and tragic were to happen. You can get with LegalZoom and use their last will and living trust bundles—the more you plan ahead the more you save. If you go to LegalZoom.com and enter promo code Pat you will be able to save, if you put that in the referral box. Again, that's LegalZoom.com, promo code P-A-T. Awesome, thanks so much and here is today's question from Paula.
Paula: Hi Pat. Paula Slader here from StraightFromTheHorsesMouthRadioShow.com. I've been listening to your podcasts and following you since 2011. Your excellent content and tutorials helped me create a website from scratch and start a podcast, even though I am technically challenged. I'm grateful for all the wonderful advice you've given on SPI, AskPat, and the 1-Day Business Breakthrough.
My question is about my choice of niche. I get very little traffic on both my website and my podcast. I have a non-existent email list, unfortunately I think I've selected a niche so small or my content is really missing something. I would appreciate any advice. Thank you for everything, your honesty and authenticity is so refreshing and welcome in this marketing world.
Pat Flynn: Hey Paula, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today and I truly appreciate all the kind words about the different things that I do to help as many people as I can, AskPat being one of them. I'm here for you today so thank you again for the question. Now in terms of your niche that you're in, you said that your niche might be too small and I think one thing that we can do to make sure that that's the case … Because a lot of times people start out websites and they just haven't hit their stride yet, and even though the niche might be quite large, they just don't have a lot of traffic. So I wouldn't correlate the very little traffic that you have, at least at this point, to the niche selection because there's a lot of factors that play in terms of search engine rankings, and how well have you built relationships with other people who are influential in the space, if there are any.
I think, even backtracking a little, the first thing that we could do at this point is to go back and validate that niche and we can do this is different ways, and a lot of people who are struggling with traffic could potentially do this too. Not only see if their … To validate that, they should keep going with what they're doing and they are in a space where there are people who they can serve and offer products to, and get traffic coming to the website. It will give you some ideas on what it is that you could do, and who else you can reach out to, and what other places you should be exploring to get in front of, so you can bring people back to your website and your home base. So the first thing is keyword research is always a good trudge-through method to see if there are people out there searching for items in keywords, key phrases, related to what it is that you're doing, the products that you are talking about, the different ideas and strategies that you're mentioning, the help that you're offering to people on your particular website.
So you could sign up for Google AdWords at AdWords.google.com and use their keyword planner tool. It's a free tool you can use; even though AdWords is for paid advertising, you can get free access to their keyword planner to be able to see what keywords people are typing in. Another thing you could do is in Google itself, on the homepage of google.com, you could start typing in some of the keywords related to your particular niche—and you're going to see a lot of other keywords pop up and you'll see some that use these strings that you typed in, and then more text beyond that to see what else other people are typing in, and I could give you some ideas to help you see if there are other people looking in perhaps a different way than you think they're looking for. Also, when you click search for that particular keyword, if you scroll all the way to the bottom you're going to see a link or a list of related searches. So words that aren't necessarily the same or have the same wordings, a lot of them do, but you'll see some other related keywords that you might be able to click through to go and find certain things or at least even just validate that there are other people out there.
So that's quick, easy, keyword research that you can do, you can get into a little more advanced keyword research by using tools like Market Samurai or my personal favorite at the time right now, which is Long Tail Pro, AskPat.com/longtailpro. Spencer, the owner of the product and the founder, is giving everybody a discount if you go to AskPat.com/longtailpro you'll see how that works and you can check it out there.
It gives you a lot more data in terms of the keywords that you're searching for and it'll give you some good direction in terms of what else you could be writing on your site with whatever niche you're in or it can even help you find a new niche to get into if you feel like this is indeed too small of a niche.
Now another thing you could do is go to another search engine—one of my favorite search engines out there—and that is Amazon.com. A lot of people don't think of Amazon as a search engine, but it absolutely is and the cool thing about Amazon is that is a search engine with buyers in mind. There are 300, 400 million people who have their credit cards in Amazon, it's kind of scary to think about. Those are people who have the ability to buy anything, so that's a buyer's search engine. If you go there and you search for certain keywords related to your particular niche, then you're going to see that there might be books, there might be products, related to whatever it is that you're talking about and that is good validation.
You can go into the reviews and see what people like or dislike about those books where those authors are primarily located on the web. You can go and find them and reach out to them and hopefully get in front of their audience in one way, shape, or form. That goes along with my next step here, is that you want to build a list. An email list is important and yes we'll get to that in a second, but what I mean is a spreadsheet or a list of the different blogs, the different websites, the different forms, the different Twitter accounts, the different Facebook groups, the different Linkedin groups, again, related to your topic and you'll see that. If this is something that you find and it can be relatively easy to find even very small niches. Garry Vaynerchuck was the one who said in his book Crush It!, if you are passionate about worms, worms, you can kill it if you go forth with all the passion that you have behind it and truly know that you can become the authority on worms. Really there's no niche too small in my opinion. I would really focus on where those people are located.
It might not be completely obvious but through these searches you might be able to find some second or third string attachments or correlations between other groups that will have the same kind of target audience that you have. So make a list of all those things and that's going to be helpful for you, because then when you start to build content out, when you start to get guest posts and do things like that, you can reach out to those people and build a relationship with them and even get in contact with them to start helping each other out. I would do that as well and then simple, like I said, Google searches for the keywords that you have and see if there's anything there. That's the first place I would go, see if you can find where the people who are in your target audience exist. Maybe they aren't exactly the same keyword but maybe it's a related keyword or maybe you have to go one level up to find those people, but then within that category you can become the expert at that sub-category.
You're going to have to explore a little bit, that's the first thing I would mention. Then going back to the email list, like I mentioned, that's going to be really important. The thing is, you don't need a huge email list to have an incredible impact on your business and for you to have an incredible impact on people. Even if it's just 50 people, if you have 50 people on your email list, which a lot of people might think that's minuscule, that's not even worth it. But it absolutely is because those are 50 people on the other end of that email list and those are people who could benefit from what you have to offer, and if they like what you do and they see what you have to offer, they perhaps might be willing to pay for it or at least come to your website when you have new content coming out. You can post a link to an email that gets sent out to them and if you have a great relationship with them, and hopefully you're reaching out to them and talking to them personally to get to know them even more so that they will understand that you are their trusted advisor.
That's what you want to happen and it doesn't take very many people to see you as a trusted advisor to have amazing things happen for you and your brand. So go ahead and reach out to those few people you have on your email list, absolutely build one, you have to build one in order to be able to do that and also to be able to send traffic back to your website to those people who have given you permission to send them messages.
So Paula that's where I would start. I wouldn't say that your niche is too small right away, we're going to have to dig a little bit deeper. I don't know what niche you're in exactly. I wouldn't say it's necessarily your content that's lacking, but that could perhaps be the case as well. You're going to have to see in your target space if the niche isn't too small, maybe people aren't finding you because you are writing about the same things everybody else is writing about. You aren't building relationships with people and bringing new spins on topics that have already been talked about. In that regard, perhaps it is your content, but again, I can't tell right from this voicemail, but you're going to have to dig a little bit deeper. Hopefully that gives you a little bit of direction in terms of where you can move forward with this. Paula, I appreciate your kind words again and your question coming in today, for that we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt and that's going to be sent your way free of charge thanks to my assistant who's going to reach out to you in very short time to collect your information for that.
For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask it right there on that page. I also want to thank LegalZoom.com, again it's super easy for those of us who are out there building businesses and also, like I said, it is National Make A Will month at LegalZoom.com. Anything legally related, go to LegalZoom.com, they're going to help you get things set up. They don't offer legal advice per say but you can get guidance from LegalZoom's network independent attorneys in most states since they're not a law firm. Don't procrastinate when it comes to protecting your family, or if you are in the middle of starting a business with incorporating or trademarking or all that stuff. They do all that stuff for you. Don't forget enter Pat in the referral box at checkout to save even more. That's LegalZoom.com, promo code “Pat.” Thanks again so much, I appreciate your time today and here's a quote from Catarina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, she said, “So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”
Amen to that. Cheers, take care and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat. Thanks.