AP 0940: How Can I Expand My Online Community?

AskPat 940 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 940 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.

Miha Matlievski: : Hi Pat, my name is Miha Matlievski and a month or so ago I started this project called FailuresAnonymous.com. Having dealt with a lot of failures myself, some massive failures, I know how healing it can be to put all those thoughts that are going and racing through your mind out there, to put them in writing. It's a start of healing process. Even if you do it anonymously, getting maybe some advice, and support from other people can mean so much when dealing with failure. That's why I started the project, and I reached out to a few friends of mine—they posted a few first stories. But now I want to expand the community, and I don't really have a big advertising budget. I would like to do it as free as possible. The difficulty I have is how to reach communities. I reached out to a few influencers, but the first thing they ask you is, “What is the reach of your website?” Because the reach is really low at the moment, it's really hard for me to get some people to share their failures, and do an interview with them.

If you have any good ideas on how to approach the whole thing, what to do, if it can be low budget or even free, that would help me a lot. I'm looking forward to your answer. I hope I get picked for one of your next episodes. Pat, keep up the good work; I really enjoy listening to your podcast. Take care, and I'll hope you be able to take a minute or so of your time and check out my website. Maybe even you can contribute some of your failure stories—that would be really, really awesome. Take care, and bye bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey Miha, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate your support. Congratulations on what seems to be an amazing project. I understand that at the very beginning it can be very difficult because you don't have that audience yet, and so it's hard to get access to influencers. Although I will say along those lines before I give you some other strategies, you might want to be a little bit more strategic with who you select, and how you feature them. For example—I use this tactic a lot when I share with other people how to get influencers on their podcast. That's select people who are coming out with books soon. Select people who have seemed to say yes to a number of different other podcasts, or maybe they're coming out with a product. In most cases those kinds of people are going to be more likely to say yes. Also just realize that if people say no, you know that … I mean you know this is just a no right now. Just keep those people in contact, you can approach those people who said no right now later and say, “Hey, you know what? When I first contacted you I only had this much, but look at the growth now, look at where we're at now.” And they're going to be more likely to say yes. Plus if you get some of those bigger names on there up front, especially people who are authors, you're able to then, for example, name drop and say, “Oh, well we've done interviews with so and so, and these two people here. And you fit the same qualification. I'd love to interview you, and have you be alongside them as well.”

Those are some strategies to get people to say yes to come on your show, or to do an interview. Also another thing is you might be able to benefit by not doing an interview per se, but just having them answer a single question. Something that takes literally like less than a minute to do, or type in a reply for. You can compile those answers into what's called a round up post. This is how I launched FoodTrucker.com back in 2013. I reached out to a number of food truck owners asking a single question, and that was, “What's one thing you wish you knew before you started to food truck?” We had 50 responses come back. Now, I will say that was out of 250 people that I reached out to. You're going to have to do your work, you're going to have to hustle of course. But still, 20 percent conversion rate with that is not bad, and I will say that about 80 percent of the 50 came as a result of a follow up for people who didn't answer back initially. Again, you're just going to have to hustle and keep going out there if you really know this is something that's important to you.

Now, getting access to influencers isn't the only way to grow your community. I think another great way to do it is through potentially interviewing or featuring forum owners, or group owners. If you go to Facebook for example and type in different keywords related to the topic that you're discussing, you can really easily, by clicking on the members button, figure out who the admins are. Literally, that's another button, Admins. You can reach out to those people and you can say, “Hey, my name is Miha. I'm featuring amazing community owners who deal with fear in their communities, and I'd love to feature you on the show, or interview you and ask you a couple questions for the blog.” What's really cool about that is they're going to be A) more likely to say yes, but B) also they're going to be likely to share that with their audience afterwards. A lot of times the sort of A list—quote, A list—influencers, they're not going to be even thinking about sharing it. I mean, that's not why they're doing it. But the B level, C level—don't be afraid to ask those people too, but also forum owners. LinkedIn is a great place to go as well.

Yeah, the other thing that you could do is seriously just put your content on other peoples sites. Yes, maybe you don't have a large audience yet, but you have this amazing content, or you've done this amazing research that very much compliments another influencer's work. Well, you can come on and write a guest post, or come on and be a guest on another persons podcast. Instead of being the publisher, be the person that other people are publishing about. That's another way to go about it too.

Just a few ideas there, and I would definitely make sure that as you build your community, the biggest thing with community is communication. That's why communication and community sound very similar. Make sure you're communicating with your community, especially in the beginning where it's going to be a lot easier for you to have those conversations. That way they'll get to know you, and why you're doing what you're doing, and you'll be able to really understand and empathize with those who are following you, and why, and who else you might be able to reach out to. Plus, a lot of them are going to have references for who else you can speak to. If you have connected in some way to somebody who should be interviewed for example, it's going to be much easier than just sort of cold asking them up front.

Hopefully that helps Miha, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate you, and I want to send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much, I appreciate you. Here's a quote to finish off the day by Lolly Daskal, “Where we fall are the stepping stones for our journey.” All right, take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.