AskPat 661 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 661 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 Megan, but before we get to her question I want to mention that this episode of AskPat is brought to you by Braintree. You know it's a beautiful thing when your customers want to pay you, of course. But, what if they could pay you in every single way possible? Well, that's what Braintree does. They allow you to accept all forms of payments including, PayPal, Apple Pay, Android Pay, and many many more. Now, you can take them all in over a hundred and thirty currencies too. How awesome is that? As their company grows, Braintree will stay by your side from your first dollar to your billionth. So, all it takes is a couple lines of code to get started. To learn more, visit braintreepayments.com/pat. That's braintreepayments.com/pat.

All right, now here's today's question from Megan.

Megan: Hey, Pat. My name's Megan. I'm in the freelance writing and content blogging niche. Something I haven't heard you talk about too much and that I'm working on right now is, how do you get influencers within your niche to respond to your emails, especially if you're working on something like a round-up post? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Megan! Thank you so much for the question. I know this is a struggle for a lot of people for a number of different reasons. First of all, there's a mindset thing which you may or may not have, but a lot of people I know who look to reach out to people who are A-listers or even B-listers, sometimes they are just afraid of reaching out because they're afraid of rejection.

Well, as you probably know, and as most people probably know who are listening to this, if you don't ask, you don't get. You just have to be comfortable with the fact that you might get rejected and in most cases, 99.99999 percent of cases, nothing bad will ever happen as a result of simply asking. If it does, well, that's probably somebody you don't want to deal with anyways. Hopefully, that just gets rid of mindset issues people have in terms of the fear of reaching out and I always say, that fear is actually something that I see as a sign. That whatever it is you're doing is actually something worth doing. That there is something awesome on the other end.

Think about it: These round-up posts, they're worth it. I mean, they have always performed very well when you get all these authority figures and even if they're not authority figures in terms of A-listers I think putting B and C-listers on there might actually be even better and increase your chances of people saying yes. Here's why: First of all, they don't get as many opportunities as the A-lister so they're more likely to say yes just because they want that exposure; they're continuing to grow; they know they're sort of up and coming and they want every chance possible to get more exposure so, they're likely to say yes.

Here's the cool thing for you. They're also likely to share it for the exact same reason. Because they're up and coming, they want that exposure, so they're going to share it with the people who already follow them too. So, if you can't get the A-listers after what I'll share with you in a second. B-listers, C-listers in your niche are just as good and sometimes better actually.

A good example of this my podcast: the Smart Passive Income podcast. My post popular episodes are not the ones with Tim Ferriss and Gary Vaynerchuk and some of the other big names. The most popular ones are with, actually, people who nobody's ever heard of before that are just like them or just like the audience. So, just keep that in mind, Megan, and everybody else out there.

Now, there's a number of different quote tricks that you can use. I hate using the word “tricks” because tricking anybody is just wrong, but there are hacks I guess you can use to make it more likely that an influencer will say yes. So, first of all, I would say that you just need to know that you need to make their life as easy as possible. In most cases, responding on Twitter is quite easy, and I've participated in many round-up posts where I respond via Twitter. Plus, there's a sharing aspect and a viral aspect of that. Especially, if you embed those tweets that they reply with into that particular post. Plus, it'looks nicer if people can then join the conversation from there. So, you can choose Twitter as the medium to collect those answers.

What's cool about that is you get these nice short, sweet answers, and influencers know that they only have 140 characters to reply, so they're going to make it to the point and it's going to make your article likely more effective. Other things you can do is reach out to people on Twitter without asking. Just to make sure that there is a connection there already so they know who you are, that you exist. Or you can even mention in a follow-up email at some point that “Hey, we connected on Twitter once, I just want to thank you again. By the way, I'm doing a …” I wouldn't even say “round-up post”; I would just say, “I'm combining the answers from some of my favorite <blank>. I would love just a minute of your time to answer this question—just hit reply. I'll take care of the rest.” That's how I would word it. Again, you're just making it incredibly easy. You're sharing the benefit. Also, which is, you're going to … You know, exposure, you plan to share this. Once you get a couple big names in there, you can also name-drop them too. So, if you have, for example, I don't know … Richard Branson say yes. You know, he was the one who had yesterday's quote of the day, which was “Screw it, let's do it.” If, he had said yes to you for whatever reason, which would be awesome, when you email other people and say “Oh, well, Richard Branson's participating,” they're probably gonna want to be associated with an article that Richard Branson. So, that's how you could do that.

Well, how do you get Richard Branson to say yes? Well, here is a trick that you can use which is, get people who are coming out with books soon. This is a trick or a hack that people use in the podcasting industry to get people to become guests and spend like forty-five minutes to an hour. Well, it's likely going to work for somebody's one minute of time to reply to one single question. So, find the people who are coming out with books and or courses or have big promotions coming up for something and reach out to them. That's how you can then have a number of different authority figures in there, which you can then use to name drop to, perhaps, get other authority figures in there too.

Yeah, so that's what I would recommend. That should work. Megan, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate you, and hopefully that helps everybody out there. I've actually used these tips … I'm actually right in the middle of using these tips for my own round-up posts. Which, you may or may not have seen on the blog already at this point. Well, at the time of this recording it's not out, but at the time that this recording goes live it should be out so, anyway, you might have seen it on the blog anyway or on the podcast.

Well, thank you, Megan. I appreciate you, and maybe this actually gives a lot of ideas for people who are just struggling to figure out what to write about and I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much and you'll hear from my assistant in the next month or so to collect your information so we can send it to you for free, 'cause that's what we do here on AskPat.

Actually, if you go to askpat.com you can ask your question right there if you want to get featured and you can see some of the people at the bottom of that page who have already sported their AskPat t-shirts. It's a really comfortable shirt. It's from American Apparel. It's my favorite fabric on, you know, just regular t-shirts. You're going to love it, so please ask questions. That's what makes this show run.

I appreciate you, and as always I love to end with a quote and today's quote comes from B.C. Forbes. He says, “If you don't drive your business, you will be driven out of business.” Boom. That “boom” part was me, not Forbes. Anyway, cheers, guys! Thanks so much, and I'll see you the next episode of AskPat. Bye now.