AskPat 523 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 523 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 is today's question from Sam.

Sam: Hi Pat. This is Sam Davis Houston here. I was actually trying to come to this site and I was trying to remember what the URL was, and I just kept singing the jingle in my head because it's really catchy. And everything that you do is just so amazing and I know everyone always says this, but I just had to reiterate that. And I was actually wondering, when you were starting Ask Pat, and if someone else wanted to start sort of question-and-answer podcast, how would you suggest people go about actually finding people to ask questions?

Because obviously you started with a large following on Smart Passive Income, and it was probably pretty easy for you to just sort of tell people to come over here and ask their questions. But what would you recommend for someone who was interested in maybe starting a similar podcast but doesn't have a large following to begin with? So I'd love your input and thanks again for all that you do.

Pat Flynn: Hey Sam, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate what you said there in the beginning. And it's kind of cool to hear that the jingle is actually what made you remember the URL. So that worked out just exactly the way I wanted it to. So thank you for that, Sam. I really appreciate that.

Now, yes. You're absolutely right. It was pretty easy for me to get questions coming in because I already had an established audience on Smart Passive Income. And they were, of course, already established as podcast listeners, a lot of them too. So it was very easy for me to have them come over to AskPat which started four years after my other show started. So I did have a user base already.

Now, if you don't have a user base, how can you start a Q and A style podcast? Well, getting voicemail questions is going to be a little bit more difficult because it takes a little bit of trust for somebody to call in and ask their question, which is why I think it's really cool for everybody else who's listening to the show, who has asked a question, and yourself included in that obviously.

But if you don't have people calling in, and you can't do that in the beginning, or you could although it can be a little bit harder. And I like the fact that you're going to. If you have a relationship with an audience already, you're going to get these great comments like the comments you made in the beginning saying about how I've been able to help you and what you think of the show and all that sort of stuff. So I would actually recommend by not getting voicemail questions in the beginning.

Eventually, overtime, you're going to get a user base and you could have the ability to collect voicemail questions from people, and that adds another cool flavor to the show. I could obviously easily just take these questions and answer them without including the voicemail question. And so, if you go and do it that way, you don't have to take voicemail questions. You can take questions via Twitter. If you have a blog, you can have a blog post that says, “Hey guys, I'm going to be doing a Q & A podcast. Ask your questions and I'll answer them individually on the show.”

Or maybe you already have a podcast and you do one episode that is all Q and As. I know people like Tim Ferriss has done that. And those are really interesting podcast episodes because I get to hear from the minds of his audience, who is where I'm at too in terms of just curiosity. A lot of times, those people ask the same questions that I have but I don't hear their voices. I hear them through Tim reading those questions loud. And so, that's a great place to start too. If you have any sort of following on social media, that's definitely where you could start and that's where I would go.

If you don't have a following, then you can get involved in groups and forums and communities that exist. And you can ask what questions are being served there and actually just search and see what other people are asking about. I mean, I think a cool thing that you could do is go into a forum or a Facebook group related to your particular niche, see what questions people are asking. And if you can answer those questions, answer them on a show. And then, reach back out to those people, even publicly, on those comments or on those thread. Say, “Hey, I loved your question so much. I recorded a podcast episode and I answered it here. And I love to know what you think. Here is the link.”

And that's it. That's all you have to do. And then, people would start to listen and you're going to get a user base. Then you can even, on that show, as you begin to answer more questions (again, you're not taking voicemails yet), you can then say, “Hey, I'm actually interested in featuring some of you guys on the show too. So if you have a voicemail question that you'd like to ask me, just go to this website blah, blah, blah, and leave your voicemail question there.”

Now, what tool would you use to do that? Well, I use speakpipe.com. I have it connected on my website at AskPat.com to collect those voicemail questions. But you can also drive people to a smart URL using pretty links or speakpipe.com gives you a nice-looking URL too. But I would definitely check it out. They are great people over there. They've actually included a number of different features as a result of me asking based on how often I use it, because I use it all the time. I get dozens of questions coming in every day. And, of course, like I said earlier in the show, I try to answer as many as possible here on the show for you.

So speakpipe.com is where I would get connected to begin collecting voicemail questions, which then serve them up to you as MP3 files, which you can then drop into your audio editing software, and it makes it really easy from there. So that's how I would start. Then just take it from there and grow.

Sam, hopefully that answers your question and gives a lot of you out there who maybe you have blogs, maybe you have a podcast, and you're thinking of doing Q & As. Maybe not an entire different podcast like I have on AskPat versus my other show. But maybe you want to do something like Tim does and have an entire episode or an entire blog post dedicated to answering the questions of your audience, which just changes up the style, makes it really interesting. And also, it gets your audience to know that you're paying attention and listening to them, and that you're there to serve them too. And you can collect those voicemail questions in a similar way that I taught you earlier in this episode, and compile that and do what you want with it. And hopefully that helps you.

So Sam, thank you so much for the question today. I really appreciate it. I want to send you an Ask Pat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And I again want to reiterate one more time that, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much for all the support. I really appreciate it. And for those of you who are listening, if you haven't heard me talk about this yet, head on over to willitflybook.com.
My new book is coming out February 1st. It's called Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money. And it's available for pre-order and all that good stuff, and I love for you to check it out. Thank you so much again. That URL is willitflybook.com.

Now, as always, I like to end with a quote. But for those of you who know about my show and who have listened for a while, I usually end with a quote, and it's kind of random. But these quotes that are coming up leading up to the launch of my book on February 1st, are all going to have to do around the theme of the book. Not validation, which is really what the book is about, but this idea of flight. Because, obviously, we launch things all the time but how do you know if those things are going to take flight? Well, a lot of these quotes relate to flight and flying and wings and business at the same time, which I thought was really cool. So here is the first one, and this one comes from my all-time favorite person who I always quote. This is Henry Ford. And he said, “When everything else seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”

Cheers. Take care, and I will see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.