by: AskPat 537 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 537 of Ask Pat. 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.
Alright, here's today's questions from Dale.
Dale: My name is Dale and I am from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. I don't even know where I stumbled upon your stuff. But, since I did, I flew on a plane for work and I just sort of listened to as much as I could. And, so I ended up having a question now with this, AskPat. So, I thought I'd pose it out to you guys. So basically my question is, how do you jump into a niche that is already super-saturated, but that's what you know? How do you monetize that? How do you find how to break into there when there's so much noise out there? So, that's basically my question. Thanks Pat, and looking forward to hearing more from you. Thanks.
Pat Flynn: Hey Dale what's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I am very familiar with getting into a space that is extremely saturated and I know a lot of people out there have done the same thing. And, a lot of people I know have done the same thing. Somebody that comes to mind is Steve Kamb over at Nerd Fitness. He was in, I think it was up to 196 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. We talk a little about his story. He came out with a book recently called Level Up Your Life. And, he talks about, in that episode, how he was able to break through into the fitness industry which is very, very, very saturated.
I don't know what industry you're in, but whatever industry you're looking to get into, the number one thing you can do, when you're looking to get into a space, is to understand truly what position would make you stand out. As I like to say, as I said in my book Will It Fly?, stand out from the crowd. But how do you know how to do that unless you know what's in that, or who is in that crowd? So one way to do this is run through my market map exercise, which I outline in my book, Will It Fly? You can find it at WillItFlyBook.com. But I'll just explain for you here.
This is where you determine the three Ps of your target market. So, the saturated market that you're looking to get in to. Write down a list of all of the places where people in that target audience hang out: online, offline, just write them all out. All the websites, blogs, forums, social media groups, all those things, write them all down. The second piece are the people. The influencers in that space already. Look up the top Twitter profiles, the top Facebook personalities. A lot of people on those websites and those places are going to be all on that list as well, but just write them all down. Have a convenient way to contact them or find a place where they're at, in that spreadsheet that you're creating. Then the third P, are the products. What is being offered to that target audience already? What is out there serving them? And, what are they paying for?
So when you have these three Ps in front of you on this Excel sheet, it's very similar to an exercise that Neil Patel shared on my podcast called, The 200 List. But, how ever many you can get of each of these three Ps is going to be very, very insightful. Because when you see this, it becomes your market map. This is what is out there serving that particular market. And, if it's a saturated market, the list can be quite big. But, then you can have this birds-eye perspective on the market and be able to position yourself in a way much easier than just trying to guess what works. So, by doing this, you'll be able to understand who's out there, and find the different patterns of what's working and what's not.
And again, it's all about positioning. So when I came into this space of internet marketing, everybody was doing it a certain way, and I went in and did it a completely different way. I don't need to get super detailed here because that could take forever, because I've purposefully done things differently in so many different ways. From how I treat my email list, from sharing my failures in addition to my wins, to revealing how much money I make on my income reports. All those things are very, very strategic in the way that I'm actually approaching what I do online. And that's how I've been able to grow and crack into this very saturated space called internet marketing.
Steve Kamb, he did it by actually niching down. So he took a group of people within the fitness space, and really focused on them and became their trusted advisor, their leader. And his is nerds or people who are into video games and nerdy things like that, and that's why his business is called Nerd Fitness. And he's created an amazing community, even bigger than SPI, all around that sense of nerds who are just trying to be fit and live a healthy lifestyle.
There's another person, Derek Halpern, he comes to mind. And, he came in even later than I in the internet marketing space. He came in with a different angle. And he used his ability to really decipher what was happening in certain studies, psychological studies. He went to school for psychology and all this stuff. So he's about to read these studies and look at them in a way that a lot of us aren't able to look at them and use what's called your “unfair advantage.” He was able to determine what his was and incorporate that in his business. I was able to incorporate my unfair advantage, which I know I have a few, which is my ability to build relationships with people really quickly online, to be able to understand what they like, and what they would respond to, and be able to give them that. To be able to break things down that are very complicated into a very easy to consume manner, that those are my unique abilities.
What is your superpower? Dale, so whatever it is that it is, what is your superpower? Incorporate that into this saturated market that you're getting into, and that is what's going to help you stand out. Because if you don't know what that superpower is, well then you're not going to ever be able do well. It's just that's the way it is. So that combined with the positioning, superpower, and your positioning, that's how you win in a saturated market. Now there's a lot of other things you could do to. You want to make sure that you build a relationships with some of the top players in that market too. That's what's going to help speed up the growth of whatever it is that you're trying to do. But it's going to be easy if you have a certain position that is not out there already. You can come in with a certain expertise or angle that nobody's talking about, or they just want to avoid. And you can become that person that everybody else is going to reference on that thing within that saturated market. So that's how I would approach it and hopefully, that has you thinking about what those things might be.
So Dale, I appreciate your question. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show just like we do for everybody whose question gets featured here on the show. And for those of you who have a question that you'd like to ask, head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.
I also want to thank again everybody who has already purchased and gotten their copy of my book, Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money. This is a perfect book for those of you who have the same question as Dale. How do you know this thing that you're going into is actually going to work out for you? Well, I give you everything you need to know, step by step. I hold your hand. We do exercises in the book together. I actually start them and actually you follow my lead. You got to check it out. So far everybody's been saying amazing things about it. Over 100 reviews at the time of this recording, 97% five-star reviews. You got to check it out. If you want to check it out, find it at WillItFlyBook.com and as always, thank you so much for taking time today.
And the quotes this week on AskPat at the end of the show are all from my book. And here's a quote from me in the book, Will It Fly?, and that is, “Good ideas are common. But those who are willing to take action and execute those ideas, are far more rare.”
Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you guys in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks again guys. Bye.