AP 0411: How Do I Build Traffic to My Services Website?

AskPat 411 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 411 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 Elyse, but before we get to Elyse's question, I do want to thank today's first sponsor which is Lynda.com, an amazing platform that I've used. I know a lot of other people use, tens of thousands of people use actually, to help them learn and strengthen their skills, from anything from business to technology, their creative skills. There's over 3,000 on demand video courses, and these aren't just linked to like YouTube videos. These are super high end professionally recorded in-studio videos that Lynda.com does to help you through anything, from learning new software to business fundamentals, income tax stuff. I mean anything you can think of, iPhone and Android security.

I mean it's a lot of stuff that can benefit you and what you're up to. You can check it all out. See if there's a course for you. Go to Lynda.com/AskPat, and you can get a 10-day free trial. Lynda.com/AskPat. You're going to love it.

All right, here's today's question from Elyse.

Elyse: Hey, Pat. Just want to start out by saying thank you so much for putting out amazing content constantly. I have just been absorbing your wisdom, and I'm really grateful for all the information you put out there for all of us to benefit from. I also got to say this is like my take 10 on this recording, so I hope this one goes across smoothly.

My question is in regards to my business that I started about six months ago. My website is ContentByElyse.com, and I'm Elyse. What I'm really curious about is how to really bring more traffic to my website and to gain more business. I am curious to see what channels you think would be the most effective for me. I specialize in resumes, professional materials, creative consultation for bloggers and people that have websites. I really specialize in online copy. I like communication in this space.

So, I've heard different things, you know. I've been wanting to maybe hone in on LinkedIn or I've been looking into Facebook ads. I’ve been growing my email list. I post a blog weekly. I set up a YouTube channel. And I love writing, so I'm going to be looking into guest posting which was one of your suggestions, as well. And at this point, I just haven't been getting really enough traffic or enough leads to be sitting comfortably so I can continue to create content for digital products I'd like to launch in the future. I'd like to do webinars, workshops, you name it. I really want to succeed in the online space.

And thus far, because I do work on a case by case or, I'm really investing a lot of time in the actual work that I do for clients, I really have. . . It's been a big challenge for me to figure out how to gain new clients and take care of the ones I have, and really continue to grow this sustainably. So I would love to hear your ideas on how I can streamline some of my processes and just figure things out so it's a little bit smoother and I can just continue to grow. Because I love the service I'm providing. People are getting a lot of value from it, and I see so many ways that I can really instruct people to communicate better in these avenues, and there's a lot of potential here. So, love your help, Pat. Thank you so much and yeah, keep being awesome.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Elyse, thank you so much for the question today, and I appreciate your support, and I'm sorry you had to record this ten times, or you had to record your question ten times. I totally know that feeling because the first time I recorded a podcast episode, I recorded it three times all the way through. I scripted it out even, and it just was terrible. But I go through it and so did you. So that's great. So I'm going to do what I can to help you.

Now it seems like that you are moving along. You have clients which is great. The first thing I would do would be to ask yourself, well what is it that you really want to do? If you just had a magic wand and you could just pshhh, all of sudden be where you want to be and do what you want to do, what would that be? Would it be serving more clients? Would it be serving less clients and having digital products? So I think it's really important, because it wasn't very clear exactly what your goals were. You talked about more traffic and more business, but what is more business to you? Is that more clients, in which case it would be a completely different path than getting people to download a digital product.

I mean, obviously there are people out there who serve their audience in both ways, and ideally you'd want to do that in a way where it cost a lot for your time. That way you have less. And again, this is if you want to do both and you want to provide a high value service. You want to be like the best that people recommend, and whenever anybody talks about anything related to what you do, you're the one that always comes up in conversation. You charge a lot more for your time. That creates that baseline price for you that is high up there.

I don't know what you're pricing at, but where you price yourself at matters in terms of your business and where everything else kind of is in alignment with that. I could very easily say that for most people who are doing this kind of work, you could probably double what you're charging, and this is something that came out of a one day business breakthrough session. I mean it’s a theme that comes up every time, that people always under price themselves, and when you price yourself much higher, the perceived value is much higher, as well, and you're going to get a higher type of. . . You're going to get a better type of client. Not to say that your clients that you have now aren't great, but you're going to get the high end ones that are going to do the work because they're paying more.

And then your digital products could be better priced as well, because it's going to be like, “oh, well I can't afford Elyse at this price, but here are the products that she has to offer.” And those products, what are they? Well, they're going to be the things that are common throughout all the different clients that you have, that you feel like you can sort of almost, I don't want to say ship off, but you're creating a hub where people can learn and do these things that you're doing for them, that you don't actually need to do for them one-to-one because that's where. . . I mean your time is precious, right? And that's why I'm really excited that you said you wanted to do these webinars and workshops, where it's just not one-to-one, but one-to-many.

And that goes along with one of the strategies I think that would work well for you right now, which is would be to not only build your email list doing this strategy, but also getting in front of an audience, building a relationship with them. You are great behind the microphone and you care about your audience. It's obvious. And you provide great value to those who you serve. You can do that on a webinar, for example, a free webinar that you do to build a relationship, and then pitch people at the end to either get into a more regular kind of workshop. Maybe you just blow their minds away with some really high value action items that people get right out of the gate there. And, of course, this isn't something that people can. . . I mean content creation, copy, communication, those sorts of things. People are going to want the help over and over and over again. So maybe you could use this webinar to introduce yourself, to collect email addresses in terms of the registration, and then you could follow up with them or sell, and/or sell directly on that webinar to a workshop.

Maybe it's an eight week workshop or an ongoing one, as well. Maybe people are planning to get access to you once a week in an end of the week workshop webinar that people can come into. You record those. You provide those, as well, to your audience, too. You could charge a lot for that as well. It's something that you're always there providing value every single month. It could be that recurring fee that you need to feel comfortable with what you're doing. Because I know these one-on-one things can be very difficult in terms of, you know, you feel like that once you stop, then your income stops, right?

But I want to look up something really quick here on Google. Brian Casel, Smart Passive Income. This is another thing that I would recommend, as well. So check out Episode 158 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. So SmartPassiveIncome.com/Session158. It's called, “How to Productize Your Service-Based Business.”

So right now, you have a service-based business. And in this interview with Brian Casel, he's sort of mastered the art of taking a service-based businesses and taking pieces of it and creating a product out of it. Now, his service, he still has to do, like humans still have to do stuff, but that human doesn't have to be you, so he talks about how to hire the right people and how to create these systems and workflows which you alluded to, which would be extremely helpful for you. So you could still continue to provide value to your audience, your one-on-one clients, your workshop clients, for example, through systems that are there, where you have VAs doing a lot of that legwork for you, and then you can focus on the higher level things from marketing, building relationships.

Yes, guest posting would be great. Guest podcasting would be great too. I had Nikki Elledge Brown on the show and she provided a ton of value by coming on my show and talking about copywriting and using language and communication, and I know a lot of people came over to her site as a result of that, and so you can get in front of an audience as well.

You could also incorporate the Derek Halpern strategy, and this is something that works really well, especially for services like this as well. So what Derek did was, he was not the first person to talk about online business and entrepreneurship. You can find him at SocialTriggers.com. But he came into it in a very cool position, so I'm hoping that you have a good position in this space, as well. Because there's a lot of people providing the same service, but what makes Elyse special? You want to know what that answer is, of course, so that when somebody's like well, why should I go with you instead of this guy, well then you would be able to answer them right away.

Well, Derek, he came in in the position of he's the guy who's understanding the psychological stuff that's going on with the marketing, and he's the only guy who's reading these really long studies and philosophical books and psychological studies to kind of determine the marketing actions one should take in their business. But, when he first got on the scene, he did something really smart. He reached out to influencers, like myself, Chris Brogan, a number of other people, and actually provided value to us.

He walked us through how to increase our conversions, and he taught us along the way some tips. He did this in private, like he did with Chris Brogan, although I believe Chris recorded it. I'm not sure. I think I remember watching it somewhere, but I did record it myself. And it is up on the website. And you can watch him walk me through the process of, “okay, well you need to include more forms on this page, and you need you to phrase it this way because it's going to work better.” And he's telling me everything behind it and why.

And then I put it to the test, and it worked. And I was more than happy to share Derek and what he was doing with other people, because he provided me a ton of value and I wanted to give back the results that he shared with me. So if you could, for example, find influencers out there who perhaps have a need. Maybe they have a hole in their communication or there's just, you could tell that they need some help with something that you could offer, go ahead and offer that help. And you could even offer it for free, just once or twice. And then build that relationship with them, at which point they would probably be more than happy to start sharing you as a resource for other people, too.

Now you could also do this sort of affiliate or referral relationship, too, where, for example, maybe you give them a cut of that commission. Or you give a commission for that payment if any of their audience comes on as a client or comes to one of your workshops or gets into your membership site or buys one of your productized services, for example. There's a lot of different things you could do here, and I think that's maybe why things are slowing down or might feel slow because you haven't really decided exactly what direction you want to go, and I think it's really important to nail down. This is the big idea here in this particular episode. You need to nail down what you want your business to look like.

Now how do you know what you want your business to look like? Well, how much money do you want to make? And beyond that, well what do you want your ideal lifestyle to be like? Well, how much money is that going to need? And then how do you want your business to kind of support that?

So maybe you find that eventually you don't want to have to put in any work because you want passive income more than anything, and so eventually you're going to have to want to kind of wean your clients off of you into a productized service or membership site or something like that where it's going to take less of your time. Well, then that's going to mean that you're not going to go down the route where you're just going to be collecting clients all the time. You're going to be working on the digital product side of things or building a team to help you with this productized service.

Or maybe you love doing one-on-one stuff and you want to have 10 clients each paying you $1,000 a month, and they have access you and meet with them once or twice a week to help them with their stuff. Ten clients, and then that's $1,000 a month. Right? So if that's the kind of lifestyle, then great.

This is something we've heard a lot here on AskPat every few episodes: understanding what that goal is first and kind of backtracking from there. So what is that goal, how much money is it going to take, what does it look like to make that money? Because maybe it's all clients and no product, productized service or products online. Or maybe it's all products and maybe a productized service, but no clients. Or maybe a mix of the two.

I would find out what those numbers are and then work toward that. And that's going to help you figure out okay, well this is where I need to go to get traffic. This is what I need to do and how I can stand out to accomplish these things, as well. This is what the processes should look like. If you are kind of figuring out a whole bunch of different things at the same time, you're going to have a whole bunch of different processes and workflows, and they're all going to mix in with each other. Nail down what it is you want. Nail down what those numbers are and then work your way toward that, and just focus on that. That's really what I would do.

So, Elyse, I hope that answers your questions or at least helps your gears going and gives you something to think about. I appreciate you asking this question. This is a great one. I hope you follow up with me and us in the future. Anybody else who has anything to add, use the hash tag #AskPat411 on Twitter. That’s #AskPat411, and we can continue this conversation off of the show, as well, and see if anybody else has anything else to offer Elyse in terms of advice or maybe you are in the same boat or have had this experience before, as well.

Elyse, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much. For anybody else who has a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much for listening and I appreciate it. And here's a quote to end the day by Jimmy Johnson. He said, “The difference between ordinary and extraordinary is that little extra,” and I fully agree with that. Cheers. Take care and I'll see you tomorrow. Thanks.