hosted by: AskPat 586 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 586 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.
Here's today's question from Sean. Here we go.
Sean: Hey Pat. My name is Sean, and I recently launched a site for people to share the projects that they make with their hands. I'm trying to promote the site, but the number one feedback is, “Why would I use SimpleCove.com over ‘x'?” With “x” being some other image-sharing site.
I try to explain to them my site allows you to tell the project's story, but it doesn't seem to change people's minds. Do you have any tips on how I can explain that SimpleCove is a platform for sharing their projects' stories and not just another image-sharing site? I appreciate everything you do. Thanks, Pat.
Pat Flynn: Hey Sean, what's up. Thank you so much for the question today. This is probably one of the most important questions we've received in a while because you need to know why people should use you over somebody else who's doing something similar.
This is so, so important. It seems like you've given this a lot of thought and you've tried out different things and they haven't worked. Well, one way to think about this is it's determining what your USP is. Or your Unique Selling Proposition.
And there's another of different things that you can use to be unique and different than anybody else. But the number one thing I would do first is figure out who everybody else is and how they're doing what they're doing. So creating a spreadsheet—I talk about this in my book, Will It Fly?—creating your market map. One of those things in the market map is to discover who else is out there serving your audience.
And how are they doing it. What products are being offered. You want to make sure you have this birds-eye perspective of the space so that, if you do come up with a position of some kind or some angle, that it's different than anybody else out there. And so that's the number one thing. Figure out who else is out there, how they're serving, and what is it that makes them unique? How are they sharing what their unique thing is? That's going to help you find out what your position, your unique selling proposition is. So your USP.
The second thing is to talk to your potential customers. If you have any customers already, that's where I would start. Ask them, hey, why do you use my service over everybody else? And you're going to actually find out that might not be what you expect.
And then you can actually utilize what other people have been saying about you and not what you think they use you for. So that's the second thing. Talk to your existing customers to see why is it that they use you. Give them an additional month for free or give them something in return. Of course, you want to provide value to them, but in exchange you're going to get these amazing answers that are going to help you when it comes to trying to convince other customers, too.
A lot of you have businesses—maybe not you, Sean, but a lot of you have businesses that have reviews. So look at your reviews, either on Amazon or on Yelp, and see. And really pay attention to them. Listen to those who are enjoying your service and paying attention to specifically why you and not the other guy.
So that's another thing you can do. If you don't have any customers, talk to potential customers and ask them, well, what would make you use my site? Is this enough? What if I did this? What if I did this instead? What if I did that? That's, again, going to give you direct feedback from the mouths and the minds of your audience, and that's what really matters.
Now, in terms of your specifically, you said an image-sharing service that helps you tell your story. You've got to go deeper than that. You've got to ask yourself, or you've got to think of it from the other person's perspective, which is asking the question, “So what? So what if you can tell your story? What does that mean? What benefit is that to me?”
You need to dig deeper. You want to go five, six levels deep if you can, and ask why. Or so what. That's one of the most important questions. When you're thinking about your business and what you have to offer, we're always going to come up with these features, right? “So what” is what you want to ask after that feature. So, “oh, my blog has any easy way to search through the website now because it's changed recently and the search function is much better.”
So what? Well, so that you can find the content that you need sooner and not waste your time. So what? So that you can actually find the information you need to build your business today. Again, you thought you just heard how that worked. So what? Ask yourself so what. So what is it about people telling their story and not the how, but the why. That's really what's most important.
You can explain this in many different ways. You can hone in on an amazing headline. And again, pay attention to not just what people are saying but how they're saying it. If you're having these conversations with customers or potential customers or prospects about your potential USP, pay attention to the language that they use. The wording. That's going to help them understand—if you understand the language that they use, they're going to feel that you know what they're going through and just really resonate with what you have to say and what you have to offer.
It's going to take some dancing to figure out what exactly our USP is going to be, and of course you probably have some ideas of what it is. But then again, go further and get to the benefits. Not just the features, but the benefits. So you can tell your story. So what? What's the benefit of that feature. And just keep going with it.
So, Sean, I hope that answers your question or at least gives you a place to start. I think that would actually help you out very, very much. And it's a great exercise for everybody, actually.
Thank you guys so much for listening in. I really appreciate it. Sean, I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for everybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat and you can ask right there on that page.
Thank you so much and here's a quote to finish off the day by Brian Clarke. And that quote is, “On average, eight out of ten people will read your headline copy. But only two out of ten will read the rest.” The headline's so important, isn't it? Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.