AP 0593: How Do I Monetize My Website?

AskPat 593 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 593 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 Priscilla.

But before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor which is Freshbooks.com. An awesome company helping to serve over three million business owners and they can help serve you too. They've helped me. It just makes it so much easier to keep track of our finances right your income, your expenses, and all the things going on especially if you do any invoicing actually. If you are a coach or you have any clients or you do any consulting. If you need to bill somebody Freshbooks makes it really easy not just for you to bill in a very professional manner but for you to get paid back. Because I've been on the receiving end of Freshbooks invoices before and again just a couple of clicks and boom it's easy to pay for those things. So, that's what you want your customers to do for you too so you can get paid and focus more on what you need to do to run your business.

So, if you want to check out Freshbooks for free for 30 days, a 30-day free trial head on over FreshBooks.com/AskPat and enter the code “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section.

Awesome, all right now let's get to today's question from Priscilla.

Priscilla: Hi Pat, my name's Priscilla and I have a website named AfricanCurls.com. [Editor's note: This site is no longer active.] and I've had this website for about five years and I'm trying to get the audience or get it filtered to get it basically invincible so I can start earning some money because I have over 300 articles on the website. And I have Adsense and I have Amazon affiliates on it and I was wondering how to get this website running so that I can be making some money because it's been five years. And I love the topic that I'm writing about but it seems like every other month it's either getting hacked for malware and it's either down or I'm just not doing or marketing. I don't know how to basically market it so that I can be…the people that do come on the site can buy something because I do have a few products and I have articles and I have a YouTube channel and everything. So, I just need help on how to start making money on my website so that I can see the fruits of my labor after five or four plus years. Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Hey Priscilla, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today I really appreciate it. It's obvious that you have passion for this topic. You have over 300 articles. You have several YouTube videos. I'm on your YouTube channel right now and I wanna talk about that in just a second. Five years almost and just not monetizing so it's obviously something that you're very passionate about because a lot of people if they go five years without making any money from a business a lot of people would just give up at that point. So, I'm glad to see that this is the passion part of it which is really important.

Now we need to work on the monetization part. Do you have any sort of audience already? That's where I would start. I would reach out to your audience and see what is it they're most interested in. Because I'm here on your YouTube channel and you have a lot of various topics that you talk about. Everything from let's see fashion, to DIY, to motivation, natural hair challenges, product reviews. It's a little bit confusing to me actually to know what is it that you're providing here. And I think once you kind of get to know you a little bit better it's much more than just curls. I think African Curls is more than just “here's how you do beauty stuff.” This is you. This is your brand. Your personality and I see your smiley face here on your YouTube channel. And it's just very easy to connect with you. I think you need to put more you into your brand, I think more than anything at least on your website.

Now, unfortunately I'm trying to get on your website. You had mentioned that it gets hacked and stuff and that's not good. That needs to be fixed. So, I would definitely reach out to anybody who might be able to help. There's services like WPCurve that can help you with figuring out word press sites and helping you through a lot of these problems. Dan Norris is great and I'm sure he'll help you so you can check it out at WPCurve.com [Editor's note: WP Curve was acquired by GoDaddy]. Or even going to your hosting provider to make sure that that's something that something that can actually be solved too on there and too that's something that they can actually help you with. So, getting that fixed needs to happen and then also making sure your website's secure using things like Sucuri. Or at least some of these limit login attempt WordPress plugins just to stop people from getting into there. I think that's the first thing…you need to plug in that hole. So fix your website, get it up there, get it to a point where it doesn't have that malware. That shouldn't be happening and it's just unfortunate that it does happen sometimes. But that's the first thing because you have these great videos. I watched a few of them and they lead people back to your website. Currently the website is down and that just shouldn't happen. And I know you're continuing to stay active because I see recent uploads of your videos. That's probably really fun for you and the website stuff isn't which is why you're doing it but you have to do that. You need to get your brand and your hub all fixed on your website.

So, the second thing I want to talk about is really discovering what it is that you should be selling. I mean I think Adsense and affiliate things are fine, but if you really want to start making money you really have to serve your audience with your own products and selling them things that are actually going to help them that they are interested in. So what are their biggest pains? What are their biggest problems? And that's what I would try and find out. Try to have conversations on Skype or at least on social media with some of your audience and see what you could do to better serve them. What is it that they're most interested in? And actually you could probably go through your website and videos right now to see what the most interesting topics are for people. I'm here in your videos tab in YouTube right now and by far the most popular video you've done with thousands of views compared to just hundreds with the others is called Best Natural Hair Growth Oils. And that is a good sign that you should continue researching that topic in relation to your audience and what it is that they would want.

So, I would start to talk more about oils on your website, on your videos, and actually get more people to know that you have this expertise on this. And then you could eventually lead them into something that they need help with that they would pay for. So, more than just product reviews. I would absolutely get into some sort of tutorials or maybe you might be able to do a webinar for example. Maybe it could even be a paid webinar or do a product on Udemy. I mean this is will give you immediate authority as well. And the reason I say Udemy is because this website's platform already exists. It allows you to create these videos which you are obviously good at. And put them on this platform and charge a price for it. So Udemy.com and become the expert with this first topic which is Best Natural Hair Growth Oils and when you talk about these products, these topics, you will get as a byproduct affiliated commissions from those too. But more than that you are going to see income come in immediately from these topics and again that just becomes the beginning because when people are there watching your Udemy courses if you create more. Maybe this will become initially your platform for monetization. Then you can actually branch out and start to create courses and whatnot of your own on your own site too later down the road. But I think having it be on UDEMY would be a very easy way to validate this, to test this. It's really easy to set up so again I recommend checking out Udemy.com. So, that's what I would do. That's the very specific action I would do in those steps.

So, number one, fix your website. Number two, get on Udemy.com, create a course about Hair Growth Oils and sell that for I don't know however much price you believe that that could go for. I mean I envision that this would be a 29 dollar product to start out with. Just to kind of get your feet wet and get it started and you can promote this course to your existing audience. You can talk about it on your YouTube channel and just you're gonna see…try to get that one sale. That's gonna be a huge motivator for you, seriously, and show you that you have something great to share and that people are willing to pay for it. And that's where I would start because that's the video that I see is getting the most kind of bang for your buck right now. So, start there because it's proven and then keep going.

So Priscilla, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it and I wish you all the best. Keep going, you're just starting out with what I think is the right path here. A lot of these videos that you're coming out with have only recently come out and this one by far is the best one. So, keep going with that because that's a sign. So keep going, cheers, and we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And if you, any of you, have any questions 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 just like Priscilla did and I look forward to your questions.

And I also want to give a shout out once again to FreshBooks. I want to give you that link one more time for a 30-day free trial that's Freshbooks.com/AskPat and make sure you use the code AskPat in the how did you hear about us section to get your 30 day free trial. Thank you so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by Lee Odden from TopRank Marketing he said, “Content is the reason search began in the first place.” So good because we always so much worry about search and stuff but it starts with the content. “Content is the reason search began in the first place.” Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.