by: AskPat 750 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 750 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. Now heres today's question from Jeff.
Jeff: Hi, Pat. I'm a new listener and while I'm late to the party, I've been listening to you everyday at least twice a day for the past two weeks, just trying to take in everything that you have to offer. And I'm loving everything that you do, and now I want to start a blog but I wasn't sure if I should wait to actually launch the website until I had several blog posts written, so that I'm not just putting up a site with nothing on there. And, I know about building my email list, I know about how to launch the website. Just wasn't sure of the timing. Do I write the posts then launch the website then build the list? Or in what order we do all that? I've listened to several blog posts, probably at least twenty of your podcasts and I've read several of your blog posts and haven't specifically seen that question addressed yet. Uh, so thank you for everything that you do.
Pat Flynn: Hey Jeff, so thank you so much for your question. I appreciate the kind words and for you listening to the show, awesome. Keep up the great work!
Now, in terms of your question for how many blog posts should you have live on your website before you actually launch. That's a great question and this relates to anything that you're doing from YouTube, to podcasting, to blogging. You want to have a. . .I would say between three and five pieces of content already on the website before you launch, before you send an email out to your email list if you've pre-built that. Before you share it on social media, before you get any eyes on it, unless it's some of your team members or people who you want to just make sure everything is cool before you put it out there in the world.
I would have three to five pieces of content. Five is optimal, and even more if you can. And the reason for that is because you want to be able to dive into your website and to keep reading and to not just come to a dead-end. And the problem is I've made this mistake myself, especially when I launched my podcast. I've launched with one episode and that was it. And that was when people were really excited about it, and it was a good opportunity to get people into new episodes after that, but I didn't have anything else to offer.
Here’s the other benefit of having multiple pieces of content when people arrive on your website. One piece of content may not actually resonate with somebody, or the headline might not catch their attention. But, there might be another article which might be more relevant to them. So, what I would do is plan out your content for when you launch. Five would be optimal to start with. I mean obviously you can do more but five, and I would pick five different kinds of articles. I mean they are all going to be around a particular topic, the topic of your blog of course, but pick different sub-topics to discuss, and really, really go high-end value with them.
I would also consider how you can provide a small, quick win for each of those blog posts so that people when they see that they're reading your stuff, they can actually try something out and in a very short time period get a result. That's going to create a habit for them wanting to come back and subscribe and read more of your stuff later on.
So, three to five pieces of content to launch with and then on top of that I would have five to ten additional pieces of content ready to go. That way when you launch you don't have to worry about “Okay now I gotta work on my next article,” you have a whole bunch already ready for you.
You want the launch of your blog, your podcast, or your YouTube channel or whatever to be a huge event with a lot of promotion behind it. So, after you launch you want to go out there and interact with as many people as you can. Anybody who comments, you reply. Anybody who you have their email address, you reach out to them. Anybody in your network, you reach out to them. Your friends, your family, you get them to share it for you as well and you just go all out with it. And by creating a backlog of content, you're giving yourself room to do that because the last thing you want to do is just put it up their and hope for the best and not even give yourself a chance to have it be reached out there and it extend it to parts of the internet that you wouldn't be able to reach otherwise unless you put some work into it. And, you don't want to just have to immediately worry about new pieces of content.
So, be very strategic with it and Jeff, I wish you all the best. Congrats and I look forward to hearing more from you in the future. And, for everybody else out there who's just starting out just best of luck to you, too. Hopefully you take that advice and roll with it.
So, Jeff, thanks so much. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page. Looking forward to it.
And, as always we are going to finish off with a quote and today's quote is from Mark Twain. He says “Kindness is a language which the deaf can here and the blind can see.”
Super cool. Thanks so much, I appreciate you and I look forward to serving you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.