by: AskPat 709 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 709 of AskPat. Thank you so much joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
Now here's today's question from Chris.
Chris: Hi Pat, thanks for taking my question. Thank you for all that you do, it's been very helpful. My question is this: How many blog posts should I have ready when I launch my new blog? My blog's going to have several pages that reflect different sub-interests of my topic. My about me page and some others. I'll assume I'll have one post for each of those pages. Then I'll have several in banks so that I can get my feet under me and promote it in the social sphere for awhile and not have to worry about generating new content. Let me know your thoughts on this and thanks again.
Pat Flynn: Hey Chris, thank you so much for the question. Congrats on the upcoming launch of your blog, depending on when you listen to this. I hope for all the best. It sounds like you know a little bit about what you're doing already because you should launch with more than one post. It sounds like you already know you should do that. The reason why you want to launch with more than one post is because you don't want to make the same mistake that I did. Which is you launch with one post and maybe you do some promotion, you get people excited about it, you have a list of people that you want to send it to, and you have a social media following already that could benefit from it. You launch, you have one post, people find it, they love it, and there's nothing else to read. They can't dig deeper. They want to dig deeper. There's more opportunities for people to share if they do that. More opportunities to collect email addresses and they don't so they just leave. The site just looks bare.
I love the fact that you have different categories or sub-niches within this bigger niche. I would hope that you don't have too many of them to start out. I would plan to expand to some of them, but focus more of your energy on really crushing a few. Two or three subtopics within a bigger topic of your blog. If you have more than that, take the top two or three and focus on those for now. You want to become the trusted advisor, the expert. Getting people who are really interested in those particular topics only first to follow you, to give you feedback, to give them the opportunity to tell you what else to write about. That way you can focus your writing efforts and not be too spread out in terms of all the different types of content.
This will help you also with getting used to your writing style since you're going to be writing about the same thing, but exploring it in different ways and angles It's also going to help you find influences and other people you can build a relationship with out there who are going to be really excited about the fact that you're talking about these specific things that could be useful for them and/or their audiences as well. You could save some of that other content too as guest posts that you could talk about on other people's sites that it may be more relevant to to bring more traffic back to your website, which will help you get a nice jump start once you get started. There's a lot of things you could do to grow your blog and the last thing you want to do is spread yourself too thin. I like the fact that you're going to have a bank of articles already so that you said you don't have to worry about new content but let me tell you what, those banks of content that you have, they run out quite quickly.
You don't necessarily need to post every day. I wouldn't recommend that. You want to give yourself time to promote and get your articles out there. I would say that two or three times a week to start is plenty. Some people even just post one a week. Again, you want to make sure that you have plenty of content to read when people first arrive. I did this with FoodTruckr, I think we launched with five different blog posts at FoodTruckr.com. One of them being an epic one that actually took off and did really well, went viral on Reddit. It was the first one that we published which was 50 Food Truckers Speak Out About The One Thing They Wish They'd Known Before They Started.
That article still continues to get a ton of traffic and that's simply just a round up post made up of other people's answers. We reached out to and had conversations with other food truck owners who then supplied that answer to the question, “What's the one thing you wish you knew before you got started?” We compiled that all into one particular blog post and that allowed us to build a ton of relationships, provide a ton of value right up front. A lot of those 50 food trucks who were featured in that post shared it with other people too because it gave them free exposure.
High quality, high value, promotional, sharable posts like that do a very good job, Chris. I wouldn't worry so much about trying to get all those different categories, like you said, at first. Have a couple and really start to crank out the content for them, but also be purposeful about what you do after. It's not just the social sharing that's going to help you get exposure, it's going to be those relationships that you build, those guest posts that you write, those guest podcast episodes that you're on. There's a lot of ways to go about it and I want to wish you the best of luck. Chris, keep up the good work and I can't wait to here about your progress. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show.
For everybody else listening right now, 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. You can ask right there on that page.
Thank you so much and here is a quote from Andrew Carnegie to finish off the day. That is: “There is little success where there is little laughter.”
Laughter is important. Cheers, take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.