AP 0856: How Should I Use Live Video to Answer Questions from My Audience?

AskPat 856 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 856 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 coming in from Brandon, but before we get to Brandon's question, I do want to thank today's sponsor, one of my favorite companies, which is FreshBooks.com. They're helping me manage by books. They're also helping me with invoicing. They serve millions of other small businesses too, and they could serve you too. And guess what? They're offering a 30-day free trial. If you go to FreshBooks.com/askpat and just make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “how did you hear about us?” section.

With the invoicing thing I've been using them quite a bit lately. I've been doing a lot of coaching with students and such, and it just makes it really easy. Under 30 seconds I can create a very professional looking invoice, I can keep track of who has paid, who has even opened the invoices, it's super simple. So again, one more time, 30-day free trial, FreshBooks.com/askpat. Awesome. Now here's today's question from Brandon.

Brandon: Hey Pat. My name is Brandon Yahn. I run a site called StudentLoansGuy.com. Many of my readers are contacting me directly for advice on what they should do with their student loans. It's time consuming to answer each individually, so I'm starting to explore using live video to answer people's questions every week. You obviously use your podcast for this, but do you have suggestions on the best video platform. I'm thinking of using Facebook Live, but wanted to hear your perspective and if you had any other suggestions. Thanks Pat. I appreciate all you do.

Pat Flynn: Hey Brandon. Thank you so much for the question. First of all, I think it's a great sign that people are reaching out to you for individual questions. It sounds like you have a great thing going on, and I love that you're looking for more ways to better serve your audience and do it in a scalable way that makes sense for you and your time and the business that you want to build too. So congratulations. Awesome.

Now let me help you through this question. There's a number of different live video platforms that you can get ahold of. I've been exploring this quite a bit lately and talking to a lot of people about live video because I'm going to be doing it a lot myself. There's a couple ways to go about it, but here's what I would do if I were you Brandon. I would use live video, but I wouldn't use it to formally answer people's questions as they're coming in. I would save that for a more, well at least getting off of Facebook for the purposes of collecting people's email addresses in order to give people access to you. There are different kinds of platforms that allow you to be live with people in a way that allows you to collect email addresses, which is going to be important for you to follow up, providing more value to them, and also offering your own offerings down the road.

So here's what I would do if I were you. I would use Facebook Live for audience building, for having people share me so I can get more exposure, and I would tackle the most common questions on Facebook Live. I wouldn't necessarily answer individual questions or make it a formal Q&A session, because I want to hold that for a session that requires registration. So hey, you can come on and get your own questions answered in a setting where it'll be recorded and you'll have it for you and all those kinds of things.

With this kind of stuff people may be more inclined to ask questions if they know they're in a place where it's not going to be so public, for example. That's the worry I have with Facebook Live. People are going to essentially be sharing questions related to massive debts that they have and other things like that, which may not be something they all want to do publicly. But if it's in a more private place, like within a webinar for example, so you could use something like Zoom.us or GoToWebinar or WebinarNinja.co [Note: I no longer recommend Webinar Ninja. Check out my resources page for my current recommendation for webinar software.], and what you do is you set up a time and a date when people will get access to that. People will register ahead of time, which will give you their email address at which point, initially, you just want to obviously say thanks and remind them leading up that event. And you treat it like and event, that's going to give it more bang for your buck in terms of that particular time when you're answering people's questions.

And then you could do what you want with that. You can use that opportunity to answer people's questions but then lead into an offer of some kind or you could even just have it be completely Q&A. Then you can send people the replay and then offer people an offer within the email sequence or weeks after they get access to that. You can offer them something, it's up to you. The funnel, that's when it begins. So that's the strategy I would use, Brandon. And again, live video on Facebook, on a public place like Facebook, I would use to establish expertise, to answer the most common questions, and to give people an opportunity to share you so more people can discover you, and get into these registered access points with you later.

So Brandon, thank you so much for the question. I appreciate you, I want to wish you the best of luck. For those of you who are listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, like Brandon, and guess what? Brandon, you get a t-shirt because your question's featured and I love that. I love giving away these t-shirts and there's been nearly 1,000 given away, which has been super cool. So I'm super stoked to offer them to people who get their question featured here on the show. So hey, AskPat.com. That's where you go to ask questions, that's where you can see the rest of the episodes that have been published, and you can subscribe to the show. Thank you so much.

Here's a quote to finish off the day by Albert Hubbard, “To escape criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” Guys, in order to make a difference, in order to make things happen and move forward, you're going to have to open yourself up for criticism every once in a while. But as the quote says, you can remove yourself from that potential by doing nothing. I think you know that, that's not the right answer. All right guys, take care. Thank you so much and I'll see in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.