by: AskPat 627 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 627 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 great questions today from GTO, who also asked yesterday's question.
But before we get to his second question today, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is Braintree. Braintree is awesome because it lets your customers pay in the way that they want to pay so they let you accept all forms of payment including, PayPal, Apple Pay, Android Pay and more. Now you can take them all in over 130 currencies and as your company grows, Braintree will stay by your side and grow with you from your first dollar to your billionth. All it takes is a couple lines of code to get started. To learn more visit braintreepayments.com/pat. Again, that's braintreepayments.com/pat.
Alright, now here's today's question from GTO.
GTO: Hey Pat, it's GTO in Pittsburgh. I just want to say thanks again for all that you do. I'm very happy, very thankful that I discovered you when I did, and I can't wait to read Will It Fly? this spring. I think it's going to have a lot of great information that the creative people I surround myself with will benefit from. So, my question is, is I've got a buddy named Owen Green who runs website and Facebook page called homewoodnation.com, and he describes it as a “hyper local news experiment,” and it focuses on one neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and that's Homewood. Now, it's been a labor of love of his for five years and he gets like 150 views a month, and that's it. And I know that 50 of those views are mine because I add events to his calendar every week.
So, I guess I'm trying to figure out if his niche is too small or too specific. And also to mention, I give him a lot of tips from what I learn from you. I make sure he knows that he's got to have a photo with every post. He's got to make it prettier. He's got to make the navigation better, but I feel maybe he's running out of steam and he might be better served recreating his website in a new direction. So, I wanted to get your thoughts on that Pat, and I thank you for anything that you, any advice you can provide.
Pat Flynn: Hey GTO, thanks again for your question here, great to hear from you again. And kind of interesting, we've never done a back-to-back sort of two-question thing before by one person, but if you'd like, we can definitely give away your T-shirt to somebody else out there. We will be sending you one from yesterday's questions, but anyway, just let me know via email, we'll connect. I want to help out you and your friend, and it seems like you're a great friend because you've been helping this person with their website and giving them tips and you know, working on his calendar and he's been doing it for five years only gets 150 views per month.
And quite honestly, after five years, with that much, my big question is, well what has come as a result of this? Is he just doing it because he's passionate about it and not really caring about what happens? This is what he's into, this sort of hobby, not really wanting to make money from it? If that's the case, then you know things are fine. I don't think that things are bad if that's the case, and you know those 100 people that are visiting his website every month could be getting a lot out of it. And I think that it depends really on what his goals are and what his really big end game is with this website, or what he wants to finally achieve with it. If he's looking to have you know, 1,000 people on his email list then that's something, but if he wants 1,000 visitors a day to his website and he wants something much bigger, then that's another thing. So, it depends on, to answer the question, is his niche too small? Well, how small is okay for him? What else does he want?
Now, if he's getting burned out, and that usually happens when you are not reaching your goals, when you're shooting for something and you've been working so hard on it and you're not seeing those results. Well then, there needs to be some change somewhere. And for me, if a person is not reaching their goals, if they're seeing too small after such a long period of time, like I said, something needs to change, whether that is the expansion of that niche, so reaching out. You know, not necessarily creating something completely brand new, but maybe taking what has been already started and expanding it, or using that as a template for other locations, or expanding outside of, if it's location based, which it often is in these sort of limited traffic kind of situations, you can expand to the next county or the next city over, and just grow it from there because a lot of people will cross over in between those two.
It also might take a different approach, you know, if this person's been doing the same thing for five years, obviously, what he's been doing hasn't been working. Again, if he hasn't been able to reach his goals or meet the needs that he wants for his website and the work that he's been doing. Well then, something needs to change in his approach. Maybe it's the social media aspect of it. Maybe there are certain things that he has done that is working that he should be spending more of his time on. I really think that's where a lot of people can really benefit is from is by looking at the numbers, seeing what's working and just doing more of that and less of the other stuff. You might find that it's one specific type of post or one kind of news article that's working really well. Well then, just do more of that and you might start to see some growth.
But if this was my situation, I would give myself three months of really hard work, nailing down trying to expand off of this plateau. Trying some new marketing techniques or trying to expand into a different niche, that's what I would do. And if I didn't see any results after those three months, because it's really important to give yourself that deadline and you want to give yourself some time. These things take time, and you want to give yourself time to see results from the work that you're doing. But you need to have that deadline or else you're going to just keep working and just might eventually reach that burnout. But that deadline's really important because it gives you that target date and to start to set things in motion from there.
So, GTO, I think all you have to do is give him the advice, you know, give yourself three months to reach your goals, or first of all figure out what those goals are if he doesn't have them. And then, try to see if he can reenergize himself from there, and if not, maybe then it's a sign that you can move on to the next thing.
So, GTO, thanks again for the question. I look forward to hearing from you whether or not we should give away your T-shirt and if so, I'm going to announce that in a later episode. And, you know, I often give away shirts for people who have their question featured a second time here in the show. Anyway, we'll talk and for those of you listening, you'll find out if there's a giveaway sometime in the near future. Thank you again so much for the question, GTO, and for everybody else out there asking questions, thank you because this show wouldn't exist without you so I appreciate you so much.
I also, as you know, I love to end each episode with a quote and today's quote is from William Hague, he says, “There's only one growth strategy: hard work.”
Now, I sort of agree with that. I agree with it because it does require hard work but it also requires smart work, knowing what to do first, because a lot of people work hard, like your friend here, GTO, but maybe they're not working hard on the right stuff. So, a little bit of thinking up front on nailing down what it is that those goals are and how you can reach those goals. Then you work hard on those things. That's where you dedicate that focus on and you can start to see growth from there. So hard work plus smart work equals growth.
Cheers, take care, and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Bye.