hosted by: AskPat 490 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 490 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for all the birthday wishes from yesterday too, I really appreciate that. My birthday was on the 6th. The big 33.
I appreciate you guys, thanks for all the support. We have a great question today from Jeremy but before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor which is AWeber.com, an awesome email service provider that can help you get started with building your email list. I used AWeber when I first started out to build my list to over 120 thousand people with broadcast emails and also autoresponder emails to continually keep in constant contact with those audience members and subscribers, so that when I send an email the open rates are much higher. Also, I can just continually provide value and have people go through that automation process which is really important, especially for Smart Passive Income-type stuff.
If you want to check out AWeber for free for 30 days all you have to do is head on over to AWeber.com/askpat. Go ahead and check it out. You can see another testimonial from me there too. AWeber.com/askpat. Check it out. All right. Here's today's question from Jeremy.
Jeremy: Hey Pat. My name is Jeremy and my passion is springboard diving. My question is I want to create a niche site on springboard diving because in high school and college I dove and I didn't have the coaches I wanted. I didn't have the time or money to get a coach so my idea was to maybe come up with a e-course or start out with a blog on diving. But my problem is that I have done a lot of research and I haven't found very much on the web about the subject and in a lot of the research I've seen, you said that it's not necessarily a good idea to get into something that it doesn't look like there's a big market for. I wanted to get your two cents on that and see if I should even go into this. Then I also had a question on my age. I'm only 22 years old so I wanted to know, I think I'm nervous a little bit to get into because I don't think people will think I have the credibility because I'm so young. Any input you could give on that would be awesome. Thanks.
Pat Flynn: Hey Jeremy. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. I think it's really cool that you have an interesting niche in mind, springboard diving. The first thing I want to mention is that is that the same as regular diving? I don't know the space so you want to make sure that when you're doing your research you try and figure out if there are any other ways that people are looking for this stuff. There might not be any websites but maybe there are certain keywords for example that people are typing in to find the same type of information. If you can understand what those other terms are it can give you a better idea of what that niche market is like.
Now, the thing that I will mention, and I think this is going to be the most helpful to you (and we'll talk about your age in a sec), but the thing that's going to help you understand that this is something that works, is you want to test this. The way you would test this is by going into a blog that has people of the same industry. Not necessarily who are interested in the same niche but the same industry. The diving or the swimming. What you want to do is put yourself in front of a crowd and talk about and provide value in regards to springboard diving specifically. Give away some tips and your best stuff and then you essentially have a call to action at the end that is essentially a hand raise.
What I like to call a hand raise and that is everybody who is like, “Hey guys, if you want more interest, if you are more interested in this topic come over to my website here.” You can just set up a landing page to collect email addresses, for example. That way you don't have to build a whole thing out. You don't have to. You just create a little something that says, “Hey guys if you're more interested in this stuff, if you want to hear more about this kind of thing, if this is something that interests you, put in your email address.” That's how you can know whether or not this is going to work. If you do this on a couple sites with big diving sites, for example, or big swimming sites, where people might get interested in springboard diving specifically, you can test to see if there's any of those who would come over and get more interested in the topic.
If not, if you find that zero people come over even though you've provided value, then you know that this isn't something that you should potentially get into. I think that's the most direct and easiest way to go, is you put yourself in front of that audience who could potentially become interested in this topic, you share value. Talk more about what it is that you have to offer in terms of information and what it's like. Maybe you tell your story about how you were able to figure all these things out and maybe share some proof of what you do and how it's helped and all those sorts of things. Again, I don't know about springboard diving so I don't know exactly what the topic is but you put that information out on those websites as a guest post and I feel because it is a niche, such an interesting topic, I would be very easy for you to land a guest post.
You write those posts ahead of time and you send them out to one of the biggest websites out there that is related to your topic and then you just say, “Hey, here's my draft. I think this would be really helpful. I see you don't have any information about this. I'd love to be that person to fill in that gap.” In that post you have a call to action to come back to your page and learn more. If you don't get anybody who wants to learn more then you know that nobody wants to learn more. But if you are getting a lot of emails then you know to take the next step. This is sort of what I like to call an iterative confirmation process or an iterative validation process. I talk about this in my book, Will It Fly? Check that out at WillItFlyBook.com. There's a lot of things that are involved with validation and this just one of the things you could do to get that, like I said, hand raise.
It's like getting in front of an audience in person and saying, “Hey, is anybody interested in this topic here?” And if you have nobody raising their hand, then you don't continue talking about that topic. But if you have a lot of people who are, you can take those people aside and start to give them information they want about it. That's how I would tackle that. You become that person who writes about it. See if anybody else is interested.
Now, let's talk about your age. 22, so what? You're 22. You have experience. You've done these things that other people have not. Age does not matter. It's when you think it matters that it actually does, because it will reflect in your copy, in your confidence, in your writing, in your sales processes, in your guest posts. Don't think that you are not qualified because of your age. I know a lot of people who are much younger than I am who are much smarter and vice versa.
Age is just a number. It honestly does not matter at all. You prove yourself with the knowledge, with your hustle, with your information, and with how much you are trying to provide value to a particular audience. That's how you prove yourself. Not with an age. Jeremy, I hope that answers your question and gives you some thoughts to move forward and some specific things you could to actually to test this idea out. I wish you the best of luck. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. I also want to mention you can all head over to AskPat.com and you can ask your question right there on that page, if you have a question you'd like to potentially featured here on the show. I also want to think today's sponsor which is AWeber.com. That's A-W-E-B-E-R.com. You can head over to AWeber.com/askpat and you'll get a 30 day free trial of this amazing email service provider that is the same one I used to get started to build my list to over 120 thousand people.
Probably the best part about AWeber is their customer service. I've had some integration issues in the past and they are super quick with their live-chat feature. Again, it's just really easy and they care about their customers, I know. Head on over to AWeber.com/askpat. You can get started with that. I also want to finish off with a quote. This quote is from John Aguilar. He said, “Nothing big will happen in your life until you build off the many small things.” Cheers. Take care. Thanks so much for the support and I appreciate you guys. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.