AP 0301: Is My Website Topic Too Broad?

AskPat 301 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 301 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you're doing well. I'm feeling great. My voice is back, completely back to normal, and a lot of cool stuff happening this month at Social Media Marketing World. I'll be speaking there and doing a panel as well. Then next month, I'm doing the opening keynote at New Media Expo, and I can't wait for you to see what I'm up to for that presentation, so look out for that.

Sweet. Now, let's get to today's question from Gaby.

Gaby: Hi, Pat. My name is Gaby and I am creating my first website. It's going to be about arts, but about all the different types of art forms. For example, a category will be theater and under it will be subcategories. For example, history, influential work, curious information, and stuff like that. I don't know if the website, like, my idea, is too broad. I don't know if I should narrow down the niche because I want to do a website that includes all the different types of art, for example, visual arts and the type of visual arts, photography and painting and drawing, theater, cinema, music, and all that. I'd like to know if that's too broad. I don't know if I should narrow it down. I don't know if that's too much information. Please let me know. Thank you so much.

Pat Flynn: Hey, hey, Gaby. What's up? Thank you so much for the question today. To quickly answer your question here right in the first second or two, yes, you have to niche down. It's the best thing you could do for a number of different reasons. One, there's just a lot of competition out there, and if you're talking about different art forms, that's awesome. I completely understand that you want to eventually cover all of those things, but just think about all the content that's going to be involved with creating a powerhouse website that serves all of these different art forms. I mean, just theater history, that one little part in that subcategory, is going to be a major undertaking to get that to a point where people will then talk about it, because that's what you want to build. You want to build a site, a resource, that when this topic comes up in conversation. You are the one that people recommend to somebody else to get more information about it. You want to become the ultimate resource for this.

Right now, it's going to be really difficult to become the ultimate resource for anything and everything having to do with art. It is just really hard to do a broad category type situation when we're just starting out and we don't have too much money, we don't have angel investors to create this website, do all this advertising. I mean, it's not impossible, I'm not going to say it's not impossible, but it is almost impossible. That's why niching down is really, really important. As I've heard many times in the past, and you've probably heard me say this before, the riches are in the niches. The riches are in the niches, and if I were to say it like my friend Chris Ducker says, it wouldn't rhyme, but it would be the riches are in the “neeshes.” That doesn't make sense, but the riches are in the niches. You have to narrow it down.

There's a great article that is a recommended reading for everybody out there, and Gaby, I highly recommend you read this. This is called “1,000 True Fans” by a guy named Kevin Kelly. This article, which was written for specifically musicians and artists and the like, is actually very applicable to people who are entrepreneurs. The whole premise behind this is, just think, if you only had 1,000 people, 1,000 people, Gaby, that were truly in love with what you do and just complete raving true fans, enough that where they would pay $100 to get access to you or buy from you or whatever. $100 a year, that's already a six-figure income. That's $100,000, $100 a year times 1,000 people: 1,000 true fans.

As much as we all want to change the entire world, you have to start by changing somebody's world first. It was on an interview with Andrew Warner at mixergy.com where he actually, not necessarily called me out, but, I mean, he's a fantastic interviewer, he asks those questions that nobody is willing to ask. He asked me a question, because I was talking about all these little niche sites that I do, and he said, “Pat, you have this little architecture exam website, and now you have this thing in this security guard training website.” I didn't have the FoodTruckr website at the time, but I'm sure he would use this as an example too. He said, “Pat, you're targeting all these little things and you're making decent money, but, I mean, why aren't you creating something bigger, something that changes the world? Why not create the next Excel?”

That was his example, and that was a fantastic question. Why not think bigger? Well, doing that is much more difficult to start out with, but my answer was, “I might not be changing the entire world, Andrew, but I'm changing somebody's world right now.” It was very, very apparent to me because I was getting emails from people that were saying, “Pat, thank you for helping me pass this exam.” I still get emails from people who use my exam material to pass their tests. Even security guards, people who don't know the Pat Flynn like all of you know, the Smart Passive Income Pat Flynn, or the AskPat Pat Flynn. Security guards, people who've gotten brand new jobs have emailed me saying, “Pat, I used your job board over at securityguardtraining.com.” They don't say Pat, they actually say Pete, because Pete is the pen name there. They're emailing Pete, or Pat, they're just saying very honest things about how the site has helped them. I've made a difference in those people's lives and that's what you want to do.

Really, the true thing you want to do here, Gaby, is niche down. Pick your favorite topic, and maybe it's theater, but even in that topic, you want to go sub on that and become the ultimate resource on that particular topic. That's going to help you out in so many ways. It's going to help you stand out in the community and amongst everybody else talking about this bigger topic. If people are interested in this subtopic, you're going to be the one that they're going to talk to. If you go to other sites and talk about how you talk about every other art form, you're not going to be as authoritative as if you went to another site that talked about art and said, “Hey, you know what? I have a site, it's all about the history of theater. That's all I talk about.” They're going to want you on their podcast, they're going to want you as a guest because you are the expert on that, and it's so much easier to become the expert on that little tiny thing.

Again, going back to Kevin Kelly and “1,000 True Fans”, you don't need a huge audience to make a major impact not only in the lives of those people, but in your life as well. Again, $100 a year for 1,000 people. Again, that's just some numbers, but that math should, hopefully, inspire you and everybody else out there listening who are potentially struggling with trying to get more traffic and trying to build tens of thousands of followers. No. What if you were to get 1,000 true fans who just loved you to death who'd be willing to pay and hang out with you, or maybe go to a virtual conference, listen to episode 151 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast where Lain Ehmann, somebody who makes over six figures a year in the scrapbooking industry using virtual conferences. I mean, this is something that we can all do. Again, that's SmartPassiveIncome.com/Session151.

Again, niche down and then you have an opportunity, once you sort of become known as that expert in that space, then you could branch out and start to add new things on top of that. It's going to be a much easier route to do it that way, and plus the content that you have to talk about, you're just focused. You're following Gary Keller and Jay Papasan's advice from the book, The One Thing, to do the one thing, and then you can expand out of that instead of dividing all of your attention. I think it was in the book.

I get the book, The One Thing, and Essentialism, mixed up a little bit, but there's a really cool thing that I saw. It's of a graphic where it has two examples. One is a circle that says energy in the middle of the circle and then there's arrows pointing out from all directions, little tiny arrows pointing out from all directions, and that's what life is like when you divide your energy into all these different projects. Even on a website, when you divide your energy into all these different subtopics or all these different parts within that bigger niche. Then, next to that, there's an image of a circle with the word energy in it with a line just pointing straight up, and that's one line, one big, long arrow, and that's where your energy should be focused.

Gaby, I hope this answers your question. Actually, this should make life a lot easier for you. You're going to have, in the grand scheme of things, less content to have to worry about in terms of the different kinds of content, and then you can get really deep down into the nitty gritty details to stand out as an expert in that subtopic. What that subtopic is, I don't know. That's something you're going to have to explore and maybe test and try out. Yeah, you might even benefit from before even starting to do this, thinking about the subtopic and writing about these different subtopics first, knowing that you're just going to pick one or two. Then try publishing those articles on other people's sites and seeing how people react and how you feel about them, doing that before you set up a website and build out this whole thing and then try to get it out there, that's not the way to go. You want to kind of validate it first, I guess you could say, it's what I was going there for, or what I was going for there.

For those of you out there listening, I'd love to hear what you think. Do you agree with my answer? Do you have anything else to say? Use the hashtag #AskPat301 on Twitter and we'll all follow that conversation and continue the conversation based off of Gaby's great question. Gaby, thank you so much for the question today, and a AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed your way for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you who have a question, go to AskPat.com, you can ask right there.

Thank you so much, everybody. I appreciate it. I'm going to quote one of my favorite quotes of all time, and this from my favorite movie of all time, Back to the Future. This is Doc Emmett Brown played by Christopher Lloyd. He says, “Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.” Okay, thanks. Love you guys. Take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.