by: AskPat 601 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 601 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate you and your time and as always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week. We have a great question today from Jamal, but before we get to that, I do want to give a quick plug for my book, Will It Fly?, which you can find that at willitflybook.com. It's about how to test your ideas and validate them before you put in all that time and effort, just to make sure that they're going to work out for you.
A little bit of time to invest up front to make sure that the time you do spend on your business is going to be well worth your while and that's kind of what Jamal's question is about today, so let's get right into it. Here we go.
Jamal: Hello, I'm Jamal and my question is, without using Long Tail Pro or Market Samurai, what are some concrete science you have found a good niche you can work with and profit from? Whenever I find a niche I like, I get almost overcome with fear and doubt about whether it will work or whether I'm just wasting my time. Thanks.
Pat Flynn: Hey Jamal, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate it and like I said earlier, Will It Fly? will be a great resource for you because it does walk you through the steps and the process of actually validating and testing your ideas. If you have a bunch of ideas or even if you only have one, you can do some things to make sure that it's actually going to work out for you before you put in all that time, effort and potentially stress into it, which we're all going to have to go through.
Even with successful businesses you're going to have to work hard, you're going to have to pull through and plow through those tough times but that paralyzation, that paralyzing effect that you have when you're starting a business, that's very common, so Jamal, you're definitely not alone. I've experienced it myself, I continue to experience it with new things that I try. The way that I sort of hack myself or my brain to plow through those things is I think of the fear as a sign.
This is something that is very much in alignment with the book out there called, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and he says that fear, that self-doubt, that resistance is actually a sign that whatever it is you're thinking of doing is actually worth doing, that there's something awesome on the other end. Now of course, the niche that you select is very important but that fear that you have in general means that you do care about this, you do want it to work, so hopefully you will do the things that you would need to do in order to make it happen and that up front would require some research.
How do you, without using Long Tail Pro or Market Samurai, which are keyword research tools, how would you find a good niche and plow ahead? In fact, I wouldn't even start with Market Samurai or Long Tail Pro and I know that might sound a little bit weird, because in the past I have done experiments and have built successful websites and businesses that have started with Long Tail Pro or Market Samurai by looking at Google Search figures and volumes of keywords and which ones are competitive, which ones are not. That's how I've been able to build securityguardtraininghq.com, which continues to generate $1,000 or $2,000 every month over the past four or five years, and again, I started with Market Samurai for that one.
Then foodtruckr.com, which is continuing to go and actually we're putting a lot more effort into it in the next coming months to hopefully ten X the income from there too, so you'll hear more about that soon. Again, that was all started with keyword research.What I would start with is actually conversations, talking to people in specific niches that you have some interest in and then actually looking for particular problems that you can provide solutions for. One of the things I will mention, there's a whole number of different kinds of fears that you might have related to the businesses or ideas that you might be wanting to start.
What I would start with is actually conversations, talking to people in specific niches that you have some interest in and then actually looking for particular problems that you can provide solutions for. One of the things I will mention, there's a whole number of different kinds of fears that you might have related to the businesses or ideas that you might be wanting to start.
One of the most common ones is, when you do the research and you go out there, you're going to find that there's a lot of people out there, if it's a niche that is quite popular, that there's going to be a lot of people already serving that particular audience, already providing solutions to the audience that you want to provide a solution for. You know, initially, a lot of people fall back or they see that as a sign that they shouldn't go forward because somebody else has actually done that work, but actually it's a good sign that there's a market there for you.
You know, initially, a lot of people fall back or they see that as a sign that they shouldn't go forward because somebody else has actually done that work, but actually it's a good sign that there's a market there for you. That it's already been tested, somebody's vetted it out and actually validated that there's a market there but, secondly, it gives you an opportunity to see from a birds eye perspective what's different and position yourself in a way that allows you to enter that market that again, already has people serving that audience but to be able to come in and serve that audience in a different way.I'm going to give you an exercise that will help you, Jamal, that comes directly from the book. This is called creating your market map. I think I talked about it in a recent episode of AskPat, but I'll go into detail here of what this is about.
I'm going to give you an exercise that will help you, Jamal, that comes directly from the book. This is called creating your market map. I think I talked about it in a recent episode of AskPat, but I'll go into detail here of what this is about.
What you want to do is, you want to find your three P's, so after you come up with an initial idea or a seed idea or you have some kind of interest or you talk to some people who have a particular problem, if you want to research further, here's what you do, you want to know who's in that crowd so you can know how to stand out from it and you want to find the three P's of your audience and that is, create a spreadsheet of the following three “P's”. The first P are the places, the websites, the forums, the groups and all the places where online and offline even, that your target audience that you just targeted, again, you're still in the research mode.
The first P are the places—the websites, the forums, the groups and all the places where online and offline even, that your target audience that you just targeted are. Again, you're still in the research mode. You haven't committed anything yet. Where they all exist and congregate and hang out, that's the first P, all the places.The second P is a list of the people, the influences in that space who already have some influence over those people. That's going to be really handy and I'll tell you why in a second. You want to know who those people are because they've already spent
The second P is a list of the people, the influencers in that space who already have some influence over those people. That's going to be really handy and I'll tell you why in a second. You want to know who those people are because they've already spent time to earn that trust and there are ways to actually utilize that and use that to your advantage.
Then number three are the products, what are the products and the solutions that are being offered to that particular audience out there.
Once you create that spreadsheet, even if there's only ten of each of those P's, it's going to be a great snapshot of what's going on in that market so you can then look and see from a birds eye view what's going on and what might need some help or holes there might be that you can then come in and fill.
This market map becomes a completely useful tool for you if you continue to move forward with this niche after you do this research. Sometimes you do this research and you find that well, it's not as interesting as you thought it was but sometimes you do this research and it looks completely attractive and you want to keep moving forward.
If you do keep moving forward, these three P's will be completely useful to you, because, the places, those are places that you could guest post on to start growing and marketing your business once you've validated it. The places are also places where you could potentially advertise if you wanted to. The people, those are the people that you should be building a relationship with, reaching out to, potentially down the road creating JV partnerships with or working side by side on certain projects with.
Then the products are a great list to have because you can see what's already being offered out there and offer something different but also you can gauge the prices and what people are already buying and it just becomes, again, a useful tool for you. That's the market map and that's just a taste of what you can find in Will It Fly?, but that's going to help you get started.
That's how you find a good niche. You see what's out there and where you could come in and further than that, you also want to get into your customer's head by having conversations with them, doing surveys and just really discovering and extracting what those ideas might be.
Then actually going as far as coming up with a solution and before you even build it, actually getting people, a small amount of people, to pay for them just to validate that that is something that actually people would pay money for. This is the quicker, easier route, a little bit harder of course. It's going to take some time but you know, if you want to succeed you're going to have to put the work in and get out of your comfort zone and this is a lot faster than building a blog on a topic that you may or may not be sure about and then hoping to build an audience and then surveying your audience from there. That takes time, it takes time to build those relationships but if you start with the problem, that's where everything kind of comes and stems off of.
Jamal, thank you so much for your question today. Hope that gives you at least a good starting point and I want to wish you all the best of luck. I want to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here in the show as well, so you'll hear from my assistant Jessica in the next couple weeks to collect your information for that. Everybody else out there, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to askpat.com.
You can ask right there on that page and again, one more time, a small plug for my book, Will It Fly?, Wall Street Journal bestseller, self-published, you can find it on Amazon or at willitflybook.com. You can get it on Kindle, get the paperback version or on Audible and if you listen to this podcast you will probably love listening to that and you can find that on Audible also.
Thank you so much. I appreciate you and here's a quote to finish off the day by Maya Angelou, who's been featured here with several other quotes in the past, but I like this one too. “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
Similar quote I think I remember hearing about or from Arnold Schwarzenegger where everybody sees the results but nobody sees the hours of work you put in at the gym, or something similar to that, but put in the hours, put in the hard work and great things will happen, especially when you have serving the customer in mind. Cheers, take care and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks so much. Bye.