AP 0228: What Is the Fastest Way to Promote My Products?

AskPat 228 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 228 of AskPat. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have another great question today from Annette, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com, something I wish I got started with sooner because when I started my business, I started using regular old Excel spreadsheets to keep track of everything, and come tax season, it was a huge mess that first year. I got smart; I got FreshBooks.

Go to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section for a free trial. Organize your finances, so you can worry more about what you need to do to get your business moving and less about playing catch up with the organization of your accounts. Again, GetFreshBooks.com, and enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section.

Awesome. Let's get to today's question from Annette.

Annette: Hi. Hello, Pat. My name is Annette Thomas, and I am owner of ThomasAPublishing.com. That's www.ThomasAPublishing.com, and I am selling ebooks and a lot of digital goods like software titles, e-books of course, courses, learning media, resources, things like that. I was wondering, what is one of the best ways to sell and promote these types of products online that will get me the most amount of viewership with the least amount of time? Thank you.

Pat Flynn: Annette, thank you so much for the question, and I appreciate how direct it is. What is the best way to promote my products to get the most viewership in the least amount of time? I do have an answer for you, and that is to get in front of somebody else's audience and have them help promote you and your products for you. You're going to get in front of a brand new audience, you're going to have the recommendation of somebody else. Depending on how good you are building relationships and convincing somebody and selling your product to this person who can then sell it to somebody else, perhaps it's through just the kindness of their heart or better yet, a JV partnership or an affiliate referral type of relationship, that is the best way to do it. You're going to gain that trust with that audience much faster by having somebody else pitch you for them. That is how it works.

Now, how do you approach that? First, I would recommend finding out who has your target audience and who is an influencer for people who have that target audience. Make a spreadsheet, seriously. Open up an Excel file, make a list of the top 50 sites and resources and locations out there where people who are in your target audience exist, people who would benefit, and niche it down. Really get into the fine niches because the riches are in the niches, as they say. Find those influencers, and then what you're going to do is try and figure out the best way that they can promote for you. Try to discover, in their brands and how they influence their audience, what are their main mediums of promoting content? Maybe they're primarily podcasters. Maybe they're primarily on video. Maybe they're primarily bloggers. Maybe they mainly use their email list. Try to figure that out, or maybe get a VA to help you do that. That is how you want them to promote you.

Then, the relationship building starts, and you truly want to build a real relationship with them. You don't just want to send these people an email or a tweet and say, “Hey! Promote my product!” or, “Do you want to start a JV partnership with me?” Every time I get an email that says, “Hey, I have this product and I want you to promote it for me,” I don't even respond. That's rude. You're obviously trying to get in front of my audience. Why don't you get to know me first? And then I want to be interested in what you have to potentially offer my audience. Anytime I promoted other people's stuff, it's been people that have provided value to me first.

What can you do Annette, and everybody out there listening, to these influencers to help them? Maybe that product comes in later down the road, but you can't expect to just approach somebody and on day one, have them promote your stuff to their audience. It's going to take some time, but this is how you jump start it. It's going to take much longer to start a blog and start a podcast. Perhaps you might have those things already, but it takes a lot longer to build relationships using those types of ways. I think beyond paid advertising, which is probably the second best way to do it, because you are getting directly in front of your target audience again, but in a different way. Perhaps you're doing it on a platform where they are already looking for stuff. I'm not talking about Facebook specifically, but that's obviously a different beast because people are on there to be social, but then they're getting promoted, too. You have to take them through a journey into a landing page and then build a relationship with them that way.

If you were on a platform already like Amazon, people are on there looking to buy, and there's actually paid advertising on Amazon. Depending on what kind of products you have, that might be a great way to go as well. Again, where are your audiences? Think about that. If they're there to buy, that's a great time for you to approach those people or get yourself in front of people on that platform, whether it's through connections with those influencers, or perhaps it's a site or a marketplace like Amazon. It's just a matter of putting yourself in the right places where people are who are looking to buy what you have to offer.

If you're looking to connect with specific people, the best way to do this, and this is something that always works with me, and now that I say this, I'm probably going to get a whole bunch of them, is through video. I feel like when I get these videos that people create that are only a minute or two long, I can't help but watch them because I know people spent the time. The funny thing is those are much easier to create than sending an email, and they're much more valuable in terms of creating a real connection.

Annette, if you're going to reach out to an influencer and say, “Hey. I just saw you site, I would love to write a guest post or come onto your podcast and offer this. I'd love to give your audience a discount,” that is going to help skyrocket that relationship building. It's much more formal and much more relatable watching you through video, and the fact that you created this personal video that's sort of private or unlisted in YouTube for example, and you send it to that person, that's going to help you stand out from everybody else out there who's trying to get in front of their audience as well.

That's how I would do it. Of course, I only shared this in about six minutes of time and it's going to take a lot longer than that, but that is the answer. What do you guys think? Use #AskPat228, and we can have this discussion on Twitter as well. If you have any ideas for Annette, or if you agree with me, do you think that's the best way to promote your product and get the most viewership in the least amount of time? Those were the specifications here: the most viewership in the least amount of time to promote products. That's how I think it should be done. Structure it, make it a process, make those spreadsheets, email videos to those people, and make it happen. It's going to be really quick to shoot those videos, one minute each, send them out, slice and dice them. It's going to work out great. Now, not everybody is going to reply. You just have to understand that, but really, it might only take one or two influencers to really make a huge difference.

So, Annette, thank you so much for the question. I hope that answers it. For those of you listening, 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 using the widget on that page.

I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com. If you're doing any invoicing in your business, perhaps you have coaching clients or you're doing consultations, and you need to invoice people after you work with them or once a month or whatever, FreshBooks makes amazing invoicing. It makes invoicing really easy and professional-looking, so you can spend more time doing what you need to do in your business and less time fumbling about the formatting and all that stuff and trying to get paid. GetFreshBooks.com, enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us?” section to get access to that for seven days for free. Check it out.

Awesome, thank you so much for listening in, and as always, I want to end with a quote. Today's quote is from Paul Graham. He says, “It's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.”

Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.