AP 0607: Can I Rank on Google with Only a Landing Page?

AskPat 607 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 607 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 day a week. We have a great question today from Lucas but before that I just want to give a shout out to all of you who have purchased and downloaded Will It Fly?, my new book, Will It Fly? How to Test Your Next Business Idea So You Don't Waste Your Time and Money. A Wall Street Journal best seller.

As a self published author, I must say that I am very proud I am very proud of that and very proud of those of you who have taken action already. I'm getting a load of success stories from people who have used the content in that book. If you want to check it out you can get it on Kindle, you can get the paperback version, or you can get it on Audible as well if you go to willitflybook.com. Again that's willitflybook.com, thank you so much.

All right, now here's today's question from Lucas.

Lucas: Hey bud, this is Lucas from Argentina. First of all let me thank you for sharing your experiences and your knowledge. It's very useful for me to start discovering the world of digital business and digital marketing. My question is if it's possible to position a website within the first page of Google search with the coming soon landing page.

My idea is first to position the website, get traffic, create the mailing list and once I can certify that I'm actually getting enough traffic, start investing in the content creation and building the site. I would really appreciate your advice on this. Thank you so much, have a good life.

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up Lucas, thank you so much. To be honest, Argentina is on my bucket list of places to go. I would love to visit there one day and I would love to do an Argentinian Tango somewhere there, because I love the dance on Dancing with the Stars.

But anyways, to your question. How do you position your landing page on the first page of Google. Well, it's very difficult to do that because there will be no content on that particular website and that's why I think you're going about it backwards, in terms of getting on the first page of Google.

Now, I think it's smart to create a landing page even right at the start before you have much going on because you want to collect email addresses, but you're going to have to get traffic to that site in other ways.

Getting a landing page before having content on your site, it is going to be very difficult to get on the first page of Google, and the reason is because Google wants to provide the best websites and best information out there for people. So if you're trying to get on the first page of Google you need to have the best and some unique information about a particular topic in order for that to happen, plus it takes some time and it takes social shares and it takes people just linking to it on their website and that's very difficult to do if you just have a website that's asking for an email address for example.

So, what I would do is not even worry about getting on the first page of Google as your primary means of getting traffic. That is, sort of, a by product of providing a helpful website and getting something out there that people are going to love and share and consume and all that good stuff. What you should worry about first is getting in front of audiences first to build your email list and then you can use that to figure out what content you can create, what are the most painful problems that people are having that you can provide a solution for in terms of content in many different ways, shapes and forms.

How do you get in front of those audiences? Well there's a number of different ways to do that. You could pay for traffic. That's one thing you could do to start building your email list. You could connect with other influencers and guest post or be a guest on their podcasts if you have some great information to share. Don't hold it for yourself. Give it away by making it awesome and mind blowing and publishing it on another persons site and that way you can then build a relationship much sooner with new traffic because they will be trusting you more than if you were to come at them cold, like say for example, from a Facebook ad, because they have that trust with that person who's site that you're guest posting on. So that's a great strategy too.

You could do webinars. Either driving traffic to those webinars, getting registrants who at the same time when they register will be signing up to your email list, perhaps even going to that landing page to do so, to sign up to that webinar, or connecting with other influencers who have a list or who have an audience already and, again, just delivering a ton of value. Providing some information that isn't found elsewhere.

So, hopefully, you know some information like that, that can be very attractive that you could drive traffic to, to register people to a webinar because when you do that, that's how you grow your list. That's how Amy Porterfield from AmyPorterfield.com, that's how she's grown her list, by doing webinars. Primarily getting people to go to those webinars and register them through Facebook. Even though she's not selling anything, she's still building her list and this is a long term game for her and should be a long-term game for you, too, Lucas.

So, those are just a few ideas to get traffic to your landing page. Again, you wouldn't want to rely on Google at first to get traffic to your website. You want to rely on you and the relationships you build and the massive value you have to provide. Then from there, you'll have a list, even if it's small, even if it's 30 people which I know is tiny, but that's a lot. If you imagine a room full of 30 people and the ability to ask each of them what do they need help with, what can you write about what can you create a podcast episode about, what videos should you create to help with that particular problem that they have? Man, that's great, and you can use that information to then drive what it is that you create content about and publish, which over time Google will see will be great. Hopefully, if you do provide great value through that, and they will rank you on the first page of Google if it's better and seems to be more unique over the other people who are out there serving that particular audience already.

Which is why I think it's important to niche down, and of course the last thing I want to say is, first page of Google for what? You want to make sure that you understand what sort of keywords are being used by your audience to search for things but also realize there are other sites out there ranking for those keywords too? What can you do to position yourself better than them? That's really the main question that you have to answer.

So Lucas, thank you so much for your question. I appreciate it. I look forward to seeing the results from what you have going on and again please don't just rely on Google, especially right at the beginning because Google has to find you and has to rank you and has to know that you have this information to provide. So, don't do it backwards, start with building that audience and you could do it with building an email list first so that you can have direct contact with that group of people and provide them the value they need by listening to them and answering their questions.

So Lucas thanks so much, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. All the way to Argentina, that's for sure. Can't wait to see a picture of you wearing it, maybe somewhere cool in Argentina. That'd be awesome.

Thank you so much and thank you to everybody else out there who's asking questions. Obviously, this show wouldn't exist without you and your questions so please keep them coming. Head on over to AskPat.com you can ask right there on that page, and I just want to thank all of you again who have picked up and left a review especially for Will It Fly?. Were over 400 reviews, most 5 stars, on Amazon. It's very humbling and I'm very excited because people are enjoying this content but not just enjoying it, they're using it. It's very much a workbook and so it will put you to work. It'll put you to the test, but if you do that you will be able to test and validate your ideas and know if they're going to work for you or not before you put in all that time and effort and money into that next business idea that you have.

So, check it out: willitflybook.com and for those of you who love to listen to stuff, it's actually, if you are not yet on Audible, you can get it for free because when you sign up for Audible you get one credit to download any book you want. So you can get it that way for free if you sign up. Check it out: Audible.com.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day. This is a Jewish proverb, and that is “A bird that you set free may be caught again, but a word that escapes your lips will not return.” Interesting, a lot of layers in that for sure.

Take care guys, thanks so much and I appreciate you. See you in the next episode. Bye.