by: AskPat 675 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 675 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today, 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 Daria, from Russia actually, but before we get to her question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is Iubenda.com.
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Okay, now here's today's question from Daria.
Daria: Hey, Pat. Greetings from Russia. My name is Daria, and I teach Russian online at realrussianclub.com. I try, as you call it, to be everywhere. I have this little Russian podcast, website, YouTube channel, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. I absolutely don't have time for creating unique content for all of those social things.
Here's my question: Is it okay to put the same content, maybe with some small changes, everywhere? I mean, can I make a blog post from a transcript of the YouTube video. Or, maybe I don't know, turning a podcast episode to a YouTube video? Something like that. So, on the one hand, I really don't want to seem boring to those people who follow me on all of those social networks by giving them the same content everywhere. But, on the other hand I have no time for creating that much of the unique stuff. How can I solve this problem?
Thank you so much for your answer, and thank you so much for everything you're doing for us. You're a great inspiration. That's it. Thanks, bye-bye.
Pat Flynn: Hey Daria, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today. This is a great question, and a lot of people might not know where this “be everywhere” thing came from. Well, back in 2010 I was known as somebody who had seemed to be everywhere in people's eyes. Wherever people went, on the podcasting channels, on YouTube, or other people's sites, I just had seemed to be everywhere. It's a great strategy to seem to be everywhere. I stress that “seem” to be everywhere, because on the outside it makes it seem like you are putting completely unique content in every single place that anybody in your target audience is, and to a point that's kind of true. But, to another point it's a very strategic approach, and the repurposing approach is actually a part of it.
Now, there are a lot of people who directly take, for example, transcripts from YouTube and word for word put them as blog posts. You can do that if you want. There's a lot of people who rip the audio from YouTube videos and use those specifically as they are as audio podcast episodes. You can do that too. I feel like every platform has a specific purpose, and there are opportunities to repurpose, and there's also repurposing in the social media terms. Like taking quotes from your podcast episodes, or your favorite quotes from your blog posts even, and turning those into social media cards. That's something that's not going to take long in terms of actually figuring out what to do. It just might take some time to create. If you are starting out, or even if you're not, you might want to hire out, or commission somebody to actually do those for you. You can actually do them in batches so that you don't have to always figure out how to do them as you need them. You can also put them in a system, or workflow, and have a VA, or even yourself, do them much faster than you would if you were just coming up with it on the fly as you were going each and every time.
Systems, and using help, is very much a part of the strategy as well. If you have the ability to do that. But, even if you don't you've got to be very strategic about where you do certain things. For example, video. Video's great for tutorials, and step by step things, or showing products and product reviews. People like to see what they're going to get before they get it. It's also a great place for you to share a little bit of yourself, and what you're up to, and a little bit of behind the scenes. Audio is great for interviews, and things of that nature. Blog posts are typically meant for many other kinds of content too. But, many of those things go along with each other.
For example, I have a blog post that is quite hefty, which is the podcasting tutorial that I created at podcastingtutorial.com, which I recommend that you check out if you have the ability to do so, if you want to start a podcast it's helped thousands of people do it. It's completely free. It's just a blog post. So, you can check that out. You'll see that in that blog post there are videos. It's not just one giant video about how to do this. They're broken down into six different videos which are six completely different topics that, when put together, become the steps to actually create a podcast. One of those steps might be how to tag and export your MP3 files, which is a particular problem that people are going to have. Some people are going to look up that topic specifically, but when they find that video on YouTube they're going to get introduced to my tutorial, myself. So, it is a part of one piece of content, but it's just one component of it, but it's on a different platform.
The other part of this is, I wouldn't worry so much about upsetting those who are going to be following you everywhere. Those people love you. Those people choose to consume your content everywhere you are. They're likely smart enough to know that if something is similar that they don't have to watch it. Many people still will, because they're just raving fans of what you do. So I would recommend not worrying so much about that part of it, and worrying about the fact that there are people out there who read, and only read, who will not watch a YouTube video, and not listen to a podcast. There are people out there who will watch videos, and only watch videos, who would never discover you if you had only stuck with your blog, or your podcast. There are people out there who only listen to, and religiously listen to podcasts because they don't have time to watch videos, and they don't have time to read a blog post, but they have time during their walk, or during their gym session to listen to a podcast who wouldn't have discovered you otherwise. This is why I feel like it's important to distribute your content across all those different platforms eventually.
I'm going to end on this point. You don't need to do all of those things at the same time in the beginning. In the beginning you want to choose the primary platform that you feel is best for you and your audience and your style. One that you're comfortable with. For me it was a blog. Many people start on podcasts. Once you get comfortable with that, and get a system going, perhaps get to a point where you have VAs so you can take time back and use it for something else, that's when I would recommend expanding out to another platform and experimenting with that. For me the timeline was: I started my blog on October of 2008; then I started my YouTube channel in 2009; July of 2010 I started my podcast. I didn't start all three of those things at the same time. They've all led into each other.
Now I use them as separate channels, but also in conjunction with one another to cross-promote, to share a lot of the same content in different ways like I had mentioned earlier. I might do a product review on YouTube, like I did for ConvertKit. I did a demo, but then I also featured Nathan Barry, the CEO and founder of ConvertKit on a podcast. It was just a way to have people listen to the CEO and get to know the product better, and of course people who land on that video first, they want to get to know who the product owner is and listen to him and hear the story before they purchase. People who hear the story first on the podcast want to then see the demo of what this thing looks like. So, as you can see they go hand in hand.
I would recommend just taking it one step at a time, and don't feel like you have to rush this be everywhere thing. The be everywhere thing is just a natural progression of you continually looking to increase exposure. Doing it in a slow and steady race where you really want to master, and get comfortable with the one platform first before moving on to another.
Daria, thank you so much for your question. I appreciate it. We're going to send you an “Ask Pat” t-shirt, all the way over to Russia, for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much.
For everybody else out there listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head on over to askpat.com. Boom! Click on that record there, and ask away. That's all you've got to do. So, thank you so much, I appreciate you.
As always, we like to finish with a quote here on AskPat. And, please make sure to subscribe so you get these automatically uploaded to your device. They come out five days a week, like I said. Here's a quote to finish off the day by Les Brown, he says, “Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.” Stop living your fears people. Let those fears drive you to live. That's a Pat quote.
Thanks guys! Take care, and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat. Bye.