AP 0275: When Do I Start Sharing My Website on Social Media?

AskPat 275 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody. Welcome to another weekend Episode 275 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today, I hope you're doing well.

Let's kick this off with a great question from Kevin. But before we get to that, of course, I want to thank today's sponsor, which is Lynda.com, the premiere website for learning all types of things. From over 3,000 different courses on web topics like web development, photography, visual design, business, and even software products like Excel, Word Press, Photo Shop. I mean, these are not just your typical YouTube courses—which, you know, YouTube is fine—but these are professionally shot, in-studio courses at Lynda.com headquarters and they come with worksheets and certificates sometimes. And you know, if you want to impress your boss or if you want to work on your own and improve your skills, Lynda.com, is the place to go. If you go to, Lynda.com, that's Lynda.com/askpat, you can sign up for your 10-day, all-access, free trial, for 10 days: Lynda.com/askpat. Go ahead and check it out. All right, now let's get to today's question from Kevin.

Kevin: Hey Pat, this is Kevin here, over at kevinburke2.com; long time listener. Haven't really been that engaged, but I have read your stuff for years. I decided to dive in and start a couple of what I call niche sites, and I'm going to track the progress of those at my personal blog, kevinburke2.com.

My question is, how soon should I start sharing on social media? My concern is that someone will click on my link or my post only to find a newer site with little content, and then may not return. Thanks again, look forward to hearing the answer. Keep on what you're doing, it's great, and I really appreciate it. Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Hey Kevin, what's up. Thank you so much for the question, and also all of your kind words. I'm so glad that you're a listener and just—I appreciate that so much. And I know there's a lot of long time listeners, long time commenters or callers out there, and I appreciate all of you, I mean, seriously. Doesn't matter if you call in, but Kevin you called today with a great question: How soon should you start using social media? Whether you have a niche site, or a blog, or an authority site you're trying to build, is it ever too early?

Here's my thought: I think it's too early to launch. I think when you launch a website, if you do it correctly—and I'll tell you more about that in a second—if you launch a website in the correct manner, that's at a point at which you should be comfortable using social media. Obviously, if you launch a website and maybe there's only one post, if you have social media—and like you said, people click over to your site—they're going to see there's not much meat there. There not going to be interested, and you don't want to lose that potential lead, or subscriber, or follower, or reader, or viewer.

When you launch a website, to properly do it . . . and I recommend you all go out there and go to Google right now and look up How to Launch a Brand New Website (With a Bang), I think that would get you to my article on Smart Passive Income on How to Launch a Brand New Website (With a Bang). And that is an article completely in depth about how to launch a website for a potential audience, where you would have readers and visitors on that first day. And I use this strategy myself when I launched FoodTruckr.com; FoodTruckr.com is the URL.

And on that first day we had hundreds of visits and already over 250 subscribers, which is pretty cool, and I recommend checking that out. And essentially what that is … and this was a strategy adopted by, Corbett Barr over at, Fizzle.co, back when he had ThinkTraffic.net. And he talked about this strategy, and he even launched his website with this strategy. [Editor's Note: Corbett no longer runs the ThinkTraffic.net site.]

You want to make sure that when you launch, you know, you're building buzz and building hype and all that stuff. But also—and you know, the funny thing is—you can build buzz and build hype, and you can have a social media account then. You don't even need a website to build your social following. I think the idea behind social media is to build relationships and make connections and provide value on those social media platforms.

Of course, people are going to be interested in what you have. But maybe you don't even link to what you have until you feel it's ready. And then when you launch, you launch with not just one post but several, five, maybe even more, so that when people come to your site . . .

And hopefully you would be promoting one or two of those articles heavily. They're going to come to your site and they're going to see all the other articles you have to offer. And just see that, you know, even though there's just a handful of articles there it's already filled out and you're not embarrassed by it and you are more than happy to have people come over from Twitter, or Facebook, or wherever you have shops set up on social media.

Now speaking of Twitter, in the beginning it's really important just to pick one platform and go with that. That's a big tip I have for you. And I know, I'm everywhere, right? I'm on a lot of different social media platforms. I'm on a lot of different content type platforms like podcasts, blogs, and videos. But you got to pick one and go with it. Focus on it and don't spread yourself too thin. And for social media, Twitter is definitely the answer.

It's the quickest and easiest to setup, it's only limited to 140 characters per post, and it's really easy to build a relationship with people. And again, it's limited to how much you can say. You're going to save time and be able to build other relationships with more people and get more traffic coming to your site sooner.

Then, once you sort of get to a good level there, you can move over to Facebook. Or depending on your niche, go to LinkedIn or Google+. Again, making sure you are aware where your target audience is at. It's going to take a little bit of research, but no matter what niche you're in, Twitter is definitely the one to start out with. We've heard time and time again on The Smart Passive Income Podcast from people getting their start on Twitter with a blog, and then going from there.

Now, the final thing I want to say is something you could do specifically from social media that I know a lot of people do, whether they're just starting out or they've even been doing this for a while, is their links in their profile, on their social media accounts, don't link to the homepage. Rather, they link to a special landing page on your website, a landing page specific for people coming from Twitter; a landing page, specific for people coming from Facebook. And on that page, it would say, “Hello Twitter followers.” Or you make that connection there so people stick around and read on.

And then you tell them what you have to provide for them, and then you can get them to subscribe to your list. And then, at that time, you can have a lead magnet, some type of e-book or a PDF resource tool, something short and sweet to get people to sort of, you know—some incentive to subscribe. And then you can offer some links to other posts that you've written or connecting to other social media profiles.

Again, if you're just starting out you just have that one. But you don't have to worry if people are coming to a landing page and that ebook, or that offer that you have to share; doesn't matter if you even have one post. The fact that you have this thing beyond a blog post, that people can download, just gives you a little bit more authority and a little bit more room to ask permission for people's email addresses, so you can start building that subscriber base.

Kevin, I hope that helps answer your question. You might need to listen to this again because that was sort of a lot in a short period of time. But hopefully that was helpful to you and everybody else out there listening. If you have something to add or even just a comment about this particular episode, use the #AskPat275 for this episode on Twitter—we can talk about it, we can continue this conversation. I was going to say offline, but it's still online, off the show but online at Twitter. Again, #AskPat275.

And also, before I move on and finish up with this episode, I want to thank everybody out there who supported SPI TV, which recently launched. I just had to say, take a moment just to say thank you. SPI TV—which was a brand new TV show that came out on YouTube and as an iTunes video podcast—on iTunes, it actually got to the number one video podcast in the entire US iTunes store. Number one, in the whole … through all categories. Super cool. Thank you guys so much for that.

If you want to check more of that out, you can go to WatchSPI.tv. Now Kevin, going back to you. Thank you again for the question. An AskPat t-shirt will be headed your way for having your question featured here on the show. For everybody else out there, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on this podcast, where you can hear your own voice and then have my answer follow you, all you have you do is go to, AskPat.com and check it out.

There you can also see all the other content for AskPat. And I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is linked to on there as well at AskPat.com, but today's is, Lynda.com that's, Lynda.com. You can go to, Lynda.com/askpat and get access to all of their courses for 10 days, for free. Seriously, this is such an incredible deal; 10 days for free. And if you don't like it then that's it, you don't need to do anything. But if you love it, you're going to find yourself just learning so much like I am.

And I'm still … I mean, there's so many courses out there on Lynda, specifically on Photoshop, which I'm still getting into. I love doing some Photoshop stuff on the side, especially with my family and learning how to use things like Lightroom and all these other things, to help me with my personal photography, and I'm also learning a little bit about shooting videos and stuff too. Although now I have a videographer to help with that. But all this to say there's a ton of content on there, you gotta check it out, Lynda.com/askpat. 10 days for free, check it out.

Thank you again for listening to the show, I appreciate you and as always I want to end with a quote, and today's quote is from, George A. Dorsey. He says, “The more you use your brain, the more brain you will have to use.” Boom. Boom was me, not George. Anyway, thank you so much, I appreciate you and I'll see you on the next episode of AskPat.