by: AskPat 746 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everyone? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 746 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.
All right, here's today's question from Amine.
Amine: Hi Pat. Firstly, I want to thank you for sharing with us your knowledge and experience. I am Amine from Morocco. Actually I am new to Internet marketing. I learned lots about affiliate marketing, CPA, building websites, SEO, etc. I'm thinking of one strategy and I don't know if it could work and I will be pleased to have your opinion on it. I'm thinking to build some websites around some occasional dates, for example, the Olympics that will be in Brazil this summer, maybe Halloween, Valentine’s, Christmas. Some occasions and make some affiliate offers on it, maybe add other providers. I don't know if. . .what do you think and if it's okay what can you advice me to make it good? Thanks a lot.
Pat Flynn: Hey Amine. Thanks so much for the question and all the kind words. You know, seasonal websites are . . . they exist and I know some people who take advantage of certain occasions like holidays and things like you said with the Olympics, which has already passed obviously, but that doesn't mean that you still can't think about things like that in the future. They're great in terms of getting people who are all thinking about something or doing some or looking to buy something at the same time and potentially getting in front of them. Now, the easier way to do that would be to, like you said run ads, and it seems like you have some experience doing that already. I don't know what platform that would be on, whether it's Google, AdWords, or Facebook or other ones, but those tend to work if you get the right advertisements and the right offer obviously.
Now, the reason that I don't do those, I actually did try things like that before with certain things that had happened and certain occasions in terms of finding an affiliate product, buying an ad for it and driving traffic through that to earn an affiliating income; it just wasn't working for me. I didn't know how to do it very well but I also was like, well I have to keep managing this and I have to keep up to date with everything and as soon as this event is over then I'm not making any more money or I'm not able to serve anybody anymore. So, I am building businesses and I teach businesses that are more long term, that are able to build an audience. The issue I have with this kind of business that you're talking about is that let's say you are able to help somebody, even if you did have a website with something Halloween related, well the other 11 months of the year people aren't going to be thinking about you, they're not even going to be paying attention to anything.
Now, of course you could build a website that serves people across all the certain themes, across all the different months but then your energy and what you have to offer is going to be spread out and it won't be as strong as some of these other ones that are more specialized. So, I mean you could do it and I actually think that the quicker, easier way to do it would be through if you have that experience and actually know how to craft those offers and find the right products, would be through the advertising affiliate product model where you wouldn't even need a website necessarily because it's on an affiliate’s website. But, your own website on those things, I don't think it would be worth the time unless you had an amazing unique offer. But, you said you're going to be creating these websites for affiliate products and advertisements so essentially you're just immediately from the start placing yourself as the middle man and it's going to be very difficult to compete on Google with those websites that you're pointing those products to and all those sorts of things.
So, I think special occasion type stuff is great. You don't even necessarily need a website for it. I know some people who for example create t-shirts on a website called TeeSpring, Benny Hsu, somebody who has blogged about his experience with TeeSpring and has done very well with it. So, as events happen you create a t-shirt design for it and then you run ads to people who would likely purchase that who are in that target market and that has summed him up over six figures. But, like I said before, it's not anything you would be able to necessarily create fans from or long term a business from and it's very much a reactive business model where things happen and then you create the stuff.
I want to be a business person who is proactive, who people come to me for advice, who people come to me for the right products to purchase and I want you to do the same thing so you can have this long term business. So, perhaps there might be a way for you to create a website related to some special ability that you have or a talent that you can then start to build a raving fan base from. It could still be related to these occasions or maybe not, but maybe it's a website on how to run ads for a special occasion. I don't know. Just kind of thinking of the top of my head.
Amine, I hope this is helpful and I would ask you to consider what can you do to actually start building an audience? These ads to affiliate marketing offers can work and if you have that experience like I said, go ahead do it. It's a great short term way to generate an income, but in the long term I'd encourage you to create something that would last and allow you to build those raving fans like I said.
Amine, thank you so much. We're going to send an AskPat t-shirt your way for having your question featured here on the show and for anybody else listening if you have question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, all you have to do is head over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on the page.
All right, so thanks so much for listening in. I appreciate you and here's a quote to finish off the day. It's actually a Hasidic proverb and that is, “The man who is confident in himself gains the confidence of others.”
Love that one. Take care and I'll see you in the next episode. Bye now.