SPI 940: Daily Posts vs. Growth Without Social

SPI 940: Daily Posts vs. Growth Without Social

Liz Wilcox: Hey, Pat, what would you say is the number one thing people should always be focused on in their business?

Pat Flynn: Um, you know, besides headshots. No, I’m just kidding. It’s audience growth, I think. Audience growth.

Liz Wilcox: I think so, too.

Pat Flynn: Growing what they’ve built, right? It’s one thing to build a thing. It’s another thing to, you know, find the audience to see that thing, to experience that thing, to, in your world, of course, dive into email and join a community, all that stuff.

Like, it doesn’t happen unless you grow that audience.

Liz Wilcox: I agree. I always look at it like my business is like water. If I let it go stagnant, it’s gonna stink.

Pat Flynn: Oh, yeah, still water’s bad. I’ve been learning about still water and how just dangerous it can be with the microbes and all that stuff.

Liz Wilcox: Don’t drink it.

Pat Flynn: Don’t.

Liz Wilcox: Don’t, don’t drink it, and don’t let your audience grow stagnant. Always be looking for new leads, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. I’m really excited.

Pat Flynn: Right. Let’s dive right in. We’re back with another episode. I got Liz here with me, and we’re gonna talk about audience growth. In fact, this was Liz’s idea to create this episode, and I think it’s gonna be extremely helpful.

What was the origin of the idea for this episode, Liz?

Liz Wilcox: Audience growth. Y’all, people in my community and in the SPI community have just been saying, “You know, Liz, Pat, I’ve been, I’ve been turning my wheels. Like, nothing is working. I’m posting every day. I’m consistent. I’m doing the things you guys say, but I’m not seeing much traction.”

And in my head, I’m thinking, “Okay, well, what are we doing to get eyeballs,” right? It’s not enough, and I say it with love. I say everything with love, if you, if you’re still getting to know me, but it’s not enough to just post. We’ve got to go out and actively build our audience, and I know Pat and I do that in very different ways.

Yeah. And so I thought, you know, why not just give a quick, “Hey, this is how I’m doing things. This is how you’re doing things,” and you can pick and choose what works for you, your personality, your capacity. So let’s get into it. I’m just gonna, I’m gonna interview Pat. I’m gonna take the mic. Pat, how are you building your audience right now?

Pat Flynn: Yeah, so I think, you know, I’m gonna use Deep Pocket Monster as a case study right now because a lot of people are curious about that. They see how big it’s growing, and it continues to grow, and the revenue continues to fly there, and so I’m gonna talk about that. The growth is happening from being consistent on social media and specifically creating a video every day, and you know, we’ve talked about this before.

Not too long ago, we ran the 30 Day Short Form Video Challenge. I have seen what that has done for people. There’s been a number of people in that challenge, and even in our community, who have participated in that who said that that was a life-changing 30 days for them because they are now seeing results that they haven’t seen before.

Now, for the people who are like, “Well, I am creating every day, but I’m not seeing anything,” it’s funny ’cause yesterday I had a person tell me exactly that, a person who came up to me on social. He’s like, “Pat, I need your help because I have been doing exactly what you said to do. I have been creating a video every day for the last 60 days, and the videos are going nowhere.”

And I said, “Okay, let me look at your videos.” So I look, and it just was so obvious what was happening. And before I tell you exactly what happened, I need to tell you that you need to ask for help when you need that help, and I think because you can’t read the label when you are inside the bottle. Let me say that one more time.

You can’t read the label when you’re inside the bottle. When you’re doing the thing and you’re so involved in it and you’re so deep into it, there are some things that are so obvious but you are blind to simply because you’ve been doing it every day. And so the thing that I found with this person who was creating a video every day was they were not thinking about the hooks in their videos.

Every single video waited two or three seconds before getting into the whole reason why a person might need to watch that video. And so I said, “Just you need to work on your hooks. For the next thirty days do videos again,” like yes, another thirty days, but we’re gonna do it now with just focusing on the first second of the video.

Show something visual and ask a question in the beginning that gets a person to stick around. And of course, that was only yesterday, but I guarantee you that they’re gonna see results that they hadn’t seen before. Because the truth is, what is the definition of insanity? It’s from Einstein, right? Like the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again expecting different results.

In order to get different results, you have to change something. Something has to change. So this is where going into the SPI Community and saying, “Hey, guys, I need this help. This is what’s happening,” and just getting some eyeballs from the outside to see and point things out or to try certain things, or going to a mentor or asking a friend like, “Hey, what is happening here?

Is there something that I’m missing?” In, in many cases, there’s something completely obvious that’s just not working that we can change right away. So there’s sort of two parts to this answer, and I can go deeper if you’d like, Liz, but it is number one, it is the creating daily. I think that is very important.

Quality is important, yes, but more important, especially in the beginning if you haven’t seen results yet, it’s actually quantity. It’s getting those reps in. But part two of this is after a certain period of time, checking to see what’s working, and if it’s not, fixing something or changing something and then experimenting with it for another period of time until you see something that does work.

Liz Wilcox: Listen, when Pat was just setting this up, he was doing the hook. He was like, “Before I tell you…” I was like, “This guy makes so many Shorts.” And then-

Pat Flynn: It’s natural now.

Liz Wilcox: It’s natural now, but that’s what, I think that proves your point of it’s quantity at first.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Liz Wilcox: Because y- you’ve got to practice, and I think what Pat does so well, and what this person is gonna, you know, end up doing really well also, is practice in public, right?

You’ve got to be willing to post, right? Yes. It’s not enough to, y’all, you can’t see me. I’m in a closet right now. It’s not enough to just, you know, pretend to interview Pat Flynn. You’ve gotta do it. We gotta, we gotta hit publish on this thing, right? That’s how, that’s how we get better. So I love that so much, and I think the proof is in the pudding of, you know, Pat just giving us a hook, repeating himself, making it, like, I was like, “What?

What is he gonna say?” Right? And so if you didn’t catch that, like, go back, rewind, like, three minutes, and listen again, and you can really see or hear what Pat is talking about.

Pat Flynn: Oh, wow, I appreciate you calling that out, ’cause now that I’m thinking about what I said, I’m like, oh yeah, wow, I am pretty good.

But that’s only because I’ve practiced, right? It’s, it’s just like practicing an instrument. If you’re a pianist and you’re practicing for a recital, you know, you practice the parts, you play, you literally hit the keys on the stuff that’s hard, right? If you just played the stuff that’s easy, then that’s not getting you anywhere.

You practice the stuff that’s hard so that by the time you come to the recital, you don’t even have to think anymore. It’s just a part of what you do. This is the same thing that I heard Harry Mack talk about. I don’t know if you know Harry Mack, but Harry Mack is a very famous freestyle hip hop artist, and he comes up with these incredible connections and rhymes just off the top of his head or off the dome, as he calls it.

And there was a video of him talking about how he does what he does, and he says that he forces himself to mess up. He puts the beat, the tempo, on his practices a little faster than what he’s normally doing so that he can mess up, so that he stumbles. Because if he can master that and eventually get through that, when he’s rapping in person, on stage, or on a live stream at a much slower pace, I mean, he’s got it down.

He doesn’t even have to think anymore because he’s forcing himself to stumble. And so I know that might sound hard for a lot of us who are like, “Well, I don’t wanna look bad. I don’t wanna embarrass myself.” Well, then you’re never gonna grow. I, I mean, just honestly, you’re never gonna grow. So hit publish, get dirty.

You gotta be a disaster before you become the master. I heard that from John Lee Dumas. But I have a quote that goes alongside that, which is, “You gotta be cringe before they binge,” right? You gotta be cringe before they binge, and if you’re not allowing yourself to be a little cringe, well, you’re just gonna stay put.

That’s it.

Liz Wilcox: I am so cringey. Like, I look back at stuff, even stuff I wrote. So I’m an email marketer, so most of my content is written, and I’ll look at an email from three months ago, and I’m like, “I can’t believe I called somebody boo three times in one email.” Hey, boo. Like, I… Right. “Hey, boo. You got this, boo. You know, I’m, I’m proud of you.” Like, like, it’s, it’s cringe, so but yeah, people, people read them. People tell me it’s great. But one thing that I’ve noticed about you as a creator, Pat, that I think really helps with the audience building, and you’ve already mentioned it, is that consistency. And so what is it, whether, you know, you’ve learned this a long time ago, or y- you know, it stays top of mind now.

Like, what keeps you consistent? Hmm. ‘Cause it’s one thing to say, “Yeah, I wanna be consistent.” It’s another to actually be consistent.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, that’s a great call-out and a great question. Uh, that, that is where a lot of people struggle. They say, “I’m going to do this every day,” and then eventually, 30 days in, they’re like, “Well, I missed a few days.”

And then a few days becomes a few weeks, becomes a few months, and then it’s like, “Oh yeah, I gotta try that again.” We, we do the same thing with our diets and everything at the start of a year, you know, when we’re going into New Year’s resolution time, et cetera. I have turned content into something that’s just a part of my day now.

It’s just built into the routine. It’s like I mentioned this a couple episodes ago, but it’s like brushing my teeth now. It’s just like if I don’t brush my teeth, I’m gonna have stink breath, and my wife is not gonna wanna sleep in the same bed as me. So I gotta make sure I brush my teeth, just like how I gotta make sure that I create that piece of content.

We are now on day 708 straight of a video published every day on, on Deep Pocket Monster, on the Shorts channel, and on Instagram, TikTok, et cetera. I have to remind people, those first 30 days, I was seeing very little views, but it wasn’t because I wasn’t good. It’s just I hadn’t had the time to learn yet, so I needed those reps.

And by day 35, finally on day 35, one of those videos went to the moon, and everything has just been history since then. But as my buddy Alex says, you gotta count uploads, not likes. Count your uploads, not likes. So I’m shooting for the uploads, right? That was the goal of that first initial 60-day challenge, was just to get 60 days straight, regardless of how many views I got or how many likes I got on those videos, and it was because that’s what I can control.

I can control myself hitting record, hitting publish. I can control myself not over-editing these videos as well. I can’t control the views all the time. I can’t control how people will respond to them, but I can control hitting record, hitting publish, so I might as well focus on that being the goal, not the views.

Because when you base your success on something that you cannot control completely, you’re living in dangerous territory. You’re ultimately probably gonna be disappointed. The results are a byproduct of you staying consistent on the things that you can control.

I love that we’re talking about this, and there’s many different ways to grow an audience, and we’re talking about audience growth, but a lot of this is mindset. A lot of this is just workflow and getting better. And when I first started this short video thing, the Should I Open It or Should I Keep It Sealed series, I mean, it took me an hour, forty-five minutes to create one of those videos.

Now, I can bang one out in 13 minutes. I’ve timed myself because I know I have the shortcuts, I have the template, I have the workflows, all of it, and I’m still trying to get faster every day with little shortcuts that I’m learning just so that I, I can get through an entire week’s worth now in just a couple hours.

But that wasn’t possible at first, but it was only possible because I kept showing up. So that is a great lesson that is not a strategy or tactic on a platform. It’s a strategy for you as a producer, as a creator, and I love that we started there.

Liz Wilcox: Yes, Pat, you said it best, a producer, right? And it is, and as much as nobody likes to hear this, sometimes it is mindset, right?

It’s-

Pat Flynn: Mm-hmm.

Liz Wilcox: If that person we mentioned earlier, you know, “Hey, I’ve been at this for 60 days. What the heck?” I think if he had anchored himself in a little different way, he might have been able to analyze why his videos weren’t working. Maybe the- Yeah … the why behind what he was doing was just, “Oh, well, I started a challenge with Pat Flynn.

I’m doing it. I’m gonna get more views,” right? “I’m gonna be like Pat Flynn.” But, and I say it with love, the why has to be stronger than, “I wanna be like Pat Flynn. I wanna be like Liz Wilcox.” It has to be something that you are rooted in. Pat even made a joke about, “Oh, well, I brush my teeth because I want my wife to be around me.”

That’s, that’s very rooted, and so around here, we’re trying something new. We’re team win. What’s important now? And so I invite you, I know you’re probably driving listening to this, maybe you’re doing the dishes, you’re in carpool, but later tonight, like, get out your journal and write out, you know, why is audience building important to you?

Why is posting content or writing emails or trying to make a living online, like, why are you listening to this podcast right now? Why did you press play? Why do you press play over and over again, right? That’s so important because when you’re rooted in your why, you’re able to sort of, well, number one, get excited.

Okay, I know my why. This is why I’m doing it, and so I’m gonna go out and do it, and I think that in itself really lends itself to consistency. Would you agree?

Pat Flynn: Yeah. Oh, amen. Amen to that. The why for brushing teeth is, like, I don’t have fun doing that, but I also don’t have fun sleeping on the couch, right?

Right. Uh, but then, you know, in the Pokemon side of things, like, I’m also trying to find the fun there. The last thing I’ll say before I take the mic from you and give you back the same question, Liz, for audience growth, is if I’m having fun creating, then the audience is gonna have more fun consuming, and I think that is a very important lesson because a lot of times we lose that, and I think going back to the why can rekindle that fire for a lot of us.

And, uh, this might be a great opportunity if you are in a car driving right now or listening on a subway or whatever the case may be, like, maybe pause for a sec before we get into Liz’s answer and just ask yourself, like, “Why am I doing this? What’s the whole point?” Because we remember that in the beginning, but then we forget.

We forget when it gets hard, but I think that is exactly what gets you through those hard moments, so I appreciate you saying that, Liz. That’s very important. I’m gonna take the mic from you now, and I’m gonna flip the question back to you, Liz. What are you doing today in your world that is working really well for audience growth?

Liz Wilcox: Well, same as Pat, have fun. And my word of the year is play. And so I’ve just been really– ’cause the last couple of years everybody knows, oh, you know, it’s such a grind. Everything’s so hard.

Pat Flynn: Yeah.

Liz Wilcox: AI is, you know, taking everything I knew and flipping it on its head. And, and I just went into January 1st thinking, “No, I’m done. I cannot have that mindset anymore. I wanna be successful.” I have a very deeply rooted why. I not only wanna be successful, but I feel this need to be successful. I have a lot of mouths to feed. And so it was, you know, well, how can I continue on then? How can I flip this, and how can I grow my audience?

Because I know business is like water, okay? Sometimes it gets stagnant, and how do you make stagnant water fresh? You get fresh leads in. You get new eyeballs. You constantly have to be growing. And, you know, I, I hate to say that. I wish I could just find my thousand true superfans, and they would stay with me forever, but some drop off.

I need to find new, right? And so I always look at my audience building as water, and how can I get fresh? And this year It was have fun. That is what is gonna make me show up, make me be consistent in the content I’m creating, and also it’s gonna attract those right people. So- Yeah … very, like tangibly, some of the things I’ve been doing are swaps.

We’ve mentioned this in previous episodes. Hey, Pat, can I share your freebie and you share mine? And we swap email lists. I have done so many of those this year, and I just added it up, and I’ve gotten over 4,000 new leads to my email list, because that’s my number one, like, group that I’m trying to grow, my number one audience I’m trying to grow, just from other people sharing my things and me sharing theirs.

I’ve also been doing, and we’ve done on the SPI side, challenges. And I think what works about a challenge, ’cause you might think, okay, well, I posted a challenge and nobody came. You’ve got to get people excited about it. Right. Give people incentive to share the challenge. Hey, I’m doing this 30-day short form challenge.

I know you mentioned you wanted to do it, too. Let’s do it together. And that’s something in a previous episode, I think about four episodes ago, Roger Coles was a, a guest, and he said he joined Pat’s challenge because his buddy joined Pat’s challenge. Oh, yeah. Right? That’s right. So getting people excited about it and even saying like, “Hey, share this with your friends.

Share this with your friends,” has been a great, great way. And y’all, I’ve said this in a previous episode as well, I’m very much down with OPP, other people’s platforms. So hello, I am on the SPI podcast right now co-hosting it, right? That is very much helping me not only establish like authority and credibility, but actual numbers, people finding me and saying, “Hey, I heard you on SPI. I came over here to check this out.” Right? And I’ve been doing that for years. At this point, I believe I don’t know the exact number, but I believe I’ve been on over 400 podcasts. So the same way Pat is just posting on YouTube over and over, anytime I can get in front of somebody who has a YouTube channel, has a podcast, things like that, because I don’t have a system for that.

You know, Pat’s got his rhythm and his rhyme, and he’s got his people. I’m basically a one-man show, and so I said, “Okay, how can I get people like Pat to promote me?” And so that’s been a great way. And not just podcasts, but virtual summits, right? We’re hosting one soon on audience building and list building, and, you know, getting other people to come on and speak, and me going on others.

That has been amazing. I’ve hosted my own. We’re trying it out in SPI, and the last three that I’ve done have built the list, I think something like 5,000 or 6,000 people in 18 months just hosting my own event and saying, you know, “Hey, Pat, you’re a speaker. Can you share it? Hey, Shahar, you’re a speaker. Can you share it?”

Things like that. So collaborations has been a really, really great way I’ve grown my audience in the last six to 12 months, really forever now.

Pat Flynn: Yeah, collaborations, partnerships. I think we had talked about that in a recent AskPat, or it was, like, the AskPat podcast that, that you hosted with me.

And I love that you tacked on still within that the consistency. I mean, 400 episodes, Liz, is something that requires a lot of effort and time and patience to do, but you’ve seen the results of that, and you continue to do that. And that’s why, you know, a lot of people have asked you recently, like, “Liz, why are you, why are you showing up so much in, in Pat’s stuff now?”

And you know, you’re community director obviously, but, like, you don’t have to do that, right? You have your own community, and you’re like, “Well, I’m in front of Pat’s audience. I get to deliver value, and we have this partnership.” And it’s like, oh, well duh, right? Because you’re doing exactly what you’re talking about right now.

And I’m curious, Liz, if you could have a dream collaboration with anybody, who would that be with?

Liz Wilcox: Kit

Pat Flynn: Mm.

Liz Wilcox: K-I-T. I would love… And this is not even a collaboration with, you know, like, another creator, right? Like, I think if you guys can’t tell, this is my dream come true, right? I hired a podcast broker back in the day, and they said, “Who’s your dream podcast?”

I said, “Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn.” You know, I made that happen. So cool. I think it was something like, I think it took me three years or something like that to… I call it networking across. You don’t wanna network up. You network across, right? So if somebody’s slightly higher, slightly higher, and eventually, you know, you make it up the ladder.

But nowadays, I’m looking at partnerships more with brands, right? And that’s something, you know, Pat can speak on. But if you think Pat Flynn is big, what about Kit? I imagine their email list is even bigger, right?

Pat Flynn: So huge, and the, the people they know, right? Their network is huge. Like, the people you connect with have their web of network that then you now have access to, and there’s a delicate way to do that, right?

And we’ve talked about brand partnerships and how to kind of get into that before, and we have a course inside of the SPI Community on that as well, but yeah. Sorry to interrupt, but I just wanted to point that out ’cause that’s, that’s a… Like, it’s not just like, “Here’s the company I’m partnering with.”

It’s like they also have connections and people that you can get in front of or provide value to and get something back in return over time.

Liz Wilcox: Right. That’s what I love about partnerships, and, you know, I joke OPP, but it’s, there’s different touchpoints. You never know who’s gonna know someone, right? Mm-hmm.

Like, Pat and I got together because my sister knows his assistant, and so that just automatically made us closer than we would have without that connection, and- Yeah … you just never know. But yeah, with Kit, and I’ve been dreaming about this for a long time, I would love for a Kit user to be able to log in and use the emails that I wrote to send out emails to their list.

Like, I’ve been writing emails for years and years. I have had, you know, tens of thousands of students use my templates. Who knows how many people have read my words? I have somebody who has, you know, an email list with half a million people that uses my templates. You know, like, wouldn’t that be amazing to just be able to log into Kit or some ESP and just have emails that are proven in so many different industries?

And, you know, they have, like, email templates that are format templates, right? Like, they’ve got the header and the footer and this and that, but what about the content? Like, that would be my dream collaboration, for sure.

Pat Flynn: Mm. I’m sure we can figure out a way to make that happen It might even be possible in some workaround, but they haven’t really talked.

Well, the one thing about Kit, and I’ve told them this personally before, I’m an advisor to Kit, is that every time they come out with something new, they often just, like, move on to the next thing. And I’m like, “You know, talk about the things that you can do with Kit,” because you can do so much with it. So maybe we can explore that even further after we get finished with this podcast, which we’re at the end at because we wanted to keep this short and sweet for you, just give you a couple things to think about as you move into the second half of the year here.

I can’t believe we’re already in the second half of 2026. Wow. But a lot of these things that we talked about today are not based on just, like, the time we’re in now. These are, these are timeless things. In fact, things that have always worked and maybe we’ve forgotten, so I’m glad that we’re talking about them again, and I’m just super grateful for our partnership, Liz, and for you to come on the show and be my co-host now for a lot of this stuff, which adds so much value and another perspective that I absolutely love.

It makes producing these a lot easier for sure, but also just makes it a lot more fun. And like you said, we’re gonna find the fun and keep making it happen.

Liz Wilcox: Yeah, I’m really excited, and if you wanna know more about audience building, we’re actually doing a List Building Live virtual summit that’s gonna be available for you to download right on the podcast player you’re listening to right now.

That’s gonna be August 18th through the 20th, and I think it’ll be about six or seven little short five to 10-minute episodes for you to download each day over the series of three days, so you can really build your audience because that is so, so important. That’s the first step to building superfans, so I can’t wait for that.

Pat Flynn: Awesome. Definitely go. Sign up for that. All the links and stuff are gonna be in the show notes. And Liz, thank you again. We’ll see everybody on the next one.

Liz Wilcox: Thank you. Yep.