AskPat 86 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 86 of AskPat. Happy to be here to help you answer your online business questions five days a week.

I want to mention at the top of the show here, because I've been getting a lot of requests for it, a lot of you in the audience either have a podcast or are starting one soon and have been asking me, “Pat, how can I get ahold of the AskPat player on AskPat?” My team and I created a custom podcast player just for this show, and a lot of people have been asking about it. You'll be happy to find out, right now, that we have packaged it and turned it into a plug-in that will be readily available to you very, very soon. That announcement will be made on the newsletter and on the blog at SmartPassiveIncome.com. So make sure you go to SmartPassiveIncome.com and subscribe to that newsletter if you want to get your hands on the AskPat player when it comes out. So, I'm happy to do that for you guys. I'm excited to share it with the world.

Now, let's get to today's question from somebody who wanted to remain anonymous, which is totally fine. You can leave questions at AskPat.com, anonymously if you'd like, and my team and I will make sure that we don't put your name in there, or anything else that you want not mentioned. So, let's hear from anonymous.

Anonymous: Hey Pat, this is an anonymous listener from over in the UK, at RoadToSelfEmployed.com. I just want to thank you for all the inspiration that you've provided me with other the past few months while I've been embarking on my own journey to becoming my own boss. My question is quite simple, really. Could you reveal the niches that you work on in your Niche Site Duels? Are you not worried that your listeners are going to take your niche and try and use that themselves, if there's a gap in the market there?

Pat Flynn: Hey, thank you so much for your question. It's a really great question, because I'm in a very unique position in the space that I'm in, where I run these experiments and I've contemplated running these experiments. Especially ones that involve new websites; I've contemplated not sharing the URL or not sharing the keywords that I choose, and when I really thought deep about that, it just wouldn't be as good as an experiment. It wouldn't be as good of a case study. People wouldn't learn as much from it if I just held back the name of the website or the URL's or the actual, whole theme that I was doing. I felt like if I left a little bit behind, it would seem almost unreal. So, I wanted to be completely honest, and up front and authentic with everyone when it came to building websites from scratch and running these experiments and case studies. Unfortunately as a result of doing that, people have stolen my ideas, and a lot of people have bombarded some of those sites.

My most recent site at FoodTruckr.com, which is a website that I built to serve the food truck industry, and those starting up in that industry, it got bombarded with massive amounts of negative SEO, which means people were linking to the site, or had hired or paid somebody a bunch of money to send bad links to my site. Which, to Google, just looks like it's bad and somebody's trying to game the system. It's such a bad thing that's out there that people can . . . If I wanted to de-rank your site, I could pay somebody to send a bunch of Viagra and Cialis links to your site. You know, from nasty websites or whatever and it would just make your site look bad and it just sucks that that is a strategy that people use. It's disgusting. Come on, really? Is that your way of trying to succeed? Why don't you just try to create something great, and not try to pull other people down to get yourself ahead? Unfortunately, that's just the way the world is.

So, to your original question, do I worry that sharing my niche information is going to have people steal those ideas or do something bad to them? I don't worry about that. I expect it. I think it's always turned into a lesson, for example, with the FoodTruckr site, I've been learning about the Disavow tool from Google webmaster tools and how to deal with that. Despite getting all those negative SEO links, I've been able to rank really high for a lot of keywords and I am getting a lot of natural search engine traffic to FoodTruckr.com, so to whoever is screwing me out there, ha! It's not working.

Anyway, as far as somebody stealing my niche, that's happened on my security guard training site, and it might have happened on the food trucker site, although nobody's really come out and told me about it. I haven't found anything, yet. Somebody on my other site, when I was doing my other experiment with security guard training at SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com, I actually wrote in one of my monthly income reports that I had been outranked. This was after a couple years of ranking number one for the term, “security guard training.” When I mentioned that, somebody left a comment saying that he was the guy who outranked me. He did that just to prove that he had good SEO skills. I was like, “Okay, you didn't have to bring my site down in order to do that.” The site wasn't as good as mine as far as information. He just knew a lot of gray hat, black hat techniques to get his site to rank higher than mine. Then, what he ended up doing was, he ended up offering to sell me his site, which was ranking number one for the keyword. I was ranking number two. He offered to sell it to me for an undisclosed amount of money, or else he would keep it up there at number one and also put a link to his SEO services right at the top, saying, “Hey, I beat Pat Flynn. I know how to do SEO. Come pay me money so I can have your site rank high, too.” Disgusting. Oh my gosh, like . . . I was just livid. I could not believe that. I had many chats with him and then eventually he turned around and I guess he just got too guilty, or a lot of people were also like, “Dude, why would you do something like that, just to prove a point?” It was not good publicity for him. Whatever the case may be, he ended up stopping whatever he was doing and I was able to outrank him and his site just sort of disappeared.

So, do I worry? No, because you know what? I'm going to do whatever I can to make the best sites I can. The best sites possible that should be ranking number one. So, even if I put my ideas out there, and people steal them, bring it on, because I'm going to make something even better. I feel like that's . . . it's kind of weird that I want that to happen. I don't want that to happen, you know, I don't wanted forced competition like that, but I like competition. I like healthy competition, where if somebody is creating a site that's as good as mine or better, well, that's just a sign that I should step up my game and do even better than that. So, I see it as motivation, I guess you could say. If people are going to steal my idea, well, go for it. Try it. That's all I have to say.

So, anyway, I hope that answers your question. A different question today but it's just giving you some insight on why I do what I do and the motivation behind that and what happens as a result if somebody were to steal my information. Now if somebody, of course, copies my stuff word for word, or . . . I've had people use my image on Facebook without permission next to ads and using my trademark where they're not supposed to. Then I'll take legal action, of course. But, if somebody wanted to get in the same niche as me because I did the research up front, well, you know, I feel like those types of people are already setting themselves up for failure because they're always going to be looking for a shortcut, and there is no shortcut to success.

So, hopefully that answers your question. Thank you so much. I do have your email on file, so I'll make sure to have my assistant send you information to get an AskPat teeshirt. If you wanted to send me a picture of it with like a blurred out face, or a black square in front of your face, because you want to still remain anonymous, that would be, actually, kind of cool. So, hopefully you hear this and you like the answer and I hope everybody else did, too.

Thank you all so much. If you have a question you'd like to hear on the show, just head on over to AskPat. Also, check out that player. It will be available for everybody soon. Lastly, as always, I end with a quote. This quote is from Brian Tracy. He says, “Never say anything about yourself you do not want to come true.” You're awesome. Take care and I'll see you the next episode.