AP 0908: Should I Take a Break from Creating Content to Grow My List?

AskPat 908 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 908 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.

We have a great question coming in today from James. Before we get to that, I just want to mention that next Monday, this coming Monday the 17th of July, is the first time that the new course of mine, Power-Up Podcasting will be open for enrollment. It will be open only for a week. It's a course that was beta-tested with 167 students. Many, most of them now have a show ready to go. Many actually are on iTunes now with their new shows and are seeing amazing results. We actually have a podcast episode next week coming out with a number of students who have found success and what the results have been since going through my course. It's coming out for the first time on Monday, July 17th. I cannot wait to share this with you because I know a lot of you have been dying to start your podcast and just need that hand-holding through the process. You need a little bit of access to people who can just answer your questions right away. You just want to know, not just how to create your podcast but launch it too, launch it to people and actually get eyes and ears on it and keep it going down the road. I cannot wait to share it with you. Go to PowerUpPodcasting.com and you can sign up for the waitlist there.

Here's today's question from James.

James: Hi Pat. My name is James. I run a resource website called GodSpeedDevelopment.com, which teaches millennials how to build confidence by learning important life skills such as organizing, setting goals, managing and growing wealth, along with methods to learning quickly and effectively. I just started this resource about a few months ago but I've already gotten caught in the cycle of creating content. I don't spend nearly enough time growing my email list or marketing at all. I have a site with about twenty articles that never really received much love. My question is, should I take a break from creating content week after week to help grow my list while taking care of my current subscribers by recycling content? I heard about Smart Passive Income from a coworker shortly after I got my first real job. You've helped me share the thing that lights me up with likeminded people, while having the opportunity to make money while doing it. You're an amazing teacher, Pat. I'm sure I speak for everybody when I say we appreciate you.

Pat Flynn: Hey James, thank you so much for this question. I completely understand where you're coming from. It's very easy to fall into that content hamster-wheel. This can happen when you're at the beginning stages of your journey, where especially it's tough because you're not getting immediate results, meaning you're not getting a lot of eyeballs on that mostly, which is amazing content because you're spending a lot of time. You're fired up about your brand and your brand new website and all the things that you have to share. You're just lit up and then nobody is seeing that stuff. It can be very deflating. I completely understand. First of all, all the stuff that you're writing now, just because nobody is seeing it right now doesn't mean nobody is going to see it later.

There are going to be many opportunities for you as you grow your brand, as you expand your reach, as you grow your audience, as you scale, as you get exposure from other people as well, to have your older content be shared. That's done in many different ways, from resurfacing things into newer blog posts by just linking to older things and referencing them. That's number one. By linking in the sidebar for example, with a Most Popular Posts tab or a Random Post tab to get people to dig in deeper, to having other people link to your stuff or even mentioning certain older articles in your email. Whether that's through broadcast emails at the time at which you write them or you can write things ahead of time and have them be sent out as a sequence, or like an autoresponder over time. Just continue to have that machine be working for you to bring back that old content. Don't feel like the old content or the content that will be “old” is going to be a waste because it's not. It's great practice. It establishes your brand. The people who are finding you now are knowing that you're an expert in this field that you're in and have a lot to say. That's fantastic.

Should you take a break from creating content so you can focus on marketing? I wouldn't necessarily take a break. Here's a quick and easy formula I would recommend to people who feel like they're on that content hamster-wheel. They're just not giving themselves enough time to actually go out there and get exposure, and find people or make sure that the articles or the blog posts or the podcast episodes or the videos that they're creating are going to be found. Here's the formula: Cut your content production in half. If you blog twice a week, blog once a week. If you blog once ever day, cut it down to three or four days a week. If you blog once a week, cut it to once every other week. Cut it in and half and use that extra time you have, the other 50 percent of time that you would've normally spent for content creation, on marketing. What do I mean by marketing? That's just such a general term. Not just putting a link on Twitter and utilizing that. What I would recommend doing is actually taking from Clay Collin's Episode 263 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a great one about laddering up in your business. At the start he talks about focusing on one marketing channel that's going to be your primary method of going about getting traffic to your website. Just pick one. It doesn't have to be one forever; it's not a permanent decision. Pick one now that seems to be working on your side already, at which point you want to actually start doing more of that. You can open up more time by doing this cut-content-in-half, double-marketing strategy. Or pick that new strategy that you're seeing out there and just focus your efforts on that. That way you're actually giving this new strategy a chance to actually do something for you. Where a lot of people fall short is they say, Pinterest, this, that . . . Then they just put a little bit of effort into each and then nothing happens. Pick one that's going to work for you.

Typically, what works best is using that extra time for building relationships and finding other people out there who are in the same space as you that you can partner up with in terms of just helping what they're doing and serving them in some way. In return, you can potentially get something back. What I mean by that is, how might you be able to provide value for some of the other people out there with your certain expertise, with your certain position? Potentially it could be done in a guest blogging format if you do a lot of blogging. Maybe it's doing a guest podcast, which is a fantastic way to go about it. Maybe it's about actually starting to write articles and trying to get ahead on some of those sites like Huffington Post and those kinds of places. There is a podcast episode that was done a while back that was very popular . . . let me look this up on the fly here. I'm going to go to SmartPassiveIncome.com. There's a search bar at the top. If you didn't know this, this is a highly-dynamic search bar, which can help you find anything that's on the website related to anything. I know this person's name. Kimanzi is his name, Constable is his last name. If you go to Episode 145, which you can find at SmartPassiveIncome.com/session145, you're going to see an article by a man, an amazing person. His name is Kimanzi Constable and he can actually be found at KimanziConstable.com. This episode, Episode 145, is really cool because he shows you how to shortcut your way into large media sites and start writing for them and bypass this wait list. He gives you that strategy just straight out in this podcast episode. That's what I would recommend doing to get a little bit more exposure outside of your own network. That way you can get more people coming to your website and learning more about who you are.

Yes, you should definitely pull back a little bit from the content creation and push forward a little in terms of getting people to find your stuff. Growing your email list too goes along with that. The more you grow your email list, the more you'll have in terms of eyes and ears on your content. That's when you come out with a new content piece. For example, you send an email out. By doing that, they're going to share it. More people will join your email list. It just becomes this amazing feedback loop that grows over time.

That's what I would recommend. James, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate you. Hopefully this is helpful for everybody else as well. James, I want to send you an AskPat teeshirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much. I appreciate you. Here is a quote to finish off the day by Jerome K. Jerome. That is: “It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.” All right guys. Take care. Thanks so much and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Once more, if you want to check out PowerUpPodcasting.com, just head over there. Sign up and you'll be first to know next week. Thanks. Bye.