AP 0164: Can I Skip a Website and Just Use My Facebook Page for Affiliate Income?

AskPat 164 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 164 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Before we get to today's question from Kevin, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com, a site, one of the many sites that I wish I knew about when I was first starting, because it helps you take control of your finances for your business—helps you with invoicing; just helps you, especially during taxes. I remember the first couple of years doing taxes, it was like all the excel spreadsheets and everything that I had to figure out and hand over to my CPA, and it was just a mess. Do yourself a favor. You're an entrepreneur. You don't need to waste your time doing things you don't need to do. Let the software do it for you. FreshBooks.com is one of the many that you should be getting involved with. GetFreshBooks.com, and enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section to start your free trial today.

Awesome. Now, let's get to today's question from Kevin.

Kevin: Hey, Pat. This is Keven Sibillia from SoccerPracticeVideos.com and I have a website and I have a Facebook page. My question is, can I forgo having a website page and just have a Facebook page, and do the same things to generate income via affiliate marketing or ad placement on my Facebook page? I appreciate any help. Thanks for everything you do, and have a wonderful day.

Pat Flynn: Kevin, thank you so much for your question today. It's interesting, because I know a lot of people who are generating an income with their Facebook page. I know a lot of people who are generating an income solely on Twitter or on LinkedIn or even on YouTube, yet they don't have a website. And every time I hear one of these stories, it's like I cringe a little bit. And I know my buddy Chris Ducker, I know exactly what he would be saying, because we've dealt with this before in our 1-Day Business Breakthrough events, which happen every once in a while whenever he comes to the US. It's just ridiculous.

You absolutely need a website. What if Facebook were to shut down tomorrow? And yes, it probably won't shut down tomorrow, but it can make changes that can affect your business. We've seen this time and time again, especially with Facebook. Facebook loves to make changes, especially since they went public and they're trying to make money for their investors. They've since cut off like 92 percent of our audience who's on our Facebook page, and are making us pay for boosting our posts or ads to show our status updates to everybody who has already given us permission to send them status updates. It ridiculous what they can do, and they can do something else completely different tomorrow. You need to take control of your business, and if you put your business in the hands of something like Facebook, Twitter, even Google, you are risking everything. And you don't want to kick yourself for not being smart and creating a website where you can have control, not only in the search engines but also with customer experience or the experience of your users, people taking your tutorials. If you were just relying on Facebook, you are not giving yourself the best chance to succeed, but also you're not giving yourself the best chance to serve your audience as well.

Facebook is pretty limited. Twitter is extremely limited. LinkedIn and YouTube are limited in customer experience, and you want those places to be the start of a conversation and always drive people back to your website. The website is where all the action happens. It's where people buy stuff. It's where people click and share things mostly, and it where's you can get the most leverage. I mean, you can build an email list off of your website much easier than it is to build an email list off of Facebook. And yes, there are tools that are available today that could allow us to do everything without a website, but again, you want to do anything you can to take control of your customer experience, your user experience, and just your business. Why would you ever put your hands in the business of somebody else?

So, don't just have a Facebook page. You can use Facebook as your primary social media platform, but it sort of becomes another leg of your business. The hub should be your website, absolutely, even if you have an audio-centric or even a video-centric page. I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk got very good results with videos, obviously. He started Wine Library TV and all that stuff, but it wasn't just on YouTube; he always brought people back to his website. He always brought people back to his page. Tim Ferriss, podcast, killing it. Number one on iTunes right now in business, and he's always bringing people back to his website, and he's now building an email list and selling products and books and stuff like that. Like, man, it just makes life so much easier, especially when you think about it in terms of communicating with your audience.

Yes, Facebook is great; people are on Facebook, but you're not going to be able to reach everybody unless you pay, and even then you don't even know exactly what's going on behind the scenes. But most importantly, you don't know what changes are going to be made down the road. If you build your business on any one of those platforms and only on any one of those platforms, it could easily change tomorrow, or it could go away, just like MySpace did, even though it's coming back, but it's more music centric now. The point being, don't risk it; have a website. Yeah, you've got to have a website. Do it. It's not that hard to create.

You can go to AskPat.com/start to go to my getting started page if you're just starting online. Perhaps you already have a following on Facebook or Twitter. You can start learning about passive income and setting up a website on your own at that page. AskPat.com/start.

Kevin, I hope that answers your question, and sorry that you were let down like that, but I say it over and over and over again. But you are taking a huge risk if you just promote on Facebook. You can do a lot more with your website, and again, the customer experience is huge. You want a business that will last you forever, right, or at least a really long time. Not as long as somebody else tells you, but as long as you can keep control and keep adding value, and the best way to do that is through your own website.

Awesome, Kevin, and thank you again so much for the question. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way for having your question featured here on AskPat, and my assistant will be contacting you very soon about getting your details for that. For those of you who are listening to this, if you have a question that you would like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat. You can ask using any sort of mic or device that you have. Even on your phone, it's so good. I'd love to hear from you and answer your question. We're, what are we up to, 164. This is so awesome, and there's a lot of questions coming in. I can't wait until we get to 1,000. I'm shooting for 1,000, which is obviously going to take like three years to do that, but I'm not stopping this. This is so much fun. I'm enjoying it a lot, and just hearing the feedback from you guys is really what makes it keep moving forward. Head over to iTunes, find AskPat and leave a review and a rating and it just helps me move forward and keeps me pumped for pumping out the content here for you.

Again, 100 percent free, and again, thanks to our sponsors for the show, which help keep everything moving and paying for the assistance to help put this together. FreshBooks.com. Again, if you'd like to get a free trial. It's an amazing piece of software. It's on the cloud; you can access it from any device and again you don't have to waste your time doing things you don't have to. You should be working on big-item things, and using software like this makes your life so much easier, again, especially during tax season. So, again, head on over to GetFreshBooks.com and enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section to get a free trial.

Thanks again, and I have a wonderful quote today to end the show from Steve Jobs, one of my all-time favorite sort of quotes and stories. So, here it goes. He says, “When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like, ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, some day you'll most certainly be right.' It made an impression on me, and since then for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' Whenever the answer has been ‘no' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.” Steve Jobs, you were an amazing man. RIP. Love ya, and thanks, everybody out there who listens to the show, and thank you. Cheers.