AP 0117: Where Do You Get All of Your Content?

AskPat 117 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 117 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. Before we get to today's question from Manny, I do want to mention and thank today's sponsor, which is 99designs.

99designs.com, it's an awesome site that I've used several times in the past to help me with things like logo design, and website design, landing page design, and even to get a t-shirt design once as well. Because, you know, working with an individual graphic designer has its limitations. Of course timing is one of those limitations. If you want dozens of designs to choose from in just seven days, visit 99designs.com/pat, and get a $99 power pack of services, free. Again 99designs.com/pat.

All right, thanks so much, and now let's get to today's question from Manny.

Manny: Hi Pat. My name is Manny, from SmartFitnessandNutrition.net. I love your content. Very good program, and I love your podcast as well. I would just like to know, how do you come up with all your content? Where do you get all this information from? It's impossible for somebody to know all these things. How do you accumulate it? Love your program, love your show, great stuff. Keep up the good work. Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Manny, thank you so much for your question, and it's a great question because a lot of people ask me this. It's interesting, because over the course of six years of blogging, I've put out over 600 posts, over 200 episodes of podcasts now, and I don't feel like I'm going to stop any time soon. And so where does all of this content come from? Experience. And not just experience like, oh, I'm doing online business, but I'm actually writing, and reporting, and sharing information about the things that I'm doing. That's what I mean about experience. And I feel like that's the easiest way to come up with stuff to write about that is most interesting to people and most unique. Because it's always going to be about my own experiences doing these different things. That's why I call myself the crash test dummy, and I love it because it's just so easy to write stuff. If I am struggling to write stuff, I feel like I'm not doing enough stuff, if that makes sense. I'm not creating enough stuff to then pull information from and create content for all of my audience out there.

One of the best things I like to do in addition to all of that, in terms of giving me inspiration for what kinds of content to write about, or create podcasts about, or create videos about, is to get all that stuff from my audience. To have them tell me exactly what I need. And there's a few ways I know that. There's a few tricks, I guess you could say, that you can use to understand what your audience wants. Specifically, if you already have somewhat of an audience or a following, you can look at your most popular content. Go into your Google Analytics, or your Clicky Analytics and see, what is it that resonates most with your audience? When you find that out, whatever has the most page views, whatever has the most time on the page or on the website, whatever those articles are, or those podcast episodes are, do more of that. Do more things like that, because that's what your audience resonates with.

I think too many people forget to look at the analytics just for that purpose. A lot of the times we say, “Oh cool that we're getting enough traffic,” or “Oh no, we're not getting enough traffic. What can we do to respond to that?” But I think we need to look into our archives, and in our traffic numbers to see what's working and do more of that. So write about those same types of articles. Talk about those same topics in different ways. Talk about it in a completely different way, perhaps causing controversy as far as showing a different angle on something you've already covered in the past. Those are great ways to take all the pieces of content and spin them and turn them around into something new. And of course, you also have to understand that things that are deep in your archive, they should be renewed every once in a while in new posts and podcasts. Because people who are brand new to your site likely aren't going to find those things.

So again, going into your analytics, and it doesn't matter when or how far in the past something was written or published, if it's popular, bring that back to life. Write about it again. Just because you've covered it once doesn't mean you cannot cover it again.

Another trick I like to use is with my autoresponder series. So when people subscribe to my email list, I forget exactly which email it is, it might be the third, fourth, or fifth email, somewhere early on, but I ask a question—again this is automated—people get this email after a number of weeks after they subscribe, this email pops into their inbox and it says, “What would you like me to write a blog post about?” Or, “What are you struggling with right now?” Or “What can I help you with?” So, imagine this. My inbox every day is filled with people replying to this email. Every day, my audience, my target audience, the people I am actually writing for and recording podcasts for and creating videos for, they are telling me exactly what they need help with. And it's all automated. I don't have to do anything. So whenever I'm struggling to find out what content I should be creating, I just go into my email inbox and find those responses from my audience who have gone to that particular number email in my autoresponder sequence, and I just look. And it tells me exactly what I should be writing about.

Now I probably could take that a step further, and get more scientific with it. I could have a VA, for example, record all of those things and start to tally which ones are the most popular. Therefore I would know which ones I should be covering next, because those are the most popular ones, and those are the ones that are likely going to be the most helpful to my audience. Now I probably should be doing that, and you should probably be doing that too, if you have this particular thing in your autoresponder. If not, then you should add it.

Actually Derek Halpern over at SocialTriggers.com, it's the first email that he sends automatically when people subscribe. He actually says, “What are you struggling with?” And he tells me people send him pages and pages of notes on what they're struggling with. And you might think, “Aww man, you don't want to read all that. Why would you want to waste time reading all that?” It's your audience telling you exactly what's on their mind. It's them giving you the exact language that you could use on your blog posts, and your podcast episodes, on your sales pages perhaps. They are telling you everything that's going on in their head, and you need to know all that stuff.

It was Jay Abraham who said, “If you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume that you have the solution.” For instance, have you ever gotten into a conversation with somebody who, maybe you didn't even know them very well, but they just seemed to understand exactly what you were going through. I mean you're almost automatically best friends with that person, because you have a connection. And that is one of the first steps when it comes to really delivering great content to your audience. Is to understand exactly what their problems are. And if they are telling you exactly what they are, you better be listening to them. So, don't think that those emails that are coming in that are pages long, about their struggles and fears and what their problems are, all those questions that are coming into your inbox, don't hate those. You should be appreciative of those. Save those, read those, dissect those, and then act on those.

So, Manny, I hope that answers your question. I mean, I agree with you. There's no way I could just know all this stuff. I don't know all this stuff, I just do all this stuff, and I just report on it. And whatever my audience asks me for, I figure out, I experiment, I test, I “crash test dummy” things up, and I report about it. And that's how, seemingly, I know what I know. That's how I've become an authority in this space, is just by doing and implementing and being honest and authentic with people.

So, Manny, thank you so much for your question today. An AskPat t-shirt is headed your way right away. One of my VAs will be in contact with you very soon to get your information. And if any of you have a question out there that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there from that webpage. And of course, again I want to thank today's sponsor, which is 99designs.com. If you go to 99designs.com/pat right now you'll get a $99 power pack of services for free, today. It's the go-to place to get a logo design, but you can actually get anything designed through their marketplace as well. You'll have access to over 310,000 graphic designers. They have a 100 percent money-back guarantee, and seriously, it's actually really exciting. You can even get your friends and your family to vote on their favorites from the designers that compete to deliver you the best design, or whatever it is you're trying to create. Again that's 99designs.com/pat.

Now as always, I'm going to end with a quote, and today's quote is from Ray Kroc. He says, “If you work just for money, you'll never make it. But if you love what you're doing and you always put the customer first, success will be yours.”

Cheers. Thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat.