AP 0913: How Do I Decide Which Content Format Is Best for Serving My Audience?

AskPat 913 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 913 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 today from Michael. But before we get to that I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks. They've been a long time sponsor of The AskPat Podcast. I love them so much, not only because they help sponsor the show and support what we do, but also they support me in my business because they help me manage my business finances. And that's what they do, they help you manage and track your expenses, your income and also help you with your invoicing. So in less in thirty seconds you can create a professional looking invoice, get it sent out, you can keep track of who owes you, who has yet to even open those invoices so you can follow up properly. It's just such an amazing tool and such a great company. If you want to check them out and try them out for thirty days for free, all you have to do is go to FreshBooks.com/askpat and just make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

Alright. Now here's today's question from Michael.

Michael: How's it going, Pat? Aloha from Eagle Valley, Colorado. My name is Mike, I'm a pastor and a trainer for over twenty years and I was wondering if you could give me some guidance, some suggestions, and some wisdom on how best I could help my pastor friends in the ministry that are unhealthy, fat, and out of shape. Now I bought your SPI theme for my website but I don't know what I'm doing. And I'm just wondering if I should start a podcast or do a video course or write an ebook or have a membership site? Or all of the above? I'm just wondering if you can give me some wisdom on how best I could put my energy towards helping my fellow friends that are in the ministry that are unhealthy? So, I'd love to hear from you; if I could get an AskPat teeshirt I'll send a picture of me working out or a video, and send it to you. Aloha, have a beautiful day, God bless.

Pat Flynn: Hey Michael, aloha, thank you so much for calling in, I appreciate it. You know it's so cool that you want to do what you can to help your pastor friends. Especially when it comes to health and fitness; I think that's so important. And a lot of us, when we need to make a change in our lives like that with our fitness and our nutrition, we need help from others because either we just don't know how to do it or we don't even know that we need to do it, or we might need that encouragement. Oftentimes it's the other people in our lives that can help us change our future in that way.

I have to thank Jeff over at TotalBodyConstruction.com. He and I meet every week, three days a week, virtually over FaceTime. He trains me in my home gym and we just crank it out. It's just been so great to have him be there to hold me accountable. I mean I will feel bad if I don't make a day or make an appointment. It's that kind of encouragement that can really have people move forward in their lives, because when I focused on fitness and health I mean, many other things have benefited as a result of that, both business and personally.

So this is just so cool Michael. I want to help out as much as I can. So you had asked about, should you start a podcast? Should you start a video course? Or an Ebook? Or membership site, or all of the above? I definitely wouldn't start with all of the above, I think that's where a lot of people fall into a lot of traps. They see someone doing many different things. Like you might see that I have my own courses, my own books, my own multiple websites, and a podcast, and a blog, and a video channel—right? I didn't create all of those at the same time. Pick one and focus on that in terms of a platform where you can start to build your audience and start to actually start to provide value to people.

Actually to kind of rewind a little bit, the first thing I would do is actually, see if you can get people who are your friends in the pastor world to kind of come on board with you to have help. You don't even need a website, or a podcast or video course, or an ebook, or a membership site to start with that. You can literally just reach out to people and say, “Hey you know what, I am a pastor too. I help people with physical fitness and I am on a mission to help my fellow pastors get healthier. I would love to be of service to you if this is something that you're interested in learning more about. Just let me know and I'll get your email, your contact info, and I'll just try to do what I can to help you out.” That way you at least start with the validation process.

This is what I talk about in my book, Will It Fly?: Narrowing down this giant goal that you have to the next step, just to see if this is something people actually want and if you can—and obviously it's going to work for you. I mean you have the passion behind it, I can feel it in your voice, and you likely have a lot of the connections already where you can already start to begin to create a list of people who know that you are there to help them. I think that's really important to start out with, because then it gives you a platform before you even have a content platform. But it just gives you access to people so that you can ask them, “How can I help you best?”

It's based on those answers, combined with your passion and what you want to do, that makes sense for you. That's what's the sweet spot. So I would want to say start a podcast, but I mean, I have a podcasting course that just came out this week, PowerUpPodcasting.com. But podcasting might not be the right platform for your audience. They might better be suited to learn from you in a video course. Or maybe they need one on one help, in which case you start with a more active role in helping them out in a more intimate fashion. Maybe it's through one on one training or group training for example. You could do it in person or even virtually just like my trainer Jeff does.

But to be there and to give direct access to you, maybe that's the way it needs to happen first? Then over time you can start to branch out into content platforms to begin to start to get more exposure to get to build your brand. Start to build an authority in the space so that people that find you for the first time will know immediately exactly who you are and what you do. But I would start exactly with your network and your friends and the people that you know, and just push it out there that this is what your mission is and see who might respond. Have a call to action to say, “You know what if this is something that you need help with, I am here to help you. I want to be your guide through this. Let me know and I'll follow up with you later on, and we can talk about how I might be able to do that.” Again, just to get that initial seed out there, just to see if this is something you can actually do. Because if you build a website or you build a video course, or you create a membership site, you're still going to need people to find it anyway, right? So why don't you just start at the root?

Now I will say that creating a podcast, creating a video course, creating a website—that can help you get exposure to people you don't have access yet. It can be a place where you can go and can start to collect email addresses. It can be a place where you can start to provide content. That's going to be helpful to everybody no matter who they are or where they're at in that journey. But again, narrowing it down, taking this big giant goal you have and just taking it to that first step, that first sort of experiment, that's where I would start, Michael. And I know you can do it; I can feel the passion in your voice. I'm real excited cause this is game-changing stuff man. You're talking my language now when you talk about the effect that health and fitness can have on your life; it's made such a huge difference in mine. To see you niche already into a space where you know people need help and to feel your passion behind it—it's just gonna be a win, right? So start at the beginning, and then utilize those networking opportunities and those relationships that you have to then determine what might be the next best step for you. I would love to say it's a podcast because I feel like podcasting is the number one platform right now to A, build a relationship with people, to B, find new people who are finding you in a space that's much less competitive than, let's say a blog or a video channel, for example. And C, it's just, if you're going to be offering any sort of service or information product down the road its just a great way to give people a taste of what you have to offer, so that when they want to work deeper with you, they'll have, already, that knowledge what that's like to work with you, or understand what it's like to get your content and learn from you.

So, how can you best help them? Have conversations with them and talk about what it is that their fears are, what it is that they're struggling with so that you can learn their language. You can empathize with them. You can learn their stories and you can help them directly, then you can branch out from there and turn it into an automated, more of a worldwide sort of presence with these other platforms.

So I'm not going to tell you which platform to start off with right now but they all are great for helping people. Then down the road, in terms of what you offer because a podcast and a video channel, and a blog for example—I mean those are free channels to provide information to build your audience to build authority. But then you have the paid products on the other side. The ebooks, membership sites, what have you. Combine your passion for what it is you want to do and how best you know how to do it, with what it is your audience needs and how that will help them best and serve them most. Then you'll find that winning combination of what to do. So start from the beginning.

Michael, thank you so much, I appreciate you and your question today. Thank you for calling in and I'm definitely going to be sending you an AskPat teeshirt so you'll hear from my assistant in the next two to three weeks. We'll collect that info from you and then we'll send it to you no charge, because that's what we do. If anybody else has a question out there and would like to be potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote for today from Mark Twain. That is, “Fewer things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.” Alright guys one more time, if you want to check out that podcasting course I was talking about just head on over to PowerUpPodcasting.com. It's open this week, closes midnight this coming Monday the 24th of July, 2017. After that, doors won't open for quite a bit. Price may even go up. But I appreciate you guys. Talk to you soon. Bye.