by: AskPat 313 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What’s up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 313 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.
Awesome. Let's get to today's question from Sam.
Sam: Hey Pat, it's Sam here. I'm thinking about creating a blog and a podcast, but I just wanted to ask you, what do you think is more impactful in creating an audience or a tribe? Thanks.
Pat Flynn: Sam, what's up? Thank you so much for the question today. This is a great one because this is a very common question. Which one do I start first, a blog or a podcast? Well, I also want to throw another one out there. What about a vlog? A video blog or video channel, for example. There are a number of different platforms you could use to serve your audience.
But I think even before you get to that, you just want to make sure that you understand and envision who that audience is going to be, or who that tribe is. Who is your avatar? Who is it that you're actually serving? Because that's actually going to help you determine whether your blog is your primary platform, or your podcast, or your video channel.
Now, myself, at Smart Passive Income, I obviously have all three. A number of podcasts, a single blog, and a video channel, which is also repurposed for a video podcast on iTunes. So I've got a lot of things going on, and people know me for my marketing strategy called “be everywhere.” Be on all these platforms, make sure you don't give a person an excuse not to have you in their life based on the platform that they prefer to learn on and absorb content on.
But I will say that you need to choose one first and go with that before branching onto another. So it's really important to start with one, and not do all of them at the same time. A lot of people see that I'm everywhere and they try to be everywhere too at the same time from the start, going on all three of those different platforms: people who read, people who write, or, people who read, people who listen, people who view. Then they end up not giving any of those platforms enough juice to become successful. Their attention is divided, their efforts are divided, and none of them succeed.
So my best advice to you is to pick one of them to be your main thing, your main platform for content delivery. Then you can use the other one, and then the other one after that, after you've sort of mastered and gotten used to the systems and the workflow and the automation and what you can do to open up more time to then be able to dedicate to those other platforms.
For those of you who don't remember, October 2008 is when I started my blog. In 2009 I started my YouTube platform, and then in 2010 I started my podcast. Then in 2012, no, excuse me, 2014, I started AskPat, my second podcast. So I've added onto my primary hub, which was my blog at first, over time, in a number of different ways. But again, I did them all one at a time.
Now let's get to your main question. What is better, a blog, a podcast, or video? Well, like I said, it depends on your audience and how they best like to consume content, and also where there might be opportunity for you as well. There are a lot of blogs out there. There's over 400-500 million active blogs last time I heard, and then only about 400-500,000 podcasts. Even in the video space, there's a lot of competition, but in certain niches there's not a lot of competition.
So I can't give you a straight up answer, Sam, in terms of what would be best for you. You're going to have to do some research first, in terms of what people are responding to and how they respond. For instance, I learned, through conversation with food truck owners, that they prefer the podcast, because they are in a truck all day long and they don't have time to read blog posts, or they can't keep their eye on the video while on the road and driving. So they prefer to listen to food truck content in the podcast form. That was really interesting, and that's why there's a podcast at FoodTruckr.com, which is one of my niche sites.
So again, through conversation with your target audience, ask around to see what would be best for them. Now, you might get a mix of different answers, but again, that's a good way to validate whether one is going to be good or not good, and then you can go that direction or avoid that direction based on their answers.
Another thing that's going to be important is, what are you comfortable with? It's really hard to start on a platform that you are not comfortable with. Yes, they're all sort of uncomfortable if you're just starting from scratch, but a lot of people find that they would much rather talk than they would write. They're terrible writers, but they would much rather talk. In which case, a podcast would make more sense, and would be much easier to get over those initial barriers to provide content and start to build that tribe and start to build that audience.
For some people, they prefer to write and hate the sound of their voice. That was me. They prefer to write, and then they go that way first. Some people like and have experience with going behind the camera and getting on video, in which case doing a video podcast or a video YouTube channel might be the best way to go.
But whichever one you want to do, a blog, a podcast, or a video, again, as your primary form of delivering content, you have to have a website. Too many people are starting YouTube channels, a lot of people are starting audio podcasts, without a real sense of what happens when people absorb their content, and trying to get those people back on a website. You have to have a website for some sort of lead capture, and because when you think about it, a website is your own, and that's something you control.
When you have your videos out there on YouTube or an audio thing out there on a podcast, yes they're still your content, but they're on platforms that you have no control over. When people come to your website, that's an experience that you have full control over, making sure that customer or that reader or listener or viewer is actually enjoying and can get involved with what you're doing. Can build even more of an authority, you building more authority with them, and trust. But also collecting their email address, that's really important. You want to make sure you do that from the get-go, and you're going to need a website in order to do that.
So I feel like if you are able to choose between any of those three platforms, which one would be best? Well, I think we can all feel how big podcasting is getting right now and how mainstream it's going. It's going into dashboards of vehicles now. It's a native app in the iPhone. There are signs that this is growing even more. So if I were to get started, and if I had the selection of all three, knowing that all three were viable options to serve my audience, I would start with what currently I'm most comfortable with, which is my voice.
A lot of you know I've done a lot of podcasting over the past couple years, tuned it back a little bit with the blog, but I'm bringing that back to a weekly schedule now. But I'm very comfortable behind the microphone, so I would most likely start a podcast. But I would have a website to serve that feed, which was required anyway, or not necessarily required because you could have a feed coming off of, for example, SoundCloud or Libsyn, which are hosts for your audio files, and just go off of that without having a website.
But it's nice to have a website because then, again, you can control that feed. But then when you get people back on your website they can view the show notes, they can click on things, you can get them to take action on certain things, you can collect their email address. And then serve them even more, build even more trust and authority with them, at which point you'd be able to survey them or even just start to see what the chatter is about and what they need more help with.
“What do you want to learn more about?” is a question you always want to ask your audience, and they're going to tell you. Then you're going to be able to turn that into more podcast episodes, or sometimes written blog posts if the content is more suitable for a written platform as opposed to an audio platform. Or a product that you can sell. Or maybe it's an affiliate product that somebody else sells that you can earn a commission from. So there's a lot of ways to go about it.
But I like the idea of a podcast also, not just because it's easier for you potentially, if you are really into recording your voice and stuff like that. But also just what a podcast can do, competitively, with other podcasts that are out there. It's very easy to stand out still. Getting in that New and Noteworthy in the first eight weeks is very possible still, and ranking among other podcasts in your space and getting exposure on iTunes is great. People are still doing really well with that. It's very hard to start a blog, for example, and expect traffic and exposure to come in without putting in a little bit more hard work. There's a lot of hard work involved either way, but I like the idea of a podcast.
But also it's a great way to build an immediate connection with your audience. Because, as you're all listening right now, you're hearing my voice, and we're building a relationship right now. You're hearing the tone of my voice, and my mood, and my emotions behind it. As opposed to text, which is just kind of, you know, text. But text is important as well, so. . . you’re going to get that SEO, search engine optimization, from that. Articles that could be found in Google later. You're going to want to utilize that.
So, a podcast, along with a blog, podcast being the primary platform, but the blog there for written specific content and show notes to serve your podcast audience as well. Then collecting email addresses. So that's how I would go about it. The email addresses, that's important, that's the cherry on top here that's going to help you really put things together in terms of creating that tribe. Especially when you first start out, because that's your opportunity, as your audience is small, to really get ahold of and make a direct connection with each and every one of them. That's how you build amazing fans, raving fans, long-term tribe fans, and they're going to help spread the word for you. Because you're small and because you're just starting out, that's your unique advantage right now, over everybody else who's in that space already.
So, Sam, thank you so much for that question. It opened up a whole bunch of things there. I appreciate you all, and all of you for listening. An AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed your way for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com and you an ask right there on that page thanks to Speakpipe.com.
I also want to end, as always, with a quote. Today's quote is from Vishen Lakhiani. “It's about using the right tools, with the right triggers, within a proper marketing framework.” So that's how you succeed. “It's about using the right tools, with the right triggers, within a proper marketing framework.” Think about that.
Thanks so much, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks everybody.