AP 0538: Why Should I Continue with Content Marketing?

AskPat 538 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 358 of Ask Pat. 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 today from somebody who goes by the name of Isloooboy, that's his nickname.

But before we get to his question, I do want to give a huge shout out and just a big congratulations to the success that Nathan Barry has been having over at ConvertKit.com. I'm actually an advisor for the company, and this is an email service provider that you can check out that I'm using now on my blog, and it is by far the coolest and best email service provider I've had access to because, I mean that's why I'm an advisor, but because it allows you to do a lot of these more advanced things that bloggers should be doing, like tagging and campaigns, and all these sort of things. Again, you just want to check it out. Head on over to AskPat.com/convertkit. Again, that's AskPat.com/convertkit.

Alright, here's today's question from Isloooboy.

Isloooboy: Hi, my name is Zeb, but online world know me in my nickname Isloooboy. My question is, give me one single reason to remain, stick with content marketing after spending five long years as field blogger who is unable to make money more than what he spent.

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up Isloooboy? Thank you so much for the question today. This is a deep question, but I'm very thankful that you said what's the one reason, and I think the number one reason why you should keep doing something, even if you're just only making enough money to recoup what you've spent, it's kind of easy. It's because you love doing it. It's because you have a passion for what it is that you're doing, and if you don't, well then why are you doing it, really? Because you're not generating a profit, you need to generate something in order to fuel yourself, to keep yourself going. If you've been doing this for five years, something has been keeping you going, and it can't be just hope. Hope that it will finally one day take off.

Like you know how they say, “Oh, the band's gonna make it!” Well, you want to first validate that it could, and make sure you're in a market that would be able to actually support you in a way that you need to be supported to be able to recoup those costs, and I would recommend checking out my book Will It Fly? You could check it out at WillItFlyBook.com, which will help you do just that. But you also want to make sure that in the way that you're running your business now, you're potentially not optimizing in the way that you could, or you could be saving more money or making more money, so using what's working now, doing more of that, doing less of what's not working, and making sure to cut cost where there are costs that aren't needed in building your business and growing your business.

But I would also make sure to survey your audience and any customers that you have, see what else that they might need, because these are the things that take you from the level that you're at now to the level beyond, and that's how you would know is you ask your audience and you figure it out. If you keep doing the same thing, you're gonna keep getting the same results, and that's probably why you've been getting the same results for the last five years.

Now, like I said earlier, the passion that you have behind whatever it is that you do, whatever that passion might be, even if it's actually not for that topic that you're talking about, there has to be a passion and a joy in what you do somewhere. So for instance, an example I like to use is my niche site over at SecurityGuardTrainingHQ.com. I'm not a security guard. My mom was a security guard, so that's a little bit of a tie-in, but beyond that I have no passion for the security guard industry. However, I do have a passion for helping people out who want to become somebody in their career, and that is the particular site that does it for those specific people. I chose that particular topic in particular because keyword research and data research and actually even going out there and seeing what the competition was like for that particular keyword led me to believe that there needed to be somebody to come in and actually tell it like it is and share all the information that one would need to become a security guard in all the different states in the US, and I did that. And that's what has helped it become successful since 2010, and it's still doing really well because I had that passion to make sure to give people the best information possible.

To go back to your original question: What's the number one reason or thing that I can say to keep going even though you're not making a profit? You need to have some sort of profit in joy, or profit in passion. That can take you a long way, and once you get a little bit more smart about your business and how it's run and optimize things and survey your audience, ask them what else they need, begin to build products. There are ways to get off the plateau that you're on. There are always ways to get off the plateau you're on, you just have to find out what those ways are. Once you do that, then you could potentially make a lot more money than you are now, so that you can begin to earn a profit. So there's a lot more involved with this question obviously, but I just wanted to answer really quick what that number one thing is. That's what's gonna keep you going, that passion and that joy for what you do, because there's a lot more to it than money. I hope you all know that.

So thank you so much for the question, I really appreciate it. We're gonna send you an AskPat T-shirt for having your question featured here on the show, thank you so much. For everybody else out there who has a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. Just hit the record button, ask your question, they come into the system here, I and my assistant listen to them and you might get featured and get a t-shirt, too. Again, check that out, ask your questions at AskPat.com.

And I also want to give another shout-out to, once again, ConvertKit. Go to AskPat.com/convertkit, that is my affiliate link; they're not sponsoring this show, but I'm just mentioning them because they're a tool that I love and that is an affiliate link, meaning I get a commission if you go through that link. I'm confident that it will be an email service provider that you're gonna be extremely happy with. Super easy to use, the most intuitive user interface and design that you could ever dream of in a email service provider. That's what Nathan's super power is, his designs, and he's been able to apply that to something where there's a big hole in the market, and that was email service, so you want to check that out. Go to AskPat.com/convertkit. ConvertKit.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day. This also comes from my book, Will It Fly? at WillItFlyBook.com, and that is, “The truth is that if you don't have a passion for what you are doing, your energy will eventually fizzle out.”

Very appropriate for today's episode. Thanks so much, I appreciate you, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.