by: AskPat 937 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 937 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online questions five days a week.
We have a great question coming in today from Bryce.
Bryce: Hey Pat, this is Bryce and I was just wondering about your experience with your course making, successful course-making, now that you've been through the ins and outs and struggles of creating it. I'm wondering if you would change anything in your Will It Fly? book with the new knowledge that you have, and if so what is it?
Pat Flynn: Hey Bryce, what's up? Thank you so much for the question. I appreciate that. It's always interesting to reflect back on what you wish you had known or what you wish you had done differently. There were a number of different things in my past that I wish I had done differently. For example, like I talked about in the last episode of AskPat, I wish I did courses for GreenExamAcademy.com. I'm beyond that point now and I'm a little bit out of the loop in that industry, although that site still continues to do very well. I wish I had done that. I would've probably two or three-X'd my income as a result of doing that. I also wish that I had started my email list sooner, absolutely. I also wish that I started working with virtual assistance in building a team sooner.
Now, related to Will It Fly?, I was very, very happy with how well that was executed. I wish for one thing not related to the courses, which I know you referenced, but one thing I wish we did differently was just gave ourself a little bit more—my team and I, I wish we gave ourselves a little bit more time to plan out how it was going to be launched in terms of just the timing. We were really, really rushed in packing everything. We kind of overworked a few people who were key members in terms of getting the book packaged and putting it together. For example, the designer who is designing the Kindle version of the book, we were really, really leaning on him pretty hard. We definitely thanked him for it obviously, in the end, and we're just grateful for his work.
Anyway, related to the course, I did a pretty good job of leading people into my email list from that book. Again, for those of you who may have—it's been a while or maybe you haven't read it yet, I offer a free online companion course using Teachable, which is the same course software that I used for my paid courses. That was my first test with Teachable, which was really nice. I'm a paid affiliate and also advisor for the company, just for Teachable now, because I just love them so much. I use them for the free companion course for Will It Fly?, which allowed me to collect email addresses. In that companion course, it's essentially laid out chapter by chapter just like the book and within each chapter if there are links, that's where they're mentioned [Full Disclosure: I'm a compensated advisor and an affiliate for Teachable.]. If there are things that I teach, I create small short videos to help people walk though those things and just any other extras, and of course downloads for exercises and sheets and things like that too. That worked out really well and that allowed me to build a relationship with those people, understand more about them. That list is over 15,000 or so right now and that allowed me to then utilize that list to then build out the first online course that I promoted. It's still available, although I don't know if the doors are going to be open by the time this episode comes out, but it opens and closes every once in a while, and that's SmartFromScratch.com. That worked out really, really well. Then, the next course was a power up podcasting course called Power-Up Podcasting at PowerUpPodcasting.com.
I learned a lot from that as well. I was really happy with the sequence of the way that I ran it, the way that collected email addresses. If there's one thing I wish I could do differently, which I can do because the book is self published—it's printed on demand through CreateSpace and I can always just update the Kindle version really easily—is I can mention the course specifically and talk about Smart From Scratch and tease it or at least seed it in the book in different places so that by the time people hear about it down the road in the sequences, they're then able to realize or remember that and it just continues that conversation. Instead of just out of the blue, “Hey, now you can pay for this course,” I can inject it into the book and have it be there to warm people up to it. That's the cool thing about self publishing and doing it in the print on demand style like that, is you can always make changes. I will likely do that in the future. That's what I would change and I'm just very happy with it, so still learning a lot though. The one thing I wish I had done differently with the Smart From Scratch launch is I wish I had emailed more. With Power-Up Podcasting, I emailed essentially every day during the launch and that had so much more a of a positive effect versus the negative outcome as a result of that. I only had one person complain that I was emailing too much versus not emailing at all and having people even miss out on the opportunity.
There you go, Bryce, great question. Thank you so much. I appreciate you and I will send over an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com and you can ask right there on that page.
Thank you so much. I appreciate you all for listening in, and here's a quote to finish off the day. This is another anonymous quote, but it's a great one too and that is: “Things could be worse. Suppose your errors were counted and published every day, like those of a baseball player.” So good. All right, guys, take care. Thanks so much and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.
Pretty cool when the Cubs won the World Series. Right? Who was it over? Was it over Miami?
