AP 0883: How Do I Identify My YouTube Audience?

AskPat 883 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 883 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 fantastic question coming in today from Jim, but before we get to Jim's question I just want to mention really quick and thank FreshBooks for being a sponsor of the AskPat podcast, one of the first sponsors here on the show way back in 2014 and I still love to promote them because they're awesome. They've helped me and millions of other small businesses with managing our business finances, from the income to the expenses. More recently, for me personally, is the invoicing features that they have. I bill students and things like that and it makes it really easy—in under thirty seconds we can just create a really quick but very professional-looking invoice that gets sent out. We can keep track of who owes and who has not paid yet which is the same thing as owed. Then also who has yet to open those invoices which is really handy when it comes to following through and getting paid. So check them out for thirty days for free by going to FreshBooks.com/askpat and just make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How Did You Hear About Us” section. Again that's FreshBooks.com/askpat.

All right now here's today's question from Jim.

Jim: Hey Pat, immigration attorney Jim Hacking in St. Louis, hope you're doing well. I want to say thank you for all the great content and instruction and teaching and love that you've shown all of us for all these years. I got my copy of Will it Fly?, I've read it, and my question for you is: I have about 800 plus YouTube subscribers to my channel and I send out periodic videos. I'm not entirely consistent with when I publish but I'm wondering, is there a way that I can talk to those people or contact those people? What recommendations do you have—other than speaking to them directly through YouTube—to find out who they are, what they're interested in. I'm imagining they're interested in immigration law because that's what all my videos are about, but I'm wondering if you have any tips on identifying your audience within YouTube. Thanks for everything and have a great 2017, see you.

Pat Flynn: Hey Jim, thank you so much for the question and the love, I appreciate that. Now, how can you identify your YouTube audience? Well it's not as easy as we would hope, right? Because with YouTube we only get so many insights from YouTube based on who is watching our videos. We get some data, based on what countries they might be from and how long they're watching and all those kinds of things, but who are they really and how can we figure out more about them so we can help and serve them more? Really that's what online business is about, right, finding out more about the problems and the pains and who exactly our audience is so we can come up with solutions for them. So how do you do that?

Well with any platform the best and number one way to do that is to invite them onto your email list and to do that you want to offer some sort of incentive. I would do—in your videos Jim, your future videos—I would offer at the end of your videos some sort of incentive. It doesn't have to be very big either, it can be just a checklist or a quick start guide or something handy that your audience would want to download. They go to a landing page so you mention the URL, hopefully very easy to get to and of course you can include that link in the description as well. Then on that URL, when they land on that page (hence landing page) they have the ability to get that thing by including their email address, and name if you'd like, in exchange for it.

You can set that up through something like ConvertKit or whatever email service provider you have. You likely have the ability to do this; if you wanted to get fancy with it you could use a too like Leadpages to make it really easy for you to actually create these lead pages. You can split test them, you can change things really easily, so Leadpages is a great tool as well, but more than that it really comes down to the incentive and the lead magnet that you're offering them.

That way you get them on your email list and you can then have a conversation with them. You can engage in a conversation with them. You can ask them questions, even in an automated fashion. For example, one of my favorite things to do, Jim, is in your autoresponder sequence, include a question. That question might be something like, “What are you struggling with?” Or “Tell me a little bit about yourself.”

And yes, you're asking for people to reply. That's going to immediately help you stand out from everybody else because very often people who send emails, they aren't really asking for replies so first of all, you're going to get your audience to respond and engage with you which will help them engage with you further down the road, and transact with you from that small way into a much bigger way down the road, hopefully. But more than that, you're going to be able to understand through these emails—in an automated fashion if done this way—exactly what your audience needs help with. You can rephrase that question in different ways. For example, “What's a video you'd like me to create in the future?” Or, “What blog post do you want to see me write that hasn't been written yet or you haven't found?”

These are great ways to really quickly understand what it is that you should be doing, but more than that it helps you just have a conversation with them and some of those people you might find will have very interesting stories. I would even go from your email list to a Skype call or phone call to just chat with them and talk to them. That's one of my favorite things to do. Every month I try to make an effort to get 10 people on a call with me or on a Skype call so I can just literally talk to them, ask them questions and see what's working for them and what's not working for them, what could be done to improve the experience on SPI and those kinds of things. Those kinds of conversations have had a massive effect on my business and they can on yours too, Jim.

That's really the trick, that's how you go about it. You could also go, if you don't want to do email . . . Do email. But you could also do social media so you can bring people from your videos onto a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook, connect with you there, and then it'd be again easy to have a direct conversation with them through something like a direct message and then potentially lead up into more engaged conversation on the phone or on Skype, for example. You don't even need a lead incentive to do that, but again those lead magnets do really help and getting people on an email list where people can be very open with you in their replies is definitely the best way to go.

So Jim, thank you so much for the question, I appreciate you and want to wish you all the best. I also want to send you an AskPat teeshirt 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 as well, ask away. Just go to AskPat.com and after your question gets featured like Jim's, you'll hear from my assistant in the next three to four weeks and we'll get that hooked up for you free of charge no matter where you live. So stoked to hand those out and stoked for all your attention and time and your questions because, hey, this show wouldn't exist if it wasn't for your questions. So thank you for that.

Then finally, I have a quote to finish off the day by Charles William Eliot and that quote is, “One could get a first-class education from a shelf of books five feet long.” True that . . . or with a free YouTube account, right?

By the way guys, really quick, couple days left in the open enrollment period for my new course Smart From Scratch, so if you are at the point at which you are already building an audience, you already have a business, don't worry this product's not for you; but if you're just starting out and you're waiting for the right time, well here's a good excuse. SmartFromScratch.com is now open for enrollment. It closes Friday, prices will go up the next time enrollment opens so for now get it while it's hot, SmartFromScratch.com. Cheers, thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat, bye.