SPI 857: Social Media Is Changing… This Is Where You Can Build an Audience the Fastest

Pat Flynn: You know what's crazy right now? There's probably somebody with half your expertise building a massive audience while you're still trying to figure out which platform to focus on. You're spreading yourself thin. You're wondering if you've chosen the right lane, or maybe you've chosen too many at the same time.

And like I said, you're just spreading yourself thin and these people. They're not necessarily working harder than you. They're not as smart as you, they just pick the right platform and they're doing the right things on them. See, social media and platforms that you can publish on, they're changing dramatically.

TikTok's algorithms, they're creating huge opportunities for people. YouTube Shorts is suddenly rewarding creators like never before. LinkedIn Organic is surprising everyone, but here's the thing. While every platform can work, not every platform will work for you. So today, I'm going to show you exactly where you should be focusing your energy based on who you are and how you create.

I'm going to go through each of the different platforms. Some are social media, some are more like YouTube. And no fluff, no try everything advice, just a clear roadmap. to building an audience as quickly as possible so that you can then take that audience and put them into something like an email list or a stand store or something like that.

And then you can own what you've grown and generate revenue from there. So let's dive right in. Again, the idea here being you focus on one for a certain period of time, I would say 60 days, 30 days could be a good experiment as well, but you choose one and you go for it. And if you happen to be on many of them for right now, you literally stop posting on all but one.

I know that might be hard, I know you might have your systems in place, and if you do and it seems to be working fine, but it would behoove you to experiment and see what would happen if you just took all that energy and put it just into one. Kind of like, you know those flashlights? Like this happened the other day, I was out on a lake early in the morning, before sunrise, and my son and I, we had a flashlight.

And the flashlight's one of those where you can kind of twist the lens, and if you twist it, it gets more focused, and if you twist it the other way, it just kind of spreads out. And it's Cool. Okay. You could spread out, but then when you spread it out, it's not very lit, but if you're looking for a specific point or a specific bush or something like that, or just better direction and brightness, you know, you put that laser focus on and you're good to go.

So that's what we want to do here. Okay. So let's start with. Now YouTube, I'm going to break into two different sections. We talk about YouTube a lot. I'm heavily invested and getting rewarded on YouTube. And I know many of you are as well, but if you are considering YouTube or on it, let's just kind of validate it here.

So really it is perfect for patient. Creators, patient creators who know that it's going to take some work who enjoy teaching, who enjoy storytelling, who can commit to consistent production schedules. It is not there for those seeking for overnight results. There are some platforms where you can get some overnight results, but they're not going to be as long term relationships that you'll build there.

It's not going to be something that's going to be very fruitful because it's just. Quick, and then kind of one and done, kind of like a person visiting your house for Halloween, they kind of get what they need and then they leave, versus a person sitting down and enjoying your restaurant, becoming a lifelong fan, that kind of thing.

That's what could happen. on YouTube. A huge benefit is it has a very high long term earning potential. Once you get into a rhythm there, once you have these videos out there and you start to find out who you are and how you tell story and how you show up, there is a lot of ad revenue to be made on YouTube.

There's a lot of ability to take those people who come across your multiple videos, they're subscribed, they come and see you every week, every other week, how often you publish. And you build a relationship with them and they come to your email list. They want to buy your product because they want to get more from you.

You can hire people who want to get coaching from you because they're getting asynchronous coaching from watching your videos, but they want to talk to you directly. And that comes with a price. So coaching and done for you services. Can be very, very well managed and well sold on a platform like YouTube.

It is a search engine. Of course, I don't focus too much on the search engine capabilities, although that is there, and it's the second most popular search engine after Google. The benefit really is going to be the, what they call suggested traffic and browse traffic. That's where your video will show up on a person's homepage or.

After a person watches another video gets recommended to them and they're not even subscribed It's just what YouTube believes they want to watch next and if you nail the title and thumbnail Which is the first moment of potential kind of interruption or attention grabbing that is going to do very very well for you In addition long form YouTube videos perform very well in an evergreen fashion I mean there are certain exceptions to this rule If you're doing time based news things or sports, what happened today in the baseball game kind of stuff, that stuff's not going to last as long, but if you build your content so that the stories continue on or so that the lessons remain relevant, these things can really start stacking on each other.

Every video feeds into all the other videos and things can grow from there and the evergreenness, the usefulness of those videos for your brand can stack on one another in a really, really. Great way to grow your brand, grow your subscribership, build loyalty, garner authority, and also of course, generate revenue.

And you can build strong brands on YouTube with long form for sure. Now, like with anything, there are weaknesses. So in addition to key strengths with each of these platforms that I'm going to guide you through today, we're going to talk about the key weaknesses and a key weakness on YouTube for a long form video.

And when I say long, I mean, Not the vertical videos, but the horizontal videos that are, you know, more than three minutes in length. Right? They're three to however long. I've created videos that are hours long, in fact, that have done very well. Whatever the case may be, because it's more than just like a video shot on your phone that you can post immediately like a short, it is a little bit slower to grow.

There is something to be said for quantity with any platform. The more you publish, the quicker you learn. The more you publish, the more that's out there for people to potentially find you, and for you to get in front of them. But with long form, especially if you are spending time with either storyboarding or crafting a story, it can be really slow at the start.

Especially if you've never done video before, because It takes a lot of courage to hit publish and to start talking to the lens of your camera and then to edit and put the stuff out. Sometimes it could take weeks to create a video that's only 8 to 10 minutes in length. And I've spoken to a lot of people, even my good friends, like Rick Mulready, who recently started his YouTube channel that's now grown.

By the way, Rick, I know you listen to the show. I want to congratulate you in front of everybody. You are now over 40, 000 subscribers on your Rick Mulready channel. On YouTube talking about AI, and it was just like, he'll vouch for this slow initial growth, but he's ramping up his videos are seeing tens of thousands of views now because he just got started and he fought through those initial kind of hardships with getting in front of the camera for the first time.

He's doing an amazing job. So Rick, super proud of you. I just wanted to share you as an example here. It is a significant time investment. It is going to require a lot of energy and effort. And there's a bit of a technical curve as well, because likely you were crafting these stories where you have voiceovers over this stuff.

If you're doing like essay type documentaries type stuff, you're going to have to produce those. In post edit, the voiceovers, it might require more locations for you to go to more research, those kinds of things. But this is why these things get watched for longer because there's a story. There's something that you share in the beginning that hooks people to the end.

And that's what you must do. So let's talk about some must do practices. So we talked about key strengths. Key weaknesses must do practices strong hook first 7 to 10 seconds. I need to know why am I here? What is this going to do for me? Every viewer, this goes for every platform. Everybody is selfish. We want to know what's in it for us.

And on YouTube, it's especially important. Significantly important because you're putting so much time and effort into the storytelling in the long form video that if you don't nail the hook, then there's literally no reason for a person to stick around. And if people leave early, if people leave within the first 30 seconds, Then, that signals to YouTube that, well, okay, well, people who see this don't stick around, so let's not share it with anybody else, right, and that's where you get less impressions, you get throttled impressions.

The reverse is true, though. If you hold people for a long time, YouTube will help you. YouTube will support you. They'll send it out to more people because, when you think about it, you're helping YouTube keep people on the platform, which makes them more money. So when you help YouTube, YouTube will help you got to optimize your titles and thumbnails.

That is another must do. We call it the click and stick strategy in our YouTube from scratch course. And the click is the title and thumbnail and the stick is the retention. So that's the hook and the storytelling. And then the last thing you must do here. I mean, there's a lot of things, but other than just hit publish and go, which is going to teach you more than anything, study the analytics.

The more you look at your analytics, you go into your videos and you'd say, okay, you look at the retention graphs. Where are people dropping off? Go to that part in the video. In fact, the retention graph is nice because inside of YouTube's analytics, you go to the point at which it drops off and it will.

It shows a little video of what's happening at that moment in your video and you can go, Oh, that's where I just kind of blabbered on about something. I'm going to not do that the next time. Or you see a nice flat kind of length of time in your retention graph. Great. That means whatever you said right before that or however you're delivering that content during that time is keeping people on board.

So study that. Do that. Click through rates. Watch time. Those are all really key engagement. These are kinds of things that you must. Must pay attention to the analytics, common pitfalls, chasing perfection early on. If you try to get it perfect upfront, you're never going to hit publish. And that means you're never going to learn and you're never going to put it out there for people to potentially find not niching down enough.

I think when we try to create too much general content, that's out there. You are not going to really get a person to go, Ooh, this is for me. Right. They're going to go on. This is, is this for me? Is this not for me? It seems to be for everybody, but like I need something a little bit more specialized. Other pitfalls are poor thumbnail design.

Don't tell the whole story in the thumbnail. I see it all the time. You put little images of everything across the entire story that you're trying to tell, or the entire lesson that you're trying to share, just one image that is focused, that incites curiosity that plays with the title. If you include words in your thumbnail, don't have it match exactly the same words as the title.

That's redundant. Have it be a word that might intrigue somebody related to the title that they have just read. Right, so poor thumbnail design. Inconsistent uploading. You gotta stay consistent. It's really, really key. That's how you build audience. That's how you build a rapport with those people that are watching, but also with YouTube.

YouTube begins to learn your upload schedule and help you out if you can help them, again, get in front of more people. So, to finish off with YouTube longs, I'll call it, the best practice would be to commit to six months. Six months of consistent uploads for one video per week, ten to fifteen minutes in length.

Now don't take that as you must have a ten minute video and if it's nine minutes it's never going to work. No. The videos need to be as long as they need to be. I mean, you can have a very valuable five minute video just in general. Try to shoot for videos that are kind of around that length. That's a good length, 10 to 15 minutes.

Initially six month goals, you can get to a thousand subscribers in six months. In fact, in many cases, if you just study like what we teach inside of YouTube from scratch, inside of our SPI community. I mean, we've had people get to a thousand subscribers in less than a month by just following some simple rules.

I've shared many of them with you already to help you and staying consistent and don't worry about the views. Yes, worry about the analytics and use the views to understand why or why not certain things have happened. But you want to worry about staying consistent more. That is going to be the win here.

And that's going to be a common theme throughout all of these platforms that we're talking about, all these publishing methods, right? Just shoot for the goal of consistently showing up in the rate that you want to. Commit to that. And the numbers will happen and the numbers will happen the way they're supposed to.

And then you can assess afterwards whether or not you want to continue. Speaking of continue, let's continue with YouTube shorts. And this is specifically for YouTube. We will be talking about Instagram as well as Tik TOK and other short type platforms. But let's talk about YouTube specifically. So YouTube shorts are.

Really, really great for quick tip creators, those testing things on YouTube. What I love about shorts is it's a perfect experimental ground, right? You can experiment for something with something for like 30 days and you can just kind of show up for 30 days straight and try a bunch of things and you can try different content.

It's a great sort of stepping stone into the world of video. If you aren't really great at editing and you just kind of want something quick and simple. You know, you don't need to be a flashy editor to hold a person's attention. Again, hear about it when we get into the tips in this section, but the hook is going to be really key.

And there are people who don't do any edits at all. They just talk to the camera or they show something that they're doing while they're talking or create a voiceover. And these are highly engaged videos that are wonderful. Some key strengths. Well, it leverages YouTube's platform. There's a lot of people who are on YouTube and YouTube Shorts I think are, what is it, a billion views a day?

I don't even know, it's ridiculous. Just on the Shorts shelf alone. The Shorts feed, it's crazy. Lower production requirements, like I said. Quick audience feedback. You'll be able to tell rather quickly what is working and what is not after even just a week of publishing daily. And if you can go even more than daily, Some of my favorite creators, I just happened to catch four or five times a day.

I would still focus on quality, or I should say value, having value in what it is that you share and showing up. And again, not worrying about the numbers. You just consistently show up. It will start to work, but quantity is still key. Don't sacrifice value though. That's what I'm trying to say. You want to still have some value, but you don't have to have the highest quality stuff.

In fact, sometimes the more raw stuff is more real. It's more relatable. And that's what I love about this too. It's as if it's okay that you're just talking to the camera. It's as if when you're watching, it's like, Oh, this person's in the room with me, right? I see a lot of videos. Where I watched till the end, a person's telling a story for several minutes.

They're just in their car. They're like waiting for their kid to come out of practice or something. And they're just talking to the camera about something that I'm interested in. Right. And if you do have the opportunity to have both a long form channel and a short form component within it, then sometimes if the audience is overlapping, the shorts can turn into long form viewers and even vice versa.

Not always the case. In general, same audience, same channel. Different audience, different channels. So some key weaknesses, however, it's less predictable than long form. The algorithm is very finicky. It's changing all the time. I mean, the other one is too for the long forms, but it just seems like you can do the exact same thing the next day and it won't go anywhere.

So it's a little bit harder to predict. It's harder to monetize directly. You can monetize on YouTube Shorts, but I mean, we're talking 10 cents every. Thousand views versus on longs, depending on your niche, you can get anywhere between 5 to 50 for every thousand versus 10 cents. So that's what, for every million views, you're getting a hundred bucks.

That's not a lot. Monetization just doesn't happen on only ads. It can happen by bringing people to your program or talking about it or bringing them to your shop or showing the thing that you're selling. And those things are possible too. And the other key weakness here is there is a need for frequent posting.

It's, it's just not going to work. It will not work if you just are infrequent, the more the better. And it's sad, but that's how the algorithms work. Must do practices hook in the first second. You have to have some visual, some movement. I mean, think about it. People are doom scrolling. I mean, they're flipping through until they find something that catches their eye that we're basically like on, what is it?

Tinder with our audience, we have to catch a person's attention or they're just going to swipe away. So what can you say? What can you show? What can you do? You have to think about that single clear message per short going all over the place. It's not going to work. That's why in general like the top five tips or whatever on shorts don't work very well because it's like people just need the one.

So if you have like a top five tips thing that worked somewhere else, break it up into five different shorts that could work really, really well. So post consistently once a day. Is ideal two to three is actually better per day, every other day, probably minimum, but it's not going to work as well. If you're going to do this, do it.

And like I said, you're going to laser focus on it. So daily. And when you do this daily, you will learn how to do it even better and even faster, get more comfortable with it, et cetera. And every once trending sounds. Trends aren't as important anymore where you're using the song that everybody else is using or the same dance or anything like that.

I wouldn't even worry about that. That's what people think that shorts and TikTok and reels have to be like, where you have to just dance to get attention. No, now it's about the hook and talking to the people that you believe this video is for. And remember a person's doom scrolling. How are you going to help them understand what's in it for them?

So some common pitfalls are, I mean, this one's if you also have a TikTok and you repost on Instagram. Reposting the one with the watermark is just doom, don't do that. No clear value proposition, you're kind of just blabbering on, again, hook is really, really important. Too many topics at once. Weak hooks. I mean, they're, yeah.

Don't even worry about and stress about thumbnails or anything like that. Like, people don't see the thumbnails unless they're coming to your page. But the massive growth comes from when people see it while they're flipping through and your video shows up. So, timeline and metrics. Commit to 60 days. I mean, I would do 60 days.

Try to get 60 days, 60 videos, if not more, 45 to 60 seconds for each. I mean, again, they can be as short as 15. I would say if you do this, you can have multiple videos that have over 10, 000 views and you can get 2, 500 subscribers within 60 days. I mean, it's very possible for sure. Next, let's talk about TikTok, which is pretty similar to YouTube shorts.

There's going to be a lot of overlap here. However, there's some special things with the TikTok algorithm that we want to talk about as well. TikTok in particular is really great for high energy creators who can post frequently. In fact, there is a strategy here where you could post both on YouTube shorts.

And I think that is something that can work really, really well if you just get the systems in place. If you just do one, it doesn't take very long to just literally publish to the other. Trouble with doing that is now your focus is broken up, especially when it comes to the community and the comments that are happening there.

But that's not as big of a worry, but it is a great platform. Issue with it is it's really unknown whether it's going to continue to be here or not. It was banned at one point. It kept being mentioned to be banned or it might be sold, but if it's sold, it's going to change because it's not TikTok's algorithm anymore.

It's whoever bought it. The strength of TikTok is its algorithm. It is probably out of all the platforms here today. The one where you could probably grow the fastest. There is monetization opportunities on there as well. You can generate more revenue. I generate about a third of the amount of revenue on TikTok than I do with YouTube shorts, just FYI.

And that's just, again, a fraction of, of YouTube longs in terms of ad revenue. But let's talk about more of the key strengths here for TikTok fastest growing growth potential. Like I said, powerful discovery algorithm has a search capability. Sure. But it's again, the feed. And again, this is why it's important for your videos to be very niched and very purposeful for a group of people because The algorithm will find those people.

There's really good built in editing tools, there's a quick feedback loop, meaning you'll rather quickly see what is working and what is not. Which is great. The key weaknesses though are the videos have a pretty short lifespan. In general, there are many cases where videos will pop off and do well for a very, very long time.

But in general, that's very rare. Keeping up with the algorithm and staying on top of it and continuing to create is going to be really important. So the longevity of these videos aren't really great, but when you show up and you're in real time and you're talking about real life things that relate to the real life people that are there, I mean, you're showing up.

It's so easy. You just put on the phone, you just take your phone, shoot yourself filming the video and talking and you're there or shooting the thing or. You know, offering your tips or telling that story. There is a need for constant content, just like on YouTube shorts. And there is platform stability issues.

Again, like I said, is this going to be around? I don't know. Some must do practices. You know what works really, really well on TikTok? Taking somebody else's video that was already proven to be successful and you take the beginning of that other person's video and if they've enabled it, which you will know if you can try to stitch it, it will either let you or not.

And stitch means you're going to add on to a certain section of that video. So you could watch one of my videos, for example, and it's the first 10 seconds and then it cuts to you. Reacting to it or talking about it or, you know, validating it or countering it, whatever it might be. This works really well because the hook was already proven.

Go to a creator that you follow in the niche that you're in. Take one of their videos that is very popular and stitch the beginning of it. Maybe you're answering the same question that they're answering, or maybe you are commenting on it, or you disagree with this person. The hook is already there. It's not you actually, it's them.

And you could see by the analytics, cause you can go in and literally see how many views all these videos have from other people. And then you can kind of just piggyback off that. So doing the stitching thing works really, really well. Posting multiple times, if you can, there is a very, very strong community aspect on TikTok with the people that follow you.

I feel like more than any other platform. For shorts, like you can talk to them and talk to them as a community, give them a name. And this is something that like, I just feel like TikTok does really, really well. Again, it's really good at finding the right people for the right videos. That is the strength of TikTok.

And it's why people's algorithms are so keyed in on who they are, right? And so if you can show up and. You know, integrate yourself into their daily life. I mean, people are watching my take talks before they go to bed every single night. It shows up right on time for them every single time I publish because I publish the same time every day and they look forward to it.

And they're like, Hey, good to see you again tonight, Pat. I'll see you tomorrow. That kind of thing like that kind of feel happens on tick tock, which is really cool. Some common pitfalls, though, are that. You don't want to overproduce these things. Again, I think the more raw the videos, the better. The more real life these things are, the more a person's going to connect with you.

Same thing as YouTube shorts, inconsistent posting is not going to really help at all. You want to stay consistent and post once a day, kind of minimum if possible. And. Kind of have that be the boundary for you. What would it take for you to post once a day? How much time potentially might you need or need to carve out?

And what should you say no to when it comes to the productions that you're putting together for TikTok so that you can get to that once a day publication schedule? The other pitfall is not taking advantage of, like I said, the stitching and the commenting. The commenting is a really great thing too. You can do this on other platforms too, but really It works really, really well on TikTok.

If a person replies to one of your videos, you can actually create a video with that reply then being shown on the screen. So you can now show that you are engaged with the community, but maybe a person says something that was incorrect or supports what you're sharing. And then you can further that. And again, it allows you to address individual people in the comments.

And this works really, really well. This is how you start to create. two or three videos a day because you're not producing with a camera separately and then post editing and all this stuff that's not even required. You can have these sort of like really engaging conversations, show these comments on the next video that you share that get put into the feed and on your page.

And again, the more the merrier. The more the merrier. So timeline and metrics, I would go for again, 60 days here daily and you could repurpose if you wanted to, but if it feels like it's starting to get a little bit like a chore to do that, then don't just be sure if you do repurpose that you don't publish on Instagram or on, on YouTube, the one with the tick tock watermark.

And I would say that you get. I would say 5, 000 followers and consistently get 1, 000 views per video. I mean, how huge would that be for you to just focus? Like, this is what I'm saying. The power of this, like just focusing on one of these alone. Now there's always going to be that drawback of putting all your eggs into one basket, which is why we're doing this for a short period of time, which is why we want to eventually bring these people from whichever platform we grow on to our email list or to our stand store and start showing them the other things we have to offer.

So let's move on to Instagram now. So Instagram is great, especially for visual brands and lifestyle content creators. If you do a lot of things with your hands or the locations that you're in, those types of things, I feel like Tik Tok is better suited for face to camera while Instagram is not as great for face to camera.

Right. That being said, it can work. I have seen brands on there and I do follow people who do face to camera on Instagram, but take talk. It feels like that. That's more not welcomed. It just performs better there. But again, Instagram with reels is another place for you to publish those things, right?

Because there's Instagram reels, there's Instagram stories, and there's Instagram posts. So posts can be videos as well. There's a lot. To uncover with Instagram. So I'm going to talk about Instagram more of in a general sense. We've, I think I've covered a lot of short form strategies and a lot of those strategies will work for Instagram reels as well.

Instagram stories are great stories. If you are doing stories, it's not necessarily a great way to quote unquote grow because you're mostly in general, sharing those stories with people who already follow you. So I like. Tacking on Instagram stories, just to kind of talk about this real quick. I like tacking on Instagram stories, just in moments of the day where I'm doing something that may be interesting to those people who already follow me.

I don't fine tune those. I just might take a picture and go, look where I'm at, or, Hey, this thing caught my eye, or what do you think of this? Or run some sort of poll or something. I try to create at least one story a day on Instagram, just to kind of continually and more deeply engaged with those who've already subscribed or who already see my videos or my reels.

So stories are there to kind of like amplify and build even stronger relationships with people. And I love Instagram stories. It's one of my favorite things to just do like on the fly. If I'm at a convention or something, I'll just take a snap photo or I'll stop a quick photo of where I'm at or who I'm with and tag that person.

And boom, there's a story and everybody's kind of like. Getting an insider view of what I'm doing. That's what I think stories are great for. It's just like, Hey, come follow me on this journey. You can do blitzes. I think blitzes of stories are great. If you happen to be at like a convention, you can just say to yourself, okay.

I'm going to do 20 quick story posts about where I'm at and things I see right away and they're just there for the next 24 hours and then they disappear. And that's why they're, they're there for people who just kind of are following along in your journey. But let's talk about Instagram in general. So it's really perfect for visual brands, lifestyle content creators.

Like I said, there's a multi format. Right, like I said, so if it feels like it's too much because, well there's posts, and on these posts, do you do video, do you do carousels, do you just do an image, you have to write the little bio or the blurb, hashtags are still a thing on there where it's not on platforms like X, there's stories, there's reels.

There's trials. Here's the thing about Instagram. Monetization basically is zero. Unlike TikTok and definitely unlike YouTube. The same videos that I'm posting on TikTok and YouTube that are getting millions of views and tens of thousands of dollars per month are getting zero dollars on Instagram. There was once, at some point, A monetization system that is similar to the TikTok and YouTube sort of ad type strategy that doesn't exist anymore.

You cannot sign up to it. It is for people who are grandfathered into it. And the only way to monetize now are through gifting. I think I've received two cents from somebody on Instagram for a following of 800, 000. On Instagram on DeepPocketMonster and over a hundred thousand on Pat Flynn. And I think there's subscriptions as well.

You can ask your subscribers to pay and they pay monthly to get access to like additional posts that only subscribers can get. But I would much rather do that with something like a paid newsletter or a community. But it is something you can monetize if you have a bigger audience. And that kind of makes sense for the kind of content that you're doing.

So key strengths, however, for Instagram, multiple content formats. So you can kind of like Tackle things from a bunch of different angles. There's strong brand building potential. This is a great one because a lot of brands that do work with other brands are on Instagram. And they do their work and the social media managers at these other companies do brand deals through Instagram, probably more so than TikTok and then definitely more so than YouTube.

It's hard to connect directly with people. On YouTube. That is a weakness of YouTube specifically. This is a strength on Instagram. The person to person connection. The DMs. And if you are a brand and you're showing up and you're getting a lot of views and you connect with these other brands that are out there, it's so easy to connect with them.

It's so easy to partner with them. And do these brand collaborations. It's so easy to actually do, like literally publish a brand collaboration and a person I did this with the Detroit Lions. I did, uh, get paid for that. I got flown to Detroit and I got to come to a game and open Pokemon cards on the field.

But I filmed a short and a real and a tick tock on their field and on Instagram, we just collabed on it, which meant that it was published on both my following and the Detroit lions following. So it was as if they posted it, even though I initiated it, it showed up on both of our pages and both of our feeds to our audiences.

And as a result, it was the time their second highest viewed, video on Instagram Reels within like two weeks. The Detroit Lions. I helped them create their second highest viewed video, which was pretty cool for a period of time. I think it currently has like 4 million views at this point, but it was cool.

The little collab that we did, it's so easy to do brand partnerships on a platform like Instagram. So that's what it's huge for. Great for relationship building for your audience. When you start to get comments, reaching out to DMs or via direct messages to them. Even putting a little voice message or a little video saying hello.

So easy to do on Instagram. That's what I love, love, love about Instagram. It's a relationship building for sure. And there's some pretty good shopping integration too, to have people buy things, if you sell them later and those kinds of things, Instagram is really, really good at that key weaknesses though, it seems to be increasingly pay to play.

So, you know, like boosting posts and those kinds of things. I mean, that's just, that's just the meta way. That's how it was on Facebook. It's this way on Instagram. It's a complex algorithm. It is kind of unknown how the algorithm works compared to like a TikTok or a YouTube, there are more higher aesthetic expectations on the platform.

Right. Whereas like you can be a little bit more loose on tech talk on Instagram, especially if you're doing posts and carousels. I mean, this is, this is a visual platform. That's why it's made. So having higher end stuff, higher produced stuff is going to be important. And it's pretty time intensive. I would say it does require a little bit more work, especially if you were.

Doing like what you should do, which is mixing a lot of these formats together, like real stories and posts, creating the same kind of like consistent aesthetic that used to be more important. It's not as important anymore. Like more people just don't care about how their actual page looks. Remember when people used to like, you know, the grid, they used to kind of create like pictures with the grid and make sure they all had the same kind of like, if you're a photographer, then yes, people are still going to look at that.

And that's how you get clients. People look at your kind of portfolio and your Instagram pages, your portfolio. That's again, a huge advantage of a tool like Instagram, it being more visual. If you are eventually going to get clients that are more in a visual field or are looking to you for visual or motion type stuff, then yes, Instagram is definitely the place you want to be.

The community component of it, like I said, it's going to be really key. Maintaining that aesthetic is something you must do. And then some specific tips for feed posts, carousels work really, really well, especially for education, like, okay, step one, and then swipe step two, swipe step three, or if you're sharing.

Top 10 places in Monterey Bay to visit. Cool. Let's put them all in a different image, multiple posts, and people are swiping through. That is called a carousel high quality visuals three to four times per week on feed posts for reels. Definitely similar strategies to what we talked about in the other short form platforms.

Using music is great. They're tapped into a lot of music that you can just put in the background, even on stills and then four to five times per week. So basically daily, if possible stories, some update per day. It's going to be important. And again, this is why it's like multi format, right? You're building an audience through your reels and feed posts.

Feed posts are injecting more visuals to your audience. Your stories are more behind the scenes a couple of times a day if possible. And I would give it 90 days. If you were just starting out on Instagram, give it 90 days, three to four times weekly on posts, four times to five times weekly on reels stories daily.

Give it 90 days. You could probably garner 2, 500 followers. And again, have that really good engagement with those videos. That's what you want. You want to ask questions. You want to have people tell their stories in the comments. I see that happening more on Instagram than on tech talk for sure. People in the comment section itself, sharing their life stories, opening up a bit.

People are more likely to do that on that platform. All right, let's talk about LinkedIn. Yes. Perfect for B2B creators. So business to business creators. That's not to say if you are not a business to business creator, it's not going to work for you. It's working for a lot of people, but professional is, is the keyword there.

Professional thought leaders. You are looking to stand out and be an authority in the space that you're in. It's not really for just. Entertainment focused creators, right? There's always going to be some sort of business or professional aspect to this. So if you think in reverse engineer from who your ideal clients are, if you have clients, then think about that.

If your ideal person who's going to be engaging with you is more like a casual, just person who's watching a game show, a person who might watch Mr. Beast, then maybe you aren't ready for LinkedIn or it might not make sense, but it's still worth experimenting with. Because there's a lot of people on there.

It feels very old school. And some people love that. It feels, cause it's mostly written content. I would consider video. And we'll talk about that in the tips in just a second. People like Neil Patel, I'm basing my strategy on. He's going live daily with video as a, as a my. And it seems to be working. I am getting some engagement on LinkedIn for the first time ever.

After having an account for a decade plus by doing what? By focusing on it. You might have heard this in a previous podcast episode where I said I was going to focus on LinkedIn. For a certain number of days straight and I'm doing that and it's working and I'm learning and the algorithm starting to go Oh Pat's consistent here.

Cool. That's what a lot of these algorithms will do. So key strengths high value professional audience This is where if you eventually know that you're gonna have just a few clients, but they're paying you thousands, right? You are doing consultations or you're doing done for you services for other businesses.

You don't need a million followers or subscribers You just need a few key clients. This is where you can hook up with them. They can find you and you can chat with them. You can have professional conversation and even just get hired right on the platform has really good organic reach right now. Content longevity is working.

I'm seeing a lot of people who are creating these really highly valuable pieces of content that are helpful that people save, they bookmark and they're using them and they're not just using them. They're sharing them with others, which then gets more views, more reach. And again, like I said, the professional networking on this platform is unlike anything else.

Key weaknesses, though, is it is kind of limited with creative freedom. I mean, I definitely think that because of that, there is a case for standing out by being more creative on the platform, especially in the niche that you're in. I mean, again, I'm not an expert at LinkedIn. I'm in the middle of learning it as I go, but there is sort of a etiquette.

It feels like on the platform, especially with comments and how people reply. I've tried some videos that are more entertainment based that work elsewhere that just. Aren't working on LinkedIn and sometimes the more professional how to type stuff stuff that I feel like worked back in the day on blogs Works really well on LinkedIn and I do feel again that word blog We'll talk about that in just a second later on in this conversation We're having today about different platforms because blog is an interesting one but it linked in does feel like the old days of blogging where I'm publishing what feels like blog posts just In video format, but the comments feel very bloggy and that's both good and bad.

It's good because maybe just for me, it's familiar. It's where I started and I know how that works. And so the more you engage, the more you leave comments, the better it is. I mean, your account will be seen more. Just the algorithm will push it out more in your posts if you are engaging with more people.

That's just how it works. And it feels like how people used to leave comments on blog posts back in the day where I'm not sure if it's genuine or not. And with AI, I'm not sure if these people are actually meaning to say these things or if they're just pushing a button to say these things. I'm not sure.

So it does feel a little interesting and a weird time to be in this. But I do like it. It does come with more of a professional tone. Maybe considered a weakness. You kind of have to Again, there's like an etiquette there. It feels like it's slower growth, but again, if you are targeting the right people and you just need a few clients and they pay really, really well for the work that you have, I mean, it could work really, really well.

This is Justin Welsh's number one platform, I believe is LinkedIn and he's crushing it. I'd recommend you follow him and it's a more narrow content scope, but I hear. That, and I'm not here yet because I have just started on LinkedIn. You can do a really good job of cycling through a 90 to 120 day content cycle, right?

Where you kind of just like repost, not copy paste, but you can kind of go through a 90 to 120 day content cycle where you're kind of like bringing back the same topics that you brought back before and maybe just updating it. I cannot wait to get to that point where I can get to kind of like a third through the year and then just kind of.

Say the same things over or better. That's really cool. But like I said earlier, key weakness, slower growth, more narrow content scope. But here's what you must do. Sharing industry insights is something that I see working really, really well. This is something I see Neil Patel do. He's like, these are the kinds of posts that have the most backlinks, or these are the kinds of videos that get the most views and it's super helpful, right?

Again, it's like. The old blogging days. Here are the kinds of posts, but now in an updated format here on LinkedIn, which is kind of cool. I like it. Tell professional stories. This is where I think the creativity can come in, in a more professional setting. Tell professional stories. Jason Pfeiffer. Does this very, very well.

He's the editor in chief at entrepreneur magazine, and he's got a fantastic LinkedIn account you should follow. And just the storytelling. And he tells stories of other companies and he tells his own stories. And I love it. It works really, really well. Post during business hours, people are probably at work wasting time on LinkedIn and that's where you can be found and engage with the network as well.

Again, that is very, very important. If you're just posting and it's kind of one way street conversation, you're not engaging, you're not actually commenting and liking like. All those little factors liking even do matter. So the commitment I would probably commit to 120 days. 90 days maybe minimum. And post 3 5 times a week.

I would post, try to post daily. But again, remember, you have the ability to create written posts. You have the ability to create images. You have the ability to do videos. And I'm just trying the video thing because I'm starting to get familiar with that. Even though I'm not totally comfortable with it.

Yes, I do YouTube, and I'm not totally comfortable with video, but I do it because I know that's a great, great strategy. And after 90 days, or 120 days, 500 connections. 500 connections, consistent engagement, that's what you want to shoot for. Alright, next, let's talk about X. So X is a X factor here in the social media platform arena.

And of course this was formerly known as Twitter. I've been on the platform since 2010, so 15 years. So I've seen it go through a number of different changes. And right now, especially since the takeover from Elon Musk and his purchase, it's become very interesting. I know a lot of people just don't want to go on it sometimes just because of Elon.

But also it's not, how do I say this? It's very similar to. Tick tock in the way that you basically will get more of what you put into it, whoever you engage with the kinds of topics you're interested in, you're just going to see more and more of that your bubble and the walls in that bubble become thicker, the more you dive in, and that could be a good thing because you get more of those kinds of things you want to know, but it also https: otter.

ai If you, I don't know how I got into this, but in X, especially around the election time, I must have read a couple posts or watched a couple videos that made X believe that, like, I wanted to go all in on political related stuff, and I just started to see, like, just one side of things the whole time based on those first couple videos I saw, and you just got to be conscious of that, and that may be great in some cases, maybe not so great in others, but let's talk about X in a few different ways.

Let's talk about its key strengths. Let's talk about X in a few different ways. Actually and really who it's perfect for it's for it's like quick insights quick community building quick conversation This is where you can kind of like water cooler talk and you can educate and you can share threads threading isn't it's important We'll talk about some must do practices and such but you can just have a random thought and share it with literally If nobody sees it, no worries, but also a lot of people could see it.

And that's kind of cool. You never know what could blow up on there. That that's also where it's kind of like on TikTok. You never know what you could share. On my DeepPocketMonsterX account, or I might say Twitter a few times because I still mix those two up. I posted just a random thought the other day about how much trash Pokemon cards have because the boxes have all this plastic and all this waste.

And I just shared that randomly. And then a bunch of people retweeted it, a bunch of people shared it. It has 184, 000 impressions. Like 5, 000 to 6, 000 people hearted this thing. And it's had a lot of people discuss. Around it and share their thoughts and some people agree. Some people disagree. Some people came up with solutions They're kind of debating under there just because I had this thing and I only had at the time 15, 000 followers on Twitter And I got a hundred and eighty four Thousand impressions and I got several thousand more followers just as a result of that one post because it was I mean I don't know how it was controversial.

I think there is too much trash, but I think it's because it connected with people directly just Just directly. So I think that that's what the strength is on Twitter. The other strength on Twitter, and what I love, is something that I got inspired by Alex Hermosi. You know, I'm not a huge fan of his, but I don't dislike him either.

Maybe I'm just intimidated by his muscles and his wife beater that he wears all the time. But he does this thing where he uses X as his experimental ground. He'll post a number of different random thoughts throughout the day, and he'll just see which ones actually take off. And the ones that take off, that's a signal.

I'm going to create a podcast episode about it, or he does, or he'll create a video around it. He'll go deeper into that. It'll become a newsletter because it's proven and you can see that, okay, this thing took off on X. People shared it. They talked about it. They're communicating around it. They'll probably do that elsewhere too.

So I love that idea. And why I think X is really key. Monetization can happen on the platform. I monetized on the DeepPocketMonster channel. And with, I think I had 6 million impressions. I think I made 29. Just to kind of give you an idea. So here are the key strengths. So, real time engagement. This is like, As real time as you can get, which I love great for networking.

I've networked and have built a lot of great, strong relationships just on X alone. And if you need more direct relationships for your business, X is a great place to do that. And yes, some of it is professional, but. A lot of it isn't so where as LinkedIn is more professional and kind of professional only this is where you can be entertainment based and like there's a lot of gamers and a lot of all kinds of industries, actors, voiceover artists, like you name it, they're there quick content testing, like I said, and you can.

Even though the character length is pretty small for a particular post, to get that quick thought out there, you can create threads. And that means, like, replying to your own stuff to create basically a blog post, or a longer thought about something. And those tend to get more reach, too, because there's just more.

The comment theme here, unfortunately, is, More is better. With a lot of these things. With YouTube longs though, I would say more story is better, in my opinion. So, some key weaknesses for X. Fast moving timeline. I mean, stuff like you post today will be negligent tomorrow. Like, there's literally, like, it's not even gonna matter what you said yesterday.

That said, there are things that can take off and, you know, depending on what you say, stuff that you said a year ago can come up in certain arguments and stuff. So you just gotta always be honest. Admit when you're making mistakes. I mean, this stuff moves really, really fast. It's a, it's a fast moving timeline, but you can find your people in there and use the tools that Twitter offers you to create those lists of people that you want to follow, because there is a lot of noise out there and they'll feed a lot of people to you that you may or may not want in front of you.

The reach is unpredictable, but that is both a good thing and bad thing because you never know. Need for frequent posting. So again, like I said, more is better and you, you have more room to just play here. Probably more than anywhere else because a post is just so informal that you, you publish it and you'll see and be able to tell right away whether or not it was something that carries on in the niche or not.

And very limited monetization, like I said. It works really well, though, for things like behind the scenes, sharing things as it's happening. There was somebody I saw who was live tweeting, like, a date that they were on. It was a date, they actually used X. I cannot remember this person's name, but it was such a fascinating case study.

It happened last year, in 2024. And a guy said that he wanted to fly to I think Japan with a woman and go and take her on this date, just literally friendship, like nothing, no funny business, and just kind of treat this person to a flight to Japan and get to know them better. And as creepy as that kind of sounds, he found a date.

And he was live tweeting this date, sharing some pictures as they were going along. It was really sweet actually, it became like a romance story for a hot minute on Twitter or X. That was how he was relaying what was happening, was through X. I, I don't see that happening like, as much on YouTube Shorts. I see it happening a little bit more on TikTok, the sort of real timeness.

But X is really where a lot of real time stuff happens. It's why a lot of news outlets use X, because X utilizes that fast moving timeline. A lot of sports, a lot of Olympic coverage, for example, when that was happening, was happening and very valuable to consumers on X, right? Engaging threads hooks are really important here as well.

Like first couple words. capture their attention. You can engage with bigger accounts. This is what's really cool. You can make quick connections with people because it is so informal. You know, I've had big celebrities just reply and retweet. You don't want to, you want to know something funny again. I don't talk about politics.

I don't share my political affiliation here whatsoever. But interestingly enough, Obama follows me. And my team found this out for me, I don't even know, I don't know if he just did a mass following one day or a social media person had listened to my podcast, I have no idea, but when he was president he had followed me, which I thought was kind of interesting, so all that to say you can connect with and communicate with a lot of people.

Larger brands, larger celebrities, larger accounts build in public. Like I said, it's a great thing that you can do and share things in real time and post consistently. So as far as timeline and metrics, if you choose this mission, I would say 60 days post three to five times a day, and you could probably get a thousand followers and some consistent engagement from that, from your audience.

Alright, next let's talk about live streaming. Live streaming is a special kind of publishing because it is live and it's difficult to imagine ourselves sometimes live doing anything because it's real. You cannot get more real than this except if a person were in the same room with you. And I probably wouldn't want every single person in my audience in the same room with me, but I want them to feel like that.

Sometimes if I'm opening Pokemon or if I'm sharing business tips, just like I did for 365 days straight on the income stream, which was the name of my daily show during the COVID thing. In March of 2020, I had vowed to go live every single day at 9 AM. And I did that for 365 days. And then it ended. It was a 365 day experiment.

And it was. Beautiful. One of the best decisions I ever made. Did it grow my YouTube account? Because I went live on YouTube. Not really. It didn't cause any huge influx and growth, but it did help create some incredible relationships with people who I still have like such a deep relationship with today.

People who showed up every day with me. And it was great because I was able to show up for them during this crazy time where nobody knew what was happening or what was going to happen. And we can kind of like consoling each other and I could just help them build their businesses during that time. It was really amazing.

And it really is live streaming, whether you do it on YouTube or Twitch or kick. There is a live component on any of these other platforms as well. Instagram, Tik TOK. Is there LinkedIn live now too? I'm not exactly sure, but live is amazing because you can really connect with people. And if you happen to have some experience with public speaking, this is really, really going to be helpful.

However, I will say. That going live is a great kickstart to a public speaking career because it forces you to get up there and learn how to engage and tell stories and on the fly share things, which is such a handy characteristic to have, especially in the business space. Because then when you're on a sales call, guess what?

It's going to be so much easier when you're in person in a networking event. So much easier. It is a great platform where you are allowed to make mistakes. People don't expect it to be perfect. And a lot of people will just kind of put it on the background or kind of listen more casually because they just have nothing else to do, or they're interested in the topic that you have to share.

So as far as building a larger audience, There are people who are building audiences with just live streaming. If you have an engaging personality or you want one, this is the place to do it. If you have limited time or inconsistent schedules, however, then this wouldn't be for you. It is one of those things that you will benefit most by showing up consistently.

By practicing, you get better every single time. You get more comfortable every single time. And even if you have Zero people watching, it's still worth doing because you can, number one, those replays will still be available and still be useful. In fact, on the live streams during the income stream on the Pat Flynn YouTube channel, more people were watching the replays than the actual lives.

So that's, again, one of the big benefits of YouTube is those lives that then turn into videos and you can update the thumbnails and titles later if you want. Those will still be seen and still work evergreen, less so on platforms like Twitch or Kick or especially on social media platforms like TikTok and Reels.

Those lives don't get seen as much and as often after the live is over compared to YouTube. So YouTube live is definitely my favorite. Great discoverability. And you can then take from those lives. This is a cool benefit of the lives is with all that content. Let's say you're live for an hour and you go live every other day.

Well, during that hour, you maybe tell 12 different stories or five different stories you're engaging. People are asking questions and you're answering those questions. And those are five minute chunks. Any of those chunks. Those little moments in the middle of your live stream can turn into shorts, and you can rip them out.

In fact, you can do that just right from the YouTube platform itself. And a lot of people are using those lives to create a lot of those shorts that then bring more people back to the lives, and then the VODs, the videos on demands that are created afterwards from those lives. So that's really cool. A consistent schedule is going to be really key.

Engaging with the chat is going to be something you're going to have to learn to do. It is a skill, it is an art, but it can be learned. Referencing people by name, calling them out, and using a lot of tools. This is where maybe the weakness is, is it takes a lot more tools. It takes a lot more technicalities to do this.

It takes a lot more effort. It takes a lot more energy. It takes you getting out of your comfort zone, and that's hard, but also it's so worth it. So worth it. You can monetize on lives as well in many different kinds of ways. So consistent schedule, engaging with the chat is key. You need a clear stream structure going into a stream.

A person wants to know, okay, what is happening here, right? You're not at the point when you're starting out that you can just kind of show up like moist critical does on YouTube and people will like show up by the thousands because they just are already a fan of this. You have to have topic specific streams.

And you can come in as the expert or somebody exploring or doing research in real time and sharing as you go. Emily Baker, for example, is somebody who is an incredible live streamer. She has been on the podcast several times before. She's a lawyer. And she covers a lot of these cases that are happening in real time.

And she's like kind of discovering things as she goes and interacting with her audience. And just trusting her knowledge and expertise to do that rather than like scripting this whole thing and creating videos up front. So it's actually easier for several people once they get into the groove and they get used to it, to create livestream videos versus scripted storyboarded videos or even shorts.

The shorts can come from these videos, which is really cool. And like I said, quality technical setup is going to be key. People are not going to watch a grainy live stream with terrible audio. The audio is really important component of it as well. So that's just kind of a high level view of live stream, but I would encourage you to do that.

But again, if you're going to do this three to four times a week, two hours each time, 90 days. Go for it. You will be a much better communicator after. You will have developed a strong relationship with a few amazing people in your audience who discover you and show up and continue to show up for you because they find you unique in some case or they love what you say and they want to learn more.

These can become coaching clients. This is like. A 90 day webinar you're doing, but you're kind of just starting that relationship now. I would say you can get to a point where after 90 days, you're getting 50 average viewers in every live stream and one core community forming. That would be awesome. And that's all you need to build a strong community and a community that would support you and help you launch your thing or join a community that people would pay for, whether that's a discord community or a community on circle or something like that.

90 days, go for it. Next, let's talk about blogging. Blogging I've said it before, I said this in a mastermind group and they kind of got on me, but let me say this with an asterisk, blogging is dead, but it's not really. It's kind of dormant. It's not a growing platform is very oversaturated and SEO is not as useful as it once was search engine optimization.

There is no longer a just build it and they will come situation. And I know it's. If you build it, he will come from the movie, but if you build it, they won't come. You have to go and find these people to come back to your website and check out your blog. Blogging networks are no longer a huge thing where if you blogged and people kind of would discover that blog from their own blogs, these kinds of things just aren't working anymore.

However, blogs can still work. Websites are still important. It's not where I would recommend starting. However. But, there are a few cases where blogging can make sense for you at the start. I don't want you to start here because you're afraid of video though. That's where a lot of people, I feel like, get it wrong.

They're like, okay, well, I'm not good on camera, I'm not good on a microphone, therefore I will blog. I feel like you are then choosing the hardest route for yourself moving forward to be discovered. Not because writing does not allow that capability, but because you are just ultimately scared of these platforms that we've already talked about today.

that are going to get you many, many more eyeballs and ear balls on you, your balls. Yeah, we haven't talked about podcasting yet. We'll, we'll talk about that last year, but blogging is perfect for deep subject matter experts. Super highly technical things work really, really well on blogging because it does need.

A lot more room to talk about it needs a lot more visuals to show certain things and again there is a case for having these things still be shared on YouTube, but for people who are very search heavy in their content where there are people searching for these things and you know this and you want to create the literal best information on this stuff, then blogging can be really great for that.

It's definitely not for people who are seeking quick results or viral growth. Key strengths, you get to own your own platform. Unlike these other platforms where you're building your audience and then at any moment in time, an algorithm can change, which is why, again, you've got to own what you've grown.

If you've grown something on YouTube, if you've grown something on X or on LinkedIn, taking them out of there and into an email list is going to be really key. If people are on your website or a blog, they're already, and it's really easy for them to subscribe. Content longevity is great. If you create something that is really, really useful, a pillar article in a community or in an industry, well, it's just going to get shared and linked to.

There's a lot. to do to make that happen and a lot to understand to give yourself a chance, but it is possible. Search engine optimization, like I said, isn't as strong as it once was, but it's still a thing. You can with the proper metadata and proper titles and keywords and just really good content that people share, then yes, you can be found when people search for it and that's free traffic.

And then the email list building from your blog is really great. Key weaknesses, slow growth, very high competition, very saturated. Technical requirements aren't as much of a weakness, but it still is. This is why I think starting on something like a stand is probably my number one recommendation. If you aren't needing to write on a website, if you want to sell something or sell into a coaching call or really quickly create an online course or a membership or something, Stan is great for just.

Removing those technical requirements, a blog specifically though, which Stan is not going to allow you to do is setting up a WordPress site on a host and domain, and that's just going to take a lot more effort and time. I do have videos to help inside of our courses and stuff, but that is not. As big of a deal as it once was because before we used to have to code our own websites, use things like Dreamweaver and there's regular maintenance, you know, especially with plugins and other things like that, like websites do require upkeep.

Whereas on these social media platforms, those are being updated on the back end on their side. Keyword research is really important. Quality over quantity. I would say that that is definitely the case here. This is the one case where going deep into something is much better than just surface level a bunch of times.

So quality over quantity here, internal linking, understanding how. Any articles you write kind of relate to your stuff and also other stuff that's out there on the web. You want to show Google, you want to show Wikipedia, all these other things that you are a resource worth linking to and becoming a part of this interweb of, of resources for this particular thing.

And again, you must also. While they're there, capture an email. So time commitment would be six months for this post once or twice weekly. And you could probably get a thousand monthly visitors in a, in an email list of at least 150 to 200 people within six months, realistically, that being said. There are ways to grow your email list even without a website and a blog that you could grow to over a thousand on your email list faster.

But if you are going down the blogging route, that would be the case. Now let's finish off with podcasting. We're here on a podcast right now. I think the huge strength. of a podcast is its ability to create a deep relationship. I mean, you've been listening to me for over an hour. People are reading a blog post for maybe 10 minutes.

People are watching a video for probably less in general, especially short from content that's 45 to 60 seconds, and then they're out, moving on, swiping up, and something like on X or LinkedIn, they're just spending a couple minutes reading something and moving on. Here, you're listening because you are in the car, you're on a walk or on a jog, you're at the gym, you're on a plane because you've downloaded this, and you just are here with me.

And that is unlike any other platform. This is why I'm so big still on podcasting, even though you've seen me go all in on YouTube lately. We're here. We've been together for an hour, people. That's. Huge. You've heard my voice. There's no exit button when listening to this like there is on any of these other platforms.

You can go so deep with the relationships with people. And this is why podcasting had been the number one way that people had discovered the brand back in the day. And it's how most people who are in this community have come to find me, have come to join the community. By the way, if you haven't yet, you should, smartpassiveincome.

com slash community. But some of the weaknesses of podcasting, however, relate to its findability. There is not really an algorithm that's helping us much here. Having a website to support can add a little bit to that, but what people are doing now is adding YouTube. To their podcast or recording a video to go along with their podcast and publishing that or just publishing the audio on YouTube music through YouTube and getting more listens that way, but there isn't really a great algorithm for people to if you come up with the best episode, then it's not going to automatically be shown to people who that best episode would be for for your niche.

And that's that's a shame. That's a huge benefit to things like YouTube and these other social media platforms. A big detriment to podcasting. You can still be found on search through Apple Podcasts and Spotify and things like that and like I said Google as well. But really what's gonna get your podcast to grow is word of mouth.

Which is why the sort of deep rapport with your audience is really key because people will build a relationship with you, they'll listen to you, they'll talk about you with others, they'll get more people to become fans much faster than you can if you were just to randomly stumble across them yourself.

Because a person's recommending you to them. Right. There's no better recommendation than one that comes from a trusted friend. And that's where we as podcasters can definitely take advantage. And this comes with creating excellent content, going deep into these conversations. It's so much easier to connect with somebody and say, Hey, would you like to come on the podcast?

I'd love to interview you and share your expertise with my audience. And give you some exposure so much easier to do it that way than with a YouTube video because a person has to then think about getting on camera and those kinds of things and what are they going to say and people understand YouTube is more formal, more edited, more cut versus a podcast is feels just more raw.

It's more conversational. It's like the audience is just kind of in a room with two people talking and that's great. This is why I love podcasting. The relationships that it's built for me that have helped my business, my family, my career has been unmatched. To any other platform. So if you are going to go down the effort of going into podcasting, amazing.

You want to get to the hook. We no longer have the ability to talk for 10 minutes about random stuff before we get into the episode. People are trained on these other platforms that we just talked about. And then when they come onto a podcast and they don't get what they want right away, they're moving on.

So it's really important in the first minute, just like I did in the first minute of this episode here. Give them a hook. Like I said, remember there's probably somebody out there half as smart as you growing much faster because they're doing X, Y, and Z. That was a fine tuned hook to get you to perk up and go, what I need to figure out what's going on here.

And here you are one hour and eight minutes later, plus to figure out all this stuff. And hopefully this is helping you at least explore these options. If you haven't really considered all of them yet, or get excited about one or two. And again, choose one for the time commitment time for podcasts. Best practice again, hook in the first 30 seconds.

I would say even 20 seconds. You have, we have a little bit more room than on a tick tock where you had the first two seconds, but still you want to get to it fast. Storytelling is key. This is the platform to practice storytelling, tell your stories, really get into the visuals, study storytelling, become the best storyteller possible, and then people will tell that story and bring more people in via word of mouth, because that's where growth is really going to happen on a podcast, word of mouth, people talking about these episodes, we hear when a certain celebrity is on another person's podcast and some You That's what we want to have happen with our shows as well.

So practice maybe talking about something a little bit more controversial. Bring an opposing view on your show and have a debate, but a friendly one with them. These are the things that are going to work to really, really get some views and people listening to your show these days. I would commit to six months, four months minimum, six months would be ideal.

One podcast episode per week 30 minutes to an hour each could be longer and I would say if you do this I think again with all these things you could speed up the process by going through our courses, right? We have our number one course, which is power up podcasting. It's by far most successful I feel like you could get to a consistent 500 downloads per episode That number will vary depending on the niche that you've selected.

500 downloads per episode and a core audience being built. An email list can even come off of that. But I feel like you could even get your first client. Maybe even two within the first couple months. So that's podcasting. So we talked about a lot. of platforms today, and I want to say just number one, I'm proud of you for trying to figure this out because it's not easy.

And the truth is, when you commit to this time period for whichever platform, don't worry about how well the videos, the posts, the audio is doing. Yes, look at the analytics, consider how to readjust from there, but don't get so down if the numbers are down. I would get down if you knew that you could have published something, but you didn't.

That's where I would be down. And if that happens, if you miss a date or if you're not consistent, great. Just go, okay, I'm going to do better next week. Boom. And then you get back on the saddle and you go for it. The win is you seeing it through for that length of time that we talked about and then being able to assess truly whether or not you want to continue or not, or try something else.

Awesome. Keep up the great work. We're going to go a little bit deeper into video in the next week and also some of these other platforms as well in the future. Make sure you hit subscribe so you don't miss out. And again, if you want to go really deep into some of this stuff and learn how to do it the right way, the smart way, head on over to our community.

If you're in the community already, you know, you have access to all of our courses already, but head on over to smart, passive income. com slash community. Just get started and we'll see you in there. Thank you so much. And best of luck to you. I'll see you on any of these platforms because I'm on all of them, but I wasn't on all of them right away. One at a time, laser focus. You got this.

SPI 831: How to Find a Winning Strategy with Seth Godin

Seth Godin: You're not the one who's supposed to get the word out. If you write a book and give it for free to 10 people who trust you and no one asks you for another copy, you didn't write a good enough book. The idea is not, "How do I get on Oprah and yell about my book?" It's, "How do I make it so that the ten or the hundred or the thousand true fans tell the others?"

All the stuff that matters to us. We didn't hear about it because the creator bought an ad or showed up on our feed. We heard about it because someone we trusted told us about it.

Pat Flynn: I lost sleep over this podcast interview and I was so nervous about it because it was somebody who I've been wanting to have on the show for such a long time, but even more than that, I just wanted to thank this person, and today I couldn't be more excited to invite Seth Godin on the SPI podcast.

After 830 episodes, I've finally been able to have him on the show. He has a brand new book that's coming out called This Is Strategy, and I definitely recommend you check it out. But we talk a little bit more than strategy today. We talk about the new version of what a purple cow might be and we just get pretty deep and I love Seth's answers to every question that I've ever seen him answer on a podcast or in a video and so I knew this was gonna be really special.

So this was definitely a treat and an honor and Seth was so nice like, he's just such a nice guy. So, here he is, Seth Godin.

Announcer: You're listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that's all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he's worn the same Darth Vader Halloween costume to greet trick or treaters five years in a row, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Seth Godin, welcome to SPI. Thank you so much for being here today.

Seth Godin: Well, thank you for having me, for showing up the way you do. It's been a long time.

Pat Flynn: And in full uniform too, with the yellow glasses, for those who aren't able to watch right now, I'm curious, how many pairs of those glasses do you actually own?

Seth Godin: Well, when my eyesight started to fail, I said, my brand is my face. So I bought clear frames and I'm like, that doesn't work either all in or all out. So I buy cheap glasses. None of this Luxotica nonsense, but I lost my favorite pair on the bike path. I don't know how that's possible. So now I have two pair, but I'm not ready to invest in like an Elton John collection.

Pat Flynn: Okay. I was wondering if you woke up in the morning, you opened a drawer and there were like a hundred pairs there and you just happened to choose, you know, row two number five for for some odd reason.

Seth Godin: I'm too cheap for that. ,

Pat Flynn: you have a new book that is just about to come out, if not already, and it's called, This Is Strategy.

And I'm excited to chat about this with you because I think it's something we all need. A lot of us kind of jump into, especially with the barrier to entry being a lot lower. Now we see the results that other people have. We get encouraged by that. And to quote you, actually, and something that helped me early on, just ship it.

That was something that was huge for me because I was always in my own head. But how do you balance the idea of just shipping and going out there and putting yourself out there with the strategy that's actually required to see some success?

Seth Godin: This is a great place to start, and I have to begin with the semantics of it, because the word just gets us into trouble.

Nike and the just do it thing, just, it was the word I used to use way too much, could be implied to mean what the hell, do it, whatever. And what I actually say is merely ship it. And by merely ship it, I mean, drop the drama, drop the narrative, simply ship the work, the best work, the work that you are proud of, But, We need to get out of our own way.

And this is Steve Pressfield's gift to me and a lot of what I wrote about in the practice. But the reason I'm so excited to talk to you is because your listeners are doing something brave and important. They've stripped away all the insulation. They don't have 40 layers around them. They haven't raised 25 million.

They don't have a giant ad budget. They're exposed to the market. And that means they have to deal with their mindset. The mindset of merely shipping it and it mostly means they got to get their strategy right because it doesn't matter how hard you're running if you're running in the wrong direction.

And in the book, I basically say one of the ways you can tell if someone's good surfer is if they find good waves. And strategy is the art of finding a good way.

Pat Flynn: Reminds me. I used to play soccer when I was a kid and I was a small kid. I didn't even hit five feet tall until my junior year of high school.

Seth Godin: So you and Michael Jordan.

Pat Flynn: Yeah. I mean, he got the growth spurt later. I did not. So I don't know what, what happened there, but my advantage was the strategy. I was the number one assist person on the team because I could read the field. That, that was the only thing I could really provide. Cause I couldn't provide strength and power, but I could provide that forward thinking this in the game and you know the chess match of soccer and thinking two steps ahead. This is what I feel would be the differentiator for a business owner like those who are listening and those who have millions of dollars to spend on whatever they have to go into the strategy. How do you start with strategy when you have never gone down this path before there are so many avenues it seems that you could go down that it almost becomes overwhelming.

How do you determine what that first step actually is?

Seth Godin: Well, the zeroth step, I think, is where we begin, which is, who are you and what are you seeking to do? A lot of people who say they are entrepreneurs are freelancers. I, for example, I'm a freelancer. I'm proud of it. I get paid when I work. I can't have someone who isn't me show up and be me.

And being a freelancer is sort of a job without a boss. Being a freelancer is your craft, your work, that other people value. If you can acknowledge and embrace that, a whole bunch of different choices will present themselves. If you're an entrepreneur, your job is to build something bigger than yourself.

To use other people's money and effort to create leverage so that you create value when you're not in the room. If you can get that straight, then you start by saying, what's the change I seek to make? And why would someone who has the option pick me? And it's a very challenging question because you're working so hard.

You know how good your work is. But people aren't picking you and you end up resenting those people. And what we have to do is have the empathy to celebrate those people. Someone who doesn't choose you made the right choice. You have to figure out why they made the right choice. What is it that they want and they see that you don't?

But once we can have the empathy for people, you know, if, if, if you're a standup comic and someone isn't laughing at your jokes and you find out they only speak Italian, you can forgive them. It's your fault. You're telling the jokes in the wrong language, right? So that's where I begin with empathy.

Pat Flynn: How do you lean into empathy and begin to ask those questions?

Why to whom do you ask and what are the questions?

Seth Godin: Well, one of the reasons it's worth the enormous amount of trouble to publish a book as opposed to just writing a blog post which would be way easier and reach more people is books demand conversations. So you hand two copies of the book to two people who trust you and you trust them and say I want to talk about number 136 and number 149 Let's have a conversation about that. Because if you can't talk about your strategy, if it's intuitive, then it's not really a strategy, right?

That strategy is something that we don't have to hide. Tactics could be a surprise. Tactics could be secret, but strategy, Starbucks doesn't hide their strategy. Football coaches don't hide their strategy. Your strategy is something you can stick with and you don't want to change, but you better say what it is out loud if you want it to get better.

Pat Flynn: I think the audience may be confused on what the difference between a tactic and a strategy is. I think a lot of us default, especially us newbies, default to a tactic as a strategy. My strategy will be TikTok, for example. That's not what I'm hearing from you. What is a strategy versus a tactic?

Seth Godin: So a strategy is something that we can stick with for a very long time and our tactics are going to change. Apple decided, when Steve finally got his act together, that they were going to make functional luxury goods for people who want to develop good taste and status around digital items. And the iPhone isn't better at being a phone than an Android phone.

It is better at serving that desire, giving you connection and status and good taste around digital interaction. So anything that Johnny Ive or anybody else brings into the office, they can look at through that lens. So once you start down that road with an iMac, it's not that conceptually difficult to end up with an iPad or an iPhone.

Starbucks says, our strategy is twofold. One, to help uncaffeinated people become caffeinated. And two, to give those people a place where they feel, at least for a moment, something of substantial status and luxury. Those are the two things they do. And when they work to forward that, they do great when they do something like inventing a decaf coffee that's in a powder you can buy at the supermarket, they fail because that's not what their strategy is.

So a key part of it is who exactly are you trying to serve and what change are you trying to make for them? And then you will find tactics that help you serve that strategy. And what you want as the person who's running the enterprise is not to come up with some fancy complicated mission statement that could mean anything, but to actually come up with a strategy that tells you what you do and what you don't do.

So it was not hard for me to not be on TikTok, to not be on Twitter, to not be on LinkedIn, to not be on Facebook, because none of them matched what I am trying to do. And so because I already knew what I was trying to do and who I was trying to do it for, I didn't have to spend a lot of time debating the tactics.

Pat Flynn: That's so key for everybody listening to understand what your filters are and to understand what your North Star is. It makes the decision to not do TikTok, to not do Instagram or those kinds of things much, much easier. Although it is getting harder. There's a lot of noise out there. We see a lot of, especially in the media, you know, so and so blew up overnight and it's because of this.

And so we get pulled mentally this way and that way. What do you do to make sure that. Even though you know which direction you want to go, you're not being pulled by those other levers that other people are pulling. It's a seemingly very hard thing to do. It took a while for me to know how to stay in my lane, but the world's getting noisier.

It's getting harder and harder to do that.

Seth Godin: Yeah, it's a great question. Do you remember, well, we're too old to remember, but have you ever heard of phrenology, which was bigger than astrology a hundred years ago?

Pat Flynn: No.

Seth Godin: So if you do a Google image search on phrenology, you'll see a picture that you will recognize.

It's a human skull with dotted lines on it. And phrenology was the pseudoscience of feeling the bumps on someone's head and using them to figure out if they were creative or if they were evil, if they were trustworthy. It had racism associated with it and lots of other things. And it's obviously false, but phrenology was a very big deal.

When we read the bumps on someone's head to try to determine their personality, we're using a false proxy. We're doing a easily measured thing that is not related to the thing we care about. So the number of people who saw your TikTok video is a false proxy. It has nothing to do with how much money you made, what a difference you made.

I mean, I saw a TikToker guy did, he got 39 million views. He was picking up something with his bare feet. I don't know, but that's what people wanted to watch. But that didn't match the change he wanted to make. It was just a number. So, if you are chasing a false proxy, you're going to be busy all the time and disappointed often.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that. One of the books that you wrote, I mean, you've written several. What number is now this one? This Is Strategy, is it 20 or 21 or?

Seth Godin: So I used to be a book packager, which is a profession I would recommend to anybody if it was 1987. Book packagers invent ideas and sell them to book publishers.

And I did 120 books when I was doing that. Oh wow. So I don't really count those. Okay. After that, 21 bestsellers.

Pat Flynn: Okay. Twenty one. Twenty two on the way. This is, this is going to be a good one. And I'm taking a lot of inspiration. I have my first traditionally published book coming out very, very soon. So Wow!

Seth Godin: Tell me about it. What's it called?

Pat Flynn: It's called Lean Learning, how to achieve more by learning less.

Seth Godin: Brilliant, brilliant idea.

Pat Flynn: Thank you. Thank you. A lot of people have seen a lot of the things that I've been involved with. I've invented something. I have a new YouTube channel in the Pokemon space. It seems like people call me like Midas because everything I touch turns to gold, it seems, but I know that's not true.

It's just the way that I learn myself into those things is non traditional. I don't read the textbook and then go do the thing. I live the textbook as it's happening. So this book kind of distills a lot of that into a frameworks in a step by step process. And I found the, I was going to save these questions to the end, but since we're here, I've self published three books.

Great experience. I have a lot of control. I could say yes to everything. Working with a publisher has been challenging in different kinds of ways and also very enlightening, but now that I'm not 100 percent in control of all the creative efforts, it's, I'm, I am finding a little bit difficult. I know you've had experience in both self publishing and traditional publishing.

I'd love to hear your perspective on perhaps the pros and cons of each or your experience. And I know that the Kickstarter campaigns that you've run Icarus and, and those which I supported, which were making noise in the industry, which was amazing, but here we are several years later. I just love your, maybe even just coach me for a minute on what I can do to best see myself toward a result that I hopefully can achieve.

Seth Godin: Well, I would love to hop on a call anytime you want to coach you directly, but let me tell you, let's talk about systems for a minute because it's relevant here. Book publishing around the world, they have a fall list and a spring list when they launch most of the books in the upcoming season.

Why don't they have a winter list? They don't have a winter list even though it's when most people in North America buy and read books because in 1910 and so the Erie Canal used to freeze in the winter and it was very hard to get books from New York to Chicago so they didn't try to promote books for December or January.

We still don't do that. It's absurd, but systems stick around. So there are all these systems in traditional book publishing that stick around. So here's one. Barnes Noble used to be the dominant seller of books in the U. S. And if a book was a New York Times bestseller, they discounted it 40 percent and sold it at >cost><, and they put it in the front of the store, which made it sell even more. So book publishers who seek status because they're not measuring dollars and cents because they don't have any, decided that getting a New York Times bestseller was the single best way to get a book to sell a lot of copies. So there's all this pressure on authors to promote a lot of books in the first week, so you get on the New York Times bestseller list. But wait, Barnes Noble doesn't matter anymore. And yet we're still running around playing this ridiculous game around status and false proxies. as opposed to doing the work related to why we wrote the book in the first place. So what authors need to begin with is, why did I write this book? And what would a good outcome look like? And if the answer is, I was a New York Times bestseller, then go pay some guy and buy your way onto the list, because it's not worth, it's not worth bending everything in your life to earn this false proxy gold star. So it's interesting because I have more than 175, 000 emails in my email box, not counting spam. And when I look for someone like you in my email box, you're the fact that you backed my Kickstarter shows up. And that was 12 years ago, but your name is in the file, right? So thank you for that. The thing is that I think authors of nonfiction books, two things. One, We write books to be shared. You cannot possibly reach enough people directly for your book to work. James Clear hardly knew anybody and now his book has sold tens of millions of copies because people who read it gave it to someone else. So what we're looking to do is create books that sell by the box, not by the copy because we want people to hand them out to cause a conversation to happen. And the second thing, which is relevant to everybody who's listening to this, stop thinking about the biggest possible audience. The biggest possible audience is a trap when you want is the smallest viable audience. And I've had 21 bestsellers in a row and not one of them has reached more than 1 percent of the US population. So to a rounding error, I have 0 percent market share. If I kept chasing people who watched the view or I said yes, to go on some AM radio show, I'd just be broken. Instead, it's like, no, this book is in for you and that channel is in for me. I am here to serve these people. And if they talk about it, that's great. But that's a very clear mission. The people listening to this, if you get 100,000 customers, you win. That's an enormous number. So, forgive the other 299 million people. Just forgive them and go back to focusing on the people who are enrolled in the journey you're on. Pat Flynn: That's so brilliant. When I self published my first business book, Will It Fly?, it actually went on to become a Wall Street Journal bestseller as a self published book, which I didn't even know was possible.

And the only reason that happened was, like you said, people started to share it. Nobody ever talked about business and starting one in that way tells a lot of stories from me and being a parent, and it's just different than other business books. And this new one has a lot of the similar kind of tone to it.

But I'd imagined people reading it at the beach or at the pool that summer. And then I started to see on twitter those images of people laying on the lounge chair with the book in between their legs and it's just like this vision actually happened and I have vision similar for this book but it's more in the sense of educators achieving things with their students and entrepreneurs doing things that they never thought possible before and I'm excited and this is why I want to make sure you understand that at least for me your book has changed my life your books have changed my life one of them being purple cow this idea And most people listening to this probably know, but you know, in the field of brown cows, you want to be the purple cow, the one that stands out, the one that people stop for.

My question today for you, Seth, is with everybody trying to make a purple cow, now all the cows are purple, or at least they're all different colors now. It's feeling like it's harder to stand out. What is the 2024 version of a purple cow?

Seth Godin: So a purple cow is not a gimmick. A purple cow is a generous tool to help the people you are seeking to help.

So, for those who are watching a video. I'll keep this on my desk. The original copy of Purple Cow came in a milk carton. So I only sold 5,000 copies, because I had no publisher. And this was the envelope. I mailed it to people in the milk carton. And some people got the wrong idea about gimmicks. The milk carton ended up on people's desk at work, whereas books end up on their bookshelf.

Why would someone put it on their desk? Because they wanted to help me? No. Because they wanted their boss to change the culture of the company so they could make the kind of stuff they were excited about. I gave them a tool to say something they always wanted to say. That's what the word remarkable means, worth making a remark about.

So if you go ahead and do a Twitter live stream naked, standing on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, That was a gimmick. People will look at that, but that will not achieve your goal. That if you give people something, right, if someone says to their spouse, you need to read Pat's book because it's going to help both of us raise our kid, or it's going to help both of us build our organization, you did them a service.

They didn't do it because they like you or because you made a ruckus. They did it because they needed to talk about it. And so we're never going to run out of things worth talking about. Most people are too scared or too lazy to do that. They're going to just build hype or hustle. And it's going to get noisier and noisier, but that's not your problem.

Pat Flynn: When you have something to say that is remarkable. And I know a lot of the audience is remarkable and has remarkable things to share and to say and to sell. It almost feels like it's so noisy out there that whatever I say, no matter how loud I yell, it's never going to be heard. And this is how a lot of the audience is feeling.

They have something amazing to share.

Seth Godin: You nailed it, but they're fibbing to themselves a little bit. Because you're not the one who's supposed to get the word out. If you write a book and give it for free to 10 people who trust you and no one asks you for another copy, you didn't write a good enough book.

The idea is not, how do I get an Oprah and yell about my book? It's how do I make it so that the 10 or the hundred or the thousand true fans tell the others? So an example is if you're a woodworker, dovetailing is this fascinating and difficult thing. This guy made a dovetail device for 29, it uses a magnet, it's a miracle.

How do I know about it? Did he tell me? Of course not. I heard about it from a woodworker who couldn't wait to tell me about it. And I can go down a long list of things in my life. The bean to bar chocolate, where I got these glasses, all the stuff that matters to us. We didn't hear about it because the creator bought an ad or showed up on our feed.

We heard about it because someone we trusted told us about it, and if people aren't talking about what you're doing, you might want to think about how you are telling the story and whether the thing you're making is actually as remarkable as you think it is.

Pat Flynn: All right, we'll clip that and have that replayed over and over just so people get that into their head.

I love that so much. Seth, you went to engineering school back in the day at Stanford. I'm curious, your time at Stanford, how much or how little did you care about the Cal versus Stanford rivalry when you were at Stanford?

Seth Godin: Okay. So to be fair. I went to engineering school at Tufts, where I found a loophole in the catalog that allowed me to get a degree without taking any advanced engineering classes, not one.

So I took every class I cared about, but skipped all the ones I didn't care about. It was great. That sounds like a perfect education. They took it out of the catalog. You can't do that anymore. And then I got to Stanford. The year of the big game. I was at the business school and the big game is famous because the marching band went on the field and ruined a touchdown or something.

Anyway, I had zero interest in that. I did go to see the Grateful Dead on Frost Amphitheater and That was a magical California experience, but I have to tell you that at 22 years old, I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have.

Pat Flynn: So the big game I have seen at least a hundred times in my life because I was in the Cal band and they play that every single year to hype us up before the big game during that week.

So I was curious cause I knew it was around that time and the fact that you mentioned it unprompted, it makes me so happy. That is really cool. You have written blog posts about your engineering education. Obviously you're not an engineer in perhaps what you thought you were going to be doing back then, but you are engineering in kind of different kinds of ways, but you do give credit to that learning and that education in many different ways.

What were the one or two things you learned from engineering school that you then were able to apply or that you appreciated and happened even though you didn't go down that route?

Seth Godin: So the first thing is there's a difference between a problem and a situation. Situation sucks. There's no way out. You got to live with situations, right?

If you're 85 years old and you break your hip, that's the situation. A problem has a solution. You might not like the solution. The solution might not be easy, but there's a solution. So first decide if you have a problem or a situation, and if it's a problem, decide if you care enough to solve it. And if you don't let it go, and if you do solve it, the second thing is engineers discover that there is actually a best answer. And in a world that is increasingly qualitative with people bending the truth in lots of different ways, it's worth saying, is this actually a problem that has a right answer? If it isn't one with a right answer, then go ahead and pick the best available answer and just go and move on to the next thing.

If it is one with a possible best answer, put in the effort to find it. So, I've been shipping projects my whole career, most of which have failed, but that's what I do. I look for a problem, I come up with a theory about how I can solve it, and then I merely ship the work to see, and if it resonates, then I make it better.

And I guess the third thing I would say is people don't really know what the word quality means. Quality doesn't mean luxury, quality doesn't mean expensive. A Toyota is a higher quality car than a Rolls Royce. Because quality means meets spec quality says, did this match what you asked for and does it do exactly what it says it does.

And if you don't like the spec, make a better spec. But if this, you know, is this milk carton good quality? Well, I can't tell if it's going to hold 30 pounds or not leak, but that's not in the spec. Right? The spec is, could I make a milk carton without buying a dairy and ship it in six weeks and have it look like a milk carton?

The answer is yes. So this is a high quality milk carton.

Pat Flynn: And a lot of the quality is because of who you know you are building it for. Yeah. Right? A Toyota is being built for a family and they have specific needs. Yeah. You know, somebody who would buy Rolls Royce, who cares so much about status, quality means something different to them.

So this goes back to what we talked about earlier, which is know who you're doing this for, which I think is key. Another phrase that I quote you on many, many times is, and this was, you know, I got my start in 2008 and then soon started a podcast and the podcast is what really it was my launchpad for a lot of things that people know me for.

And you had quoted, I don't know when you said this, but you had said that podcasting is the new blogging. And I quoted you so much on that. And I even extended it at one point. I said, if Seth Godin says that podcasting is just the new blogging, therefore guest podcasting is the new guest blogging. And people took to that and it's, it's been great.

I'm curious your thoughts on 2024 and beyond. What is the new podcasting these days? Where are people having a platform that is an opportune time to amplify their message and reach people that matter?

Seth Godin: Okay. So the thesis of Permission Marketing, which was my real breakthrough first book was that's not going to go away.

The value of talking to people who want to hear from you in a disintermediated conversation. is priceless. So Google shows up with Gmail and tries to get in between me and my readers by moving me to the spam folder or the promo folder where I don't belong. Eventually it comes back. Then podcasting comes along and it is also disintermediated.

You don't need anyone's permission. Once someone puts your podcast in their podcast thing, you can talk directly to them and they are only going to listen to people they want to listen to. And podcasting worked so well, it wrecked itself, because there are too many podcasts. So it's very difficult for somebody to get enough listenership to make it worth doing again next week.

And so, the fact that you've been doing this for 15 years is extraordinary. It means you made it with hard work and persistence and commitment to the other side, right? And then when you add advertising to it as the way to pay for it, it starts to be a mess again, because the advertiser wants something you don't want.

The advertiser wants you to pander, they want you to interrupt yourself all the time, they want you to pretend to endorse things you don't believe in, on and on and on and on. Because if podcasts are a commodity, the advertiser is going to buy the cheapest one they can afford, right? So the best podcasts don't do that.

The best podcasts don't do that. are able to say, I want a sponsor, not an advertiser. Don't argue with me about the CPM. My listeners are special. And you're going to pay extra for that and followed by rules, or you can't advertise here. So now to answer your question, when you are on YouTube and have an actual subscriber, that's a form of permission that you can make a video and send it right to people who want to get it.

On the other hand, As we've seen, if a billionaire takes over a platform and starts changing the algorithm and you can no longer talk to the people who are, quote, following you, you've been intermediated out of the game. You are unpaid labor for somebody who doesn't treat you with respect. So my expectation is that going forward with AI, we're going to see a whole bunch of gatekeepers lose their power.

Google is already losing an enormous amount of power to things like perplexity. And that leaves. huge opportunities for new direct communication. But the thing about direct communication is it doesn't scale forever. So you got to be worth it, right? There are podcasts I used to listen to that are now stacking up in my reader because I just don't have time to keep listening to them.

They didn't make it to the top of my attention pile. Attention doesn't get any bigger. So you're going to have to take what you earn and that's probably going to be under pressure. So you have to re earn it all the time.

Pat Flynn: Thank you. As we finish up here, I wanted to call out a project that you worked on with a good friend of mine, Barrett Brooks.

I know that he had worked under you for a little bit, which was amazing. And he's spoken with high regards to, to that time. And he was the one who told me about the Carbon Almanac, a book that you had helped write. And publish related to the fact that it's not too late to reverse what's going on in the environment and with global warming and such.

What other projects are you working on that are more beyond the sort of marketing tone that you normally have? I was very surprised and very grateful to see that book and your voice behind that and the work that it's doing. Are there any other projects that we could get excited about that you're working on perhaps under wraps or that you're willing to share about other things that you believe in and want to support?

Seth Godin: You know, the Carbon Almanac changed my life. It was my full time job for more than a year and a half as a volunteer. I worked with 1900 people in 90 countries, and it's been an extraordinary sense of solace and connection and possibility. It demonstrated to me and to other people that you can do something really cool with other people who want to do it with you, and you don't have to have money to do that.

And I would love to do another one that big, that deep, that exciting, they don't come along every day. With the new book, I partnered with Askinosie Chocolate and made a collectible chocolate bar. The thing about chocolate, chocolate, and it's almost Halloween, so it's worth saying this out loud. The people who collect cacao from trees are slave labor in many places.

There are more than a million children who do it. The wages are ridiculous, $2 an hour. And if you're buying cheap chocolate, you are furthering the problem. Don't buy cheap chocolate. What Askinosie does, their motto is, it's not about the chocolate, it's about the chocolate. Sean goes to Tanzania, goes to the Philippines, meets the farmers, pays them five or 10 times the usual rate, sends their kids to private school and on and on and on because we can afford it.

And the things I am focused on as I enter this next stage of my life are about teaching people and being aware of unearned privilege and focusing on what are we going to do now that we've earned all this leverage? How are we going to use the communities around us not to get more, but to make things better.

And so I'm not done with the climate thing. It's going to be something we live with for the rest of our lives. And I'm trying to find interesting new ways to be of use.

Pat Flynn: Thank you for that. Tell me a little bit about the collectible component of the chocolate. Is there a certain limited quantity of them?

I'd love to know a little bit more about that since I'm in the collectible space on the Pokemon side of the world, but.

Seth Godin: You're the OG. So plenty of people have no trouble paying 50 bucks for a bottle of wine. And a great chocolate bar should cost 50 bucks too. They tend to cost 10. What I did was, I hand designed the packaging.

It's really cool. I don't have one here to show you. And it comes with a collectible trading card inside. There are 54 different cards. One of them is a golden ticket. There's only 100 golden tickets. If you find a golden ticket, there's a secret URL on it. You go to the URL, it explains what to do with the golden ticket.

You mail it to a secret post office box and you can win some really cool stuff. The other collectible cards, there's going to be a prize for someone who can identify at least 50 of the people who are on the cards. And it's a huge range of People who I share a lesson about strategy through each one of them and the chocolate is the first time Askinosie's made a blend It's Philippines Tanzania and Ghana and I haven't tasted it yet.

But my hunch is it's gonna be pretty amazing.

Pat Flynn: Oh my gosh I, when I was in Ghana, we were building schools over there through Pencils of Promise. We had been able to sample some stuff over there. It was, it was incredible. And I've actually been getting in a little bit into the chocolate game. How are you involved with, or how much do you know about the sort of like health related aspects of really good chocolate with not a lot of heavy metals and the, you know, I don't even remember the scientific term of the, the things in there that can help you with brain and energy.

Like, are you getting involved in the sort of health aspect of that as well.

Seth Godin: Okay, so we have a couple minutes. I'll get nerdy on you.

Pat Flynn: Okay, let's get nerdy

Seth Godin: John Scharffenberger was a winemaker and he figured out that chocolate was either coming from the giant evil companies like Nestle's or Hershey's or made in Switzerland and He found an old machine in France brought it to California and built the first bean to bar chocolate maker in the US. He was importing beans You And making chocolate bars.

And I had to meet John. And when I was a VP at Yahoo, we did a a pilot of a promotion together. So I got to understand bean to bar chocolate. The way he launched it is really interesting. He was sure the answer would be chefs. He was going to sell three to 10 pound blocks of high quality chocolate to pastry chefs. But pastry chefs like the status quo, they're using old recipes and they do it exactly the same way. Couldn't make any sales. So he had this leftover chocolate, he took it to the Berkeley Farmer's Market, and he sold it all in 20 minutes. And he's like, you don't have to tell me twice. I know who this is for. And that's when bean to bar chocolate came along.

Sean was probably the third or fourth guy to do it at Askinosie Chocolate. He used to be a criminal defense attorney working with rapists and organized crime figures. No one ever went to jail who he represented. He burned out. Good for him. And he decided to do this. So anyway, I got more and more into this cause I don't drink.

And this would become my vice. I have a basket here of more than 40 different kinds of dark chocolate. And I was four days away from starting a chocolate bar company. I took courses. I have a chocolate making facility in my house where I can make chocolate from scratch. I was going to scale it up. And then I thought, you know what, I'm probably better at marketing than Sean Askinosie, but I'm not a better person than him.

So I'm going to start stealing market share from him. Why don't I just sell his chocolate instead? So I've been aligned with many, I know many of these people. I love them. The answer to your question, the amount of heavy metal that you eat, if you eat as much chocolate as I eat, Is vanishingly small. You don't need to worry about the heavy metal and chocolate.

And I eat a lot of chocolate. Because a lot of chocolate is a couple of squares. It's not like you're drinking bottles of wine, right?

It's not something that you need to worry about. As for the beneficial side effects, they're bigger in Harry Potter than they are in real life, because you may recall in the second or third book, dark chocolate gets you saved if you get attacked by one of those evil creatures.

But I can attest that my best ideas come when I have a chocolate buzz. I haven't done double blind studies, but that's the way it is. I'm sticking with it.

Pat Flynn: If it works, it works. And you're not the first person I've heard who've said that chocolate during the creative phase of their work actually is really, really helpful.

And I've been feeling the effects as well. I buy some really expensive chocolate for this exact purpose. Fun fact, I took a chocolate factory tour at the Scharfenberger factory in Berkeley, California while I was there. And it was such a fun experience. Seth, thank you so much for this. In a minute, can you tell people why they should check out This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans.

Seth Godin: Well, first, thank you for letting me rant. I realize I've been ranting, but you are such a good interviewer that you can just keep setting me up to rant and rant and rant.

Pat Flynn: Thank you, Seth. It means a lot.

Seth Godin: If you go to Seths.blog/TIS, you can read about the book. I don't care if you buy my book. I really don't.

I just need you to talk about it. I need you to sit down with someone you care about and have a conversation about how are you making things better and what strategy would help you do that more. That's why I wrote a book. Not because I want to chop down trees or get a check from my publisher, but because I want people to have a conversation.

If your strategy is working, you don't need my help. But if it It could be better. You need to talk to somebody about it and this book is a good way to start.

Pat Flynn: In your vision, a person reads this book, sits at a dinner table and says, gosh, you got to read Seth's book because blank. What are they filling in that blank with?

Seth Godin: Because then you'll understand what I am wrestling with. I'm not here to just do my job. That's what our grandparents did. I'm here to figure out what my job is and to be of service. To do work that matters for people who care. Will you help me do that? As opposed to asking, when am I going to get a nine to five job?

Cause that's not going to happen anytime soon.

Pat Flynn: Seth, this was an honor and a pleasure. Thank you so much for letting me let you rant. And I look forward to the next conversation.

Seth Godin: Let's not wait so long. I'm looking forward to it. Thank you, Pat.

Pat Flynn: Thank you.

All right. I hope you enjoy that interview with Seth Godin. What an absolute pleasure that was. I've been reading his blog forever. Even back before I became an entrepreneur, his blog was around and like just the amount of people that he has helped myself included is just staggering and he continues to do so. And I very much admire that and to get inspired by that. So I'm hoping that you definitely check out his new book.

This Is Strategy make better plans and you can check that out on Amazon or on his website and definitely check out his blog. Let me know what you think. Hit me up on Instagram or X at Pat Flynn and let me know that you listen to this and what you thought about it. I'd love to have him back on the show at some point and we'd love to just continue to deepen that relationship with Mr. Seth Godin. Thank you, Seth. I appreciate you. And thank you for listening all the way through. I appreciate you as well. Please hit up the show notes for all the links and resources mentioned. And just to visit the website if you haven't visited it in a while, it may look a little different to you.

SmartPassiveIncome.com/session831. Again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/session831. Look forward to serving you more in the next and upcoming episodes. And we'll chat soon. Take care, everybody. Thanks.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I'm your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!