Pat Flynn Explains How to Build and Monetize Your Online Audience

Who is your target audience? It's a very basic question, but if you don't have a detailed response, it's going to be super hard to launch or scale your business. You won't know what products to develop, what channels to promote them on, and what content you can create to get them to stop scrolling and start engaging. Now, fortunately, today we're joined by Pat Flynn. He's a teachable course creator, an entrepreneur, and the founder of Smart Passive Income. I'm sure a lot of you have heard his podcast. Today. He'll teach us how to identify our audience, how to research them and find great insights for them, and how to use those insights to create better products and services. Let's hop into it right now. I believe you cannot build an audience without first becoming self aware. What comes to your mind when I say that?

What comes to mind is how one can understand that they themselves can potentially serve that audience. If you are doing research of an audience, but you're not aware of the fact that you either have the drive to step up to serve this audience, or the skill, or the ability to find the skill to solve their problems, then this is all for nothing, right? And I think a part of this goes into, before you build the audience, you become a part of the audience. I do really think that's important. And by becoming a part of that audience, you get to realize, well, how do these people talk? What's the language? And that way when you have conversations with them later, when you're trying to help them and you can speak the same language and you can both understand each other. I know a lot of people who build businesses and then they start selling it and they have no idea why things aren't selling, but it's because they're using a language that's completely different than those who are on the, on the beginning end of what it is that they're teaching. Secondly, you get to empathize. And I think empathy is one of the most important things anybody can have, just in general, for relationships, for parenting, for, you know, for business, as an employee, as an employer. I think empathy is so key and it's almost impossible, if not actually impossible, to empathize with somebody or a group of people who you just met for the first time. I think it's important to ask questions in a way where you can begin to understand what's going through a person's head and not just what, but why, and getting into that deeper level of who a person is and, or who a group of people is, so that when it is time to create content. When it is time to create a product, when it's time to serve them in some way. You're not just using some made up avatar like in the avatar. Exercise is really important, right? His name's Jim and he's this age and he has this many kids or whatever. Like that's cool because then you can start to determine, okay, well this is who we're creating it for. But why not just find a real person or real people to fill in that role such that when you have questions about, well, I don't know what a person in this space might think, well, I can't go ask made up Jimmy, but I can go ask, you know, Don, who I had a conversation with last week, who is struggling and I can ask them. I can ask him, well, how does it, how would he feel about, you know, something like this, which I might create or maybe not. So when you become self aware of the fact that you need to immerse yourself and understand fully, your behavior changes and your approach to business changes.

So what Pat's referring to right now, I call that the lonely work. It's not as flashy as having a cool TikTok video or a viral Instagram post, but doing that lonely work is what gives you the information to build better products and services. And the impact cannot be denied. Now, right now Pat's going to tell a quick story about a guy who went so deep on that work that he actually went into debt to better understand his audience.

You had mentioned understanding how a person feels. I know an entrepreneur who helps people who are in debt, help them get out of debt. Well, guess what he did to learn about this audience. He went in debt. He purposefully put himself in tens of thousands of dollars in debt so he can understand fully how that would feel. Like it might sound kind of crazy, but when he started getting those bills, you know, and started getting those follow ups to say, hey, you haven't paid, we're going to come after you or your possessions, he started to really feel like how some of his clients felt. And you know, maybe you don't have to go quite to that level, but as much as you can and you're comfortable, you want to immerse yourself in the space so that you can make true recommendations. And you yourself are a part of this too. So you can also, you know, empathize fully on both sides.

Now I've been in debt before, but it wasn't on purpose. One thing I did do on purpose though is this. When I first Started out as a digital marketing consultant. So what I would do is I would go to free digital marketing events here in New York City. I wasn't really there for the information, but I wanted to hear the questions that the audience asked and how the presenters delivered the information. That's how I learned more about my audience. And you want to do the same thing. What conferences can you go to? Webinars, chat rooms, whatever it is, anywhere you can learn more about your audience that that's where you want to be. So, yes, there's a time invested in that. And I know it's so hard to invest that time when you're first starting out and you're focused on making money, but trust me, it will pay off in the end. Now, another investment you must make is building your audience. Pat's going to go deeper into how we can do that right now and give you some very specific advice. Pretend you're talking to your best friend. He or she just started their own business and they're not convinced audience building is necessary. They're saying, look, I'm good at what I do. That should be enough. What would you say to them to convince them of the necessity to build their audience?

Oh, wow. First of all, I say, really? Okay, well, there is somebody out there in the world right now who's less skilled than you, who doesn't have as much experience, who has hundreds, potentially thousands of people who are hanging on to their every word, who trust them. And if you think that your skill alone is going to be enough to convince a person that, that you are their go to person for this service, well, you're just kidding yourself. So, you know, good luck. I would just tell them straight like that, you know, and it's true. And I think that might help convince a person to realize, wow, it's not just the fact that I have a skill or an ability that's going to help me succeed. It's the fact that I can demonstrate this in a way that proves it, that builds trust and authority and earns people's respect. That's going to get me the business that I desire.

We all need friends like Pat who can tell to us straight like that. And I'll tell you again, being an expert at your job is a prerequisite. You do not get rewarded as much as you might think. Now at a 9 to 5, sure, that's how you advance as an entrepreneur. No, you want to get rewarded for who you are, not just what you do. How do you do that? You build an audience. Now get ready to take some notes. Pat's going to give you some very specific steps on how to do that right now.

And so how does this, how does this happen? Well, this is where we go, okay, well, what's going to give me the most leverage? Right? What's the one platform I could get on that's gonna help me get in front of the most people and build me the most trust and the most audience in the shortest period of time? And that's a good question. But at the same time, again, it always comes down to, well, let's find out where these people exist first and let's talk to them so that when we pick the platform that is gonna be your biggest leverage, we'll know exactly what to say. We can even invite these people on and have ability to coach them right on. And demonstrate that authority and proof right in front of everybody else. And if that sounds hard to you, well, good, because this is the curl that you have to get over to do this. And this is where a lot of people who may consider themselves introverts feel like they're a little bit at a disadvantage. It's like, oh, no, now I got to put myself out there. Well, here's the thing. You, as an introvert, you actually have an advantage because you can make deeper connections with less people. And when you're starting out, you can go deep with fewer people to find out more about more people. And so building those relationships, building an email list is what I would recommend at the start too. You know, going into forums, going to communities, being a guest on other people's podcasts, and having a place like an email list to bring people to where you can help them further, where you can communicate with them in a two way street. Not just one way, but two way. Maybe you provide them some sort of worksheet or cheat sheet or something that's going to help them get a quick win or a quick result to help them, help convince them to give you their email. Then those 10 people on your email list, you reach out to them, what are their names? Get on a zoom call with them, talk to them, understand them. Those people represent the people who are most interested in what you potentially have to offer. And it's going to be a collaborative effort driven by the audience to create something that will bring more people in.

Okay, a lot of great tips there. And as you follow them, you're going to start seeing some initial traction in regards to building your audience. Now you might feel tempted to go deep on other platforms as well. People are saying you gotta get on TikTok. You have to get onto Clubhouse now. I always recommend securing your username on different channels. That way it's consistent, but you don't necessarily need to be active on them. Pat's gonna go deeper into why you just focus on one channel initially before moving on to others. What do I do right now as a new entrepreneur to grow my audience?

You pick one platform and you master it. Everything that you want to learn about growth, just learn about growth on that one platform. And maybe that platform is podcasting, maybe that platform is YouTube, maybe that platform is LinkedIn, maybe it's TikTok. All of those will work for building an audience. However, if you do all of them, none of them will work. When you disperse your energy across all those different places. 25% here, 25% here, here, and here. Sure, you happen to be on those platforms, but you're not a hundred percent on any of them. And so you're going to find better results by mastering one platform. Take the course that's just about that platform. Watch all the YouTube videos that are all about how to master and grow on that one platform, and then experiment on that one platform, lean into it, make connections and build relationships with people on that one platform. On that platform, reach out to the individuals who are there, subscribe to you or following you, and get to know them there natively in that platform. Instagram is a great place to do this. Instagram, and going to direct messages and sharing videos or voices to share messages blows people away. And it allows you to connect with them more so that you can learn more about them and serve them better, perhaps on your website. So I think a website's still important to have that's kind of like your hub. You get to control that. You build your email list there. That's very important because who knows what happens to these platforms where we're building our audience. And any moment they could change an algorithm or get bought out or something can happen and then you lose them. So I think it's important to pick a platform where you can reach where there is organic potential growth, and then bring them back to your website and build that email list so you can connect with them further and just pick one platform. That's it to start with. You can, you can. You can optimize there. You can get, you know, once you feel like you've mastered it, or you hire somebody to help you with it, then you can move on to another platform. And then when you do move to another platform, you'll have that much more of a connection on that initial one to just easily start the second one, because a lot of those people are probably there too. But you know, when you think about it, most people only enjoy one or two platforms as consumers, and we just stick around to it. Right. I know people who only watch YouTube videos or people who only listen to podcasts. So why do we think that only showing up a quarter percent on that platform is going to gain 100% of a person's attention? It's not. So that's why I say let's just narrow it down. Pick one, lean into it, master it, build your audience there, and then you can do some amazing things.

Pick one platform. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but if you think about it, you probably know some creators on Instagram that are blowing up. And on LinkedIn, no one gives a gwiz. It's because they knew what platform to be on. And everything else might be a distraction based on their desired outcome. And then beyond that, make sure to build your email list. I see far too many people confuse followers with leads. Let's be clear here. Social media is an earned media channel. You have to earn the right to get in front of your audience. Your email list is an owned channel. Since you own it, you can contact them whenever you want. Pat's going to go deeper into how to develop your email list now. So, Pat, that one platform used to be Facebook, and I used to work at Facebook. So we're telling everyone, yeah, build your organic following. It's amazing. Like, back then you could just say hi in your Facebook page and. And 40% of your followers would see it. Now it's closer to like 1 to 4%. And I know right now you're leaning more towards Circle. If I'm not incorrect, can you just explain the difference between building a platform on Facebook, whether it be a page or a group in circle?

Yeah. Wow. Facebook. I had spent so many hours building my Facebook fan page, this was back in 2010, only to one day wake up to an email that says, yeah, basically we're going to deprioritize fan pages, and it's all about groups. And then people started building groups, and then groups started to get, you know, crowded and whatnot. And the big difference between Facebook and Circle is Facebook is just all the things we know Facebook to be. Circle is essentially just like the Facebook groups part of it, but you get to control it and it's yours, similar to how you might have an email list. And so whatever platform you're building an audience, this is where you then bring them over to Circle to build a community. And that's the difference. You're not organically being found on Circle. Circle is where you bring people. It's like your home. You go out to a conference, right? The conference being social media, and you go out there, you find your pockets of people, you meet them, you connect with them. You're like, hey, I'd love to invite you over for hanging out with everybody else who's in this space and we can all connect together. Cool. Come over to the house or come over to Circle, which is outside of the social media sphere and it's its own sort of circle, if you will, of people who you want to connect with. And that's the future of business, is my opinion. Community and these membership driven models that are people who want to connect with each other. And this is why Facebook groups were a thing. And it's still. They still are a thing. But Circle allows you to take control over those groups and to have, you know, your ability to better connect with those people. And it has all the same features of Facebook groups, or most of them, if not more and better. It almost looks like the marriage between Facebook groups and Slack, where you can have different channels for different discussions. And they're called spaces inside of Circle. Full disclosure, I'm an advisor to Circle, just so you know. But it has been amazing to launch a premium community on Circle over the last year called SPI Pro. We have hundreds of paying members in there who pay not for more content. In fact, that's the last thing they wanted. In a survey, we asked, well, what do you want in this membership? And they're like, we don't want more content. We want connection, we want community, we want collaboration, we want to get pushed, we want challenges. We want to find other people like us in a place outside of Facebook where there's all this other noise. And so that's really the big difference. And I highly recommend you all check out Circle because, wow, it's just an amazing platform and we've had so much fun with it.

Here's one thing I like about Pat. He's not afraid to test one approach versus another and then make a decision based on his desired outcome. But as opportunities in the marketplace changes, he's also not afraid to keep on testing. So by now, you're probably ready to charge and start building your audience. Let's pause here. Pat's going to talk to us about the commander's intent and how we can leverage that to grow our audience even more efficiently.

We want to connect with the audience and just leave it at that first, because you might not know what the next steps might be from there. I think that when we, you know, this is so different than building a business plan right, where we have all the steps laid out in front of us. I think instead of saying, okay, here's all the steps of the things we need to do, I think we just need to have what's called a commander's intent. What is your intent? My intent is to best serve this community in some way, shape or form. Okay, step one, let's just go talk to them and see what they need. You might find that the last thing they want is a circle community because there's always. There's many of them that exist already or there's so many face. Maybe they, maybe you might find out that they need accountability from a one on one coach and that's the best way to serve that audience. In which case your idea of going from lead magnet to circle would be completely wrong. So we don't again want to guess. We want to know for sure and have that traction so that when we're making the next decision, it's based off of the last step. And so that I would have you slow down a little bit and say, okay, let's put that off to the side, because that is a potential pathway we could take. But it all starts with communication with this particular group, immersing ourselves in this space to understand what they might need help with and how they might prefer that help. You might also find that circle is going to take too much time because it does take time to manage a community. It's not a set and forget situation, whereas an online course is. And you might find that you literally have no time to manage a community right now. But hopefully you might find that an online course will work because it serves that audience. You'll make some money and then convert some of those people to a community when you can hire a community manager. But of course it's nice because you can set it up once and it kind of runs on its own, thus giving you back more time. So this is where again, we slow down and we go back to step one. First, let's just have conversations because I know that is not necessarily the sexiest part of this, but it's the most necessary part. Too many people have a website without having a business. So many people have business cards without having a business. So many people have a social media account and say they're a business owner when they haven't even tested or even had conversations with their audience yet that's the first step.

That commander's intent requires delayed gratification and constantly focusing on your audience. And I know we're asking a lot of you, so might be thinking to yourself, is this worth it? How much money am I going to make from this? Pat's going to answer that question for you right now, but I'd love to know, just in regards to audience building in general, how do you measure the roi? Through direct channels like Email and maybe less indirect channels like Clubhouse?

Yeah. You know, this ROI situation can be a very interesting thing. A lot of people coming from corporate, that's one of the first questions they ask, because we're so used to X number of hours in, y number of dollars out, and just in all regards, from your own paycheck to campaigns that you run, et cetera. But when it comes to success online, it can be very difficult to measure how much money does this conversation I have with my audience get me back? And I think the ROI question is one I don't try to avoid, but I kind of just go, well, that's not the right question to ask right now. And I don't mean that to offend you, Terry. I know that you're just channeling what everybody's thinking, and I hope I'm not offending everybody out there. But you need to immerse yourself in a space, and the ROI on that is infinite, in my opinion. When you discover who these people are, what they might need help with and what solutions they might need, that is not measurable, but it is infinite. Right? And you can't measure infinite. I mean, infinite is infinite, but there's a million ways, an infinite number of ways that you could potentially solve even one problem, let alone how many different problems there are. So where ROI comes into play is when you start putting numbers to things. And if you have, for example, a campaign where you're running an ad, you want to know if you're spending this much money and how much money you're getting back. That's very important. But ads don't matter unless you know who you're targeting. Copywriting doesn't matter unless you know what words to say. And again, so it always stems down to those who are just starting out. Who's. Who are you doing this for, and what do they need help with? And I'm sorry I keep saying that, but there's nothing more important than that. And then it comes into, well, okay, great, I got a solution. I'm going to launch my Thing, Maybe it's an online course or some group coaching program or something. If you start calculating ROI initially like that, it's not going to look very good. You're going to go, wow, I put in like 120 hours of work into all the conversations I've had, the development of this course and just following up and the office hours. Like, I put in 120 hours, I only made $2,000. And if I do the calculations, that's like 45 cents per minute or per hour that I'm making. That's not good at all. And then you go, well, I made way more at my job per hour. And it's like, those are the wrong comparisons. Because you start out small, you get that one customer getting one result, and then you exponentially grow. And there is a period or a point of crossover between the income that you get doing it this way and the income that you would have had doing it the other way. And when you think about it, there is a ceiling in which you could have earned in your position at a 9 to 5 or your other job. There's a ceiling. There is a ceiling. As an entrepreneur, there is no ceiling. It's as big as you want it to grow. Obviously it comes with work, but you get, over time, you get paid for the work that you put in into serving others. You can make the same amount of money in your job working far harder than the other person. In fact, you can make way less depending on what part of the hierarchy you're in and your income level and the compensation structure, etc. So I would much rather have the opportunity to go much higher, as higher as I want to go, with much more freedom, not just in money, but mostly in time.

So obviously the ROI part's a really tough question to answer, but if you go into every single interaction thinking, what am I going to get out of this? You'll miss out on the lesson you should be thinking, what can I create an opportunity to learn, to help someone, to build a better business. There's always these small, seemingly insignificant things that can lead to radical outcomes. But if you stop to this micro analyze every opportunity, you'll never get a chance to get that reward. So by now you're thinking about next steps. How can you put all this information into action? Pat is a great opportunity for you. He's going to explain it to you. Right now.

The Audience Driven Summit is coming up October 12 and 13. It's completely free and we are putting together an amazing roster of people who are amazing audience builders and they serve their audience very well. And they're going to talk about what's working today and what's going to work next year and what are the trends right now in audience building. So there's no better place to go if you're interested in building an audience. Audiencedriven Co that summit sounds amazing.

You should definitely check it out. It's gonna be a good way to continue the learning experience from today. Before we wrap up, Pat's gonna share his initial hesitation he had around building his audience. I think it's gonna be very relevant for you because it's gonna address some of the hesitations you might have as well. But on your end, again, when you're first starting out, building your audience. Now, being an introvert, was it challenging for you to create videos, to create audio content? How did you push through any of those barriers that came up?

I was definitely hesitant to create video and audio content, and this is why I started out as a blogger. In 2008, I started Smart Passive Income blog blogging three times a week. Very happy to do so because I could just hide behind my keyboard. You didn't even see a photo of me on the website. And when it was, it didn't even like it was. I was like hidden behind glasses and I didn't put my full self in there and such. And then in 2009, I started my YouTube channel because everybody was creating YouTube channels back then and it was a great way to bring more organic traffic back to your website. And I was all about website growth. However, I was afraid to put my face on camera. So what I did was I did screen recordings. I did screen recording tutorials of different software and tools to show people how to use them. And it was just my voice. But I wasn't as afraid because people were just watching the screen and I knew they just wanted the how to. They didn't care about me. As long as I helped them get that solution, well, then everything was good. And that's a big lesson. As long as you help people get the solution, it doesn't really matter what you look like or what you sound like, to be honest. And then in 2010, I started my podcast. I had a little bit of training, thankfully, because I did those voiceovers for those screen recordings. But even then I was still very afraid because the podcast felt like a lot more personal. It was me telling story, it was me asking questions on interviews. It wasn't just me sharing a how to do something on video. And so I actually was very scared. So much so that it took me a year and a half to finally record my first episode. I actually made a claim on my website in 2008 that I was going to start a podcast. I bought the equipment, in fact, but my first episode didn't come out until July of 2010. And it was because I was so afraid. I was afraid of what people would say. I was afraid of what people. People would not think it was good or hate the sound of my own voice. And there was only one person that ever said anything about my voice, and it was me. I'm the only person that ever said anything negative about that. And I think that just speaks to the fact that we always try to get in our own way. And if only I had launched it sooner because it became the number one way that people have found out about me and my brand. It still continues to be that. And if I had just even a couple more years ahead back then, that would have exponentially grown into much more. It's like investing. The sooner you do it. I mean, time is on your side. But if you don't have a podcast yet and you're interested to get started, you should start now, because it's still in its early phases. We just have less than 2 million podcasts out there right now. When you Compare that to 500 million active blogs and 50 million active YouTube channels, we're still in the early days. And when you think about how people consume podcasts, people are listening. Just like you're potentially listening to podcasts on your own device right now for 30 minutes, an hour, two hours, three hours, three, four hours at a time. And on a video, people might only watch for five minutes, or on a blog post they might only read for five minutes, and they're skipping around. So, yeah, it took a while, but every time I felt that way and I finally done it, I always go, man, I only wish I did that sooner. What was I so afraid of?

What was I so afraid of? Well, it's a good question for us to ask. Maybe you're afraid that you're going to fail or that no one's going to be listening. Well, guess what? You are going to fail. And initially, no one's going to be listening. But if you learn to see failure as data, you'll keep on getting better and better and better as a result. Here's what you should be afraid of. Not reaching your full potential. And if you let your best idea stay trapped inside of your head, that's exactly what's going to happen. So go ahead and get started. Today. Everything you want to accomplish is on the other side of that fear or hesitation. And there are people out there who you don't even know that are waiting to hear your voice.