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In this episode of GradBlogger, we talk to Pat Flynn about how superfans can help you grow your blog and your business. We talk about what a superfan is, why they are so important, and how you find, create, and grow them.
Disclosure: Some of the links in the podcast show notes and transcripts are affiliate links (indicated with [Affiliate] in front). If you choose to make a purchase through these links, GradBlogger will earn a commission from that purchase at no extra cost to you
Introduction
Chris Cloney: 00:08
Welcome to Episode #19 of GradBlogger. This is the podcast for helping academics, graduate students, Ph.D.s, and professors change the world through online business. This is where we’re giving you the tools, the tricks, and the tips that you need to build an online business from blogging, podcasting, and video, and make your dent in the world with your expertise and your research experience.
Chris Cloney: 00:28
I’m your host, Dr. Chris Cloney. In today’s episode, we’re talking about the power of superfans to grow your blog and grow your business, and to do that, we have a very special guest: Pat Flynn from smartpassiveincome.com. Pat, I want to give you a big thank you and a big welcome to GradBlogger today.
Pat Flynn: 00:43
Oh, man. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you so, so much.
Chris Cloney: 00:46
Awesome. So before we jump into the content, and I do want to jump into the content because I think the audience is really going to like this episode, I have to start with a big thank you.
Chris Cloney: 00:54
I started listening to the SPI Smart Passive Income Podcast back in 2016 when I launched my online business based on blogging about my Ph.D. research. That business has now grown into a multi-member team. We’ve also launched GradBlogger since then.
I just wanted to encourage a lot of the listeners to go check out Smart Passive Income. If you’re just getting starting on your journey, go to Episode One and work your way forward, because it’s made a tremendous difference in my life and my businesses, so I just want to start with a big thank you before we jumped into the content.
Pat Flynn: 01:26
Dude, thank you so much for that. I mean, I have been doing this for 11 years, and this is exactly why I do what I do: to hear things like that and how I can have an effect on people’s lives.
I know that’s what any business owner should do and what we’re going to talk about today is helping and serving others because then that helps spread your message even more. Now here I am on your show and we’re talking about my new book and this is so cool, so just thank you for reminding me why I do what I do. This is exactly it.
Chris Cloney: 01:54
Love it. So as I said in the outset, we’re talking about the power of superfans to grow your blog and your business. We’re going to talk about what a Superfan is, why they are so critical, and how you find, create, and grow them as part of your own audience.
As Pat mentioned, this is something he knows a lot about. He’s about to release a book, [Affiliate] Superfans: the Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business. It comes out August 13th.
Chris Cloney: 02:26
Pat’s going to give you a couple of links you can go to if you want to pre-order the book or become part of the prelaunch team. I personally pre-ordered three copies of the book: one for myself and two special copies, but you’ll have to wait until the end of this episode to find out what’s going to happen with those two special copies.
Chris Cloney: 02:50
Before we jump into the main topic, which is superfans, I want to take the listeners back a bit, because there are a lot of listeners who did their Ph.D., are doing a postdoc, or are doing a professorship, and they feel like they’re:
- Not going to make tenure
- Going to be let go sometime in the near future or just got released from their university.
Chris Cloney: 03:12
Only one in 10 Ph.D.s go on to be university professors over the long-term, so there are a lot of people being let go.
Pat, I know you get started back in 2007 or 2008 with a blog about the architecture exam, which you turned into a business. I feel like there are a lot of listeners in the audience who could relate to that story. So without taking too much time away from the main topic, is there any way you can go through that process a bit?
Tell Us About the Architecture Exam
Pat Flynn: 03:38
Yeah, absolutely. I grew up in San Diego, California. Straight A student, graduated from high school, top of the class, graduated from college, top of the class with an architecture degree. I wanted to be an architect. It was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life and I was doing it.
I was doing it for three, four years until 2008, when I was let go. My dream was taken away from me and it was a tough blow. I didn’t really have a plan B. I was very upset too, because I was like, “What’s happening here? I did everything. Graduated top of the class. Even in my architecture firm, I was the youngest to be promoted to job captain. I was getting licensure and all that stuff, and yet I still got let go.”
Pat Flynn: 04:21
Obviously, it was because of the recession, but even still, I felt betrayed a little bit because I thought that doing it right was supposed to land me this secure job, yet I still got let go.
Well, to make a long story short, I took some knowledge I had about a particular exam in the architecture space called the LEED exam, which is about green buildings, sustainable design, those kinds of things.
It was a very difficult exam. There wasn’t a lot of information about it when I took it, but I knew I could help people with it, so I decided to build a website and I was very active in forums, helping people pass this exam. Eventually, I started to become known as sort of a go-to person in that space. Before long a lot of people started asking me to write a book.
Pat Flynn: 05:02
I was like, “No, I’m not qualified to write a book. I didn’t even get a perfect score. I didn’t get my degree in sustainable design.” Yet, I still was seen as the expert because I was posting about it and helping people.
Finally, in late 2008, I published a study guide. I wrote a Word document, turned it into a PDF file and sold it for $19 as an ebook online. And in that month I had made $7,908.55 from this book.
Pat Flynn: 05:31
It just blew me away. I had no idea that this world really existed and every time I did some research on the online business space, all I could come across were these scummy, snake oily type people who are selling the dream.
It was interesting because here I was doing it and making money, but in addition to that, I was getting these thank you notes from people who were calling me by name and giving me recognition, stuff that I never got as a soon-to-be architect.
Pat Flynn: 06:01
That’s when I made the decision to go full in with entrepreneurship and build that business out. I added more products. I started smartpassiveincome.com, which is where most people know me from now, and where I started talking about how I built that business. I gave people inside access to everything I was doing. Everything I was doing right, everything I was doing wrong, things I would have done differently, including how much money I was making and where it was all coming from.
Pat Flynn: 06:22
What’s really cool was that I started to become known as a transparent, authentic person who was not the snake oily guy in this space. I was just honest about it. The truth is that it’s hard and it’s not easy, but it’s possible. I feel like anybody can do it, and that’s what I teach people to do today.
Superfans is just another moment in time of some really important pieces of advice that I want to share with people who are helping to build their businesses. That’s where we’re at today. It’s pretty crazy, but I think back and, honestly, getting laid off was the best thing that could ever happen to me.
Chris Cloney: 06:56
That’s a great point. So I want to highlight a couple of things from that conversation that will really resonate with graduate students, postdocs that are now on their third postdoc and can’t get a job, and people that got rejected from university.
So three points. One: I did all the right things. I heard you say that. And I hear that time and time again. People are emailing me, saying, “I’ve done all the right things and I still got let go.” So that’s number one.
Number two is that it’s possible. These people are experts. My expertise is in chemical engineering, industrial safety, fire and explosions involving solid powders. That’s what my blog is about. That’s what DustSafetyScience, my business, is about. It’s possible if you put yourself out there.
Number three: you can do it without being scummy. In a previous episode, I talked about funnels and funnels are for numbers, not for people. You don’t really want to trap people in this funnel where they can’t climb out. Funnel is just a word for saying that you have this percentage of people dropping off. So you can do it without being scummy.
So those are the three things I wanted to highlight. If anybody’s interested in checking that story. There’s a post on smartpassiveincome.com, which we’ll put in the show notes at gradblogger.com/19 that goes through Pat’s journey of creating In the Leed, which was the original website, and then Green Exam Academy.
The topic today is the power of superfans to help grow you to those next steps. Can you give us just a definition? What is a superfan?
What is a Superfan?
Pat Flynn: 08:21
Yeah, For example, if you are a musician, a superfan would be somebody who not only has posters and bought all the albums, but they would travel eight hours to go and listen to your set. If you’re selling products, they’re buying your products before they even come out. Their credit cards are already ready. They’ve loved everything that you’ve done so far and trust you and they don’t even read the sales page when they buy your products.
If you are a performer, they’re at your show in the front row and they wouldn’t be anywhere else in the world. These are your superfans and it doesn’t matter what business you have, you can have superfans.
I was introduced to this fact via my architecture website. I got an email one day from a woman named Jackie, and she was just so ecstatic that I was able to help her finally pass this exam.
Pat Flynn: 09:05
She was studying for a year. She got my guide, I helped her out a little bit via email and she was just so thankful that she finally passed the exam. She got a promotion, she got a raise and she was like, “I want to invite you to dinner. Thank you so much. My family can go to Disneyland now.” At the end of this email, it said, “I’m a huge fan. Thanks.”
I was like, “What? How are you a fan? I just helped you pass an exam.” I was a fan of Michael Jordan and Harry Potter and those kinds of things. But being a fan of Pat Flynn, the architecture guy, this didn’t make any sense. Then the next couple of months went by and I noticed that there were 30 or 40 customers coming in from the very same exact company that she was from.
Pat Flynn: 09:43
I finally realized that she went out and convinced every single person in her firm to buy the same product. I was like, “Wow!” Because number one, this was an ebook. She could’ve just sent it to them for free and I would have never known. But she convinced them to buy from me because she was so thankful and wanted to repay me.
This one single person turned into 30 new customers and it was because of the experience that she had. Not only did I help her solve her problems, but I provided her a lot of little touch points that got her to realize that I cared for her and what she was going through, which was really interesting. That’s the service that I now recommend everybody to provide and it can be done in a scalable way.
Pat Flynn: 10:23
These are the kinds of things I talked about in my book. There was an article written by a guy named Kevin Kelly, called A Thousand True Fans. It should be really inspiring to everybody who’s creating anything because it makes you realize that you don’t need a blockbuster hit. Whenever you hear people talking about business, they’re like, “Oh, I want to have millions of followers, millions of subscribers, and I need to create the next Uber. I should create the next eBay.”
The truth is you don’t need all that to have something amazingly successful and fulfilling in life. You just need, as Kevin says, a thousand true fans, because if you have that thousand true fans and they love your creative, they love your art, your service, your knowledge so much that they’ll be willing to pay on a low end, $100 a year.
Pat Flynn: 11:03
It’s less than $10 a month. That’s a six-figure business, right? A thousand people times $100 a year. The crazy thing is that these fans are going to bring even more people in.
We’re funneling everything, like you said, and we’re worried about search engine optimization and advertising, and social media and getting more and more and more exposure. Cool. That’s important. But what happens when those people finally get to your brand, when they finally are in your business? They’re going to have the same treatment as everybody else, unless you do it differently.
Pat Flynn: 11:35
The truth is that your business will go internally from the inside if you focus on creating those superfan-like moments, and as great as Kevin Kelly’s article was and how inspiring that was, it shows you don’t need a blockbuster hit. I love that you talk about funnels because I talked about funnels in this book as well, but I flipped the funnel.
Pat Flynn: 11:54
I turn it into a pyramid because where people come in is the bottom. They come in the largest part of your audience, which is the casual audience member. The person who discovers you for the first time. They have no idea who you are. They found you on Google, or via a recommendation but they have no idea who you are.
Your job is to up them into the next level, which is the active audience member. These are your subscribers, followers. They know who you are, they know what you have to offer. They’re not yet fans. Fans don’t happen overnight, but from there, you bring them into the community: a smaller portion of the overall user base, but one of the strongest pieces of your brand because this is you not only talking to your customers and people, and not your people just talking to you. This is them speaking to each other.
You think of anybody who’s a fan of Star Trek: they go to Trekkie conventions. First of all, they have a name -they’re Trekkies- but they also go to conventions to find other people like them, which does what for Star Trek? It keeps it living, it keeps it going. And then of course at the top, you have your superfans, which is where most of your customers are going to come from. So as much as a funnel is great and it’s important to have a funnel, people enter here and they end up here. But I like your analogy. It’s like it’s hard for people to climb out with the flip, the pyramid. People are at the bottom and guess what?
Pat Flynn: 13:18
You have to help them up, and there’s gravity at play. It’s not easy. It doesn’t happen overnight. But once they’re there, they’re at the top of the summit. They’re feeling good. They’re shouting from that mountain saying, “Come on, come up here, come with me” and they’re bringing their people who are ready to be customers. It’s different from you worrying about brand-new people coming in cold, and trying to convince them who you are. This is what Superfans is about. It’s what I believe business should be moving forward.
Why Are They Important to Growing Your Blog and Your Business?
Pat Flynn: 13:44
It’s our insurance policy as business owners, because those superfans are going to be with you forever, and they will be there for you even if your website goes down. Even if your social media channels, those algorithms get in the way like they are right now, and you’re not able to reach everybody. If that happens, guess what? Your superfans are going to go out of their way to make sure that they have you in their life because you’ve done so much for them. This book is all about those little touchpoints that you can provide from the moment they find you until they reach the top of the pyramid and become superfans.
Chris Cloney: 14:33
Yeah, I agree. So I want to ask a question, and I’ll give part of the answer. You mentioned the thousand true fans, which is a really good concept. What does this mean if you’re an expert in a really niche field? This would be a question I’d ask my listeners and the answer is that you may not even need a thousand fans.
When we got our first $500 per month in ad sponsorship, we had 150 people on our newsletter. When we launched our company DustSafetyScience in April of 2018, I wrote a blog post about it. It was called “The Five Lessons I Learned From Launching My Online Research Company.” I did it live at a conference. I did a presentation and said, “This is our mission, this our goal, this is what we’re doing.” But lesson number one was the power of superfans.
Chris Cloney: 15:16
This blog post went up in September 2018. I only had maybe three superfans, but they were all at this conference. I’ll highlight a couple of ways that they got me to launch this business. (We made about $30,000 in revenue in that four-day conference.)
One fought to have me present at the conference. His boss said it’s full, and he said, “You need to have Chris Cloney. He’s talking about dust explosions and fires, industrial safety stuff. You need to have him.” So they fit me in, gave me a slot where there wasn’t one, because somebody went to bat for me.
Chris Cloney: 15:48
They had a panel discussion the first day and another one of my superfans was up in front of the room of 500 people. I told him the night before that my son was being born, and he said in front of the room, “And we have Chris Cloney here, who’s blogging about dust explosions, which is my field, and I have to tell you that he’s just expecting.”
Chris Cloney: 16:09
And then he looked at me like, “Oh, I’m not supposed to say this.” I was like, well, what are you going to say now? So I just gave him a thumbs up and he said, “He’s expecting his first son.” For the rest of the event, everybody knew who I was.
This room full of 500 people included the first two companies to sign up, and another company was a superfan. They kept sending people my way the whole conference, so we were able to sign up 10 companies as advertisers to support our mission, which is to achieve a year with zero fatalities from these industrial hazards by 2038. So it works if you’re an expert, but it’s actually- I’m trying to think of a better analogy,-but it’s on steroids. If you’re in a very, very niche topic, there are only hundreds of people in the world that care about my specific research field.
Chris Cloney: 16:45
If you become known as a leader in that field, it’s even more powerful to have superfans, even more powerful to have these people that are really going to bat for you. So I just want to highlight that, because the audience listening to this podcast is going to be experts and they may be a little bit afraid about putting themselves out there, but the things you can do are really immense. So that’s the background of what a superfan is. I think we even talked about a lot about why you need them.
How Do You Find Superfans?
Chris Cloney: 17:07
I want to get into some of the nitty-gritty details now. How do we go about finding them? How do we grow them? How do we encourage them to become superfans? I think you gave a step by step process where they’re listeners, then they’re an active audience, and then maybe they’re fans. How do we as bloggers, as podcasters, as video producers, go about enticing these people to join our tribe?
Pat Flynn: 17:30
Well, fans aren’t found. They’re created, right? So for anybody who comes across you in some any way, shape or form, that’s your opportunity to bring them up this pyramid.
It starts at the bottom with your casual audience members. These are people who have just found you, right? And these are the people who you need to activate to become active subscribers. In terms of how you do that, there are a number of different ways that I talk about the book.
My two favourite ways are, number one, giving them a small, quick win. This is so key. When I was in architecture, I was a personal finance blog nerd. I read all the personal finance blogs. There was one in particular that I was hesitant to read because the name was a little off-putting to me. It was called I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
Pat Flynn: 18:11
I heard it was popular. This guy, Ramit Sethi, was big in the finance space. But I was didn’t like the way it sounded. But then I came across an article of his, that was- I can’t remember the exact title, but the subject was “Read this script to your cable company and save 20% on your cable bill in 15 minutes.” And I was like, wait, really? I could do that? So during lunch one day, I called my cable company and I read the script that he wrote out for me, and I was able to save 25% of the cable bill, in 15 minutes.
Back then I was like, oh my gosh, but across a whole year I’ve saved thousands of dollars and over 40 years, I’ve saved six figures. Wow, Ramit, amazing! So of course, I dove right into all of his stuff because he gave me that quick win versus the other personal finance bloggers who were saying, “You have to not drink lattes. You have to save $25 a month in your account for 40 years and then you’ll reap the rewards.”
Pat Flynn: 19:06
Who do you think I’m going to be more interested in? The person who gave me the quick win or the person who’s making me wait 40 years for that win? I was obviously a fan of Ramit after that point. I was activated. I dove into all of this content. I even went and paid for some of his courses after that and now he and I are friends, which is really cool.
But yeah, that’s how I got in with them- providing a small quick win. A lot of us, though, want to offer these giant things and it’s hard because we’re experts, right? So we know a lot and we want to shower our people with all that information. But the truth is, you’ve got to find those small little tidbits first.
Pat Flynn: 19:39
If you want to change somebody’s life, you need to start by changing their day first and give them something quick and easy that they can use that they’re going to just run with and then they’re going to come back.
There has been a lot of psychology and studies about the small quick win, and the reward you give that will then bring that person back. It’s kinda like that yes ladder that we talk about.
Another way that I love doing this is to make sure that you are speaking the right language. You’re using the right lyrics. My wife, she’s a huge fan of the Backstreet Boys. She has been for 30 years. She was telling me about the first time she remembered listening to one of their songs and it was at a time when she was going through a breakup with her boyfriend.
Pat Flynn: 20:20
She was 15 and the Backstreet Boys came on the radio and she was like, “Yeah, I remember hearing that song before, but I never paid attention, but this time I did because every word that they were saying was about what I was going through in my life.” That was her activation moment with the band. Of course, after that she bought the album, she got a concert ticket and she had gotten the bobbleheads and that whatever, like all that crap. But it started with getting the lyrics right.
In our business, we may know how to solve problems, but unless we speak the same language as our target audience, it doesn’t matter that you know how to solve those problems. Those people won’t know that. Jay Abraham, a very famous old school marketer once said, “If you can define the problem better than your target customer, they will automatically assume you have the solution.”
Pat Flynn: 21:03
That’s when you get a person going, “Oh man, yeah, you get me. You must be the person that I need to go to because you understand what I’m going through.”
So those are a couple of quick ways that you can activate a casual audience member to want to subscribe, to want to come back for more.
This reminds me of when I was a kid. I was a short kid. I was five feet tall during my senior year of high school, right? Unfortunately, I had tall friends who liked to play basketball. Not a good setup for me, but they were nice and they invited me to play basketball every day. And every day I would never get passed the ball. I was always last picked. I would never have a chance to shoot.
Pat Flynn: 21:37
So even though I was quote, “Playing basketball,” I never really felt like I belonged to that group. And it didn’t make me feel good. It didn’t make me want to go and be a part of it even more. In our businesses, we often bring people into our ecosystem. We get these subscribers, but then we don’t make them feel like they belong, and there is a number of different ways that you can do this.
First of all, give them permission to speak up, give them permission to talk and comment, and engage. There are a lot of engagement related strategies in the book for this level, because once a person is involved then they’re going to be invested. Right? So one quick example is with the cover of my book. I went to a certain group of people in my audience and I said, “Hey, here are five different versions of this book, covers. Which one do you like better? Can you tell me why?”
Pat Flynn: 22:27
Now, of course, this helps me because I get a little survey really quick to understand which cover is making a bigger impact. But more important is the fact that I’m involving my audience in the process of what’s being created. As a result of them being involved, they’re going to be very interested in what it turns out. They’re going to be feeling like they’re a part of it. When this book comes out, they’re feeling like this is also their book as well.
This is where you can start to build that community and level them up into the community, which is where you create moments where your people can find each other. It can happen in a live setting, which is why a lot of people do live events.
Pat Flynn: 23:03
I’m doing my first live event later this year. You’ll notice that when you do live streams, a lot of people in the comment sections will connect with each other. You can facilitate that, and when you do that, guess what? That heightens your brand.
Lego is an example that I talk about in the book. They were on the brink of bankruptcy. They were $800 million in debt in 2013. They were just focusing way too much on product and product and product. So their CEO came by and he said, “We need to build for our fans again.” And so that’s when you started to see a lot of deals between Lego and things that fans wanted, which were Minecraft sets or Harry Potter sets, or all these other sets and licensed deals. Yes, they had to spend even more money on these, but guess what, now they are worth billions, more than Hasbro and Mattel combined, because they started focusing on fans in some interesting ways.
Pat Flynn: 23:54
We talked about getting the audience involved. If you go to Lego Ideas, any one of us can create a Lego creation out of our legos, post it up there. If it gets over 10,000 votes from the community, Lego will consider manufacturing that product, and you’ll get a royalty from that. How amazing is that? Creation number four was the Delorean from Back to the Future, which was really cool because I’m a huge Back to the Future fan.
Pat Flynn: 24:25
Have you ever heard of the AFOL? A-F-O-L?
Chris Cloney: 24:29
I have not. No.
Pat Flynn: 24:30
That’s an adult fan of Lego and they’re known as AFOLs. If you go to meetup.com and look up AFOLs or AFOL, you’re going to find that thousands of meetings that happen every single year with adult fans of Lego who come together and they talk about the products, they build things together, they help influence the company. And Lego loves this. They want it to happen. If you go to YouTube and look up Lego, you don’t see only Lego showing up, Lego the company showing up with their own products.
Pat Flynn: 25:01
Guess what? You see 10 million videos from Lego creators: user-generated content, which they want to happen. A lot of companies go the opposite way. They go, “No, you are not allowed to use our product in your videos. You’re not allowed to use our trademark.” But Lego’s doing the opposite. They’re going, “No, fans. You guys are fans.”
They’re helping to promote the product at the same time and bringing that community closer together. There are a lot of ways that you can do this online or offline, but to put the cherry on top, my favorite way to build a superfan is just to give a person a little bit of personal time, and no, that’s not completely scalable, but it does help dramatically, and I think this is very helpful for your audience too, who may not have millions of followers or millions of subscribers in their business.
Pat Flynn: 25:43
So you have an even better opportunity because there are fewer people in your audience. You can get to know them even better. You should know their names. You should reach out to them via Instagram direct message. You can send a video on Instagram for free to your followers. If you have followers or customers on social media, send them a direct message, a video with your face saying, “Hey, what’s up to Jim? Just Pat here. I wanted to see how you’re doing. If you have any questions, let me know. Just wanted to check in.”
It takes literally less than 10 seconds to create. You’re going to get a response that is like you’ve blown their minds. You’ve given them a little bit of attention and your competition is not doing this.
Pat Flynn: 26:22
This like in small-town days when people used to do business before the Internet. You would go to Bob the baker’s bakery, not just because the bread’s good, but because when you walk in, Bob’s like, “Hey, welcome back. How’s Jimmy? How’s little Tammy doing?” He knows you and you know their family. You go to Bob the baker all the time, every single week, same time. You’re a fan of his, and then, guess what, a supermarket opens up with bread that’s even cheaper.
Pat Flynn: 26:48
But you know what? You still go to Bob the baker because Bob knows you and you know Bob. That’s the relationship. That little personal touch goes such a long way. If you have a smaller business, you have more opportunities than those bigger brands to make that personal touch. That’s what’s going to help you stand out. That’s what’s going to build those superfans for you. And like I said, it doesn’t happen overnight, but we all have access to the tools right now to be able to make this happen.
Chris Cloney: 27:12
Oh, I love it. I think that was- I stopped counting at about 10 tips on getting superfans on my notes.
Pat Flynn: 27:18
Sorry. I get a little passionate about this.
Chris Cloney: 27:20
But no, it’s perfect. I think that’s a great way to just illustrate the power. The one I put a star beside was ‘just focus on your fans’ ideas, not your ideas.” So it’s not really about what you want or what you think people need. Go and talk to somebody: pick up a phone, talk to them, send them an email, get on Skype, or get on Zoom and use those ideas to serve them better and build a business from them.
So this has been an amazing interview. I know that the GradBlogger fans and hopefully superfans are going to really like this. Where’s the best spot for them to go to find out more about superfans? As I mentioned, if you’re listening to this the day it comes out, the book launches in five days from now, but where should they go to find out more if they’re listening then or even in the future?
How Do You Create More Superfans?
Pat Flynn: 28:03
I don’t know if you have an affiliate link or something that you want people to go through. I recommend going there to give back to Chris for all the amazing things he’s doing. But either way, if you want to go to yoursuperfans.com before the launch, you can submit your receipt for the pre-order there and I’ll give you the audiobook for free during launch week, which is a good deal. I know a lot of you like to listen, which is great.
That’s before August 13th. If you’re listening to this in the future, just go through Chris’s link if he has one on the show notes or whatever. I’m just super stoked to get it into everybody’s hands because this is, to me, what businesses need to be starting to think about because we’re all sort of jaded by those vanity numbers that we all want, right?
Pat Flynn: 28:54
More subscribers, more traffic and yeah that stuff’s important. But superfans are not really measurable, which is why I don’t think a lot of people are doing it right now, but those are the things that are going to give you a future-proof business and help you get started faster, and help you build deeper connections.
I love that tip that you mentioned at the end there. I even reach out to 10 email subscribers. Even though I have an email list of over 200,000 people, I still make the time every single month to talk to 10 people in my audience on the phone, because guess what? It takes the guesswork out. I don’t have to guess what content to create. I don’t have to guess what products to create. It is all crowdsourced from my people and the superfans that I have. So, I highly recommend following that advice from Chris and I hope that you’ll check out the book. Again, you can submit your receipt at yoursuperfans.com or just get it wherever.
Chris Cloney: 29:41
Agreed, 100%. And yeah, we’ll have those links in the show notes if we do end up with an affiliate link. We’ll put it somewhere near the top. But that’s not really my goal with this. I bought Pat’s books before. I’ve already bought this one- a couple of copies of it, which we’ll talk about in a moment. So just go pick it up. If you’re running an online business, I know it’s going to have a big impact. And then if you want to hit me up about it later, shoot me an email and tell me how much it helped you move your business.
So Pat, I just want to say thanks again. I really appreciate having you on the podcast and I know that the audience is really going to get a lot from this interview.
Pat Flynn: 30:16
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me and good luck to everybody.
Chris Cloney: 30:19
Awesome. Thanks, Pat. And we will be talking soon because I’m heading down that way for FlynnCon1, just in a couple of weeks.
Pat Flynn: 30:26
Thanks, man.
Chris Cloney: 30:27
So you’ve been listening to myself, Dr. Chris Cloney, and Pat Flynn from smartpassiveincome.com and we’ve been talking about the power of superfans to grow your blog and your business. We talked about what superfan is, why are they so critical to building up an online community or building up an online blog and to grow your business. We also give a ton of tips on how to go about doing that.
As Pat said, you can find his book at yoursuperfans.com. If you are joining in the next couple of days, you can pre-order it and get a number of goodies there like the free audiobook version. If you’re listening in the future, you should be able to get it there as well.
Chris Cloney: 31:05
I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope you’re excited about the content that we’re sharing with GradBlogger. As always, you can get a transcript of these episodes at gradblogger.com/19. We’ll also pull out some of these tips for creating superfans in your business or finding superfans, and going about using them to build your own personal brand in a way that’s going to help that community and create the change you want in the world.
Chris Cloney: 31:28
So I mentioned at the beginning of the episode that I personally purchased three copies of the Superfans book on pre-order. We’re going to do a giveaway, a random draw, and to enter the draw, all you have to do is tweet or put a message on Instagram tagging @GradBlogger and @ Pat Flynn, and in that message, leave a URL to your blog and just put the change that you want to see in the world.
Enter to win a copy of Superfans: the Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business by posting about the change you want to see in the world on Instagram. Include your blog URL in the post and tag @GradBlogger and @PatFlynn to be entered to win one of three copies from GradBlogger.
Chris Cloney: 31:57
I really want to show Pat and the people who are following with him on social media, the power that academics have to make this sort of change in the world. So again, if you want to enter the random draw giveaway tag @GradBlogger (Instagram or Twitter) and @Pat Flynn (Instagram or Twitter). We will collect these up until September 15th and draw for the two copies of Superfans.
There’s a twist here. If you’ve already ordered the book, all you need to do if you win is email us a copy of the receipt and we’ll give you an Amazon gift card to buy any two books of your choice. I’ll do this up to say, $50. I’d recommend [Affiliate] Will It Fly and Let Go, by Pat Flynn, to get the full suite of his books, but we’ll leave that choice up to you.
Chris Cloney: 33:05
As always, I really appreciate you listening to GradBlogger. I’m really excited to keep bringing in these people who are the forefront of online business, online marketing, digital marketing, to help integrate with us academics so we can really start and continue to make a big change in the world. So I hope you have a great week ahead. I really look forward to continuing to help you grow your business.
Resources
Pat Flynn:
Instagram
Twitter
YouTube
Companies:
DustSafetyScience
Smart Passive Income
Green Exam Academy
Lego Ideas
Books [Affiliate]:
Flynn, Pat. Let Go
Flynn, Pat. Superfans: the Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business
Flynn, Pat. Will It Fly
Longhurst, Jongo. 1000 True Fans: Use Kevin Kelly’s Simple Idea to Earn A Living Doing What You Love
Blog Posts:
The Five Lessons I Learned From Launching My Online Research Company
