SPI 612: Crowdsparking

SPI 612: Crowdsparking

Announcer: Welcome to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, where it’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, And now your host, he’s buying himself a bass fishing kayak for his 40th birthday. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Hey, a couple episodes ago, I mentioned the unstuck newsletter. This is SPI’s brand new newsletter.

Something that you could look forward to in your inbox. A five minute quick hit of inspiration, education, something that’s gonna help you get unstuck in your business. And if you wanna check that out, SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. And issue one came out and people have been raving about it. It’s been awesome.

And just thank you for the positive feedback and also the constructive feedback since we’ve published Unstuck. And again, if you wanna check it out, SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. But I wanted to cover what we covered in issue one, which came out at the end of August, because this is something that has been a game changer for myself as a content creator.

And if you are a content creator and it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on. If you’re on a short form video social media platform, or you’re a podcaster like myself or doing videos too. This tip is gonna help you. And this is with regards to a term that I coined called crowdsparking. Now maybe somebody else came up with that term before me, but I’ve been using it a lot lately.

You know crowdsourcing, right? Sourcing from a crowd to, to create something. But I wanted to take that a step further and use a crowd essentially, or utilize an audience that you’ve built or a public forum to spark ideas, right? Not just source ideas, but to spark or ignite something.

Because crowd sourcing is like you’re getting a whole bunch of different ideas from a bunch of different people and you just see those ideas for what they are from each person or each sort of origin. But crowd sparking is the idea that the crowd will tell you which idea is better than the other ideas, right? It sparks an idea for you to create a piece of content.

So essentially what this issue talked about was I was at an event in Las Vegas, Sean Cannell’s event. He has Think Media, he had Grow With Video Live and on stage Alex Hormozi, who is an author of a book called $100M Offers.

It’s a great, absolutely fantastic book. I highly recommend to check it out. But he was on stage talking about his content creation method. And what was really kind of frustrating was when he went over his method, it was just so obvious to me that I was kind of kicking myself because I hadn’t been doing this.

Since watching this presentation on stage in person, I’ve been practicing what he’s been saying, and it’s been working out really, really well. And I wanted to pass this on to you like I did in the newsletter, if you got that. And just a reminder for those of you who are here, maybe who have gotten that newsletter, just kind of, Hey, like you should do this because it’s actually working.

So what this idea is is, and the way Alex uses Twitter in fact is really interesting. You don’t need to use Twitter, you can use any sort of short form platform to be able to do this. But essentially he uses Twitter as a way to brain dump. Right. He used to brain dump in sort of, I don’t know what program Notion or Evernote or something.

And he would just create ideas. I think it was actually Apple Notes or something where he would ponder an idea or get just like a, like a spark for something and put it in his notepad just so we can go back to it later. What you miss out on is the public reaction to each of those things. So he’s been now using Twitter in fact to, four to six times a day, any ideas that comes to his mind, any quotes that he has, or just like opinions or anything, he’ll brain dump that one at a time on Twitter. And what will happen is the audience will respond. They’ll either heart it or retweet it, or, you know, reply to it. In, in which case he might have an engaging conversation and that’s really useful.

Or it might just be crickets and that’s useful as well because now Alex knows that that idea is not one worth putting in more time for a longer form piece of content, like on his podcast or like on his YouTube channel. And he’s been able to grow both of those channels by hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a very short period of time.

He’s a seasoned business owner, Alex Hormozi, but he’s fairly new to content creation, especially taking it seriously like this. And he was teaching this on stage and it was, it was blowing everybody’s minds. And again, the reason my mind was blown was just, this is so obvious. And, and I don’t know why I haven’t been doing this.

So if you have been following me on Twitter lately, you’ll notice that once or twice a day, I’ll post a thought or an idea, and there’s a wide range of responses. And those responses that have the most engagement gives me an idea for what to create a podcast episode about. In fact, some of the podcast episodes and Follow Up Fridays that have come about have come as a result of crowd sparking.

And again, the idea that it just sparks an idea and they spark it together, right. It takes energy to, to create a spark to then light that fire. And this is where crowd sparking can come into play. I don’t know if that’s gonna catch on as far as a term, but I’m doing it right. Just like on Mean Girls it’s so fetch.

If you know that reference bonus points for you, if not, don’t worry. But crowd sparking these ideas can be really, really fantastic because it gives you inspiration. When you see an idea that is engaging on a small level, you’ll have a likelier chance or a higher chance or higher likelihood that it will hit when you go in the long form.

Now, obviously your short form audience is different perhaps from your long form audience, but if you are targeting the same audience, then generally speaking, you’ll increase the chances that it will hit. And this is really important because we are all strapped for time these days. When it comes to content creation, we’d rather create content that we know is going to make an impact.

The beauty of this as well, especially on a platform like Twitter, where people are very, very open to replying much quicker. Even on Instagram, I find that people have a hard time, percentage wise of the audience, they have a harder time replying with something useful, not to say my Instagram audience isn’t great.

I love you guys on @PatFlynn on Instagram, but it’s a lot of support, which I absolutely love and, and need. Versus Twitter, which is like, oftentimes constructive feedback and criticism, which I need as well as not just support, but validation using language that can be really helpful. And that’s the other thing about this is when you have these engaging responses, Instagram stories are a great place for this as well, by the way, especially when you get those direct messages back, those are very intimate messages coming your way and that language.

Like I was saying the language from Instagram stories, language from Twitter, this can work on LinkedIn and other smaller, short form, social media platforms. The language you can see come in is language that you could use when you create your long form content. Right? So this was issue one of, or this story and, and this, this call to action for you was unless issue one of the Unstuck newsletter.

So again, you can get unstuck at SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck, because I’m gonna be working really hard. I’m currently the helm of of the content for the unstuck newsletter. And it is tips like this, it is the fact that I get access to certain things, certain people, certain events that, that perhaps you don’t get access to and I can pass forward that information and inspiration and education your way through that newsletter. Like I have been doing here on the podcast for years, except the newsletter’s gonna be more in real time. So crowd sparking, do it. Because when you experiment on a podcast, it takes a lot longer, for example, to know whether or not there is something there.

And I always encourage that. Yes, you should definitely experiment with your podcast. You should try different formats. You should try new things and see what works. See what doesn’t. But. On the more faster moving platforms like Twitter, you’re able to, to just really quickly understand, Hey, did that hit home and, and did that not hit home?

In fact, there was a tweet that I posted not too long ago, that basically was like, Hey, you know, I, I offered this really amazing tip about working in public and that if you’re gonna be marketing something, you wanna make sure you market it as you are creating it, for example. And this way, when you launch the thing, there’s already people who are invested in it, who have commented about it, who who know it exists, you’ve, you’re building awareness and that’s what marketing is.

And to, and to do it while you’re creating is much better than waiting until the thing’s done and then asking, okay, now how do I get people to find this anyway, a great tip, very useful tip, hardly any engagement at all on Twitter. And yes, factors that could be involved with that time of posting day of the week, et cetera.

But this was posted on a Monday or a Tuesday. I thought it was an amazing piece of content and it is, and people have replied and said, yeah, this is super fantastic. And, and some people have added to the conversation, which is, again, is another reason why doing this publicly is awesome because a lot of the value comes from the comments, not just like your initial seed post, but it kind of fell flat.

So in my head, I was like, Ooh, this would be a great newsletter. Right for the Unstuck newsletter, or this would be a great blog post or a podcast episode or a video. Nope, I’m gonna not do that. And it just lives on social media. It’s still a great tip. I still might include it in a list of tips for example, but it’s not gonna be the main driver and I’m already getting signals.

Right? That’s that’s the big thing here with crowd sparking. You’re able to understand what will create those sparks and what doesn’t. And do sparks always catch on? No, but again, it at least gives you the higher likelihood or the higher chance that, that it will catch fire and spread in a good way, right?

Not like wildfire spreading. We wanna control those or not have any of those. But what I’m talking about is like viral spreading that. That’s what we want. Anyway. I hope this was helpful. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. If you want to go get Unstuck, that is our SPI newsletter in your inbox every single week, head on over to SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck and you could subscribe there and I promise you it’s gonna be worth your time. So make sure to check that out and have a wonderful weekend.

And I look forward to serving you in next week’s episode. We got another great interview coming your way and just the lineup for the rest of the year is blowing my mind.

It’s just, I’m, I’m so excited. There’s some special surprises, some surpris guests that I know that you won’t be able to guess. I guarantee it. But are probably gonna blow your mind and also, again, great content, great success stories. And we also have coming up another series of SPI Pros who are gonna grab the mic here on Fridays.

A lot of you have been leaving a lot of positive feedback and just love hearing from our own community members. People just like you, who are over at SPI Pro. And again, you can always apply to SPI Pro and check out the Learner Community. See if that’s right for you. SPIpro.com. I highly recommend you check that out.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you. And I’ll see you in the next one.
Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is Sara Jane Hess. Our series producer is David Grabowski. And our executive producer is Matt Gartland. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media. We’ll catch you in the next session.