SPI 662: She Caught Me, Then Told Me This

SPI 662: She Caught Me, Then Told Me This

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, his Pokemon YouTube channel grew to half a million subscribers in just two years. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Hey, so I just interviewed Lewis Howes this past Wednesday.

If you haven’t heard that episode, you should definitely listen to it. It’s amazing. Lewis is a good friend of mine, and his growth and his maturity has led himself to some incredible work with his podcast and his brand new book. But speaking of book, and this is off, this is a different topic, but I, I needed to get on here to share this with you because this is my favorite thing that that happens, right?

My favorite. Is to not just hear from an audience member or a fan, it’s to see the results that a fan has had after implementing something that I’ve taught, it is my absolute favorite thing here on SPI because it reminds me that this work matters and that this stuff actually works. And the best thing is I can share that story and hopefully motivate some of you to take action if you’re not already taking action or perhaps take the right action if you’re taking the wrong action.

You know, get back on course. Anyway, hopefully you can hear in the tone of my voice just how excited I am. This just came in. Twitter, in fact, in shout out to Kepi in Australia for this, because she sent me a series of tweets. Actually, the way it started was she got two emails from me, so we had just sent a newsletter email out, you know, the Unstuck newsletter.

If you haven’t gotten that, you should SmartPassiveIncome.com/unstuck. Anyway, she sent me a message saying, Hey, she got both of my emails, and by both, I mean the split test. She saw both headlines that were being split tested for the same email. So she was very curious and I love that she was curious about that because she subscribed via two emails.

I never asked her why, but she did catch both headlines or both subject lines for this email that was sent out and she was just curious about that. And the way that works is through ConvertKit. ConvertKit allows us to split test a subject line and ConvertKit will send to 15% of our list, you know, one subject line to half of that and the other subject line to the other half of that 15%.

I dunno why I can’t do math right now. Seven and a half percent. Okay. I think that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. Anyway, and that’s within four hours. And it, what it’s doing is it’s gauging which subject line gets more opens, or if there’s a sale opens, which one gets more clicks or click through rates inside of the links in there.

Anyway, the results of this particular experiment were pretty negligible. Like they, they didn’t really differ much, but this opened up a conversation between myself and Kepi that went from split testing and her catching our split test. We always split test the Unstuck newsletter because that’s not, I mean, we do have it come out once a week on the same day, but it’s okay that it takes four hours for, you know, 85% or the rest of the list to get that after we see a winning subject line.

Anyway, it moved from split test to her just saying, and I’m gonna read her tweets here. She said, thanks, Pat. You’re legend. Please hear that in my Australian accent. I’m not gonna pretend like I know how to do an Australian accent or even attempt to do that because it could potentially sound very offensive and I’m not good at it.

I’m not good at impressions. You can ask my son instead, who I don’t know how or where he got it. He just knows how to do impressions and an Australian accent is one of them. Anyway, she said, Hey Pat, you’re a legend. Also, I’m working through Superfans and it is ,one, blowing my mind and two, two suggestions of yours literally grew my Patreon business by 200% last week. So thank you.

So she implemented something from Superfans the week prior and saw 200% increase in her conversions. And so I was like, what? Like I’m curious now, I what is it? And she said, okay, first thing I did was I sent some holiday voice messages to some of my most active Patreon members.

Not salesy, just simple kindness and appreciation that they were such nice people to have in the community. It took 15 minutes. This is what I talk about when I talk about what I like to call the What’s Up in the book, Superfans. Just a small outreach. Doesn’t have to be huge. No. Just let them know that you know that they’re there.

That’s exactly what she did. I love that. She did this around the holidays too, and she said, my business partner and I were umming and awing about our Patreon community. To be honest, it hasn’t grown at all in a year. We are considering what to do with an option being to shut it down until we figured out how to scale it.

But while reading Superfans, I realize that these people are my superfans. These are the people I have a direct communication with or direct contact with who will answer any question I ask of them, and will most directly tell me what would be best to help and serve them. So, Instead of shutting it down, we realized that lots of those people wanted more direct access to us, so we actually opened up a new tier, much more high ticket capped at 10 and what do you know, nine spots filled in the first week and three Xed our business there and maybe unsurprisingly, all the people I had sent holiday messages to signed up.

Boom. I absolutely love that story because it doesn’t take much to have a person on the other end of the internet realize that there is somebody there who cares for them, that thinks about them and is hoping to help them in one way or another. And when it comes to options like you, you listening right now, would you rather work with somebody or better, pay somebody for help if you knew that they knew you existed or if you knew that you were just potentially a credit card number to them. Right? So this is the power Superfans, and my favorite thing about this is not just the fans like Kepi who took action, but the fact that this book was written in 2018, published in 2019 and it still continues to serve people today. I love it. I love it so much because when I wrote this book, I wrote it with this in mind, regardless of technology, regardless of environment, what will always remain true and that is the human connection. And that’s where Superfans are. Through a connection, not through a funnel, not by an advertisement or advertisement, as some might say.

I don’t know why I went there, but through real human connection and what I teach inside of of Superfans, I’ve seen work in real time with the people who have read this book. Thank you, Kepi, and I’m seeing it work in real time, what I’m doing in a brand new sector, a brand new niche that I’ve never, like, I didn’t even know anything about it prior to 2022.

And as I often do here on these Friday episodes, I do love to give you an update on that case study on it. It, it’s sort of like if you’ve been with me for a very long time, you’ll know that back in 2010, I got talking 13 years ago, I started this thing called the Niche Site Duel where I built a website publicly and showed people kind of the case study, well, what didn’t go well and, and eventually in 73 days, I got its number one in Google. It started generating hundreds and then thousands of dollars through advertisements, advertisements on that website. And eventually I sold that in 2020. And that case study helped so many people because it not just showed, like that, it could be done, but it also was the step-by-step on how to do it. Well, I wrote the book on step-by-Step, how to create a community, and that book is called Superfans and I hope that you’ll check it out. If you go to PatFlynn.com/superfans, you can find it there, or of course, just check it out on Amazon.

That would mean a lot cuz like I said, this book continues to help and serve people today, and it’s just so serendipitous that I had written it at the time that I did because I knew that this is where things were headed. I knew things were headed to a point where things were gonna get so wild and crazy with tech or you know, and now we’re like, I didn’t predict that AI would be to where it is today.

I didn’t even mention the words AI or machine learning in this book, but here we are and what’s going to help you stand out from the crowd? The human connection, empathy with your audience, helping them in a way that a robot never could understanding, asking questions, listening, all these things. So anyway, I’m very proud of this book, some of my best work, and it will continue to serve.

And so if you already have it, I would love it if you would share it too. And if you’re building a community, awesome. But the case study, the new Niche Site Duel to circle back around. Circle being the keyword word there because I love Circle. Circle’s the platform we use for SPI Pro and our communities inside of SPI. Inside of SPI I, we’ve pivoted as well.

Our business is community now, so passionate about this. The new case study is the Pokemon channel and as many of you know, I’ve been following the book to a T, everything from the bottom of the pyramid to the top of it. And I’m even putting on an event this, in a few months in Anaheim, California.

Currently it is mid-January. At the time that I record this, we’ve already sold over 500 tickets to this event. That’s more attendees than FlynnCon, by the way, in a brand new space. But we’re shooting for 1500 to 2000, and the videos that we’re coming out with are popping on YouTube. One video that we published the other day was the number three video trending in all of YouTube. All of YouTube, billions of hours or minutes, probably minutes of content get published every day on YouTube, were consumed at least, and our video was top three. And in the same weekend we had just crossed 500,000 subscribers on, and there’s a case for the YouTube course, Smart From Scratch, which you can get access to.

I don’t just wanna tell you what to do, I wanna show you, I wanna lead by example, like I always have, but it seems like the way that I’m leading now is definitely bigger than it’s ever been. And hopefully you can follow along and whether it’s a, a big thing, like starting a brand new YouTube channel or creating an event or writing a book, which I’m writing my next one as we speak, or something small, like what Kepi did, which was, Hey, I’m gonna reach to people who are in our community and just give them a little bit of love, and that goes a long way too. Anyway, thank you so much for today. I appreciate you and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. I’m gonna go to bed now. I love y’all. Take care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Our senior producer is David Grabowski. Our series producer is Paul Grigoras, 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.