SPI 628: My TikTok 30-Day Challenge Starts Today

SPI 628: My TikTok 30-Day Challenge Starts Today

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, he used to spend lunch during school in the band room studying for the next quiz. Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: So I’m currently running an experiment on TikTok. TikTok has been spoken about many times before, and I went to an event and a lot of people are talking about TikTok. And I didn’t avoid it, I’ve just been playing around with it and you know, just like you do when you explore something. You get a little burst of energy and try a few things, and then you let it sit and you don’t go back to it until somebody else says, “Yeah, you should check it out.”

And then you check it out for a while, you get another burst of energy and you might post a couple things and then you just kind of don’t do anything with it, right? But as you know, and as I’ve taught here before, in order for something to have a chance to do anything, you have to give it a chance to do something.

And what I mean, is you need to give it some time and you need to take it, not even necessarily take it seriously, but you need to commit to it for a period of time so that you could see real results. Now that being said, playing and just experimenting and being okay with that is totally fine. That’s totally okay to do.

There’s no rule that says, for every platform you’re on, you have to crush it and commit and stay up all night. There’s platforms where I’ve just posted one or two things and, and did nothing, and it’s okay to just, again, spend a little bit of time to experiment because you never know one of those platforms might do well or you might find you love it and then you dedicate some time and effort into it and, and then all of a sudden you are sort of an early adopter or you figure your way through it and then you become an influencer on that platform and you start to build your audience there and that can happen.

With a lot of people asking me about TikTok and a lot of chatter about TikTok across all spectrums from people who are creating organic content to promote their business to people who are finding an audience there and discovering themselves to people who I know who are spending tens of thousands of dollars on the platform using TikTok ads and seeing the results of new students and new clients coming from there.

All really interesting stuff. So this has given me the clue to, Okay, Pat. Let’s commit to it for a certain period of time and let’s experiment with it while doing it. And let’s take best practices from others and see what works for you. See what you like. See what you don’t like. Because the truth is, there are many formulas on individual platforms that work.

And what might work for one person might not work for you or me. You kind of have to find your way. And this, this is, you know, I think Roberto Blake talks about this quite often when it comes to YouTube. You just gotta publish your first a hundred videos. Like don’t even care about the subscribers and the views, although of course we all do, but just get through your first 100 because when you get through that first a hundred, you have enough reps to get better and improve and start to discover even subconsciously, what is working and what isn’t.

What’s working on the platform that you can do more of, and also what’s working for you that you can get more energy behind. And then you can start to hone in on what works for you there and find your voice, as we call it. Right, and I love that. And on TikTok, I’m giving myself from this day, 30 days to post one TikTok per day to see what happens.

I did this a few years ago. Actually. It was during the pandemic. I did this on Instagram and I found that although I did enjoy it, I didn’t get a ton of reach from the videos that I created, although a few videos hit hundreds of thousands of views and a couple over a million. They weren’t really bringing in anything for me other than nice numbers and views and that’s cool, but it didn’t really do anything for me.

So with TikTok, I wanna take a, a little bit of a different of approach. I want to figure out a way to start really showing up as Pat Flynn, the entrepreneur on that platform. And this is a smart thing to do for me at this point because TikTok, yes, it is growing.

There is a much younger audience on there and they are not listening to podcasts as much as I would hope, and many of them are going to more shorter platform video content platforms. That’s not to say YouTube is still, I mean, YouTube is still number one actually right now. Podcasting is still up there as well for the loyal audience and for a few new people here and there every single day.

But when it comes to massive audiences and organic growth to help them discover who I am and what I have to offer, I’m gonna give TikTok a try. And the reason why I wanna do this now is because, as you heard, an episode ago, or a couple episodes ago, actually two Fridays ago, so two weeks ago, an episode 624, I made a really big announcement and this announcement was related to a new book that I will be publishing.

And I don’t yet have the ability to share the details of the deal and the publisher that we’re working with and whatnot, but that that’ll come soon, I promise, because I wanna be an open book, pun intended as that progresses. As I step into the world of traditional publishing, I can’t tell you one thing, it’s gonna be a while until this book comes out.

So the timeline of a book to be published as a self-published author, you know, it takes a while to write the book either way, right? But as far as after the manuscript is complete, Superfans took seven months to get out there, Will it fly? took even less time after it was finally finished.

With this traditional publisher, and this is the case with the multiple publishers that I spoke to before I, I signed with this particular publisher, it was gonna be 18 to 24 months, not from the point at which I signed that contract, but potentially, because things can change, but potentially the point at which I submit the final or the, at least the first draft or the, the, the manuscript.

So that doesn’t even include writing time. That’s a long time. And I think this is the trouble with a lot of books that are out there. I’m sort of digressing at this point, but a lot of books are written. For the now, but time goes by and things change. So this is why I wanna write a timeless book, but this book is gonna be really important for the next step in my life.

And as I enter my forties soon, the audiences that I wanna reach, the potential stages that I wanna speak on to reach a much broader audience than just the entrepreneurial audience that I’ve been able to attract, and the TikTok platform will allow me to find a way to get through and share these messages and also build my platform on, on there.

And I wanna see what happens. I wanna see if anything pops. And by pop I mean go viral and sort of get an, an algorithm kick and a boost behind it, which is a good sign. Again, especially before I write this book. Imagine testing different messages, sharing different stories, seeing what resonates with an audience on TikTok or a platform like TikTok.

YouTube Shorts is also on my radar as well, especially since they’ve announced, and this is mainly for the Deep Pocket Monster Channel, but they’ve recently announced that shorts creators, this is YouTube shorts, shorts is a competitor to short form video and they’re gonna be paying out so much more.

I think 45% of ad revenue will be going over to shorts, creators whose ads are shown against those creators videos, which is a huge opportunity. We’ve had some shorts see 15 million to 20 million views back when the, the, the revenue was just part of a fund that all Shorts creators got access to. So, you know, 15 million view video, $300.

And that’s still great, but the potential ad revenue now on YouTube is much greater. So that being said, I can repurpose maybe some of this content onto YouTube on the Pat Flynn channel or perhaps another channel. We’ll see. But the point being, The 30 day challenge starts now and so you’ll wanna check back, make sure you subscribe and check back.

I would say four episodes from now, four or five episodes from now, I’ll give you an update on the Great TikTok experiment to see what happens. And this is gonna be great because it forces me to to tell story, certain stories. It forces me to figure out how to capture attention with those stories. Cuz on these short form video platforms, you gotta capture attention.

Real quickly, right? You gotta hold their attention. It’s not even about keywords, it’s about that hook in the very beginning, right? So how might I hook a person and how might that then be portrayed in the book, for example? Um, maybe these stories that I think are gonna be great, kind of fall flat or get comments like, eh, that, you know, wasn’t really that great.

Maybe there’ll be some that just kind of go gangbusters, and I’ll take note of that and I’ll have a record of that, obviously, and when I go back to my TikTok account. But the 30 day challenge is really key here. I recognize now that I’m very motivated by these X number of day challenges, especially when I make them public.

I did this back in 2018, in November, there was a month called NaNoWriMo. I mean, there is a month called NaNoWriMo. This is national novel writer’s month, and this is always November, every single year. And I used November of 2018 to write every day to try to finish the book Superfans. And I made that public and I even shared how many words I wrote every single day.

And every, every single day I reported to the audience and we played a little game. How many words did Pat write today? And it inspired me to just make sure that I kept going with it. And what ended up happening was I created one of my best bodies of work Superfans as a result of that. So who knows what happens after this TikTok experiment.

I might find that it’s just not my cup of tea, which is great to find out as well. There’s no lose in this situation, so, as my other responsibilities, my other obligations are met so long as I’m still being a husband and a father during this process. And the beauty of short form videos, it’s short, right?

I don’t have to spend hours creating these things. It could be a little, you know, moment of the day that I schedule, which is exactly how I’m gonna do it, and I’m not gonna try to batch process and get ahead. I think I’m just gonna kind of stay in the moment every single day and try use the time sort of right after I dropped the kids off at school, which is sort of like they’re in school.

I’m the most creative and, and sort of excited at that moment to create something short and interesting on the TikTok platform. So if you’re not following me on TikTok, you could follow me @Pat_Flynn. I didn’t get on early enough to get just Pat Flynn, but Pat underscore Flynn and uh, you could find me there.

So we’ll see how this goes. But thank you. And I’ll keep you posted. I’ll keep you posted. Cheers. Take care. I’ll see you on the platform and see you in the next episode. Make sure you subscribe so you don’t miss out on the results. Bye everybody.

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.