If You Want to Grow An Audience in 2024, Do This!

if you want to change somebody's life start by changing their day first what does this audience want to see how can I make them feel special how can I make them feel like they're a part of something when you make time to really connect with your audience they will become fans even more you got to just press record what's up think media Sean canel here and we're about to dive into a session with my friend Pat Flynn recorded at our event grow with video live Pat's also the author of super fans and in this video he's going to be breaking down how to go deeper than just getting views and actually build a real community and if you haven't heard Pat Flynn is one of our speakers coming up at grow with video live this year so check out the link to get tickets to that event in the description down below and now let's jump into this session with Pat Flynn that's my wife April she is a super fan of the Backstreet Boys or as she calls them her boys I'm also a fan of something that for people on the outside they're like wow that's totally weird because that's what it's like for people on the outside they think it's kind of strange but if you're on the inside if you're a fan of something and you find another person who's also a fan of that thing you're immediately like best friends like right away right and the thing that I am a super fan of is a movie called Back to the Future see now we could be best friends I can already tell and this is just a fraction of some of the memorabilia that I have and what's really interesting about super fans is super fans will a spend a lot of money with you B talk about you incessantly even though nobody asks for it and for us who are in the YouTube and Creator space these this is our marketing team these are the people who will go to at bat for us these are the people who will defend our channels from trolls and haters and WhatsApp commenters inside of our comments right they will be there before we even know a fire exists and if something happens to your brand or if you change your way they're not going to be sad they're going to be downright devastated because they've made you your brand your message a part of their life now what's really interesting is I've gained a number of super fans over the years and I've noticed something amazing about them they tend to want to give you things and here are some examples this is a piece of artwork from a man named Ernesto and this is an ancient Mexican form of artwork of string on beeswax and he spent two weeks making this thing says Pat to the Flynn which is really amazing I came out with a book in 2015 called will it Fly and this is uh Jeffrey who said hey Pat thanks for all you do heard you're publishing a book next year I don't know what it's about I just want to buy 20 copies to support you and give them away to my friends and family which is incredibly generous and I also have a podcast any listeners of the SPI podcast yes let's go my podcast comes out every Wednesday one time I was late and you know what I heard about it from Stephen here he said where the is episode 112 and uh and he followed that up with uh thanks love your stuff Steve that's how much he loved me because he was yelling at me in all caps right but this is about the human beings on the other end about creating experiences and bringing your community together and I'm going to teach you how to have fans like this in your business and brand that could support you right so I want to introduce the Pyramid of fandom here for you and this is going to be the structure of our presentation and it starts with the largest part of our user base if you imagine this pyramid your entire user base anybody who's ever heard of you most of them lie down here in the bottom this is your casual audience they've just found you they discover you on a search or a link or a mention from somewhere else or on social media they don't quite know exactly who you are or what you've done yet but you've created a piece of content that resonates with them in some way shape or form and our job is to convert them from a casual audience member to now an active audience member right active audience member this is now a subscriber a follower a person who knows how to talk about you with others and if you come out with a product or something piece of content they're most likely going to at least check it out cuz they know who you are now and this is where many creators stop we just want subscribers and that's it but we could keep going and that's where the bigger opportunities lie we can bring people into now a connected Community this is where the magic happens in in Our Brands right this is where the community comes together and it's not just you talking to them and them talking to you it's them finding and talking to each other they can sometimes even create a name for themselves right like what are fans of Taylor Swift called swifties how about fans of Lady Gaga Little Monsters right and uh Beyonce's beehive and uh fans of Justin Bieber just weird right no I'm just kidding yeah the Believers exactly but this is where magic happens in the brand and I'm going to show you how to bring the community together and then finally some of those people will become the super fans like we've been talking about but what's really interesting about this Ascension up this pyramid is that gravity is working against us right we have to help people go up this pyramid and unfortunately this is what most people are focused on something that we are all very familiar with you have a bunch of traffic coming in some of those traffics become subscribers some of those subs become people who visit your sales page and some of those people now become customers what is this called everybody a funnel exactly and funnels are awesome and are necessary especially because you can automate a lot of this and focus elsewhere however you remove a lot of The Human Experience and moments of magic in your brand when you focus just on this and if you just focus on this you might get some active audience members you might get some customers but there's so much more opportunity because when we look at this let me ask you where is most of the engagement in your audience going to come from the top or the bottom of this pyramid where are most of your repeat customers going to come from the top or the bottom of this pyamid pyamid so why are we so focused on getting more people into the pyramid versus getting people who are in the pyramid in Our Brands already up this pyramid doesn't that make sense we should bring people up this pyramid and the cool thing about this is when we do this people who are in the top parts of this pyramid will bring new people in for us and they don't come in cold anymore they come in active because it comes from a recommendation from within is this making sense let me hear yes okay fantastic and the biggest lesson here to learn is that super fans are not created the moment people find you they're created by the moments that you create for them over time so we are going to Showcase how we can bring people from casual to audience uh active audience active audience to community and Community to super fans this is how we're going to go about it and it starts at the bottom here remember most of the people who find us find us at the bottom now let me ask you this have you experienced this already at this conference you find somebody that you've never met before and you had a chat with them and it sounds like this hey where you from what do you do what's your YouTube channel what's your name like all that stuff how many of you have met people like that already right I hope so because you're here not just to learn from us on stage you're here to network with each other right but there's that one conversation you have with one person who's like hey uh where'd you go to school oh I went to UC Berkeley you went to Berkeley no way I went to Berkeley too are you serious what year did you graduate oh my gosh uh we probably pass each other in Quad best friends forever go Bears right you find that one person who had a similar thing or simar similar experience to you and boom you're immediately connected you don't even need to talk further you already know this person is going to Vibe with you right so my suggestion for you in your videos is to put a little bit more personality into your business I went to a conference once and it was in San Diego and it was on like a boat which was really cool and I was getting out of the bathroom and I hear across the room a woman yelling at me and she says Pat Big Baby Pat Flynn big baby I was like what the heck is going on that's kind of rude so I went up to her cuz she was yelling at me and her name was Jennifer it was on her name tag and she goes oh my God Pat I love you I listen to your podcast all the time like you're the best and I'm like then why were you mean to me and she said oh my gosh I'm so sorry like I just remember one episode where you talked about how you were an 11 PB 12 ounce baby and I just like I had a big baby and I connected with that this is true by the way proof this is me one week after birth don't look at it in the eyes cuz it's the crazy part about this also is my mom's 411 so I have literally no idea how this works like physics and geometry go out the window when I think about that anyway the beginning of my podcast actually I'm GNA can we go back a slide because that's really scary okay there we go in my podcast and on my videos I share a lot about my life but not for like several minutes just little notes here and there about who I am for example now you know I'm a fan of Back to the Future and that's something you know about me similar to how we know those kinds of things about our friends right and that helps differentiate you and it might connect with somebody but if anything it makes you even more unique it makes you more human right so Back to the Future okay Pat like what does that mean well check this out this is a tweet from Andy who says I can't even watch Back to the Future anymore without thinking about Pat Flynn and SPI here's one from Joel who said look what I found at Target when I think of Back to the Future I think of Pat Flynn and then here is Chris who says Back to the Future is playing right now on ABC I wonder if patlin can sense it and yes Chris I can I can so the big lesson here is a lot of these little moments and things about you are what make you unique nobody is like you so why are we not talking about who we are as a person now I'm not saying you have to describe everything you're having for breakfast all the time but what makes you you bring that out in some way shape or form even if your channel has really nothing to do about that it has everything to do with building a relationship and this is not a B2B economy it's not a b Toc economy it is a P2P a personto person economy where we connect with other people who we resonate with right okay embrace your weird that's what you got to do embrace your weird now when I think about April and I was April my wife uh not the not last month um I think about the story that she told me when I was asking her about well how did you become a fan of the back street boys anyway and she brought me back all the way to when she was 15 years old she had just broken up with her boyfriend she was crying on the pillow there was no Spotify there was no YouTube or iTunes or even iPod at this time sorry April dating you a little bit but on the song on the there was a song on the radio that played and she said you know it was a song I heard many times before but because I was in this state of mind of having just gone through this terrible breakup I just felt a connection to the song because every lyric in that song was describing everything I was going through at that time of life and I was like what song is that and she said it's Quit Playing Games With My Heart by the back boys right but the big lesson here is that yes that thing was being played all the time but because it resonated with her in that moment in that State of Mind the lyrics really connected with her so not only is it important to discover what the problems are and the Pains of our audience we need to know how to talk to them we need to understand the lyrics and this is a quote by a man named Jay Abraham that says if you can Define the problem better than your Target customer they will automatically assume you have the solution you want a person to capture your video and go oh my gosh this person gets me finally somebody understands exactly what I'm going through and it's not just about knowing who you're speaking to it's about understanding the lyrics that they will respond to what words do they use to describe those problems just give that back to them and you will automatically that much be that much further ahead in their eyes right so that's moment of activation number two we talked about bringing your personality in that's number one number two is really connecting on the language level with your audience and I have a third way to convert an audience member into an active audience member and that will take you back we're going to go into the DeLorean into my junior year of college and my junior year of college was interesting right because I was in the marching band and so like fall semester it was always about band and architecture I was in the studio nobody saw me outside of those worlds but spring semester at all the time in the world so I did what every College male student would do at the age of 20 with all that extra time any guesses who said drink no I played video games that's right and at this time of my life I got into a game called World of Warcraft or wow for short uh and rightfully so because wow I suffered grade wise and spent 48 hours straight uh hanging out with my guild because we had a quest to go on right like literally every night was that now if you don't know this game or you're not familiar with it it's interesting you come in here and you select between Alliance or Horde you go into this virtual world kind of like a metaverse and then you interact and you go on these quests and immediately I knew that I was going to be H hooked on this game I knew because in the first five minutes you do one simple little thing you open a chest you get gold and then you increase your level experience from one to two you unlock new abilities and then all of a sudden you forget to go to class that's how it works similar a little easier game is Angry Birds right this is level one of Angry Birds by the way three Angry Birds on the left- hand side and then you have one bad piggy on this building you hit it you win it's like the worst architecture I've ever seen and then all of a sudden points Stars you forget to get kids at school so what are these games doing that we could utilize in our business in Our Brands in our YouTube channel small quick wins small quick wins I know we want to do big things and help our audience in so many big ways but we need to start small to go big right we need to start small to go big actually quick story I used to follow a lot of personal finance blogs back when RSS feeds were like a thing to subscribe to blogs and I subscribed to almost all of them all but one there was one that I disliked because the language was a little bit different and I just didn't really resonate with this guy his name was RIT seti from I will teach you to ber. com and I was just like I'm not that I'm in this for the long game this guy is crazy but then all of a sudden there were these things called blog carnivals where everybody was sharing articles from all the other bloggers that was a way to collaborate and it was one article that was getting passed around by R that everybody was talking about so I was like fine I'll read this article and I'll see what this is all about since everybody else is talking about it right power of social proof well read this article and it was basically you can call your cable company read the script that remit set out for you to save 20 to 25% on your cable bill so I did that in 15 minutes I saved 20% of my cable bill and I was just like oh my gosh I've been missing out this guy has some legit stuff that can help me and I stopped reading all the other guys and I started diving into remat stuff ending up spending thousands of dollars over the years on his programs but it wasn't because those programs attracted me it was because he helped me out really quick right from the start and when you consider personal finance blogs it's like okay save 20% of your capable bill for 15 minutes and you save hundreds of dollars per year like immediately or these other guys who are like hey put 20 bucks into an account every you know until you're 65 then you can enjoy it right which one's going to attract me more right now REM me right so now I try to implement small quick win uh small quick wins in my brand is as often as I can if you want to change somebody's life start by changing their day first right if you want to change somebody's life start by changing their day first hey we're going to get back into this session with Pat in just a second but if you haven't heard he is one of our speakers this year at our event grow withv video. com we're also excited to welcome Dave Ramsey shelene Johnson myself the think media team and so many other great speakers to the number one event for building your personal brand and business with online video and YouTube so make sure to get the best prices on tickets right now at Grow withv video live.

com all right let's keep going we're going to move up this pyramid we're going to now convert people who are active in our audience who are following to then become a part of our connected Community remember Community is where magic happens it's where you're at a ballpark and the home team hits a home run to win the game you're high-fiving and hugging people just simply because they're wearing the same ball cap as you you don't even know who they are that's what can happen in our communities as well now I'm going to take you back in time again now remember when I said I was a big baby when I was born well I haven't really grown much since then um my parents thought I was going to be huge and and then I wasn't everybody kept growing and I stopped uh to give you some proof this was my high school senior photo uh and just to give you some perspective a trumpet is 18 inches tall um yeah I was a short kid I was a short kid so I got picked on a lot I got bullied but thankfully I found refuge in the band because that's where all the other weirdos were and so we could be all weirdos together and that was cool unfortunately I had really tall friends who love to play basketball so every day at recess this was my view and that wasn't fun they invited me to play because they were my friends but I always got picked last I get it and I never got past the ball therefore I never got a chance to shoot so even though I was on the court playing basketball was I even really playing basketball no actually I felt worse how often are we inviting people into our communities but not even making them feel recognized or making them feel like they belong it's one thing to create a platform it's another thing to create connections and we need to help facilitate and create these connections it starts with giving them attention helping them understand that they are seen that's just a human thing we love to know that we are being seen and then more so making people feel like they belong to something like there are other people like them here too remember the weirdos in band all got together and we became friends now I'm going to give you some strategies for engagement that are along these lines my first and favorite one is actually not to ask questions yes when you ask questions you get answers but instead I want you to ask for the answer there's a difference there well what do I mean by that well how many of you let me see a raise a hands how many of you watch game shows or have ever watched a game show on television hands up please okay keep your hand up if you've ever watched the game show by yourself at home why did more hands go up that's weird now keep your hand up this is the last one if while watching a game show by yourself you've blurted out the answer right thank you why we're not going to win anything from the television screen why do we do that because we love to know that we're right we love to know that we know what's going on I mean Jeopardy all day I'm like yes I'm winning virtual money that doesn't actually matter but I feel good about myself right okay so we can offer that opportunity for our audience as well ask for the answer you might already know the answer and that's great it's great that you know the answer it's great that you're positioning yourself as an expert but we also want to position ourselves as somebody who allows others to have an answer too right and so you can do that case in point Steve Spangler one of the OG YouTubers back in the day six science was the name of his channel still exists amongst other things when he started his YouTube channel I listened to this on a social media uh podcast um he said that when he started his channel he would do science videos to teach kids and just like a good teacher he would teach everything he would uh suck in uh air from a balloon and his voice would be really low and he'd be like that's sulfur hexafluoride it's denser than G gas and that's why your voice is lower and it's like cool and he would ask what most YouTubers were asking before leave a comment let me know what you think and he'd get the comments that you would all expect first was always the comment then where can I get that gas and cool that's it very very low engagement but he knew that engaging with his audience was going to be very important so he switched it up he did the experiment and then he said you tell me what happened in the comments and I'll feature the best answer every week and the comments and the engagement engagement exploded so much so that Steve Spangler was one of the first OG people asked to by YouTube to create a YouTube original because he had so much engagement in his audience people were fighting over the answers pulling out their chemistry books trying to become the answer because Steve gave them a place to be heard and to be seen and that was really really smart another brand that's doing this very well getting their audience involved is Lego in fact obviously this is a much bigger brand however did you know that in 2003 they were $800 million in debt we almost lost Lego why were they in debt because they were pumping out so many products just because that's what they thought they had to do how many of us are creating videos and trying to stay consistent just because that's what we think we have to do that's going to get you in in in Deb in a different kind of way with your mental game right so we don't want that to happen now Lego is worth $150 billion dollars bigger than Hasbro and Mattel combined they had a new CEO CA who came on and said you know what we're going to focus on what the fans want we're going to focus and listen this is where a lot of those brand deals have come in between Harry Potter and Mario and Lego and all that kind of stuff because they knew that that's what the audience wanted co-creation has been a important part of LEGO's growth they say we actively encourage our fans to interact and suggest products ideas while we have 120 staff designers we potentially have 120,000 volunteer designers they fans we can access outside of the company to help us invent case in point ideas. lego. com any one of us can create a Lego invention upload it here and if the community votes it up Lego will manufacture that product on your behalf and you'll get a cut of that and check this out number four DeLorean that guess who made that not me unfortunately I wish but I fell in love even more with the brand because they positioned me as somebody who or they knew that they were uh just getting this particular audience in there so of course I bought two you know one to build and one to hold for value and they're worth a lot now which is pretty cool but case in point again the lesson get your audience involved in some of the decision- making in your business and brand because when people are involved people will invest let me say that one more time when people are involved people people will invest back in 2010 I created a niche website in the security guard training space this was my most popular post I had ever published at the time hey which logo for this new website do you like better A or B now when I come out with books and stuff I always do this because I want to get my audience involved and have them vote and they have there there's just so much engagement when you give people an opportunity to speak up here's our dear friend Amy Porterfield she said hey there got a minute I need a little font help can you tell me which font for the social love weekly you like best this is her brand new newsletter coming out now do we think that one of the Primo marketers of all time needs font help no but this is so smart because guess what she's getting her audience to get involved which triggers the algorithm right so that's number one but number two she's also sliding in there the fact that she has a newsletter coming out a touch Point without being aggressive super super smart so again we're converting people to become a part of our community we're getting them involved another way to invite our community into something special is what I like called the factory tour back in the American Revolution when all of these factories were popping up you know cranking things out textiles and whatnot they were very closed up they were very secretive nobody was allowed inside of there except the people who worked in the business and investors however they changed it up somebody had the bread idea to open up the factory doors and let people in these tours to see how the company does what they do how many of you ever been on a brewery tour or a chocolate factory tour or something like that right thank you so much fun and you take back so much information right not just hey they put quality time and work into their stuff but you also share that with other people too and now in the social media space you definitely take your phone out and show those things off to other people and now you are a brand ambassador in that way because simply they open up their doors so when you go to Crispy Cream for example what do you see when you go under your Crispy Cream this glass panel and all the adults and kids looking at the little glaze go on top of the oil and and the duts in there right you you've seen that before it's just so fascinating we as humans are just so curious so we as creators can feed into that with our audience and get them involved right I used to publish a monthly income report sharing line by line where I was making money where I was losing money this put me on the map back in 2008 to to 2010 Gary ve ask arv this was simply a version of that right let's have a guy named drock follow him around and show off just what he does you're getting an inside look and you're able to pull something out that you wouldn't normally get if that didn't happen so open up the factory doors talk about how you do what you do every once in a while people will be interested especially those who are part of the community who's already involved in what it is that you do and what it is that you share next create connection opportunities that means create meetups create events like this one create virtual events again opportunities for your audience to connect with each other if you go to uh meetup.

com and you type a afol l you'll find thousands of meetings between adult fans of Lego That's niche in a niche in a niche and this way people who are adult fans of Lego can connect with each other and find each other there's also events that are put on that are not Lego putting them on but fans that put them on and guess what Lego doesn't like say hey you're not allowed to use our IP they say hey what can we do to help you which is so awesome right so brick Fair Virginia brick con we got brick world all these brick things and it's super cool so I've done the same thing I will travel somewhere and run out a coffee shop and just bring fans there and it's so cool and I just sit back and I might be talking to one person but it's actually the benefit is them finding each other I did this once I went to speak at a event in San uh St Louis and I ran out a pizza joint and there were hundreds of people there it was super fun at the end of the night I thought I got to everybody I was shaking hands taking pictures but there was one woman at the end of the night her name was Tanya I saw her name tag and I felt bad because I didn't see her all night and I was like oh maybe you you know I I I went up to her and I was like hey you know what I'm sorry maybe we can find some time to chat later and she's like Pat don't get upset when I say this but I didn't come here to see you and I was like and she's like no no don't get me wrong I hear you every day in the car on my commute but I never get a chance to find people just like me so I wanted to use this time as much as possible to find other people who speak the same language as me who get it who are in the entrepreneurial world with me which is super cool we do formal events like meetups and things like that and this is letg go day which was back uh this is June 17th every year I celebrate the day I got let go for my job Best Day Ever and this was live streamed because I want to bring people in on that uh I did a bigger Event in San Diego not too long ago and now we have a community a virtual community using circle. Soo which sort of acts like a Facebook group but with a little bit more control another thing you can do is to put the spotlight on your people this is my all-time favorite thing to do to help bring the community together even more even though you want to talk to and uh communicate with every single person in the community it's very difficult to do that but a way to have a feeling like that is to pull a few special members from your audience and highlight them make them the hero of the story this is very Donald Miller Story brand if you've ever heard of that book make the audience the hero of the story so I created a podcast episode where I invited three of my podcasting students on to talk about how they made their podcast now I didn't invite them on and ask them hey tell me why you love PowerUp podcasting which is the name of my course tell me why you love my course so much you don't want to approach it that way I approached it like this hey tell me why you wanted to start a podcast tell me what your biggest challenges were in starting a podcast and now everybody listening has this trigger in their head going oh my gosh I have the same challenges as DrB who's definitly afraid of technology or DrShannon in the middle there who was taking a offline business online and wasn't sure if a podcast was the right route or Rob from Disney Travel Secrets who was so concerned about his business and how much time the podcast was going to take he wasn't sure if it was going to increase Roi well he told a story about how he increases Roi 342 % because of his podcast DrB talks about how she's helping people with ADHD in over 33 different countries around the world so now everybody listening is basically getting access to the most genuine organic testimonials that one could ever ask for to help promote the product and when I came out with this episode it was during a launch week we made over $150,000 directly from this podcast episode and I had people email me literally saying hey Pat you better thank DrB cuz she sold me into your course I could sell all day but not as well as one of my own students can on my behalf and you have this beautiful thing called a platform to be able to Showcase some of your students and some of your audience members all right to quote the famous philosopher Drke we started from the bottom and now we are here um now some of your community members will become super fans just kind of automatically which is beautiful right when people feel connected they want to be even more connected however there's one thing that I would recommend to do to nudge people right at the top and that is to create memorable Moments by surprise the by surprise part is the most important part right if you say good night to your spouse every night good night honey I love you good night honey I love you good night honey I love you every night it doesn't become less special but it kind of does because it's just expected right except there's that one time she doesn't say it back and you're like are you mad at me but she fell asleep early anyway I'm not going to get into that um it's the by surprise it's you going into her office at 3:48 p. m.