62: How Online Dating Can Teach You to Be a Better Communicator with Patrick King

Patrick King is a dating, image, and social skills coach based in San Francisco, California, and has been featured on numerous national publications such as Inc.com. He’s also a #1 Amazon best-selling author with the most popular online dating book on the market, and writes frequently on dating, love, sex, and relationships.

He focuses on using his emotional intelligence and understanding human interaction to break down emotional barriers, instill confidence, and equip people with the tools they need for success.

Patrick started out as an attorney helping startup businesses and entrepreneurs get started on the right track. As more and more friends started asking for relationship advice and help, Patrick realized he had a gift to share with the world beyond his training as an attorney.

Patrick decided to begin publishing his books on Kindle after he met Jordan Gray who we interviewed in episode 38. He used the Kindle publishing Bible to help him format his first book for Kindle. It was a book on online dating.

Patrick really didn’t enjoy being a lawyer. He decided to leave that job after he had 10 books published on Amazon.

Patrick doesn’t think changing careers from lawyer to dating expert was really the leap of faith that some people like to say it was. He quit his job after he had enough success selling his expertise that he knew eventually he could produce an income that would support him.

What Makes a Good Online Dating Profile

What most people don’t realize is that writing a good online dating profile is an exercise in creative writing. Writing a good profile means avoiding the tropes of bad online dating profiles. You want to avoid things like:

Using a list of adjectives to describe yourself.

Saying how much you love to travel.

Saying you love eating your food.

Don’t use the same pictures as everyone else.

What you want to do is make your personality stand out in a way that everyone else is not.

When you look at human beings superficially we all have a lot in common. So if you don’t dig deep and highlight those aspects of your personality that make you unique, you’re just going to look like everyone else online.

“Online dating is this funny thing. You want to brag about yourself but, it’s not a resume. You want to appear the best version of yourself. But you want to appear humble too. So, it’s kind of trying to walk a fine line.” – Patrick King

How Patrick Works with Dating Clients

The first step to working with Patrick is to fill out his contact form. After you send him a message he will reply to you. That begins the dialogue.

When you become his client he’ll send you a survey of 50 questions that will give him a good idea of your personality. This isn’t a standard questionnaire. It has quirky questions like, “what is your dream job?” The purpose of these questions is to help you dig deep and reveal your authentic personality so he can help you put that on display most effectively.

He uses the questionnaire to craft a dating profile that is equal parts substance and silliness.

What you have to remember is that a dating profile is simply a snapshot or aspect of who you are. It’s not the whole picture. That’s where a lot of people go wrong.

They try to fit everything about them into the space of a relatively tiny profile and because that’s what they’re trying to do they end up making very general statements that don’t give potential dates any real information about them, or allow any sort of initial attraction to form.

Patrick uses a series of mini stories to illustrate the attractive and unique parts of your personality.

It’s the old adage, “show don’t tell” you want to give people a relatable story rather than telling them what a wonderful person you are.

How Being an Online Dating Coach Has Helped Patrick Become a Better Writer

The number one thing that helped Patrick become a better writer is focusing on the topics that his clients and audience wanted him to write about.

When you have a laser focus on helping your audience achieve the results they want, and every word you write is designed to take them from where they are to where they want to be, building an audience of engaged, helpful fans to spread the word about your message and products is inevitable.

“If you are writing nonfiction you should have an idea of who your target audience is. You should have an idea of exactly what they want. You should know what benefits they’re expecting to get out of your book. If you don’t know that you need to go back and do some more research.” – Patrick King

Patrick King’s Amazon Marketing Strategy

Patrick doesn’t have a traditional marketing strategy for Amazon. He writes guest blogs on some dating advice blogs. He does podcasts like this one.

If you want to be better at marketing your books learn copywriting. That was the biggest game changer for Patrick because it taught him to treat his words like a product, which they are. You can have integrity and still sell people a product.

All copywriting does is tap into what people want. If you can produce something the market will buy without having to actively promote it, that is a win in Patrick’s book. That is why Patrick focuses on writing books all on a set of related topics.

First of all, people need help in a number of different ways when it comes to dating. Second, people absorb information differently depending on the angle you take with that information.

If you nail achieving the benefits that people want when you write your book, your book will sell itself because satisfied customers will tell everyone they know who’s interested in the same topic about your book.

The AIDA Formula for Copywriting

Attention

Grab the reader’s attention right away from the very first sentence.

Interest

Get the reader interested by showing them clearly how your book / profile / product / service is unique and different from anything or anyone else in the world. Be unique! But don’t just be unique – prove it with the language you use.

Desire

People want results, not books or products or services. They want RESULTS. So tell them exactly what results they’ll get when they buy your book or product. Explain the features AND the benefits of what you offer so readers can see immediately what they will get when they make the decision to buy from you.

Action

Ask people to buy! The biggest mistake you can make is not asking. In your book description, in your emails, on your website… always guide readers to take action and buy your book. If you don’t ask, they can’t say “yes!”

Copywriting should have its fingerprints everywhere when it comes to your book. You should use copywriting

• In your title.
• In your book description.
• On your book cover.

And in the first 10% of your e-book.

You could even make the case that you should use copywriting throughout the book itself. It’s important to use copywriting at least in the areas listed above because those are the areas that can convince a potential customer to buy your book.

“You need to tell people why they should buy your book or they’re not going to.” – Tom Corson Knowles

I see it all the time. I’m shopping on Amazon and I see a light bulb. But it doesn’t tell me anything about the product. The description won’t even tell me the wattage of the lightbulb. If I don’t have any information, I’m not going to buy a product.

I’m not going to buy a book if the book description page doesn’t tell me anything about the book because I don’t know if the book is going to help me solve the problem I want to solve. Unless the book description tells me, there’s no way for me to know that is a book that’s going to solve the problem I have.

You need to be as clear, specific and persuasive as possible in your book description or people are just going to click away and not by your book.

Amazon is a platform with so many choices. You have your thumbnail and your title, and if you don’t get your prospect’s attention in one second or less you’ve lost the sale.

Don’t Chase Trends

Patrick wrote a couple of books chasing trends. He doesn’t recommend it. He wrote a book on baking soda under a pen name, and within one month there were 20 copycats on Amazon.

They copied every element of his book. They copied the content and the cover design.

In Patrick’s experience it’s much better to write something that only you can write. You’ll build a stronger platform that way because people will be looking for you and your content, not just content about the subject.

When you write a topic that you have unique expertise in no one can rip off your idea and make a knockoff copy of your book. If they try to it won’t be successful, because they can copy your words, but they can’t copy your expertise and the way in which you deliver the information.

Also, if you authentically deliver a message to an audience on Amazon, you will get more loyal fans in the long run.

Follow Your Passion

Everyone has knowledge in their head they can monetize. All you have to do is write about subjects that you are passionate about studying.

When you write about subjects you’re passionate about you know more than the average person. More than that, your passion comes through in your writing.

Patrick’s Writing Schedule

Patrick has been a prolific author over the last two years. He attributes his success to the fact that he started his professional career as a lawyer.

That means he didn’t mind working long hours, and he was also highly motivated to replace his lawyer income with his writing. That meant he had to publish quickly and get a lot of products out there to build an audience and client base.

Patrick has slowed down production recently because he wants to focus on creating higher-quality books that have evergreen information.

He uses ghostwriters to write chapters of his book that don’t require his unique knowledge.

For instance, Patrick has a book on confidence. In that book there’s a chapter on why confidence is important. That’s the type of thing many people can convey nearly as well as him. So he doesn’t need to spend his time writing that chapter if he can hire a ghostwriter who can write a quality chapter about that topic.

He still edits everything and make sure that the chapters he has ghostwritten are delivered in his voice.

Another thing Patrick has learned is that more hours writing is not necessarily better. He limits himself to writing no more than 6 hours a day, and usually 5 hours a day.

Stephen King in his book On Writing I said that everyone has 15 hours to 20 hours of creative writing in them a week.

When you limit the amount of hours you spend actually creatively writing, your creative writing output is much better. Your mind is fresher and you enjoy it more.

Surprisingly, by limiting the number of hours that he actually does creative writing Patrick has produced more books faster than he did before.

When I started TCK publishing I worked from 9 AM to 9 PM every day. Now I only write 15 minutes to 60 minutes a day.

That doesn’t seem like a lot but you’d be amazed how much you can get done when you’re really focused.

One of the problems that Internet entrepreneurs have because we’ve chosen to take total responsibility for creating our own income, we feel like leisure time is an opportunity cost where we could be doing more work and creating value which will make us more money in the long run.

The truth is that you need some sort of balance. You need to fill your creative well as you use it to keep creative projects going.

Maker Vs Manager

A creative person will block off hours to dive into a project because that’s what they feel they need to be creative.

A manager is someone who watches the clock and rigorously follows a schedule. Patrick is the most productive when he schedules his days by role.

He decides ahead of time what kind of person he’s going to be on a specific day. By giving himself the flexibility to choose whether to be a maker or a manager, Patrick has found a happy medium where he can be the most productive.

No one multitasks very well. But you can batch tasks together so that you’re in one mode during the day.

How Patrick Manages His Ideas

At the beginning of his self-publishing career Patrick would spend hours on Amazon doing market research.

He usually gets his book ideas from his clients. When they’re having a problem and he hasn’t written a book about it he makes a note of it.

He uses the site workflowy.com. It’s a simple website that allows you to keep track of bulleted lists. They use a freemium model and allow you to have 100 bullet points on a number of lists. If you need more than 100 Bullet points per month you can sign up for a premium account on their website.

In his workflowy.com document he has a bullet point with possible book ideas. Under that bullet point he lists a bunch of possible book ideas and comparable books. He regularly checks on those comparable books to see if those books have sticking power in Amazon’s rankings. Once he sure that a book idea is commercially viable, that’s when he begins the process of writing the book.

One thing Patrick would like to be better at is figuring out what titles and covers get attention from the customers on Amazon. Patrick has a book Social Fluency which doesn’t sell very well. He thinks it’s because people don’t understand the idea of the book when they first look at that cover.

It’s not enough to have a good book title. You have to have a title that the average reader can understand immediately. It’s important to get feedback from other people about book titles and covers.

Other people can look at your book titles and covers with fresh eyes. They aren’t emotionally invested in a creative choice. Patrick has a book coming out on charisma and he wanted to title it “Bottled Charisma” fortunately his friends convinced him that wasn’t a good title.

Patrick’s Future Plans

Patrick wants to begin moving his brand off of Amazon. He wants his income to be more independent of Amazon’s platform.

That’s why he’s started a mailing list so he can connect with his customers on a direct and personal basis with no intermediary.

Patrick has done very well on Amazon. But each sale gives him close to $3 in income. He wants to expand revenue streams and take control of communication with his audience.

He wants to control his own distribution so that he doesn’t need any other sites selling for him.

People and Resources Mentioned

Neville Medhora and his course on copywriting.

Stephen King and his book On Writing

Jordan Gray. Listen to episode 38 of the podcast. We talk about how to have amazing relationships and be productive at the same time.

Patrick mentioned the Kopywriting Kourse from AppSumo which helped him become a better writer and marketer.

Patrick recommends workflowy for keeping track of projects and ideas.

Learn more about Patrick and connect with him at patrickkingconsulting.com

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