How Pat Flynn Lost His Job Then Made $203,219.04 In His First Year Online
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Pat Flynn has an inspiring story that you must listen to if you are like many people around the world who recently lost their job and want to transition to making an income online from your own business.
Pat lost his job as an architect and decided to start an Internet business. His blog was originally set up as a website to store his notes while studying a special type of architecture qualification called the LEED exam. The blog started receiving lots of traffic because of his LEED notes. Some of Pat’s readers emailed him and suggested he create a book on how to pass the exam, which he did simply by compiling his blog posts together in a sequence.
Pat published his ebook and made $8,000 in his first month. After just one year of running his online business he has made $203,219.04, as reported in his Annual Passive Income Report.
In this interview with Pat you will hear him break down his entire story, including how he set up his blog, how he created his ebook and sells it online. If you don’t think your life can change in just a few short months thanks to the Internet, this interview will change your mind. Enjoy!
Show Notes
- How Pat lost his job as an architecture during the economic downturn and started a blog
- What topic Pat wrote about on his blog that skyrocketed his traffic and led to making his first product
- How Pat was able to make $8,000 in his first month selling his ebook
- Pat explains how he managed his business from his iphone while in Hawaii, making $9,000 a week
- A step-by-step breakdown of how Pat started his blog, wrote his ebook by combining his blog posts, and then started selling it from his blog
- How Pat created a simple sales page and what shopping cart service he uses to sell his ebook
- Why Pat believes he is successful selling his first ebook online and others fail
- How Pat gets targeted traffic to his blog, mostly for free from Google
- Pat explains what elements of his sales page he tests using Google Optimizer
Resources
Mp3 Download
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How Can You Make Passive Income Online?
I had a meeting with a friend and his business partner last week. The request was to “pick my brain” on the best way to move forward to generate some passive income streams online.
These two particular people are like a lot of people I know. They’ve got tech skills, they know the Internet well and they have lots of ideas for cool Internet business applications and websites.
Unfortunately they’ve managed to dig themselves into a situation where they spend all their time working on client jobs, running what you might call a “consulting” tech firm, completing various programming and web development projects for other people’s businesses. The money in this business model can be good, but it has some serious downsides too, namely -
- You have to deal with clients, usually one-on-one, a very low leverage interaction and often just painful as you have to work you way through lots of annoying clients to find the good ones
- You work very long hours, which my two friends could certainly testament to
- You know a lot about a lot, yet have difficulty specializing in anything
- You’re in competition with every other jack-of-all trades web development firm out there, which means you unfortunately end up competing on price, and it’s certainly not nice to have to undercut yourself simply to work with bad clients
Those points aren’t necessarily true across the board, but I’m pretty sure any person who has ever consulted or done any kind of web development work for clients will know what I’m talking about.
My friends are smart enough to realize the path they are on is not going to lead them to where they want to go, so they’re looking to make some changes.
The goal is to develop some form of income stream, or several, that could replace the need to take on client work. As always, the relationship between time, money and freedom of choice is heavily integrated here, as my friends are looking to make more money without drastically increasing their workload and eventually freeing up their time so they can do what they want to, rather than what they have to.
Let’s Not Be Strict About Passive Definitions
I’m about to reveal what I talked about during our meeting with my two friends. In terms of what I suggest you do if you are looking to make some passive income online, I don’t want people to get too caught up on the idea of “pure” passive income.
The methods I’m about to talk about are not pure passive income sources, however they have the potential to be low work, high return income sources that can potentially become very close to pure passive longer term. The fact is, it takes time to develop these income streams, but we all love the phrase passive income so I’ve decided to use it here in the title of my post.
So to clarify, what we are looking to do is start up completely new projects that have the potential to become good sources of near-passive and possibly pure passive income, it just might take some time to get there.
First, Understand Your Unique Opportunities
One of the first things I discussed with my friends was taking their present situation and turning it into something that’s less work for them. Sometimes the “lowest hanging fruit” is just a simple adjustment to the business model you are following now, transforming your core skill from labor intensive, to hands-off delivery, or at least much less work.
Here’s some examples of how you might do this -
The Truth About Membership Sites
I’ve read a lot of articles about membership sites at other blogs and websites. Many people who write in the online marketing space jump on the bandwagon and talk about the benefits of owning some kind of subscription based income stream. They point out the obvious, such as recursive income, the stability and significant money that can be made with only a few members.
Unfortunately, nearly every person I’ve seen write about running membership sites has never actually owned a profitable one. Despite how good the model is, most people never get off their butts and actually launch a membership site, or if they do, their site fails because there’s a fatal flaw in their execution or strategy. I find it hypocritical that people can “teach” how to make money with a membership site never having actually done so themselves.
I agree with what people say about membership sites, even if they make statements without having the experience of running one. They are not necessarily wrong, they are just repeating what others have said, so it’s hard to have faith in them as experts. Without proof, how can you really know about something?
I say the same things about membership sites that other people do; they are the best online business model I know of. The difference of course, is that I own two membership sites and have conducted many different types of membership site launches. There’s no greater insight gained about how to do something than actually doing it, so I’m in a position to pass on some real “insider” information about this subject.
Today I want to clarify something that has bothered me about other people’s commentary about the membership site model, especially from people who have never actually run such a site.
The Reality About Membership Sites
Understanding Affiliate Marketing From The Perspective Of A Blogger
I’ve been affiliate marketer for almost as long as I have been a blogger and it’s amazing how much you learn as you go along.
I was very frustrated by nearly all of the affiliate promotions run on my blog during the first two years or so. Each time I published a blog post that focused on an affiliate offer I had such a poor response, on several occasions I thought about giving up blogging altogether. Yet, over time, things would prove worthwhile, as sales began to trickle in.
I expected a rush of sales after posting a blog post affiliate promotion, like all the Internet marketers talk about, and was disappointed when it didn’t happen to me. Instead my sales “dripped” in, one every now and then over the days and weeks that followed, which was certainly not as exciting as $1,000+ in 24 hours just from writing one email, as others claim happened to them.
Those early days taught me that patience is a virtue when it comes to building an affiliate marketing business based on a blog. I’ve learned a lot about what goes into effective affiliate marketing since then, yet in many ways, I still walk into most promotions completely blind and with little expectation. You never know how well something will sell and I’m constantly surprised by my results.
What Pricing Point Should You Promote As An Affiliate?
Do I Really Only Work Two Hours Per Day?
Those who know me well, my friends, family and colleagues, read the claims I make about my blogging and laugh.
As per the Blog Mastermind sales page and throughout the Blog Profits Blueprint, I claim that I only work two hours a day to generate the around $5000 a month income from my blogs and related projects (forums I purchased with profits from my blogging).
The people who see me on a regular basis would tell you that I work a lot harder than just two hours per day.
So is my claim a marketing gimmick? Is it something I state just to lure people in with dreams of an easy working life for a high financial return? Am I using some kind of trigger to convince you that my program is the answer you have been looking for?
Well yes and no.
Yes in the sense that having a claim that is desirable and something compelling enough that people would hand over money to learn what it is all about, is a requirement for my offer to be successful.
If I used something like – Work 40 hours a week and if you are lucky you might just make a full time income from blogging – not many people are going to join. Heck, I wouldn’t join either, who wants to work 40 hours a week for $35K a year!?!
The reality is that my program is designed to teach what I really do – I really work about two hours aggregate per day on my blogs to produce about $5000 a month in income. However I spend a lot of the rest of my time doing other work, which tends to add up to 4-10 hour “working” days on average, including weekends sometimes too.
