Pat Flynn
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This is the sixth installment of my monthly report, which I use to summarize my income, where it came from, and anything I did or learned that may have had an impact (or will make an impact) on my earnings.
Important Goings-On in April
Quite a bit happened in April. Here’s a quick breakdown regarding each of my income (or potential income) streams:
GreenExamAcademy.com
The LEED exam is going through a major transition period right now. Registration for the old exam is closed, but people can still take the exam if they happened to have registered before April 1st. As a result, my study guide sales have slowed just a bit. However, I am still pretty surprised that my sales are still relatively strong, which means there are still a lot of people who signed up for the test by the deadline who have yet to study.
I have a couple of months, but I want to begin working on new material for the new exam. I’ve already received a lot of requests for it, so I know it would be a smart thing for me to continue with. There’s just one problem . . . and this is kind of a biggie.
I received a cease and desist letter from the USGBC (United States Green Building Council). I’m not going to go into much detail about this right now, but they are not telling me to stop what I’m doing, they just don’t want me to use the word “LEED” in the domain name intheleed.com (Editor’s note: IntheLeed.com has become GreenExamAcademy.com) I’ve also noticed that other “LEED” websites have changed their domain names too, which leads me to believe they received the same letter.
I don’t want to lose my domain name, so I’m working to keep it. I do respect the USGBC and everything they are doing, don’t get me wrong, but I want to show them I’m serious about what I’m doing and how I’m helping their cause, so I hired an attorney to help us communicate. I’ll let you know how it all goes down once it’s over. Fun times!
LOLer Apps
I’m really excited to announce that LOLer Apps, the iPhone app development company my friend and I created (we outsource all of our ideas), has released its first application! That’s right! As of May 1st, our first app, iPopit!, is on sale for $0.99 in the app store. Here’s our official release on our blog.
It’s been 2 days, and we’ve already sold about 50 copies worldwide. It’s not much, but considering we haven’t done much to promote it yet (we’re about to), that’s pretty good. I promise to give you more details about this later. Good times!
The Smart Passive Income Blog
This blog is going through a few changes within the next month. I hired a designer to redesign the website to allow me to place some ads and start monetizing it a little better. Also, I’m almost finished with an ebook that will be a free gift for signing up for a newsletter on this site as well.
The ebook will be about how to make an ebook, kind of like my 10 part ebook series that I wrote earlier last month.
So, I’m expecting one day this month you’ll come back to this blog and see it look completely different. I’m hoping you like it.
Note: Items with an empty difference percentage were not present on the previous month’s income report.
So like I said, my sales took a little hit because of the exam changeover, but I still made a decent amount. I’m predicting even more of a drop in sales as the last day to take the exam approached (June 30), but I’m hoping the iPhone app sales help boost my earnings for May. We’ll see.
Important Things I Learned in April
As you may have noticed, my affiliate earnings did increase by over 100 percent. I attribute this solely to Twitter. Yes . . . Twitter.
I’ve spent the last month trying to earn as many twitter followers as possible. As of today, my twitter account (http://twitter.com/patflynn—please follow me!) has over 2150 followers, with more and more people following me each day. So how does this help my affiliate earnings? In two ways:
- It brings new people to this website, where I do have some affiliate links to other people’s products.
- I tweet (sparingly) about products that I’ve used to help me get to where I’m at today. I do this to be helpful, not to spam, but it does generate a few sales as a result, which is pretty cool.
So if you’re not yet on the Twitter bandwagon, I recommend at least exploring it’s capabilities.
Another thing I learned is that it’s really important to be organized. I have 3 or 4 projects going on simultaneously, and I would be lost without organization. I’ll give you tips later on this month about organization.
What’s Next
Like I said, the iPhone app stuff is taking off, so I’ll be posting a lot about that and referring to our LOLer Apps website quite a bit. We have another application that should be in the app store by mid-month which we’re really excited about. We believe this app has the most potential to become huge out of all the rest we have planned so far. Exciting!
Again, look out for the blog redesign—it should be ready by mid-month as well.
Cheers everyone!
