Pat Flynn
Editor’s Note: The content regarding eHow is no longer relevant. Please visit our Getting Started page, which we keep up to date with advice for getting started with earning money online. (Updated 10/2015)
It’s the first of the month again so you know what that means—it’s time for another income report!
Every month I write a detailed post about the money I’ve generated online—how much I’ve made, where it comes from and what I’ve been doing to earn more. I do this not only to help me keep track of how things are going with my online businesses, but also so you can learn from both my wins and my failures. I’ve been keeping this up for the past 2 years and these reports seem to generate the most interest and inspiration for people, which is why I continue to do them. Before I go on, I would just like to thank you once again for all of your support. This blog would not be how it is today without you, and I promise no matter how big this blog grows that I will never forget that.
I hope you enjoy this month’s report.
Important Going-Ons in October
Another reason I love to write these reports is because I get to see everything that I’ve accomplished during the past month—and lots of fantastic things happened in October.
As most of you know, I was fortunate enough to attend Blog World Expo where I met a lot of wonderful like-minded people, and a lot of my idols and heroes too. It was inspirational to say the least, which is why I think I had the energy to do everything I did after I got back home.
Passive Income Strategies Webinar with Cliff Ravenscraft
Me and Cliff Ravenscraft of PodcastAnswerMan (who you may remember from the extremely inspirational Session #5 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast) hooked up at the beginning of the month to plan a special webinar for his podcasting audience about strategies for building passive income streams. Both Cliff and I earn a decent income passively from our online businesses and we wanted to put together a high-quality, high-value webinar to share what we know and how others could do the same thing.
The webinar, which was held just last week, was amazing! I know we over-delivered with our content and gave the audience a fantastic plan to start to monetizing their podcasts.
As a result, we were both able to take away $1000 each from that webinar. Not bad for a 2 hour session, although I must admit that I spent a good amount of time preparing slides for the presentation beforehand.
The coolest part is that since Cliff recorded this webinar as it was happening, we’ll be creating a digital product that people can later purchase. This is exactly the strategy for creating passive income products that I outlined in Session #4 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast: 5 Powerful Ways to Create Passive Income Products Record a webinar or teach a private group of people and then repackage that material into a downloadable course or product that you can sell.
If you don’t think you can do it on your own, find someone that compliments your talents or skills and do one together.
The Niche Site Duel
[Editor’s Note, 2019: While the Niche Site Duel challenge was really formative for SPI, the strategies presented are no longer current, and so we made the decision to remove those posts. We don’t want you to waste time pursing outdated strategies.]
Two awesome things happened in October with my new security guard training niche site that I built for the niche site duel vs. Tyrone Shum:
- I’ve started to earn money from it; and
- It climbed to the first page of Google for my primary keyword.
Tyrone and I haven’t discussed an “end goal” for this challenge yet, but regardless of what the actual goal is I knew that no matter what I would have to at least start to monetize the site, and it would definitely help if I made it to the first page of Google—and in two months I’ve accomplished both.
I hope this shows you that it can be done. It wasn’t insanely difficult, but at the same time it wasn’t a walk in the park either. It takes a lot of work to begin to see results and if you’re doing mostly everything yourself like I am, it can take quite a bit of time too.
It’s not over yet though, as my ultimate goal is to rank in the #1 spot for my primary keyword. If you want to follow along from start to finish check out the niche site duel hub.
In the month of October, my niche site has earned a total of $62.65 (that’s $81.41 since starting), all from Adsense ads on the site. To be honest, this is more than I was making with GreenExamAcademy when I first introduced Adsense on that site, so it’s very encouraging to see. If I quit working on it now, I’m pretty sure I could consistently earn between $50 and $100 a month from now on, however I have an aggressive monetization strategy laid out that I’m hoping to implement in the upcoming months that has the potential to earn thousands more. We’ll see how it goes, and of course, I’ll keep you posted.
As far as traffic, I’m now seeing an average of about 140 visitors a day, with a 33% increase since landing on the first page of Google (currently ranked at #7 per Market Samurai).
My Secret Project
If you’ve read The No Fail Approach to Product Creation, then you’ll know that I’m currently working on a brand new project. Specifically, it’s a premium WordPress plugin that I’m getting developed at this very moment that I desperately need, and I know many of you need as well.
How do I know?
Because many of you have told me. (Hint hint)
Since it’s for me, I won’t feel so bad if it doesn’t sell one copy because at least I’ll get to use it on my own. However, the people I’ve spoken to about it are already diggin’ it and I can’t wait to share it with you when it comes out. Again, I’m sorry to leave you hanging right now.
iPhone Apps
I know I haven’t talked much about my iPhone app business lately, but it’s still going strong. We have about 28 published applications in iTunes—some paid and some free—but we haven’t really talked much about adding more to our repertoire. Now that Verizon will carry the iPhone soon, apparently, I think that’s going to change and hopefully we’ll have some new ones out for when the new, app-hungry customers arrive.
In October, we’ve done a few updates to some of our existing apps which should hopefully increase the ad revenue on our free apps in November. I guess we’ll have to wait until the next income report to see what happens.
Okay—let’s get to the numbers!
Full Disclosure: Some of the items in the list below are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase through that link, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that I have experience with all of these companies, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money on these products unless you feel you need them or that they will help you achieve your goals.
Note: Items with an empty difference percentage were not present on the previous month’s income report.
Another fantastic month! It’s hard to believe that compared to last month, the income is virtually the same, even though the income from things such as my affiliate earnings are significantly less. The reason is because everything else saw a plus (+) last month, so it covered the losses. This is why diversifying your passive income portfolio is important.
You should definitely keep your focus on one or two projects at a time (or else you’ll spread yourself thin and never actually complete anything), but the nice thing about passive income is that once you have a business setup for you on auto-pilot, you can use that extra time you have to create new passive income streams and add to your portfolio.
What I Learned in October
I learned everything I needed to know about outsourcing. For a while, I’ve been interested in hiring a virtual assistant to help me as my online businesses are expanding and as I find jobs within them that need to be done, but I don’t necessarily want to do myself. My buddy Tyrone Shum and I held a webinar where I asked him a ton of questions about the hiring process, payments, how to make sure they get the work done properly—all that stuff—and it was perfect. So, a huge thank you goes out to Tyrone for taking the time to walk through that process with me, and I can happily say that I am working with 1 virtual assistant at the moment who is helping me with some new niche sites.
The replay of the outsourcing webinar and the Q&A session is available to everyone for free at Hiring a Virtual Assistant—Everything You Need to Know.
Another thing I learned remembered came to me when listening to one of Cliff Ravenscraft’s many podcasts—Business Tech Weekly.
On it, Cliff was talking about Dave Ramsey and something he said at one of his seminars, which really struck a chord with me. To sum it up for you, Dave was talking about how so many people feel like they don’t have an extra $200, $100 or even $50 a month to put into some kind of savings account or emergency fund. How so many people feel like they are living paycheck to paycheck without the ability to spare any change to save for anything at all. Then, he said, what if your son or daughter were extremely sick and needed $5000 to pay for a surgery or else they would die, do you think you’d be able to scrape up $5000 then? Of course you would, because you would do anything to get that money to save your son or daughter.
This reminded me of an exercise that my high school band director did with me:
Director: “Put your hands up as high as you can.”
Class: (everyone raises their hands, reaching toward the ceiling)
Director: “Now put your hands even higher.”
Class: (everyone raises their hands even higher than before, as high as they possibly can, and some people even standing up to do so.)
Director: “You see, you can always do more than you originally think.”
Participating in this exercise changed my life because I think about it almost every day. I know that I can always do more. Like what Dave was talking about, if you really need to make it happen, if you really want it that bad, you’ll find a way to get it done.
You can always raise your hands a little further, in all aspects of life.
Thanks for your time, and I wish you a safe and profitable November. Cheers!
