How Does a Passive Income Business Work? – Video Interview With Pat Flynn From SmartPassiveIncome.com

Have we got a real treat for you this time! A few weeks back, I got the opportunity to talk with Mr. Passive Income himself – Pat Flynn. Pat is an online entrepreneur who has build an amazingly successful business around his SmartPassiveIncome.com blog (amongst his other projects!). Pat is the Nomad Couch guest of honor today, so I’ll get out of your way right now and let Pat share his wisdom on Passive Income business and multiple Income Sources. Enjoy!

In the first video:

Who is Pat and what do you do?

Pat shares his story and the steps that he’s taken to got to the point where he is today.

What was Pat doing before he got into the passive income online business.
How did he go from a regular 9-5 job to working for himself as a online entrepreneur.
Pat’s first “personal blog” and how it turned out to be a huge success for him: GreenExamAcademy.com
How the SmartPassiveIncome.com blog started and what’s it about?
Passive income products – Put in the hard work first, unlock the passive income stream later.
Pat shares info about his passive income streams: affiliate products, iPhone apps & writing articles.

Do you have a thing called “a regular workday” or does it change everyday?

What’s a regular workday like for Pat?
Pat’s working schedule.
Distractions and how to live with them.
What Pat misses from the regular 9-5 job?

Do you work mostly from home or do you go to a coffee shop or similar every now and then to work?

Why Pat prefer’s working from home over working from the local Starbucks?

In the second video:

Do you do all the work yourself or do you outsource?

Pat shares his point of view to outsourcing and the way he does things regarding using VA’s (Virtual Assistants)
Where Pat finds his outsourced people if he needs them
Pat shares his experiences with outsourcing, regarding the iPhone app business his running

You’re also building niche sites and have a challenge going on with Tyrone Shum. How’s that working for you?

How the Niche Site Duel challenge started and what are they competing each other on (also check out Tyrone’s site for this!)
What kind of niche sites are they building and how has the challenge gone so far.
Tyrone’s working with VA’s with the challenge, Pat is doing it just by himself. How does this affect the process?
Are you already selling something through your niche site?
Google rankings – why you need to get to the first result page?

You selected a security guard training for your niche site subject. Do you know anything about the subject personally?

Pat shares his thoughts why you don’t need to know about the niche site subject when you start building the thing
Why you need to have personal interest on the subject that you’re niche site is going to be about?
Why is it good to not know much about the subject when you start creating content for the niche site?
Where to find information and find out the questions people are asking about the niche subject?
The “curse of knowledge”. What’s that all about?

In the third video:

Targeting country specific markets – Have you ever made an ebook for another language?

Pat’s views on creating information products for a country specific audiences (i.e. for Finnish readers)
Should I target a country specific audience – how to know if it will work?
Another way to find out if it’s a good idea: Try out what Tim Ferriss talks about in the 4 Hour Workweek – Create a landing page for your product, tell about you’re product (that you haven’t written yet!) and see how many sign ups you get for the product email list. If the interest seem strong enough – create the thing!

You’ve mentioned that you absolutely love mastermind groups. Are you in one right now?

Pat tells why it’s vital to be in a mastermind group if you’re running an online business (or any business!).
What is a mastermind group anyway?
How does a mastermind group meetings go and what tools & processes are there involved?

How did you get involved in a mastermind group for the first time?

Pat started with a mastermind group that was based on the InternetBusinessMastery class he was participating at the time.
Pat shares info about another group his in and what do they actually do on a weekly basis.
How do you meet online? GoToMeeting.com, FreeConferenceCall.com and others.

Back to the Smart Passive Income blog – Building traffic & audience

~10, 000 RSS subscribers, 5000 email subscribers, ~2000 podcast subscribers in just one month, 3000 Facebook likes..! What kind of methods have you used to grow the site’s audience to the point where it is today? Any single best method that has worked for you?
The first 6 months with almost no traffic at all! How did you “survive it” and motivated yourself to go on?
Why social proof is VERY POWERFUL? From 10-20 daily visitors to 4000 in one day. How did that happen?
Guest posting, getting mentioned in other blog, and the online karma – it really do exists.
What was the focus of Smart Passive Income blog in the very beginning?

In the fourth video:

If you would have to start from a scratch today and create an authority based website for yourself, how would you do it?

Pat’s insights for finding about what to write, who the possible audience would be and what kind of things would they be interested about.
See what everyone else is doing and then do something totally different. Pat’s thoughts on that.
Why Pat reveals everything that he does online (even the failures)? Why honesty, transparency and not using “the annoying flashing banners” is a huge advantage for any serious online entrepreneurs today?
Networking with other blogger’s – do it.
What Corbett Barr did when he launched ThinkTraffic.net and why that was a fantastic idea?

We’re about to wrap this up, but before we do – just one more question: What’s happening next with your businesses?

Pat shares some of his future plans and ideas for the Smart Passive Income blog.

Prefer an Audio Version of the Interview?

If you listen to podcasts through iTunes, you’ll find our iTunes channel here.

I also prepared an audio version of the interview, so if you’d like to download and listen the interview from your MP3 player, here you go!

Right click and “save as” to download the files to your computer.

Audio Part 1 (9.21 minutes – 10.7MB) | Audio Part 2 (5.31 minutes – 8.6MB)

Audio Part 3 (5.33 minutes – 9.2MB) | Audio Part 4 (5.34 minutes – 4.8MB)

Share the love.

Don’t forget to stop over at SmartPassiveIncome.com blog and say hi to Pat! And the same goes here as well at Nomad Couch! We both love to hear feedback from you guys and gals so don’t be a stranger.

Got excited? Have some thoughts you’d like to share with other readers? Share them in the comments and please, if you liked this interview, tweet, like & share the living daylights out of it! We’d really appreciate that.

Also, I’m curious who would YOU love to see interviewed here at Nomad Couch next? If you have some online entrepreneur you’d like to see featured, please share your suggestions through the Nomad Couch Facebook page so others can vote for your suggestion too! Thank you so much for your support, this blog could not go on without it!

- Juha

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http://www.venturemixx.com/ Tony Ruiz

Awesome! I love Pat’s story. Very inspiring. Pat’s mindset to make passive income is unstoppable.

http://www.nomadcouch.com/ Juha Liikala

Pat in fact reminds me of some of my fitness friends. He's very organised, sticks to his plans and most importantly – is willing to DO WHAT IT TAKES to succeed. Most people don't have that mindset.

Pat sure has inspired a LOT of people out there. He is a prime example of what can be done when you just keep doing what you love and really take action to make things happen. I absolutely love the whole passive income business model. Put in the hard work first and then enjoy the fruits of your efforts. It's nothing like those "get rich quick" schemes out there which we all despise..

I think the whole Internet marketing field should start turning to what Pat is doing right now. Being open & cut the BS. But then again.. as long as there are people (and there probably always will be) who are willing to throw their money into the fire and buy empty promises without hesitations – well, you know the story.

Thanks for stopping by Tony! Love the idea you have going on at Venturemixx. Awesome content there buddy!

http://www.venturemixx.com/ Tony Ruiz

Hi Juha! I agree. The mindset is everything. One thing that Pat has done is apply his success with building passive income streams to his fitness goals and vice-versa. Something I truly respect.

You're welcome. I'll be checking out more of your posts. Keep em' coming.

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Winston

Dear Pat,
I like your blog. There is a lot of good useful advice and information for free in it. However, I am a critical thinker and can’t help but be skeptical about a few things:

- First, you seem to contradict yourself. In your 101 intro, you tell everyone that making passive income online is not easy, and that it requires a lot of hard work and time to build up, which is true. But then in your story, you say you made $8000 off one ebook during your first month attempt at this, and that in your first year, you made over $200,000, and now you make $30,000 a month. Isn’t that a direct contradiction? By your claims, you got rich quick easily, but you tell everyone that it takes a lot of time and hard work and is not easy.

- I’ve been making money online for 3 years now, and I know many others who are doing it too. $8,000 in your first month is an extraordinary claim, not a realistic one, even if you are a super genius. It took me 3 years to build up enough traffic and reputation to make a little over $900 a month. And that was through hard work and content generation, not with any secret formula. Your sites do look great, and do have top rankings I see, but there are many sites out there that look great with web 2.0 graphics and nifty wordpress themes too, and they ain’t making shit. I still think your claims are extraordinary. But your fans seem to believe everything you say, like a Gospel preacher in a church, with no skepticism. Why is that?

- What evidence is there to back your income claims? Why haven’t you posted screen shots of your Adsense report earnings, or of your monthly PayPal transactions? But even those are easy to fake. Anyone can download or save a webpage offline, and then manipulate the HTML in it to produce any numbers they want. On the internet, anyone can claim anything. Even in Amway and other MLM’s, lots of people making nothing are claiming to be doing well and pulling in thousands of dollars per month. It doesn’t mean it’s all true. Furthermore, if you really are making $30k a month, why are you wearing the cheapest most worn t-shirts in every video interview you give?

- In my experience, people who really are pulling in a lot of income do not like to draw public attention to it, unless they are celebrities. There are negative consequences to doing that. Especially if you are making a lot of money online, it is not in one’s best interest to publicize it, for it will draw bad people, and incite others to follow your business model and create copycat versions of your site, which could potentially jeopardize your income. No rational person would want to do that.

- In addition, there is an old adage that says: “You cannot make a lot of money by telling people the truth”. I wonder if that applies here. Another witty quote says:

“The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.” – H. L. Mencken

So it makes sense to be skeptical here, doesn’t it?

http://www.smartpassiveincome.com Pat

Winston – as I mentioned on other blogs where you posted this exact same message, you just sent me the same message VIA email and didn’t even give me a chance to answer before copy/pasting this everywhere. I find that to be extremely rude, but I just sent you my response anyways and would appreciate it if you were a little more courteous about how you handled this. I told everyone on Yaro’s blog too, if anyone is interested in my response to Winston, let me know and I’ll send you an email.
http://www.smartpassiveincome.com Pat

Oh, and I think it extremely naive to say: “Furthermore, if you really are making $30k a month, why are you wearing the cheapest most worn t-shirts in every video interview you give?” – unbelievable. Really? I find my cheap worm out shirts to be extremely comfortable.

Mr X.

Winston,

Warren Buffett the
Worlds 3rd richest man with $ 47 billion dollars still lives in the same house
in the same neighborhood where he bought the home in 1958 for
$31,500.

What’s your point?

Mr X.