Archive for January, 2009
Today I had my first meeting with a Certified Public Accountant. For those of you who aren’t too sure, a CPA is a person who has passed the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination whose primary function is to provide assurance services, or public accounting. In addition, they can help with business consulting, financial and estate planning, tax prep, and so on.
I had a financial planner once before who was actually very helpful in educating me about my future relating to retirement and larger purchases in my near future, such as a car and a house. However today, the CPA (let’s call him Dave) was pretty much focused on Flynndustries, LLC (my business), and my personal income with regards to taxes – something I am pretty clueless about. Remember, this is a learning process for me and if I tried to know and understand everything before diving into it, I would never have started my business in the first place.
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After more than 24 hours of driving on the road, 14 hours of shredding Tahoe powder, and the many laughs and new memories with my homeboys, I’m finally back from my bachelor party. It was a long trip and I was a little worried because it was the first time that I was really going to be away from my home computer for a period longer than just one day. Although I was nervous because I usually check my email once an hour (an unhealthy online addiction equivalent to smoking cigarettes, I admit) I knew that since my business was online and passive, it would continue to run and process orders throughout the weekend, 24/7 without me.
Because this chart was so popular in one of my earlier posts, I’m going to show it to you again. This is what an online passive income business model looks like…
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I found the secret to increasing traffic to your website. It has worked for me 100% of the time on both blogs that I currently own. What’s the big secret? It’s being nice to people.
Greetings! How are you today? I hope this day has brought you great joy! Ok, enough!. That’s not what I mean by “being nice”. You can have whatever attitude you want on your blog or website, and a lot of times it helps to have an edge or some kind of personality to convey to your readers.
What I mean by being nice is to always be honest, always be responsive, and always go the extra mile. If someone emails you, you should always do your best to respond. I mean, they took the time to contact you, so don’t be a butt and not respond back. Even just a “Hey, I got your email, and I’ll get back to you real soon” would suffice.
It may sound a little weird, but Karma does exist in the blogging world. If you are honest, show passion, respond, and give people what they want – you will be rewarded in one way or another.
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I’m writing to you from the snowy slopes of Lake Tahoe! Actually, this is a timed post that is set to be published while I’m in Tahoe snowboarding with 10 of my buddies for my Bachelor Party, but I wanted to write this ahead of time to make sure I kept the blog rolling, even while I’m away.
As you may or may not know, I’ve been seeing a personal trainer for the last 2 months. I hired David (from my local 24-hour fitness club) because I noticed that I was getting really out of shape – mainly from sitting in front of my computer, a poor diet and a lack of motivation. Because my income is primarily passive income, I now have the free time to get in shape again.
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In my last post, I told you about how I was going to explore PPC Affiliate Marketing to earn more income online. Here, I’ll tell you about another idea that is currently underway as well – iPhone applications.
I presume you’ve heard of the iPhone. If not, you should crawl out from under that rock. Anyways, iPhone applications are selling like hotcakes. There are over 10,000 applications that iPhone users (over 10 MILLION of them) can download. Some of them are free, while others go for a small price, usually between $0.99 and $9.99.
So let’s see, if I create an iPhone app, sell it for $1.99, and just 0.5% (just HALF A PERCENT) of iPhone user’s buy it – that’s $10mil * .005 * 1.99 = ~$100,000. Sound too good to be true? Well, have you heard of the application so tastefully named: iFart?
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As most of you probably know, my main source of income online comes from a blog I created where I sell an eBook and now an audio guide as well. The audio guide was recently launched and is doing very well, but I’ll talk more about the results in my monthly report at the beginning of next month. I also do a little bit of affiliate marketing as well as write articles on eHow (although it’s been a while but I’m still pulling in cash every day). Last month, I grossed around $12,000 in total.
It’s funny because I work from home, but the “work” I do is virtually unrelated to my current income streams. For instance, I would say that with the near $10,000 I made from my other blog in December, I spent a total of less than 10 hours of actual work related to it the entire month – which was mainly answering customer service emails. So, when you say, “Pat, you’re not really making passive income if you’re working,” what I’m really working on is new projects that may help generate more passive income in the future.
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I just got back from a long weekend with my fiancee. We stayed at the San Luis Rey Mission in Oceanside, CA for a weekend long retreat for engaged couples who are soon to be married. I learned a lot of things about marriage preparation, such as how to argue (yes, how to argue), how to work together to make big decisions in our lives, as well as what we’ll need to make decisions about, such as where to spend our holidays, how to think about finances, and what our goals in life are.
Overall, the weekend was great, but I couldn’t help but start relating some of the information that I learned over the weekend to my business, which I will share with you now because I think it’s very sound advice. It all has to do with things that distract or take away from a relationship. In regards to making money, especially making money online – whether you’re blogging, writing ebooks or articles on eHow – these are things that waste your time. They may be obvious to you, but hear me out.
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In my last post, I discussed exactly why I started my own company, Flynndustries, LLC – but here I’ll tell you exactly how it was accomplished in only 30 minutes.
Traditionally, if you wanted to start your own company it took quite a bit of work. First, you’d have to fill out your state’s “Articles of Organization form” after first determining if your business name is available, then mail that to the Secretary of State Office, get an employer identification number (EIN), and fax that to the IRS. Then you wait until your papers are approved, and get lawyers to do some more paper work and blah blah blah. My point is – it took a long time.
Luckily, you can do pretty much anything on the internet these days, including starting your own business. I used LegalZoom, which was relatively inexpensive, and their customer service is superb.
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So it’s official. I am now the proud owner of my very own business – and I have to say, it feels wonderful! It’s always been my life long dream to own my own business, so it’s nice to say that I was able to achieve this at the age of 26. But looking back at what I had envisioned my own business to be, this is not what I had in mind.
Before, I had imagined having my own office and leading a team of people to do a certain job – maybe an architecture firm, since I studied architecture in college. My company would be named Flynn Architecture or something of that nature, and I’d go all around the world Networking with people and examining all of the buildings my company had designed. Well, my company is not Flynn Architecture, and I don’t have an office. I don’t even have people under me. It’s just me and my company, Flynndustries, LLC.
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You’ve seen The Matrix, right? Do you remember when Neo (Keanu Reeves) laid down, plugged in, and woke up saying, “I Know Kung Fu”? Or, in The Matrix Reloaded, when Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) needed to learn how to ride a Susuki GSX-R motorcycle only to be instantly uploaded that skill?
We’re not quite at that point in time where we can instantly upload information into our brains, unfortunately. But, there is something we can do today that is very similar – we can read. By reading, we can learn whatever it is we want to do.
I read for three basic reasons:
- To learn something new: a skill or an idea (which may be related to something that I already know about)
- To know how to implement these newly learned skills or ideas.
- To become more of an expert on a subject. As I’ve mentioned before in this post, to be considered an expert about something, you just have to know more than somebody else about it.
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Today I had my first meeting with a Certified Public Accountant. For those of you who aren’t too sure, a CPA is a person who has passed the Uniform Certified Public Accountant Examination whose primary function is to provide assurance services, or public accounting. In addition, they can help with business consulting, financial and estate planning, tax prep, and so on.
No, I'm not a millionaire, but I am living off of passive income made online. I'm here to show 
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