Archive for the ‘Featured’ Category
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It’s here! The first session of The Smart Passive Income Podcast!
You can download the podcast to your computer or listen to it here on the blog. Additionally, I will be submitting the podcast feed to iTunes soon, so you can subscribe there as well – but I’ll let you know when it’s up and ready to go.
Since this is our first session together, I spend a little bit of time introducing myself and how I define passive income and utilize it for my businesses and lifestyle. Also, I go over the formalities of the show and what to expect from future sessions.
Future shows will have a structured format, and several will include special guests.
Special information about the episode such as items mentioned during the session and action items will usually appear below, along with a transcript.
Right click here to download the MP3
Items Mentioned in This Session:
Action Items:
- Once iTunes has approved the show, I’ll provide you with an iTunes feed for the podcast only. Additionally, you can also subscribe to the blog and get all of my material (blog posts and podcast) by clicking here.
Transcript:
This is a short tutorial about how to hide or remove a page from Google.
Well actually, we’re not “hiding” anything from Google, we’re just telling Google not to index certain pages on our site so they don’t show up in the search engines.
Why would you want to do this?
There are some instances where you actually do not want content on your site to show up in the search engines. Let’s say, for example, you have a newsletter and it comes with a free eBook or a report. If you create a special page that has links to download your eBook, it will get picked up by search engine robots, show up on the results page for certain keywords, and people can potentially bypass your opt-in form to get the eBook that you’re giving away.
How do I know this?
Because it happened to me.
Click to continue…
Last week, I posted a question asking all of you whether you prefer a full post or a partial post in your RSS feed.
The argument was that a full post is what most subscribers favor, but showing a full post keeps people off of your site. On the other hand, you could get more traffic coming to your site by showing a partial post or “teaser”, but then it would defeat the purpose of having an RSS feed in the first place.
The response was amazing. In fact, more than 60 individual people commented with their opinion – and almost all of them favored ‘full post’.
Although we can easily conclude that a full post is the way to go, I wanted to illustrate two principles that came about as a result of asking this simple question: social proof and putting your readers first.
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Recently, a number of people have been asking me for my opinion about how much of a post one should show in their RSS feed. On Feedburner (which I know has been on the fritz lately as far as numbers are concerned), you can choose to have either your entire post shown, or just a piece of it with a link to read more back on the site.
(To change your setting in Feedburner, login and click on the “Optimize” tab, and then click on “Summary Burner” at the bottom)
I have always shown the full post, but a number of people have made a good argument for only showing the beginning portion or a teaser.
On one hand, people subscribe to RSS feeds to conveniently read material off-site. So why would we want to make things inconvenient by having them come back to the blog to finish the post?
On the other hand, it’s evident that by showing the full RSS feed, we’re not maximizing the amount of traffic on our sites because the subscribers have all of the content they need off-site. Plus, don’t we want our readers to engage in the comment section and possibly click on other things on our site to stay on it as long as possible?
It’s a toss up, and I’m really interested in what you think.
Are you for a Full Post, or a Partial Post in the RSS feed? Which do you prefer, and why? Is there a “happy medium” you’d like to share?
Last week, an SPI reader asked me the following question:
“Pat. You seem to be EVERYWHERE online. Everywhere I go, people are talking about you and your name always comes up. How do you do it?”
To be honest, I never believed I would become this successful online, especially with SPI – a blog in the “make money online” niche, which as you probably know is wildly over saturated. Although my success is partially accidental I know exactly why I’m here.
What it really comes down to is this:
If you want to become successful online, you must think about what you do as building a brand. In order to build a brand, you must do what you can to be everywhere.
A successful blogger is not just a blogger. True – it’s the blog where things get started. It’s where authority is constructed and content is published. But if you stick to just a blog, you’ll be just that – stuck to your blog.
Your blog or your website is only the beginning. It’s your hub, your homebase where people can go to find out more about who you are and what you do, but it’s also just one piece of the giant puzzle that is your brand – your omnipresent, influential and (if applicable), money making brand.
Below are 7 ways to simply be everywhere:
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It’s the beginning of a new month, which means it’s time for a new monthly income report! Every month, I write out a detailed report showing exactly where my online earnings come from. Although I share all of my income down to the penny, it’s not really about the numbers – it’s more about what I’ve been up to that may have had an impact on my earnings and sharing that with you so you can learn from both my successes, and my failures.
Let’s get to it…
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This is the final installment of my YouTube marketing tactics series. In part 1, we covered how to approach video marketing, as well as what to include in your recordings for maximum impact. In part 2, we discussed the importance of optimizing the Title, Description and Tags of your video, and I included a few cool tricks to help you “snipe” traffic from other popular videos.
In part 3, we’re going to cover some tips and tricks that you can do with your video after it’s uploaded. Much like with blogging (and iPhone apps), the work should not stop once your content is live. There are a few things you should do before you can just let YouTube and the Internet do it’s thing and drive traffic to your videos and ultimately your blog automatically. Again, it’s about putting in the hard work now, so you can continuously reap the benefits later.
Click to continue…
In part 1 of this mini series about video marketing on YouTube we discussed two important topics:
- Your mindset as you begin to push videos onto YouTube for brand expansion and traffic generation; and
- A number of things you can do to your video recording to optimize it.
In part 2 we’re going to cover some tips and tricks for what to do after your video is recorded with the title, description and tags.
Click to continue…
YouTube.
It’s been around for over 5 years, yet for some reason most bloggers still haven’t explored the video sharing platform where millions of people around the world are watching over 2 billion videos a day.
I took the SPI brand onto YouTube on September 26th, 2009 for the same reason I do everything else I report on this blog – to see if it’s a worth while place to invest my time.
276 days later, I can truthfully say that I’m more than pleased with the results of my experiment with YouTube to expand the SPI brand and audience base. Here are some quick numbers from my account as of today:
- 15 Uploaded Videos
- 59,582 Total Views
- 720 Subscribers
That’s an average of about 1 new video every 2 to 3 weeks. Considering that the average length of my videos is about 6 minutes in length, you can get a feel for just how much time I’ve really dedicated to this “experiment” – 6 minutes every 3 weeks.
Not a huge amount of time invested, but you can see that I’ve earned a considerable number of views and a good amount of subscribers as a result, which has ultimately increased traffic to my blog as well as helped to earn a few affiliate sales here and there. Without much additional effort, my daily viewership continues to grow as you can see below:
By no means would I call myself a YouTube expert, but I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way that may help you expand your brand, increase your views and grab more subscribers if you do decide to expand onto YouTube, if you’re not on the platform already.
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This past Wednesday, I held my very first webinar. So far, the feedback has been excellent and apparently it was good enough that it taught both beginners and advanced some new things about keyword research and search engine optimization. A huge thank you to those of you who attended, and especially those of you who took extra time to email or message me with your appreciation.
A replay of the webinar will be available very shortly for those of you who missed it or who want to watch it again. Please make sure to follow me on Twitter, or join me on my Facebook Page (which just surpassed 2000 fans!) for a link when that becomes available. It was supposed to be available today, but there were some technical problems which I’ll talk in more detail about below.
Update: The Webinar Replay is now available!
It was definitely a fantastic learning experience. I was used to shooting videos and screencasts for YouTube, so it wasn’t a total “OMG what am I doing” type of thing, but the fact that there are people watching you LIVE makes it so much more interesting, and honestly a lot more fun too.
If you have an audience base (or even if you don’t, and you want to expand your audience base), I definitely recommend holding a webinar. I can imagine it being somewhat scary, especially for those of you who are shy and nameless behind your blogs and websites, but it’s like what Tim Ferriss preaches in the 4-Hour Work Week: you have to learn how to put yourself in uncomfortable situations if you want to get anywhere with your business, and in life. Or, as I like to say it – take bold actions.
Below are 10 things that I learned from my first webinar experience that you can use to be ahead of the game when you do your own.
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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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