AP 0917: What Tools Did You Use to Build Your Site?

AskPat 917 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what up everybody, Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 917 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a great question today from fourteen-year-old Niels from Germany. Let's get to that question right now. Here we go.

Niels: Hi Pat, this is Niels from Germany. I'm currently fourteen years old, and I wanted to ask what tools you're exactly using to build your website. At the moment, I am making solid $530 a month with my niche sites, and I want to start building my own business in a few months. A while ago, I sell designs and videos to small businesses in Germany and build a seed funding. As you can guess, I'm really into good looking designs, and your site is amazing. I tried to figure out which tools you are using to build your site, but at the end I came to the decision that it can't be WordPress, because I don't know any thing or tool that has all that aspects like your site. So tell me, is there any unknown tool out there that isn't on your resources page? I really appreciate your work, and I would love to hear from you. Bye.

Pat Flynn: Hey Niels. Thank you so much, and first of all, congratulations. You are 14 years old, and you're making that much money because you took action, because you took risks, and you just are trying to figure it out. I love that. Man, when I was fourteen, I was playing Quake II, and I was spending a lot of time shooting rail guns in a video game, and man, if only I spent even half that time trying to build my own business, who knows where I could have been now. But anyway, congratulations.

Now to answer your question, I am indeed using WordPress for SmartPassiveIncome.com, but it is a highly customized theme that's using a number of different plugins that are even customized themselves to see what you see on SPI. Is that something that's necessary? No. When you get to a certain level, it makes sense to customize, but before that, the best thing you can do is take what's working and optimize it.

These niche sites that you have, are they actually built in a way that they're optimized so that you can maximize the income that's coming from them? Are there design things and tools related to what you need to be done in order to do that versus what you are seeing on other people's sites? I think it's very important, especially at a early age, to realize that it's cool to get inspiration and see other people and what they're doing and want to try something like what they have, but it's also important to know what's working for you now and expand on that and optimize that before you potentially spread yourself too thin. What that means is your energy's going to be divided into different places where it could be more utilized, focused, on fewer things. Yeah, the tools are there, and like I said, with SPI, it's highly customized, so I wouldn't even worry about trying to make it look like that. I would just build something that makes sense for you with where you're at with your budget.

I guess you could say—if you wanted me to reference one tool, that's my team. My team and my developers are the ones who put that site together in a way that made sense after we sat down and talked about what needed to be on the site based on where I'm at. But SPI and myself and my position, it's totally different from everybody else's, and you have your own position and your own things that you need to do. I would recommend finding tools and/or people, resources, to help you with what it is that your goals are, Niels. That's that, and again, just congratulations on your success. I think it's really inspiring for people who are listening out there.

There might be a few listeners out there who are like, “Oh my gosh, a fourteen-year-old's making more money than I am.” Well, hopefully this will give you inspiration. You can always change the way you perceive something. This is something I'm trying to teach my kids right now. Sometimes certain events happen, and they get really sad by it, but there is always a way to flip it around or turn it into a lesson that can be used for good, for improvement, for becoming more efficient, for taking in the world for what's great about it and not what's so negative about it. Anyway, just off on a little tangent right now. It's just something that came to mind that I wanted to share.

Niels, thank you for calling in today. I appreciate it. We're going to send an AskPat teeshirt your way, all the way to Germany, and I look forward to hearing that you received it well and that you think it's comfortable, because I think it's comfortable. But anyway, you'll hear from my assistant in the next couple weeks. We're going to send that to you free of charge, and I wish you all the best of luck. For those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page. Thank you so much. I appreciate you, and here's a quote to finish off the day by Oscar Wilde: “I am not young enough to know everything.” Mmm. Very relevant for this episode. Hey Niels, thank you so much. For those of you listening, thank you. Oscar Wilde, thank you. I'll see you guys on the next episode of AskPat. Bye.