by: AskPat 246 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 246 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 another great question today from Adam, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, a company that I've been using for over four years now and very, very happy with them. That is AWeber.com. This is an email service provider, which means they are the company that I use to collect email addresses on my website. They allow me to send out mass emails to all the people who have subscribed or to a certain segment of the people who have subscribed. I have various lists there based on different places where people sign up, so I can easily send messages to people who need them and have them take action. Email is still one of the best ways to reach an audience, and I use it not only to potentially make sales and things like that, but I use it to drive traffic back to my site, which you should all be doing. I use it, to most importantly, build an even deeper relationship and create friendships with my audience as well. If you're on my list, I hope you feel that way too. So, if you'd like to get yourself set up with AWeber, you can try it out for one dollar for 30 days. 30 day trial for one dollar if you go to AWeber.com/askpat. Again, that's AWeber.com/askpat.
Sweet. Let's get to today's question from Adam.
Adam: Hey Pat, I've been getting into your podcast. I recommended them to a mate, and he's pretty keen on it. He got to episode 15 and he started writing stuff for InfoBarrel. Is this still a recommended first step for getting into making money online? Thanks, my name's Adam. Cheers. Bye.
Pat Flynn: Adam, what's up dude? I hope you're enjoying your helicopter ride. It sounds like you're in a helicopter, at least, but thank you so much for sharing the site with your friend. For those of you listening, Adam mentioned an episode of the Smart Passive Income Podcast. When he was talking about session 15, that was SmartPassiveIncome.com/session15 or episode 15 of that podcast, which is one of three in a series, 15, 16, and 17, that talk about all the different ways that one could possibly generate a passive income online and how to get started. I, in that episode, mentioned that one of the easiest ways to get started, to actually just dip your little toe in the water just to get a feel for what it's like to be online and potentially make a little bit of money, is to write for a site called InfoBarrel.
Now a little bit of history behind that: I used to write for a site called eHow. When I first started back in 2008, I did a little experiment because I found some people that were making money through articles that they wrote. They were making money from those articles that they had published month over month over month on a site called eHow. You could actually contribute your own articles on this site on any topic that you wanted. So, I did an experiment. I wrote 150 articles in I don't know how many days, but I think in a week actually. I wrote 150 articles, and I just posted them on the site just to see. Can I make money just by posting these and having them sit there and generate income? Eventually over time, within a couple months, I started seeing $10 come in, $30 come in. The next month, $50 and eventually got to a point where I was making over $100 a month for doing nothing 'cause I had already put in that work. That was a cool example of a small segment of the possibilities for passive income generation. I continued to write a little bit more articles. I got a lot of other people writing there as well. Then all of a sudden, eHow changed their policy. They said, “Sorry, we're closing up shop. You cannot contribute anymore articles.” Then, they actually offered to buy articles from people who had written articles before. So, they actually . . . I sold them my articles for a couple thousand dollars, I think. They stopped and everybody was looking around for another site to do this on.
Then, InfoBarrel came along. I liked InfoBarrel even more because they were a little bit more strict with their guidelines for articles and things like that. I started writing on InfoBarrel, as well. Now, I only wrote about three or four articles just to test it out. I knew how the process worked, but I wanted to give it a shot and it worked. I started seeing $2 or $3 a day come in after a month because it takes time for those articles to be found on Google and search engines and things like that. Then, that became my recommendation for people who were really scared of the technology, who want to just dip their toe in the water, who have never written a word online in their life before, that is what I recommend.
I still recommend that because I feel like if I could just give somebody a start in something, I would actually skip that step. I would say, “Hey, you know what? Start your own blog. Find a target market, start your own blog, and just start publishing. Start talking to people who have this pain or need or issue that you can help provide support for.” That's where I would actually recommend starting. However, people really get held up by the technology part of that. Now more than ever, it's so easy to start a blog or a website. But even still, people are scared. So what's nice about InfoBarrel and the reason I still recommend that particular site is because you just have to sign in, and you're off and ready to go. You just have to write. There's an audience there already. There's a community of people there that you can get involved with, as well, which is great training for when you start to eventually write more, get comfortable, start your own blog. Then, you can start to learn how to communicate with people in your niche as well, similar to how you might communicate with people in that forum. The forum in the community over there is really great. Ryan, one of the founders, is really cool too. I interviewed him once, as well. Yeah, it's just a really cool community.
Now, I would definitely say that you are not going to make a lot of money on InfoBarrel and probably less than you would have if you had started InfoBarrel when I first recommended it because Google is not necessarily getting rid of sites like that, but they are devaluing them. They are not having those types of what they used to call content forums. InfoBarrel would probably be one of the higher quality ones because of the strict guidelines that they had. But even still, there are articles that are great on there that are being found for certain keywords because that is the place to get the best information on certain things, because people who write on that platform sometimes will take the time that's required to give true value. That is something that should be worthy of a top spot or a first page at least in Google.
That's the kind of approach you have to take when you have your own site, when you have a podcast that you have, or when you write for a site that's somebody else's platform like on InfoBarrel. So again, that is . . . Adam, you could tell your buddy I still recommend it, but to just be completely honest, you're not going to get rich. You might just make a couple dollars here or there. But you know what, we had many instances in the past, myself included and this is through interviews and stuff that I've done with people, that when they see that first 10 cents come in . . . well for me, it was my first $1.18. For Jocelyn and Shane Sams over in my podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com, episode 122, they talked about their first 10 cents and how amazing and inspiring and motivating that was. Yeah, it's only 10 cents. You could find it in the cushions of your couch or in your car underneath the little mat where your feet go, but to know that you are putting something online and then something happens where you get paid, it's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool feeling.
That is hopefully a great stepping stone, you know, that first step on that ladder in this world of blogging and online business. That can be InfoBarrel to give you that motivation and the taste of what it's like to write online because that's a skill that you have to learn. So, you might as well learn on another platform first where other people can help provide advice. There's some sort of structure involved and you don't need to worry about the headaches of the technology that often stop people from moving forward. So, that's the whole idea behind that. So yes, I still would recommend it. Although, in an ideal situation, I would skip that step and start your own blog. Just start writing on your own stuff anyway because you want to keep in control as much content as possible. But if you want to just dip your feet in the water, get your feet wet and connect with a pretty cool community, InfoBarrel is a pretty cool place to go. Cool.
Adam, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. An AskPat t-shirt is going to be headed your way. Hopefully we'll get you down from the copter at some point, but thank you again so much for the question. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show and a chance to win an AskPat t-shirt, again we send it to you completely free, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there using the widget from Speakpipe.com there on that page.
I also want to thank today's sponsor, which is AWeber. Now, another cool thing that AWeber allows you to do is to use their autoresponder function, which is my favorite feature of them all, which is a way to pre-write emails. You write these emails in advance and you could set them to go out sequentially over time after people subscribe. So, I have a list of about 30 to 40 emails that I've pre-written that are everlasting. They're not like, “Hey, this is what happened today,” but these are tips and valuable information and places to send people back to the blog. I'm getting more traffic this way, as well. What happens is, once somebody subscribes, after seven days they get an email number one. After that, they get number two, number 3, number 4. I can keep in contact with my audience for an entire year without lifting a finger. So when I send that broadcast email out, it's not cold anymore. They're going to open it and I get results. So if you'd like to try AWeber for 30 days for one dollar, head on over to AWeber.com/askpat. That's it. AWeber.com/askpat. Thank you all so much for your time and just as the year closes, I appreciate you so much. I can't say that enough. You'll probably hear me say it once again in the next episode because that will be the last one of 2014. But, this isn't the last one.
But, this is the final moment of the show where I love to end with a quote. Today's quote comes from Steven Kellogg. He says, “It's better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than at the top of the one you don't.”
So true. Cheers. Take care. I'll see you in the next episode, the final episode of 2014 of AskPat. Check you later.