AP 0610: How Passive Is Your Income Really?

AskPat 610 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody, Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 610 of AskPat, thank you so much for joining me today. As always I'm here to help you by answering your on-line business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from Menasheh but before we get to his question, I do want to thank today's sponsor which is FreshBooks, FreshBooks.com. You know it makes it super simple to do all your accounting on the cloud and this is just such a great solution for small business owners and it's really a joy to use. As soon as you try it, you'll realize just how much time you can save dealing with your day-to-day paperwork, for example, with invoicing you can create and send perfectly crafted invoices, it literally takes about thirty seconds.

Online payments, your clients can pay you online which can really improve how quickly you get paid. And there's automated expense tracking too, it's really cool. So, if you want to get a 30-day free trial just go to Freshbooks.com/askpat and enter “AskPat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Again, that's Freshbooks.com/askpat and enter “Ask Pat.”

All right, thanks so much and here's today's question from Menasheh.

Menasheh: Hi Pat, my name is Menasheh Promzi and I'm interested in the passive income business sort of thing but I haven't quite started yet, so here's my question. Let's say you had quit working right now and devote all your time to your family, just how passive is this income?

Pat Flynn: Hey, thank you so much for this question. I love when I get this question because a lot of people, they see my passive income statements or my monthly income reports and they see quite a bit of money there but then they realize just how much work I'm putting in and the natural follow-up question, well, really how passive is this income, Pat? And I love the way you framed it, if you were to quit everything that you're doing today, how passive is this income if you just spent all your time with your family?

Well, I could tell you, I guarantee you that if I were to quit everything right now, things would begin to decline. There's no such thing as 100% passive income even when you think about real estate and stock market, you still have to keep those things in check every once in a while, you still have to maintain them and have people look over them every once in a while and it's the same thing with your passive income business. Of course it takes a lot of hard work to set it up but once you get it to a point where it's automated it can be let go for a little bit and the little bit part kind of varies depending on how well you set it up, the industry and all that stuff, again, like I said you always want to keep track of things.

But, a very direct answer if I were to actually quit what I was doing today in terms of work and just let everything sit, I believe that I would be good for about a year-and-a-half to two years, guaranteed. Potentially more because I have a lot of recurring income coming from products that are charging people a recurring income which is great, for example, the Smart Podcast Player charges an annual recurring income.

The affiliate relationship that I have, not with Bluehost, Bluehost is just a one-time payment for commissions, but with things like AWeber and ConvertKit and LeadPages, those are recurring income and those three alone add up over $12-15,000 in earnings every single month which is great and that's definitely more than enough to help keep me going with my family and still have us enjoy the things we want to do.

So it definitely is passive but I guarantee that if I were to stop creating content for example, fresh content, that my rankings would decline, my authority would decline and as a result my traffic and then earnings would decline and with any of those recurring things they do last for quite a while.

I have some people who have purchased through my email service provider affiliate links from years ago that are still paying me monthly, you know the email service providers pay me an affiliate income monthly because those people have still stayed on years, you know, five, six, seven years now which is great but hopefully that answers your question. It is definitely passive but I am also working very hard.

A lot of the things I'm working really hard on are for future passive income opportunities and potential opportunities. They don't always work out but, you know, I try what I can. I experiment and sometimes I win and it becomes another passive income addition and again, it is something I have to maintain and just look over and make sure it's something that continues to stay relevant and valuable to my audience and I do that with all the products I recommend. But at the same time you have to keep pushing forward because complacency and just settling in is kind of dangerous because you never know what can happen and what I'm working on now is just giving you a little bit of a behind-the-scenes kind of look at what's happening in SPI.

A lot of you know that my affiliate income is my primary source of income and that is income that is generated through commissions by recommending other people's products, other company's products and that's a dangerous thing to rely on for your primary source of income because at any moment in time any of those companies could sever this affiliate relationship I have with them and I'd be out that money. Maybe they get bought out, maybe they just don't want to work with affiliates anymore, whatever.

I'm beginning to start a journey toward my own products, keeping people within my brand, you've seen this with my book that just recently came out called Will It Fly? at willitflybook.com and future courses are coming out, other products, other software, a lot of great things coming in under the SPI brand which I own, which I control and will ultimately make me feel more secure about the income that is coming in and there you go.

So, Menasheh, thank you much for the question, we're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much and I want to thank everybody else out there who's listening, thank you, I appreciate you and your time and your questions and of course without your questions we wouldn't have an AskPat so please continue asking your questions.

Head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there on that page and I also want to thank once again FreshBooks, now I mentioned automated expense tracking, you might be wondering what that is exactly. What that means you can link your FreshBooks account to your credit card and debit cards so that next time you expense that business lunch, for example, boom, it's waiting in your FreshBooks account, it's all done, automated, it's fantastic, so go ahead and check it out free for 30 days by going to FreshBooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us?” section.

Thank you so much, I appreciate you and as always, here's a quote to finish off the day and this is by my good friend Michael Hyatt and that is, “Marketing is really just about sharing your passion.”

Love that, cheers, take care and I'll see you in the next episode of askPat. Bye.