AP 0636: Is Your Affiliate Income a Realistic Goal?

AskPat 636 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up everybody, Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 636 of Ask Pat. Thank you so much for joining me today. Today we have a great question from Jon but before we get to Jon's question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is FreshBooks.com.

FreshBooks is an awesome website that can help you manage your business finances, and if you have any clients or students or doing any coaching or need to bill anybody for any reason. FreshBooks is the easiest tool to use both for you as the person doing the billing and the person on the other end who will be paying you. I have been on both ends of that spectrum and its awesome and I love it and I highly recommend checking out FreshBooks. I use it to keep my books in order and keep track of all the expenses, the income and all that great stuff, so if you want to check it for free for 30 days, go to Freshbooks.com/askpat and make sure you enter “Ask Pat” in the “How did you hear about us” section.

Alright, now here is today's question from Jon.

Jon: Hi this is Jon. I am new to affiliate marketing, and I was curious, I was looking at your blog and looked at some of your reports and I was blown away at the amount of income you are generating on a monthly basis in 2015. I guess my question to you is, is it still possible to be able to do that and how long did it take for you to get established to generate that amount of income on a monthly basis?

Pat Flynn: Hey what's up Jon, Pat here. Thank you so much for the question. I didn't get your email address in the forum that was brought to us, so if you wanted to get an Ask Pat t-Shirt for having your question here on the show, just shoot us or shoot me your email address through my contact forum and we will make sure to get that for you, if not, no worries. To respond to your question, first of all, thank you so much for checking out the website, checking out my earnings. For those of you who do not know I actually reveal how much money I make each month and I have been doing this since October of 2008. Now if you go back to October 2008 on my income report page which you can find on the blog, you can see the growth and how long it took for me to get there, and it's has been eight years now since.

I will say that the first year that I started putting the work in, I didn't see a dime. A lot of people know my story, a lot of people hear that in October of 2008 that is actually when I launched my e-book to help people pass an exam in the architectural industry, that was my first money that I made online through products and anything like that. Any, any significant money I had made a few dollars and cents here and there though Adsense beforehand on the same website. That is when things started to take off. It was at that point, it was a site that had already been up and running and capturing peoples attention in the exam space for that particular niche that I was speaking to. So it takes a while, and I've noticed that for my own projects and for several other people's projects that I have examined and people that I have spoken to, it can take up to a year and a half to see sometimes any income coming in which too many people might say, “No man, that's not that much.” When you think about what this online business stuff can do for you and the kind of lifestyle it can eventually create for you, this is hopefully a long-term game for some of you. Some of you might be investing in the stock market or doing real estate. Well those things take time too, and so does online business.

I feel that online business is the best way for wealth building and also providing value and serving the world, which is an awesome part of it too. So it can take a while, and I will say my numbers are quite high relative to other people that also post their income online, but I also know people who make a lot more than I do. I would say that I am kinda in the middle and yes, I've been doing this for a while, so those of you who are just starting out I don't want you to be deflated by that. I want you to be encouraged by it because there are new opportunists coming every single day. There is always something you can do to better serve your audience, and in doing so you can always be rewarded even more.

The last thing I want to say is that I want to warn you, Jon, and everybody else out there listening, that the comparison game is something that you have to be very very careful about. By comparison game I mean when you compare where your earnings are at or where your anything is at versus somebody else's, it's hard because it's not always going to be one for one. It's not always the same situation. You might be comparing apples and oranges and of course there's different time periods involved too. It can be very depressing to a point where it can actually stop you in your tracks. I have done that before when I first started, when I see these people who were making millions of dollars online and I say, “Well I could never get there,” so then I stopped worrying about that and just started with, “Well, how do I get my first sale?” or even before that, “How do I write this first chapter in this book I am going to publish?” Then I started worrying about next steps after that.

Comparing is good because you can be inspired by what other people are doing. You can have something to shoot for, and you can learn from their experiences, but it's also dangerous because if you begin to compare and feel like you are not as good as somebody else or it's never going to happened for you, you can stop yourself in your tracks when really, you are not comparing the same things. My recommendation is to continue to be inspired by others. Continue to see that there is an upside no matter where you are at. I always know that too, which is why I put in the hard work, which is why I put in time up front to determine what my priorities are, then start to break those big goals down into smaller milestones so I can reach one at a time and just continue making steps forward toward that end goal. I feel like that's what's been very important for my success, and I know that is what's important for making other peoples successes happen too. Keep getting inspired, and don't let other people's numbers or any successes that they share with you get you down, use that as motivation, absolutely.

Thanks Jon. I appreciate it, and again send me an email if you'd like the t-shirt, we would love to send that to you. Thank you so much. I appreciate you guys listening, and I really appreciate it.

I also want to thank FreshBooks.com for being on an awesome long standing sponsor here for the Ask Pat podcast. If you want to check out FreshBooks for free once again go ahead and go to FreshBooks.com/askpat and enter Ask Pat in the “How did you hear about us section.” You're gonna get access to the most amazing piece of software you can use to take control and organize your finances so you can stay stress-free and continue working on your business. And of course I want to thank all of you also who have asked questions because this show wouldn't exist without you, so continue to ask your questions please by going to AskPat.com and hitting the record button on that page.

And finally, as always, I love to end with a quote, and today's quote is from Jonathan Mildenhall: “If you don't have room to fail, you don't have room to grow.”

Love it! Thanks guys, take care, and I will see the next episode of Ask Pat, bye.