by: AskPat 558 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 558 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.
We have a great question today from Gideon, who has an awesome accent, by the way. But before that, I do want to just mention that if you haven't yet picked up my new book Will It Fly?, please go ahead and check it out. Go to WillItFlyBook.com. Over 16,000 people have it in their hands and have been reading it, and I'm so happy about that. It became a Wall Street Journal best seller, and I'm just so excited to share it with the world, because I know it can help a lot of people. It already has, so I want you to check it out. WillItFlyBook.com, that's the place to go. Thank you so much for all your support for it.
Okay, here's today's questions from Gideon.
Gideon: Hey, Pat. My name is Gideon Hanekom, and I have a blog at GideonHanekom.com. Firstly, I just wanted to say, I really relate to your story, and I love the fact that you're a family man, as I am one too. I love serving people, and I aim to add valuable content to my blog on a daily basis, so I've got no issue coming up with good stuff that can really add value to people's lives, and I'm willing to work hard, and I am working hard to make it happen consistently.
My question is, however, how can I get paid for the work I'm putting in right now? I don't want to be famous or earn millions and millions of dollars. I would, however, just want to make enough return from my work or the work I'm putting in right now, so it would free me up to do the things I love, like spending time with my family and trying and exercise. After researching the top 50 earning blogs, it seems that, it's either those people who teach about making money online that actually make money online or those with very familiar brand names like Huffington Post or Tony Robbins, as an example, which kind of makes me wonder if using my own name was a good idea to start with.
My question is, can one make some income from serving people outside of those so-called money-making niches, and could this be profitable? What is confusing, though, is that many gurus have, you know, they're all so different things, and it's kind of confusing. I'm putting in the hard work right now, but it just feels like there's a lot of holes in my water tank, and more water is flowing out than flowing, if you know what I mean. How would I go about it, if I want to turn these things around? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks. Cheers.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Gideon. Thank you so much for the question. It sounds like you're on a roll. You're doing some good stuff, and you're putting in the hard work, and I love that. That's the first step. You need to put in the hard work, of course. But, of course, you want to get paid for that work that you do, too, which—I'm glad you're asking this question, because I feel like there's a lot of people out there who are blogging and podcasting, who are putting in a lot of hours, and they're not necessarily seeing the return on it. And there's a lot facets to that, of course, and so I would recommend actually starting to listen to episode 192, 193, and 194 of the Smart Passive Income podcast. You can find the first one, 192, at SmartPassiveIncome.com/Session192. And I recommend those, because those will give you some insight on what you can do to generate an income online, and the different requirements for doing that, and different types of passive income that you could generate online, and what goes along with each, how to get started, what's available to you, and what tools can help you, and all those sorts of things. So, again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/Session192.
There are a number of others way you could get paid, as well, for the hard work that you're doing, and if you're serving an audience, you should be getting paid for that work. It's just a matter of giving those people an opportunity to pay you back, so 192, 193, and 194, that's by far the best thing that's going to help you, but I'm going to go over a few things right now that can also help you. I don't know what your business is. I don't exactly know what type it is or how you serve your audience, but like I said, if you're serving an audience, and you're helping them, you're providing value, then it's just a matter of allowing your audience to give you a return for that in one way, shape, or form, and there's lots of different ways to do that.
There is affiliate marketing, for example, which might be the quickest and easiest way for you to get set up, because you can promote and recommend products that you use and that are great, that can also continue to serve your audience and get paid every time somebody makes a purchase. Working with a company and having them set up an affiliate link for you, that's how I would go about it. And of course, in those episodes that I talked about earlier, I go in detail about that there. But affiliate marketing would be a great solution for you to start out with, and I recommend more people do it, because it's a pretty low-hanging fruit, actually. There are a lot of great companies out there who create things that we can't create ourselves, and it's still beneficial for our audience, and we could get paid for sharing those things with them.
Affiliate marketing is great, because you don't have to create those products, but that is the best thing you could do is, spend time to create your own stuff. Now, how do you know what to create? Well, you want to make sure that you know what the biggest struggles are for your audience. You could survey your audience, ask them that question in an email or even on your blog, just what do they need help with, and the one that they need the most help with, you can create a product or a solution for it. You can get paid up front for that, as well. That's why I recommend Will It Fly? at the beginning of this particular episode, because that shows you how you can validate these ideas before you spend all that time on them and then see if it's actually going to work. You can see if it's going to work beforehand by taking a sample size of your audience and testing this product idea by actually having them pay for it.
And that's, again, before you actually build the thing. And the reason why that's important is, because sometimes you share with your audience this thing you're working on, and people are excited about it, and they enjoy it, but when it comes time to pay, they just don't end up paying. You need to make sure that you're going to have paying costumers at the other end, because, again, the whole point is, you need to get paid for the hard work that you're doing. You need to make sure that you're giving these avenues that make sense with the particular audience that you've built, so that's how you can do it. The book Will It Fly? will show you how to do that step by step, throughout the entire process, so I highly recommend that.
Now, depending on the relationship that you have with the audience, there's other ways that you can generate an income. You could hook up with a company named Patreon, for example, and that's an amazing company that has allowed audiences to support their favorites, podcasts, video celebrities, not even celebrities, really, but just in your own world that you just become this resource for.
You can have your audience pledge to pay you every time you come out with a new piece of content. And it's just like a dollar, sometimes up to more than that, but if you imagine a thousand people paying you a dollar, for example, every time you come out with a new podcast episode, every week, I mean that's $52 out of somebody's pocket per year, but if you have a thousand people doing that, that's $52,000, if I did my math correctly there.
That's pretty amazing that that can be done, and Patreon is a platform that allows you to collect those fees and get payouts and stuff like that. I've interviewed the founder and also a user, Tom Merritt, who is making thousands of dollars for every podcast episode that he comes out with, and it's a cool way to do it without actually putting advertisements in front of your audience.
That's another thing that you could do. Depending on the traffic that you have, or the relationship and the strength of that rapport that you have with your audience, you know, other companies want to get in front of that, and you can make money through advertising, and that's another way you can do it. Another way that you could generate income, if you want to start—and this has become probably one of the easiest solutions for people—is you start freelancing. You know, you're talking about these things that you're helping people do, well, you can actually help people do them in other ways. You can give people access to you, and your knowledge, and your brain, and your work, and your services, and you can start collecting an income that way. No, it's not passive income, not at all, but you are generating an income and building a relationship. And also, you could productize those services, as well, by hiring a team to help do some of those things, depending on, again, I don't know what your business model is or what it is exactly that you do to serve, but there are potentially ways to do that, too.
Gideon, I hope this at least gets your gears going in your brain and gives you some ideas, and again, I would recommend SmartPassiveIncome.com/session192 to start out with. That's the first of three episodes in a three-part series about all the different types of ways that you could generate an income online and what goes along with each. And I would also recommend my book, WillItFlyBook.com.
Gideon, if you hear this, and if you haven't picked up my book yet, shoot me an email. I want to send you a copy. I'll just send it to you, or I can gift you the Kindle version, or whatever. I just want to get that in your hands, because I think that's going to really help you. Just shoot me an email, [email protected], and I'd be happy to gift that to you. And also we're going to give you a t-shirt, because we give a t-shirt to everybody whose question gets featured here on the show. We've sent over 557 t-shirts, so you're the 558th person that has gotten a t-shirt. Actually, there's more than that, because some have, like, a family member that they're working with, and I hook them up with two. But anyway, getting off topic here. Gideon, thank you so much for your question today. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email, [email protected] We'll hook that up for you.
And for anybody else who has a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com. You can ask right there on that page. Just hit the record button, and ask away. And I also want to thank you, again, all of you who have supported Will It Fly?, my piece of work that I've been working on for over a year last year, and it's just so great to see it in people's hands now. You know, meeting with people in San Diego, sometimes I go to coffee, and they're bringing their books with them, and they have me sign them. It's such a trippy thing, like, I'll never get used to how awesome the feeling is, because it's just amazing, and everybody has a different story. And I realize that, so I'm very thankful every time somebody mentions the book and how much it's helped them. And if you haven't picked it up yet, I know it could help you too. Go to WillItFlyBook.com. You could check it out right there.
And as always, I'd like to end it with a quote, and today's quote is from George Bernard Shaw. He said, “Success does not consist in never making mistakes, but in never making the same one a second time.” Cheers. Take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.
