AP 0299: How Soon Should a Blogger Start Sharing Income Reports?

AskPat 299 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody, Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 299, that's supposed to be a drum roll and now that I think about it I don't know why I'm drum rolling to 299, the big one is next week, in Episode 300, the big 3 double 0, which is crazy.

Thank you all for so much for helping me get here, seriously, this show obviously wouldn't exist without you because there would be no questions. So thank you for everybody who has submitted a question. Thanks to you to those of you who have listened and we got another great episode today. A fantastic question from Laurence, but before we get to that question, I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is 99designs.com an awesome site you can go to to get anything designed, from logos, and I've recently done a logo contest actually for the soccer team that I'm coaching.

I decided to get a logo or an insignia done on 99designs.com and what I did was I put my job description up, I said “Youth boys soccer team, we're The Golden Eagles, we're looking for a really cool-looking logo that shows a golden eagle and has our name,” and then within four or five hours we had about twenty submissions, and I narrowed them down, I'm choosing a few, and we're not done with the design contest yet at the time of this recording, but it is just so cool, because all of these designs from different people around the world are coming in and I can pick and choose the best one that best suits the team that I'm coaching. You can get anything design done, not just logos, websites, you can get templates done, landing pages, icon sets, anything. It's crazy, t-shirts, food truck wraps, a lot of things. Go ahead and check it out, 99designs.com/pat. If you go there, you'll get a $99 Power Pack of services for free that you can use toward your next design project, so check it out.

Awesome, here is today's question from Laurence.

Laurence: Hey Pat, this is Laurence Bradford from the site LearnToCodeWith.Me, first off I want to give a huge thank you for being such an inspiration. If you even have the chance to look at my site, you'll see that a lot of the aspects of it are inspired by you; for instance, the getting started page, my resource page, and the affiliate disclaimer page that I have. Of course, I've modified it to fit my purposes and my own site, but you were the initial inspiration.

Like you, I really want to be as transparent as possible with the people who read my site. With that being said, I would love to start doing income reports, however, I'm really not generating that much revenue right now for my affiliate links, maybe about $100 every month, give or take, and I have a few different sources of the affiliate links, a few programs that I'm in and they're all, pretty much, code-related. My question is, how soon should someone start an income report? I know the answer could vary, but I was thinking maybe wait until I was making at least $1000 or a few hundred a month. I would love your thoughts on that.

Keep up the great work, I love the AskPat show, I love the Smart Passive Income Podcast, and I also love now the 1-Day Business Breakthrough. I'm completely addicted and you have enough coming out everyday to get me at the gym, it's easier for me to workout. Anyway, thank you and have a good one.

Pat Flynn: Hey Laurence, thank you so much for the question today, I really appreciate it and I appreciate all your support and everything that you said, especially that I'm helping you get to the gym, I think that's really cool; you're not the first person to tell me that. For those of you who are out there listening to the gym right now, keep up the good work, run a little harder or do a few more reps for Pat today. Finish off the week strong. Again, thank you for the question.

Let's talk about income reports for a minute. I started writing income reports when I started Smart Passive Income, the first month, in October 2008. That was the first month after I had done so well on Green Exam Academy and having a really incredible launch of my ebook there and I wanted to share everything, exactly how it all went down, including down to the penny how much I'd made and how many sales I had. I was only going to do it for a month or two but then the response was incredible and people were saying, “Oh my gosh, I've never seen anything like this before,” especially in this space where most people in the online marketing, internet, business world were hiding all that thing or sharing no numbers at all, talking the talk but not really walking the walk.

I kept it up and I've kept it up ever since, and February's income report is going to come out next week if you're listening to this by the time this comes out … Actually, it has come out already, I'm sorry. Check it out on the blog, smartpassiveincome.com.

I've seen income reports coming into the spotlight now on a lot of sites which is really cool. I think it's really awesome, especially on internet marketing sites or sites where you're trying to teach somebody how to make money, because that only proves yourself and it provides authenticity and transparency which people can generate a relationship with you with because you're showing them trust and that you are open and honest. I've also seen income reports on sites not related to internet marketing like on PinchofYum.com, who I featured in a recent episode of the Smart Passive Income podcast. They produce an income report as well. I will say that I've also seen some people in the internet marketing space produce an income report who are trying to teach people how to make money and they have yet to make money themselves. By producing an income report, showing that, it's working against their message.

First of all, those people, necessarily, shouldn't be focusing on teaching people how to make money, they haven't yet made money themselves. You're teaching coding, so this is different. I think what might be more interesting is a report related to something that you're doing, that you can track every single month and I've known a few people to do this. Somebody really close to me, Chris Ducker, did this back in 2010, I believe, when he had his virtual lifestyle website. When he was working on taking himself out of the CEO role and becoming a virtual CEO, meaning he was going to work hard on not getting into the office as much and staying home with his family more. Every month he was tracking, not his income but how many hours he was spending at the office, and every month it would go down, down, down, until he became a virtual CEO or he only spends a few hours a month in his office now because he can do everything remotely from his home. He has a team working for him doing a lot of the hard things that he used to do himself, that he didn't need to do himself.

For him it took burnout to figure all this out, and this is what started this trek and this journey for him and he started to keep track of this, this is really, really interesting. I think the fact that he was tracking it … One of the cool things about this income report or these reports in general, are that these are things that come out every month and people look forward to them. They see the progress from one month to another, you can track, you can make conclusions based off of trends and things like that. I'm curious, I'm curious Laurence, if there's something you could do, not income-related—because I agree with you, showing that you're only making $100 a month when your audience may not necessarily care at that point, especially in the beginning. It might not be the right move, and for many people it's not the right move yet, but I feel like once you get to a point in terms of the number of audience members that you have, and also the money that you're making, I think at that point you can turn around and say, “You know what? I just wanted to be honest with all of you guys. I am making money from this site and I want to thank you guys for that because you guys are helping me out and you're helping me help you out more.”

I think that's really cool. I think … I feel like 1000 in this particular situation, like you said, it's going to be different all around. I think if you wanted to report your income, maybe a good goal for you to have is get to 1000, so get to 1000, do it, then you can do this and that would be a cool reward for you and your audience, for you to put that message out there and be like, “Hey guys, I'm teaching you guys coding, I wanted to show you how much I'm making. This is my life now and I'm doing this to make a living and I'm so thankful for you.” When you get to that point, oftentimes it's people will be like, “Oh wow, I'm actually supporting you and this is awesome and we're working together. I'm helping you and you're helping me.” They're often going to look for ways to pay you back even more and increase that monthly income report for you.

I also want to make sure and pitch this idea of having these reports that are different than income. Is there something in your particular area that you could track that would be really interesting for your audience to follow? What if it was lines of code? I don't know, I'm just spit-balling here but what if you tracked, for example Laurence, how many lines of code you created each month and that people could compare and then comment on how many lines of code they did. Maybe you could have a, you know how there's a writing contest in November where everybody tries to write 50,000 words, I think it's … Gosh, I don't remember the name of that, let me look it up on Google right now. 50,000 words in November, what is that called? That's called National Novel Writing Month so nowrimo is the short of this, nowrimo, yeah, nannowrimo so NANOWRIMO.org. Anyway, that's so random, and yes I used airtime to search that up, but point being—maybe like with the number of words we're keeping track of everyday, you could have your audience and yourself track, keep track of how many lines of code you're writing everyday and maybe there can be some group correlations and contests and maybe you have a National Coding Month. I don't know, just think it out loud.

If anybody else out there has any ideas, you can use the #AskPat299 and we can continue this conversation on Twitter, again #AskPat299 and help out Laurence and we come up with some more ideas. What do you think about this income report? Do you agree doing it at $100 a month? Maybe not the right thing yet unless you were somebody, for example, who was starting a personal finance site and then it would be really interesting, if you were in debt for example, to show where you're at now and how you're chipping away at that. In that scenario, for example, would be worth doing it right away because you're showing people the journey. In your case Laurence, it didn't sound like you were showing people necessarily the journey or maybe you are. What do you guys think? #AskPat299. Laurence, I hope this helps you out a little bit. I want you all to consider how you might be able to create reports because they're one of the coolest things I've done on Smart Passive Income but I've also seen a lot of people use different kinds of reports to make a cool connection and a cool thing that people can look forward to every month on their own sites too.

Laurence, an AskPat t-shirt is headed your way, thank you again for the question today. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like featured here in the show, all you have to do is head on over to AskPat.com, you can ask right there on that page. You can also head on over to 99designs.com/pat to get your $99 power pack of services for free because they're going to help you with your next design project. Like I said, I've used it for a number of things including my son's youth soccer team recently, then also other logos in the past. I've used it for some website design templates for clients before and other things like that. It's really cool, really handy, really helpful, seven day turn around and if you don't like the designs that are given to you, you can always get your money back. They're really good with that, again, 99designs.com/pat. Thank you so much and as always I want to end with a quote and today's quote is from Peter T. McIntyre. He says, “Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” Sweet.

Awesome, thank you guys so much and I appreciate all your votes over at PodcastAwards.com. Smart Passive Income is nominated for a business award at the 10th Annual Podcast Awards, I'm going to be at NMX where they announce the winners. I'll going to be key-noting that event and I could use your help. Head on over to PodcastAwards.com and look under the business category and vote for Smart Passive Income, it would help out so much. Thank you so much, I appreciate it and I'll see you next week in another episode of AskPat and the 300th Episode of AskPat. Thank you guys so much for helping me get here and here's to another 299. Peace.