AskPat 604 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody. Pat Flynn here and welcome to Episode 604 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate you listening in and as always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

We have a different kind of episode today, not necessarily a rant I would say, but it starts with a voicemail from somebody who is anonymous. Nothing bad from this person. This person is just letting me know of something that doesn't make me very happy but I do have some comments about it and so I'm gonna share this audio file right now and I'll comment right after. So thank you to whoever sent this in, we do have your email address and we'll send you an AskPat t-shirt or try to get in contact with you so we can send you one.

Yeah, anyway. Let's just listen to the audio. Here we go.

Anonymous: Hi Pat this is to inform you that I came across a website called SmartActiveIncome.com. Like you have SmartPassiveIncome.com. It's an active, just replace that passive word with the active and then type URL and then you'll see why I'm mentioning this website. They have duplicated your website, maybe stealing some stuff from you. The same themes, same colors, and everything so have a look at it and … I mean, I really hate when people stealing it so I thought, let me just inform you. It's SmartActiveIncome.com website. Thanks.

Pat Flynn: Alright, Anonymous, thank you so much for that notification about a person who has pretty much ripped off the design of my website. Although I recently checked it out and I've actually heard of this site before, I've visited it and I was kind of disgusted when I saw that they completely hijacked and took my theme that I previously had before the new redesign and just changed the words around but same design scheme, same colors, same copy in many places. Just not cool. We tried to reach out to this person, they didn't respond. Tried to reach through their domain and hosting company to try and get it taken down and that never happened.

So you know, there are going to be people out there, especially when you start to get popular, start to get big, that are just going to copy your stuff and it's kind of sad. I'm not upset about it because it just makes me feel sad, really, that people think that they can just copy something that somebody successful is doing and that will equal success. Yes, I did just leave the URL in there and you might go visit the site and they might have a bump in traffic or whatever, but I think when you visit the site hopefully you'll be wise enough to not fall into the traps of any copy or sales pitches that they might have and I just wanted to share this with you because this isn't the first time that it's happened and it happened quite a bit.

And I've seen it happen in several other cases outside of my own brand before. For example, how many podcasts are on fire? And what I mean is John Lee Dumas is a good friend of mine who has a podcast called Entrepreneur on Fire and there are several other podcasts out there called blank on Fire. Blank on Fire. Which are obviously started, and many of them actually students of John's, which is quite unfortunate but that just happens.

And so with things like SmartActiveIncome.com which is obviously a play on SmartPassiveIncome.com. There's also a website out there called SmartPassiveIncome.org. There's also DumbPassiveIncome. There's a lot of ones that were obviously started because of the work that I've done. There's also podcasts that have started that have ripped off my cover art. There's also podcasts that are Ask this person, Ask this person's name, Ask this person's name. And I believe I was one of the first ones to do that or the first one to do that. But that's okay. That's not a big deal. Many of them actually did ask permission and I was just like, “Okay, if you want to.”

Anyway, this happens and the worst thing that you can do is just get completely upset by it because you have so many people out there that you need to serve and that's what I know. A lot of the time that you might waste on trying to fix these things or take these people down, it's just gonna take time away from you actually providing value to those who need your help. Similar to like haters and trolls who will just try to take your energy away and want to distract you from what you should be doing. So it's a similar thing now.

If it seems like these people are making a profit and actually ripping your stuff off, if you have a good team on board or a lawyer who can help you crack down on those things. Hopefully you have your website or domain name trademarked and all that stuff if somebody were to copy that, for example, or use that trademark without your permission, then you can get those things taken down.

I will say that there's also been instances where I've seen my book being offered for free on various websites. Black hat sites and things like that. In that case, it's a little bit of a … You gotta be careful because even my lawyer had advised me that I could go down and shut those sites down because they were actually giving my stuff away for free instead of actually paying for it and actually offering them for free to their members or community members. And yes that sucks because they're not actually purchasing the book but two things to think about here.

One, I feel like if I have a book and people get it for free, even though it's paid, the book is just step one of a long term relationship that I'm building with my audience there. And if people are going to be somebody who's going to be following me for quite a while, no matter how they get started, you know, eventually they're going to get to a point where they're going to support what I do. In one way shape or form.

So that's one way to think about it. You know, it might not be the best way to think about it but that's how I approach it just so I don't get upset about it. I try to slam people over the head with massive value that even if they were to pick up my book for free, they'd wanna pay me back in return down the road. And if not, well, they're not in my target audience anyway.

And that's the other part of it. You know, a lot of these people who are getting these things for free, you know, pirated copies of whatever, I mean, they're not gonna pay for it anyway. That's just … And they're not in my target audience so whatever. I don't care. I care about the people who do pay for it and who I can provide value to, who are paying attention, and actually supporting my work. So that's that.

The other part of it is, and I was advised by my lawyer to not take action necessarily, I mean I could choose to if I wanted to but just to as a warning, especially on some of these kinds of sites, if you were to take action on them, they have the resources to take action back on you in a very heavy way. So I just don't wanna deal with that and so I just let it happen. And yeah. I'm just being very honest about that and my approach but that's that. And so for all the people out there who copy my stuff and steal my stuff and plagiarize and you know, just whatever. Good luck. That's all I could say.

But for the rest of you who are out there and you're trying to make a difference in this world, you know, I'm here to help, I'm here to serve, and I'll do it in the best way that I can. And I appreciate you and your honesty and I will continue to be transparent and honest with you down the road. So thank you so much for that and I don't know if that was considered a rant or whatever but just some thoughts and you know great question or great voicemail I guess to kinda start off this topic.

But thank you guys so much. I appreciate you and all of your support. No sponsors in this episode, I just wanted to have it be clean and all about this and so yeah. I appreciate you. Thank you for your time and I look forward to serving you in next week's AskPat episode but I will end with a quote like I always do. I've ended a quote in every single episode and I'm not gonna stop that.

So this is one from Guy Kawasaki and he says, “If you have more money that brains, you should focus on outbound marketing. If you have more brains than money, you should focus on inbound marketing.” Kind of interesting. We'll talk about some of those things in upcoming episodes of AskPat but until then, keep pushing forward. Love you guys and again. Thank you for your support. Bye guys.