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In this inaugural podcast episode, I interview the MOST ADMIRED MAN in Internet Marketing today.

And that’s saying a lot, for an industry that has unfortunately become associated with pressure sales, snake oil salesmen, and making money at others’ expense.

Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income – The Day Before Overnight Success, Episode 1.

If you don’t follow Pat Flynn yet, SmartPassiveIncome.com is THE MOST VALUABLE resource on Internet Marketing, Escaping the Rat Race, and Building an Authentic Personal Brand.

It’s amazing that just about 3 years ago, Pat was an up-and-coming architect. Then, a sudden layoff, an upcoming wedding, and lots of uncertainty. Pat credits Internet Business Academy with giving him the tools to turn his passion at the time into his first online business. Within one year, Pat had earned six figures comfortably. And not just that, but he TRULY has become the most admired man in Internet Marketing. Check out this invaluable interview, (audio and transcript below), and leave a comment. Thanks!

[buzzsprout episode="23360" player="true"]

Items mentioned in this post:

• SmartPassiveIancome.com
• Internet Business Mastery Academy
• Green Exam Academy

Transcript of the Pat Flynn interview:

Bolaji: Alright. Hello everyone. This is Bolaji with DayBeforeOvernightSuccess.com and WhoIsBolaji.com.

I have the distinct pleasure of interviewing a blogger who is no stranger to people in the internet marketing world, the architectural design world, the personal development world, this guy’s famous even going beyond his niches. Pat Flynn from smartpassiveincome.com is my guest today.

For those few who may not know who Pat is, I’d like to sort of set the table a little bit and give you some insight into who the man is. Pat is a self-described 28 year old dude from southern California who makes a living on the internet. He considers himself the on the internet. He considers himself the luckiest person on earth and it’s not too hard to see why when you learn about his beautiful wife and child. Pat’s a very fortunate man.

Pat has had wild success in the internet marketing space in a relatively short amount of time but don’t consider him lucky, consider him prepared. Success didn’t fall in this guy’s lap. Opportunity fell in his lap but he was definitely prepared to take advantage of it.

So I’m going to be asking Pat those burning questions that you all have for someone who has been able to succeed in this space. What’s it like to be able to run your own company, work on your own time and live your passion. We’ll go ahead and get into all those questions but first let me welcome Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Hey, wow. That was an amazing introduction. Thank you Bolaji and it’s my pleasure to be here. I mean just thank you. That was awesome.

Bolaji: Thank you so much Pat for making the time. I really appreciate you as a person and how your personal brand reflect your person. I’d like to share, pat, a comment that I read from one of your readers. I think you published this after your first annual income report and by the way folks, we’re going to talk a little bit about Pat’s annual income reports. He’s very transparent with his business so we know how much he’s making. this one reader, Leon, he said to Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income:

“What sets you apart from many online aside from your obvious transparency and giving soul is that regardless if a person has brought a product from you or not, you still treat them with the utmost respect. As a carryover effect, they become a raving fans of everything Pat Flynn and smartpassiveincome are involved with.”

Wow!

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: I love that quote. Leon’s an awesome guy. That’s really amazing for him to say.

Bolaji: That is an incredible testimony and if nobody, if people don’t know anything else about you. Folks if you can get one of your subscribers to say that publicly about you, you’re doing something right.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: It’s really, really amazing. I’m just being me but I guess being me understands where I came from. Like you were it wasn’t too long ago that I wasn’t in this space. I was working a 9 to 5 job. I’m sure we’ll get into that in second but I know exactly where I came from. I know there’s a lot of people out there who are pursuing the same path in life and I’m happy to help out each and every single person because I’m in such a good place in life right now. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been and I want to impart that on to other people too as much as I can. That’s why I have the smart passive income blog. That’s why I talk about making money online. I know that sometimes when you hear about people talking about how they make money online, it can seem kind of scammy or kind of unreal. That’s why I try to keep everything transparent. I talk about my wins as much as I talk about my failures. Or my failures as much as I talk about my wins and just keep everything real. I do respond to every single email and try to respond to the comments because I was there too. Honestly I know the power of just helping the little people because one day, you’ll never know, one of those people that you helped could blow up bigger than you. They can take you along with them, too. That’s kind of where I’m coming from and my belief in the space.

Bolaji: I appreciate that Pat and I read a little bit about your long term strategy in that annual income report. It reminded me of another individual who has done so well, not only in internet marketing but also in other spaces and that is Gary Vaynerchuk. I loved Gary’s book, crush it. That’s one of my favorite reads from last year. I just read it last year.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Yeah I’ve read it like four times.

Bolaji: Oh look at that. He has one of the most incredible chapters in that book and he says, the greatest marketing strategy in the world is care.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Absolutely.

Bolaji: That’s the entire chapter.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: I love that.

Bolaji: And that is Pat’s long term strategy. So Pat talks about going out of his way to help people over delivering and providing extreme value.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: It’s worked ever since the beginning. I mean for the businesses that I set up in the first place that didn’t have to do with internet marketing. It’s the same exact strategies. We’ll get into that story in a second I’m sure.

Bolaji: I’ve got to say Pat. That’s pretty boring as far as a long term strategy goes. I mean there’s no special tactics, no pizzazz, just help people and go out of your way to help people.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: It keeps me focused on what really I should be doing which is helping people and the moment I get away from that, the moment I started thinking about the money, or the moment I started thinking about what products I want to create or how famous I might possibly be. For one, my fulfilment factor goes away and second, I’m just creating content and producing things without people coming first. You could tell the quality of the product is just to…I follow these people who have become big and then who kind of followed the same path as me but then they just kind of switched gears and just are all about the money. I don’t want to go that way. That’s why my long term business model is just giving away as much free information as possible, helping people and caring coz if I can remember that in everything I does, it will always come back to me. It always has. The more I help people, the more it comes back to me. It may not be a direct if I help you; you’re going to help me back. That doesn’t always happen and usually it doesn’t but if I help you, you might tell someone about me who then would pay me back.

It’s just a huge connection between people and how they can help you. It’s all about word of mouth. That’s been a big factor for me in my growth. Just standing out from the crowd, doing something different. That’s really my philosophy I think, just caring. I mean it’s hard on the online world because on the online world, people kind of default thinking that to not trust people and it’s hard to win people’s trust online. That’s what you have to do. Everything that happens in business happens after trust happens.

Bolaji: That’s a powerful statement. So the listeners perhaps have a bit on an insight into Pat Flynn, the brand and smart passive income, the brand. Why don’t we go back to the beginning? Maybe we could go back to December 1982 or maybe not that far back but…

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: I saw this light and it was just hurting my eye like sunshine. That was my birthday. That was when I was born.

Bolaji: So before the whole internet marketing success, who was Pat Flynn? How did you get into blogging? How did you get into architecture and how did you transition from a corporate job into this wild, Wild West called the internet?

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: It’s an amazing story and I loved to tell it because it just helps me remember all the wonderful things that have happened. I guess I can start with, I’ll start with college, I won’t go back to 1982 but I’ll start with 2001 when I attended CAL, university of California, Berkeley and I was a band geek and I was an architecture major. I went through five years of college, got my architectural degree and landed a wonderful job, probably like a dream job pretty much coming from an architectural background in school. Right out of school I worked for a prestigious architecture company in alameda, which is up in the bay area, up in the northern part of California.

Life was good. I had a really good paycheck. I was working on some really cool projects with really high end clients and it was just amazing. I was learning so much. I had told myself that I was going to dedicate 40 years of my life to just crushing it in this industry, in the architecture industry. So I was learning everything I could. I was taking courses. I was doing apprenticeships and just trying to figure the whole industry out. One of those courses or one of those things that I wanted to do to add to my resume was this thing called the LEED Exam, L-E-E-D which stands for leadership, energy, environmental design. It’s kind of a certification you can get as an architect, a builder, a designer that shows you know a little bit about green buildings or sustainable design. Designing for environmentally friendly purposes.

I had started a website or a blog at that time pretty much for me because I had been travelling a lot and it was really easy for me to write. I could type faster than I could write and my handwriting wasn’t so good. I didn’t want to carry huge notebooks when I was travelling. so I used my blog as a content management system to keep track of my notes and I thought it’d be cool to maybe share with some of my coworkers once I passed the test to help them study and pass the test, too. I created the site; I never had any intention of it ever turning into a business. I passed the test, everything was good. I was going to leave the blog as it was for my coworkers and then all of a sudden, the whole economy thing happened. I went down along with it and I got laid off.

That was really, really tough time. Those are rough three days of my life because I was engaged to be married and my fiancé was not working so I was the sole provider. I knew I was going to be the sole provider for the family for awhile and I didn’t know what to do. Luckily I had been listening to a few podcasts and reading some blogs about internet business. That’s how I knew how to start a blog. Those were just really inspiring to me but at the time before I got laid off, they were just kind of listening for fun. Just listening for pleasure and kind of living vicariously through those other success stories that I keep hearing.

When I got laid off then I was like, okay I’m going to try this internet business thing and actually, I actually tried to get other architecture jobs but I couldn’t because the industry was so bad that no one was hiring. Nobody was building anything because no one had any money. So no one’s building anything. No’s going to be designing. So I was like couldn’t get another job. I thought about doing retail or just something but then I remembered all the inspiration I got from all the podcast listening to. Okay I’m going to give this internet business thing a shot and so what I did was, I said okay I have this blog. I’m going to see what I can do with it and then right after that, I put some analytical tools to kind of gauge how many people were coming to my site just to prepare for turning that into a business.

The first day, I checked my statistics; I learned that there were thousands of people from all around the world visiting my site every single day to help them pass the test too. At first it really freaked me out, it scared me coz I didn’t know all this was happening. I didn’t know anything about Google, keyword research or any of these internet marketing terms that you hear of today. So it freaked me out. I was like hey all these people who I don’t know about who are reading my stuff. I was probably naive in not knowing that a blog is something public but it turned out to be the best thing ever because then I learned that if you have traffic coming to a site, you can potentially make money from it. So I gave it a shot.

The first thing I did after doing a lot of research and listening to more podcasts of how people began their internet business journeys, I put ad sense in my site and immediately I saw income coming in. mind you, it was 2 or 3 dollars a day but that was amazing to me. All I did was put some little piece of code to my site and I immediately see money. That was just very little money but that was amazing to me. That gave me the encouragement to go beyond adsense.

So the next thing I did was I rented space on my site. I did private advertising for companies that I thought would maybe benefit from the traffic that was coming to my site in this industry. So I sold one or two spots right away for 250 or 300 dollars a month and that was awesome. I was making like $600-$800 a month from adsense and those ads which was amazing especially because I had started but obviously that wasn’t enough to kind of support my future wife and my lifestyle at the time.

I joined some mastermind groups. These are groups that you can get together with people who have similar goals, similar values and you just learn from each other. When I told my story to people, they said you have to create an eBook for your site. I was like; I don’t want to write an eBook. That’s going to take forever. How do I know if it’s going to sell any? What if it’s just bombs? I don’t even know where to start. These are all the questions that were going through my head but after 2 or 3 sessions with them and them bombarding me with questions. Have you started eBook yet? Have you started your eBook yet? Have you started your eBook yet? I was like okay I got to do this and so I spent about two months writing an eBook from scratch. Just in plain, old Microsoft word and I finished it. From there, that forced me to figure out how to sell it online. I learned about services like PayPal and ejunkie which let me digitally deliver those products if people were to buy them automatically via email and I put it on my site.

I didn’t know what a launch was. I guess now you can call it soft launch. I just put it on my site, told people it was there, put like a banner ad for it on my site. In the first month after launching that eBook, I had made about $8,000 in one single month and that just blew my mind. I thought I was doing something illegal. It just didn’t seem right or impossible but it was totally possible. From there, I just kind of took that momentum. I kept making more money every month. I added an audio guide to go along with it. So I had someone record audio for it. Actually I tried to record audio for it myself but the quality was really bad. I kept saying words like um and like. Even though I was reading a script, I was saying those words. I needed someone professional to do it and so I paid someone about $1500 to record this. I was like, $1500 dollars? That’s ridiculous for something I could do myself potentially but they were very good. They turned it out in two weeks. She did a wonderful job, very professional. It was probably the best money I’ve ever spent for my business. I wasn’t used to spending that much money but now I know that in order to grow; you kind of have to spend a little bit in the right places obviously. The first month after I launched the audio guide to go along with that eBook, this time I had 3 products. I had the eBook, the audio guide separately, then the eBook and audio guide as a package together at a discount price. I was making $15,000-$16,000 a month. Then I peaked in March 2009 at $30,000 in one single month.

Bolaji: Amazing.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: That’s kind of my whole story about how I got started. The time that I started to see success with this eBook that I created smartpassiveincome.com because I want to share with people exactly what I was doing. Like what we were talking about a lot of people who talk about making money online make money by talking about making money online. I knew that I was making money online in a very small niche that mostly people probably never even heard of before. so just to give people encouragement and let people know that it is possible to make money online without having to talk about making money online.

Now I do realize that now I’m at a point where my blog, smartpassiveincome.com has grown to a point where it is making money online for me too, which is great. A wonderful bonus to all the stuff that has been happening. That was not the intention at the beginning as well and now I have a podcast that goes along with the smartpassiveincome.com. I’ve been extending that brand. I’ve been asked to speak live at certain events. I’ve been asked to do consultation. Things are just taking off. It’s wonderful. Like I said, I just feel like the luckiest guy in the world but I know that it wasn’t all luck. It was kind of opportunities were presented to me and I took them. I’m just really, really happy to be here today and here talking about what, kind of my journey.

Bolaji: That is such a fantastic story. I’d love to highlight a couple of things you mentioned which folks should probably pay close attention to. One of those is that you created this website for the pure intention of giving value.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Yes. For myself, to learn and to my coworkers.

Bolaji: That’s right and that’s sort of contrary to what a lot of us would start in the internet marketing are thinking of. Often, we’re thinking how can I make money? What can I do to make money? It is a tougher way to build trust.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Absolutely. Like I was talking about earlier, if you have the intention of making money before you do anything, your content is going to be kind of skewed or kind of presented in a way that there is that notion that all you’re trying to do is make money. That’s why I said care first; the money will just come as a result.

Bolaji: The other thing that sort of complements your building this community, where you are providing value, is that when it was time to figure out how to monetize, you invested in coaching with the very well reputed Internet Business Mastery Academy and then you also invested in the mastermind groups. So you are not only learning from people ahead of you in internet marketing but you’re also getting support and accountability from your peers.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Absolutely and also on top of that, there was people who didn’t know as much as I did. I got to teach a little bit and I got to reinforce what I had just learned which is really cool. They say the best way to learn is to actually teach. That’s something, another good thing that came out of the mastermind groups. I give a lot of credit to where I am today in the Internet Business Mastery Academy and what they’ve done for me and I was lucky enough to have Sterling, one of the hosts, move to San Diego at that time which is where I’m from.

We got together to do those mastermind groups, live mastermind groups. He was actually the first one who said you got to write an eBook. He knows what he’s talking about and he changed my life.

Bolaji: So for the folks who are listening, if you don’t have somebody of good repute to follow, try to find a mentor. A well reputed one that you can find follow but also you can find some peers that can provide accountability to you right away. Pat, I’m very interested in your personal brand.

So you started out in the architectural space and established yourself as an authority there but then you are able to translate that to the smart passive income blog which became an authority website in the very crowded internet marketing space. So can you talk a little bit about the smart passive income brand and how you started to grow that and then what directions you’re taking it into?

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Sure. I mean like I was talking about earlier the smart passive income site or blog was created to kind of just share what I was doing with my other stuff. That’s what it’s always has been about. What I do on the site which a lot of other blogs don’t really do is they actually do real life case studies or experiments. I do real life case studies. If I’m going to run a split test for something on my site at greenexamacademy.com which is my LEED exam site then ill report exactly what happens. If it’s a failure or if it’s a win and then I just take people through my business exactly how I’m going through.

Again, it was never my intention for this to grow as big as it was. My intention was just to help people who are interested and again, care. I keep saying it’s luck but it is and it isn’t luck but I mean it’s, people are calling me an A-list blogger now. It seems crazy to me because I looked up to a bunch of A-list bloggers when I was first starting out. I went to them for help and now people are coming to me for help and I’ve grown so much in just a short period of time. I think I know why this is happening. I do a lot of things differently than people do on this similar types of blogs in the make money online or blogging industry. What I was talking about was those case studies. I revealed my income reports every month which not everyone does or people are afraid of. It gives people an insider view of exactly where my money’s coming from.

With those income monthly reports and also the annual income reports, it’s not just about money. It’s not even about the money. if it was up to me, I would, well it is up to me obviously but I would rather not put the money in there but I know that seeing the figures and the numbers is very powerful which is why I put them in there. That’s not what those reports are about. The reports are about exactly what I did in the previous month or the past year to get those numbers, to find success, or the kind of experiments that I’ve been running. What has been working, what hasn’t been working? Again this is to show people what I’m doing and if something I’m doing interests them, then I can help them do that, too.

For example, recently, what we’ve been doing what we call the niche side duel on my site. My buddy Tyrone from tyoneshum.com. He challenged me to a duel or a battle to create a niche site from scratch and we’ll both pick different niches and build our sites and see who can get to the top of Google and see who can make the most money and make everything public. Again, the transparency thing comes into play and a lot of people are interested in this and since then, a lot of people have been asking a lot of questions and Tyrone and I have been helping. We both got our sites to number 1 in Google. We’re both making money from our sites and now we’re helping other people do those. We just started a coaching program to help students do the same thing and create their own sites which has been we’re in week 3 right now of 8 in our coaching program and it’s going really well. People who have never created a website before have their sites up and they’re starting to write content. It’s just really cool how everything has been taking off.

Another thing that I believe that has helped my site grow is that I’m very involved in the community of my site. I believe that a blog is like, the work of a blogger shouldn’t end after they press publish. I believe that there’s a lot of opportunities to grow, to build relationships, long lasting relationships, relationships with people that can then spread word out after you hit the publish button. So you’ll see me in the comments section of my blog all the time. you’ll see me go, if you were to email me a question and it’s been tough lately coz I’ve been getting a lot of emails so I’m trying to work out a kind of a system to help with that maybe like a frequently asked questions section. I don’t know but I will spend a lot of time answering emails in a really in depth answers and I think a lot of people have emailed me after I’ve responded and say thanks you’re the first one who responded and you went over the top. You over delivered in your answer, thank you. then from there, some of them say, I’m going to make sure I tell all my friends about you or they say, I’m going to make sure that whenever I need a product or whenever I’m going to start my own website, I’m going to go through your affiliate links.

The thing about my site is I really don’t sell anything on my site. I just show people methods and the tools that I use and it’s because of the quality and value of information that I give away, people are looking to help to find a way to pay me back in one way or another, whether it’s telling their friends or going through an affiliate link. That’s kind of the business model of passive income and how that site is making money now.

Bolaji: That is very different, Pat, from what most other leaders in the industry are doing.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: I think that’s why, I mean people have, I don’t want to burst my own bubble but people said, your site is a breath of fresh air. I think it is because I know what other sites are doing out there and they’re just sell, sell, sell. Or they give away part of the content, part of the formula and then the rest of the formula is in something you have to pay for but I just give it all away. That’s been what helped to boost my traffic, to help spread the word about my site and help increase the income.

Bolaji: So speaking about the traffic, Pat, I’m curious to know how you were able to deal in the early days perhaps with not having a lot of traffic. I went to look at, for example, some of your older blog posts and was surprised to see comments in the single digits. For folks, for new bloggers out there, 9 comments is great but on Pat’s blog, he regularly gets a hundred comment posts. So for a lot of us newer bloggers that are writing and just crickets out there, sometimes it’s going to be tough to say well I’m going to keep on writing even though nobody’s reading. How were you able to get through that phase?

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: It’s very tough. To be honest with you, I’ve wanted to give up on the smartpassiveincome blog several times.

Bolaji: No way.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Yeah, several times. I swear coz I didn’t know if it was worth my time and I never knew if it was going to…I wasn’t getting any fulfilment from it when people weren’t responding to my content, when people weren’t leaving any comments. I was seeing a totally flat line on my traffic stats. I’ve wanted to give up a lot of times; obviously I’m so glad I didn’t. The first thing you have to realize first is that a very small percentage of people comment. Of the overall readers that you have a very small percentage of people comment. Like you said, I get a hundred comments on most of my posts which is a lot but I also get 8 to 10,000 people coming in to my site every day. At the beginning, I was getting maybe a hundred visits a day with only one or two or three comments. I knew that there were people reading and you can kind of tell how people are interacting with your site through Google analytics.

You can see how long they’ve stayed there. You can check your bounce rate which is the rate in which people come to your site and the immediately leave without clicking on anything else. It’s tough and I know this may sound cliché but you just have to believe in what you’re doing. If I didn’t keep going, I wouldn’t be where I am today. That’s obvious. There’s a lot of things that happened along the way to kind of increase my traffic, to increase my brand awareness.

Some of those things were things that I didn’t even have to do with. For example, at a moment where I wanted to give up on the blog, there was a blogger at lazymanandmoney.com. He wrote a post about my blog and just basically said, you have to be reading this blog. Ever since that day, I didn’t ask him to do that. It was just the kindness of his heart to do that, to thank me for all the content that I had been producing for a long period of time. That was his way of thanking me. Like that day, I had seen record amount of traffic and ever since that day, the blog has been skyrocketing because all that word of mouth just kept going from there. It kind of grew exponentially.

From there I was also asked Yaro Starak to do an interview in his blog coz he heard about my story. Speaking of story, I think that’s a really important thing to have because obviously, you’ve heard my story, those of you who are listening right now. I know it’s a very inspirational story. What has attracted me to other sites are their stories as well coz it gives a little more personal connection to the author.

That’s why I think people kind of seek me out to share my story and kind of feature me on their sites which is really cool but also it’s because the content that I produce as well.

Another thing that I’ve done to kind of build traffic and expand my brand is I’ve gone to other platforms besides the blog. That’s why I say, I’d like to say, smart passive income brand a lot, not just the blog. The blog is just a small piece of it. The blog is the home, the hub, the node but there are other pieces of it such as doing videos on YouTube. I’ve done a few videos on YouTube.

I tried to pick topics that I believe that people would want to watch and I’ve done a little bit within my videos to help stand out from the crowd like I do this thing where I will actually write with a pen on the site or on the screen which no one else does. Not very many people do and that helps people kind of understand that that’s what I do which is really cool. I mean you’re welcome to, any of you out there are welcome to do that too because it’s a really powerful way to teach people by them watching a video seeing a cursor on the screen write something or circle something just like if you were in a classroom with a white blackboard or something. That’s been really powerful.

My videos have been viewed I think most 250,000 times now since I started doing YouTube just about a year ago. I’ve also expanded into doing podcasts. I’ve always wanted to do podcasts coz podcasts are kind of what inspired me to do this. I knew it was a way to reach people that who would have never otherwise found me. That’s been going really well too. I’ve had over I think 400,000 listens from it so far. A lot of people have emailed saying that’s how they found me through iTunes which is really cool.

So that’s expanding my brand as well. I mean just trying to figure out ways to grab new audiences because when you start a blog and you get into it for awhile and you see your traffic plateauing. You’re kind of writing for the same people all the time. That’s good. You’re building your fanbase and you’re building your authority with those people but you also want to think about other ways that you can expand your brand, reach new audiences and bring them and have them come on as regulars as well.

Bolaji: Wow, there’s a lot of really good stuff in there. Pat, there’s one thing that almost discourages newbies when they hear success stories and I’ll just go back to your relating how you’re growing the smart passive income brand. You started out with blogging. You had lots of success there and then you moved into videos and you moved into podcasts. We haven’t even talked about this yet but you very successfully moved into iPhone apps.

Apparently you can do it all, Pat. The folks out there that are probably saying, well, I’m not that good at podcasts. I don’t know the first thing about videos. So I want to ask you sort of a two part question here, Pat. If you were a superhero, Pat Flynn the superhero, what would your superpowers be? Secondly, I also want to know what your weakness is would be because I suspect things may not be as they seem with you moving so successfully in so many different directions.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: I think if I had a superpower it would be the ability to clone myself to be in many places at one time right now. I think you can kind of see that from all the work that I’ve been doing but really I’m just one person but I’m still able to do all these things. It’s because of a few important factors. One is just the notion that I believe I could do well in each of these things and even though, okay, when I first started blogging, like seriously blogging, it took me forever to just get a blog post up and learn how to do blogging. I didn’t know the first thing about wordpress or anything like that but I learned just from experiencing it and now I believe that I have a good amount of knowledge enough to help other people do it as well. When I first started videos, I had no clue where to start but I just found people who knew how to do it. Asked them what I should do. Read some instructional videos or take some courses about it and now I’m at a point where I feel I know a good amount about video where I can teach other people too. So now I feel like sort of an expert on it.

Podcasting, that’s the thing that I was scared of the most but the thing that I wanted to do the most. The reason I was scared because I was scared about being behind the microphone. I was scared about audio quality and setting it up coz I knew you can’t just flip the switch and automatically on a podcast. There’s a lot to it and that all freaked me out. like I said, being behind the mic freaked me out but as you can tell now, I’m really comfortable behind a microphone and I’m getting asked to do speaking gigs now which I’m really happy to have the opportunity to do which I’ve totally would have turned down before because of my fear. Again, this is all happening because I’m putting myself in the deep end. I’m experiencing it knowing that I will learn just from doing it. It will be a struggle.

For all the newbies out there, it is a struggle. I know it sounds like all these happened and it kind of just fell into my lap but there was a lot of hardwork involved. I mean, when I set up the first blog about the LEED exam. That was like 6 to 8 months of writing content. Again, just for myself and my coworkers but that was a lot of work. Every day, I was putting new stuff up there to help myself learn. With the smart passive income blog, it took about a year of writing constantly every single week. Almost every other day providing tons of value and content to then finally get to the point where things just started to take off on their own. There’s no easy buttons out there. Whenever you hear people say, get rich quick or this is the formula for success or whatever. There is no easy to do it. it’s going to take a lot of hardwork and that’s why I think going back to my superpowers, just cloning myself and being able to experience many different things that eventually will turn into my brand as a whole and me learning about blogging, me learning about YouTube, me learning about podcasting. All pretty much at the same time, putting that all together and turning that into my brand is kind of what’s going on. If I had the ability to choose a second superpower though, I would choose flying because I always wanted to fly. I hate traffic when driving and the airline, you have to pay for baggage now. So flying is my second one.

As far as the weakness, my real weakness and why believe that I didn’t make as much money as I did in the beginning was because I am very, I guess you could say, I want to control everything with myself. I want to do everything myself, as you could see I’m involved in a lot of things. Obviously I have my hand in many pools or having my foot dipped in many pools but I want to do everything myself and that’s not a good way to approach it what I’ve learned. Recently, I’ve started to work with certain virtual assistants who may be better at doing the things I want to do but I might not be so good at or which I’m not good at or I don’t have the time to learn.

We could seaway to iPhones apps. I have an iPhones app business. I co-own an iPhones app business. We have 27 iPhones apps live in iTunes right now. We’re working on a bunch more and I have no clue how to code an iPhones apple. my business partner has no clue how to code an iPhones app. what we do is hire virtual assistants or people through sites like elance.com odesk who are experts at what they do which is building iPhones apps. We just give them our idea. We pay them a fee to build it and then they give it back to us and then we submit it to iTunes. that’s been wildly successful and because we’re utilizing virtual assistants, we can do 4, 5, 6 applications at a time whereas if I want to get into this business and do it all on my own, it would take me I don’t know, 4, 5 months to learn how to code a basic application. Then figure out an idea then code it and learn everything there is to know about that more advanced application and then I finally have after a year, one application which is by mediocre at best. That’s why utilizing myself, using VA’s to create even more versions of myself or more hands, busy hands working on our business we’ve been able to utilize that greatly to our advantage.

My weakness and I still have trouble with that. I have some products coming out soon. I want to figure out how to add a certain shopping cart or to an affiliate program. I want to figure that out on my own but I know it would be really smart of me to just hire someone to do that for me. So that’s something I’ve been struggling with.

Bolaji: That’s really insightful there and I appreciate you sharing that. I happen to know what your kryptonite, if we can call it that is, beyond your weakness. For those who read Pat’s blog, you’ll probably know he’s not crazy about spiders.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Oh. Yeah. There was one in our bathroom last night actually and my wife has to kill it or I couldn’t rest. She didn’t kill it. She just brings it outside and I have to, that’s a one oh my gosh, I can take snakes and cockroaches and aliens but I can’t take spiders.

Bolaji: On the next podcast, we’ll talk aboutPpat’s alien encounters but that’s for another time. Just one quick question, Pat. why are you not afraid to fail and I want to add a little bit to that, I think I’ve observed that a lot of successful people they tend to view failure in a different way than the average person does. It allows them to brush themselves off whenever they fail.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: That’s a good question.

Bolaji: But now things have changed for you in the past few years because you almost have a lot more to lose now that you have a valuable brand. You’re not just pat Flynn anymore. You’re smart passive income with Pat Flynn. So every time you fail, it’s a lot more visible.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: True but at the same time I think whenever I fail which I do report on my blog every once in awhile. Like I said I’m totally transparent. For one that knowing that I am going to be talking about my failures helps I to make sure that I do things right the first time. That’s the first part. Second part is when I do fail and I do know that I’m going to publish those experiments or whatever trials and errors on my blog, I feel like that makes me seem more like a real person online. I know that’s beneficial for me in that way. It’s beneficial for other people as well because then they get to see what not to do.

Thirdly like you’re talking about earlier, just a second ago. I know that failing is good because that takes me one step closer to succeeding. Every failure is a step closer to being successful. That’s how I view it and as long as you learn from your failures, if you learn from your mistakes, it’s not actually failing. Failing is actually doing something wrong and not learning from it and then doing it wrong again. So that’s kind of my take on it.

Bolaji: That’s fantastic. Pat, I want to sort of wrap things up so I can be respectful of your time here and so I’m going to sort of jump to the last question that I have.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: Sure.

Bolaji: I’m interested to know what some of your aspirations are beyond the LEED exam, beyond internet marketing, even beyond iPhones apps?

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: What it really comes down to is my family. Everything that I do is kind of motivated or driven by being able to spend more time with my family. I want to get to a point where I can have a really good brand, a really good businesses, get to a point where I can then be comfortable with travelling and having those businesses still work for me which could happen now but I still feel like it’s a little early for me to do that. like I said, everything has just taken off so fast for me that I kind of have to make sure I know what I’m doing and I’m in the right spot in my life. My kind of long term desire is just to, I’m not all about the fancy cars and huge mansions and stuff like that. I’m just more about family and helping people as well. So not only my immediate family here, my wife and my son and our grandparents and everyone here but also the family that I’ve been building online on my blog. Really helping people, helping them succeed so they could spend more time with their family as well. If I can just really help with one person tonight, I think I would have succeeded. I have already gotten a lot of feedback from people saying that I’ve helped them in their online businesses and starting their journey.

A couple of people emailed me the other day saying that they finally got their eBooks written and I have a free eBook on my blog at ebooksthesmartway.com. It’s a shortcut to go there and they use that guide to help them publish their first eBooks. Now, one guy said he made $3,000 in the first 3 days. That was just so awesome to hear that it was because of something that I did. That’s really what matters to me most. It’s not the material things but changing people’s lives and I know that I am in a really good place and in a good position to help people in that way but at the same time I know that the position I have now has, comes with a lot of responsibility. A lot of people email me everyday saying hey I have this great product. Would you mind promoting this on your site for me? I’ll give you 50% or whatever. I get 2 or 3 of those emails every single day. it’s very tempting coz there’s a lot of money that could be made there but at the same time, I always think about what’s the most important. What the primary motive is for the site and it’s not to make money, it’s to help people. So I do review those products and if I feel like they are products that will help people or help myself first and then help people as a result then I will possibly share it but I turned down about probably 99% of them because it’s really all about the people. I don’t know if that answers the question, I kind of went off on a tangent.

Bolaji: No, you absolutely did and I appreciate the candor there. Folks, you’re hearing it here first. This is unscripted, this is Pat Flynn. He’s a living testament that you can be yourself and succeed in this industry. You don’t have to pretend to be a guru or an expert which a lot of us have been guilty of. You don’t have to try to sell the latest and greatest tactics. You can just be you and that’s very encouraging and hopefully it will be inspirational for a lot of listeners.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: That comes right out of crush it by Gary Vaynerchuk too. So if you haven’t picked that up. It talks about a lot of the same principles.

Bolaji: Yeah, Pat’s right. That is a phenomenal book. I’ve got to throw one random thing in there. Pat sent out a link earlier this week where he highlighted a video of his wedding. At the wedding reception, he had a phenomenal dance performance with his wife. It was adorable. I really appreciate getting that personal insight. That’s totally a tangent but when you visit Pat’s site, do a search on wedding and hopefully you’ll find that video.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: That was fun. My wife, she was a dancer in college, a hip hop dancer. So she choreographed that. That was pretty cool.

Bolaji: It was really good. We’ll go ahead and wrap up here. This has been an extreme pleasure, a highlight of the year for me certainly and hopefully a highlight for the folks who are listening.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: It’s only January though so you got a lot of time to find someone…

Bolaji: It was a really good January though so you had a lot of competition. Folks, this has been Bolaji with whoisbludgy.com and rat-race-escape-artist.com. We’ve had the distinct pleasure of spending the hour with Pat Flynn. You can find Pat Flynn at smartpassiveincome.com and you can also get his very valuable eBook. It’s called eBooks the smart way. He just gave out the URL. You want to go there. It is ebooksthesmartway.com

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: It’s free.

Bolaji: It is free and it is valuable. So please do check it out. If you are into podcasts, you also might want to find him on iTunes but you can find all of that information from his hub, smartpassiveincome.com. So folks, until next time. Keep trying, go after your goals and keep pursuing your passion. Pat, thank you very much.

Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income: And you’re welcome. Thank you for having me.

Bolaji: Take care folks. Bye bye.