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MAKING BANK is now a weekly YouTube TV show and iTunes Podcast full of #Success and #Business with Josh.

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Summary

It’s not everyone that can say that being laid off from their dream job was the best thing that could have happened to them. Today’s guest turned what felt like the end into a new beginning that has earned him more money working fewer hours.

There are many people touting passive income but Pat Flynn really walks the walk by sharing his income, expenses, and mistakes he’s made along the way. Pat is routinely praised for his authentic leadership style and business principles. Forbes recently named him one of the ten most transparent leaders in business.

 Today on #MakingBank, host Josh Felber invites Pat Flynn to talk about his journey from getting laid off to becoming the passive income guy. He shares what he learned along the way as well as how he started and grew his podcast from its infancy to one of the most popular business podcasts.

Pat Flynn is a beloved thought leader in the areas of online entrepreneurship, digital marketing, and lifestyle businesses. He overcame career adversity at an early age by finding his own path and true passion. Despite his success in business, Pat’s greatest joys are spending time with his family and friends as well as helping inspire and educate others on how to succeed with their own entrepreneurial careers.

So, tune-in to hear Josh and Pat talk all-things entrepreneurship and marketing, as well as…

• Why Pat is grateful for getting laid off.
• How to launch a podcast and maintain momentum.
• Pat’s philosophy about how earnings tie into how well you serve your audience.
• Why feeling resistance is actually a good thing.

And more…

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The Path to Passive Income and Podcast Gold with Guest Pat Flynn: MakingBank S2E48

Josh Felber:                          Welcome to Making Bank. I am Josh Felber where we uncover the success strategies and the secrets of the top 1% so you can amplify your life and your business today. I’m really excited for today’s guest. I want to introduce you to Pat Flynn. Pat, welcome to Making Bank.

Pat Flynn:                               Thanks for having me here.

Josh Felber:                          Awesome, man. For all the people that don’t know who you are, maybe that little 1%, tell us a little bit about who Pat Flynn is and what you do.

Pat Flynn:                               Sure, so again, my name is Pat Flynn. I live here in San Diego actually, where we’re filming this right now, so it wasn’t too much of a drive to come but again, thank you for having me.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               I got my start actually after I got let go from an architecture position.

Josh Felber:                          Okay.

Pat Flynn:                               I went to school for architecture. I thought I was going to do that for the rest of my life and I was actually really happy at my job but in 2008, I was told I was going to be let go, which was just a crushing blow to me because that was my dream but looking back, that was actually the best thing to ever happen to me because then I was introduced to this world of online business and internet marketing and I discovered that through actually a podcast.

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               It was called Internet Business Mastery hosted by two guys, Jeremy and Jason and it was on one particular episode that they had, where they interviewed a guy who was making six figures a year helping people pass the project management exam, the PM exam. I was like, “Wait a sec, I’ve taken a bunch of exams when I was in architecture, maybe I can do something similar.” To make a long story short, in October of 2008, I had a website up. I was providing content, I was getting found in Google for a lot of the keywords.

Josh Felber:                          Cool.

Pat Flynn:                               I was becoming this sort of expert in this industry for this really niched exam, it was called the Lead Exam, which is like energy and environmental design-type stuff, but I wasn’t an expert. I barely passed the test but because I was the one actually promoting and sharing this information freely, I became seen as this expert and then I published a study guide in October of 2008, which was sold for $19.95. I had no idea what I was doing with pricing and it was just an e-book.

Josh Felber:                          It just sounded good, right?

Pat Flynn:                               It was so Frankenstein, the way it was put together, like I wrote it in Word and then I just like saved it as a PDF and that was my product but it ended up doing really, really well. It made $7,908.55 in October of 2008, which was like 4x what I was making as an architect at that time and I was like, “What? This is crazy,” but it was funny because after that first sale, I remember, I was like, “Oh my gosh, it worked. What if this person asks for a refund? What if I get sued?” Like all this crazy like stuff that when you’re trying something new, you’re like, “Wait, this can’t be real.”

Josh Felber:                          Yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               It was real and I ended up adding more products to the line, by the time 2009 rolled around, I was making between $20-30,000 a month with this like electronic e-book and the coolest part about it like because the way I set it up, because it wasn’t a physical product that I had to go and ship out, people could come to the site, they would buy the guide and literally, it would be delivered to them automatically, right?

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               That’s very common these days. Back then, it was sort of new and that’s where this idea, passive income becoming the motivator for me because I would literally wake up in the morning and see more money in my bank account.

Josh Felber:                          That’s always awesome.

Pat Flynn:                               It’s always awesome. It’s crazy. Really, truly, what that showed me was that internet marketing can be done in a legit way because not only was I making a lot of money, not only was it passive, but I was getting these amazing thank you letters, like notes, some hand-written from the architects that I had helped.

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               They were like, “I got a new job because of you. I got promoted. I got a raise. You saved my family.” Like I was like, “What? This is insane.”

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               The crazy thing was like when I was in architecture, I worked so hard and I have my fingerprint on a lot of actually restaurants out there in the world right now. Yard House, PF Chang’s, I had my hand in designing a lot of those.

Josh Felber:                          Oh yeah, that’s awesome.

Pat Flynn:                               If I were to ask you watching this now, like if you, can you name the person who even built the house that you live in, the house that you are raising your family in? You would likely not be able to answer that unless it was like your grandpa with his two bare hands kind of thing.

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               Then like here was getting recognition for this little exam and people calling me by name and thanking me and wanting to meet me. It really showed me that the online world enables us to really connect with people and build these real relationships and serve and that’s where my whole philosophy of actually serving first comes into play. Your earnings should be a by-product of how well you serve your audience.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Then later that year in 2008, I actually started a website called SmartPassiveIncome.com, which is where most people know me from now and that’s where I just started to document everything I was doing, everything I was learning, things that I wished I’d done differently. I started to build new businesses publicly and share the process along the way and sharing my failures along the way. Now, fast forward to 2017, I have a podcast that goes along with it, which just passed 42.5 million downloads.

Josh Felber:                          Wow, that’s amazing.

Pat Flynn:                               It just like blows my mind because I’m in my home in San Diego and my two kids are like running around and like millions and millions of viewers and listeners, which is insane. Then I have a very popular blog and now a video channel to go along with it. I’m getting paid to speak. I just wrote a book called “Will It Fly?”, which came out exactly a year ago and it became a, as a self-published book, a Wall Street Journal best-seller.

Josh Felber:                          Wow.

Pat Flynn:                               Which I didn’t even know was possible and now it’s getting picked up in other countries and I’m working on my next book and I’m getting paid to speak. It’s just mind-blowing. I’m so thankful for this journey and going back to my lay-off, it was like, “Thank God I got laid off.”

Josh Felber:                          For sure.

Pat Flynn:                               To show me all these things that were available to me.

Josh Felber:                          That’s amazing. I love the story, and I know, and it’s cool how transparent you are on your blog as you know, you’ve been building your different businesses and everything, letting people know, “Hey, these are what some of the challenges I’ve encountered. This is what’s really working well for me and everything.” It’s awesome to see that journey, that something that was probably pretty dramatic and seemed like such a setback when it happened with getting laid off, that you’ve now transformed into just a great life for you and your family, as well as just being able to serve and share with over 42 million people.

Pat Flynn:                               It was a crazy transition. Luckily, when I had gotten the news that I was going to get let go, I wasn’t let go that day.

Josh Felber:                          Okay.

Pat Flynn:                               I had a couple months because I had some clients they couldn’t just like remove me from them.

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               I had like two months til my death, basically. It felt like that, right.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               I actually moved back with my parents to San Diego. I was living in Orange County. I moved back with my parents, actually, timing wise, I just proposed to my girlfriend too.

Josh Felber:                          Oh, wow.

Pat Flynn:                               Then I got the news and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy.” We go back home to live with our families to save money and my wife’s Philippina, I’m half Philippino and when you’re a Philippino getting married, like you have to invite everybody. Literally like-

Josh Felber:                          It’s not like one or two people.

Pat Flynn:                               No, no, no, it’s like your mom and that sort of immediate family, right, but all of their friends and all of their nurse friends, just literally, it’s going to be a big wedding so we were like crushed because where’s this money going to come from? We did everything we could to save money and I took the train every day because gas at the time was like $5 a gallon. It was cheaper for me to train every day to Orange County an hour and a half. I remember sitting on the train ride and I would see people come in the train with their briefcases and their laptops and I’d be so jealous of them, like, “You’re so lucky, you have no idea how lucky you are to still have your job. I wish I was you.”

Then I got tired of listening to my like Linkin Park playlist, my angry music. That’s when I discovered podcasts and then I discovered that Internet Business Mastery one. That’s why I’ve always wanted to start a podcast, because that was the catalyst for me. It was the platform that showed me all this stuff is possible, so I had always wanted to start a podcast.

It’s really funny because in December of ’08, when I had SmartPassiveIncome.com, I had announced to the small world that I had available at that time, that I was going to start a podcast. I bought all this equipment, I spent like hundreds of bucks. I put my first recording out. I was like, “Hey guys, I’m going to start a podcast.” My first episode didn’t come out until July in 2010.

Josh Felber:                          Oh wow, a year and a half.

Pat Flynn:                               A year and a half later because I was so dang scared because on a blog, you can hide behind your keyboard, right, and edit. Like putting your voice out there, that was so crazy to me.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               When the podcast started in July of 2010, that was really the hockey stick moment for SmartPassiveIncome. Like it went wild and now I have these incredible raving fans who listen to me and they binge-listen to me and they’re like literally having dreams. I get emails like, “I had a dream about you last night.” I’m like, “That’s weird,” but that’s kind of cool, right? The thing about podcasts, it’s like people listen when they’re on a jog or while they’re on a commute and all those kinds of things. It’s like no other platform allows one to listen to somebody for over an hour sometimes versus a video, which is much shorter or like a blog post, which is even shorter than that. I’m just really happy that I kind of moved forward with the podcast.

Josh Felber:                          That’s cool.

Pat Flynn:                               Whatever you want to talk about, I’m here to help. I have my foot in many different pools and many different platforms so whatever I can do to serve you guys out there, I’m here.

Josh Felber:                          That’s so cool. That’s why, what I said, “Oh man, I get to have Pat Flynn on the show.” I just love your story and just the transformation and the challenges and the success you had from that and I know one of the things that just even inspired me is having my own show was hearing what you were doing and John Lee and some of the other guys and everything out there and stuff. I was like, “Okay, cool. How can I do this?” For me, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do video,” even though I probably was like horrible on video. I know I was horrible on video.

Pat Flynn:                               Dude, like John Lee, you mentioned, he had this quote that sticks with me and that’s, “Every master started as a disaster,” and if you all got back to your favorite podcasts or Josh’s show, like if you go back to the first episode, it’s like bad, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               You cannot watch your own stuff. I can’t listen to my first podcast.

Josh Felber:                          I still don’t.

Pat Flynn:                               It’s real embarrassing, but it just shows you that you have to get through that muck before you get to the good stuff.

Josh Felber:                          For sure.

Pat Flynn:                               It’s all about getting started, right, and there’s a lot of things that go with that.

Josh Felber:                          That’s key. What were some of the biggest breakthroughs for you as you were podcasting and growing your show? We’ll kind of start there, and then we’ll go back and say, “Hey, what are some of those biggest challenges?”

Pat Flynn:                               Sure, so some of the big breakthroughs, I mean I remember specifically, I was only doing a show every other week to start.

Josh Felber:                          Okay, sure.

Pat Flynn:                               Now I do it every week and I have other podcasts that happen almost daily now but I started every other week because I just was kind of getting a feel for it and I was blogging three times a week on top of that.

Josh Felber:                          Okay.

Pat Flynn:                               I was mainly a blogger still. A few months later, I went to this conference and all I could hear from people were like, “Oh my gosh, I love your podcast. Your podcast this. I love your podcast.” I’m like, “What about my blog? Like I work so much harder on that.”

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Then I realize nobody ever says, “Pat, thank you so much for your post on those top five tips for Facebook,” right?

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               Like nobody will go out of your way to thank you for that, but when you tell stories on a platform like podcast or a video like this, it’s like that becomes memorable and it becomes something that people have become a part of them and so when they see that person, all these people were coming up to me like we’ve been friends for years.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               They’re like, “Oh, how’s your wife doing? How are your kids?” I’m like, “Hold up, who are you?” It was really creepy at first, right?

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               I was really scared like and then I realized, “Wow, this platform podcasting is allowing me to actually build these real, like legit real relationships with people.” Not just one-to-one. It feels one-to-one to the listener because they’re listening to you like in their ears, right?

Josh Felber:                          For sure.

Pat Flynn:                               At first, it was one to 100, one to 1,000, now it’s one to 100,000 with every episode. Like imagine going to a stadium every week and having people pour in there because they’ve chosen to listen to you. That’s what it’s like. If you scale that down and you’re just starting out and you’re like, “Those are numbers that I can never reach,” that’s totally fine.

Imagine a room of 100 people. A little room, you go into a room, you’re on stage and 100 people are there, they signed up to listen to you every single week. Like that’s really powerful, right?

Josh Felber:                          For sure, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               It really brings it back into perspective, so that was a big moment for me. Just realizing getting that feel from people that this was big, so that’s when I switched from bi-weekly to weekly.

Josh Felber:                          Okay.

Pat Flynn:                               Then the other cool part about podcasting and the big thing for me was, being able to have an excuse to talk to really high-up people for a really long time. You know, like Gary Vaynerchuk, Tim Ferriss, I could never just have originally reached out to someone and be like, “Can you talk to me for 45 minutes?” No, they don’t have time for that, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               “Hey, you want to come on my podcast? I have several listeners who may enjoy your upcoming book.”

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               Oh yeah, they’re going to say yes, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Then now I can name drop and be like, “Oh, I’ve interviewed people like Gary V. And Tim Ferriss.”

Josh Felber:                          Yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               People aren’t usually going to say, “Yes,” they might be more likely to say yes now.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome.

Pat Flynn:                               The influencer sort of reach out ability with the podcast is cool too. Then just through association. You think of people like John Lee Dumas who’ve been very successful with podcasting. He’s become successful because he’s been able to interview all these other people who are now sharing his show because they’ve been featured on that. It’s just incredible.

Josh Felber:                          Then those are kind of some of your biggest breakthrough points with podcasting. What were some of the, maybe like three points of challenges and kind of house you worked through those along your journey.

Pat Flynn:                               Sure. There’s been millions of challenges, right? Like there’s so many failure. To start, it was just getting over myself and those limiting beliefs that, “Is this something I could really do?” Then really, to solve that problem, it was breaking those big goals down into smaller chunks. I learned these strategies through the internet marketers that I was following. You know, taking these big goals, chunking them down into little bitty milestones so that you can actually appreciate the journey and not just the light at the end of the tunnel that you can hardly ever see right at the beginning, right?

Appreciating the small wins along the way is great for motivation and to keep moving forward, so that’s one thing. Secondly, just the technology part of it, like that stuff scared the crap out of me. I’m not super techy like that but then I soon realized that there are other people out there who are great at those things.

Josh Felber:                          Okay.

Pat Flynn:                               If I just connect with those people, or learn from them, then they’ll show me the way, and a lot of people use technology as an excuse to stop themselves from blogging or podcasting or doing video, right? Another thing, I didn’t think I was qualified to do it, especially with the lead guide, I’m like, “I barely passed the exam. Am I really somebody who should be writing this book?”

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Right? Like shouldn’t a person who got a perfect score be writing this?

Josh Felber:                          Yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               Not me, but then like I said earlier, you become an expert in the eyes of somebody if you are just a couple steps ahead of them.

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               When you really think about it, a lot of times, and I know this now because I interview not just A-listers in my podcast now, I interview success stories that I’ve created, so people who are in my audience.

Josh Felber:                          Yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               Nobody’s ever heard of them before, but those episodes get way more compliments, they get way more downloads and shared a lot more because they’re more relatable.

Josh Felber:                          Sure, [crosstalk 00:14:37].

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, exactly. They’re only one or two steps ahead of my listening audience versus somebody who’s 100 steps ahead.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Because of that, they are more likable, they are more approachable, and so for me with my lead exam stuff, I soon realized that I’m actually better suited to teach these people because I’ve gone through that same process not too long ago versus this corporate company who’s creating these guides that A, are a lot more expensive but B, don’t have any personality behind them.

A big challenge was in 2009, I guess the organization that administers this exam found out about what I was doing and they created their own guides because they didn’t have guides before. They created their own study guides and I thought I was crushed. Like how can I compete with the organization that writes the exam questions?

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               I’m done, right? I actually had surges of sales when they came out with their own guides.

Josh Felber:                          Wow.

Pat Flynn:                               Because what happened was, that event allowed people to realize that there were guides out there but they were looking for other options and they found this guy named Pat Flynn who wrote a book who was somebody who went through the exam just not too long ago.

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               I started to get a lot more customers at that point, which was super cool.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome, yeah. That’s so cool. They’re bringing out the exam then, help drive more sales for you and it was totally like opposite mindset of where you were mentally.

Pat Flynn:                               There’s been a lot of those moments for me where I expected something to happen one way and then it happens another way.

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               Another one was related to the price of my guide. I’d mentioned earlier I sold it for $19.95 and just literally threw a dart at the wall for that because I had no idea what I was doing. Then I had one of my customers come up to me or email me and said, “Pat, I’m a small business owner, you need to raise the price of your book.” Like this was somebody who bought my book, telling me to raise the price of my book and I was just like, “No, I’m pretty comfortable with this price. I really want to be that guy that everybody gets at the low price. I want to serve everybody.”

He’s like, “You will have more in sales if you raise this price because this book looks really cheap the way you’re selling it. Like trust me, do it.” I literally increased the price by 50% and the next day, I had a 25% raise in sales, like the quantity.

Josh Felber:                          Wow, sure.

Pat Flynn:                               I was like, “What? Like first of all, thank you for emailing me.” It really went against what I thought because I thought okay, cheaper is better but then I realized there’s this thing called perceived value where if you go to a furniture store and everything’s like $1,000 and you see this amazing-looking chair but it’s $5, you’re like, “Something’s wrong. I’m not going to sit on that chair.”

Josh Felber:                          Right. It’s going to fall apart when I sit on it, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               That was one of those things I realized, and then the coolest part was I was so just stoked about how successful I was at the beginning. I reached out to all my customers and I asked them a couple questions like surveying because I wanted to learn more about, “Okay, well, why are buying from me versus anybody else who’s selling stuff?” What was really interesting was that 25% of the respondents had said, “Pat, I had already passed the exam when you came out with your guide but I bought it anyway because you finally gave me a way for me to pay you back.”

Josh Felber:                          Wow.

Pat Flynn:                               I was like, like what?

Josh Felber:                          That is, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               Holy crap, like you didn’t even need to spend that money but you felt the need to because of all the value that it-

Josh Felber:                          Once created, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah. That just showed me, okay, serve first, by-product of that is your earnings and that’s the approach I always take now.

Josh Felber:                          Cool. What would you say maybe like three points are if somebody’s wanting to get started with a podcast, whether it’s audio or video or whatever?

Pat Flynn:                               Sure.

Josh Felber:                          I guess, what are maybe three easy strategies or tips to give them?

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, I mean I have a free podcasting tutorial …

Josh Felber:                          Oh, awesome.

Pat Flynn:                               … That one could go through, no emails required or nothing. Like my job is to just blow you away with content and have you want to give me your email. That’s the approach that I take.

Josh Felber:                          Cool.

Pat Flynn:                               PodcastingTutorial.com, it’ll get you through the entire process from start to finish, but there’s some really key things to know. First of all, a podcast as much as it is audio, it’s actually very visual, because when you go to iTunes, what do you see first before you listen to anything? You see the cover art, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Pay attention to the category that you’re going into and how you might be able to stand out, plus iTunes is Apple, Apple loves to showcase great-looking things. Don’t just skimp over the artwork for your show.

Secondly, when you launch, don’t just launch with one episode like I did because you want to give people a chance to dive into it more. We are in the Netflix binge-watching era, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Where people will go and keep going with the concept that they like. You want to give maybe three episodes when you launch, not just one. That way, people can dive into more, maybe one episode resonates with somebody more than another one, which then gives you the ability to take advantage of the iTunes algorithm, which is somewhat secret but it’s kind of known. It’s not as open as Google in terms of how their secrets are, but the algorithm essentially is the more subscriptions, the more downloads, and ratings and reviews you can get in a shorter time period like the acceleration of those things, is what bumps you up in the rankings.

Josh Felber:                          Oh, gotcha.

Pat Flynn:                               When you have three episodes come out, you’re really taking advantage of all those things at the same time and when you launch, launch it like an event. Like this is a huge deal, like make it, build hype for it, run a contest that same day, get all your network involved to kind of promote at the same time, that’s how you really launch with a bang and stay at the top longer for sure.

Josh Felber:                          Okay. I’m glad you brought that up, is the whole algorithm and trying to get that figured out, so what do you suggest, because you said you’d launch with three or five, kind of in that range, do you promote, does it matter if they subscribe to one or all three or do you need to focus on just like driving the traffic to the one episode?

Pat Flynn:                               I would drive traffic to your first episode, have that one be the game-changer, however, people will continue to listen to the others, or they’ll come across that episode, see the others and actually be more interested in those other ones. When they subscribe, they’re just subscribing to your show.

Josh Felber:                          To the show, okay, cool.

Pat Flynn:                               What’s really cool about that and the way podcasting works is when people subscribe to you show, the next time you come out with an episode, it automatically gets pushed to their device.

Josh Felber:                          Right, okay.

Pat Flynn:                               Like they don’t have to go and make a choice to download it again.

Josh Felber:                          Automatically.

Pat Flynn:                               It’s on their device.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome.

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, which is super cool.

Josh Felber:                          Because I just see from myself looking, is a lot of the different rank, like, “Oh, my podcast is number one but it’s only there for like a day or something.”

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah.

Josh Felber:                          How do you get like, for me, like high performances like sustained performance over time, not just boom, a burst in one day? How do you get that sustained I guess top spots for continuous?

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, great question. What I would do is like I said, when you launch, you launch like an event, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               To make a big deal out of it, then you’re going to go through the motions and it’s going to be stabilizing and you’re going to see the rankings and the traffic and the downloads just start to stabilize a little bit.

Josh Felber:                          Okay.

Pat Flynn:                               You want to give it another spike. What I would do is create what I like to call a hit episode in the future. Yes, you want all your episodes to be hit episodes, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               But pick one, maybe it’s an interview with an A-lister that you know is coming up that you can plan a little bit more ahead more, create an event around, run contests around it, to just again, give a huge surge for the acceleration for those things that affect the rankings. Doing that every 10 episodes, you’ll get a nice spike that brings you back up and raises that plateau that you-

Josh Felber:                          Kind of keeps that level there in that sense.

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, exactly, and there’s a bunch of different kinds of episodes like that, it doesn’t have to be an interview with an A-lister. One episode that I did that went really well was I asked 15 different entrepreneurs a single question and I had them respond with their voice.

Josh Felber:                          Oh, cool.

Pat Flynn:                               They used a tool called, or you can use a tool called SpeakPipe.com.

Josh Felber:                          Speak Pipe, okay.

Pat Flynn:                               If you forward people to your special Speak Pipe link, they can record their voice through their computer and then it gets shipped to you as an MP3.

Josh Felber:                          Oh, nice.

Pat Flynn:                               Like literally right away.

Josh Felber:                          That’s cool, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               You can just drop those MP3s, so what I did was I asked 15 entrepreneurs, “What’s one thing you wish you knew before you got started as an entrepreneur?”

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Then I just combined all those MP3s into one episode. It’s sort of like those posts that you see on blogs, round-up posts I think they call them, but in a podcast format.

Josh Felber:                          That’s cool.

Pat Flynn:                               Of course, because they’re featured on your show, they’re going to share that.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               With-

Josh Felber:                          15 people sharing you.

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, exactly, so I had a huge spike in downloads at that point and a lot of new subscribers in higher rankings too. Another good tip for you is to interview forum owners. This is a great tip because when you think about it, forum owners, they have these large numbers of people who are just communicating within a specific topic. If you invite that forum owner to come talk about that community and share some advice and stuff, do you think that that forum owner is going to share that interview with that forum?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Absolutely.

Josh Felber:                          For sure.

Pat Flynn:                               Like totally. It doesn’t even matter if you have a podcast or a video show or even just a blog interview, that works really, really, well. That’s some untapped land for a lot of you who are kind of looking for bigger surges in your traffic perhaps.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome. Like the other day, one of the interviews I did with Gary Vandercheck, he actually just shared it out on his own iTunes thing, through his own channel and stuff and everybody’s like, “Oh dude, congrats.” I’m like, “What are you guys talking about?” They’re like, “Here,” they sent me a photo, I’m like, “Oh, that’s awesome.”

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, Gary’s cool like that. He gives back to people who help him.

Josh Felber:                          For sure, yeah, but like I said, you see that, and then you start seeing that traction and stuff and I never asked him. It was really cool for him to give that back and everything as well.

Pat Flynn:                               That’s cool. Yeah.

Josh Felber:                          You’re talking about like different contests and things like that, what was a successful contest for you that helped push more people to the rankings and everything [crosstalk 00:24:09].

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, there’s a couple things you can do. There’s some tools out there that are available to you to kind of manage these things for you. In the WordPress site, there’s a WordPress [inaudible 00:24:15] called King Sumo, which is run by the guys from App Sumo.

Josh Felber:                          App Sumo, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               That’s a great tool because it sort of viralizes the contest so in order for people to qualify for more entries into the random contest, they have to share.

Josh Felber:                          Gotcha, okay.

Pat Flynn:                               The more shares, the more entries they have into the contest. There’s also one called Raffle Copter, which is really good …

Josh Felber:                          Okay, sure.

Pat Flynn:                               … For those contests as well. In terms of what to give away, I mean honestly, it doesn’t really matter. You’re going to give them an excuse to potentially get something in return for a small action of what that is.

Josh Felber:                          From a promotion.

Pat Flynn:                               My buddy Chris Decker and I, we launched a podcast a few years back called the One-Day Business Breakthrough Podcast. We run these little small events every once in a while when we’re in town together. We just created a podcast to kind of promote that event and we launched it and said, “Hey, we’re going to give away a T-shirt a day for the week of launch. It’s going to go to a person who reviews the show,” so we’ll go and look on iTunes at all the reviews and we’ll pick one person every day for this week and they’re going to win a shirt.

You have to subscribe and then leave a review and we got up to like the top five podcasts overall from doing that.

Josh Felber:                          Right. That’s cool.

Pat Flynn:                               It was crazy. We had a huge surge of downloads, obviously we’re not there anymore but we’re still continuing even though we haven’t updated that show for a while. This is the other cool thing about podcasting and the directory because it’s not as competitive as say websites or blogs, there’s far less. You can get a lot of Evergreen traffic and a lot of people I know are specifically now building podcasts that aren’t going to go on forever but they create a 20-episode series for example, that at the end, promotes a coaching program or promotes some sort of product or online course.

Josh Felber:                          Sure.

Pat Flynn:                               It’s just a constant stream of people because when you-

Josh Felber:                          Because people are always listening.

Pat Flynn:                               People are always listening and they’re listening to the person who will potentially become their coach.

Josh Felber:                          Right. Connection too.

Pat Flynn:                               They’re getting coaching and getting a feel for what it’s like already, so it just makes sense to me.

Josh Felber:                          Right. Wow.

Pat Flynn:                               That’s been working really well for people too.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome.

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah.

Josh Felber:                          I hope you guys are taking great notes here. Pat is just filling this up with knowledge bombs, tons of golden nuggets, so I mean, if you guys are thinking about starting a podcast, if you already have a podcast, I mean you can utilize anything that he’s talking about to level up, move it to that next level for you out there. Super exciting, man. Tons of awesome content.

There’s a lot of different podcasts out there, a lot of them don’t make any kind of money, so how did you monetize or I know that’s not your first thought for it, it’s creating the value and putting the best content out there, but then what was that next step? Obviously, you’re like, “Okay, cool. I got to have some kind of money generation along the way.” What’s that best strategy for people?

Pat Flynn:                               Well, there’s a number of different ways to go about it. It depends on who you are and what you have available, if you have your own products, you can sell your own products through your podcast.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               You can do that in many different ways. You can sell products as an affiliate. Actually, that’s the first way that I started generating an income through podcasts. The cool thing about that is that you might talk about a process that goes from start to finish and within that process, whatever that is, you drop tools or services that you use and just things that you’ve used along the way. Then you have the links on your show notes on your website where people click through or you have really easy URLs that people can go through.

Like if you have a Word Press site, there’s a tool called Pretty Link that shortens those long URLs and makes them really easy to type in or remember. Affiliate marketing is great but another way to use affiliate marketing is to actually invite the owner of that product that you are promoting on the show to do the interview.

Josh Felber:                          Okay, right, there you go, sure.

Pat Flynn:                               Because the challenge with affiliate marketing is it’s not your own product and if you’re recommending it, people are like, “Okay, I see you’re using this but I don’t really trust it yet,” but if you have the person who owns that product come on, I mean they’re going to do a good job for you.

Josh Felber:                          Talking about it, right, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               They want to.

Josh Felber:                          Use them to promote it.

Pat Flynn:                               Right, exactly, but then what’s happening is your listeners are starting to develop a relationship with this product and because you’re the one who hosted this person, they’re going to go through your affiliate link to do that. Now I have episodes that I’ve recorded back in 2012 that are continually, I’m keeping track based on special links that are in those episodes, every day, 10 to 50 clicks on those older episodes that were made six years ago.

Josh Felber:                          Right. That’s amazing, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               Which is cool. Again, just dropping those things in there and over time, they exponentially grow into just a massive amount of ways that people can sort of help you increase your income.

Another way to go about it is advertising and sponsorship, which is very popular. However, it’s a little bit difficult at first because you have to get a certain number of people to download.

Josh Felber:                          That they look for, okay.

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, so if you go through a company like Midrole.com or other ones that sort of connect the sponsor to your show, you’re going to have to have a minimum of about 50,000 downloads per month, which is quite a lot, especially for those just starting out. However, if there is a company out there that you really want to sponsor, just go out and reach out to them because the way that it works typically is on a CPM model or a per thousand listens.

Maybe you only have 1,000 listens per show, but if they are the most targeted audience who always [inaudible 00:29:17] for you, well a company is obviously going to want to get in front of that and you can charge a lot more. You can do a trial run for one episode just to prove yourself to them too, and that can work.

On top of that, there’s another tool out there called Patreon, which a lot of people are using, especially in the podcasting world but it’s not just for podcasts but what it does is it allows your fans or your audience to support the show in a way that’s very much like PBS. Like supported by viewers like you. A person could pledge, for example, “Oh, I’ll pledge a dollar for every episode you come out with.”

If they’re like a huge fan of your show, that’s going to be totally worth it, right, but imagine if you get 4,000 listeners to each pledge a dollar for every episode you come out with.

Josh Felber:                          Yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               Now we’re talking about some good money coming in. It makes the audience feel good because they feel like they’re a part of it and they’re supporting the show, right?

Josh Felber:                          [crosstalk 00:30:01]. That’s pretty cool.

Pat Flynn:                               Plus, you can remove the sponsors from there, which does take up a little bit of air time.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               There’s a number of different ways to go about it. One of my favorite things to do is take people behind the scenes of launches that are coming up. When I came out with my book “Will It Fly?” last year, which was awesome, to lead into that, I did some solo podcast episodes that were just talking about the process of writing a book, and what it was like to work with a team and get it edited and all that was entail with that.

Josh Felber:                          That’s cool.

Pat Flynn:                               I interviewed people who were experts in strategies for launching a book. Again, providing value, but at the same time, just dropping hints about my book coming out so by the time the book came out, it kind of-

Josh Felber:                          It was already planted seeds out there, stuff everywhere.

Pat Flynn:                               For sure, and I did the same thing recently with my product launch for a course that I came out with, so taking people behind the scenes with your podcast or any platform you have is a good strategy to lead into a launch that you have coming up.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome, man. I think we got a couple minutes left so I guess what’s one piece of technology that you couldn’t live without?

Pat Flynn:                               Oh gosh, my calendar. If it doesn’t get scheduled, for me at least, it doesn’t get done.

Josh Felber:                          Right, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               I have to be very strict with where I spend my time and without the calendar, it’d be very difficult to manage all the things I have going on, so that keeps me insane. Then the other thing, it’s not necessarily technology, but it’s a tool that I use now with every piece of content that I create.

Josh Felber:                          Okay.

Pat Flynn:                               That’s Post-It notes. I know it sounds old school but I absolutely love Post-It notes because it’s very small, so you can only write down like one or two things, but you can pick them up and move them around. When I’m brainstorming a new book for example, I’ll just write down an idea, put it down, write down the idea, then by the end, I have like 60 different things that I want included in this book because our brains do a great job of coming up with ideas, but not a great job, actually a terrible job, of organizing those ideas.

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               In creating hierarchy or order. What the Post-It notes do is it helps you take all those things in your brain, visualize them, and then you can start to create patterns and clumps, and groups, and hierarchies, and you’ll find through that exercise that a book with just magically form because you’re like, “Oh, here’s chapter one. That makes sense because that’s in the beginning and here are four things that I should talk about in that chapter. Here’s the next step, and here’s the next step,” and then it’s just, your outline is there.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome, yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               If you’re doing a book, or a course, or a series of any kind, like the Post-It notes work really, I feel like Post-It notes should reach out to me because I’ve been helping them so much. I’ve shared this strategy many times.

Josh Felber:                          Sponsor, right?

Pat Flynn:                               Yeah, maybe.

Josh Felber:                          Yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               It is a really, truly magical experience to go through that and actually see your product form right in front of you, where before, it was just like mush in your brain. Where it’s not ever defined until you see it.

Josh Felber:                          That’s like one of the best tips because when I think, like you said, I always think in like those little chunks and it’s like, “Okay, here, I wrote it here on a notebook, or type it in my phone,” but like kind of popping it all just on a little sticky note thing is phenomenal because then I can write those ideas down whether they’re all in one day, over a week, or whatever it may be and then put it all together and say, “Okay, what am I looking at?”

Pat Flynn:                               I do this when I create my courses now too, so I have every lesson in the course has its own Post-It note basically by the end. When I’m ready to start filming, I take that Post-It note out, I put it on my computer, and I’m just focused on that.

Josh Felber:                          On that, right.

Pat Flynn:                               Like I have that note there and that’s my one thing that I’m working on and then as I put it back, I put a giant X over it and I can just see the checklist right in front of me. It’s just such a great way to organize.

Josh Felber:                          That’s awesome. It’s like super old school but it’s like super simple, that’s so awesome. It doesn’t require any kind of technology or anything, just super cheap Post-It notes.

Pat Flynn:                               Post-It notes, yeah.

Josh Felber:                          Awesome. Well, I know you got a super busy schedule today. It was such an honor to have you on Making Bank.

Pat Flynn:                               Thank you for having me.

Josh Felber:                          Just learning all the insights, learning all the different ways how we can be better podcasters, even myself and just what we need to do to take the next steps to move forward so, what’s one I guess just last piece of advice or a suggestion or thought or idea you’d like to leave with the audience?

Pat Flynn:                               Sure, so the biggest things I’ve learned over the years as I start to sort of step out of my comfort zone and try these new things, like I always thought I was going to be a blogger, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               I stepped into the video world and the podcasting world and the speaking world and before each of those things, I’ve always been met with a lot of fear and resistance as Stephen Pressfield says in The War of Art. At first, I would just kind of draw back and go back to where I was. That’s why it took me like a year and a half to start my podcast.

Josh Felber:                          Yeah.

Pat Flynn:                               I’ll try it. Uncomfortable, going to go back to what I was used to doing. That was like my security blanket, right, was blogging. I soon realized that the fear that I had was actually a sign that that’s what I should do. That it was something that was meaningful. That it was something that would actually have an effect on my business because it was something I feared, because it was outside of my comfort zone, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               Now I look toward the fear and I go to it. If I don’t have a little bit of a fear or nervousness before I’m doing something or challenging myself with something new, that’s when I get really scared because that means I’m probably not going big enough.

Josh Felber:                          Right, okay.

Pat Flynn:                               The challenge I have to you is ask yourself, with whatever it is that you’re doing right now, are you a little bit nervous about it, and if not, I would actually be scared of that, the fact that you’re not nervous about it. It probably means you’re not going big enough because you can only make progress when you go big and bold, right?

Josh Felber:                          Right.

Pat Flynn:                               It takes bold actions and the sign of that happening is you’re a little bit nervous about that next thing, so if you’re not, push yourself even more, go a little bit bigger to the point at which you start to feel in your gut that this is maybe something that is a little bit scary to you. Just keep going toward that as a sign.

Josh Felber:                          Cool. Awesome, and where can people find out about what you’re doing, any of your podcasts or any different links you want to send?

Pat Flynn:                               Sure, thank you. You can just go to SmartPassiveIncome.com and find me there. Everything I have going on is there. I’m very active on Twitter/Instragram @PatFlynn.

Josh Felber:                          Cool, awesome. Well, thank you again.

Pat Flynn:                               Thanks, Josh.

Josh Felber:                          Appreciate it. I am Josh Felber. You are watching Making Bank today. Get out and be extraordinary.