Smart Passive Income #168 to #174 - It's a Boy & Tips to Get More Time & Un-Goals & Newspaper & Make Over & Income Report & Questions

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... more personal information: K**** F****, born December 24th 2009 ... nevertheless congratulations ...

... and because we are not able to create more time, Pat has suggestions to use the time we have more efficient:

• Work when you are most efficient
• Use dead time (e.g. when driving, eating, running, ...)
• Skip time wasters (e.g. TV, video games, Facebook, Twitter ...)
• Organize yourself and find strategies which allow you to be more efficient ...
• Love what you are doing ...

... and suitable for New-Years resolutions, don't only think about what you want to do but also what you do NOT want to do ...

... some history delivered from newspapers ... (strange Pat did not mention newspapers to be time wasters) ...

... Pat's site gets a make over ...

... his income for December 2009 is up nearly 1.500 bucks to 10.000,- USD ...

... and a couple of questions to improve your blog:

• Is your content work sharing? no
• How are you encouraging comments? maybe
• Is it easy to share your posts on social bookmarking sites, Twitter, or Facebook? yes
• Is your content worth reading? hardly
• Did you ask your readers? yes, what do you think?

Smart Passive Income #167 - Marketing Forums & Advise

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Pat introduces five forums targeting online marketing. One of them is only available for a small subscription fee. Another one seems to have changed it's name in the last four years (at least the link forwards to another site) ...

Should you like to participate there, Pat has some advice on what to do and not to do:

• Don't just join to promote your own sites ... 
• Use your signature to promote your site (combining this with the advise above, it seems you should guerrilla marketing) ...
• Read the rules before posting (you will be the first one) ...
• Search before starting a new thread (you will be the first one, too) ...
• Help other people in need (you will be among a view) ...
• Don't loose yourself in the forums (you will not be the only one) ...

Smart Passive Income #166 - Tips, Tips and more Tips

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It's Christmas 2009 and Pat has a huge Christmas present for us in form of 51 tips for blogging and online marketing:

for your motivation

• Make sure to write down your goals and check them from time to time to see if you are on track.
• Compare your current state with the past, has it (not) improved? Why?
• There is always a way to improve things.
• Do something, it will hardly improve by itself.
• Use what makes you different to your advantage.
• Don't be frightened.
• Failing provides a way to learn from your mistakes.
• Don't overwork, work smarter.
• Be aware of your karma, give back.
• Enjoy what you are doing.

for your content

• Be consistent with what you are doing (don't change every day/week).
• Be different.
• Use keywords in blog titles.
• Use keywords in anchor texts and links.
• Use different text styles to make text more readable.
• Use different text styles to stress important parts.
• Use stories to involve your readers.
• Use data (Pat really, really likes this one).
• Write for your readers (know your readers).
• Enjoy what you are doing.

for your desgin

• Squint your eyes (or blur a screenshot of your page) to see what stands out of your design.
• Add an elevator pitch to let your visitors know in a couple of seconds what your site is about.
• Allow your visitors to subscribe easily.
• Avoid clutter.
• Be present with personal stories.

for getting noticed

• Comment on on blogs.
• Write guest posts.
• Participate in forums.
• Give interviews.
• Be controversial.

for networking

• Join a group of people with similar goals.
• Attend conventions.
• Join online groups.
• Use social networks.

for Twitter

• Get followers by following others.
• Use a personal photo in your profile.
• Use a custom background.
• Track your links.

for Facebook

• Setup a Facebook page.
• Setup a Facebook landing page.
• Interact with your visitors.
• Encourage comments and link posts.
• Don't get lost.

for growth

• Use different kinds of media.
• Create information products.
• Hire help.
• Work one hour a day for yourself.
• Be confident with your decisions.

Smart Passive Income #165 - Involvement by Asking & Give Avays

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Pat asks his readers to name his new eBook. To increase the involvement of his readers, he promises ten copies of The 4-Hour Workweek for people who subscribe to his blog. ... because we are about three years in the future, we know already the outcome. It's a combination of the responses from his readers ... Does that mean he does not really trust his readers?

Smart Passive Income #164 - How to Avoid Giving Up

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Pat compares being self employed with training for sports (He really loves comparisons) and gives five ways how to remind yourself not not quit either:

• Remember why you are doing it! ... you have a goal/reason, that should be motivating ...
• Don't allow back doors which allow quitting without loosing face ...
• Tell someone your plans so it would be embarrassing to quit ...
• Set a deadline, against which you can work and see if you reached your goals in time ...
• Find people with similar goals, which can support and motivate you ...

Smart Passive Income #161 to #163 - Income Report & Reading List & Affiliate Marketing

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Pat's income for November 2009 is down another 100 bucks, but still at 8.500,- USD.

... and suitable for the Christmas vacation he provides a list of reading/listening/using/doing suggestions.

 ... and he explains three types of affiliate marketing:

• unattached affiliate marketing - where you (or the affiliate provider system) just add randomly affiliate links to your page, hope that somebody clicks on the link, buys the product and makes you some money ...
• related affiliate marketing - where you choose the adds related to your site/topic/content, which is more targeted and suited to your visitors ...
• involved affiliate marketing - where you "truly" believe in the product you are "selling" and create a story around the affiliate link which "should" make clicking and finally buying unresistant ...

Smart Passive Income #160 - Pre Product Market Research

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Pat starts a new series:  How to test your online product before it exists?

First,  check if a market exists

• Enter possible keywords into Google. Do the results contain paid advertisements?
• Are there other web sites selling similar products?
• Check Amazon. Are there books or products related to your product idea?
• Add the keyword "forum:" to your Google search. Are there any forums? Is there a lot of conversation/posts/replies? When was the latest post?
• ...

Smart Passive Income #158 & #159 - Esoteric & What to Learn from Art

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It's Christmas (here in 2013) and Pat seems to know back in November 2009 ... he becomes quite esoteric ...

I Give You Permission to Succeed, By Pat Flynn

 ... which sounds like he just read a self-help book ...  sorry for the sarcasm, thanks Pat what would we do without you? ;)

... and we are back to analogies ... while studying architecture, Pat attended an introduction course to drawing. He learned that to get more realistic images, you should pay special attention to shadows.

What works for art, works for marketing ... meaning when running your marketing campaign, don't focus on the product, but take care of the "shadows of marketing":

• the problem
• the solution, it's benefits and features
• the testimonials
• the original price compared to the reduced one
• the bonuses or free gifts
• the scarcity factor ("buy know, or worry for ever")
• and (because we are using an art analogy) the whole picture

Smart Passive Income #157 - Bad Response

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What to do when somebody speaks bad about you?

... use it to your advantage ... if there is a little bit of truth in it, you can use it to change (your product) ... if not, respond and ask what you should change ...

Smart Passive Income #156 - Why Personal Information?

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Why is Pat sharing so much personal information? He wants to connect with his traffic. Ok, sounds reasonable, and is most likely more effective than cold selling ... but, no fear of identity theft?

... in addition he recommends to encourage comments ... so, please, please, please, leave a commen ...

... I will respond (not only because Pat says so) ...

... and you should hook up further, using Facebook and Twitter ...

... and last (but not least) provide mini-transactions by

• entering a name and email into an opt-in form for a newsletter or a free gift
• using polls, surveys and contests

Smart Passive Income #154 & # 155 - Baby Shower & Wordpress Themes

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More personal information ... Pat is having (had) a baby shower ...

... and he discusses wordpress themes:

There are tons of free ones, however they might be limited - not having features you might need/want, and are not that unique - in a sense that lots of other blogs might look like yours ...

Then there are premium ones, starting at a couple of bugs with the sky as limit ... again, however ... they might have more features, hopefully those you need/want, but are still not that unique ... others might still have bought the same theme ...

... or you might want to go for a custom theme from a designer of your choice ... if you do, let them know as detailed as possible what you really want (including sketches, examples of other sites). The better you specify what you want, the more you will like the result ;)

Smart Passive Income #153 - Fear

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Pat discusses which of two book titles would sell better ... and goes for the one addressing fear.

His conclusion for advertising:

• be as specific as possible defining your product ...
• address fear and show how your product solves that very problem ...

Smart Passive Income #152 - Numbers or Beeing Quniqe

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Pat really likes numbers, and to mix them in ways any mathematician would be jealous. (Multiply pi by two and again with the radius of a circle, ... voila, that's the way you become rich ... sorry, kidding ...)

Three tidbits of "today's" post:

• People buying from you once will likely buy from you again (... in other words, it's easier to satisfy an existing customer, than to get a new one)
• Optimize the "dollars earned per customer" buy finding the optimum price for your product (not too cheap, not too expensive, ... which is actually quite difficult ...)
• You don't need a lot of customers to become successful (if you product sells for the "right" price)

... and two approaches to achieve what's said above:

• enter a popular market, and gain a market share using an unique angle
• specialize in niches (where you might not have to fight with that many competitors, but still need an unique angle)

... or to summarize: BE UNIQUE

Smart Passive Income #150 & #151 - Income Report & Facebook

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Pat's income for October 2009 was back "down" to 8.500,- USD ... which makes a total yearly income for 2008/2009 of 200.000,- USD ...

... and a really, really, really long explanation why and how Facebook can boost a blog ... however Facebook changes quite frequently, so his detailed explanations are a bit outdated...

Smart Passive Income #149 - Result of the Google Page Rank Experiment

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Remember Pat started an experiment trying to rank on top places for a specific google search.
He succeeded within one week making place #1.

He started with a blog post where he put the key phrase, in the title, the URL, the meta description and the first sentence of the post. He made the keywords bold everywhere in the content of the post. He embedded a YouTube video with the same title, using the same key phrase as anchor text and an image with the same title.

The tweeted and linked the post on Facebook (using the same key phrase).

He added bookmarks on Digg, StumbleUpon, and Delicious (again using the same key phrase in title and description) and used a browser plugin (SocialMarker) for a number of other bookmarking sites. (He also used those bookmarks for the YouTube video).

He submitted the video to five other video websites (again including back links and keywords).

He added additional articles (with new content) on eHow, eZineArticles, GoArticles, ArticleAlley, Squidoo and Hubpages linking back to the original article in multiple ways.

... and became #1 ...

Smart Passive Income #148 - Stop Procrastinating

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Glen Allsopp posted a guest post on Pat's blog, defining the turning point of his online career, when he realized that it is more important to actually do something than reading about it, or investigating on how to to it in the most optimized way ... He advises to note down everything you to and then check what was useful and what wasn't ...

Smart Passive Income #147 - Tips for better Writing

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Pat's tip to write better articles:

Do not write for yourself, but for a specific "imaginative" audience.

 Imagine your reader and be as specific as possible:

• What are their names?
• How old are they?
• What do they for a living?
• Where do they live?
• Where do they come from?
• What are their problems?
• Why should they read your article?

 Write to help them, to solve their problems!

Smart Passive Income #146 - Reasons to use Passive Income

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But recaps how passive income works in a video presentation (Remember: Setup a product once using an automated process to sell it ...) and he stresses why it's the proper business model for him:

• It's cheap and easy to setup
• It's low risk
• You do not have to add additional work once the process is setup
• It works parallel to a nine-to-five job
• It works 24/7
• It's easy to test new strategies
• You can use multiple passive income streams
• You get more time and freedom 

... and he provides his #1 Adsense tip: Not to use Adsense, but search for people willing to advertise on your site for yourself ...

Smart Passive Income #145 - Further SEO Optimization & The Experiment Begins

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Pat names three ways (he thinks) search engines use to rank web sites:

• The number of links to the page: More is better, Links from higher ranked pages are even better ...
• The activity of the page: Is it still alive or did the content change recently?
• The relevancy of the page: Does the page match the search query?

Concerning the relevancy he provides more detail:

• The relevancy of the domain and URL themselves
• The title and headlines of the page (especially ones wrapped by header tags)
• The consistency of the content (does the content contain only keywords without "real" text)
• The relevancy of the back links (if their content matches the query)
• The relevancy of the text of the back links (does the text of the actually link text match the query?)
• The relevancy of the used media

For his SEO experiment addressing the items above he decides to:

• Create a new post containing his keywords in the title.
• Create a YouTube video containing his keywords in title, description and tags.
• In the video ask a question to be answered via comments.
• Bookmark blog and video on various bookmarking websites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious et al.
• Post links to the blog and video on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter ...
• Later on write additional articles following the steps above and in addition link to the previous articles and videos.

... let's see what happens ...

Smart Passive Income #144 - SEO by Keywords

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Pat starts a new experiment: Pushing the search ranking of his site using keyword positioning.

He starts by determining which keywords are looked for most - using the tools provided by Goolge Adwords (and another one which does not seem working any more).

Smart Passive Income #142 & #143 - YouTube & Facebook to Conquer the World

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Pat posted his first YouTube video explaining how to create screen casts for (guess) YouTube videos ...

... and he explains how to increase your web traffic using Facebook ...

Smart Passive Income #141 - "Stupid" eMails

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Pat explains, why emails from non-customers - asking questions - are good, even if they do not make you any money for now ... because the writers took time to contact you explaining their problems in need for a solution ... which you could provide ...

Smart Passive Income #138 to #140 - Reading & Wordpress & 5 Tings NOT to DO

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Pat posts a number of reading recommendations - not all of them do exist anymore ...

... and a wordpress plugin to add "social" buttons to your blog ...

... and five things not to do:

• not starting earlier
• under pricing your products
• take the lowest bid when outsourcing
• not testing your products
• not adding more products

Smart Passive Income #137 - "Ten" "Secret" Techniques ...

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Ten (secret) techniques to get more subscribers:

• Add a subscribe button at the top of your page.
• Use squeeze pages.
• Add additional subscribe buttons so that one is visible even when your page is scrolled down.
• Make your subscribe buttons stick out from your page.
• Use pop ups.
• Ask your visitors to subscribe.
• Offer an incentive.
• Less is more.
• Test the above.
• Test again.

... well, there are ten items, two are clearly outdated ... and rewording does not really count, does it? 

Smart Passive Income #135 & #136 - Future Plans & Blog = Bar

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Pat shares plans for his future ...

... and he compares a blog to a bar ... not people rushing through (on the lookout for a public toilet) are good customers, but people who stay and have a drink or two ... and he summarizes:

• First impression is key, huge traffic does not count if everybody hits the back button immediately.
• You need to give your customers something, that they will want to stay and visit again.

Smart Passive Income #134 - What to do when you are afraid to do something

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Pat provides advice on what to do when you are afraid to do something:

• Ask yourself what's the worst that could happen
• Find out what to expect
• Just do it!

Smart Passive Income #133 - Third Law of Business (borrowed from Mr. Newton)

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Sorry Pat, but Newtons third Law is not really translatable to business:

For Every Action There is an Equal and Opposite Reaction

After postulating his third law of business, Pat limits it everything not money related, and gives lots of reasons why it does not work for money, but no reasons why it should work for every thing else ...

Smart Passive Income #132 - Second Law of Business (again borrowed from Mr. Newton)

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As predicted - ok, I could have just read ahead - here comes the next of physics law raped in the name of business:

The acceleration of your success is directly proportional to the amount of force you apply, but inversely proportional to the number of markets you try to reach.

Pat summarizes this trip into the world of physics better by just saying:

Just focus on one market and you’ll do better.

Smart Passive Income #131 - First Law of Business (stolen from Mr. Newton)

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Pat postulates the first law of business which is actually Newtons first law of motion - he just interchanged the word object with business:

"Every business in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it."

Meaning if you have no business, and are dreaming about one, but actually not doing any thing, you will have none.

If you have a business, but is does not so good, and you are not changing anything, it will not get - most likely - get better by itself.

If you have a business, and it does fantastic, and you are not changing anything - according to the law above - it will stay fantastic ... but most likely there will be another law derived from the second law of thermodynamics that will show that it will get worse ...

Did you notice that business people - especially management consultants - always borrow from physics or even better from quantum physics?

Smart Passive Income #128 to #130 - Affiliate Links & Income Report & Five Reasons not to become Self Employed

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Pat is not sure if he should hide his affiliate links ... well he does now (end of 2013) ... seems he made up his mind ...

... and we have reached September 2009 ... his income report for August 2019 is up a couple of hundred bugs, has not reached its former height, but more than 9.000,- is not bad at all ...

After one year of self employment, Pat gives five reasons why you shouldn't:

• You are responsible for everything, you make your own decision, nobody tells you what to do ... of course that's one of the reasons to become self employed ... but sometimes you would like to hand over that responsibility and just do tasks somebody tells you to do ...
• You are master over your time, you can schedule on your whimsy ... which again is nice, but sometimes, you actually will do nothing, and other times you do too much ...
• Procrastination ... it's really much easier to achieve a mind of procrastination than at a work place where your boss looks over your shoulder all of the time ...
• You are sooo alone, no coworkers, ... well that depends on the size of your company ;)
• No benefits, ... true, you get no retirement plan (actually not true, set up one yourself!) ... no medical, or dental plan (again, setup one yourself!) ... no paid vacations (wasn't the idea of passive income, to get paid even when you are not working?) ... no free lunches (... which you actually can pay for yourself when you earn more ...)

Smart Passive Income #125 - to #127 - App Promotion & Informational Content & It's a Boy

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Pat tried to contact reviewer sites for his new App iCaption. But got virtually no feedback. Now he tries a different approach: a contest ...

... and he reveals three ways to sell your informational content:

• a book
• an audio book
• a video

... and his boy is born, congratulations ... (now you know his name, his birthday ... another open door for identity theft :( )