Tyrone: Welcome to another Internet Business Podcast with Tyrone Shum from the Tyroneshum.com website or blog. Today I’ve got really special guest here, his name is Pat Flynn. I stumbled across Pat when I was actually chatting to Chris Ducker but also I also known Pat just through Yaro Starak’s blog as well. I haven’t really sort of communicated or talked to him more recently because I was just reading his blog and I got really interested in more of the stuff that he’s doing. So I thought it’s a great opportunity to get him to the call because he’s got very much same mindset as what we look at and also I wanted to share with you exactly what he does and how you can also model off him to. Welcome on to the call Pat!

Pat: Thanks Tyrone, I appreciate it. I’m looking forward to answering some questions for you and your audience too.

Tyrone: Yeah, it’s really great. I guess for the people who don’t know who you are and want to find out a little bit more about you firstly, share you story, love to hear about how you got started and what got you started on your first blog.

Pat: Ah, sure of course. Well, when I graduated college, I actually went to University of California in Berkeley. I studied Architecture. I loved it, I got a nice 9 to 5 job after that. I really saw my whole life ahead of me like planning to work til I was 6 to 5. It was all set for me. I really love my job then the whole economy thing happened and I lost my job and I was kind of having this turning point where I could decide whether to look for another 9 to 5 job or try getting business online which I heard so much about lately. I have been keeping up with people like Yaro and Darren Rowse from Problogger and people from all different kinds of Internet businesses like us listening to a lot of podcasts. It’s really inspirational but I just never had the mind to do it because I really enjoyed my 9 to 5.

Tyrone: Well, can I just interrupt you there…

Pat: Sure.

Tyrone: When was this when you’re still working on a 9 to 5?

Pat: Sorry it was in 2008. I was laid off at the end in October of 2008.

Tyrone: Okay, so it’s been about 2 years ago since you’ve basically moved or have been laid off and moved into starting online business.

Pat: Yes.

Tyrone: Yeah, how did you find out that blogging or starting up a business like what you’re currently doing now was like you know, what led you to doing it?

Pat: It’s kind of funny story because it was pretty much accidental. Right before I got laid off, I had a blog. It was a blog that I used just for me. I didn’t plan on having anyone else look at it which sounds kind of weird but here’s the reason. I used the blog to help myself keep track of notes for a particular exam I was taking for the architecture industry. It’s the LEED exam, L-E-E-D which stands for Leadership, Energy and Environmental Design. My handwriting is terrible and I’m really good at typing and using computer and stuff so I was using the blog as a content management system to help myself to study and organize my notes to pass this exam. Eventually, everyday I put my notes on, organize it and go back to it later and study off a bit. If I was you know, on a business trip somewhere, I would just go online and check my notes there and I don’t have to hold a huge binder or anything like that which is also helpful. And then from there, I passed the test and for some reasons, I just checked my stats one day and I saw that thousands of people around the world are actually checking out my notes online for this particular exam. It scared the crap out of me because I was like I didn’t understand how the web worked really and I was like how did this people find me. It’s kind of like what if they don’t like my notes, what if they fail because my notes aren’t right but I got a lot of inspiration from a lot of people who are doing Internet business. I was like you know what, if I have traffic I knew that if I have traffic I could somehow, make use of it. So when I saw that traffic I was like, okay, I’m going to make sure the content on my website is perfect for them. I know all about this exam now, I’m going to try to become an expert for these people and help these people out because there was no other resource like it which is partly why I’ve put it online too. After doing that, more and more people started coming to the website and people are chatting in the comments area, asking questions and I always respond, I joined people on forums and respond there, and people would come from the forums that I was talking to onto my website. Apparently, I was doing everything a blogger should do to get more traffic but I didn’t know that I was doing it.

Tyrone: You’re doing it automatically, it just happened.

Pat: It automatically did. The natural way thing should happen which they think why those are the best techniques because those are the natural techniques in Google’s eyes. Apparently, I had ranked super high for the keywords that I was using and again, because I was using it in such a natural way and not doing other techniques that you’re not supposed to do. Then I had got laid off and I used that moment to think about my blog, where was that and I said okay, I’m going to try for a few months and see if I can monetize this thing. If I can’t I’m going to go back and look for another 9 to 5 job. If I can then we’ll just go from there. So, first I started to put Adsense on the blog which is a normal thing people do trying to monetize it and it did work and I was earning like 50bucks a month, 50bucks on the first month. It was pretty good and that was my first money ever made online. It’s an amazing feeling just to see. You know I check every single hour to see like I earned 12cents in the last hour, it’s pretty awesome for doing nothing, you know basically which is a good feeling. But then from there, I went to find private advertising where there are other companies in the industry that also have lead stuff, like seminars and practice test and stuff. So I would sell space on my website for 125×125 advertisement.

Tyrone: But firstly before you go into that, a lot of people would go okay, it sounds like it’s easy to get advertising from Google Ads but doing private advertising, it’s another step and another level there. How did you approach your people to be able to get advertising because not everyone knows about this?

Pat: Well actually yeah, one company contacted me first because I guess they had people doing research for websites that were ranking high and the keywords that they wanted to, so they found me first. Then once I figured out that hey, I can rent space on my blog for people and then I went in contact with people. What I did was I saw who’s advertising on Google Ads, I saw what those companies were and I just contacted them directly and I said I can rent you a nice looking banner, you know not just a text link or something on my site for extra amount of dollars. First when I did it, it was like 50bucks a month and I was like that was awesome, that was a lot of money asking for someone. But then that’s when I started getting into Internet business, talking in forums and asking a bunch of questions. I was like 50bucks a month, would that give much traffic? You can get a lot more, why don’t you just try asking for $500 and see what happens and I said “Are you crazy?”

Tyrone: That was 5 times more.

Pat: I was like no way but I did. You know much of the companies agreed because I guess they saw my site as a valuable hub for their type of audience and I was making 500bucks a month or a little bit more for some other ads that run or two. From there, I was making decent amount of money and a lot of bloggers would be happy with 500 to 1000 a month but to earn a living off for that, not quite enough. So then I joined a lot of different mastermind groups, asked even more questions from gurus and stuff like that. Just trying to figure out what I could do, if there was anything else I could do. They said “Why don’t you come up with some type of product?” I was like, “Oh, I don’t know.” What was funny was other people from my blog were asking me or telling me that I should write a book about LEED too. But I had always say no, I don’t want to do that. It sounds complicated. I don’t want to spend a month or two writing something, you know what if it doesn’t sell?

Tyrone: You know you always, when we first started you always come through with all these fears. You ask yourself.

Pat: I know.

Tyrone: It’s like there’s always something to hold you back isn’t it?

Pat: It’s human nature to think that we’re going to fail at something which is kind of sucky which keep hold us back. Truth is if I never tried it, I wouldn’t be where I am today and I’m probably stuck in some job in a bad economy and worrying about my security and my family. But then I took the plunge, I spent a month and a half creating this e-book, a study guide for this test. The first month that I launched it, I made $88,000 which was more money that I’ve ever seen in a month, in three months actually. Then doing some more research and talk to more people, they say come out with another product. I came out with an audio guide which is basically my e-book guide but I had someone to read it off and record it and then I packaged it together. Then I had three products — I had an e-book, an audio guide and an e-book audio guide together that were selling on the blog. At first month I’ve relaunched that, I think I made $28,000.

Tyrone: Wow, did you also have a subscriber base at first to be able to launch it too? Or did you just launch it out onto the blog?

Pat: No, I didn’t know know anything about RSS or email lists or anything like that. I just put it on the blog, put a little banner on top so people would see it and then words just spread. I guess the content was that good that people told their officemates about it and then their officemates told their friends about it. It just spread like wow, fire.

Tyrone: Is the industry that you just targeted would you consider it still a niche industry or is it quitely widely known in that market because I don’t have no idea about architecture or any of those?

Pat: I mean it’s growing and there’s a lot more competition now but there are people underneath it everyday doing fairly well with it. The tests about green buildings and sustainable architecture is a big deal now making sure that environment is safe and people aren’t overusing materials and stuff like that. It was a growing niche at the time and I think any one can be successful in any niche if they have the passion in it and if they do what it takes to make that they’re successful like CrushIt from Gary Vaynerchuk. He’s really big on that and it doesn’t matter what it is. Just do it a hundred percent and put everything into it and you will succeed. I really truly believe in that because I think my back was up against the wall like I had to make this work for my family. I was about to get married at that time, I just had to make it work. I think that’s partly why I’m successful because there’s nothing holding back.

Tyrone: Absolutely. It’s interesting because coming to talk a little bit more about mindset, I think a lot of us are held back just by the fear of fact because we don’t know or we’re uncertain about what’s going to happen. Just as you said you’re looking at releasing your e-book to that niche that you’re doing currently right now and you just thought, if I did months or so, 2 months of work in this, I don’t know it’s going to sell. With all that effort, you just look back and you go wow, it’s really worth it. You’re just overcoming your fear and just taking action in doing it. And, even if it didn’t work, at least that way you’ve got something out there that you could continually sell anyway and eventually if you get enough sustainability for getting the book out there, you could sell more of it.

Pat: And, you learn from your mistakes. Honestly, the best teacher that I’ve had was just experience. That’s how I learned how to create blogs. Now I can create a new blog or website in a day if I want to. Whereas before, it’ll take me forever.

Tyrone: We realize how easy it is once we’ve done it once.

Pat: Exactly.

Tyrone: It’s much, much easy for the second time around. Okay, with the background of your green exam now, I noticed also you’ve been having another blog on along the side called Smart Passive Income. How did you come across starting that one? Share a little story behind that.

Pat: This one I started because once I start to see a little bit of success online, I wanted to tell other people that it honestly was possible to make money online without scamming people like honestly, truly making good content and bringing value to people, there is a way making a living doing that and I wanted to share that with people. I kind of started the blog right as I was launching my e-book, right when I knew that I was making money from advertising and stuff and I just want to go through my experience with my lead site and share that alongside. So I’m very transparent with everything that goes on from how much money I make, how many books I sell, things I’ve done, marketing wise that I’ve done things that I shouldn’t have done. Because I want people to understand that it is possible and give people a fast track to deal with that off. Don’t be confused when I say “fast track” because really there isn’t a fast track or an easy button to being successful online. If anyone that says they have a get a rich-quick program, that doesn’t exist don’t trust it. It does take work but you know if you learn from the right people, like I did and you’re inspired and you have passion, you can get there faster than you would if you just win it blindly.

Tyrone: That is exactly right. I think the key to hopping on to fast track is to learning from successful people who’ve already currently done it. It won’t be exactly same journey as what the successful people have done but the thing is, it’s the experience and knowledge that you gain from these guys. You can put it into your own personality because what people will be looking for is you.

Pat: Exactly.

Tyrone: That’s really good.

Pat: For Smart Passive Income blog, I don’t sell anything off of it, I have a newsletter but I don’t really promote anything on it. It’s just giving away content to help people out. I do want to eventually have a membership website or something for that but I only don’t want to think about that until way down the road because I don’t want the membership website to sort money and to influence the way the bloggers are working right now. It’s totally working whatever I’m doing, all I’m doing is providing good content and not being aggressive and selling anything. I do make money off the site just by casually placing affiliate links in a transparent way on the Resource page and within my blog posts sometimes and I’m still making money. I think people like that because I’m not forcing them to buy anything or making them feel they have to get something. I’m just putting it out there and letting them follow if they have to.

Tyrone: Yeah, exactly. That’s really good because I think people like that. They don’t want to be sold on something that they’re not wanting to buy but to provide good information and when you build up the relationship, it’s a lot easier to recommend or offer products to them and they can afford buying the product that they know that’s been recommended by you. It’s a lot easier for them to follow and buy your products as well.

Pat: Yeah, I think people are getting a lot smarter these days. You’d want to put trust to people that they’re going to purchase online before anything else. Building that authority and trust I find the most important thing. Going back, I think that’s why I was so successful is because I spend good amount of time just answering people’s questions and becoming the resource to people. Earning their trust, becoming the expert, you know I really wasn’t an expert and I didn’t know the whole system front to back. They saw me as the expert because I was the one online talking about it. The website was mine so they saw me as the expert so when I came out with that product, I think that’s why it’s kind of sold automatically. I was giving away all these free content and people were, “Oh this guy is giving away free content and now he’s come out with this, this must be awesome.” So I think that’s what drove the sales.

Tyrone: Exactly, I think it’s relationship as you said. So in terms of Smart Passive Income, the blog where you talk a little bit more about your journey and how you make money online, what are some of the tips can you also give to the listeners at the moment on how they can create passive income and what are some strategies that they could get started on if they’re looking to creating streams of income online?

Pat: I think the most important thing with passive income is you just have to find what works for you. Not necessarily copying someone else’s system but you know, take it and mend it and make it your own…

Tyrone: Not to say modeling someone’s system…

Pat: Yeah exactly but you know there’s a lot of different ways to make money online, you just have to find what works for you like some people I know, some of my online friends, they really enjoy affiliate marketing. They go to Google Adwords, purchase keywords and do all that stuff but that’s not really passive because once you stop doing campaigns, you’re going to stop making money. So you kind of have to think about how you’re going to run it automatically for you. That’s really important in the kind of business that I want to create was that I didn’t want to have to go to post office to ship something. That’s why my e-book is an e-book. I don’t have a physical product because I don’t want to go into the post office everyday or with every order. Some people maybe want to but that’s not the lifestyle that I want to design. There are third party services that I use that helped me to accept payments and deliver the e-book automatically which is again so helpful so I don’t have to be there in order for the transaction to be fulfilled. I can visit you in Australia and I can sell book while I’m on the plane or they’re on vacation or something. Maybe it’s not an e-book that you’re interested, maybe you want to create a membership website, and so you create those systems, you put content in it and drive traffic to it and once people are in there, you want it time released so that people are in there obtaining information on a monthly or weekly basis. You know, you setup your business to do that for you. It’s all about the technology and I know you talk a lot about your iPhone and how much that has helped you. It totally helped me too and also in regards to iPhone, I’ve been dubling a little bit with iPhone Apps and trying to test that as source of passive income as well. So we could talk about how the outsourcing part works later but you know I just have my ideas, my business partner and I, we have just come up with our ideas and we give it to a developer. He creates them, put it onto Apple and we start making money. Some have been done better than others but it’s possible passive income as we’ve seen. It’s kind of different market, it’s also changing because Apple’s always coming out with new stuff. So I wouldn’t plan 20 years down the road based on iPhone Apps but it is another way of generating income without having to trade your hours of time for it. That’s what passive income really is all about — finding business solutions that don’t require per hour or you don’t have to trade your time for money and when you stop working, you stop making money. This is like you work hard and then you’re done with that project and it continues to make money again and again for you. Where you can go for vacation if you want, or work on more passive income streams which is what I do. I’m not a big traveler, I just had a kid so we’re at home all the time but I’m constantly working on new projects. People are always like, “Pat, how was the passive income because you’re always working so much.” People always see me online on my blog and stuff, Well I have four other businesses and income streams at all that are automatic and already working for me and I’m trying to find more. So if I just stopped blogging and stop doing everything, I think I can sustain myself for a good amount of time for having to worry about it.

Tyrone: It’s exactly right. I think the thing is that people misconceives thinking that if you have passive income, it means that you don’t have to work. But at the same time, if this is your passion which I find blogging or helping people online that’s why I continue to do it, it’s not like about I do it because I have to but because I want to. It’s really a lifestyle choice decision which gives you the flexibility to spend time with your family and be able to do more projects like you enjoy doing as well. But as you said, at the end of the day, if you stop working today or stop doing blogging or any of those things, you still have automated income that comes in day in, day out without you having to do it anymore. That’s really passive so congratulations with that.

Pat: Thank you. Just to give you folks an idea on my green exam academy website for the LEED exam, I’ve probably put in 3 hours of work a month for that. It generates few thousand like 5 to 6 thousand a month just few hours of work. Because at the beginning I’ve put in 80 hours of work a week to set it up but now, nothing. It’s just a machine right now basically.

Tyrone: Exactly, so actually people might be interested in thinking okay, you’ve got these systems all setup, you’ve got the technology that you’ve been talking about, do you have other people helping your or managing your business besides your business partner that’s on your iPhone Apps. Do you have anyone else helping you manage the LEED exam, do you have anybody else helping you manage your blog and all those kinds of things?

Pat: I do but I don’t have anyone working full time for me. But again, if you wanted to create a passive income business, you have to have some man-hours involved to be able to make it work, it doesn’t have to be your man-hours, you know you can outsource it. I know your people know about that already but for me, personally my green exam website and on SmartPassiveIncome.com I do hire out for search engine optimization and also website designers and graphic designers when I need it so it’s on a per project basis. I have people that are kind of on-call for me, so when I need something done, I’ll just email them and they get it done and I pay them for that. I find that because again, because of the lifestyle that I want to live, I don’t want to have to manage people full-time. And, some people are okay with them and some people are really good at doing that in creating systems where they don’t have to constantly keep telling them what to do. They got procedures or procedure lists and stuff that they can do everyday and if something happens, they already know what to do without even having to ask you which is part of the idea of when to outsource, you know.

Tyrone: It really depends on what your business is. As you said, most in your business is all technology-based and if anyone can do it that way, I highly recommend firstly automate it by technology first and use it as much as you can because technology is going to be there anyway. Everything online is all electronic anyway like your payment systems, no one has to sit down there physically to process it for you. It is all done electronically or automatically. I think that that’s the key first, is to have it automated first to technology before you do outsource to find man-hours. Like obviously handing customer support, you’re not going to have it automated with the things you do but when you’ve got the right people in place, it comes very easy.

Pat: Luckily with the online exam website, the customer surface, I handled but it’s only a few emails a week. But if it started to get crazy, I might have to put in ticket support systems or hire people out that would talk to these people but luckily I haven’t got to that point. But there are always options to automate if you need it.

Tyrone: Absolutely. All right well, I know that you’ve been a fan of Tim Ferriss as well because I read one of your posts going back to when you bought 10 4-Hour Work Week books.

Pat: I have one here though, this book whew.

Tyrone: I don’t have one right here that’s similar and I just received it yesterday. I do have the original version and this is my version here. That’s the original version.

Pat: Oh wow, I never saw that cover.

Tyrone: Yeah, that’s the Australian version.

Pat: That’s cool.

Tyrone: You’ve got the American or U.K. version there so I’ve got my version that looks exactly with that one. You talk about as well that you model off that and also you’ll be giving those books away, what things have you learned from Tim Ferriss’ 4-Hour Work Week, and how do you implement some of those things in your business? Maybe just the two points of those things.

Pat: Sure, the first thing is just the business model as a whole and just visualizing it. If you have a business, I recommend writing out exactly how it works like a flowchart, exactly what happens when a customer arrives, where they go and what people are involved. If you can create it so that the only thing that’s pointing to you is receiving money then you’ve got a Tim Ferriss’ business model. He has all these different things that’s working over here. You know, customer comes in, goes to website, purchases something on automatic service where it automatically delivers here and all the stuff that’s happening. He’s just written here on a little line down here that’s money is flowing into his pocket and all the stuff that’s happening automatically. There’s no connection from him over to there except money coming into his pocket. I draw it out, I have these big whiteboards on the back here and that’s what I do when I’m trying to look for different passive income business models. I actually draw it out to see how involved the money has to be. I have to make a decision whether I want to be that involved or if there’s a way to automate it using technology, service or outsourcing to someone else. So that’s first thing, really checking out his business model. That’s kind of a theme behind the whole creating businesses that work for you instead of you working for your business in order to make it happen. Second thing is just kind of stepping out of your box and doing things that are risky that you wouldn’t normally do. He has these exercises in the book, I don’t know if you remember but like he has one thing where you go to some public area and just lay down on the ground. Put yourself on uncomfortable situations so that you can learn how to deal with things like that when it happens on your business or you can learn how to think out of the box and come up with these new innovative ways to do business online and that’s really important. The last thing has to do with email. He’s really big on his emails and not checking them hardly ever. He has systems where he just checks them maybe once a day or once or twice a week.

Tyrone: What are your thoughts on that say, with the business that we run, do you think we could run it like that?

Pat: It’s so hard. First, just we have this like habit of checking emails. Before I read the book, I would check my email every 15 minutes and I was like addicted to email. I would keep pressing the reload button because maybe someone sent me something in the last… But I’ve cut it down to twice a day because I do have customers emailing me and I do make sure I tell them on my website on my contact form I say I check emails twice a day and if I don’t get back to you within the day, try emailing me at this separate email address so they’re not expecting you to respond right away which helps.

Tyrone: Which is important. I think when I was rereading the book, the updated version, there was a subscriber or reader who’s just left down a really neat tip which I thought I’ll share as well. He apparently has his emails to be sent back to him at a scheduled time of the day so therefore he doesn’t receive those emails at separate times a day. For example, if you’re receiving 15 emails spread over 8 hours a day, somehow he’ll set it up inside his mailing system to only send it out to him at 3PM in the afternoon which is only when he checks it so it forces him to not check it within the day. It’s like I can’t check it until it’s 3 o’clock.

Pat: That’s good, that’s again another way to use technology to help you run your business in a correct manner. It’s like with the people who are checking FaceBook all the time. People are addicted to FaceBook and there are programs out there that you can setup so that it actually disables your FaceBook for certain amount of time.

Tyrone: I still haven’t got into that. I’m not a strong FaceBook fan even though I use it for business, I don’t check it as fruitfully as people do. Probably once a week for answering emails or messages or stuff like that.

Pat: Yeah, I’m like I just use it mainly for business or Fanpage and stuff.

Tyrone: That’s totally cool. One last thing, you mentioned about iPhone and your project with iPhone at the moment, how does that all going. Why was this project born in comparison to other projects for example like membership sites potentially. What got you inspired to start iPhone App?

Pat: Well the inspiration came from a few success stories that my buddy and I heard. I don’t know if you’ve heard the app called iFart.

Tyrone: I’ll say I have it because I have an iPhone.

Pat: It was an app done by Joel Comm actually and it has like different kinds of fart sounds and you can set it to do different things like you can have it so it goes off in 10 seconds, you can set it and then place it somewhere 10 seconds later or you can have it so you can set it, put the phone down and when someone touches it, it farts. It’s kind of obnoxious crazy gag app and that came out 2007 I think or no, 2008. I forgot when it came out but it was making like $27,000 a day when it first came out.

Tyrone: He said he didn’t actually offer it for free, he sold the app.

Pat: No he sold it for 99cents and it made $27,000 a day. It was the number 1 app in so many countries and it made a lot of money and I’m sure he’s making over a million already. There’s a lot of other apps out there that have the same story so that’s kind of what got us involved. We were thinking about how the business model works, we put up an app and it makes money for you. We were really trying to see if that was very viable passive income stream so that’s we did. In early 2009, we first came out with our first few applications and we hired someone to develop them for us. It was a really long process because we were just because we’re new to the scene and figuring everything out but it’s a lot of fun. We get to be creative, we get to explore this new market and we actually did fairly well. We didn’t make $27,000 a day but we’re making few thousands of dollars per application. Just recently, we started to come out with more so we’ve came out with 4 in 2009 and we’ve just let them sit there for a while they’re generating couple of thousand dollars for us every month and we’re like it was good, it’s not bad. So we’ve decided to put more out there so just in the last month in May of 2010 we came out with 12 new ones.

Tyrone: Wow, that’s amazing.

Pat: You know we hired a lot of different developers doing it all for us at the same time. Again, another benefit of using outsourcing solution getting a lot done in a short amount of time. Last month, we almost broke $10,000.

Tyrone: Wow, that’s amazing.

Pat: Yeah, honestly the numbers are slowing down a little bit because I guess apps kind of have short life span before they plateau but when it first came out, you get a big boom and it levels off a little. But we’re coming out with more and we’re excited to see where that takes. Hopefully one day, one of them will be back on $27,000 day app.

Tyrone: I think it’s persistence once you get to that point. Once you get these systems in place, I’m sure it’s easy to crank out one application out to another.

Pat: Yeah, absolutely.

Tyrone: One thing I’m curious though you said it is short life span for apps because people are pretty quicker at saying it’s not suitable and going to look at the next one. How do you apply say Internet business model off this? How would you promote apps to get it out there even more. Because once you’ve got this application there, people do look at it but don’t you have to still market it?

Pat: Yeah our apps have been successful because we have been putting a little bit of marketing program behind them. We do run advertisements. On the iPhone, there’s a company called AdMobs which runs just like Google Adsense or Google Adwords. You can pay to place your ads like on Google Adwords and then you can put in code on your application to have the ads shown so it generates ads automatically like Google Adsense would. So we bought apps and other iPhone games out there that have this code, show our application and then people click on it and download our app too. That’s one way, not being afraid to pay for advertising is something that’s important because you do have to pay a little bit. You know on my green exam academy website, I hadn’t spend a dime on advertising but I know if I did, I’ll have much wider audience or wider reach. I’m planning on going into paid advertising for that site very soon. Another thing is just making sure to get your application or your website or blog in front of people’s eyes. You can’t just create something and think that it’s going to automatically blow up. You know, you have to put it in front of people’s eyes. For blogs or your business, that means getting on directories, doing guest posts, submitting videos to get the videos out there or doing a podcast, they’re going to hit that arena, or like syndicating content and getting it out to as many places as possible to make sure people see you and them come to your website. For iPhone apps, that’s all about getting into top 100 or 200 lists, getting to iPhone app websites, getting reviews, paying for advertising. There are number of strategies for the iPhone apps like coming out on a weekend because weekends are more popular or having an iPhone app that starts with a letter at the beginning in the alphabet because when iPhone puts their apps out there, they list them out alphabetically. So there’s just little things like that you learn along the way, just nice tricks that gets your app recognized.

Tyrone: It’s very similar to a way likes say for example in YouTube. If you get yourself on the top page of YouTube, you would generate tons and tons of traffic. It’s the same thing with the iPhone, if you get yourself on the top 10 list, you’re going to have people looking because that’s what people really search for. A lot of times when I’m down looking for app, I’ll look for the top 10 and straightaway when I get bored to it, I’ll not search anything else.

Pat: There is a little bit of keyword research or keyword optimization with your apps too but iTunes searches in kind of mystery. There’s no analytics tool for iTunes search and stuff but Google obviously has that ability to see what people are searching as well.

Tyrone: I actually wanted to ask you as well with your iPhone applications, are they targeted towards or did clients give you the idea for creating the apps, or did you do it based on games?

Pat: No, this is just our wacky minds coming out of things. Our niche is kind of in the same arena as the iFart app that I was talking about. It was more of a fun thing for us, it’s a hobby, it’s something fun. There are a lot of successful iPhone apps in our niche base like medical applications, or travel applications, navigations. There are a lot of different niches within iPhone apps just like their own blogs or businesses that you can target that people are searching for and that you can do fairly well. But ours is just gag…

Tyrone: Having fun…you know just silly stuffs like that.

Pat: Yeah.

Tyrone: Actually the other day, this was going back few months ago actually I was thinking I could probably see that if I could hire someone to do an iPhone app, I thought that’ll be cool to get that stuff.

Pat: There’s actually like a lot of them already. It’s weird because you think of an idea and you look and it’s there already but honestly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. I think that scares a lot of people too with businesses because when they have an idea and they search online and they go ah, someone already did it, I’m going to move onto the next one. Well, do some research on that person’s doing that doing your idea. Are they doing it the way you would do it? Is there other way you could do better than them? Or, maybe you can collaborate with them and make it better for everyone else, I don’t know. But I think that a lot of people stop with their ideas once they found someone else doing it. I always use this example, there’s like, I think I left it on the yellow pages here in the phonebook, but it was like 789 dry cleaners in San Diego alone. It’s like who need those many dry cleaners but they all are really successful, right? Because they do their own thing and they do their own niche on their location.

Tyrone: And, what’s interesting that’s exactly what I’m going to say with the app. I was thinking I know it’s already been done but you could do it better. You said exactly what I was going to say so I’m glad you mentioned that. So true like dry cleaners as you said are over 700+ but the thing is that probably they have different client bases, some would be just generally doing it everyday. You just have to find your own niche. That’s what Internet business is all about too. For the people listening, don’t ever give up because if you find something that’s suitable and you’re good at it, you can always come out on top and be good at what you do.

Pat: Absolutely and everyone, all your competitions already laid a baseline for you that you could go off and do something better. They’ve already done a lot of all the research for you so check them out and do better than them.

Tyrone: Exactly, that’s positive. So look at that as well. All right, well Pat, I’ve been really, really grateful to be able to be able to interview you today. It’s an absolutely fun call and podcast.

Pat: And it’s my pleasure to brought up farting and stuff.

Tyrone: So that’s part of the fun.

Pat: Yeah.

Tyrone: I thought maybe just to end this call out, if people want to find out more about you and get in contact with you to learn more about what you do, how do they get in contact with you?

Pat: Sure, you could find me over my blog at SmartPassiveIncome.com. Actually if you want a quick response from me or if you have questions and you want to say Hi, find me out on FaceBook on my FaceBook page that’s FaceBook.com/SmartPassiveIncome.

Tyrone: Yeah, that’s an excellent FaceBook page and it’s something I actually learned from you. With the first video that you did on how to create FaceBook Fanpage, it actually blew me away. It’s so simple and it’s so effective.

Pat: Thanks, I appreciate that. Actually YouTube asked to partner with me on that video because it’s been getting so much traffic which is pretty cool and just today actually, I think I just surpassed 2,000 fans on my Fanpage.

Tyrone: Congratulations!

Pat: Thank you, thank you. It’s been a good ride and I love FaceBook for business. I think it’s better than Twitter and any other way to connect with people and hold conversations and go back to them later. It’s a great way to be viral too.

Tyrone: Absolutely. I found that as well. Yeah, definitely guys just check out Pat’s blog as well. It’s awesome and it has a lot of great content that you can learn. If you want to hear any more of these additional podcasts, you can go to Tyroneshum.com. And, this is the end of the call for today so thanks very much again Pat for coming on.

Pat: Thanks guys!

Tyrone: It’s a pleasure for me to be able to do it and yeah, hope to see you soon.

Pat: Yeah, we’ll talk soon right?