Category Archives: Case Studies

Million Dollar Passive Income: Pat Flynn

Posted on by • 0 Comments

If you’re in online marketing, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of Pat Flynn. He’s the founder of Smart Passive Income, a website that helps people create and grow online businesses.

Pat’s income is in the seven-figure range per year. He earns money through affiliate marketing and selling his own products teaching others how to make money online. And he runs a popular podcast, too.

Flynn began as a blogger, creating a website called Green Exam Academy to help people pass an LEED certification exam. He created an e-book and online course to help people prepare for the exam, and sold it for $19.99.

Once his first product succeeded, Flynn continued to create more information products and courses. He uses his blog and podcast to build an audience, and he uses surveys and feedback from his audience to create products that people love.

Flynn’s products range from e-books and courses on topics like podcasting and affiliate marketing, to a membership community where he offers coaching and support to entrepreneurs.

He’s also written several books you can find on Amazon, including The Edge of a Business, Superfans, How to be Better at Almost Everything, and Will it Fly?

Why is Pat Flynn so Successful at Marketing?

He provides massive value – Flynn built his brand by consistently providing valuable content to his audience. He offers free resources, tutorials, and advice that help people solve problems and achieve their goals. This has helped him build trust and credibility with his audience, which in turn has helped him grow his business.

He’s authentic – Flynn is known for being transparent with his audience. He shares his successes and failures, and he doesn’t try to sugarcoat things. This helps him connect with his audience on a deeper level and build a loyal following. In the beginning he even shared his monthly income with his readers, letting them know what he was earning and how he was earning it.

He’s consistent – He’s been publishing content, producing podcasts, and engaging with his audience for over a decade. This consistency has helped him build a strong brand and a loyal following.

He builds community – He engages with his audience on social media, hosts live events, and encourages his followers to connect with each other. This sense of community has helped him build a strong brand and a loyal following.

Favorite Pat Flynn Quotes:

“The riches are in the niches, but the fortune is in the follow-up.”

“NASA has never launched a mission just because it “sounded like a good idea,” and neither should you.”

“Every second you waste thinking about a hater or troll is a second you’re taking away from those who matter and can benefit from what you have to offer.”

“Your earnings are a byproduct of how well you serve your audience, and you can only best serve your audience when you know exactly who they are, what they’re going through, and what will get them to take action.”

“Good ideas are common, but those who are willing to take action and execute those ideas are far more rare.”

“The world needs you. It needs your energy and what you have to offer, so let’s work together to make sure you dedicate that time and energy to something that matters—both to the world, and to you.”

SEO Case Study / Blueprint for A New Website

Posted on by • 0 Comments

When Margie started a brand new website with no existing SEO strategy in place, she kept notes of what she did to build the content and use SEO to drive traffic.

I asked her to share the highlights of her notes, offering us key insights into how a brand-new website can be built with SEO in mind for someone who has never done SEO before.

Margie’s target audience is people interested in natural and organic soaps. The website will offer a wide range of handmade soaps made from natural ingredients, with a focus on promoting the benefits of natural skincare.

The goals of her SEO strategy…

  • Increase organic traffic to the website
  • Improve search engine rankings for targeted keywords
  • Increase the visibility of the website in search results
  • Drive more sales through the website

Her SEO Strategy…

1: Conduct keyword research: Identify the keywords and phrases that people are searching for when looking for natural and organic soaps. The research focuses on long-tail keywords and phrases, such as “best natural soap for sensitive skin” or “handmade organic soap for dry skin.”

2: On-page optimization: Optimize for the targeted keywords and phrases. This includes optimizing the title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags on all pages to include the targeted keywords. Additionally, the website content is optimized for the keywords, with a focus on providing valuable information that is relevant to the target audience.

3: Content creation: Regularly publish blog posts and articles that are relevant to the target audience. The content is optimized for the targeted keywords and phrases and provides value to the readers. Examples of content topics include the benefits of natural skincare, the dangers of synthetic ingredients, and the differences between different types of natural soaps.

4: Link building: Focus on building high-quality backlinks from other relevant websites. This is achieved through guest posting, influencer outreach, and other link building strategies.

Margie’s Results

After implementing the above SEO strategy, her website saw the following results within 60 days:

Organic traffic: The website began receiving a trickle of organic traffic by the second week. At the 60-day mark she is receiving several hundred visitors per day as a result of the on-page optimization and content creation efforts.

Search engine rankings: The website is ranking top of the fold for 2 long tail keywords with one long tail keyword in the #1 position, and bottom of the fold for 3 other long tail keywords. She expects this to improve dramatically over the next 3 to 4 months..

Increased visibility: As the website becomes more visible in search engine results, it will help to increase brand awareness and drive more traffic to the site. She is also starting to use social media to create brand awareness by running contests and offering tips and coupons.

More sales: With increased traffic and improved search engine rankings, the website is making its first sales. She is working on optimizing her sales pages to increase these conversions, as well as optimizing landing pages to increase subscribers.

Overall, by implementing a comprehensive SEO strategy, Margie’s new website selling handmade soap is successfully increasing its visibility and driving more sales through search engines.

And that’s for something as ordinary as soap. Just think what you can do with exciting benefit-laden information products if you begin optimizing for SEO.

Affiliate Marketing Case Study: Building A $1,000 / Month Residual Income In 7 Days

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Meet Sarah. She’s a fitness enthusiast who runs a popular blog that covers various topics related to health and fitness. She’s building a loyal following and a good reputation in the industry, but she isn’t making any money for her efforts.

One morning she is taking her supplements when it occurs to her that this would be something she could promote to her audience. She finds the website, applies to become their newest affiliate and is accepted.

Sarah writes a blog post telling the story of how she began taking these supplements, what they have done for her, and how she wouldn’t be without them. She includes affiliate links in the post which direct readers to the supplement company’s website.

Sarah shares the blog post on her social media channels and sends an email to her mailing list, letting them know about the supplements and the benefits of using them. She includes the affiliate links in all of her promotions.

To sweeten the deal, Sarah offers her followers an exclusive discount code that they can use when they purchase the supplements. The discount code is only available to Sarah’s followers on their first purchase and it’s an offer many of her readers can’t refuse.

Sarah’s affiliate sales start to roll in and she continues to promote and earn commissions.

Now here’s the best part: When a new customer places an order, they have the option of receiving the supplements on a monthly basis at a discount. If they take this option, then Sarah will receive not just a one-time commission, but additional commissions each month on the automatic shipments.

Encouraged by her success, Sarah continues to promote products from the same supplement company. She creates additional blog posts and social media promotions, each time including her affiliate links and exclusive discount codes.

By the end of the first week, Sarah’s earned close to a $1,000 in commissions from the affiliate program. More importantly, many of the orders are set for monthly renewal. And as the next 3 weeks progress, she makes more sales with more automatic renewals.

That’s almost $1000 in commissions the first week, nearly $3,000 in commissions total for the month, and now she has monthly residual commissions of over $1,000 a month.

Of course, Sarah’s ‘overnight’ success wasn’t overnight at all. She’d already been building her blog and her audience for some time and realized it was silly not to start monetizing. If she had begun promoting sooner, when she first started blogging, no doubt she would have begun making money sooner, too.

Her knowledge of her niche and her customers, as well as and her ability to create valuable content that resonates with her followers created a great deal of trust with her readers. She also leveraged the power of social media and email marketing to promote the products and drive sales. Additionally, offering an exclusive discount code helped to incentivize her followers to make purchases through her affiliate links.

It’s important to note that building a $1,000/month residual income through affiliate marketing in one week isn’t typical. It requires a unique combination of industry knowledge, a loyal following, and effective marketing strategies.

If you already have a blog and an email list, then it might be possible. If not, perhaps it’s time to start a blog and list so that you, too, can begin to reap the power of affiliate marketing.

Mini-Case Study Plus Hidden Business Opportunity

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Victorine Lieske reveals she made $17,000 from her audiobooks on YouTube.

Frankly it never even occurred to me that people would listen to audiobooks on YouTube, but apparently it’s a growing trend.

Book publishing in general deals with spikes and dips in income. You publish a book and get a spike of sales, then the sales dip over the months unless you continue to market the book heavily.

Victorine has 10,000 followers on her YouTube channel and it provides a more stable, predictable income for her.

Plus, it also gives her more exposure which results in more book sales, too.

While Victorine writes romance books, this could work for non-fiction as well.

Now here’s the hidden business opportunity in all this: Of course you can publish your own books on YouTube, but why not act as an agent, publishing all sorts of other people’s books on YouTube?

Choose an author, offer to handle all the details for them and get them online. Send some traffic, be sure to include links to their books on Amazon and share the YouTube income with them.

The author gets their books on YouTube without having to do anything. They get a cut of the income as well as traffic to their books on Amazon and more sales there.

You handle the details and get paid for it. You then add more authors in the same niche and build up your audience and your stable of writers.

The trick to this will be choosing one niche and sticking to it. This way subscribers know just what to expect from your channel and it’s much easier for you to bring in new traffic, too.

How much can you earn? Impossible to say, but if you get ten authors like Victorine and divide the profits in half, the profits are pretty easy to calculate.

$90,000 Lost by Using Fiverr – Here’s What Happened

Posted on by • 0 Comments

Reddit user ShogunSpirit4 (we’ll call them SS4) reports they lost $90,000 because of a developer they found on Fiverr.

SS4 hired a developer to create a website that could accept payments via QR code or by entering their credit card number.

As far as SS4 knew, everything was fine and dandy. That is, until they did an audit and realized funds were missing.

It seems the developer swapped out the QR code for his own. Customers who used a QR code were paying the developer, not the site owner. And the developer was savvy enough to install a backdoor through which he sent payment confirmation and access codes to the customers, making everything appear legitimate.

The total amount of money lost was $90,000 and the developer is nowhere to be found.

How might you prevent this from happening to you?

Your first answer might be to never hire strangers, but you can quickly see the problem with this. Everyone is a stranger until you get to know them, and if you never get to know anyone new then you’re going to be quite limited in business and in life.

A few suggestions:

  • Look for people who have plenty of substantiated testimonials from happy clients. If they are new, don’t let them near your financials.
  • Audit your site often. A quick check could have told this entrepreneur that they had X number of subscribers which meant they should have Y amount of money. This isn’t complicated and would only take a couple of minutes to get the totals and do the math. How it was allowed to progress to a whopping $90,000 is a mystery, unless perhaps they were doing this amount of business in an extremely short period of time.
  • Change all passcodes often and keep tabs on when your site is accessed and my whom.
  • Run test purchases often to make sure everything is working properly.

Being just a little bit paranoid at all times is a good thing. This is your mode of income we’re talking about, the very money that allows you to have a roof over your head and food on your table.

Be vigilant and keep tabs on the numbers like your livelihood depends upon it, because frankly, it does.