martial arts academy

AoL 033: Building a Successful Martial Arts Academy with AJ Clingerman

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As we have found out, passion filled work comes in many forms. Just last week, we saw how David Picciuto helps others learn about woodworking online. He gets to utilize his past interests in art and design to aid in getting his new found passion of woodworking out into the world.

For me, I’ve recently come to realize that I love teaching, connecting people and ideas, tech, and entrepreneurship. These are topics that I’m constantly learning more about when I can. They are what I naturally gravitate towards.

Likewise, this session’s guest, AJ Clingerman, always knew that she wanted to have her own studio. While originally it was a dance studio, she was open to the idea of starting the Indiana Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy with her husband when she realized how deep his love of the martial art was.

In my opinion, they have a heck of a story and team going on. Able to capitalize on what they both do well. She does business, he focuses on training and training others.

In this session, we’ll get to know half of this partnership. Particularly we discuss with AJ what James told her about BJJ when they first started dating, where the idea of the academy came from, growing pains that she and James have held to deal with while growing the business, what experience she’s obtained from working with people like Scott Manning and Dan Kennedy, and where the idea for her two books came from.

If you’re interested in starting a athletic training academy, or simply want to expand online what you’re already doing, then I think you’ll get a ton out of this talk.

SPECIFICALLY, YOU’LL FIND OUT MORE ABOUT:

  • How AJ got into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu in the first place.
  • How long AJ has envisioned herself running a business.
  • Why she chose not to pursue a college degree.
  • Where the idea for INDY EGO (Extreme Grappling Open) came from.
  • Where the idea for the Indiana Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Academy came from.
  • What kind of growing pains they had to go through when starting a business knowing little about actually running a business.
  • Where the idea for Indy Business Success came from and how this initiative is helping business owners around Indianapolis.
  • How she won Dan Kennedy’s Marketer of the Year award.
  • One thing you should definitely consider when starting a business based YouTube Channel.
  • What gave AJ the idea to write her books.
  • What she thinks about women in men’s fields – especially in martial arts.
  • …and MUCH more.

Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.

ITEMS and PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

SHOW NOTE EXTRAS:

AJ featured on Dan Kennedy’s YouTube Channel:

Marketing Methods Guerrilla Marketing Techniques with AJ Clingerman

How You Can Defend Yourself by Disarming a Gunman

7 Essential Kickboxing Techniques

Thanks for Listening!

Thanks so much for joining us again this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the top of the post.

Also, please leave an honest review for The AoL Podcast on iTunes! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.

If you have any questions feel free to email them over via the email mentioned in the show or by our contact form.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, and/or Google Play Music. It’s absolutely free to do so.

A huge thank-you to you guys for joining us!

Cheers!

backup a wordpress site

UpdraftPlus: A Simple Tool to Backup A WordPress Site

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One of the things that people struggle with all the time when it comes to hosting their own site is backups. How do you backup a WordPress site? Why do you need to? The simple answer is that for one reason or another, data can be lost or corrupted – even on big hosts.

In New Inceptions’ lifetime (which officially has been since 2010), I’ve had malware installed on the same server as mine before. That malware can affect everything and everyone on the storage space of the server.

I was reminded of this in the past week.

You might have noticed that I didn’t have a blog post last week. However, I did write one. It was 2000 words of awesomeness about the things I’ve been learning and relearning about email marketing.

Obviously, it wasn’t posted – and here’s why: after I made the post, I saved it as a draft. Well, something didn’t go right on my particular install at the time. So just as my screen was coming up from “saving”, I scrolled through to see if there wasn’t anything else that might need changed. As I did this, I realized that two-thirds of my post had disappeared!

Needless to say, I was somewhat furious.

I’ll probably eventually redo the post as I get more results from what I’ve been learning. However, in the meantime I’m just going to tell you that it’s going to become a primary focus of mine in the foreseeable future. Up to my first 10k Subscribers – at least!

Long Story Short

I don’t know if this has anything to do with with it, but the install of one of my clients had been hacked into last weekend. No traffic was getting to their site and that meant no revenue for me. Bad times!

In the meantime, I didn’t realize that this was going on. And the next thing I knew, malware started causing issues on my site as well. I didn’t have any idea that this was possible. I always thought that if it was a different install of WordPress, then we wouldn’t have that issue. Not so.

The particular issue that this malware was causing me was CRAZY amounts of traffic – at least for my site. This ended up being bot traffic, and to make matters worse, it was causing my site to call for a ton of Cron jobs. These particular kind of jobs eat at the number of how many “processes” that your host provides you. Hostgator usually limits each shared host customer to 25. Not bad – mainly because you can typically keep it under 10 if your site is humming along without any problems.

Well, as soon as I realized how many processes these jobs were taking up and in how slow my site was acting, I figured that it had been corrupted and I needed to take it offline. I did and thought to myself “well, looks like I’ll have to build the website back up from scratch”. Why? Because that’s what I had to do the last time my site got hacked. In fact, that was when I thought it was a great time to buy Enfold as my theme.

If you’ve never had that feeling, it’s a bad feeling to have. Hopefully what I’m about to say next will prevent you from having to feel that too many times yourself!

One Last Shot

It’s funny, but my engineering training always shows up one way or another. Especially when I have problems with technical things. Where many people might start panicking, my brain just flips to a logical step by step troubleshooting mode.

In this particular instance, when I realized I was going to have to shut down the site, I dropped in a maintenance plugin – actually one that collected emails to let people know when it was back up.

As soon as I activated that plugin, I noticed that the Cron Jobs were dropping and I was able to actually navigate around my site. (Even if this wasn’t the case I know that I can manually cancel processes by going into Cpanel and manually stopping each one. (This is why it’s good to have a large monitor or in my case, multiple monitors. You can do multiple things at once. In grad school it was research on one monitor and write on the other. In this case it was stop one process in Cpanel, and then move to another page. Stop a couple more and move to another page.)

Not too long ago, I had to move my site from its previous installation to where it is now on Hostgator. You’d think this would be somewhat easy. Just like people copy videos on YouTube or Facebook – download from one account and upload on another.

It’s not that simple when transferring a WordPress install.

What you have to do is actually download another plugin that will download all the pieces of WordPress. This includes the files that you upload, but it also takes in account the database (that keeps track of your posts and any links you have on them), the theme, AND the plugins.

Well, I knew I didn’t want to backup all that information. I wanted something that could save just the files I wanted. My old plugin put everything into one archive folder. That simply wasn’t going to do.

I wanted something that could separate the files apart. Because more than likely the affected files were going to be in the theme OR in the plugins.

I eventually found a solution that was going to give me this option.

My Solution for Malware

UpdraftPlus was the backup software that allowed me to separate all these files into compartments. Here’s how the restore went down.

  1. Installed UpdraftPlus.
  2. Create New Backups.
  3. Download the parts that I want. In my case it was the Database and Uploads parts. (FYI: Uploads houses the information for Enfold – so technically I’m keeping my theme settings!)
  4. Write down list of plugins being used.
  5. Create a new install of WordPress.
  6. Re-install UpdraftPlus.
  7. Restore (upload) the Database and Uploads which I just downloaded.
  8. Reinstall the theme and each plugin that was on my list.

And there you go.

This process took me a matter of 2+ hours with a site that part of the time was fighting me. However, I’d rather put in that time compared to having to redo the site again.

Action Steps

So that you’re prepared when your site gets hacked, install UpdraftPlus in your site right now. It’s free for what I used it for. You can have it save your backups on a number of remote servers – I’m pretty sure Dropbox and Google Drive are part of that selection. Not sure what the premium version does.

Also, make sure you install the plugin from McAfee so that your site is being scanned on a regular basis for malware. Even though it didn’t show up this particular time with McAfee, the last time I was hacked, McAfee saw it. Having the plugin installed alerts McAfee right away instead of them having to randomly access your site.

intrapreneur brian glassman

AoL 031: Entrepreneurial skill development, Intrapreneurship, and the Importance of True Passion with Dr. Brian Glassman

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Most people, I’d believe, really want to live a life that they’re proud of and do work that fuels their fire. The lucky ones have jobs that give them this work. They feel as if they’re really good at whatever is they do AND they love it! However, a lot of people simply don’t have that opportunity. So they continue to work in a job they do simply because it pays the bills. If they have money coming in, they get by.

To me, I feel that I might as well be in a jail if I was doing a job I didn’t love doing for 8+ hours a day. Having to get up day after day and be a cog in someone else’s machine that I probably don’t even know? I couldn’t do it! I think that’s one reason that I knew that entrepreneurship was going to be my future and that’s why I opted to get it as my focus in grad school.

While I was there, I met this session’s guest, Dr. Brian Glassman. Brian is one interesting and traveled guy. At the time that I had met him, he was working on his doctorate, but already had plenty of grad school under his belt.

What really struck me back then, and continues to this day is that he usually has a different perspective on everything.

Just when I thought I had all these definitions defined about how the world works, he hits me with a new view of what Intrapreneurship is and how one can use it to step into a role at a larger company. In other words, working your way across into a job you love, instead of starting it all from scratch.

In this discussion, we also talk further about Entrepreneurship vs Intrapreneurship, why it’s important to stay focused when you’re set on becoming an entrepreneur, why Brian decided to go the Intrapreneur route, and we even talk a bit about work life balance.

If you’re the type of person who thinks like an entrepreneur, but doesn’t want to have limited resources when starting out, than perhaps being an Intrapreneur might be a path you might consider after hearing our chat.

SPECIFICALLY, YOU’LL FIND OUT MORE ABOUT:

  • The difference between Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship.
  • What Brian’s learned from his Entrepreneurial students regarding what kind of skills budding entrepreneurs need.
  • Why it’s important to stay focused when picking up entrepreneurial skills.
  • What a college graduate should consider upon graduating when it comes to starting a business or finding a job.
  • What the transition was like to go from academia to working as Intrapreneur.
  • How you can learn a new skill set outside of academia, even if you’re working inside a corporation day after day.
  • Why Brian decided to become an Intrapreneur instead of an Entrepreneur (at least for right now!)
  • Why it’s important to care more about working smart and working in your passion area – especially when it comes to work-life balance.
  • Why routines and habits are so important in life.
  • Why people skills are much more important in the long run than simply being smart.
  • What the three types of entrepreneurs are.
  • Why Sam Walton is Brian’s example of success.
  • …and MUCH more.

Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.

ITEMS and PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

SHOW NOTE EXTRAS:

Fizzle Show: 5 Reasons Why I Quit My Business to Pursue My Dream Job

What is an Intrapreneur?

Be the Change You Want to See in Your Company – Tedx Presentation by Gib Bulloch

Intrapreneurship in Walmart

Thanks for Listening!

Thanks so much for joining us again this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the top of the post.

Also, please leave an honest review for The AoL Podcast on iTunes! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.

If you have any questions feel free to email them over via the email mentioned in the show or by our contact form.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, and/or Soundcloud. It’s absolutely free to do so.

A huge thank-you to you guys for joining us!

Cheers!

Set Yourself Apart From the Competition

Learning How to Set Yourself Apart from the Competition

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When you’re starting to a business, whether it’s strictly online, or even if it’s a brick and mortar business, you have to know how to set yourself apart from the competition that’s in your niche.

Not too long ago, I posted a piece about creativity in where I stated that creativity isn’t about being original, it’s about being able to connect your unique experiences in a way that matters to your audience and/or clients. Even if some of your experiences are shared with other people, not all of them will be.

Knowing this and learning how to showcase that collection of experiences helps you separate from the crowd if you know how to take advantage of it.

All you have to do is make sure there’s a reason why people should visit, read or buy from you. Do this, and you’ll get your followers, and beat your competitors.

Example: Tesla Motors

Just this past week, Tesla debuted the Model 3. They are decimating all previously held numbers for plug-in cars. Why is this?

You could say that it’s the first at making electric cars. But that isn’t the case.

You could say they’re the first in making plug-in cars readily available to the market. Close, but not quite there. Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf are relatively easy enough to get your hands on if you wanted them.

So what exactly is it that’s setting them apart from the pack?

It’s the extras:

  • Superchargers
  • Wireless Software Updates
  • No Pressure Sales (Pretty much anyone can get a test drive!)
  • Performance (not a large golf cart!)
  • Great range for an all electric car.

You might notice that the top 3 are customer service related, and the bottom two are product related. Not bad!

BONUS: There are plenty of videos of people’s reactions from taking a test drive of a Tesla Model S. If you’d like to take a test drive of the Model S with myself and my friend Ben, you can do that here:

Here’s a recording of Maria testing it (Note that AMS no longer runs the Noblesville Mini as stated in the video):

Is it any wonder that I have stock in the company? 🙂

My Example:

While New Inceptions is young, I think the success that I have received comes from the podcast side of things. There are many other business podcasts that like to interview big names and give you the details that helped them get to be a successful entrepreneur or leader, I like to believe that mine is different. I want to make the content that I provide completely relatable.

Part of how I do this is by providing quality information that will help you move from being a freshman entrepreneur all the way up to being a senior. I do this by tapping into everyday entrepreneurs who have had just enough success that a new person can see themselves actually achieving the same thing. I want you to feel as if you’re going on this journey with me as a fellow classmate. Currently I’m a sophomore, so the types of people I have on the show right now are sophomores or juniors themselves.

Also, while I’m new at running my own business, I have had the privilege of learning from online business people for 6 years now. So this gives me some good connections in helping those that are completely brand new to the scene.

Have a question, I’ll answer to the best of my ability. If I don’t know the answer, I’m not going to give some random response! Let’s figure it out together!

Just a little heads up. One thing that I’ve been asked about several times over since starting on my path last year is about all the pieces that a person needs to have a successful online business. I’m currently in the process of making a checklist of 5 different steps you’ll need to take care of to give yourself a fighting chance.

You’ll see more details about this later.

Action Steps:

If you’re starting your own online business like me, or even if you’re doing some offline work, I want you to ask yourself a question. What makes you stand out from the crowd? What makes you memorable?

Do you know the answer? Does your audience and/or clients know that answer? Make sure that they do.

If you don’t know the answer, how do you expect your audience to recognize it? Spend some time figuring out what’s going to separate you from other creators out there. Again, you can have the same kind of sauce – but add your own special spice to it!

business website

AoL 029: How to Make Your Website Work for You! with Jon Thompson

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When doing business in today’s world, one of the basic things that we have to have is a website. It’s the central hub to all of our social media and it’s where we own EVERYTHING that’s on it. It’s not rented space (meaning that if we have content elsewhere, if that company were to ever break ties with us or that they just bellied up, we would lose our business from there). When you have your own site, you protect yourself from these issues.

However, once you have that website up, there’s always going to be all kinds of maintenance that you have to do to keep it relevant. One of the easiest ways to drive Search Engines to your site is to produce content on a regular basis (just like this!). Other things that you can do include SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing – if you’ve never heard of SEM, you might have heard of backlinking which is part of it.)

Like many people who do online marketing for a living, I know a thing or two about making websites. Once you do it once or twice and you’re used to running your site, then you can help others get there. However, that’s really just scratching the surface. There’s so much more that goes into having a successful website, it’s not even funny.

This session’s guest has made helping people do all those other things that make a successful website his business. From getting one up from scratch to helping simply with SEO and SEM, Jon has his clients covered. Working in an efficient, transparent, and very communication centric manner, he doesn’t try to sell people and small companies a one size fits all solution. He’s all about customer service. Which in the online world can be somewhat rare – especially since a lot of hosting companies are moving towards easy one size for everyone solution methods.

In this particular chat with Jon, we discuss how he lined himself up for success, why you should be aware of what SEO and SEM are, the importance of knowing keywords when creating your website, and why he believes customer service is so important – today more than ever. We also touch on how he got into the work he does and what kind of clients he likes to have.

Whether you’re looking to get your website noticed in an ocean of websites, or you’re simply thinking about being a freelancer that does similar things, this is a good talk for you.

SPECIFICALLY, YOU’LL FIND OUT MORE ABOUT:

  • Why VeerDigital’s service description is somewhat vague.
  • How he lined himself up for success in the field that he eventually started a business in.
  • Why he believes that people need to stick with their strengths with anything that they do.
  • What he got out of his first experience in a startup.
  • How mentors have set him up for success.
  • What SEO and SEM are and why it’s important to know what they are and how they work.
  • Why you should still have your own website.
  • The importance of knowing keywords when creating your website (and maintaining it in the future).
  • Why customer service is so important today.
  • Why it’s important for service providers to be highly transparent and be proactive with their clients.
  • What kind of quality Jon looks for in the clients that he chooses to work with.
  • Where Jon’s drop shipping company came from.
  • Where Jon sees his business being in a few years.
  • …and MUCH more.

Right click here and save-as to download this episode to your computer.

ITEMS and PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

SHOW NOTE EXTRAS:

Search Engine Optimization Crash Course

SEO Tutorial 2016: A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

How Can Small Sites Become Popular?

How does Google Search Work?

SEO for startups in under 10 minutes

BONUS: Creating Great Content that performs well in Google Search Results

Thanks for Listening!

Thanks so much for joining us again this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the top of the post.

Also, please leave an honest review for The AoL Podcast on iTunes! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and we read each and every one of them.

If you have any questions feel free to email them over via the email mentioned in the show or by our contact form.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, and/or Podbean. It’s absolutely free to do so.

A huge thank-you to you guys for joining us!

Cheers!

Tying Heartstrings: The #1 Way to Increase Influence, Traffic, and Income

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I know this is a little to the point, but I’m going to admit it. I’ve found the secret to building a successful business… and you might not like it. However, it’s worked for tons of people around the web. And honestly, if you want to make an impact on others doing something you love, then you’re going to have to do it.

What’s this big it? What’s this secret? It’s being your genuine self and setting on a journey to master yourself.

When I say that, what kind of thoughts come to mind? Do you think of being a skilled speaker? Do you think of someone that hustles 24/7? Maybe you think of mastering the skill of connecting people? Perhaps you think of becoming a great author?

Perhaps you think about all those things. Maybe, none of them come to mind.

When I say “master yourself” or as others might put it become the ideal you”, I don’t mean for you to change who you are as a person. However, I might be asking for you to change your perspective of who you are and what you’re capable of.

Everyone is Different

From school, we know that certain kinds of people tend to resonate with others who are like them. Generally speaking, introverts get along real well with other introverts and extroverts get along well extroverts.

However, while this all true, we’re all different even more than that. Some introverts will like sports just as much as some extroverts. Some extroverts will love meditating as much as some introverts.

There were the groups that were popular. There were the band geeks. There were those of us who were into science.

It’s simple to say that there are all kinds of people. Your way of presenting yourself and your interests will resonate more with some people more than it does with others. Just as an example, I’ve met people who resonate more with Gary Vee more than they resonate with Ramit Sethi – even though, both are very direct in what they have to say and teach very similar topics.

To simplify what I am saying is this: the ideal you is someone that is not only a master of themselves, but someone that can communicate that self to others that will appreciate it.

I believe that the more compassion you show towards others, the more others will return for more in the future, and quite possibly, help you out in the future as well!

 

So, How do I Communite Myself Better to Others?

To say it in one word, be nice. Be honest, responsive, grateful, and go the extra mile for your audience.

On Monday, I was reminded about this once again when I was watching Brian Fanzo on Periscope. In this particular scope he said, that in the next year that three things were going to be huge in being a success in marketing (specifically live streaming):

  • Community
  • Storytelling
  • Engagement

Ask yourself, why are these things important? I’ll give you a moment.

It’s because they’re all things that people can connect with. As the host of the scope, you’re being nice here.

  • When you welcome others that are like you into a community, they realize that they’re no longer alone.
  • When you tell a story, they can connect you to others on so many levels. Your audience can relate better to who you are. They can agree that you want the same things in life. And furthermore, stories can even help people realize that your life and theirs are similar.
  • When you engage with someone who takes the time to engage with you first, they’ll appreciate you even more. When someone emails you, be sure to email them back. When someone drops a comment on your post or wall, make sure to respond. When you do this, it shows the audience member that you indeed care.

Doing these three things will build influence with your audience. In all three, you’re showing a certain levels of being nice and courteous. You’re providing value because they feel valued.

What’s the Point of Giving Away Value?

Well, if it’s not too obvious, the more value you give to your audience, the more they’ll come back. In LTD, we called it tying heartstrings. The more you do something for someone else, the more loops of string you’re throwing around their heart. If you have enough heartstrings tied around their heart, they’ll never be able to leave. If they did, they’d essentially be leaving a small portion of themselves behind. Also, the more heartstrings that you tie, the more they’ll want to engage even more with you, and promote you to others. This, in turn, drives up your traffic.

There are five ways this can happen:

  • They’ll share something you posted on social media.
  • They can subscribe to your email list. Whenever you deliver an update, there’s the potential that they’ll come back. Or heck, they might even share that newsletter with someone else.
  • They can comment on your post. This promotes conversation. If you’ve ever been over at Reddit, you might have realized that sometimes the comments and the discussion it leads to is much more interesting than the post itself.
  • They can email you directly. If they need help, again, you’d give it to them. This increases your trust level and helps them remember YOUR website. He or she will then be more likely to refer to your website to somebody else. If you’re just having a conversation about whatever, who knows – that person may have a blog with thousands of readers. Develop a rapport with this person and you may have found someone who may….
  • They’ll make a link back to your site from their site. (This is called back linking and Google LOVES backlinking.)

Ok, So I’ve Tied Some Heartstrings. Now What?

Well, I’m sure what you might like me to say is that you can sit back and watch your numbers go up, but things aren’t that simple. You’ll need to keep stirring the pot. Gotta keep that momentum going.

What it is time for, however, is for you to put up that first product of yours (if you haven’t already). Studies show that someone is more likely going to buy from a particular source the more times they’ve had in contact with that particular seller.

What’s it going to be? The easy way would be to just come up with something that they might like. The better idea would be to listen to those who you’ve brought in and ask them what they want – then make it. Like me, at the time of this writing, you might have silent traffic (hi guys!) and might have to rely on interviewing 5 to 10 people who you think would actually be candidates for what you have to offer.

Then once, you feel you have enough overlap of their responses, make it, and then deliver them back to them. (For bonus points, you might be so good at getting into those people’s needs that they might just be your first customers and prepay before it’s made!)

Action Steps:

So this week’s action steps are for you to think about this process. Are you connecting with your audience? Are they connecting with you? What kind of problems are you running into there?

If you are connecting and thinking about that first or next product, how’s your research going? Are you having any major setbacks as far as creating some actual buyers? Let us know below!

Understanding Passive Income as Organic Earnings

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In my last podcast session with Matt Bernstein, one of the nuggets of information he dropped (among MANY) was that he first heard of passive income from the same book I did, Robert Kiyosaki’s “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. The main difference was that he read it when he was young and I read it when I was starting college.

I was already heading towards getting my first degree when I read the book in 2002. My workload as an engineering student was pretty massive, but I’ve been in the search of ways for it to work ever since then. Why wouldn’t I be? To me, it’s the answer of old adage ‘What? Do you think that money grows on trees?’.

Actually…

Passive income should really be called “organic earnings”. Not because they’re earnings picked from a tree, mind you, but because they are earnings that are based on how well we set ourselves up to sell something automatically. We simply have to let either word of mouth and/or online business nature take it’s course. It doesn’t matter if we personally do an additional hour of work, we’re not going to be paid any more for that one hour directly. Indirectly, however, we might get paid over and over again.

What I’ve found through 13 years of investigation and research, are a few things I really want to share with you guys today.

Passive Income Creates Options

Working on developing passive income opens up the potential for a whole new lifestyle that most would only dream of living. As they say in LTD, eventually you can have 6 Saturdays and a Sunday every week if you work on your business like a business and not a hobby.

If you want to travel somewhere – you could, with no reservations (no pun intended). Get up, buy a ticket, and go without packing. Get some clothes when you get there!

If you have some work to do, you can simply do it from the internet. All you would need is your laptop (or just an internet cafe), and your online business could still be up and running. This is exactly what Cam (from session 8) and Ginger (from session 20) do on their travels.

If travel to travel isn’t your thing, then you have other options. Perhaps you simply want to be at the gym or out on the golf range at any time you want. Or maybe, you just want the opportunity to go to any sports games you’d want. If you’re big into entertainment, you can potentially create a man cave for a king!

Or, if you’re like my wife, Maria, you could work somewhere you love that maybe doesn’t pay you a supporting wage (or you could even volunteer), and your passive income could pick up the slack.

It really depends on you and your ambitions!

If you can Share it Online, it can be a Source of Passive Income.

Any business that you do online can help you create passive income. At AMS, one of the things I struggled to do was figure out how to create passive income for the company. While we were mainly online, our events were TOTALLY not. All registrations were online, true, but our registrants had to actually come to our events. So, just like a brick and mortar store, our ability to provide value to people was based on our geographical location.

In 2016, however, we have started implementing Virtual Races. In the first race we had being virtual as an option, we had 93 registrants from all over the US. While many might wonder, “What’s the point of doing a race if you’re not at the actual location of the event?” in 2016, we should realize that many people run for the gear they get from the event. It’s their proof that they did the event. Virtual Races are considered passive income sources because all you have to do is make the event and you can theoretically sell as many entries as possible.

Likewise, one of our upcoming guests, David Picciuto, is what many of us would consider a Maker. When we think of a Maker, we typically think physical products that are limited and typically sold in a geographical region. Typically, you’d be right. However, this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case either. In fact, in our upcoming chat, we’ll explore how his site, makesomething.tv, where he shares with others how they can build things he’s built… and other topics related to doing what he’s done.

Another example of something that isn’t typically thought of being a passive income business, is being an artist. However, if you’re an artist and want to generate passive income, then one idea might be to do teach while they’re creating their work similar to how Bob Ross taught on his show for so many years. (And, in fact, whoever owns his brand now, has made a passive income site based on his teaching.)

Passive Income Doesn’t Come Cheap

However, let’s be clear that true passive income isn’t for free. In fact, earning a passive income simply isn’t a “get rich quick” idea. It takes some time, a bit of research and probably a little bit of luck too (although I like to say you can create your own luck), in order to get to a point where you’re comfortable saying you have a successful passive income creating business.

It’s about putting in the hard work now, so you can reap the benefits later. – Pat Flynn

Action Steps

Are you really serious about getting started on your path to developing passive income for yourself? If so, then you ought to think about what type of business you want and get on starting to make it. Not only that, but why?

Do you want it to…

  • Be side income on the side of your day job?
  • Be able to quit a job that you dislike?
  • Work On a project that you’re passionate about?
  • Be financially free?

This is part of what you should consider.

There are multiple resources around the web that I spoke of in this post. However, stay tuned for our very own resource that will combine the best thoughts of all these resources (and others) coming soon!

Comments are welcome below and check out Bob Ross’ site if you haven’t yet or not sure who he was. He was a great inspiration to my creativity as a kid!