SPI 875: The First Dollar Formula—30 Days to Earn Your First Dollar Online

SPI 875: The First Dollar Formula—30 Days to Earn Your First Dollar Online

Pat Flynn: I wanna take you back in time and we’re gonna go back to 2008. Anybody who’s followed the show and has followed my work for a while knows how important 2008 is because in June of 2008, June 17th, to be specific, I was let go. So I celebrate every single year. June 17th is let go day, and I celebrated that yesterday at the time that this recording comes out.

So why do I celebrate it? Because it was the day that changed my life. Now, I didn’t know it at the time, but 2008 was also an important year because I had started to build stuff that I had never built before. The reason was because I had moved back in with my parents. I did not wanna be there, no offense to them, but I was building a life, and I felt like I was going backwards, couldn’t get another job as an architect.

I, in fact, went in for many more interviews and got denied every single time. Even though in my other position, I was the youngest person to be a job captain at this firm of over 200 people in a renowned firm in the Bay Area. I had all the credentials, and yet nobody was hiring. This is how bad it was in 2008. But how good it was to get myself outta my comfort zone to try something new.

So I had built a website. I’d built a website to help architects pass an exam. It’s called the LEED Exam, LEED, which stands for Leadership and Energy and Environmental Design. And you don’t need to know what that means. But all you need to know is I had put my notes on a website. I found a really, really easy default blog template, a free one to start, just creating blog posts.

And it wasn’t a once per day blog post situation. It was like as many blog posts about all the different topics, about all the different chapters in this really thick guide that we had to understand to learn about to pass this exam. And within about three weeks, I was able to sprint enough to do this, to get about 50 pages on this website in about three weeks.

So again, I had nothing else to do. I was laid off. So I was leaning into it. All of a sudden, I started to see a little bit of traffic. I started to gain momentum. A little bit of traffic went a very long way in keeping me going. This is the first lesson I wanna teach you today as we go back in time.

Because eventually we’re gonna get to what I like to call the first dollar formula and something I wanna share with you that’s brand new at SPI and to help you at the beginning. But you gotta reward yourself for even the small wins up front. It can be really hard, especially if you are in a community where there might be people who are talking about bigger wins, or you start to open up lines of communication where you are following people who are making a lot more money, or who have a lot more subscribers, or who have a lot more followers, it can be so easy to play that comparison game and start to tear yourself down despite you having done more than you had ever done before. So thankfully again, I was very excited to see maybe 50 to a hundred visitors a day to this website, imagining real people from all over the world reviewing my website.

But the comments were not on, and all I could see was the Google Analytics traffic. So again, small wins, but huge to keep me going. And then I unlocked the comments. I decided, you know what? I wanna see if I can engage with anybody here. And the first day, I remember the first day that I unlocked comments, it was not two hours later that I had a question on one of my posts, and I don’t remember which post it was, but it was about a very specific part of the exam, and I think I knew the answer to it, but I remember still doing research to make sure it was the right answer, right? I didn’t wanna say anything wrong. It felt really good to know somebody was there and had typed something on my own website, like there was a real person there and I was able to help this person out, and I wanted to give them the best answer possible. So I did. And one comment turned into two, turned into 10, turned into within about a two week period, over a hundred comments.

Some of those comments were, This is amazing, thank you. I was looking for this online. I finally found it. This is exactly what I was looking for. Other comments were questions, helping me fill in gaps. I started to realize what I was missing. The big lesson there is I wouldn’t have known what was missing from an outside perspective, from the perspective of my potential customer or subscriber or at this point it was just a reader because I didn’t have an email list at this point. I wasn’t yet smart enough to understand the importance of having an email list, but I made it work. I was learning as I was going, and I started to realize that, wow, I need to put even more on here. I need to answer these other questions. I started to get a lot of questions from people asking what exam day was like.

That was not something that I had ever thought about posting, but people were like, Hey, can you post a little bit about what to expect when I arrive in the exam room? Am I allowed to bring my own pencils? Am I allowed to dah, dah, dah? Can I use a calculator? Can I bring in my textbooks? And I knew all the answers to those.

And then I got connected with people who had done online business before. This is outside. These are not the commenters on my website. This was an online group called Internet Business Mastery. There was a podcast of the same name, which is where I found them. This podcast really inspired me more than anything.

Jeremy and Jason, if you’re out there, thank you so much for your love and support and just really your storytelling and encouragement. It really helped me get started and realize there was something else out there for me, and hopefully all of you listening to this feels the same about what I do here.

But I started to discover that I was a small fish in a big pond. That I had very little in terms of success. I had traffic, sure. And I had commenters. Great. But these people who were also in this group had way more of all that, and many of them were also generating revenue. Something that I had never done before and still felt a little impossible to me.

I wasn’t quite sure how it was gonna happen, but I knew that it wasn’t gonna happen if I didn’t have a website with traffic on it. So I had built those things anyway. And there came a point when Jeremy, one of the co-hosts of the Internet Business Mastery Podcast moved to San Diego, which is where I’m from, and I thought that was very interesting.

He was from Utah, decided to move to San Diego to get closer to the beach, and there I was in the same location. And he said that for anybody in the San Diego area, we were gonna meet at a Panera Bread in Meira Mesa, San Diego. And we were gonna meet on a particular date. And guess what? I lived in Meira Mesa.

This was like fate. However, I was so close to not going because I was chickening myself out. I felt like I had nothing to contribute. I felt like I was gonna be a waste of space. I felt like I was just going to embarrass myself, but I decided to go anyway. I said, what have I got to lose? So I went there and there were a mix of men and women.

Each who were seemingly already knowing each other because I got there kind of late and I pulled up a chair. It was really cool to get to meet Jeremy and we started to do this thing called a round table. And one by one, every person started to introduce themselves and share their online business. And it just brought me back to elementary school.

Remember elementary school when there were reading circles and every time a reading circle happened and it was like four more people until your turn, three more people, two more people, and you start to like sweat bullets and get really nervous, or at least that’s how I felt. because I was shy, I was introverted, I didn’t know what to say.

And even just reading, I was scared that I was gonna say words incorrectly. I was looking for every excuse to leave. I would ask to go to the bathroom knowing that I wouldn’t be back in time to read. That would usually backfire because as soon as I sat down I would have to read. So I learned my lesson there too.

But when it came to my turn in this little circle at Panera Bread in  Meira Mesa, I shared a little bit about my history having just gotten laid off. I had shared my website that I started and the fact that I had several thousand visitors coming to the website and a lot of commenters, but wasn’t making any money from the website.

And I think it was Jeremy or somebody else complimented me and saying, wow, you got thousands of visitors a month. This is a great start for you. And they started to share a little bit more about how that can build over time. And I said, no, no. Like I have a few thousand visitors a day coming to the website and everybody paused and said, oh my gosh, we need to help you make money because you are so close.

I didn’t know that. I thought it was so far because again, I had never done this before. I didn’t know what I didn’t know, and eventually it came to the point where Jeremy recommended that I publish an ebook and my first question was, I don’t know exactly what an ebook is. And eventually I was told just to create a PDF file.

And this is where my first sort of experience with true Lean Learning came into action, which was creating this resource study guide to then sell. But again, something I’d never done before. I wanted to read all about it. I went to Barnes and Noble to look up how to sell things online. I looked up courses on how to do copywriting because I had never done copywriting or sold anything with my words before.

I was looking for all the resources in the world. But I eventually realized that if I had continued to learn all about that I would’ve never taken any action at all, and that the first thing I had to do, no matter what was to write this thing. And what I did was just open up Word and get it done. As I talk about my book, lean Learning, if this were easy, what would it look like?

It it was that, even though there were other programs I could have used that maybe are easier for some people, I was just used to Microsoft Word from running essays at school. So I just opened that up and wrote out all my notes. I took some notes that I had online and reformatted them for a book, and eventually, after three weeks, it was done. I had a PDF file. That was a pretty darn good guide. At least I thought so, but it wasn’t formatted well. And you know what? That’s okay because it was at that point and that point only that I then found the resources I needed to learn how to format the book and turn it into a landscape book that was easier to work with and insert places where people could actually put answers in and those kinds of things.

And that took about a day. Actually, I found a couple resources online and got exactly what I needed. And then I was ready to sell this thing. That was something I’d never done before. So was I disqualified to doing that? No. I just needed to find somebody who knew how to do that. So I just went to the community, the online Internet Business Mastery community, and I asked, Hey, I have a PDF file, an ebook that I wanna sell.

How do I sell it? And I started to get dozens of answers from people. And all of those answers basically said the easiest way to do it would be to use a tool called e junkie. Now E Junkie doesn’t live anymore. There are many tools like it, and Kit is a tool that can do virtually the same thing. Sell a digital asset, and that’s what E Junkie allowed me to do.

Upload my PDF file and get back in return a button that if a person clicked on it, there’d be a price they’d pay for it, and they get an email with that guide attached, and I’d get money in my PayPal account. It almost sounded too good to be true. However, I was more in the camp of, I’ll believe it when I see it.

So I was still cautiously optimistic about all this, but I did find my way to get a button and actually have this thing technically be able to sell online. But now I needed to know how to actually sell. And there are courses, there were programs, there were these events I could go to to learn how to sell.

But what I really needed was really just a sales page, somewhere to write the right words to convince people who were already on my website to click the button. And again, I did the same thing. I went to somebody who was a champion for the work in the people in our community, and I asked, Hey. How do I write a sales page for this?

What’s the easiest way to do it? And eventually I found my way to a resource called Moonlighting on the Internet by Yanick Silver. I still have this book in my library. It is pretty much useless now, except for the part that I actually used back then. The reason why I say it’s useless is because it was chock full of dozens of different strategies to moonlight on the internet to make money on the internet back then, including things like eBay and that sort of thing. And of course times have changed and there’s a lot more things, and eBay of course, still can work for some people. But anyway, that’s besides the point. What I really needed outta this book was at the end there was an appendix and this appendix had a Mad Libs styles sales page where I could essentially insert the name of my product, the features and the benefits, and everything else was written for me.

It was a template. So I literally took that template, pasted it on my website, inserted my own words for the things that were blank and just waited. And it wasn’t until the next morning that I discovered I got a PayPal email around 9:40 AM that said notification of payment received and my book was sold.

And the rush of feelings that came from just helping one person, that changed everything for me. It really opened up the idea that this was actually possible. I had proof in my inbox, and then of course I checked the PayPal account just to make sure this was real and it was there minus some PayPal fees, but that’s okay.

It was a real transaction. That, it changed everything. It made me want to go get more customers. It made me wanna help more people. It made me wanna find and discover new ways to sell. It made me discover this world of email marketing to then be able to build a list and sell directly to people, which ended up helping me make five figures per month, upwards of $35,000 at some point in 2009 at the peak. The first transaction changed everything.

At SPI, we have something brand new that we wanted to share with you to help you get to your first dollar. And it’s called 30 Days to Earn your First Dollar Online, and all it is is an email sequence with the only instructions you need. Filtering out everything else, leaning out everything else so that you can lean into getting your first transaction and in order to go there and sign up for that and start to be fed via email these really easy lessons and call to actions because we want you to actually have this happen so that by the time you get to the end, you’ll have had that same transformation that I had back in 2008, that first transaction. It’s transformational and I want you to go through that same experience too.

So all you have to do is go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/firstdollar. Again,  SmartPassiveIncome.com/firstdollar. Spelled out no spaces, F-I-R-S-T-D-O-L-L-A-R  SmartPassiveIncome.com/firstdollar. And sign up there even if you are already on our email list, you can go there and you won’t get twice as many emails.

You’ll just get signed up for this particular series of emails. That we have spent months putting together for you to help you get again to that transformational first dollar. When I think a little bit more deeply about why we are so scared, it’s because we don’t know if the things that we’re creating will work.

And for me in all the years of creation, the thing that helps prove more than anything that something will work is the fact that I am getting paid for the thing that I’m doing. And so this strategy, which takes you directly through the 1 1 1 strategy, you’ve heard me talk about this before and I’ve even shared it, yet you hear it and you don’t do it, which is why we’re putting this in a format that allows you to actually get things done and see these results.

And if you do this, it will work. It’s going to test you a little bit, but that’s what you need. You can’t just sit here and listen to podcasts all the time and expect change to happen. You have to take action SmartPassiveIncome.com/firstdollar, and I know it’s scary. And if you’re a little bit nervous, guess what?

That’s good. That means this matters to you. That means there’s something incredible on the other end of this. And the people that I’ve shared this strategy with who have done this have unlocked new opportunities in their life. But you know what? The doors of opportunity are heavy, but just like any heavy door, once you start and get it going, the heaviness goes away.

because you’re building that momentum. These doors are not gonna open on their own. But this is a key that you can have to go and unlock these doors in your future. Through this first dollar formula sequence, you’re going to unlock who to serve, how to serve them, how to find these people, and the exact messages you can use to ask people to transact with you in a way that does not feel slimy, in a way that feels real, in a way that actually becomes natural.

And that’s, I think, what we want. We don’t wanna come across slimy, and that was a big thing that when I think about myself, back in the day when I was starting to sell, especially selling online courses, right? Information that I wasn’t sure was gonna help people because I had just never helped people through those things before.

I knew these courses would work. I just never had the idea of having beta testers or anything like that. I was just that diving right in. But again, I learned and now we pass forward the lessons to you. So the idea of having one person transact with you does what you need most, which is unlock that confidence.

Because when you unlock that confidence, that confidence comes through, now that you know you have this quote unquote cure for this metaphorical disease that you are curing whatever the inconvenience or struggle might be or obstacle for your target audience, you’re going to go out there and go out there with energy and confidence that comes across in everything that you do, in the emails that you send, in, how you show up as a guest on another person’s podcast, how you show up on video.

When I unlocked that first sale, I was driven more than ever because I was no longer afraid. I was no longer afraid. And think about it if it didn’t work right? Like if you go and try to find one person and serve them and it doesn’t work, okay, cool. It was a micro experiment and you try to find somebody else, and every no gets you closer to a yes, but every action helps you learn because like I talk about in Lean Learning, it is action over information that helps guide you. It is not the mistakes you make that derail you. It is the mistakes that you make that become the rails that you work within. It’s so counterintuitive. It’s so different than how we learn growing up.

It is not learning everything there is to know and then picking the one or two things, just like how we often read books, we read the whole thing and then maybe implement one or two things. Versus what if you just found the chapter that you needed right now, or what if you found the email sequence that you needed right now for the thing that matters most?

And to me, that is unlocking your confidence. That’s the big difference between people who succeed and people who do not. Those who have the confidence and for some they’re born with it. And I was always jealous of those people. I was always somebody who looked up to somebody who just seemed to have that charisma on stage who could sell without any issues.

And it just seemed natural for them. I admired them, but that was not me. And when I tried to be like that, I felt fake. But when I unlocked my first dollar, no longer did I feel fake. I felt like I had a duty. I felt like I had to step forward and share this for everybody else out there too. And that’s why I’m here and my team and I, and everybody who has worked on this and multiple team members that have gotten their hands on the first dollar formula, we are here to step up and serve you because we know that if we can help you unlock that confidence, it’s gonna get you those results.

It’s gonna get you to build and scale your business. It’s gonna get you some revenue that you’ve never had before. I cannot wait to hear these stories. I am so excited. That is a thing that is driving me more than anything are the stories on the other end of this adventure. We have done things like this before with more technical things like starting an email list and then at the end of a sequence or the end of a challenge, seeing the number of email subscribers people have had that they never had before.

That’s incredible. But this, this is on another level because this is more than just technicalities. This is confidence. This is emotion. This is unlocking new skills that can stack on each other and exponentially grow what it is that you’re creating. Skills that you can use kind of anywhere in any new business that you want, but it starts here.

So again, smart passive income.com/first dollar is where you want to go. And please let us know how it goes. Of course, we’ll be guiding you. These emails are already pre-written, and after 30 days, we hope to hear from you about your success. And of course, we hope to see you in the SPI community to continue that success and scale and grow without burnout, without to overwhelm.

And that’s a big theme for us this year, is to help you without the overwhelm. Right, which is what exactly why this first dollar formula exists. We said, what is the easiest way to get a person to find success? Well, let’s just help them get their first dollar. Okay? What would be the easiest way to do that?

And that’s what we built. So again, the reason I’m so confident in this is because it has worked and it’s going to work for you too. So again, SmartPassiveIncome.com/firstdollar. Go there now. It’s the last time I’m gonna say it because it’s your turn. Go for it. I’ll see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for supporting SPI.

It has been a wild ride to this first half of the year with the book launch and now this new sequence and a website redesign. Have you seen the website redesign yet? Go check it out, SmartPassiveIncome.com and you’ll see some amazing things there that maybe you haven’t seen before. We don’t just stay stagnant here, people we’re always updating and trying to make things better for you.

So thank you again for taking action, and I look forward to serving you in the next episode. Cheers.