Smart Passive Income Blog Review, The Shocking Truth About Pat Flynn and the Long Con

Greetings, before we get started I want to provide a slight disclaimer about what I am going to write.  I like Pat Flynn.  Pat Flynn is the person responsible for me getting off my lazy @$$ and actually doing something with my life.  That being said, it would be irresponsible of me not to share highly valuable information about my experiences with Pat Flynn, Niche Site Duel and the Passive Income Blog / Podcast.

This is an honest review of Pat Flynn.  I know this is going to make a lot of people upset, and I'm probably going to receive some hate mail because of this particular blog post.  I might even lose the 100 readers I do have, but I have no choice.  It's that important to me.  I took the time to calm down and collect my thoughts before writing this.  I want people to understand my experience with Pat so they can benefit from it (or discard it, whatever they choose).

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Pat Flynn is an internet marketing personality that had tremendous exposure over the past half a decade.  His story is truly inspirational and as a regular reader / listener of his products I can tell you that he really is a very charismatic guy. When I first found out about him, I was reading about him and Tyrone Shum and their infamous "Niche Site Duel".  I was highly driven by his story to follow in his footsteps and show the world that I was really capable of making a living exactly the way that Pat did.  Not only did I have a real desire to make these dreams come true, now I had a blueprint to follow, written by an average guy, just like you or I, the "underdog".

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I was in a horrible place financially when I made the jump into internet marketing.  That income counter that Pat has on his smart passive income blog had me so excited I really thought that everything he was saying, had to be true  That hard work could really make a "niche site fantasy" a reality.  I had access to this highly valuable information that no one else wanted to share with me. I saw his income statements, and I was reading all this chatter on forums and review boards,  and I was completely starstruck by this fantastic guy who really wanted to help people out.  After being scammed by a few different marketers I really thought that I had found a lucky break.  My time was finally here.

On the Passive Income Blog, there is a step-by-step guide on how to start a niche site!  Mind you when I started this adventure, I had no experience in web marketing.  However, I did have a lot of computer experience and I won the Dade-County programming competition back in high school.  Myself and a group of friends placed 14th in the state of Florida and I had been using a computer and programming in one language or another since the age of five.  I was confident that I would have the necessary skills to see this through to fruition.  With Pat's help I was certain that I could make 30k a month "passively" and be able to obtain all the things in life that I thought I deserved.

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I was hooked.  I started listening to podcasts, and I started taking notes, I studied from the time I woke up in the morning, until I passed out (sometimes 2 days later) and I was eating, living and breathing Pat Flynn's marketing plan.  There was one thing I completely missed though...I was the one he was marketing to.  I bought it hook line and sinker.

I registered for "Niche Site Duel 2.0" where Pat had this ingenious idea of creating a place where new marketers could all get together and talk with each other.  We could learn from each other and talk about different ideas and tactics so that we would be able to succeed together.  What a great idea right?.... WRONG

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I felt completely hoodwinked.  First of all, Pat is not even on the site.  He posted a couple posts a year or two ago when he started the site, and I don't think he has ever been seen since.  He is not there to answer questions, he is not there to hold your hand, and he certainly isn't going to write back if you message him on there.  What are you stupid or something?

There were a few members that actually made huge efforts to help people.  Not just me, but other people as well.  These people were very important to me when I was starting out, because I had no "mentor".  The mentor I thought I had, was never around.  You can email him, or leave him a question for his other podcast "ask Pat", but after listening literally to hundreds of hours of audio from him, it was very easy to realize that the chances of him getting to your question were pretty small.  I have tried to contact Pat on numerous occasions, and other than his automated marketing emails, there was only one time he ever answered me.

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I kept going...I just knew for sure that Pat would never steer me wrong and that he really wanted to help me, even if he didn't have the time to do it.  That's how much I believed (or wanted to believe) that what Pat Flynn was saying was going to guide me to success.  I knew that if I could just get a couple of things going a little bit, and then maybe Pat would talk to me.. Heck maybe even interview me on one of his podcasts because I had used his plan and become successful.

I actually fantasized about that interview in my mind, as silly as that sounds, but it's true.  I really wanted to talk to him, and I wanted to do well so that I could make him proud.  It's sad, but it's true, and I have a feeling based on his "cult" following that I'm not the only one that thought about that same interview.

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So the first falling out I had was on Niche Site Duel.  Let me explain a couple of things that Pat Flynn's program is not going to teach you, and you are going to have to learn on your own, one way or another.

1. Google Sandbox - Google can take anywhere from 1 day to several months to crawl your site.  Why?  Because... there is no answer to that question, google does whatever it wants, it doesn't tell you why it does it, or how it does it.  You have no right to ask either.  Google doesn't care about you or you stupid website about widgets, but when you are first starting out, you really want google to look at it.  You can't help but think "I have the best website EVER made on the face of the earth about plumbing fittings, and I just can't believe google doesn't have me on the front page yet".  It's so exciting and you will have worked so very hard getting to that point, you really aren't prepared for the fact that it could take weeks or even months to get in the index, if you appear in the search results at all.  That's a topic for another time really.....
2.  Keywords are not as important as they used to be when this whole "niche marketing" keyword craze began.  Back in the day you could make "howtobuildabridge.com" and really get up there in the listings when someone searched for "how to build a bridge". but this is my biggest complaint, and the straw that broke the camels back for me with Pat Flynn.  Google actually penalizes you for Exact Match Domains, and Partial Match Domains.  So..yeah.. all that Market Samurai jibber jabber, and that week you spent coming up with just the right combination with traffic, and relevany, and then actually finding the domain name available that doesn't cost 3000 dollars for a premium listing?  MORE OR LESS WORTHLESS.

Photo Credit:    by  Craig Key 

You might be saying to yourself at this point "Robert you are crazy, keyword research is important and maybe you just can't use exact match domains, but it's still important"... NO ITS NOT.. The words that I tried to rank for were not important.  It turns out the page that holds the number 1 spot for those keywords... DOESN'T HAVE THE KEYWORDS ON IT........ ANYWHERE.  It doesn't have the exact match for those keywords in the copy... it doesn't have it in the title, or in a meta description, or in a filename of a picture.. or an alt tag...or ANYWHERE....AT ALL... so ... ya.. once I figured that out I got extremely mad that I spent real money buying a domain name that was hurting me based on Pat's emphasis on how important the keyword research tool was. 

I sure am glad I spent that money on the market samurai (I used Pat's Affiliate Link) to buy a tool that does absolutely, positively NOTHING to help me.  It's another marketing ploy for a product that accomplishes tasks you can do for free with the Keyword Planner.  Yeah yeah, it has suggestions, and can generate keywords, but they are 99% of the time keywords that aren't relevant to what you are trying to sell.  You can argue this all you want, you know it's true if you have used the tool yourself.  The tools offers "competition" etc.. it's all a bunch of hogwash.  It has the "possible income" section where it calculates 50% of the traffic for the #1 spot for the word, then shows you how much you would make if EVERY SINGLE PERSON that visited your site clicked an advertisement.  That's never going to happen, google would ban your account if it did.  Again, no explanation on this point.  Pat never talks about the fact that keyword samurai is flat out lying to you.  Why would they do that?  Because they want you to see how much you "could" make in a hypothetical situation that will NEVER exist and you will actually believe that you could make 1000 dollars a day in advertising for a specific keyword that google doesn't want you to optimize for.  Oh thank you Pat for endorsing this bunch of lies meant to purposely mislead people into thinking that this fantasy of "iloverubberducks.com" can exist!

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Anyway so back to the duel.  Before I knew that I was not only wasting my time with a keyword/domain combo that was hurting me, and before I knew that google might take a month of Sundays to actually crawl my site, I was on there day and night, posting, trying to find out as much information as possible, and I made the biggest mistake I could have ever made....

I posted to the forums, and allowed people to see my site.  The next day I woke up and logged on to see that I had been de-indexed on google and on bing (where I was #1 for my keyword at the time)... not only that, I had a pile of garbage backlinks pointing to my site... I had a manual action against me in webmaster tools, and someone had just launched a site called:  "yourexactsamesite.org"... and it was in the front page of bing already and it looked like a cut and paste job right off my site.  I was crushed completely.

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I then realized that someone with ill intentions had crushed me based on the information I provided in the niche site duel forum.  I realized that I had made a horrible mistake that I Was not going to be able to correct.  Was it my fault?  Absolutely... 100% my mistake.  I didn't understand that there are a great number of people involved in internet marketing that are really horrible people.  I learned that I could never share the site names that I am working on, because this will happen over and over again.  I was really upset because I had just started finally making money with the site and some of the things I was trying were working.  Pat was nowhere to be found, and instead people used his website to hurt other people trying to start out in business.  Way to go Pat!

I am really mad at Pat at this point, and I sent an email to him saying something along the lines that "I will never buy one your products, or ever use your sites again" and he actually wrote me back.  I don't have the email anymore, but I remember him telling me that he "doesn't sell anything" and blah blah blah.  Now I know better, he does sell things.  He sold eBooks, he sells affiliate links to all the trash he's promoting on Passive Income Blog, but I bought in one more time.  I was just so excited that he actually emailed me that once again I said to myself "he has to be a good guy, he really wants to help people do this".

Anyway, I continued with the podcast.  I continued taking notes.  I tried harder and harder to make it work just like Pat said it would.  But I started to find out, It doesn't work like Pat says it works.  In fact all that old outdated information doesn't work at all.

OK so if that's true, I should have listened to everything and get all the new info and still be able to do it right?... Well no, not exactly, now I had this messed up site, that had all these things that I originally done incorrectly and I didn't have the plan anymore. Because the original plan doesn't work, and maybe if you sat there and took notes (which I did) out of every podcast and corrected all the things that have changed, maybe you could do that, but after 6 months of VERY hard work, I had given up hope.  I didn't want to rewrite his plan.. I wanted to know how the it works right now... not read about how great Pat Flynn has it for him and his family while all of us suckers read his piles of worthless content.

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I was played like a fiddle.


I know that I failed at this because of myself.  I know that Pat is not the reason I failed.  The reason I failed is because I put faith where I shouldn't have put faith.  This person never updated all that messed up info, because it ranks well and I'm sure he wouldn't wanna pull the plug on the money maker.  I feel that he has a responsibility to his followers to update these things and put together something current that works, instead of leading people on each week and bringing on some other marketer that runs an affiliate site.

It's not realistic, he is praying on people's false hopes.  He's selling snake oil, and I don't care if he says "it's all free"... because it isn't.  It comes at a price to the people that blindly follow him.  I guess he really doesn't care about anyone like I thought he did.  If he cared, he would update that stuff, and not let people run themselves into the ground trying to execute a plan that will not work.  I mean put together a current plan and sell it...I would buy it... there are 10's of thousands of people that would buy it.

The Most Important Things I Learned From Pat Flynn's GIANT LONG CON SCAM

Don't share your links and projects with people on the internet (or in real life).  There are people that will crush you on purpose just for fun.  Heaven forbid you actually have something profitable then they will really go after you.

Photo Credit:    by  Will Scullin 

There is no blueprint for web marketing success.  It's all a bunch of people that want to take your money by preying on the fact that you are desperate and you want that "dream" of owning a ".com" that makes you billions.  It's especially bad when the person thinks they can "outsource" everything and just pay people to do it all for them.   I'm not saying you can't outsource...because you can, in fact you HAVE TO if you want to succeed at this.  But you also have to be really involved, there is no "passive income" on the internet, you're gonna work your ass off to see it to fruition.  I am seeing success now, I making enough money to live on and it was originally Pat that got me going in that direction.

What wound up working, and how it "really is" is not what Pat describes or sells.  He's just a marketer that is selling hope.  I got upset because I am a good judge of character and I am not the person that typically gets scammed.

If you want to learn more about making money online, email me at voicesmicro@gmail.com.  That's all I have to say... no sales pitch.. We can talk about your goals, your expectations, where you currently are in your journey, and I will tailor a custom plan to get you on the right path.