Sean Donahoe – $5 Dollar Millionaire

$5 Dollar Millionaire – Sean Donahoe

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Sean has a great story of landing in America with 5 bucks to generating huge amounts of money leveraging the Internet. He is now an expert in Internet marketing and gives great tips on leveraging technology to earn you money.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss

Check out Imsuccesscenter.com.

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Sean Donahoe on the show. Sean and I actually met through a friend and he runs iamsuccesscenter.com and I have been extremely impressed by the amount of content and knowledge that he has so I am really excited to actually finally meet him and get him on the show today. So thank you so much for coming on, Sean.

SEAN DONAHOE: Hey, you're most welcome. How are you doing?

JAIME TARDY: Excellent. So what I want to start with, because I don't know too much about your background and I bet the people who are listening don't really know right now either, so why don't you go ahead and tell us how you got into internet marketing and being a business owner.

SEAN DONAHOE: Well, it's kind of a strange and varied story. A lot of people, you know, they kind of start reading online and saying, "Hey online this looks like an easy way to make money." I came at it from a different angle than most. I've always been a bit of an entrepreneur. My father was an entrepreneur and ran multiple businesses and he always encouraged me to work for myself, look to be your own boss and when I was a kid, kind of like about 10 years old, I wanted to get a computer. I'm not going to show my age here but computers were not in every home. They were very, very basic. In fact, my calculator has more power than the first computer I had. He said, "If you want to get a computer, you got to get off your butt and earn the money to get one."

JAIME TARDY: Go dad!

SEAN DONAHOE: I was like, "Okay, thanks dad. I appreciate that." Then I had the idea, I was like I'll start washing cars and I went up and down my street and every weekend I'd go with my bucket and mop and I'd wash neighbors cars and stuff like that. Then I realize, again didn't have no encouragement from my father on this one. He just said, "No, you're doing your stuff but you need to scale it up." That's all he said. And he showed me how much money I was money and how long it was going to take to get my computer. Funnily enough, okay I was really into computers and stuff like this; I was really fascinated with them.

So this kind of went on later on but I realized I needed to get more cars done so I started speaking to the kids at school saying, "Hey would you like to make some extra money?" So I started hiring other kids to jump on board and I took 50 percent commission of everything they did.

JAIME TARDY: 50 percent, yes!

SEAN DONAHOE: Absolutely! They liked the idea of this because it was more money than they were getting. So we ended up covering not only my village but also different areas of the town next to it where all these other kids lived. So I was starting to rake in all this money and it was really cool. I had my first car by the time I was 12.

JAIME TARDY: What?

SEAN DONAHOE: Now I drove it in a field. It was a beat up old mini cooper but hey I was driving at the age of 12 so this was really cool. I had the computer I wanted very quickly and I started realizing, hey you know, beat this; why am I am going to school? I'm making more money. It was like crazy. We started doing odd jobs and stuff like that and I stopped working in my business so to speak. I was answering the phone all the time for taking orders. Would you want to do these odd jobs? Would you want to do this? I started handing out flyers and what my team would do is they would give five flyers every time they did a job so they could hand it out to their friends and neighbors.

It just became completely crazy. That made me realize that when I got out of school I go to work for myself, I don?t want to work for anyone else although the economies of scale and reality kicked in, I did start working for other companies but I realized very quickly I wanted to do that. So I started my own computer company, funnily enough, and I started building computers and again this was when businesses really started to pick up and start automating everything in the office and everything else with PCs. So I went crazy there.

JAIME TARDY: What year was that by the way?

SEAN DONAHOE: Oh this was back in '91 I would say. It was back in the day of the Amiga piece, Amiga and the PCs were just really starting to come out with Pentiums and stuff like that. So this is way, way, way back when. Kind of about '94. '95 the internet was starting to kid of creep into common language and I started realizing hey there is a lot of potential for businesses getting on there. This is when, on Yahoo, if you had "A" as the first letter of your business you were at the top of the directory. The good old days.

JAIME TARDY: I know! If I knew about business then, man!

SEAN DONAHOE: So I started realizing the potential. I started talking to businesses; hey you need to get in on this. You need to allow me to show you what's going on. Let's get you a website going and again, it went over most people's heads at that time. So anyway, this was back when I was in Scotland which was a very backward area of Scotland, really in the very north of Scotland which is like 50 years behind everyone else.

JAIME TARDY: So website was like this high, not like this high.

SEAN DONAHOE: Yeah, we're still looking at yellow pages listings and stuff like that. So fast forward, I came to America because I realized hey there is a lot more opportunity over here for technology, taking what I'm doing to a whole new level and also the potential for consulting, for internet marketing. It was really a hot market.

JAIME TARDY: So when was this? What year did you come over?

SEAN DONAHOE: This would be about '98. So a few years later and really it's starting to kick off and everything else. A few things went wrong in the meantime. I will say that not every business is a success. Just prior to '98 I got into a government contract for health care industry where I basically leveraged every resource and piece of capital I could to make this contract happen and that's when I found out the government has more lawyers than you, even if they have signed a contract and they back out. So I lost everything. I literally lost my entire business, my house, everything.

JAIME TARDY: Was that before you came over?

SEAN DONAHOE: This is before. I thought okay, I need a fresh start. By the time I arrived in America, this is kind of a lot the weird part of my background and I actually arrived in America with a promise of a job and $5.00 in my pocket and nothing else. Literally my life was in a suitcase.

JAIME TARDY: This is an awesome story.

SEAN DONAHOE: This is why I'm being called the $5.00 millionaire.

JAIME TARDY: Is that really? I love that.

SEAN DONAHOE: Yes, because that's basically I took a huge gamble with a promise of come work with this consulting company. By the time I leveraged everything and bought my ticket and put everything in a suitcase, I had five bucks left. I took a big gamble. It paid out thankfully.

JAIME TARDY: I might not know you now, if it did not, right?

SEAN DONAHOE: That's it otherwise I'd be on the streets or something like that. But made it work and we started consulting with a lot of companies, a lot of biotechs and stuff like that with the technology side of things. But again, the internet and the possibilities of the internet marketing was starting to creep in again and I kept telling everyone about this but a lot of people, because I was consulting in Manhattan, Boston and a lot of these companies, again, it went right over their head. They got the Madison Avenue mindset.

I was showing them huge potential. I'd demonstrate all sorts of crazy stuff, again, no interest in it whatsoever. In this case, I said to heck with you guys, I'm going to start doing this myself. I kind of went underground a little bit, started creating all sorts of cool websites. We had an art business which was an online ecommerce store. That grew to be the second largest art provider online doing about $300,000-$400,000 a month pure profit and that was automated through eBay. We did all sorts of stuff - affiliate marketing. That was drop shooting. I never saw a single piece of product but I had it all automated with all the kind of geeky stuff I do.

JAIME TARDY: By the way, geek, yeah. I have a degree in IT. I'm the biggest geek you'd know. So this is so cool. What year was this that you started the art business?

SEAN DONAHOE: This would be 2002/2003.

JAIME TARDY: Really? I was working at an internet service provider in 1998 thinking wow this has so much potential and, of course, I was young so I didn't even think about business, but the fact that you were sort of right there on the ground floor, you could see, you also probably saw the boom and the bust, right?

SEAN DONAHOE: I was actually, this was one of the cool things is a lot of the IT companies started hearing about me by reputation. I was a freelance consultant. They started bringing me in on word of mouth and stuff like that so I gave them a lot of information and I tried to warn a few of them who were blowing all their venture capital money on fast cars. I was like, no get your infrastructure, get a solid foundation and you'll see in a lot of my teachings I'm all about getting a solid foundation to build on before the walls come crumbling down.

If you don't have a good foundation, you will have the nasty bubble that did happen where everyone was throwing crazy money at internet startups and had no idea about business. They just had an idea that might make it.

JAIME TARDY: So how did you go from there? Did the bubble affect you? I mean did the bursting of the bubble?

SEAN DONAHOE: Not really. Again, the one thing, and this is one of the beautiful things about the internet is there are so many companies out there that have good knowledge. Although we heard a lot of the ones that went bankrupt and bust and all the VC that was being just pumped in there, there were good business out there and I started working with, again kind of a lot on the IT side of things, which kept us going while we were still doing a lot of other things. But I was working with companies on the Fortune 500 list, international publishers, international banks and we were doing a lot of the kind of, well there's an area of industry called the storage area networking.

It was kind of a new technology. It was before cloud computing really. It kind of evolved from that intercloud computing so I was kind of involved in the base end of that as well for a lot of things and even showing my geeky side, I am a bit of a Linux geek so everything that you see in these phones, anything that's Linux, part of the kernel that's in there is actually part of my code as well.

JAIME TARDY: Really?

SEAN DONAHOE: Everyone carries a little piece of me in their pocket basically which is the way I like to?

JAIME TARDY: I'm a Linux geek too. That's awesome.

SEAN DONAHOE: So the geeky side of things help pay the bills while I kind of started learning and teaching myself a lot about the internet marketing side and search engine optimization. Even on one stage I own my own search engine.

JAIME TARDY: Oh really? Wow, you could have been the next Google or the first Google.

SEAN DONAHOE: Yeah, I wish! Basically it was kind of like Dogpile if you know that search engine where it goes and grabs information from all the search engines, compares them and then rates them and then presents the information. I actually had one of the first metasearch engines. So it is very, very cool. I've had my fingers in a lot of pies, a lot of businesses over the years. Some have worked, some haven't. I mean Google swallowed up pretty much everyone. Got out of that market with his own money. It worked out very well.

Again, I started working with a lot more companies about getting them online, getting them high end websites and stuff like that. Some of them would listen. Some of them wouldn't. But at the end of the day, a lot of my basics comes from the corporate background of high end marketing. Then from there to where I am now, basically I just gave up. I got fed up with all my corporate clients when they wouldn't listen. If they wouldn't listen, I would fire them. It's as simple as that.

I had 70 to 80 clients at one stage and I was literally on the phone for 5 to 10 minutes with each one of them and it got crazy. I got nothing done. So I basically said, "Okay, done." I've got to concentrate on my stuff, because I had so many projects going and people relying on me for what I had going. I had to basically fire all my clients, all my corporate clients and I just said okay I'm doing this myself.

JAIME TARDY: So how many hours were you working when you were doing all of that stuff like a week?

SEAN DONAHOE: I'll be quite honest, about 80 hours a week. One thing about being an entrepreneur is you've got to love what you do because if you don't like what you're doing and you're spending that much time, you resent it. But I did love, I do and now I love it even more because I don't have the headaches.

JAIME TARDY: No clients, yes!

SEAN DONAHOE: My clients and stuff like that but you can only carry so much on your shoulders at one time. So one tip I certainly give is make sure that you're optimizing your time and don't carry everything. I'm very much a person who tries to do everything themselves. That is one of my failing points when I first started. As soon as I started reorganizing my business and starting with a clean slate so to speak, and thinking about the real structure of my business with me at the top, what I've got to do to get where I need to be and start mapping that out, I mean this is a diagram, I'll try and do it visually here.

If you're here right now at the starting point and you know you want to be up here at your millionaire status, what you've got to do is figure out the path and the obstacles that are going to be in your way to get there and then start working at each one of those as your next goal. If you start doing that and really map it out, to get to a million dollars is about $3,000 a day. That's where you need to be in terms of income to hit the seven figures. What can you do that will bring in $3,000 a day?

So thinking about the different steams of income I'm at, you've got to have multiple strings of income so that you're not putting all your eggs in one basket. So membership sites, pay per click campaigns with CPA, affiliate marketing, product sales and stuff that's recurring and all that kind of stuff, it all adds up at the end of the day until you hit your seven figure level and that's why I really started mapping out. But the funny thing was I was doing that for myself but other people started realizing in the industry, hey you've got to speak to this guy.

He knows what he is doing and I would go to conferences and seminars just to sort of stay ahead of what's going on. Then I'd get started talking to people and they say what do you do' I do video marketing. It's kind of where I started with dominating You Tube for affiliate stuff. They're like okay well you've got to tell us how you do that. No I don't!

JAIME TARDY: I know, right!

SEAN DONAHOE: Then they'll say we'll pay you and I had some of the top people in the industry where they realized what I was doing was just the tip of the iceberg. They'd give me a retainer of $10,000 a month to train them to show them what I do and then one of them said, you know, you need to put this in a course and sell it and I'm like who's going to pay $2,000 to learn that? But then again I saw that everyone in the industry selling $2,000 courses and making millions and I'm like okay I'm looking a gift horse in the mouth here.

JAIME TARDY: The reluctant internet marketer. I love that.

SEAN DONAHOE: I know. It's one of those things because everyone sees and everyone on this call has probably gotten their email bombarded with all these kind of crazy, overhyped BS courses. There is so much rehash rubbish and just pure BS out there. It gets very, very disappointing especially if they're not buying it and you get discouraged because it doesn't work and I started thinking well who is going to buy this? So anyway, I decided I'd give it a shot. I just decided to bite the bullet, I put down a very simple, it actually started off as a 30-page PDF.

I was going to put it on the Warrior forum just to test the market. So what started off as a 30-page PDF grew to a 90-page PDF with about six hours worth of videos because once I started I had so many ideas of the things I could, oh I need to add this, I need to talk about that. Then that became my very first product. I put it up on the Warrior forum, became a massive hit and then that grew over two years and I started doing other courses the same way but within two years I had a 15-hour mega course on video marketing. That was a massive success.

It kind of made me realize that I could be doing this myself and making a very good income and stay private but then again I could also share this information and help everyone else because I've been stung by those stupid reports and the Click Bank commission rip off, whatever dotcom is next and it just makes you nuts, when there are so many different ways that you can make real money on the internet.

JAIME TARDY: I was going to say I hear that a lot and that's sort of the thing. People that listen to this show and stuff have probably been burned. I've gotten email saying I really want to do this online thing but I don't really know what to do and I tried this and that didn't work so people are disillusioned like oh well maybe I can't do it and don't get me wrong, it's hard too. I think a lot of the easy success click here it's all set is difficult because people go oh it's the internet, I do this and we're all done. Yay! Especially people that don't know computers very well.

SEAN DONAHOE: Yeah, the get rich quick button; the easy button. Here's the thing. If there was an easy button, it would be locked up in Fort Knox and there'd be a guy who is selling it would be tapping it continuously. Yeah, it doesn't exist. You've got to think like a business at the end of the day. The fundamentals and this is the easiest way I can say to make money online. Find a product, find a person who wants that product and bring them together. It could be your product which will make you a lot more money. It could be someone else's product which will make you a little bit of money but it's a great way to start.

The easiest, easiest way is go do something. Even if you put a 10 page report together, just sit down, think about a problem. Easiest way, I'll give you a 6-figure business model right now. The easiest way to get started ' go to Yahoo answers. Just skim around, find a common problem. Now Yahoo answers will not only give you the common problems but also the solutions because people are asking questions and answering them. So not only have you got the people who have a problem, you're identifying them, you're getting a good idea about who they are, what their situation is, what the problems are, but you're also getting the solutions to match to that.

You could easily put together a 10 or 25-page report basically consolidating all that information. Go to Wikipedia, go out and kind of gather that information, consolidate it into one report addressing that one problem and then put it out there. Go to forums, get a sales page made. Very, very simple. It's easy to do. You don't even have to put it on places like Click Bank. You just get a buy now button from PayPal. Get a sales page done. If you don't know copywriting, go to the Warriorforum.com. Look in the Warriors for hire section. There's people that will do you an amazing sales page for $99.00.

Now to get a really professional sales page done could cost you $5,000 but there are budding copywriters out there that want to make money right now so you can get it done for a fraction of the price. You just get that done, get it up there and get it in front of people who want to get that problem solved. Go to forums. Start answering questions. Go to the answers, all these answers sites. Start answering questions like that and then say hey I actually cover this in Page 15 of my book; link to it. Once you've got your reputation up a bit, you start getting traction.

Then rinse and repeat that entire process. Get about 10 reports out there. Boom! And then you can start looking at things like up sells and then instead of making a PDF version, make it a video version. Again, you increase the perceived value. You can scale it up from there but you got to get your feet wet. You got to get out there and know that you can do it. Once you've done that, you can expand.

JAIME TARDY: So I think that's really, really interesting because you're right, we have to do something in order to actually get something. I'm all about action not just reading tons of information and knowing it all and keeping it in your head. It's really about action. I love what you're saying to create a course or to even find another one if you don't have a chance to do that. But it's that marketing piece right there is what everyone cares about because it sounds easy to go on forums and stuff like that and post but now we're inundated with everybody trying to sell their own stuff. So what is really the best way to get that first sale and then, from there, to scale it up to get 100 sales?

SEAN DONAHOE: Okay. I'll give you an analogy. When I was in Manhattan, now I was working at the Twin Towers while they were still there and I used to come down every morning and lunch time and there was a sandwich shop around the corner that shut at lunch times, at a really stupid hour. Now this was really cool. It shut at 2:00. I'm working on a weird schedule because I'm a consultant so I have to work within what everyone else is doing. So I came down, the sandwich shop shut at 2:00. Now the really cool thing was there was a pizza joint around the corner and at 2:00 a guy would come out with a sign at 2:00 standing in front of the sandwich shop and giving out leaflets for the pizza shop around the corner.

I loved this because and this is the analogy. You want to find your market, stand in front of your crowd where the demand is with a big sign saying here's the solution. That to me, I was hungry. There's the solution - there's pizza around the corner. Great! You have got to go where your people are be it in forums, be it in answer sites or just with search engine optimization. Finding a low competition, high search volume keyword that you can target.

Say for example, I'm dabbling in Kindle right now. A term I'm going after is "how to cure acne now." Now I'm doing a whole lot of how to books and one of them is how to cure acne now, which is searched for globally about 40,000 times a month. Now, the cool thing is I am doing this with Kindle and Amazon so I can actually get the marketing force of Amazon behind me so that I will very quickly rise to the top of the search engines for that exact term and have my Kindle book for $7.00 right there.

JAIME TARDY: This is on my to do list that I have to do still so thank you for bringing it up again.

SEAN DONAHOE: I'm loving Kindle right now. I've got about, I shouldn't say this, but I've got about 104 titles coming out in the next six months. I'm not writing a single one of them. I'm outsourcing the whole thing. Then I've got loads of different series. I do everything on a huge scale. One of my secrets is scale and automation. I don't do my own products anymore. I actually, well I do, but a lot of my small stuff I've outsourced it all and then I funnel it into my larger back ends where I do all my stuff. Things like all these books, the exact monologue I just gave, I'm doing this on Kindle right now.

Instead of putting them out on sales pages, I'm putting them out on Kindle and let Amazon do all the marketing for me. So they do all the promotion. They even do pay per click ads and stuff like that. I'm just getting them the content.

JAIME TARDY: Oh yeah, they do it all.

SEAN DONAHOE: Yes, they do everything. So that's a great little tip there.

JAIME TARDY: I'll bump that up on my to do list now, right? Big arrow, I still need to do that. Okay.

SEAN DONAHOE: It's very, very cool to do. Very cool to do and so easy because all you have to do is basically format your Word doc the right way, create a nice cover. You can get it done for $5.00 and then upload it. Just tell them where they want to send the 70 percent commission and you pocket the rest. It's good, that's it.

JAIME TARDY: I'm going to delve into that just a little bit for the one that you gave an example. That's a 40,000 searches a month keyword and so that should be really difficult to get in, right? So if you have it on Amazon, do you send back links to and this is where we get geeky so if anyone doesn't know that much about SEO, this might go a little bit over your head but SEO is a good thing to learn anyway. So do you just send a bunch of back links to that? Get a lot of reviews and then it will automatically come up? I mean I think that's a difficult thing.

SEAN DONAHOE: No, that's a good thing. This is a bit sneaky so I am going to share some really good inside stuff.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, yes!

SEAN DONAHOE: This is why I love doing this kind of stuff because I actually love giving back. Beautiful thing and a very simple business model with Kindle. You get your PDF. You put it up there and then what you do is you go to favor, find someone that will actually buy your book. You have to give them the money to buy your book and then leave a paid review. You don't want people to give reviews without buying it because obviously Amazon will see that there's a mismatch there. How could these people have reviewed it when they don't even know what's in it? So they will see that.

You spend a little money to promote your book interview that regard. Get like two or three reviews. Then, you have the option of getting onto what's called the KDP select program. Now the select program basically allows your book to be put into a pool where it is shared, it's given away for free for Amazon prime members and by having those initial reviews, it encourages other people to then leave some reviews as well once it has gotten shared into this kind of pool. And it gets put on there exclusively on Kindle for like 90 days. They will actually then increase the amount of marketing they do for your exclusive book and basically then it takes off from there.

Now what I also do is I also have an SEO team I outsource and then they will do some back linking, multi level link pyramids and stuff like this to it so it gives it a natural boost as well. Outside of the 800-pound gorilla that Amazon is, it's the same process. Now I will also do and this is where, shall I say the outside of Amazon stuff we'll do for the other type of marketing I was talking about, is if you have a nice sales page done, you have howtocureacnenow.com, get a dead on domain name for your keyword, that's going to help you a lot. Your sales page will often times refer to how to cure acne now as a phrase.

You have it in your titles, your subtitles, your body and then that is a SEO optimized page with things like your earnings disclaimers, your privacy policies and everything else. This gets your quality score up there as well, maybe even on the back end you have a little blog with some articles targeted to the same key word and then you get your SEO efforts; even outsource it. Again, the Warriors for hire section on the Warrior forum. There's lots of people on there that will do packages of SEOs. So you don't have to know everything. You don't have to be an expert. You go pay someone $40 and they will do a whole ton of drip fed links over time at different levels with different sources. You don't have to be an SEO expert. They will do all that for you for $40 and again, your site comes up the ranking. Your sales page comes up and off you go.

You could even do an affiliate program. If you put your product on Click Bank, for example, there's a 100,000 maybe even 200,000 affiliates willing to promote your product. Or go find people on Click Bank right now who are also selling a product similar to yours or in a similar market who are already successful and then approach them and say, "Hey what can I do to help you?" Don't say, "Hey I've got a product, I would like you to promote it," say, "Hey I'm in a similar market, where can we cross over and help each other and what can I do to help you?"

If you do that, they're more likely to be interested and receptive where you can start a dialogue and then eventually as that relationship grows, you can say, "Well here's my product right here, would you like to push it out to your list at 75 percent commission? That's when you could start building up JV relationships with your competitors; they're not competitors. You have no competitors. Every competitor should be a potential JV partner. That's one of my secrets as well. I have no competitors. They're all partners or potential partners.

JAIME TARDY: I like that. See and that's what I loved about the internet, when I first got on the internet, even people doing the exact same thing were friends and I was like this is awesome. I came from sort of a more business background where you are like you don't tell your competition anything and they're the competition, you don't want them. They're cutthroat and now it's such a different market which is awesome, a really great place for us to be in now.

SEAN DONAHOE: Very much, very much.

JAIME TARDY: Let's talk about JVs for a little bit. Let's say somebody has a product. Actually, excuse me, I have a product, right? I'm looking to really get into JV sales more but I haven't. I haven't done any affiliate marketing, haven't done anything like that. What would someone who wants to start do something? I'm not on Click Bank. Should I go on Click Bank?

SEAN DONAHOE: Well Click Bank is a great way, I am well known on Click Bank for the internet marketing side of things. I have lots of product launches there. We have done a lot within the internet marketing industry. We have a lot of the top JV partners who have promoted our products and we've promoted theirs in return. So it's a little bit of politics there, especially in the IM sphere. But actually, a lot of the money is made outside of the IM in different issues.

So lots of people out there have websites that automatically promote all sorts of products, weight loss is an example, dating and it's really cool. But there's so many people out there that have huge lists and huge markets. If you could start developing a networking relationship, go to events, start talking to people, start helping people and if you have a way that you can help someone else, say, "Hey well I see you're doing that;" I always approach them with the what can I do to help you. even if there's nothing I can do to help them right now, exchange that contact information but don't pitch to them.

JAIME TARDY: And that's one of the funny things. I just got off the phone with someone I just met through a mastermind group friend and all that stuff and he's going what can I do to help you and I'm going I don't know what can I do to help you? It's sort of funny nowadays because everybody is looking to give first which is awesome but it's also kind of comical because we're like oh no let me see if there's someone I can use to help you but it's win-win for both of us because if we both try and help each other then we're both benefitting instead of going, "Hey help me. No, no, help me!" That's a totally different concept.

SEAN DONAHOE: Well that's the cool thing. Even if they can't help, I mean like I had one who was a top Click Bank marketer yesterday say, "Hey who did your videos?" I do a lot of my own videos but I outsourced an introduction and they said, "Could you do that introduction for me?" I said, "I can't do that for you but let me introduce you to the guy who did mine" and so, you know, you build your network that way. And again, that, in turn, was a favor I did for them, they'll do me a favor and return. It really is about networking in that regard.

Never ever approach anyone at an event and say, "Hey I've got this product would you promote it?" That happens to me all the time.

JAIME TARDY: Because then you're like this ugh!

SEAN DONAHOE: And there's nothing that makes you want to hide.

JAIME TARDY: Yeah, avoid.

SEAN DONAHOE: You're in the bar just relaxing and talking with someone and then suddenly someone comes up, "I've got this great product, you're going to want to promote it. It's the best thing ever!" And you're like it may well be but I don't want to talk to you. Not when you're so aggressive. So it's far better to approach with that giving mindset and then even if it's not working out, ask later on once your relationships, even if you haven't been able to help them and they haven't been able to help you, ask them what project they're working on and what you can do to support that project and then say, "Well I've also got a project coming up maybe we can do some back end promotion."'

It's a great way to introduce your product because if you've got this project you're working on, I'm about to launch X, if I can get your support on the launch maybe I can put your product as a recommendation on the back end and drive some of that traffic to you as well. Who is going to say no to that? So that's a great way to start building those relationships.

Another cool thing, which I would certainly recommend, it's an expensive solution but if you have the resources, hire a JV manager or JV broker. Look out there, in the internet marketing industry there?s quite a few. Outside of internet marketing they will actually go and find the people to partner with, the top people in the industry. They will go actively develop those relationships without you having to do it and then introduce you and your product to them to get the backing. That can cost anywhere from, it depends how experienced they are and how well known they are, but on average it can be anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 plus they take about 15 percent of the sales that they generate.

So if you think of a product that you would have that may be a $47 front end, maybe a $97 up sell, that could still turn into a six-figure business if you get enough sales and they will help you get there. And then again, one thing certainly in niche marketing is make sure it's evergreen and keep your products up to date. That way they will keep selling for the rest of your life. If you put it up on Click Bank and it's in a popular market, I mean I saw one that is in a very obscure market chicken coops how to make chicken coops. The weirdest niche; I would have never thought about it in a million years. It sells about 10 copies a day.

JAIME TARDY: Really?

SEAN DONAHOE: That's still $470 a day. Would never in a million years have thought of that one. But if you go into a more mainstream one, don't reinvent the wheel. That was a huge risk for that marketer. But don't reinvent the wheel. Go into markets, take a different angle to existing markets because you've got so much activity in that market, but people are looking for new things to promote and they're lucky they've got huge lists. There are people that you can approach as JVs. Prime example, okay, I am going to release another secret here, I'm actually doing a Kindle book about developing the best exercises for abdominal muscles.

For weight loss, and coming into summer people are looking into getting their beach bodies, but I have a specific key phrase that I found that is very popular and it has about six related to it so I am actually producing six Kindle eBooks about this one subject. Again, I'm going to hit each one of those keywords with the same kind of information, rewritten slightly because it's for men, for women, for working moms, for busy executives and stuff like this. Again, I'm taking that same information, reworking it slightly, creating multiple eBooks on the same subject, putting it out there and again, it works in the same way.

Again, I've got lots of people who will promote it as an Amazon product but also if I put it out there as a virtual product, non exclusive, then people will promote that as well.

JAIME TARDY: See I love how you are doing things besides just internet marketing. I have a friend, his name is Pat Flynn, and he was making a lot of money off of other stuff and then he got this site called Smart Passive Income making tons and tons of money. Now he's going wait a minute, my internet marketing stuff is up here now and my other stuff is down here. So he's continually trying to get the other stuff up because he doesn't want to be the internet marketing guy and I love how you're doing that too, because it's not about that. It's using the principles.

SEAN DONAHOE: Absolutely. The same business principles, the same models can be applied in many different areas and that's why I am saying there's no easy button but you can take a simple system, a simple process of product, person bring them together and find different ways to apply that. There are so many models that you can reverse engineer out there and apply for yourself. Okay, every commission X product you see on Click Bank has the same thing. Get traffic to a website, expose them to an offer.

Every single product out there does that same simple model and they have a different angle or different magic button or something like that. At the end of the day, traffic through a website, to a link that has an affiliate commission. That's their model. If you want to start with that, it's a great way to test the market. Maybe you can get a blog up. Word Press, go to Google, keyword tool, start looking at different keywords about industries you're interested in. Find a keyword that has low competition and they have little search filters on there. Low competition with at least 10,000 to 100,000 searches and it's low competition. The low competition is actually an ad words competition but that also often correlates to it being a low competition for other people as well.

So something with about 3 to 5 keywords. That's a great, someone who is looking for a solution keyword. Slightly long tale but then go take that keyword, go find out if you can get that keyword.com as a dead on domain. Then get some cheap hosting, go to cool handle or host gator and get cheap hosting from there. Go sign up for an account, install word press. They have easy installers for word press for howtocureacnenow.com and do a few articles. Based on that, you could outsource them for $2.00 from iwriter.com, if you want to. Two dollars for an article, that's crazy. They tend to be low quality but just kick them back until you're happy with them. They will get their money. Two dollars - that's cheap content. That's by my friend Brad Cowell, that's his website.

JAIME TARDY: Oh, because I have been going to Fiver.

SEAN DONAHOE: Yeah, Fiver is another great place. Text Broker, but yeah I Write is a place or $0.99 Articles, another great place. So you can get some content and again at the end of your articles, just refer to a link to an affiliate product. If you start getting sales, that tells you that that particular keyword can have potential for a product. Then you know, go develop a product of your own about it and then you change that website over to a sales website recommending your product and then off you can and then you can start building from there

But you get lots of these little test sites out there, testing key words, testing markets. Load them up with ad cents in the meantime so you get some ad cents income as well as your affiliate commissions and then once you've got that coming up, you know, you do a little search engine optimization, a little link building, get them up there high ranking, boom, you've got fingers in lots and lots of different niches, lots of different pies testing and then if you see one that really starts performing, you know that's the one you need to go for to create your own product and then off you go.

So that's a strategy I actually put together in a course in a lot more detail. But that's a great way to get your fingers in lots of pies, see what's happening and then accelerate that into income streams.

JAIME TARDY: I don't want to take up too much time, I have three more questions, because I keep coming up with them and I keep wanting to ask you a ton. So I want to talk about the future, in a minute, of what you see the internet marketing industry or the internet in general, but before we get into that, you've worked with tons and tons of people, what do you think is a time frame? Because everybody asks me this, I know you have to generalize because there is no time frame, it depends on how hard you work, but what's the time frame, because I did a webinar last night with a millionaire and I had a lot of people asking about internet marketing stuff, even though it was just business and wealth building oriented, but everybody was asking about internet marketing and how long is this going to take?

And when can I start seeing money? And of course, it's a hard question but what have you seen? Do you have any case studies? Do you have anything that sort of says how long because me and the millionaire last night, Todd Tresidder, was like it takes a long time, okay? Just know that it takes awhile!

SEAN DONAHOE: You know, if you want to be highly successful, yes it takes awhile. It takes two things - scale and automation. Now the way I say is this: if you have a report right now that you can sell and it makes you $10 a day, that's great. Duplicate that process and then duplicate it again and duplicate it again. The more you duplicate that single process, you know, the more money you make per day. And always look at your per day income because for millionaires, if you're shooting for millionaire status, it's $3,000 a day or it's $2,900 and something. Let's keep it simple numbers.

So if you think you can do, one thing that makes you $10 a day or $50 a day, duplicate it. It's all about scale. And automate as much of your business as you can. Take yourself out of it. I had someone who put on Kindle just on Monday a simple 25-page report they did. They've already made three or four sales. They are seeing instant income from it. So it's really the sooner you can get your product done, the sooner you can get people to that, that's when you're going to start making money. To be successful, it's rinse and repeat. You've got to keep building it, keep building it, focus on your systems, optimizing and automating as much as possible, take yourself out of the equation, because you will find that you are the biggest obstacle to your success in a lot ways, because you're always second guessing yourself.

You're always like what if? What if I do this? What if I do this? If you have an automated system that's working, don't fix what ain't broke, okay? If it is making money, optimize it, that's fine but don?t keep trying to break it and then reinvigorate it and break it and reinvigorate it. If it's working, great. Just get more people there. That's the idea. Get more people there and then take that, expand the back end or duplicate it and keep going that way. But that's what it is going to take to become that millionaire status is scale and automation and take yourself out of it.

Guys, I am going to recommend a book - Timothy Ferris? Four Hour Work Week. Now a lot of that book is filler. I was actually speaking with Tim the other day. I said only you could have created a book that has 300 pages and it's the actual last like 20 pages that has all the great information.

JAIME TARDY: But he talks about dancing and he talks about running! Storyteller.

SEAN DONAHOE: Yeah, and his martial arts stuff. It has nothing to do with the bloody process. There is one diagram in that book near the end which is a systems diagram. That diagram is worth the entire price of the book because it shows you the process with taking yourself out of it and there was a revelation to me because again I'm someone who is always hands on. I'm right in the middle of everyone and as soon as I took myself out of that equation, my income shot up five/tenfold. So as soon as I started really automating and scaling and focusing on systems and processes, that's when my income really multiplied.

JAIME TARDY: Okay, just a follow up having to do with that. That also creates risk though especially if you're going the way you need to go and then you have to pay a bunch of people as far as contractors and employees or whatever it is.

SEAN DONAHOE: True.

JAIME TARDY: So I think a lot of people I talk to?

SEAN DONAHOE: Potentially.

JAIME TARDY: Exactly, potential risk, because you never know, we're smart enough, right? We can mitigate some of that risk. But I think that's what a lot of the people that I work with too are sort of hesitant so they sort of step back and go well I'm not there yet.

SEAN DONAHOE: Well that's very true. You have to have a tipping point and that tipping point comes when you can reinvest your income into your business. If you start making $10 a day, don't spend that $10 a day on Starbucks. Reinvest that money. If you start seeing success and you know that you've got something that's working, what does it take to scale it up and then start focusing there. Now if you need, for example, you can't keep up the work yourself, then look at a cycledonlinejobs.ph.

This is Philippian outsources. I have people working for me for $200 a month and I get 40 hours worth of work out of that one employee. In fact I tend to pay a little more because I want to keep them when I find good ones. I'll pay like $300 to $400 a month for these workers and $300 to $400 is nothing when you consider how much work you get out of them but you got to make sure that what they're doing turns into profit for you straight away.

JAIME TARDY: That's the key.

SEAN DONAHOE: That's the key. So you need to get something working initially. I'll use the product, you know the report method I was mentioning, if you are starting to see income from that and you're scaling it up yourself, you're doing a little bit here, you have to have to be prepared to invest a little money in yourself. You can't start off with nothing. It does take money to get started. You've got to take a little bit of a risk but when you start seeing that success, good.

Now start reinvesting in that, reinvesting the profits, allowing that to grow and if it caps off at a certain level, okay fine, we've got other ways to generate money around that or duplicate it and then start creating multiple ones. If you have a system where you're starting seeing okay consistently that's working, that's working, that's working, write it down as a step-by-step and then you can give it to an outsourcer to replicate again and again and again and again.

JAIME TARDY: One of the things I love you saying though that I keep hearing though is to actually focus on something because I think we end up with a lot of dabblers, especially internet marketing dabblers, who are sort of like oh I'll try this.

SEAN DONAHOE: I can't tell you how many projects I'm dabbling in myself. I'll be quite honest, one of the things we're doing this year, which is kind of insane, we're moving away from the tradition Click Bank launch formula for some of our products. We're working a lot on word press plug ins. We've got about 20 in development. Some desktop software for SEO optimization. We've got all sorts of online services coming up that help marketers get started and things like that. This is outside of the normal training courses. I'm also a public speaker.

So I've got my fingers in a lot of pies but it's all about diversification. You've got to be diversified. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Have multiple things at work. I mean I was using the example earlier of putting your fingers in a lot of different test pies with these little sites. Maybe some of them will grow into products. Maybe some of them will become membership sites. Maybe some of them are just really kicking butt with ad cents and you just want to grow that into an ad cents based income. I mean I've got people who are making $10,000 to $15,000 a month just by Google giving them a check for advertising on their site.

There's lots of different business models out there but they all have the same base principle - getting people to where they want to go and making money from that. That's the basis of everything.

JAIME TARDY: So tell me, what do you think of the future? It feels as though, at least so I have heard, that we are getting sort of full on the information marketing, which I don't necessarily believe, but I really want to hear what you think about that. Is it going to be to a point where there's going to be so overfull with information that there's not going to be people buying it anymore because they already bought it all or whatever it goes.

SEAN DONAHOE: I think in the IM sphere there is a lot of saturation. There's a ton of competition and people thinking it's the easy gravy train and the jumping onboard with every piece of rehashed rubbish out there and the problem is that people are burnt on that and that is the truth. That's why I am saying the more money is outside of IM in different niches, because people are always going to have problems and need answers to those problems. That's been true for thousands of years and now the internet has allowed us to deliver that in such an easy way.

I think the way the future is going to go is the proliferation of, well smart phone technology, pads, I mean desktop computers are almost going to disappear and we're going to have these giant pads that we're just going to work on.

JAIME TARDY: Soon it will be virtual and we'll be throwing stuff around.

SEAN DONAHOE: So I think there's going to be a lot of that. I think a lot of software is going to be app based with simple installers. The app market is going to be huge. Data delivery is going to go straight to an app. You want it? It better be in a compatible format for this. That?s why Kindle I think is going to really and the iBook format with Mac and everything else is going to really, really take off. And information, everyone wants information. There's no way information marketing is going to disappear.

In the internet marketing sphere, a lot of people are burned. I'm certainly seeing a lot of people saturated with rubbish and it makes it difficult for the people who produce really high quality stuff to rise above it but there's still opportunity there but definitely, if you're going to look to make money online, look outside of IM. You're going to have a lot easier time of it and again, a lot more money to be made.

JAIME TARDY: And I just want to say too that I have been listening to your stuff actually and I am really impressed. I mean everybody that's listening sort of has an idea of who you are anyway and that you have integrity and all that fun stuff, but the quality of content I am really, really impressed with and I've read a lot. So I just want to say that you really are trying to get ahead of the trends, which I think is really a cool thing. So for our last question, is what is one action that listeners can take this week to move them forward towards their goal of a million?

SEAN DONAHOE: Well, I would say if you're not already on the path of product creation, get on that path, because affiliate marketing and people talk about commissions all the time and affiliate marketing, you're getting a slice of their pie, that's fine, but the one person who is making the most money is the product owner. So being a product owner and a developer, even if you don't do it yourself, even if you outsource that process, that's perfectly fine. I'll give you an example. I know nothing and, if you saw my stomach you'd agree with this, I've got a bit of beer belly here. I know nothing about six-pack abs since I was in the Marines and that was a long time ago and there's no chance of me getting a six pack anytime soon.

JAIME TARDY: Wait, read your book! Read your book!

SEAN DONAHOE: Yes, I need to read my own book. I'm having an expert in fitness write that for me for $300. Now $300 I know for some people that's like I don't have $300. Fine, that's fine. Get to a stage where you either write it and find it out yourself and do it yourself or save up a little money and get someone to do it and then get yourself a product made. There are people out there that will do an entire product package for you with a product, with a sales page, with all the graphics, everything done for you and you can then put that out there as your own package.

If you're not willing to invest in yourself, you're not going to make it. If you're not willing to take action, you're not going to make it. If you don't have a plan of action that you can work on, you're not going to make it. If you get all those elements put in place and like I said at the beginning of this, create a solid foundation for your own success, you can then build the walls that will be strong and last a lifetime and when you start seeing success, capitalize on it. If you fail, good, it doesn't matter. That's a lesson because it is going to get your closer to success next time.

Never let a single point of failure stop you or a roadblock stop you from proceeding. It's just a small obstacle on your way to that million dollars. If you can't overcome a small roadblock, the bigger ones down the road are going to really stop you dead in your tracks. Just being determined that you're going to get there and one of the easiest ways online is by being a product owner.

JAIME TARDY: I love it. Thank you so much, Sean. Where can we find you online and tell us more.

SEAN DONAHOE: Okay guys. If you do want to find out and you want to follow a little more about what we do, iamsuccesscenter.com and we do have a membership site where Jaime is actually a member as well. It's called the inner circle and basically what we do every week, one of the cool things is we do, well I do a webinar. I will actually demonstrate a technique. I'll show you what I'm working on currently literally behind the scenes of a multiple 7-figure business. I will tell you what projects I am working on, how I am marketing or what aspects of what I have learned, because I am always learning.

I'm considered one of the top people in internet marketing but I am always learning new stuff every week and I share that with everyone. Keep ahead of the market. See where the market is going. Inside information maybe from the FTC, what's happening with Click Bank, so basically no matter where you are with internet marketing from the beginner to the expert, hey we've always got something in there for everyone. So, follow me there and you will see what we got going on.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome. Thank you and like I said, I recommend it too. I love all the stuff that you've been giving out. So thank you. You put tons of stuff on my to do list but I love it. I need to leverage more. I know, leverage, leverage, okay you told me leverage and scale. All right, thank you so much for coming on today though, Sean. I really appreciate it.

SEAN DONAHOE: It has been my pleasure. Great to share some information with you guys. Take care.

Just to note, you can download the top ten tips from these millionaire interviews on the blog.

Thanks for listening. You can find out more great information like this on EventualMillionaire.com.

Tags: Business Growth, Business Scaling, business startup, internet marketing, millionaire interview, Online Marketing, Sean Donahoe, Startup

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Fear, Giving, Goals, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Systems/Processes

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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