Sean Malarkey – How to Market Educational Products Online

Online Marketing Professional, Twitter and Social Media Author and Speaker, President of Inspired Marketing – Sean Malarkey

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Sean walks through his process for creating a great online marketing campaign. He also gives details on exactly what software he uses and some examples that worked well for him and his partner Lewis Howes.

Go to SeanMalarkey.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Any questions or comments on the podcast let me know!

Transcript:

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast with your host, Jaime Tardy. Real talk and real advice from real millionaires, with a sharp focus on you, the eventual millionaire.

Welcome to the Eventual Millionaire podcast. I'm Jaime Tardy and today we have Sean Malarkey on the show. I'm super excited Sean is really a cool guy. He is actually the business partner of Lewis Howes. We've already have him on the show who is an awesome interview. So I'm really excited to have Sean on the show, too. Thanks so much for coming on today?

SEAN MALARKEY: Thank you Jaime it's an honor to be here. So I really appreciate you having me.

JAIME TARDY: We had some technical difficulties before this so I'm still laughing from it. So Sean, what I'd love to get into first is about your background because I don't much about yours. So what was like your first business, like your very first business, what did you do?

SEAN MALARKEY: I actually had a male escort company..

JAIME TARDY: No Way! Did you really?

SEAN MALARKEY: I'm kidding.

JAIME TARDY: I'm gullible.

SEAN MALARKEY: That's bad, sorry. I just wanted to start the interview off with a bang. Get ready for however long we have, 45 minutes of ridiculousness. So my first, I don't even know where to start, I'd say five years in my first business that I owned was a real estate company. I was in the mortgage industry. I kind of saw what was happening in the mortgage industry and saw the eventual collapse of that industry and saw a big opportunity, in the real estate side of things, from an investment standpoint. I started a real estate investment company where I was buying and selling houses.

In about a four-year run, we bought somewhere; I never really kept count, but somewhere between 100 to 150 houses. I think when I sold my interest in that business we had over 100 rentals that we owned and leased out. We ended up, in the middle of that four-year run, we started a real estate brokerage, brought on agents, bought and sold homes and listed other people's homes and help them find homes, etc.

JAIME TARDY: What year was that, by the way?

SEAN MALARKEY: What's that?

JAIME TARDY: What year was that, by the way?

SEAN MALARKEY: That's a great question. I don't know the exact answer but it was somewhere around 2005, 2006, 2007 I got started. I can do the math backwards but let's just say 2006, somewhere in there. My roles and responsibilities were marketing for that company and I handled marketing, finding all the properties as well but the main role was to market all of our properties, make the phone ring for people looking for houses and also looking to list houses. That's kind of how I got into doing what I'm doing now was that.

I've always kind of had a passion for marketing so it was a natural fit for me to handle all that and I was pretty good. We were kind of known as the go to guys to get properties leased or rented. That was one of our specialties. I got really good I guess with the internet marketing side for real estate things.

JAIME TARDY: Were you always interested in marketing? Did you go to college for it?

SEAN MALARKEY: No, I didn't really go to school. I went to school but it was for a brief stint. For me, marketing is always really fun because you come up with these ideas in your head. Some of it is original, a lot of it is from what you learn and then a combination of the two and the fun part about marketing is to implement something that you, this idea you get, and actually see results. Sometimes you see great results, sometimes you see poor results but if you're good, a majority of the time, you see good results and it's fun to make changes and kind of see what happens. How's that?

JAIME TARDY: Tell me about what you think your ratio is? A lot of people assume that when we do marketing, we're sort of generalizing things, but when we do marketing it's like most of the time it has to work in order for it to be profitable. But what do you think your ratio is from ones that actually hit really well to ones that are huge flops?

SEAN MALARKEY: We never really have any huge flops. Like most of the marketing that we do we know kind of ahead of time based on previous stuff it's going to work and then we're maybe just tweaking a new idea or trying or testing something out. I'd say 80 percent of the time things work out for the better.

JAIME TARDY: Let's talk about how you get that because I work with a lot of business owners and I get emails from a lot of people and they're like I can't figure this thing out - marketing, copywriting, especially online stuff, seems very overwhelming and huge at first of going I don't know there's too many pieces and parts. If you can, break it down. Like what are your specific tips on how to create your 80 percent ratio, in marketing, when you're starting to try something.

SEAN MALARKEY: Sure. I think number one just being involved and doing this stuff all day long kind of gives me a big advantage, because I get to see everything that's happening and I pay attention a lot to what our competitors do and often times you see stuff that's working really well from that and then you can take what they've done and put your own unique twist on it, if you will. With marketing there's no need to reinvent the wheel. I'm constantly, most of our marketing goes back to understanding our audience really well. Our audience is made up of business professionals and entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, people that take charge of their own marketing and their businesses.

So understanding that and understanding kind of what they like and what they don't like is probably the first key. So knowing our audience and knowing them pretty well and I have a really good advantage with that because most of our audience pays attention and interacts with us via social media. I can kind of get a good feel for who they are and I always just say like attracts like. A lot of our audience is a lot like us and whenever I am testing or doing something new it's is this something that I would respond to or I would like to see. If it's not, we don't do it; just a couple interesting case studies or not case studies but examples.

JAIME TARDY: That's exactly what I was going to ask. Thanks for making my job easy.

SEAN MALARKEY: I can see your paper down there with the questions. That's how I knew that.

JAIME TARDY: That would be awesome, if you could.

SEAN MALARKEY: Just recently and this kind of gives you a little bit of insight to the way we think and the way we run our business but one of our products that we sell, it's $100, it's a marketing training product. As soon as they buy that product, they are taken to a page, it's a digital product so normally they would buy and be taken to a registration page where they would enter a user name and desired password and then they would go to the members area.

Instead of doing that, we know that the easiest time to get somebody to buy something from you is right after they've bought something from you. So that's why when you're checking out at the grocery store you have all these things surrounding you because they want you to buy more. Often times like with Go Daddy, if you buy a domain name, as soon as you buy it you're offered all these additional things you can add on. The reason why it's done that way is because it's literally the easiest time to convert somebody into buying more. We know with our stuff, the way it works, it helps people and we have complementary products for certain products that really can help triple the impact, if they take both options.

With one of our offers they are taken to a page that kind of just went the opposite of what I thought would work, not what I thought would work. I kind of went the opposite of what's working and just tried something that I thought I would like to see and I created this page where it's simply just a letter. At the top it says thank you so much for purchasing blah, blah, blah product and before you access that have a quick look at this story I wanted to tell you or something like that. Then it's a quick story that basically just tells them about another product that we have, the history behind it, why it works and it's a true story that is based upon our experiences and it's a pretty good little story to read through.

At the end, it says hey we're offering this today at somewhere around 90 percent off for $47. If you like it, great, go ahead and hit the I'll take it button. If you don't, thanks for reading this and you can just click the no thanks button and that will take you right to the registration. When we ran that, it was the ugliest looking page ever. I mean normally with online marketing you want to have all these graphics and things that support your offer. I said, you know what, let's just go with a letter, because if I bought something and I just saw a letter, I would be more inclined to pay attention to it. So literally there is no graphics on the page. The header is like an H2 font so just slightly a little bit bigger than the actual text.

The text, normally they tell you to make the text real narrow because newspapers columns are narrow because people can feel like they can adjust it better. I just said screw it, I am going to go with a wide letter just like I would write you, if I was writing you a letter. That page converted at 50 percent so we increased revenues by 25 percent per customer with taking that offer, because it was half the original cost and half the people were taking it so that's where you get the 25 percent. When that worked well, I said, you know what, through the first 100 orders we saw a consistent 50 percent take. I said let's try 97 and it's still a huge discount and maybe we can still achieve 50 percent or close and more revenue.

We ended up seeing a 25 percent conversion with that. So the revenue at the end of the day was just about the same but we had less people taking the offer. I said to myself which one should we do. If we go with 97, we have less customers we have to take care of and less service but the reality is when somebody buys something often times they consider that kind of interruption of marketing. Instead of getting what they paid for they are being presented another offer and I looked at the psychology behind it and I said to myself well, if 50 percent of the people took the offer, there's a good chance, just to throw a number at the wall, there's probably 75 percent of the people that looked at that page did not mind seeing that page. That's why 50 percent, so I get 25 percent just see there wasn't a good fit or didn't have the money or what have you and maybe even higher.

The last thing we want to do is irritate somebody right when they buy a product from us. It's not a good first impression. So when I looked at the $97 price point, I said to myself well if only 25 percent are taking this, probably a lot more people were not excited about seeing this and we value our customers and value what they think of us so let's go with the $47 offer and that way we know we're helping more people and more people are taking advantage of the offer and they're less irritated, if you will, or less people will be irritated with seeing this offer.

JAIME TARDY: I have a quick question on that. How can you change and price test that easily? Do you ever have issues of people going well I just saw this was $47 and my friend just said it was $97 or anything like that?

SEAN MALARKEY: No, we don't get that. You would think that that would be, you know, it's a legitimate concern and it's a fear that kind of creeps into your head but it doesn't happen and these are coming from buyers. Our buyers are all over the world. We do have a lot of people that refer other people but it's such a small sample and it's not advertised. It's only after they buy, so only those that buy would even know that that would happen and the chances of somebody saying, "I saw this great offer for $47" to somebody who had seen it for $97, I mean it's just?

JAIME TARDY: It's slim.

SEAN MALARKEY: Yes.

JAIME TARDY: But does that ever happen with, it sounds like you do price testing a lot with products and stuff like that. Does that ever happen at all?

SEAN MALARKEY: No.

JAIME TARDY: Really? That's really interesting.

SEAN MALARKEY: Maybe it does but they don't write in and say anything. If they do and somebody was upset about it we'd more than happy to take care of them because we don't want somebody to be upset.

JAIME TARDY: That's really interesting. How do you start getting people into that too? I know you said knowing your avatar or the person that you're going towards is really, really important. Is that sort of that first step that you do, the very first step is that. How do you get that and what do you do? I've heard people go well they are this age, they're female, they're this, they're this, they like doing this. How do you sort of create your avatar?

SEAN MALARKEY: It's a great question and it really was not intentional. Early on a large portion of our list, our email list is what I am talking about, which is what we do a lot of marketing to came from LinkedIn and so we knew the demographics of the average person on LinkedIn but then more just I guess the way we know our customers is we do a lot of webinars. Every week we have multiple webinars running and we interact and engage with our customers quite a bit and we have been doing this for a number of years. Through all that interaction and engagement we really know who they are. They're not people, for the most part, who are looking to get rich quick, which a lot of people who sell stuff online kind of work in that space or that area.

That turns our audience off. None of our stuff is positioned that way and we really don't sell anything along those lines. All of our stuff is geared towards professionals who know they need to be marketing with social media or online and they just want the tools and the know how. They already know how to get rich, they know how to make money with their own products and services, they just don't necessarily have the insights to do it effectively and do it great and that's where we come in and provide that training through our expertise or publishing other experts who all they do is spend all day long working in these areas and the extensions.

JAIME TARDY: So it's not as though you have a specific avatar person for each product. It's like you have a big list, they're all about this sort of type of people and then you just give them the products that they want.

SEAN MALARKEY: Exactly and we know, for some people, a lot of our marketing trainings are social media related and we know that some people may be interested in using You Tube for their business. We know some may be interested in using Facebook. Some may be interested in both. Some may be interested in one or the other and that's fine. For the most part, all of them work very well together and we kind of know what our audience is interested in and not and we market stuff outside of what we think they might be interested in occasionally and we can see the results and know that yes this was of interest to them or it was not and we just kind of make a mental note and move on.

We don't get heavily into surveying our audience and getting all this data and whatnot. There's a lot of people that recommend doing that and it may be something we do in the future, but I've always felt like we have a pretty good understanding and we can present them with stuff that we know they like. Often times people will be on our webinars and say, "I got on this webinar not thinking that I would be interested in doing You Tube videos but I just thought maybe I should check it out and you guys have completely converted me. I didn't understand why this was important and now I do."

If I were to survey somebody and they said they weren't interested in that and I wouldn't give them that opportunity, it's kind of almost doing them a disservice.

JAIME TARDY: That's a very different way of approaching it because everybody says, well especially if you have an email list, you're supposed to ask them what they want. They tell you what you want, you deliver products and services that give them what they want. But what you're saying is sometimes they don't even know exactly what they want or what they might need.

SEAN MALARKEY: Yes and Steve Jobs was a big proponent of that. He always said that his audience doesn't know what they want. He's trying to create that for them. I know that the realtors that are on my list should be using You Tube to market their properties and they may have decided a long time ago that they didn't want to do that because it was too much work and there was just no value there but when we do a training or webinar and we show them hey a third of all this realtor's listings, from this little case study, have been sold through using You Tube and he makes his videos in literally four minutes and it's that easy, you can pretty much, I don't know, expose the possibilities that are there or shed some light on the topic that they may have had some preconceived notions that were false.

JAIME TARDY: That's awesome.

SEAN MALARKEY: I'm not saying it's not good to survey your audience. I'm kind of lazy so we haven't done it because it requires a lot of work and figuring out things that we don't know how. But, at the same time, I just know our audience and I know them pretty well or I feel like I do anyway. I hope they feel the same so we always just try and present stuff that we know will be relevant and will interest them and we've kind of learned over the years what they like to see.

It's pretty easy when you have data. We track all the data very easily. So with every webinar, every training that we do, we track how many people open the email, how many people click through, how many registered, how many showed up, how many purchased. In looking back at that data, it makes it really easy to decide what people like and what they don't like.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome. I want to continue the flow but what are some of the software programs that you use to track all that stuff. That way we just sort of have a good idea.

SEAN MALARKEY: Sure. We use, for our email marketing, we use three different companies and there's kind of a reason and a method to all that. We use iContact, Infusion Soft and A Webber. There's several other great companies out there I didn't mention. Those are just the three that we have chosen to work with and we use and we like them. Within that, we can see all the data. For webinars, we use Go To Webinar and Stealth Seminar. Stealth Seminar is a platform that you can playback pre-recorded webinars on kind of on an on demand basis. For a lot of our affiliates, we use those.

Google Docs. We keep Excel spreadsheets. We have somebody that goes in and tracks all of the data, plugs into there and gives us a quick glance at all of our campaigns and gives us the ability to kind of measure, or a quick ability to look at and say okay cool they like this, they like that, etc. Outside of that, we use, there's a software we use for a web platform we use to track behavior on websites. It's call Get Clicky. Are you familiar with that?

JAIME TARDY: Yes.

SEAN MALARKEY: It's a live, it's basically like Google analytics. You can track your customers live, on your website, look at all the data, look at historical data. There's all kinds of great information that we have there.

JAIME TARDY: When did you start implementing all the analytics and the tracking and stuff? I know a lot of people, especially first starting may get overwhelmed with some of that stuff. If you were to sort of say, like how far in the business should you be before you start really paying attention to this stuff?

SEAN MALARKEY: It's interesting. Obviously you're better off to do it day one, but it's not necessary and a lot of people get that analysis paralysis or I need to do all these things before I get started and they never get started as a result. We didn't have that all on day one. We just ran for it, got some early success and from that success, you start to excited about the possibilities and then you're like all right, all of that part is done, now I just need to implement this part and this part and this part and this part and build upon your successes.

That early success, from just getting started, is definitely the key. It doesn't have to be perfect. As much as we like to do things perfect, and we do a lot things not perfect now but we spend a lot of time getting ready before we ever put anything out just because we have the ability, we have the team and it's just as easy as me having a team meeting and saying we want to get this, this and this done and then it all gets done. But it wasn't like that early on; I had to do everything myself early on and had I tried to do everything perfect, from the beginning, I would have never gotten started.

JAIME TARDY: That's huge. How many people do you have on your team right now?

SEAN MALARKEY: I get asked this question a lot. I never really know the answer. We have one full-time person who handles accounting, payroll and a lot of just different things here and there, fulfillment of different things, customer service. We have a full-time customer service person who handled, a lot of people think we have this giant customer service team. Last year we did. We serviced over 20,000 customers with just one full-time person. We're able to do that because, and she doesn't even work full time to be honest. She is hired for full time but she doesn't work but probably two or three hours a day.

We're able to do that because we're constantly looking at our customer service issues and problems and we see trends and so we try and fix them prior to them becoming an issue for the customer. If somebody is having, 30 percent of the customer service tickets are regarding an issue that we can fix and resolve that issue before it ever becomes an issue, we do that. She might get 10 to 20 tickets a day and it takes her a minute or two to respond to them on average.

JAIME TARDY: Nice. That's really impressive. I'm sure that's what a lot of people are really liking too, especially in regular businesses, service businesses or product businesses, most of the time customer service is such a huge piece of it. It's really interesting that you can sort of take care of some of the issues, especially with the large customer base that you have.

SEAN MALARKEY: Yes, it's pretty easy. Outside of that, we have a web team that does everything from copywriting, email, build web pages, split testing, graphics, word press installs, membership areas, video editing. I mean literally like all of the mechanical work to make this work. Set up webinars, build webinar registration page, email funnels and that is a team of about six people. I have one to two point of contacts there. I relay information to them and then somebody on that staff handles it. They're contractors that we work with though. That's a contracted team so they're not considered an employee.

Outside of that, we probably have about 15 different contractors that we call on, some once a week, some once a month, some once a year. We do have an audio/video person who might as well be, they're a contractor but they are doing work for us not every day but pretty close to every day and they handle all of our audio/video, webinar recordings, editing and a lot of stuff in that arena.

JAIME TARDY: How long has that been? When did you start the company or the business and then now you have this size of a team?

SEAN MALARKEY: That was little over three years ago. I think September was our three year anniversary.

JAIME TARDY: Congratulations. That's awesome.

SEAN MALARKEY: Thank you.

JAIME TARDY: It sounds like you're doing really well. Let's go back because I want to make sure we don't forget. Step one, being the avatar, right, when you're really trying to get into marketing, step one is the avatar and really figuring out who you're talking to. Tell me more.

SEAN MALARKEY: For us, all of our audience, for the most part, came from social media. We really understood early on, because these are people that we interact and engage with all the time. Lewis and I both respond to just about every single email that people send to us. When we mail out to our audience on our list we usually use our own personal emails and we get a lot of responses. We interact and engage. I just feel like we have a good understanding of our audience. We know from the products and the marketing that we put out there, we know that it attracts exactly them. Understanding that is definitely key.

From a marketing perspective, Facebook has this really cool tool now where you can upload your email list and for everybody that uses the same exact email or register for Facebook, it will have a match and then you can then market to your email list with Facebook ads and exclusively with Facebook ads. The exciting thing for me, with that, was to plug in that data and then start to look at all the different segmenting. Let's just say my first list of around 10,000 people there was about 75,000 that have the same email on Facebook.

Then I just looked at the advanced targeting options and I was running and ad to them and I said how many of them were male. How many of them were female? To see that data, it was no surprise, it was almost split 50/50 so that was pretty cool. How many lived in the U.S.? How many lived in Canada? How many lived in Australia and to see that data. How many people like certain topics and interests? That gave me a deeper understanding of our audience but it was pretty much exactly in tune with who we thought they were.

I don't know what exactly your question was. I forget but I think it was just knowing your audience and marketing to them. I just feel like because of our space, being thought leaders I guess in social media and having a large following there gives us the ability to interact with them on a daily basis and literally dozens of people, for the most part, on a daily basis, so I feel like we probably have all this intelligence that most people normally wouldn't. In any business today, if you're not using social and not paying attention to who your customers are, who your audience is, you're foolish. There's just so much good data there and just right at your fingertips to understand exactly who they are.

JAIME TARDY: Tell me a little bit more because a lot of the times it's hard to translate that. If I was sitting talking to a person that's on my list, that'd be really easy, right? I'd get their feedback and we'd go back and forth and we can do that a little bit on social media. But like when you're creating a sales page or you're trying to sell them something where it's more or less a one-way kind of transaction, they look at your sales page, they see it, how can you really talk to them? How do you use their language? How do you make it so that way they really want it or is it one of those things where you're like well the offer is sort of a no brainer of course they would buy it, they're my people, they'll buy it anyway or does copywriting really make that much difference?

SEAN MALARKEY: A little bit of both as far as like speaking to them and then having something that they either know they want or it's just a no brainer. For all of our stuff, if we positioned our stuff, hey you're going to get rich using all this, we know that it would probably convert better but, for me, it's always been a short-term approach to appeal to that mindset. We've always looked at our products and our audience as they feel like they have a need for it. They just maybe don't understand it so with all of our communication we try and explain why they should have a need, what results they can expect and we don't really say you should buy this, for the most part. It's more there already is somewhat of a need and they're on that page because they're already interested in some fashion.

So it's our job, at that point, to communicate to them this is what we have to offer, these are results that others have gotten, this is what you can expect, if you implement what you learn here, and this is what the price is. We don't ever really try and shove anything down everybody's throat. For us, copywriting, there are some basic principles that we follow. You want the communication to be more about them than you want it to be about yourself, things like that. Instead of using "I" statements or "me" statements we try and make it about them.

But in general, we don't really go for a hard sell. As a result, people come to our page because there's already an interest and they'll read through the copy. They'll look at the data and the statistics that are there and then they are compelled to buy. We don't really want to use all this advanced copywriting that pulls on people's emotional triggers because I've always felt like if they're going to buy, they should buy because they want to buy and they want it. I don't want to trick people into buying and use tactics. We do use a little bit here and there, but there's more just kind of basic copywriting principles that you don't want to break and turn people away.

I guess if you looked at some of our elements on our sales pages you could say I am contradicting myself, but there's just some basic principles you always have to follow and it could be perceived that way. I think it's a good, our refund rates are good testimony to the way we sell the products. Historically, everything we've ever sold we've been under five percent, which for a digital product?

JAIME TARDY: For an online product, that's crazy.

SEAN MALARKEY: A product that's not tangible, in other words, you're not getting a book and saying I bought this, this is what I got or physical good. It's historically a really low rate. And even for physical goods where people have to mail in returns, they typically can see return rates of 5 to 15 percent. My thought process is that goes back to the way you present what you have to sell and who you're selling to. So if I only present something and sell to people that really truly have a need for and want it, why would they refund?

JAIME TARDY: Exactly. Let's talk about that because it sounds like you sort of have some criteria for a winning offer. I know you sell other people's products and stuff like that. What do you have to go through to find out if you think it will be a winning offer? I know you said results, which is really interesting. Tell me some more.

SEAN MALARKEY: It's interesting for us. The offers that we present to our audience, including our own products, it's not necessarily ever about how much money we'll make. The most important thing for us is is this a good fit for our audience and will it help them. Just a classic example, we do a lot of trainings on social media and when Google Plus kind of rolled out in the first six months, there was an opportunity there where people felt like they needed to know about it and whatnot. We never really felt like it was that good of a vehicle for marketing. There are some elements and things that are great about it but for the masses, it wasn't necessarily a good fit like Facebook or You Tube might be. So we never presented them an offer on Google Plus because we thought it wouldn't be a good fit.

We bring on other speakers not based on their conversion or their revenue per click or per head, but mainly will this be a good fit for our audience, will they like it, is the person presenting this well spoken. Is he just a good fit? The money has never been the driving principle behind it. There's all kinds of opportunities that we could be offering that I would make great money, but I think most of those kinds of offers are more of a short-term get in, get out, make money while you can mindset. I've never treated my audience, I just don't think they deserve that. We've always thought of it more of a long-term audience and the successes that we have had I think have come from that kind of guiding principle.

JAIME TARDY: That makes perfect sense. That's why everybody has a bad taste for internet marketers just because it seems like it's a short-term strategy and they might piss people off and that sucks. It sounds like you're really trying to do this long term.

SEAN MALARKEY: Yes, sure.

JAIME TARDY: Tell me a little bit about, you have this product. You think it's a great offer. You have the people that you want to sell it to. Now you, of course, already have a list but let's pretend you have a small list or something like that. What would you do to offer that to them' I know Lewis, when I had him on, I had him sort of go through if you didn't have a list, like step one, step two, step three how to get a list. Let's say we have a small list now.

We're going to continue with you. We have a small list now, we have a product or an offering that we think they're going to like, what sort of steps do you take from them to try and either get them, I know you do webinars, either email them what do you sort of do?

SEAN MALARKEY: There's about 100,000 different approaches, which is a problem.

JAIME TARDY: Give me one that works for you.

SEAN MALARKEY: A couple that have worked for me, when I first got started, I'm just really good with Twitter and people kind of saw me as a Twitter expert. One of the things I did to position myself and build an audience was when I very first got started I started a blog that was all about Twitter and every day, the blog was about my journey with Twitter and what I was going through, how I was growing my audience, what I was learning, what tools I was using, what I recommended, what I didn't recommend and so every day I would just put an update saying today I did this, this and this. I learned this, this and this. I found these great tools and here are my results.

Within the first 30 days, so what I would do is write a blog post and then publish it out to Twitter and people were sharing it. In the first 30 days, by the end of that 30 days I was getting somewhere around a 1,000 uniques, like 800-900 uniques a day.

JAIME TARDY: You had just started 30 days before and you were getting 1,000?

SEAN MALARKEY: Yes.

JAIME TARDY: That?s impressive.

SEAN MALARKEY: I think it really helped daily blogging and updating people and I was kind of creating a story of my growth on Twitter so people kind of get roped into that and they're fascinated by that and they want to return and see what's happening to me and how it's going and whatnot. That was what worked for me really well and I ended up from that building a good email list and marketing a Twitter training back to them and making some money with that.

Another recent example, it's kind of a long story but I recently created actually a physical product and I just said you know what this is something I could probably, I did it for my kids, and I thought this is something I could probably sell and with Facebook, with all the advanced targeting on Facebook, they make it very easy to, if you know your customer and you know the customer avatar, it's very easy to find exactly who they are and market directly to them. Right now we're running campaigns where we're losing a dollar for every dollar that we spend, but we're building an email list, we're building a Facebook fan page and I know over time that gap will narrow to the point where it becomes profitable and we'll have assets that allow me to market back to and generate revenue for free via the email list and via the fan page.

We'll see some great success with that. Facebook marketing, if you don't have a list, if you've got a little bit of money, it's very easy to spend money and tap into your exact core audience and get them interested in what you've got and to build an audience that way.

JAIME TARDY: What do you think about; say you're building up your list on Facebook? Do you sell to them right away? Is that something where you're like now you're on my list now I sell to you right away or how do you do that?

SEAN MALARKEY: You can, yes, you can. There's a million different ways to approach that. With the physical product I just created, I'm driving traffic directly to a website that has lots of information. It doesn't take them right to the order page but just talks all about the product, what it is, there's frequently asked questions, there's a gallery. There's a story kind of about it. The story is meant to actually sell the product as well. All those pages have direct links to the order page. That's actually like the third most popular site is the order page so it's working.

You can drive, with online marketing products or online products where it's digital, one of the best ways to sell them and build a list at the same time is through a webinar. To market people to a webinar registration page where they're going to be learning all about XYZ product during this webinar, you know that everybody that ops into that has an interest and need in that and if you do your targeting well, you can get really good conversions. We typically see 25 to 30 percent conversions on Facebook and if we are driving them to a webinar that has an hour of training with an offer at the end, generally we will make our money back as soon as the webinar is over and we have all these additional assets of an email list to make money.

JAIME TARDY: I think what's hard for people is that they see you with a huge email list and they're like oh well you built that a long time ago. Now it's harder. Now it's, you know, insert excuse here, for why you're doing it really well and why it's harder for me. But what you were saying before, which was really interesting, is saying that you can do Facebook ads. You can leverage what you already have. It doesn't necessarily mean that you have to start with a crazy huge email list, in order to do that.

SEAN MALARKEY: Yes, Melanie Duncan is a great example of that. In fact, you should interview her. She created this Pinterest product and had no list and no audience but knew through smart marketing on Facebook she could target exactly who her audience is and as a result, built a huge audience in over a year's time and made money all along the way.

JAIME TARDY: I'll definitely have to have her on. I think that's sort of the thing too. We assume that the people that are sort of already big are big and it's hard to sort of have someone come up through the ranks but I know Melanie has done an amazing job so maybe I should have to have her on.

SEAN MALARKEY: By the way, they've got one of the most amazing businesses ever, her and her husband, Devin, with their Greek threads things. So if you do bring them on, make sure, they've got a business that does multimillion dollars in revenue and they have not even been into the office. It's a physical product. They've got an office, a huge staff and they haven't even been in the office in over a year.

JAIME TARDY: That's awesome because they're at conferences hanging out with me.

SEAN MALARKEY: They live in New York and the business is in California.

JAIME TARDY: Oh is it? I didn't even realize it was in California. That's crazy.

SEAN MALARKEY: They've got a great, great story.

JAIME TARDY: And they are great people.

SEAN MALARKEY: Enough about them. This is all about me.

JAIME TARDY: I know. Now if I don't have them on people are going to email me. I'll totally get Melanie on. So for the last question that I always ask, what's one action that listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal?

SEAN MALARKEY: It?s interesting. We have all these ideas. The only thing we need to do is get it done and we never get it done but by simply just taking some action on an idea or on a thought process you have that may be good, generally if you take that action and actually put yourself out there, you?ll see enough results early on to know this is a good idea or it wasn?t. Most people will probably see some success, if they actually take action because usually you work hard and you get rewarded for it. No matter how small the success are it?s generally enough though to get you excited to propel you forward to much greater successes.

The one thing I would recommend, a lot of us we create all of these different things we need to do but we never really finish anything. So just picking one to two or three things that you know you can accomplish this week, actually making it a priority and getting it done. Usually by focusing on the small stuff though it gets you much closer to the kind of results and the kind of success that you want to see.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome. Anyone listening, you need to make sure that one thing or that couple things that you need to do this week that you haven't or that you're putting off, I mean I think that's the thing that's really interesting. We keep reading and keep learning and stuff instead of actually taking the action we need to take. That's what makes all the difference in the world.

SEAN MALARKEY: Most the time we are afraid. We have these fears that it's not going to work and it's not so it's easier just to continue learning and feel like we're doing something that's going to help. But at the end of the day, a lot of it is kind of fear driven. Just have no freaking fear and get it done. Most of the time, almost everybody I know that takes action sees good results or sees some results that's enough to let them know okay this is a great idea or it was stupid.

JAIME TARDY: Yes, then they can go from there.

SEAN MALARKEY: Usually that nominal success will be so exciting to you or the fears are gone, at that point, and now you're really motivated to make it happen.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome. So where can we find more information on you Sean? How can we follow you on Facebook, on Twitter, where can we get more information on you?

SEAN MALARKEY: Yes. Just Google. But no, literally my user name is Sean Malarkey on everything. So whether it be Twitter, whether it be Facebook, whether it be Google Plus, whatever it may be, just search for me and you'll find me. I have a blog - SeanMalarkey.com. There's actually a link at the top you can click on for all my different profiles to connect.

JAIME TARDY: Nice. Awesome. We'll probably link them up in here too and so thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Hopefully we'll meet in person, at some point.

SEAN MALARKEY: I can't wait.

JAIME TARDY: And be able to hang out.

SEAN MALARKEY: Thank you so much for having me on, Jaime, it really was a big honor and I hope this was received well and if anybody has any questions or comments or feedback I always love hearing that.

JAIME TARDY: Awesome. I hope you have an amazing day with that beautiful view and take care, Sean.

SEAN MALARKEY: All right, we'll see you, Jaime.

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: E-Commerce, E-Commerce Marketing, millionaire interview, Online Marketing, Physical Products, Sean Malarkey

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews, Relationships

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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