Ep 005: John Shea Has Amassed Over 100,000 Students For His Online Marketing Courses

All right guys, episode 5, Growing Your Agency. Super excited today. My name is Ryan Shank, I'm the host, and today we have John Shea with us. John, thank you so much for joining the, the podcast today. How's it going?

Good, thanks for having me, Ryan.

Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, I first— first of all, before we dive in, you know, I've been very intrigued by, you know, things that you're doing in the space, the content you're producing. Tell us a little bit about your business, and then I'm also curious how you guys you got into it and how you got started. So tell us a little bit of the background.

Yeah, I'll give you kind of the short version. So I started with internet marketing in about 2012. Initially had gotten involved through, I was doing some MLM stuff, really wasn't working out so hot for me. Kind of jumped on the shiny object train and was looking at all the different things that I could be doing online. And eventually I actually started a podcast just like what you're doing now. And I did that for about 2 years. I had a podcast all about kind of generalized marketing. And I went out and I interviewed all the big, big name people at the time in the space, like people like Pat Flynn. There's like Andrew Warner of Mixergy and many, many other people like John Lee Dumas. He's got one of the biggest business podcasts. A lot of really big name people that I had looked up to. So I was doing really well with that, but I couldn't really figure out how to monetize it. I built some good relationships and one of the guys I had interviewed, it was actually one of my first interviews, we ended up doing an SEO service together and making some money. I had my first $1,000 day and that kind of intrigued me by going out there and doing this for clients. So I kind of got into a phase of where I was doing a little bit of client work and I also got intrigued by teaching online. I actually now have over 100,000 students on the Udemy platform. Wow, I've got over 40 courses on there. I've been doing that for about 4 or 5 years now. And, um, yeah, I kind of got really involved in teaching and kind of sticking to teaching in the digital marketing space. Um, but kind of where I'm at now is I've been self-employed for the last 2 years, and I've just been kind of working with a few clients. Um, nothing too, too crazy. I didn't want to really— I wasn't motivated to build like this huge company with all these employees. I just wanted freedom. I didn't want to have to go to a job every day. I wanted to, you know, sleep in if I felt like it or play a video game at 2 o'clock if I wanted to. That was kind of the life that I was looking for. So, um, at this point I'm kind of doing a combination of client work, a little bit of affiliate marketing, and mostly like digital marketing course related stuff, um, you know, in this space, I guess you could say.

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, All of this is really, really interesting. I've recently become very interested in the affiliate space and I also have kind of been looking at this online course. I saw recently you said you're on Udemy. I've seen like Teachable as a platform which seems a little bit more white-labeled version of it, whereas Udemy more of like a marketplace where you can go in and kind of like pick—

More self-hosted. So like Udemy is a marketplace, whereas Teachable you're selling your own stuff, you're responsible for making those sales.

Yep, yep.

I have all my Udemy courses on Teachable, so it's just another means to selling, essentially.

Got it. So, so, um, you know, as far, as far as this goes, so tell me about a little bit of the client work that you're doing right now. Are you, you know, are you doing Facebook ads? Uh, are you doing AdWords? Um, what is, what does the scope of the work look like that you're for your direct clients right now?

Um, the bulk of the people I'm working with, I'm really trying to focus mainly on local SEO, meaning making a business in the Google Map Pack in the top 3. So if you search, you know, if someone doesn't know, they're listening, you know, you type in plumber in a specific city, you'll see a listing of 3 businesses that show up with their reviews and yet the prominent placement there will generally bring in a lot more phone calls and business for that particular business.

Yeah, I think there's a massive opportunity and it seems like people are starting to really go after this, but I really feel like the Google My Business local map packs, as you're saying, is just massive right now. And, and, you know, so are you verifying the listings? Talk to us a little bit about how you're getting those listings and also how you get the clients. Are you reaching out to clients cold? Like, how does, uh, kind of the details of the business work?

Yeah, so I've actually got, um, kind of two methods that I'm using right now. So, um, you know, if you were to go out and, you know, right now my, my business is a little bit broad. Like, um, in a sense, I'll take anyone that wants to be ranked in the maps, but I'm not necessarily going after like a specific niche.

Sure.

It could be an appliance company, could be, you know, I've got a restoration business. I just took on a company that does like elderly care. All of those have businesses that can benefit from being in the maps. So the work isn't really that much different in terms of what I'm doing. But mainly what I focus on is building relationships with the business owners. And right now I've got a combination where I either have a partner coming in and helping me with doing just about like 90% of the work, if not more, really outsourcing it. I'm kind of the middleman and I'm focused more on the sales side of things and the relationships with the clients while I have other people to fulfill the bulk of the work. That's just personally how I prefer it. I'm not as big on the technical side of doing everything. I'd rather either use white label providers, services, or find partners that are interested in doing this stuff and we kind of split it. I'm bringing them sales and deals and they're ultimately fulfilling it for me. So, um, that's traditionally how I'm doing it right now. Most of my clients, I brought on a new partner a year ago and we're doing it 50/50. So I'm basically bringing him a whole lot of extra monthly income. And for me it's great cause I don't really have to do a whole lot of work.

Yep. So how are you getting those clients? Are they, you know, are they coming inbound cause they've been following some of your courses? Like, like tactically, you know, how, how are you getting in touch with those business owners?

Yeah. Um, I actually took some coaching from someone a couple years ago on this, but I started using Upwork very, you know, taking it very seriously. A lot of people think like Upwork, oh, I can go on there and hire a guy, you know. I know, like, you know, let's say in your example, right, you have the PhoneWagon SaaS, and when you had that developed, you likely went on Upwork to find a developer to do that work for you for whatever it was, right? And that's how I think a lot of people are looking at it like that, but they don't realize There's businesses just like, you know, what we're doing, people going on there with very large budgets that need help. And I just focused a lot almost on really like building up a resume there with a lot of proof of my work, getting really good feedback from people and building up credibility there. I was recently given like the top-rated status. And now when I apply to jobs there, the chances of me winning that job because of that credibility and kind of the resume on there, so to speak, my profile and everything, it makes it very, very easy to land jobs. The other thing that I'm doing is kind of combining— I use this one of two ways.

But by the way, by the way, sorry, sorry to jump in, just want to add. So I just interviewed someone on our previous episode, uh, who is a digital marketing agency, pretty much just client work, but they got their largest client from Upwork. They have a profile there, clients spending half a million dollars a month in ads. Landed them from Upwork.

So it's huge.

Yeah, I mean, there's serious volume there. So, yep.

Yeah, I mean, the thing you have to think about with Upwork, and I learned this from my mentor, is that Upwork is paying like literally thousands of dollars to advertise that if you go online and type like, I need an SEO guy, or I need an AdWords guy, you know, whatever, Upwork has ads that's encouraging users to go and sign up and then post a job. And ultimately Upwork is making money. They take a portion It's like 20% on an initial job. Yeah, but I literally could go there and within the last, you know, if I looked at the last 5 hours, there's going to be tons and tons of jobs posted for digital marketing. It's just never-ending. So instead of me kind of going and finding people and, you know, kind of begging them or trying to convince them that, hey, let's work with me, when maybe they just either don't need help or they've— or maybe they're already working with someone. I don't have to kind of be trying to break down the door, whereas these people are seeking help and I know exactly what they're looking for in most cases. And I can very easily, you know, get them to a level where it's like, hey, you know, let's work together. So, um, yeah, that's what I've been finding most of my clients. And then also there's a lot of agency owners that go there looking to outsource, and I've been able to kind of strike up deals where maybe I'm just working with another agency owner and they're essentially outsourcing it to me And I portray it as, hey, we're a team, and I've got my partner on the sidelines kind of, you know, doing a lot of that work. And I'm the main, you know, so there's a little bit of arbitrage going on, but everybody's winning in the end of it, and the client's getting results and the client's happy with it.

Love it. Yeah, no, I, uh, so obviously we work with a ton of agencies, um, or marketers who actually are then doing white label work for an agency, right? So someone like you or someone, you know, that's super good maybe directly at AdWords, right? And then a big agency might have a client, you know, and they have a large scope of work, a website redesign, some copy, some ads, and then, oh, also manage, you know, $10K in ad spend. Boom, that agency or that marketer will be the white label PPC guy for that agency. So I am starting to, to see that a lot happen now. Um, exactly, you know what you're saying, these agencies are kind of looking to outsource certain pieces of, uh, of the pie. Or maybe in your case, for instance, with the local SEO, right? Like, hey, you know, I got a client, want to do some, you know, Google Maps optimization, things like that, right?

The other thing I was gonna say, this is kind of my second method, which it ties into Upwork. This is the biggest thing that I think really helps me stand out is I will do personalized video proposals for pretty much every job that I apply to.

Yeah.

And I do the same approach with email. So if I were to reach out to someone cold, say not through Upwork, I might put together a video and just talk about, go through their website and say, you know, here are the things I like, here's some of the things I don't like. And be very transparent with them. And, you know, that honesty really shows. So they're, they're able to build that trust with me very quickly, and that's what ultimately leads to a sale.

So, so talk to— so that's, that's awesome, and I love like the differentiated pitch. And that was actually going to be my next question. You know, I know, I know on Upwork, I've never done it from the provider side, but I've posted jobs and, you know, I get 30 people that are, you know, applying to these jobs. So one, Besides the video, how do you stand out? But then also talk to me about the pitch and the positioning. You know, it's like, are you going in like saying, hey, I'm gonna do this, this, and this in the maps?

Or—

and I don't want to, you know, I don't want to tee you up too much for the answer, but you know, is it really benefit-focused? Um, so I guess talk to me about that, the positioning of it.

Usually, I mean, the video itself already stands out because it's like 90%.

Of course. Yep.

Aren't doing it, you know. So yeah, that alone, you know, majority of the time I'm at least getting a response, so long as I haven't waited like 2 weeks to get back to a job that someone posted. It already has like 30 guys that applied to it. Yeah, it is your friend. But beyond that, um, once I do the video, usually I just, you know, I try not to go too heavy into like real big details because it's kind of like, you know, if you go to a car dealership and you know, they're going to be making, you know, a big major change to the motor or something. Let's just say they were doing a head gasket, right? They're not going to pull you in and be like, look, here's how I'm going to take off the, you know, the intake and like all this other stuff, right? They're not going to sit there and walk through that. So I kind of treat it the same way. When I talk to the business owners, I go into it as kind of something that they can understand, which might be that they're not showing up. And a lot of times they already know that, right? That's why they're there.

Sure, sure.

Just kind of showing them that like, hey, I have other proof. Like you can see the rankings I've gotten for other people. And it's kind of giving them some idea like when we get on the phone. I have had a lot of people that go on Upwork. I had a real estate company recently, for example. They just said, hey, we want backlinks. And like he was all gung-ho about backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. And what I had to really convince him was that, hey, like this is just one small piece of the puzzle, right? Like you could be missing out on other things in your Google My Business profile. There could be things on your website that need to be fixed, like your content could be bad, um, or other things that just like weren't part of that one small puzzle that he really needed. So I convinced him to kind of come on as like a full-on, like, let's do a local SEO campaign, not just go out and build you backlinks and then nothing else. So, um, yeah, that's probably been one of the bigger things that I've found with Upwork is that people tend to be like going there seeking something very specific, and a lot of times they don't really know what exactly they want. Because they don't understand it.

Yeah, and that's the other thing, you know, it's like backlinks, but it's like, why do you want backlinks? Oh, I want more traffic. Why do you want more traffic? Like, I want more leads that gets the sales. And I think, you know, what I'm starting to understand, especially, you know, as you know, when you're talking to these business owners, it's like links actually don't— they don't want the links per se, right? They want the sales, they want the leads to come in. I think, you know, that's kind of what I was getting at with, you know, with the pitch, right? Are you really focusing it on, hey, these are the results that we're going to deliver deliver over time. Um, not necessarily kind of middle of the funnel, top of the funnel, what we're going to do tactically. We're going to do this, this, like what in my experience, and let me know if I'm wrong, but it's like, it almost doesn't matter to them at the end of the day, like what you're doing. It's like, are you going to be able to get the, get the result that they're looking for, you know, based on kind of the requirements that they have?

Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I've been doing, and it's been a little bit tough, we've been thinking about changing this, but a lot of agencies don't do it this way. And service providers. But what we've been doing is coming up with a base fee, and that base fee is kind of like including me, us going through and say doing on-page SEO, fixing like, you know, meta descriptions or title tags or other things on their site, maybe adding schema markup, all that other little stuff that goes into it. Maybe that's setting up Google Search Console if they don't have it, something that could be a one-time thing. Yeah, sort of part of that. And then What we've been doing with a lot of our clients is we come up with a link budget and we actually tell them that we're going to be buying links and other services. So we might have a client that says, well, yeah, let's do $400 a month. And with that $400, we might go get them a press release. We could be signing them up on like a service like Moz Local, which will get them some business citations. We might be getting them a link for like a guest post opportunity. Other things that we could be doing that kind of speed up the process and It doesn't really put us in too much of a bind where, you know, we're kind of seeming very generic. A lot of these agencies are just sending out like, hey, here's your rankings, you know, and like, that's it, right?

Yeah.

We're kind of coming in, giving them custom reporting every month. I know that might be something else you're going to ask about, but yeah.

Yep. What are you, what are you using for that? What are you using to send them the reports? And also, what is, what is frequency? This is going to be a 3-part question. Tools that you're using to send them the reports, what's the cadence, the frequency of it? And then you know, what does that conversation— I mean, is it, is it a meeting? Is it a video call? Do you explain, like, talk to me really tactically about the process of that.

So what we're doing right now is we sent out a custom email that more or less has some highlights of specific keywords that we've seen a huge increase in. In terms of the tool, what we'll do is we'll use a tool called Pro Rank Tracker, and that gives us all of the insights as to what's going on with those rankings. Both local and global organic. And what we're able to do with that is basically kind of highlight, we'll just kind of snippet some screenshots, we'll do a PDF of the entire report of all the keywords we're tracking, and then we'll typically send over other screenshots of things maybe that like we purchased in terms of those links that we discussed. So if we went and got content from iWriter, we'll literally attach a screenshot that shows Hey, we spent $40 on article outsourcing. So, you know, a lot of agencies, they wouldn't normally do that. It does take more time. It has been somewhat of a little bit of a crutch because usually we're asking them for like a credit card or something on the side for that stuff, and they don't really know exactly what we're getting. So it's been a little bit of a working kind of thing that we're trying to figure out the best way to do it. Yeah, but I think it makes for like better retention. And a little bit more of a personalized, like, feel with the clients. Like, if every month we're saying, hey, you know, this month we spent $260, you know, and they gave us a $400 budget, um, like, they're not going to complain that we didn't spend another $140, you know. Yeah, it's just something where they see, like, hey, here are all the things we did. And, um, typically, again, email is pretty generic, using the ProRank tracker, and then, um, really highlighting things that were positive. And in terms of a meeting, Try to do it once a month. Some clients are more needy. Like, you know, this morning I woke up to an email where a client was like, call me, and he just sent me some random image. It looked like he wanted to use on his social media, so I have no idea what it's about. I could be in trouble. I— he could be calling me to tell me he loves me. He could be calling to ask for something simple, like no idea, right? Yeah. So some clients are just going to be like that, and that's something I've been trying to get a little bit better hold of is the expectations of what to expect and, you know, what's going on. And also being very strict about the people I onboard. I have had some issues taking people— like, I took an older gentleman recently off Upwork who was a one-man owner furniture store, and I could tell he didn't have a lot of money. He was willing to commit, you know, at least $500, $1,000 a month. But in reality, like, I went through a plan with him that included doing some stuff with Bing, like, on month 3, and that upset him. So he decided to bail and end the contract. So it was like, you know, probably just someone I wouldn't have wanted to work with anyways because honestly Bing is just more of a side thing. You know, it's not like our main focus, right? Sure.

I mean, you can get relatively, you know, lower volume, a lot cheaper, same, same kinds of quality, you know, same quality. Um, you know, we see a lot of people, not a lot, we see some people kind of supplement, you know, their AdWords with some Bing spend, especially if they're able to find little nuggets, you know, here and there of keywords, campaigns, things like that, that are, that that are converting. And that kind of goes back to the idea, it's like, it almost seems like that business owner potentially is maybe like too in the trenches. It's like, you know, you're not gonna go in and tell them like what kind of screws to use on the furniture, like fabric, you know? It's like, hey, I'm gonna deliver you the couch or whatever it is. So yeah, so okay, so, That's awesome. Super interesting. So what, uh, so talk to me about how you charge. Um, is it retainers? Is it percentage of ad spend? Is it based on scope of work? What do you see?

Um, usually we just come up again with like a base fee. So depending on what we find, you know, I know a lot of SEO companies, they just have like these generalized pricing plans and then they'll do X, Y, and Z. We try to look at it as more of like what's going on, right? So For me to say work with this furniture store, I could go look at his competition. He could be in this low competition area that's not going to need as much backlinks. His competition doesn't have as much going on. Maybe he needs, you know, I know this guy in particular is an example. He needed a lot of help with reviews. He had like a 3.2 out of 5, which isn't great, and, um, probably different things that we'd have to focus on. I had another company that was a plumbing company that had 6 Google My Business locations. Their website was like a total mess, had a custom WordPress theme, completely like very difficult to edit and work with. And we had to come up with something like a $2,500+ monthly recurring budget to be able to tackle something like that. Because now we have to consider that we're making all these new changes to the website, potentially redoing the whole thing. And then on top of that, focusing on 6 different locations as if we're doing 6 different businesses.

Yeah.

It's really kind of custom. The biggest thing I'd say we're looking at is we like to use a tool called Majestic, which allows you to look at— they call it the citation flow and trust flow metrics, which essentially kind of build up how powerful the links are, how trustworthy they are, all these other things that they kind of put into their own algorithm. So we'll look at their competitors in the top 3, top 4 or 5 and kind of gauge what kind of links do they have, how many referring websites do they have. And kind of using that as a means to figure out like what do we really charge them. Then coming up with what makes sense to do for a monthly budget to go and get them more links and ultimately beat out their competitors. So it's a little bit more one-off, but I would say anything less than $1,000, like I'd say people aren't really taking me that seriously. Like if I charge someone $250 a month and I have a partner and we're trying to get them some good solid backlinks, I mean at the end of the day, like I wouldn't even be making minimum.

There's no margin. Yeah, absolutely.

So got it. That's how I'm looking at it.

And you know, so you're pricing it based on scope of work, uh, kind of like flat fee, flat, you know, rates based on little, little pieces here and there. It's not based on percentage of ad spend. Maybe it tiers up based on the amount that they're spending, but just kind of, you look holistically at the account. What are we going to do design-wise, landing page-wise, citation building? Um, okay, that's, uh, that, that's fair. Um, switching gears, just want to ask you a couple questions about the content courses stuff, uh, then we'll, we'll wrap it up. We like to be rapid fire here. So I know you're doing a ton of stuff. You said 100,000 students. That's awesome. I think a lot of people— I've recently been like very, very interested in the online learning space. So tell me about like, where are you seeing success with it? And how are you building, you know, how are you promoting the courses to actually sell them?

Yeah, so I kind of went through a couple of phases where I really heavily invested a lot of my time in the marketplaces. I had gotten on Udemy. There's another one that was kind of an up-and-comer that grew quite substantially for when it came out with Skillshare.

Yep.

Membership model where you get paid based on minutes watched. And then I was able to get into a couple like kind of deal sites where they bundle your courses together and then they sell them for a heavy, heavy discount, but they sell in mass volume. So I had like 7 courses selling for $19 and they probably took 50% of the profit. But that very first month they published me, they made like such a massive push. I did like over $5,000 in sales.

Wow.

It was pretty cool. Like, you know, existing stuff that was selling elsewhere and then bundling it and just getting more eyeballs on it. So what I really realized was a couple of things is if someone buys a course, say, off Udemy for $10, you know, they're not going to take it that seriously. Right. So many of the things that I've just shared today, like it's almost a snippet of what I share in some of my courses. Right. And I realized that like for you to go out and you could get a client for $500 selling like the most basic website, like a bad, you know, even a halfway decent WordPress site, you could charge local business owner $500 for that easily. And for me to go out and charge $500 for my course and share all the things that I've learned over the last like 4 or 5 years, I mean, there's no reason I can't be charging $500 or $1,000 for that, right? Absolutely.

Yeah.

So I kind of took that mentality and I said, you know what, I'm going to sell my own site. I hired a mentor and they kind of taught me how to utilize things like ActiveCampaign, which involves a lot of automations. But the biggest thing that I'm doing is I'm kind of utilizing a combination of what I like to call a soap opera sequence, which is through my emails and something else that it wasn't something I invented, but It's basically called the Sphere of Influence by someone by the name of André Chaperone.

Yep.

Where instead of sending someone to the traditional ebook opt-in, you know, everybody and their mom has seen over the last 10 years in the internet marketing space. You're basically sending them to kind of a broken up blog post that's formatted on a really nice website or blog where there's no distractions and they're kind of taken through a journey and you're filtering out the people you don't want and filtering in the people you do want the most. Perfect audience for what it is you have to sell. So right now I have kind of an example site where they go through really what could have been an ebook and they go through like half of it and then they're given an opt-in opportunity. Once they opt in, I continue that story and then I kind of bring them into a soap opera sequence, which is basically email marketing, almost like a TV show. So if you watch the show Lost, right? At the end of every show, something crazy happens and you want to know what's next. This is pretty common in TV. So I actually implemented the same thing with my emails and I really encourage people to go to that next email and I give them the opportunity to actually go through a 7-week or I'm sorry, a 7-day kind of series very, very quickly. And wow, it's pretty intense. So it took me like 6 months to build this out and The idea was, you know, you focus on one avenue for getting traffic. So in my case, it was Facebook ads. If I could get a lead for $5, they would then come in, go through that funnel, and a small percentage of the people would end up buying my course for the, you know, $200 to $500 price point. I kind of played around with different price points.

Yep.

And I'd either break even, which means I'm building an email list for free, which is an email list I could continue selling to people. I can sell them PhoneWagon down the line as an affiliate, right? Or any other digital marketing service. And that's where I'm making money from all the people on my email list. And on top of that, I'm making sales for my program and hopefully making an ROI on that. So that's kind of what I've been doing and playing around with that.

Are you using ClickFunnels for a lot of that? I was.

I've decided to kind of start moving away because some of the landing pages I just felt would be a little bit better and like a newer— I'm using Thrive Architect and I've kind of moved, but I'm still using ClickFunnels. It's still there.

By the way, I love what Russell Brunson's done with ClickFunnels. How, you know, I don't know if he talks about this because I actually don't— I like follow it from a distance, but I don't like consume a ton of the content. But I just feel like he's, you know, product plus content plus community. And I feel like kind of like that, like he has people that are just like worshipping ClickFunnels, and then I'm in a ClickFunnels group with like 20,000 members, and it's just amazing. I think the scale that he's at, or that ClickFunnels is at right now, and how the people are making money, and he does the conferences, I think that that's just incredible execution. Similar to what you're saying, I do, I see a ClickFunnels landing page, and I'm just like, ooh, but I feel like they can fix that. And again, maybe being a marketer, it's like you kinda see, you get it a little bit more than maybe if you were just a consumer. Assuming it from the content standpoint. But Facebook, by the way, that is incredible the way that you can kind of get those people to come in initially, you know, one, then they're going to be on your list, then you can retarget them, you know, and you can get those clicks pretty cheap from that. I feel like they're going to crack down on those custom audiences soon because people are uploading lists that are just not opt-ins. Alright, awesome. So we're going to wrap up, just have a couple questions I want to ask you. So first question, what is your morning routine like?

Right now, it hasn't been as good as it probably should be. I've been trying to be a little bit better, but as of recently, I've been waking up in the morning and then I do like, you know, if I can, I'll try to squeeze in like a 25-minute cardio workout in front of the TV, kind of like an old school. I used to do a lot of the P90X workout in front of the TV workouts. I like to do that like before I shower or do anything. So it's just like a good start to the day. It's out of the way. Something quick, you know, under half hour if I can. And then typically I'm, you know, making myself a shake breakfast, shower, and then I'm hitting up the computer. And I traditionally have a to-do list app called— I use it, it's called Nozbe, very simple app. I just use it on my phone and desktop. And I try to the night before, I will make a list of even the most basic things I need to do. So it could be as basic as doing my dishes in the house to needing to call a client, to responding to an email, to building a website, or whatever it is I got going on. I'll just list everything out one by one, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then I tackle that as much as I can through the day. So, you know, like today I've got— I'm going to be doing something for a Google My Business thing. I'm trying to go through and take the SEMrush training to get their certifications. And I've got like a website I'm building for like some client-related stuff.

And then you're checking those off throughout the day.

Yeah, and I check them off, and then I've got templates for things. I'm very to-do list, like, task-oriented. So, sure, let's do this for everything. Like, I've got a whole to-do list of all the chores around the house, you know, like everything that I could be doing. So I use that as a means to— it's a feeling of accomplishment when you can say, like, you checked off all this stuff, and then it's always on top of mind too, you know.

Absolutely. Uh, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, the checking it off is, is really big. Um, You know, you feel that. All right, last question. If you were looking to break into digital marketing today, how would you do it? What would you do?

If I were to start over, I guess, you know, Facebook ads seems to be all the rage. Like SEO is kind of a thing I feel like some people are fading out of, you know, you see the SEO guys going to Facebook ads. It's kind of a tough question because I've been in a bind myself of like, you know, is this truly what I want to do, right? I think the biggest thing would be, you know, whatever you decide to do, right? Like, if you sit around on Facebook and you start following internet marketers, you're going to be pitched everything, everything under the sun, right? There's guys doing dropshipping, there's guys doing Amazon, you got guys building SaaS companies like you. There's all kinds of different things and so many distractions. And I've kind of been down every road. Like, I've built a SaaS, I've tried doing e-com, I've I've done client SEO, I've done Facebook ads for clients. I've sort of dabbled in all of it. And the biggest thing that I realized, and after talking to pretty much every mentor, millionaires, all kinds of successful people, the biggest thing has just been really to focus. I think, you know, the problem that I think a lot of people face is there are so many shiny objects and a lot of things look very compelling. So the advice I would give for anyone starting out would be, you know, just find something that is working and that you actually enjoy. And if you enjoy it, just stick it out for 6 months until something happens. It may not— if you go and read, you had a little guest post case study where it's not like PhoneWagon happened overnight, right? That was a very lengthy process to get it to a point where you could start even charging a customer, right? So you could have given up halfway through and said, I don't know about this. The big kahuna are out there doing this. Why should I do it? And maybe just give up. You didn't. So, and I'm sure there were moments like that for you and for anyone doing this stuff, whatever it is you're focusing on, you know, you just kind of have to stick it through. And that's still been a struggle for me in a lot of ways. But I know now with all the knowledge I've learned, like, the biggest thing I have is optimism. So I just, if I fail at something, I'm just, I keep going. It's like I'm nonstop and, you know, I'm not willing to give up until I'm reaching a level where you know, I'm at the success point I want to be, which for me is basically being essentially debt-free and not needing to work for someone.

Yep, that, that's awesome. And, and I, I, you know, the resume resonates with me a lot, you know, just I think kind of what you're talking about is just like staying heads down, staying disciplined, and, and the consistency factor. I read a book, The Slight Edge, and it's literally, you know, it's— and it's sort of like The Compound Effect, right? It's like just stay heads down, stay focused. This stuff takes 5, 10 years. Like, you know, even the stuff Like again, like you're saying with us, I mean, we're 2 years in now and it's like, yeah, it's, you know, it's a grind every day. It's like, you know, and again, we're getting these, you know, little customers. It feels like we're working so hard, you know, fighting, you know, tooth and nail. But it's like we're about to hit 500 customers probably today, paying customers, agencies, which is nice. But it's like, you know, seeing in a month, it's like, all right, in the beginning it was like 10 customers a month, you know, 20 customers, 20 additional customers. But it's just like, and then, you know, I could, I could totally see how a lot of people would be like, ah, this Oh, like, you know, blockchain is interesting right now, or, you know, whatever it is. And it's like, no, no, no, like, you know, stay focused, stay in your lane. And like, this stuff does— I mean, it compounds, right? You're going to get the referrals, you're going to become a— you're going to become a master in what you're doing. And I think, you know, kind of, you know, what you're saying, someone takes your course, it's like, look, take your— you— I, by the way, I don't know if you noticed, I actually bought one of your courses because I saw that. Yeah.

No, I didn't see that. Was it through Teachable or was it through Udemy?

I think I think it was Udemy.

I don't get the note. There's so many notifications. I shut it off.

So many. That's a good problem to have.

I get a lot of freebies going on. I have a lot of free courses. So those, yeah, I don't want to get nailed with like God knows how many notifications.

Yeah, no, no, no. But, um, point is like, you know, it's like you commit to something, like just stay committed and see it through the finish line unless it's truly, truly, truly not working. And then just know when to, you know, pull the plug, I think is, uh, is, is good advice. Um, all right, I'm gonna wrap it up here. John, thank you so much for joining us today. Episode 5, Growing Your Agency. A lot of marketers here. Tell everyone how to get in touch with you, how to find you, plug your courses.

Yeah. If you want to check out my SEO kind of agency course, go through that little sequence I just talked about. If you head over to SEOConsultingBlueprints.com, you can read through that whole article and that really breaks down my whole video audit kind of video prospecting strategy. And, um, if you want to find my blog, kind of like where I hang out, I've got my story there, income reports, all kinds of other stuff. You can head over to noshameincome.com.

noshameincome.com. All right, John, this was awesome. Uh, thank you so much for joining us. And, uh, that is it for episode 5 of Growing Your Agency. Thanks, John.

Thanks.