Danny Iny Interview Part 2

Below you will find the second part of the Great Interview I did with Danny Iny. You can find the first part “here“ if you haven’t read it yet.

Robert: I think a lot of people are under the illusion that an online business is immediate passive income, you just set up a site and you get visitors and make money.

Danny: Exactly. It’s passive income in the same way that owning a restaurant is passive income. Online businesses still require management. A restaurant business becomes passive when you can afford to hire a manager. Your website will generate passive income when you can afford to have someone do all the work for you. The work doesn’t disappear. If it was as easy as some people make out, then everyone would be doing it! Why would all of your friends have 9-5 jobs when they could be sitting on the beach drinking Margherita’s and checking their PayPal accounts? Most people don’t have that option. We’re actually running a guest post on Firepole Marketing in a couple of weeks, titled “Do what others won’t for a year, then live how others can’t for a lifetime.” I think that’s very apt, but you’re going to have to work your tail off for a year, possibly longer! It’s a huge amount of work, you can’t do it if you’re putting in three hours’ work a week like a hobby.

Robert: Great point, a good friend of mine who is an Internet Marketer said that to me when I started out, if you treat it like a hobby you’ll make little or no income, but if you treat it like a job or a business, you’ll make a decent income.

Danny: Absolutely.

Robert: Can I talk a little to you about the blog aspect of your site? Say people have a blog that they want to grow and eventually monetize. What would you class as an effective blog post?

Danny: There are a few criteria. Firstly, people have to enjoy reading it; they have to enjoy it enough that they will come back to your blog the next time you post something. That’s the very least. Secondly, getting people to engage, sign up to your email list and share the content with other people. There’s no such thing as a ‘neutral effect’ post, it’s either helping you or it’s hurting you. I’d definitely recommend reducing your post frequency if it’s coming at the expense of post quality.

Robert: Definitely, I know that many bloggers advise people to post once a day, but if the posts are decreasing quality, then it’s better to post a couple of times a week or even once a week. As you said earlier, it’s about building your readership rather than just getting people to visit your site once.

Danny: Exactly, it’s about keeping them. Now, that being said, posting frequency does matter. If the posting is good and you post more, people are going to want to come and read it. Here’s a strategy that works best when you are starting out. Firstly, write some great posts and have a good looking blog. Then if I come to your site, you give me reason to stick around. The worst thing that you can do is have a massive promotion for your blog, then I click through to your site and there’s a lousy post waiting for me on the homepage. Secondly, find blogs that you like, but not the huge authority blogs, because you won’t stand out there. Find the blogs who are in your “boat”. They will be small, getting between 5 and 15 comments on a post. That’s an important number, if they have zero comments on all of their posts, they have zero audience and they’re not really engaging anyone. If they have 5 to 15 comments, then they have a small audience and must doing something right, that audience will grow. Try to look for blogs with an Alexa ranking of over half a million. Even if the blog is small, look for quality. If you find good content on some of these sites, send them an email and say “I really like your stuff, I’d love to share it with our audience, would you like to write a guest post for my blog?”

Robert: There’s a hierarchy in blogging just like there is in any space. If the guys at the top are getting hundreds of emails a day from lots of people with small blogs, it seems very unlikely that they’ll reply to your email.

Danny: It’s actually not as hard as people think. This is something I’ve learnt since I started doing a lot of guest posts. People see a barrier that isn’t really there; it’s really quite accessible. Problogger runs a new post every day, meaning they need about 30 posts a month. They need a good supply of content. That’s something I really like about this ‘inviting people to guest post on your blog’ strategy. Firstly, it builds a relationship. They’ll be excited to tell people they know to check out their guest post on your blog, giving you more exposure. Secondly, you can post more frequently because you now have this influx of content. Thirdly and very importantly, it frees up your time. For example, if you want to run 3 posts a week on your blog, if 2 of those are guest posts, it frees up your time. You could be doing guest posts for other bigger blogs.

Robert: That’s very well spent time, increasing your exposure.

Danny: Exactly. You’ve got to have good content. This is pretty much the boilerplate template email that I use when I reach out to a blog: “Hi, I really like your stuff. I’ve been thinking about writing a post about [subject]. I thought that it might be a really good fit for your audience. Here’s an example of a headline that might work: [headline], but I’m open to suggestions. What do you think about running it as a guest post? For sample of my work check out my blog [myblog.com] or my latest guest post on [thelastplace youguestposted.com]. What do you think, should I write up a draft?” It’s that simple. Big blogs have almost always said yes to this. The trick is pitching them an idea you know they’ll like. Write a subject and a headline they’ll jump at, and their readers will respond to!

Robert: That’s a great tactic, keeping your message short and to the point, to show the person that you respect their time. It also makes it much more likely that you will get a reply quickly.

Danny: Make sure that you address all the key things they want to know. You can’t just say “Are you open to guest posts on your site?” The key thing is that you’re going to write something that their audience will want to read, and write it well.

Robert: Definitely. I mean saying everything that you need to say but in a concise format. Now is there anything that you’d advise people against when blogging?

Danny: Yes, there are two things I would advise them against. One is this sense that they are anonymous online, treating traffic as if they are faceless numbers instead of remembering that they are people. A good benchmark is that any action you’re considering, if you wouldn’t be comfortable and proud to tell your parents and your kids about it, don’t do it. I borrowed that from Guy Kawasaki’s book. It doesn’t matter that your online, the rules of the game are not different. If you would not be proud of doing it, don’t do it! Secondly, don’t jump between tactics and strategies, the whole ‘shiny object’ syndrome. There are good and bad strategies, if you want to know mine, you can read the “Why Guru Strategies For Blog Growth DON’T WORK…” post, it worked well for me. Any strategy you pick will work better than a quarter of each strategy.

Robert: I think that to a certain extent, the strategy itself is immaterial. The most important thing is that you follow it through, although I know a lot of people jump between strategies when starting out, I was a victim of this myself. Every week you’re following the latest craze or buying the newest product.

Danny: Exactly. It’s very understandable why people do this, because when you’re starting out, you don’t really know what works and what doesn’t. They say in an argument, whoever has the stronger frame wins, so if it’s you versus the “guru” of the week, the “guru” always seems to know better. You’ve got to just pick one strategy and stick to it, to the point where you can track and measure what’s working. Be very hesitant to change strategy before you have reached this point.

Robert: That’s brilliant advice. Most people give up before they can measure their results. I’d like to ask you about how you promote your site, do you use any Social Media?

Danny: I do my promotion almost exclusively on other blogs. If I find something that I like I’ll share it on Facebook and Tweet about it, and do the same whenever we have a new post on our blog. That is the extent of my activity on Social Media. Everything I do is reading and writing on blogs. That isn’t to say that Social Media isn’t good, there’s tons of potential value. I know someone who grew a very successful audience for an event through Twitter, and he did it very quickly. Personally, I have not found a way to intuitively fit Twitter with my work and what I’m doing. One tool used well is going to do a lot better than any seven tools used poorly.

Robert: Exactly, I think that people should pick the strategy that works for them and stick to it.

Danny: Yes, people need to invest their time where it will have the best returns. If Social Media works for you, then great.

Robert: Excellent advice. Now, are there any guys that you recommend we check out?

Danny: There are tons of them out there. In terms of big blogs I read Copyblogger and Problogger, but I think that the mid-level and smaller blogs are the better ones to follow because you don’t need to know what’s happening from a 10,000ft view, you need to know what’s happening a little bit ahead of you. A few I can recommend are JonAlford.com, MarleeWard.com and Marcus Sheridan at TheSalesLion.com, there are loads of good blogs out there. For a bigger list, you can go to Firepole Marketing and look at our “Best of the web” feature, which we run every couple of weeks. You will find lots of links to great blogs and articles.

Robert: Thanks Danny, will have to check that out. Now, to wrap up, what future plans do you guys have for FirepoleMarketing.com?

Danny: We’re just going to keep growing it. This is our opportunity to give something back. We want to make it available to as many Entrepreneurs as possible, which is why our focus is currently on growing an audience of Entrepreneurs and small businesses. We want to keep increasing our numbers of students; this is a business that scales very well.

Robert: I think it’s great that many online businesses are easily scalable, as long as you put a great deal of work in at the beginning.

Danny: It takes a significant amount of investment, whether it’s time or money. Peter and I put in over 2,500 hours to create the Firepole Marketing Training Program. It’s not passive, we just front-loaded as much of the work as we could.

Robert: Wow! That is some work! I hope that goes very well for you both. Ok Danny, I’m going to wrap up the interview now. I just want to say thanks so much for sparing me all this valuable time. Head over to FirepoleMarketing.com if you want to learn more about Danny and Peter and what they do. I hope the guys listening have learnt as much as me!

Danny: Peter and I read all our own emails, and will get back to you within 24 hours, so if you have any questions just ask.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this interview, more to come in the following weeks.

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