Danny very kindly agreed to do an interview with me, and it was both an honour and a pleasure to be able to speak with him, and it is great to be able to share this content with you guys. Let me introduce you to Danny Iny, one half of the team over at FirepoleMarketing.com. Whatever I had expected from this interview, Danny completely OVERDELIVERED, as you will see below.
Robert: Hey Danny, great to have you on the call.
Danny: Fantastic Robert, thank you very much for having me on the call with you.
Robert: I suppose the most logical place to start is to talk about the beginnings of your Entrepreneurial journey.
Danny: I’ve been an Entrepreneur pretty much all my life, I quit school when I was 15 to start my first business, and I’ve been an Entrepreneur since then. At the time I was involved in outsourced educational technology development and a telecommunications start-up, which was a lot of fun but didn’t really go anywhere because I was sixteen and didn’t really know anything about business. So I’ve been involved in a lot of different companies, a lot of different start-ups, many of them in the education and training space. Over time my career path kind of split in two directions, there were the start-ups I was running, and I’m a writer by trade, I published a book about effective communication in writing several years ago. I began a copywriting process, and that over time extended to the marketing and business strategy consultancy that I run today, which is, for the most part, how I pay the bills. The way that dovetailed into Firepole Marketing: Peter Vogopoluos is a friend of mine, we’ve known each other for three or four years now, and we connected somewhere on the networking circuit.
Robert: Tell me a little more about good networking
Danny: Good networking isn’t “Hey here’s my business card, I’m going to bomb you with emails over the course of the week”. Good networking is “Hey, it’s nice to meet you, I like the chemistry, we’re getting along, it sounds like you’re doing interesting stuff, lets meet for breakfast or grab a cup of coffee, I want to learn more about what you’re doing. Building a network properly is not about “Hey can you be my customer”, it’s much more about how can I add value to you, so that further down the line when an opportunity presents itself for you to refer me, it’s going to be intuitive for you to do so.
Robert: Yes, I think it’s all about what value you can add to people
Danny: Exactly. So Peter and I connected, we sat down and got to know each other, and we saw that we really saw eye-to-eye in terms of our values and our contribution, and in terms of marketing. Marketing is one of those spaces where everyone who has taken a University Course or read a book about marketing, thinks they are a marketer. People latch on to a few buzz words, like “It’s not the features it’s the benefit.” They think that if they say that then that makes them a marketer, that’s not the case. We just recognised the shared competence and being on the same wavelength.
Robert: That’s a great point, a lot of people focus on the theory side of things without any real world experience.
Danny: Absolutely, I think that both are very important, I think that book learning or academic learning is not very practical or applicable without being seen through the lens of real life experience. But, at the same time, learning only through experience is a slow and painful way to learn. There are two quotes I like very much “They say that good judgement comes from experience and experience only comes from bad judgement” and “An expert is the guy that has made all the mistakes in his field”, and by that definition I can call myself an expert!
Robert: That’s great. Can we talk a little about the challenges you have faced with both Firepole Marketing and other ventures?
Danny: Peter and I quickly realised that a lot of the people that need our help, really can’t afford our services. They very much need the help, they need business and marketing 101. They need a real foundational understanding of marketing that they can apply to their business. That’s what led us to create Firepole Marketing.
Firepole Marketing was a lot easier because one or both of us had made the mistakes in our previous lives. We still made mistakes, but the inventory of them had kind of been exhausted!
Robert: What about your personal challenges?
Danny: The biggest challenge I faced was when I launched a start-up called Maestro Reading, teaching kids how to read. That’s a fairly complex space, as the software is for children, but they don’t have much buying power! Business models are very complex in a situation where your customer and your end user are not the same person.
Robert: Wow, I’d never thought of it like that!
Danny: I had no idea going into it. It didn’t occur to me! This is my experienced post-mortem analysis of why it didn’t work out. That experience really gave me a lot of insight into understanding who is the customer, and why they are buying from you. It’s not enough to have a phenomenal, exciting product. If you don’t have it, it’s a problem, but if you do have it, it doesn’t, make your day.
Robert: There are many more parts to the puzzle; a good product is just one part
Danny: Yeah, many more parts. Another important lesson I learned with another business, it is very important that you are doing something you care about and are passionate about. When I lecture to business students, I like to tell them that: “Any successful business is going to die four times before it comes to life for the fifth time as a great success.” If you don’t care about the business enough, you’re not going to stick through all those deaths, it’s just too hard!
Robert: Excellent point, it reminds me of the saying, “Success is on the other side of failure.” Most business and successful entrepreneurs have faced failure and adversity before they discovered success. I know you guys at Firepole Marketing are trying to help small businesses and start-ups find the right steps.
Danny: It’s a week-by-week course that runs six months. It is designed to be digestible within the context of a busy entrepreneurial schedule, and gives practical, useful stuff you can do every week to tune-up your business, and its priced to be affordable within that context. That’s why we built it, and that’s why we blog. We put a ton of content out there for people, for free. We really make a lot of effort to source as good content as we can. The Guy Kawasaki interview is one example, but there are many others. We put a great deal of time and energy into writing good content. There’s actually a fantastic interview coming out next week with Randy Komisar who is the author of a couple books including ‘Getting to Plan B’. Part of the reason we put so much effort into the content is because in the past when we had successes, there were people further along the road helping us out, and voluntarily offering their advice and support. The same had happened for them; it’s a “pay-it forward” kind of dynamic. There’s a ‘reciprocal going forward’ relationship involved here. You keep helping people as you move forward, and as you grow, you’re in more of a position to give back to the people that helped you to begin with, to the extent that they might need it.
Robert: I’ve used a number of blogs to help me out, and soon I should be in a position to give back to them. If it’s alright I’d love to talk about the Guy Kawasaki interview, I know that was a big moment for Firepole Marketing.
Danny: That was a fantastic thing for us. The interview was great for Firepole Marketing and myself, and I’d like to think that it was a good interview! It’s not so much the interview itself, but everything around the interview combined with the interview, that really did a lot of good stuff for us. I think there’s an important lesson in there for people starting up. You’re not going to have one campaign or activity or event. There’s no such thing as ‘push button profits’ or you do this one thing and suddenly everything takes off. It’s a flywheel effect. You keep pushing, and each push adds a little bit of momentum. Some of the pushes may be more visible or flashy, but they all combine together. I actually guest posted on Problogger explaining the whole flywheel behind the Guy Kawasaki post. You can view that post here.
Robert: So what happened when you posted the Interview?
Publishing the interview was great, the content was great, and our audience loved it. We pulled out all the stops promoting it. It occurred to me the day before the interview ran: ‘Maybe I can milk this!’ I looked for other people online that I’d like to interview. I sent them all an email saying: “Hey, I really like your stuff, I would love to share it with our audience, would you have time to do an interview? This week and next week we’re promoting our Guy Kawasaki interview, but after that we’d be happy to run any time.”
Robert: A great bit of name-dropping there Danny!
Danny: You know, it helps! If I had this great opportunity, I was going to get as much as I possibly could out of it.
Robert: I think interviewing someone is not only a great way to connect, but also a case where you know their story, but let them tell it in their own words. That all comes from good research.
Danny: Absolutely. It’s also a great way to connect in the sense that the questions you ask can really show someone that you ‘get it’, and you’re interesting. Especially if they have a lot of interviews, if you do a really good interview, you stand out. How else am I going to get Guy Kawasaki on the phone for 45 minutes? We promoted it as much as we could, and I got a few more interviews from the requests I’d sent out and I wrote the guest post about it on Problogger. That worked great for Guy, because I exposed his work to about 170,000 more people, but it worked great for me, too. That was probably our biggest traffic spike ever. That has led to more things, but it was the whole combined effort and on-going effort. Nothing magically happened; you’ve got to keep finding those opportunities.
Robert: Definitely. The effort adds up, but it’s got to be made on several fronts. Can we talk a little about Internet Marketing in general, it’s a space very filled with hype. What are your thoughts?
Danny: Frankly, it’s a kind of ‘scammy’ space. The reason why there’s all that hype is because we live in a very instant gratification society, so people want to find that instant, magical switch that they can flick or button that they can push that’s going to make dollar bills fly out of their CD-ROM drive. Since that’s what people are looking for, that’s what a lot of the big “gurus” are selling. I don’t know how some of these people can look themselves in the mirror! However, many of them are well intentioned people. They do want their students to gain financial freedom and the lifestyle they want. They give advice with the best intentions, and they have built success for themselves, so they do know what they are talking about. For all of these steps, the strategies work, but there’s a certain critical mass necessary to make them work. Some examples: create a viral video, create a viral report, write great content, then show it to three people, everyone will share it and it will snowball.
Robert: I think that we both know from experience that in reality this doesn’t happen.
Danny: No, because it works as a mathematical model, but in practice, if you show it to three people, one won’t look, one will read it and do nothing and another one might tell three friends and their three friends might not listen. So, viral content works, but you need a certain critical mass. We’ve done two ‘viral’ initiatives on Firepole Marketing. In January, we did a ‘viral content contest’, so we had seven blog posts about selling, great posts so go check them out. The viral aspect was that we ran a contest through January, we’ve got these seven posts, you’ve got to subscribe to updates on the seven posts and leave a comment answering the question at each of the several posts, and you’ve got to share each of those posts somewhere like email or twitter. Everyone who does all those things is entered into the contest, and we gave away some really significant prizes, we gave away almost $13,000 worth of prizes!
Robert: Wow!
Danny: That was one. The second viral campaign that we ran was this “Why Guru Strategies for Blog Growth DON’T WORK…and What Does!” Check the post out here. This was very carefully timed. We gave away tons of content, and a whole framework of what works, and is applicable for pretty much anyone trying to grow an audience online. We timed it so that it went up the day before our guest post on Problogger. So anyone who comes to our site sees that post first. It was there to take advantage of the traffic spike, and it was content that was particularly relevant to the Problogger audience. We promoted it to everyone we knew. We had an offer where you got everything on a one-page hand-out you could print and put on your wall. We experimented with this ‘Pay with a Tweet’ service to make it viral. What we found with both of these campaigns is that if you do it right you get your traffic spike. But the traffic spikes are irrelevant! There are two concepts when you are measuring the results of a marketing campaign, the bump, and the ramp. The spike is the bump, but what you really care about is what the baseline visitor number is back to after the spike. These two campaigns basically DOUBLED our baseline. Now on the one hand that’s great, but it means that if you’re doing 20 unique visitors per day, at the end of your spike you’ll be doing 40 unique visitors per day, which is much better, but you’re not making millions from 40 unique visitors a day. You have to realise it’s a process you have to keep ramping up and it takes time. Having a business online involves trading lower starting costs for more difficulty in reaching people. If you open up a store front, some people are going to walk by, you will get some walk in traffic, and that doesn’t happen with a website.
If you enjoyed what you read head over to FirepoleMarketing.com to learn more about Danny and Peter.
Part 2 Coming Soon….
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