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

John Shea teaches courses on Udemy and other sites to students that want to learn how to make a living in online marketing. In less than 2 years John has sold courses to over 100,000 students and helps them learn how to quit their job and work from anywhere in the world.If you want to watch the video, here you go:

Full Transcript

Speaker 1: 00:02 All right guys, episode five, growing your agency. Super excited today. My name is Ryan and I'm the host and today we have John Shea with us. John, thank you so much for joining the podcast today. How's it going?

John Shea: 00:15 Good. Thanks for having me, Ryan.

Speaker 1: 00:17 Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, first, first of all, before we dive in, you know, I, 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 got into it and you know, how you got started. So tell us, tell us a little bit of the background.

John Shea: 00:35 Yeah, I'll give you the short version. So I started with Internet marketing and about 2012 initially had gotten involved through doing some mlm stuff. Really wasn't working out so hot for me. I'm kind of jumped on the shiny object train and was, you know, looking at all the different things that I could be doing online. And eventually, um, I actually started a podcast just like what you're doing now. And I did that for about two years. I had a podcast, I'm all about kind of generalized marketing and I went out and interviewed all the big, big name people at the time and the space, like people like Pat Flynn, I'm, there's like Andrew Warner of mixergy and many, many other people like John Lee Dumas, he's got the, one of the biggest business podcasts, a lot of really big name people that I had looked up to. So, um, I was doing really well with that, but I couldn't really figure out how to monetize it and I built some good relationships and one of the guys I interviewed was actually one of my first interviews.

John Shea: 01:30 Um, we ended up doing an seo service together and making some money. I had my first thousand dollar 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. Um, I actually now have over 100,000 students on the UWP platform. I've got over 40 courses on there. I've been doing that for about four or five years now and um, yeah, I got and got really involved in teaching and kind of sticking to teaching in the digital marketing space, but kind of where I'm at now is I've been self employed for the last two 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 everyday. I wanted to sleep in if I felt like it or play a video game at 2:00 if I wanted to. That was kind of life that I was looking for. So, um, at this point I'm kind of doing a combination of client work. I'm a little bit of affiliate marketing and I'm mostly like digital marketing course related stuff. Um, you know, in this space, I guess you could say.

Speaker 1: 02:41 Yeah, absolutely. So, um, all of this is really, really interesting. I've recently become very intrigued and very interested in the affiliate space and I also have kind of been looking at, um, at this online course. Uh, I saw recently you said you're on you to me, um, I've seen like teachable as a platform, which seems a little bit more white labeled version of it, whereas you to be more of like a marketplace where you can go in and kind of like pink,

John Shea: 03:04 so hosted. So you is a marketplace where it's teachable. You're kind of, 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.

Speaker 1: 03:18 Got It. So, so, um, you know, as far as far as this goes. So tell, tell me about a little bit the client work that you're doing right now, are, you know, are you doing facebook ads? Are you doing ad words? Um, what is, what is the scope of the work look like for your direct clients right now?

John Shea: 03:33 Um, the bulk of the people I'm working with, I'm really trying to focus mainly on local Seo, meaning making in business in the google map pack in the top three. So if you search, you know, if someone doesn't know they're listening, you know, you type in plumber in a, in a specific city, you'll see a listing of three businesses that show up with their reviews and get the prominent placement there will generally bring it a lot more phone calls in business for that particular business.

Speaker 1: 04:01 Yeah, I think there's a massive opportunity and it seems like people aren't 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 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, how, how does, uh, kind of the details of the business work?

John Shea: 04:25 Yeah. So I've actually got kind two methods that I'm using right now. So, um, you know, if you were to go in right now, my, my business is a little bit broad 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. 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, um, 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 just about like 90 percent of the work if not more really outsourcing it.

John Shea: 05:09 I'm kind of the middleman and I'm focused more on the sales side of things and the relationships with the clients. Um, well I have other people to fulfill the bulk of the work. Um, that's just personally how I preferred. I'm not as big on the technical side of doing everything. Um, 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 and 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 slash 50, so I'm basically bringing him a whole lot of extra monthly income. And for me it's great because I don't really have to do a whole lot of work.

Speaker 1: 05:50 Yup. So how are you getting those clients? Are they, are they coming inbound because they've been following some of your courses? Like, like tactically, you know, how, how are you getting in touch with those business owners?

John Shea: 06:02 I actually took some coaching from someone a couple of years ago on this, but I started using upwork very, you know, taking it very seriously. A lot of people think like upward, 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 phone wagon, Sas, 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. I'm getting really good feedback from people and building up credibility there. Um, I was recently given the top rated um, status, and now when I apply to jobs there, the chances of me winning that job because of that credibility in times of resume on there, so to speak, my profile and everything. It makes it very, very easy to land jobs. Um, the other thing that I'm doing is kind of combining. I use this one of two ways,

Speaker 1: 07:04 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 barges client from upwork. They have a profile there, client 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.

John Shea: 07:28 Yup. 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 ad words guy, you know, whatever work has ads that's encouraging users to go and sign up and then post the job. And ultimately upwork is making money. They take a portion, it's like 20 percent on an initial job bid. But I literally could go there and within the last, you know, if I looked at the last five 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 maybe they're already working with someone.

John Shea: 08:19 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 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 I'm finding most of my clients. And then also there's a lot of agency owners that go, they're 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 the main, you know, so there's a little bit of arbitrage going on. But everybody in the end of it and the clients getting results and the client's happy with it.

Speaker 1: 09:01 Love it. Yeah. No, I, I, uh, so obviously we work with a ton of agencies 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, at ad words, right. And then a big agency might have a client you know, and they have a large scope of work, a website redesigned, some copy, some ads, and then, oh, also manage. No 10 K in ad spend pool them. That agency or that marketer will be the white label PPC guy for that agency. So I am starting to see that a lot happened. Now I'm exactly what you're saying. These agencies are kind of looking to outsource certain pieces of, uh, of the pie or, or maybe in your case for instance, it's with the local Seo, right? Like, Hey, you know, I've got a client want to do some google maps optimization, things like that. Right.

John Shea: 09:47 I'm going to say this is kind of my second method, which 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 applied to and I do the same approach with email. So if I were to reach out to someone cold saying all through upwork, I'm, 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 and really shows. So they're able to build that trust with me very quickly and that's what ultimately leads to a sale.

Speaker 1: 10:24 So. So that's, that's awesome. And I love like the differentiated pitch. I was actually going to be my next question. You know, I know, I know on Upwork, I've never done it from the provider's side, but I've posted jobs and you know, I get 30 people that are 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 saying, Hey, I'm going to do this, this and this and the maps or in. I don't want to 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

John Shea: 11:02 usually. I mean the video itself already stands out because it's like 90 course. Yup. Yup. Yup. We got alone, you know, majority of the time I'm at least getting a response so long as I haven't waited like two weeks to get back to a job that someone posted. It already has like 30 guys that applied to it. 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, there are going to be making 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?

John Shea: 11:46 They're not going to sit there and walk them through that. So I kind treat it the same way when I talked to the business owners go into it. It's 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. Just kind of showing them that like, Hey, I have other proof. Like you can see the rankings I've gotten for other people. Um, 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?

John Shea: 12:26 Like you could be missing out on other things in your google my business profile. There could be things on your website. They need to be fixed, like your content could be bad or other things that just weren't part of that one small puzzle that he really needed. So I convinced him to kind of come on. It's like a full on, like let's do a local Seo campaign, not just go out and build you back links and then nothing else. So, um, that's probably been one of the bigger things that I've found with upwork is that people tend to be like going, they're seeking something very specific and a lot of times they don't really know what exactly they want because they don't understand it.

Speaker 1: 13:04 Yeah. And that's, that's the other thing, you know, it's like back links, 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, it gets to sales. And I think, you know, what I, what I'm starting to, to understand, especially now 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 to sales, they want the leads to come in. I think, you know, that's. And that's Kinda what I was getting at with, uh, you know, with the pitch, right? Are you, are you really focusing it on, hey, these are the results that we're going to deliver over time. I'm 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 w in my experience, and let me, let me know if I'm, 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?

John Shea: 13:54 Yeah, I mean one of the things that I've been doing, 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 fee is kind of like including me, us going through and say doing onpage Seo, fixing, you know, meditate. Meta descriptions are title tags or other things on their site. Maybe adding Schema markup and 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 onetime thing, but 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.

John Shea: 14:34 So we might have a client that says, well, yeah, let's do 400 bucks 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. Um, we might be getting them a link for like a post opportunity, um, other things that we can be doing that kind of speed up the process and it doesn't really put us in too much of a vine where, um, 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 we were going to ask about, but

Speaker 1: 15:13 yep. What do you, what are you using for that? What are you using to send them the reports and also what is frequency? Sends me a three 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.

John Shea: 15:36 Um, so what we're doing right now is we send a custom email that more or less has some highlights of specific keywords that we've seen a huge increase in, in terms of pool. 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, local and global, organic. And um, what we're able to do with that is basically kind of highlight. We'll just kind of snip it, 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, I writer will literally attach a screenshot that shows, hey, we spent $40 on, on article outsourcing.

John Shea: 16:22 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 um, 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 better retention and a little bit more of a personalized feel with the clients. Like if every month we're saying, hey, you know, this month we spent 260 bucks, you know, and they gave us a $400 budget. I'm like they're not going to complain that we didn't spend another 140 bucks, you know, it just something where they see like, hey here are all the things we did and I'm typically again, email is pretty generic using the pro rank tracker and then I'm really highlighting things that were positive and in terms of a meeting, try to do it once a month.

John Shea: 17:12 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 the 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 asks 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, um, to have had some issues taking people. Like I took an older gentleman recently off upwork was a one man owner furniture store and I could tell he didn't have a lot of money. Um, he was willing to commit at least 500,000 bucks a month. But in reality, like I went through a plan with them that included doing some stuff with being like on month three and that upset him, so he decided to bail in the contract. So it was probably just someone I wouldn't have wanted to work with anyways because honestly being is just more of a side thing, you know, it's not like our main focus. Right.

Speaker 1: 18:17 So you can get relatively lower volume, lot cheaper, same, same kinds of Paul, same quality. Um, you know, we see a lot of people, not a lot. We see some people kind of supplement their ad words with some beings spend, especially if they're able to find little nuggets here and there of keywords, campaigns, things like that that are, that are converting. And you know, that kind of goes back to the idea. It's like that's all. It almost seems like, you know, that business owner potentially. It's maybe like two in the trenches. It's like, you know, you're, you know, if you're, you're not going to go in and tell him like what kind of screws to use on the furniture, like fabric, you know, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna deliver, you know, the couch or whatever it is. Um, so, uh, so yeah. So, okay. So, um, that's awesome. Super interesting. So what, uh, so talk to me about how you charge. Is it retainers, is it percentage of ad spend is based on scope of work? What do you see?

John Shea: 19:14 Usually we just come up 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 as low competition area. That's not going to need as much backlinks as competition doesn't have as much going on. Maybe he needs, I know this guy in particular as an example, he needed a lot of help with reviews. You have like a three point two out of five, which isn't great and I'm probably different things that we'd have to focus on. I had another company that was a plumbing company that had six google my business locations.

John Shea: 19:56 Their website was like a total mess, had the custom wordpress theme completely, like, very difficult to edit and work with. And we had to come up with something like a $2,500 plus 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. Um, and then on top of that, focusing on six different locations as if we're doing six different businesses. So it just, it's really kind of custom. The biggest thing I'd say we're looking at is we like to use the tool called majestic, which allows you to look at, um, they call it the citation flow trust flow metrics, which essentially kind of build up, um, how powerful the links are, you know, how trustworthy they are, all these other things that they kind of put it into their own algorithm.

John Shea: 20:42 So we'll look at their competitors in the top three, top four or five and kind of gauge, you know, kind of links do they have, how many referring websites that 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 you know, ultimately beat other competitors. So it's a little bit more one off. Um, but I would say, you know, anything less than a thousand. Like I'd say, people aren't really taking me that seriously. Like if I charge someone to $50 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.

Speaker 1: 21:18 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So that's how I'm looking at it and pricing it based on scope of work. Kind of like flat feet, flat rates based on little little pieces here and there. It's not based on percentage of ad spend, maybe at tiers up based on the amount that they're spending. But just Kinda, you look holistically at the account. What are we going to do? Design wise? Landing page. Why citation citation building. Um, okay. That's a, that that's fair. Um, switching gears, just want to ask you a couple questions about the content courses, stuff that then we'll, we'll wrap it up. We'd like to be rapid fire here. Um, so I know you're, you're doing a ton of stuff. You said 100,000 students. That's awesome. I think a lot of people I've, I've recently been like very, very interested in the, the online learning space. So tell me about like where are you seeing success with it? Um, and how are you building, you know, how are you promoting the courses to actually sell them?

John Shea: 22:11 Yeah. I kind of went through a couple of phases where I really heavily invested a lot of my time in these 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 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 seven courses selling for 19 bucks and they probably took 50 percent of the profit. But that very first month they published me. They made such a massive push. I did like over 5,000 sales. Wow. It was pretty cool, like existing stuff that was selling elsewhere and then bundling it and just getting more eyeballs on it.

John Shea: 22:58 But what I really realized was a couple of things is if someone buys a course on Udemy for 10 bucks, um, 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 can get a client for 500 bucks selling like the most basic website, like a bat, you know, even a halfway decent wordpress site, you can start local business owner 500 bucks for that easily. And for me to go out and charge 500 bucks for my course and share all the things that I've learned over the last four or five years, I mean, there's no reason I can't be charging 500 or a thousand dollars for that. Right? Absolutely. Yeah.

John Shea: 23:38 So I kind of took that mentality and I said, you know what? I'm going to sell them one on site. I hired a mentor and they kind of taught me how to things like active campaign, which involves a lot of automations. But, um, 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 um, something else that, it wasn't something I invented, but it's basically called a sphere of influence by someone by the name of Andre Chaperon were 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 posts 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 into the people you do want the most perfect audience for what it is you have to sell.

John Shea: 24:35 So right now I have kind of an example site where they go through really what could have been an ebook and their growth 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. I'm 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 seven week or I'm sorry, a seven day Kinda series very, very quickly and it's pretty intense. So it took me like six 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.

John Shea: 25:31 If I could get a lead for five bucks, they would then come in and go through that funnel and a small percentage of the people would end up buying my course for the, you know, two to $500. Price Point. I kind of played around with different price points 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 could sell them phone wagon down the line as an affiliate, right? Um, or any other digital marketing service and that's where I'm making money from all the people in my email list and I'm on top of that. I'm making sales for my program and hopefully making an Roi on that so that, that's Kinda what I've been doing. And playing around with that.

Speaker 1: 26:11 Are you using click funnels for, for a lot of that or

John Shea: 26:15 I've decided to kind of start moving away because some of the landing pages I just felt it would be a little bit better in like a newer. I'm using thrive architect and I've kind of moved but I'm still using clickfunnels and still there.

Speaker 1: 26:27 But I love what Russell Brunson stone with click funnels. 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, like worshiping, you know, click funnels and then I'm in a click clickfunnels group with like 20,000 members and it's just amazing. I think the scale that he's at, right or the click funnels is at right now and how, you know, the people are, are, you know, 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 click funnels landing page and I'm just like, uhhh.

Speaker 1: 27:07 But, you know, I feel like that can, they can fix that. Um, and, and again, maybe, you know, kind of being a marketer, it's like you kind of see, you get it a little bit more than maybe if you were just consuming it from a content standpoint, but a 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 a, 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 A. Alright, awesome. So we're gonna wrap up and just have a couple questions. Want to ask you to talk. So first question, what is your morning routine like?

John Shea: 27:51 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'd 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 peanut and acts like work out in front of the TV workouts to do that before I shower, do anything. So it's just like a good start to the day. It's out of the way. Something quick, you know, under a half hour if I can. And then typically I'm 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 [inaudible] cosby. I'm very simple APP.

John Shea: 28:33 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 respond to an email to building a website or whatever it is I got going on. I'll just list everything out. One by one, one, two, three, four, five. 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 Google, my business thing. I'm trying to go through and take the sem rush training to get their certifications and um, I've got like a website and building for some client related stuff.

Speaker 1: 29:13 And then you're checking those off throughout the day.

John Shea: 29:15 Yeah. And I check them off and then I've got templates for things I'm very to do list, like task oriented, so target lists for everything. Like I'm going to hold 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 his feeling of accomplishment when you can say like, you checked off all this stuff and then always on top of mind to, you know.

Speaker 1: 29:34 Absolutely. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. The checking it off is, is really big. Um, you know, you feel that, uh, last question, if you were looking to break into digital marketing today, how would you do it? What would you do?

John Shea: 29:49 I'm bout to start over. I guess, um, 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 on, you know, you see the Seo guys going on 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 decided to do, right? Like if you sit around on facebook and you start falling internet marketers, you're going to be pitched everything. Everything under the Sun, right? There's guys doing drop shipping, there's guys do an Amazon, you go guys building sas, companies like you. There's all kinds of different things and so many distractions. And I've kinda been down every road. Like I've built a Sas, I've tried doing Econ, I've done client Seo, I've done facebook ads for clients.

John Shea: 30:34 I've sort of dabbled in all of it. And the biggest thing that I realized after talking to pretty much every mentor millionaires, all kinds of successful people, the biggest thing has just been really to focus on. 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 you enjoy it. You know, just stick it out for six months until something happens and it may not, you know, if you go and read, um, you know, you had a little guest post case study where it's not like phone wagon happen overnight, right? Like, that was a very lengthy process to get it to a point where you could start even charging a customer.

John Shea: 31:17 Right? So you could have given up like halfway through and said, I don't know about this, like, you know, the big Kahunas are out there doing this, why should I do it? And maybe just give up. You did. So and I'm sure there were moments like that for you and for anyone doing this stuff and 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 and 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 um, if I fail at something, I'm just, I keep going. It's like 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.

Speaker 1: 32:00 Yup. That's awesome. And 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, and it's sort of like the compound effect, right? It's like just stay heads down state focus. This stuff takes five, 10 years. Like you know, even the stuff like again, like you were saying with us, I mean we're two 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 little customers, it feels like we're working so hard, you know, fighting 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, at 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 will be like, add is just taking forever.

Speaker 1: 32:52 I'm just going to go chase this, uh, like, you know, blockchain's interesting right now or whatever it is. And it's like, no, no, no, no, like, you know, stay focused, stay in your lane and this stuff. Does that mean it compounds, right? You're going to get the referrals, you're going to become, you're going to become a master in what you're doing. And I think you know, kind of what you're saying, someone takes your course. It's like, look, take your eye. By the way, I don't know if you notice I actually bought one of your courses because I saw that. Yeah.

John Shea: 33:18 No, I didn't see that through teachable or was it through?

Speaker 1: 33:22 I think it was huge to me.

John Shea: 33:25 There's so many notifications. I shut it off. So many say that's a good problem to have. I get a lot of freebies and I have a lot of free courses. So those ones. Yeah, I don't want to get nailed with God knows how many notifications.

Speaker 1: 33:37 Yeah, no, no, no, but the point is like, you know, 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 pull the plug I think is uh, is, is good advice. Alright, I'm going to wrap it up here. John. Thank you so much for joining us today. Episode Five, growing your agency. A lot of marketers here. Tell everyone how to get in touch with you, uh, how to find you plug your courses.

John Shea: 34:07 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 Seo consulting blueprint.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, like where I hang out, I've got my story, their income reports, all kinds of other stuff you can head over to no shame. Income Dot Com.

Speaker 1: 34:31 No shame income.com. All right John, this was awesome. Thank you so much for joining us. And that is it for episode five of growing your agency. Thanks John. Thanks.