Episode Highlights
- Danny’s jaw-dropping story of how he pitched himself to a CEO of a gaming company with zero knowledge of gaming or programming. (Did I mention the man has balls?!)
- How to build an audience for your blog: Danny’s step-by-step strategy that you can apply in any market to build your online audience.
- How to start an entrepreneurial business with no idea and guarantee your success.
- The #1 secret ingredient all successful people share (and all unsuccessful people lack!)
- Once you get email subscribers — what to do with them?
- How to create auto-responder sequences that engage and don’t make you sound like a marketing fart!
Today’s Guest
Danny Iny, founder of Firepole Marketing has some balls. During today’s interview you’ll hear some of his stories, and I guarantee your reaction will be just like mine: jaw dropping to the floor, thinking to yourself, “Whoa! I can’t believe he actually did that!”
Leaving School To Start A Business
Danny grew up being the straight-A, goodie-goodie student. So it was quite surprising that when he turned 15, something flipped in his brain. “All of a sudden I was just bored out of my mind with school”.
The teachers’ favorite kid started cutting classes. In the first trimester of his 9th grade, he missed out on 152 classes. As time passed and he found himself spending more time ditching school and watching MTV than attending classes, so he decided to leave without completing his education and launch a business instead. He was 15.
Audience Building Strategies
Fast forward to 2014, Danny owns Firepole Marketing, which started in 2011. He has 10 people working for him, a thriving community of over 40,000, thousands of which are paying customers, and he grosses over $100,000 in sales every month.
He focuses on educating his customers on strategies for building an audience from scratch. By focusing on strategies instead of tactics, his program works across all niches, markets, and platforms. His main program is the Audience Business Masterclass — a 14-week program that walks aspiring online entrepreneurs from choosing a market and an audience, to building a thriving community, and finally building products for them and making an income.
Danny guarantees that anyone following the program for a year will have an online business generating at least $3,000-$6,000 a month — or else he’ll give you your money back + an extra $1,000 for your time. Now that’s a strong guarantee!
Check out today’s episode to learn how Danny went from leaving school at 15 years old to funding a business that generates well in excess of a million dollars annually, and for his audience building strategy that you can start implementing right now to build an audience from 0 to 2000 in 6 months!
Mentioned Resources
- Click here to download the Audience Building Blueprint (based on what Danny shared on today’s episode!)
- Firepole Marketing
- Audience Business Masterclass
- Twitter: @DannyIny
- Danny on Google+
- Danny on LinkedIn
- Tropical Think Tank
- Derek Halpern
- Tim Paige (Check out the IIP interview HERE)
- Caleb Wojcik (Check out the IIP interview HERE)
- Dane Maxwell (Check out the IIP interview HERE)
- John Lee Dumas (Check out the IIP interview HERE)
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Powerful episode! So much information, I will need to listen more than once! Danny, thank for sharing all this information! You help everyone around reach more success!
I’m glad you enjoyed it Trev 🙂 I’m always worried to go to technical and miss out on a story (and does Danny have a GREAT one or what? Man, I wish I had that attitude when I was 15 🙂 ), but he’s such a great educator and keeping the contrast between strategy to tactics really allows applying his teaching to any online venue! 🙂
My long term plan? I need to develop my email list. I have a couple lead magnets in mind, but hearing Danny’s story just is a great reminder that giving people what they want will lead to success for everyone.
Maybe I missed this, or maybe it is too simple, but what is the difference between a lead page and a squeeze page?
Beyond that? I want to ensure that I have enough guests to keep my podcast rolling for years.
Hey Trevor, that’s what it always boils down to – giving people what they want. Weird that people overcomplicate business so much, isn’t it? 😉
For our purposes, a squeeze page and landing page are basically the same thing. 🙂
Trev, check out IIP057: Conversion Optimization, Vacuum Cleaners, and A Stolen Wedding Ring for step by step checklist for creating your first lead magnet in under an hour. You can always improve it – but better have some way to collect emails than postponing it until you have the best magnet. I like the idea of resources magnet – you can offer something quite valuable while making it easy to consume and easy to produce. Hell, check eofire.com – how much effort do you think it took John Dumas to list 12 resources, probably with affiliate links too? I say not too much 🙂 But it must be converting very well, otherwise he wouldn’t have done it!
I would personally define a Lead page a any page that’s targeting at converting a new lead (like affiliate traffic, new visitors, FB ad traffic, etc.). Converting is taking favorable action, what ever that action is for you. Every lead page should only have one specific goal, and therefore should only offer one action to take. Examples – opt-in to a list, sign up to a webinar (example), buy a product, etc.
I’d define squeeze pages as a subset of lead pages. They are pages with the absolute one and only goal of getting a lead into a mailing list, usually offering some bait (lead magnet), and have very very minimal content (example).
But I wouldn’t worry too much about the definitions. You can call it any way you want 🙂 Some would define the two as the same.
Why did you ask, by the way? What confused you?
Why did I ask? I guess I assumed that it was as Danny said, “For our purposes, a squeeze page and landing page are basically the same thing” and I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something. Acting on assumptions can make for some entertaining stories to tell–long after the fact–but can also unnecessarily complicate things.
And I forgot to ask – So what’s was added to your long-term plan after today?
Thanks so much, Trevor, I’m so glad you enjoyed it – and Meron, thanks so much for having me on the show!
I’ll hang around in the comments, so if anybody has questions, I’ll do my best to answer them. 🙂
After listening to this episode, my mind is really going. My podcast,
Submarine Sea Stories is doing well and I enjoy it. I do not care for the military part of it as much, I enjoy connecting with the people I interview.
The connection submariners feel that they were in something special many people say that could not handle being on a sub for months at a time.
When someone posts on one of these Submarine FB pages, there will be hundreds of comments. I think the guys are nostalgic for those days when they had a brotherhood with the guys they served with. They post to recapture some of that connection.
How can I best serve this community (or better define that need)? I do not want to do Viagra commercials, I want to fill their need to connect.
Thanks in advance.
Bill
Hey Bill,
What about filling their need to connect by filling their need to connect? Literally (in the original sense of the word) – arrange a reunion of some kind. Would that work?
Alastair.
I agree with Alastair. Don’t know if to call it a reunion or something smaller like a meet up — but definitely agree that no matter how you call it, it’s a great way to build the community and solidify you as their leader / connector.
Then you just pay attention to what people say in such meet ups. If you hear “man, I wish that…” or “I really hate that…”. Those are golden beacons for opportunity.
You might also want to look into what the Army Strong brand is doing, if I remember correctly their all about helping veterans share their story, but I don’t remember what their model is (if at all, they might be charity)
How about building an email list from the show, and then reaching out to them with the same email that I used on my show? “what’s your biggest challenge right now?”
Instead of guessing, let them tell you. Either through meet ups or through email 🙂
Bill, are we talking just about addressing their needs, or about figuring out a need / pain that you can solve *and* charge for? I’d love a clarification on that 🙂
Great episode! Danny has great ideas for building an audience. I’ve read his book “Engagement From Scratch” and I’ve attended a couple of his webinars that he’s co-hosted with others, and he always provides great actionable advice.
Thanks Melissa, I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed my work! 🙂
This was probably one of the best episodes I’ve listened to yet! I had a chance to finally listen to this episode on Saturday. Can I just say that this episode is beyond words. Meron, you and Danny provided so much informative information. It really is going to help me with launching my podcast, blog, and my list. I learned so much from this episode! One of the most insightful is how Danny explained that you need to spend more time commenting on blogs than you think. I never dreamed you should spend 10-15 hours a week on commenting. I thought is was maybe 15 minutes a week, man was I off! A warm thanks for providing so much information!
LOVE IT Jonah! 🙂
Combine this with the lead magnet advice from Tim Paige on IIP057: Conversion Optimization, Vacuum Cleaners, and A Stolen Wedding Ring (that I know you’re already applying) and you’re golden 🙂
I forgot to ask you today when we talked – do you have a list of main places where your target audience hangs that you can start interacting in and becoming a valued member of the community?
Good question. Short answer, I have some ideas. Website and social media wise, Instagram and Tumblr
Loved the episode! I need it beat into my head that it mainly boils down to work, work, work.
I just cranked out 600 words for my next product and am pledging to myself to write at least 500 words a day on my product which needs to be done by August 16th.
Thanks for the motivation.
Woohoo! Well done!
Do you want me to keep you accountable to that, Jason? 🙂
500 words a day — I’ve been toying with the same idea. It’s really time for me too to start producing more content – across all of my channels.
What’s the product?
No need to keep me line. I’m interested in the Sunday accountability mini podcast. I’ll commit to commenting my own progress each Sunday as well.
This week, I failed on my 500 per day, but have written 2164 in the last 5 days for a 432 average.
My experience is that I work in chunks, so while I’m saying 500 per day, in my mind I’m thinking 3500 per week.
I’m pushing for around 20,000 words, so I’m moving my due up to July 31st as I’ll need a few weeks to edit and compile.
If I average 500 per day, I’ll meet 20,000 on July 10th.
My product is in the same line of the apps you checked out last September when we had a little email exchange (wow, it’s been that long and I haven’t really done anything since). I’m taking the scenic route.
Time to work. Take care!
Challenge accepted 🙂 I’ll start working on those Sunday episodes 🙂
And you didn’t fail. You wrote 2164 words. That’s a lot more than the week before, I bet. Can it be better? Perhaps. Should you still congratulate yourself for taking action every day for the last 5 days? Absolutely! Keep building the momentum my friend!
So is the product a book version of those apps? Who’s the target audience? Coaches? Parents?
This goes to the top of the list as the most helpful podcast episode I’ve EVER listened to haha I’ve already started implementing everything I could from what Danny said and have been getting great results already! Plus I lived in Montreal for the first half of last year and I LOVE hearing about anything to do with it haha
Thank you Meron and Danny!
Sam
Thanks so much, Sam, I’m so glad you enjoyed it. Hope you’ll be able to make it back to Montreal soon – the weather is finally getting beautiful again! 😉
Danny, completely off-topic here but…Julie and I were wondering about that – – is there anywhere “warm” in Canada?
In the summer, sure. 🙂