Episode #97 – Derek Pankaew on Facebook Marketing Ballin’ and How To Go From Zero To Hero

Hello, It’s John McIntyre here, the auto responder guy, it’s time for episode 97 of the McMethod email marketing podcast where, we talk about one thing and one thing only and that’s how to be awesome at life really, and in the context of the email marketing. Whether you wanna write these emails yourself, or you wanna grow your business with email marketing, sales funnels and all that stuff, this is the place to come, this is the place to learn about that, and as i’ve said recently, this is fundamentals right ? So you can take everything you’re learning here and apply it in so many other ways, in so many other traditions, whether you’re doing this stuff on radio, sales pages billboards, all of that. These fundamentals are things here, marketing fundamentals. So, I’d like to come back to that. I’m very big on simplicity, which is is to say that, I think, you know being good at life excellings and then success comes back to it, can really be simplified to a couple very ah small ah you know very short list of things, which is that you know, these fundamentals whether it’s sales or hails or any of these different things. And I find ah you know thinking that way makes it really easy to figure out what to do, because it’s just like was any of like a couple of things here, have empathy, talk to your customers regularly and make offers, that’s it, that’s really what we’re talking about here. Talk to you customers regularly with that email auto responder, and make offers, regularly, make an offer and tell them hey, look, give me a call and for a $100 we’ll do xyz for you, that’s an offer, just make offers regularly. This is that’s it, that’s just business right there, that’s your whole sales form. Now we’re just getting more complex by saying ”well, you wanna have 10 emails in the sequence here, and you wanna have some special advanced auto responder software here ” like forget about all of that for a second, talk to your customers, talk to your prospects, talk to the market place, regularly, and make them offers, that’s it. Anyway, today we’re talking to Derek Pankaew, okay, now Derek is a friend of mine, he lives here in Chiang Mai right now, though he’s taking off soon, off to uh going to build a galavan take around south these days, it was all he really liked to do, and anyways he’s here. Now a year ago, I bumped into Derek, I met him about a year ago, and he was making a couple grand a month doing some freelance copywriting, he actually had a, an information product in the, he was in the dating market okay, and then fast forward one year to now, and, he’s got a nice little business running on Facebook doing one to 2000, oh he’s doing one to two grand a day right now, and this is why I was gonna record the interview, but you know now it’s been about a month, and I spoke to him recently and it’s even you know gone quite a bit higher than that, so he is, he’s doing quite well for himself right now, good old Facebook. And today we’re gonna talk about that journey, now, it’s not just about the Facebook thing he’s doing, though you will hear about that, why I really wanted to get, part of what I really wanted to get Derek to kind of talk about was just the how to level up consistently, because what Derek has done is gone from sort of being like he was a freelance copywriter originally doing stuff in the warrior forum of all places, then he ended up with this dating uh this product, information product in the dating market, and now he’s got this decent business running on Facebook which you’ll hear about in a second. So what I really like about Derek is that he keeps taking what he has and using it to get to the next big opportunity, using that to go to the next big opportunity, he’s really really good at doing that, and so we’re gonna talk about that, how to level up consistently, what the Facebook stuff is, and also some of the freelance copywriting stuff because he had a really nice way of finding uh finding clients, finding freelance copywriting clients, and I know that there is a decent amount of people who listen to this, maybe it’s you who, want more clients, so any time you can find out about how to get more clients, well, this is gonna be one of them. So to get the short notes for this episode of the email marketing podcast go to themcmethod.com/97. Now this weeks McMasters insight of the week, very simple, how to write emails fast? I’ve got someone working for me right now and he emailed about a week ago, he had just done some work for me and he wanted to know how to write emails quickly, because the emails he had written had taken him quite a while and it was a bit exhausting and things like that, so we go on the phone and we had a chat about it, and um it’s really simple. I think it’s simple but it, part of is, it’s just gonna come with time, the more you write emails the more you practice it the faster you’re gonna get. However, you might wanna get fast like today, or maybe even yesterday, okay, now here is a couple things you can do, set a timer for 10 or 15 minutes, and just blast out the emails as fast as possible, okay, don’t, like if you can’t if you can’t think of anything to write just start writing, just say yo, so, I’m meant to be writing this email here in this text editor, but I can’t think of anything to write at all so I’m just gonna write about nothing until I think about something to write. You know what’s interesting about nothing, well nothing, because there’s nothing there, like you can just, I would call this talking shit okay, it doesn’t mean anything, but what it’s gonna do, it’s gonna unplug that, you know, that hole in your brain while the writing can creativity comes out, if you can’t write, force yourself to write nothing, by nothing write about nothing and talk about how cool nothing, alright whatever you get the point. And, another thing is streaming consciousness, you wanna like, don’t sit down and try to be really calculated about what you’re writing, like what I’m doing right now it is podcast and we’re just talking, this is the stream of consciousness, I’m not thinking about what I’m saying and just blasting out, right just, and hopefully it’s not too crazy or anything but the idea is you that wanna do this with your writing, you don’t wanna sit there thinking about it and think oh man what’s the best way to express that word, um, I need to use a better word, like that stuff you should do after you’ve written the email, before you’ve written anything, you wanna blast out that email as fast as freaking possible which means setting a timer and just, don’t even pause, don’t take a breath, just go rrrrrrrr just, you know maybe you’re gonna have to learn how to touch type if you need to okay, that’s really gonna help, and if you’re committed in that way and committed to doing it fast you will get fast and you can do this stuff in 10 or 15 minutes once you get good at it. In light of simplistics, I like to simplify things I mentioned a couple of minutes ago, you wanna simplify this, so I think about emails as first thing get their attention okay, because if you don’t have someone’s attention well they’re not gonna listen to you you know, they’re not looking at you, they’re looking at the you know, the Facebook screen, step two, say something interesting, right, you get the, you know, you’ve gotta tell them a story, say something funny, whatever, say something interesting, it’s like you’re at the bar with the friend and you’re like man you’re never gonna believe what happened the other day, got their attention, now use it to tell the story and that’s where you get them interested, and then eventually like you know use to say into like some sort of problem of this, then you just rub salt in there just like you don’t have to write emails right? And then like, and then you start rubbing salt In there and then like well you don’t have to like It just kind of sucks because it means you can’t, you can’t make money, you can’t control your cash flow in life, you can’t make more sales for your business and maybe one day you’re gonna be bankrupt because you never took the time to polish your skills with writing emails to get customers for yourself and for your clients. I’m rubbing salt on it. But, this is where the solution comes in, if you want to, yeah, if you wanna learn how to write emails you need to buy my amazing product here for 10 million dollars, okay, so get their attention, get them interested, come up with a problem, agitate the crap out of it, and then rub salt in there well basically, and then present them with the solution. That’s an email, right there, and you just blast it out, blast it out, blast it out, okay. That’s it for now. Let’s get into this interview with Mr. Derek Pankaew. John McIntyre: It’s John McIntyre here the auto responder guy, I’m here with Derek Pankaew. Now, Derek came to me, uh, I think it was this week actually with a really interesting story and I gotta rewind just so you understand the context for this. I met Derek about a year ago when he first came to Chiang Mai, I think it was roughly about a year ago, and Derek told me that uh, you know he was a copywriter, he’s been doing some freelance stuff, so, sort of a similar position to me and then he ended up in Chiang Mai, and I mean but he’d stopped doing the freelance stuff because he was focusing on information product and at that stage he was making about, I think it was about 1000 dollars a month, there was a couple partners in there, but it was uh, you know, it was doing ok, it wasn’t amazing but it was better than say slogging it out in a corporate job back home, uh, and then I asked him at the time, I said how about you wanna do a podcast sometime, we can talk about how the marketing your doing the copywriting your doing for this information product, and we can just make a podcast out of it, I’m always looking for new content, and he was like no I don’t really feel comfortable right now, it’s not, you know, he just wasn’t interested at that stage. And then what do you know, one year later, I bumped into him a couple different times, at conferences, and he’s been around Chiang Mai as well, and I mean this is a, just to wrap it really quick on Chiang Mai, there is tons of people who are doing this kind of stuff, so this isn’t some far flame place of the world though it might sound like it, there is internet publicity commerce guys, there is sales funnels, there is just everything. So then Derek comes to me like a week ago and says hey, are you still doing your podcast? I’m uh, I’m having getting some really good results and I’d love to get on there, I’ve started doing some marketing and, on Facebook ads, and I’m doing, now I’m doing one to two k profit per day. So now, so one year later he’s doing more than double than he was doing a month before but now he’s doing it every single day, which is pretty damn impressive. So, I was like yeah, hell yeah let’s do this, let’s make a podcast out of it, so we just had a chat about what we’re gonna talk about and we’re gonna run through the journey, the transition stages, a bit of how to get clients and also long term thinking, so this is, I think this episode is going to be pretty packed with, uh, with goodies. This is quite a long entry. Derek how are you doing man? Derek Pankaew: Hey, How is it going? John McIntyre: It’s good to have you on the show man. Derek Pankaew: It’s good to be here. John McIntyre: Yeah, yeah. And you’re like, you’re about, so we’re both in Chiang Mai right now, Chiang Mai for those of you like if you don’t know is about an hour north of Bangkok in Thailand. And it’s, it’s in the mountains, in the north, and the people up here are a little bit different than the people that are in Bangkok, the language is a little bit softer, there is even a northern Thai language up here. But it’s civilized, there is coffee shops and bars and restaurants and offices and all that sort of stuff, but actually Derek is about 5, I think it’s about 5 minutes, 10 minutes away on a motor bike, at one coffee shop and I’m down in the office in another area, and, so it’s a small town and he’s basically on the other side of town, but it’s only 10 minutes away, so it’s a small town but there is lots of stuff here. Anyway, so, so Derek, I know we’ve had a chat about what you’ve been on to what you’re doing right now. But I think the broad stroke is right there you know, so when we met a year ago, you were doing like a 1000 dollars a month, and now you’re doing one or two k, one or two thousand dollars per day which is really impressive. But so, what I’d like to do is rewind back to, because I know you’re doing copywriting, tell me before you even got into freelance copywriting, what, were you a corporate guy? Or were you working for a company? Did you have an office job? Derek Pankaew: No, I think uh I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship so the kind of job like a high school job to college, trying to start my own businesses, which didn’t really take off, you know I tried something when I was 18, some like random ebook or something that didn’t really work out, and I ended up working for a few different internet marketing and dating companies from 18 to uh I don’t know 21, 22 or so and then managed to, and that’s kind of when the freelance writing started taking off. John McIntyre: Ok, ok. So, It’s kind of interesting, there is a lot of people out there in the world who, there is this shift going, they’re sort of rippling across the west right now where people are boarding, you know you gotta have university degrees and office jobs to really make a career out of ourselves, and in some ways that’s a valid path, but in other ways, it’s you know it’s really not, there is actually a, you know, there is a bit of a hassling to kind of try some new stuff and get to know people, and really just hassling gritting all that kind of stuff. There is a lot of opportunity out there for someone to make something of themselves, so it sounds like that’s exactly what you’ve been doing. So tell me about like you getting into the client stuff, you were working for some of these dating companies, you probably got a taste of what marketing copywriting was like, and then at some point you decided you were gonna to quit, basically to up and leave like and go I’m gonna do this on my own, now I don’t have, so I don’t have to have a job, so I don’t have to have a boss so I can kind of be my own man. So what happened then was probably a bit of a transition period, and then you said you actually had a pretty cool, pretty simple process for how to get clients. Derek Pankaew: Yeah, so I was doing both freelance copywriting and freelance content writing. For me the copywriting always, I never figured out a way to make that consistent, you know I’d meet someone in person and we’d talk about copy and sometimes I’d get a game for one or two thousand dollars. But I never managed to get that stream of income consistent, what did work for me was content writing where I was eventually , I was able to get to a point where it was able to consistently generate between 30 and 60 dollars an hour and it was pretty easy for me to scale it up and down whenever I needed, so if I was in a cheap country I could just scale down to where I’m working one day a week or an hour a day in an expensive country I could scaled up whenever I wanted to, and yeah essentially I managed to just build a really simple to run sales funnel for my own writing services. John McIntyre: Right, right ok. So it sounds like it’s pretty cool I think there is a cool thing there, because there is people out there like they said that they’re trying to make that break, and I don’t really, I don’t have to go out of this room for this podcast but there is that issue I’ve mentioned the hero’s journey which there is a lot of people who aren’t happy, who wanna make that change and I don’t really know anyone who’s done it, I don’t really know how to do it, so I think there is so much value in hearing a story from someone like yourself about sort of how that happened, so tell me a bit more about like the warrior forum stuff, because I know you said that you had this, this, how to get clients consistently, I know you said you can get it but how did you do it? Derek Pankaew: Yeah so, I, for those who don’t know what the warrior forum is, it’s basically an online forum where a lot of internet marketers hang out, so everyone from copywriters, to website owners, to people doing SEO, to just kind of like, it’s like a giant gathering place for the people in the internet marketing community. So I’ve decided to offer writing services, I tried you know using my own social network, I tried using Elance, Odesk which really just, uh, like , the amount of money you can earn on those sites is just really low, and then I was on the warrior forum and as I was looking through these threads most people are trying to compete based on price, so the medium price per article was about $7, uh, and most people were just trying to bid lower and lower and reading through the samples, reading through the, you know, through the different threads I just wouldn’t hire any of these guys personally, like you know, I’d worked for a few companies at this point and I know that nobody that I’d ever worked with would hire these guys, it just felt so cheap, so I decided ,you know , I’m gonna position myself as the upper hand of the market instead of charging $7 a piece, I started off just charging 15,16 dollars a piece, and then I booked myself really quickly and then you know I just basically I’ll up the price until the clients didn’t wanna pay me anymore, so, yeah my position, my headline was the most expensive writer on the warrior forum and then the whole sales letter was just social proof, of proof that I could get them right, I sent screenshots of articles that I had ranked before, I had names of people that they’d recognize or companies or the people, or people I’ve written for who worked with companies that they’d recognize, so I wrote for a real estate agent who worked for Remax ,so I just, It kind of worked out in there, someone else who’d worked withTony Robbins, they just kind of use as much social proof as possible, yeah and then just, I just position myself in a different way from the whole market and I think that was actually what, actually fulfilled the need that a lot of the people on the warrior forum were looking for but just couldn’t find anywhere among the other writers, so I think I was one of, when I first started doing this I think I was the only person positioning myself this way and by the time I had finished I think there were maybe two or three other people, but yeah I was, I was literally charging four or five times what the market was charging and completely booking myself out whenever I needed more work so yeah. John McIntyre: Yeah, Yeah. I think that the interesting thing there is not because it’s not really, I think it would be quite difficult for someone to listen to this and then go straight back to warrior forum and do the same strategy, but I think the really cool take away from that is that you don’t have to compete on price, and, not even that it’s kind of this, I love this idea, like the headlines like the most expensive copywriter on the warrior forum, because some people are gonna, everyone is gonna look at that, what the hell who even sells that and so you get their attention, and then they’re gonna go down and think why is it the most expensive guy, so I think one of the lessons here is that people, I think it’s just that when you get into some of these games it’s like I can’t charge too much, you know like everyone else is doing this so I’ve gotta do it that way and you really don’t, you do it anyway, I mean you can charge way more, you can charge a little bit more, you can diversify like your position in a different way, so this is the whole thing with positioning. I remember a, it was like the middle of last year or so, or maybe the start of last year was when I had to go on this auto responder guy, And there is all this copywriters out there and they all are pretty standard, they’re not really, they just copywrite, and so if you wanna hire a copywriter well you hire a copywriter, generally it’s not like this, but generally like they situate , a copywriter is a copywriter, It’s not like that but that’s sort of what it can start to feel like and I was like what I wanna do is I wanna find a way to get people so they think that when I wanna, when I need some emails, who’s the guy I think of, and so I wanna be the auto responder guy so then if someone just will say I’m looking for a copywriter to write a sales letter, it means I don’t get recommended, but if someone says hey I need an email auto responder do you know anyone, they might be five copywriters out there that they know that they can write emails, but there is one auto responder guy, so that person is gonna go hey I know this guy whose name is John he specializes in emails even though I’m the exact same thing as the other copywriters, by calling myself something different, by positioning myself as different, it creates a, it changes the frame and it’s such a valuable lesson and it really changes everything is different, you know everyhthing is different than me. Derek Pankaew: Totally. John McIntyre : So alright, so you did that, so that’s how you got the clients, that’s how you did that, and, I mean one thing that we were talking about too is like if someone wanted to go and get clients like that, there’s probably an opportunity of going to the warrior forum or even other forums, and I know I’ve been quite a, you know In the past I used to post a little in the DC, you see which is a community weibo thing and I ended up getting a lot of clients out of that just by posting in the forum and making it known that this is what I do, so there are, there are quite a few ways to, just kind of like you put yourself out, you kind of figure out a way to position yourself and then you really just gotta put yourself out there, and it is quite an easy way to consistently get clients. So, moving on, you did the clients stuff, you were doing that and then you decided to get into the info products, so you had an info product in a dating space, it was doing about a 1000 dollars a month and then what’s changed now is you started doing some marketing on Facebook, and now you’re doing one to two thousand a day, now one thing I wanna point out here before we kind of dive in is that some of this is gonna be, it’s big numbers but somewhat on a quite short term, so it’s a bit of a grand, we’ll be talking about this in a minute, but it can be a grant and it can be on a short term so one thing that we’re focusing on for the listener is the long term, how to, you know, short term thinking and long term thinking and how it’s ok to get something for what it’s worth in the short term but it’s also wise to have a long term plan, to have a, not so much a backup plan but to have a strategy, where that the short term play fits into the grant strategy, so, and I think that’s what you’re doing beautifully here. So tell me about where are you at right now? What are you doing? And what’s the game plan? Derek Pankaew: Yes, so right now I’m selling mostly T-shirts, uh, through Tee Spring and through Facebook advertizing. Basically the way it works is that I look for, um, small markets that tend to be underserved and create interesting looking T-shirts that might be funny or sassy or just kind of epic, and then how those shirts displayed directly in there news feed and get a really high percentage like between 4 to 10% of the people who see the ad would click on it, and then between 8 and 13% of the people who see the shirt, who land on the landing page will end up buying , so just creating very very targeted T-shirts and then getting them in front of the right people using Facebook ads. John McIntyre: Nice, nice, I love it. So one thing is that, because we’ve, you know I’ve met a few people doing this and there is some big numbers going through, but tell me, like is it a grant like, number one is easy because I know that someone is gonna listen to this and think wow that sounds really easy I’m gonna do it, so tell me is it easy? How much time are you putting into this? Derek Pankaew: I think it’s not easy, like it’s actually, to do this business model is, requires so many different skill sets, I think it really like if you’ve been in internet marketing for a little while it’s a great way to make some really quick money, but if you’re just getting started I think it’s actually a terrible business model to begin through, because you really gotta understand pay traffic, you gotta understand analytics, you gotta understand photoshopping design, uh, you gotta understand like all these different things and be able to put them together. And yeah even, and even, even with those skill sets I’m currently working at least 12 hours a day, I mean yesterday I got into the office at 8am, I left at midnight, and I mean, I’m okay doing this because I’m only gonna be doing it for two or three months. But yeah it’s definitely, it’s definitely a lot of work, and it’s, like, because you don’t stop running your campaigns on the weekend so even on the weekends, I mean I’m not launching any new shirts but I’ve still gotta check, because I’m spending between 700 to 1800 dollars a day on Facebook right now, and I find spending $1800 a day on Facebook, I’m not gonna not check it, it’s just, that would just be stupid. So yeah even on Saturday Sunday I’ve still gotta spend, you know, a couple of hours just looking over the data, am I leaking money anywhere, did anything stop making money that was making money before, like I just, I have to keep my finger on it so it’s, It is kind of, it’s a somewhat stressful business to be in definitely. John McIntyre: Um, and I think there is an interesting side like I actually tried, I actually tried this I have a friend, another guy who was doing similar numbers to you, this was, uh, maybe 3 or 4 months ago I think, 6 months ago, and I’ve tried for a long time to shut down that sort of opportunistic like chase, chase the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but he told me about it and I was like man I’m gonna go try that, and I remember I spent about two hours one afternoon to set up 10 campaigns and I was like this sucks, so I didn’t, you know I still I tried but I didn’t have the I guess the persistence to, there is no way I could’ve done it for ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day, I got bored so fast which is, it’s sort of like that’s the interesting thing about this situation that you’re in, we’ll be moving on to the long term stuff in a second because there’s been a lot of smart people in my life that if told don’t go chasing the short term stuff you know, if you mention like a teaspoon idea to a season business person a lot of them are gonna say don’t, like it’s a waste of time in so short term, that’s before you try, if you get to the point where you’re making say 50 grand a month it’s gonna be a different story, but there is that, there is sort of this aversion in the business world to short term stuff, once you’ve progressed from beginner to intermediate, intermediate to advanced, if we chase the pot of gold at the rainbow I feel like there is a bit of a, I feel like there is a bit of like a guilt that we put on each other for chasing these things but then there is an argument to be had and I think that this is where you come from, there is the argument to say that if you can find something like that and make it work, it can very much cash flow or bankroll a bigger strategy, so it sounds like that’s what you’re doing, tell me about the long term play here, you’ve obviously got the short term you’re grinding out for twelve or fourteen hours a day, and you don’t really get a day off because so much money is going out the door, but there is big money and there is a lot of profit and there is a way as you’ve told me is how you’re making this into something that’s gonna be a lot bigger than just T-shirts, so tell me about that. Derek Pankaew: Sure yeah, so what I really love about doing the Facebook ads is that it gives me a lot of data, so we’re launching about 8 to 10 T-shirts a day right now so that’s about 40 to 50 shirts a week, 200 shirts a month something like that. And across all those shirts I’m betting on a number of different targets in Facebook advertizing. So I get to see exactly what markets are converting, and not only what markets are converting I can see which market’s share the most which markets are the most viral and which types of people within those markets tend to buy and tend to share, so is It women, is it men, is it, what age groups, what type of things are they interested in, so if I’m targeting someone who’s interested in golf is it the type of person who watches golf on TV is it the type of person who buys, hires golf clubs, is it the person who’s reading golf magazines right ? So I can see what kind of person is helping make things go viral, what kind of person actually buys things. And then out of the 200 markets that I’m doing per month I might pick just three to five that I’ve decided to develop more, further, and I’ll use those markets to help build up fanpages, build up email lists in the market for now more T-shirts and the not too distant I’ll definitely be marketing other products, trading courses, info products, and eventually launching my own physical products, I think my ultimate end game with all this is to build up really big fanpages really big email lists and using those to launch products on Amazon, because I think that’s, you know that’s where huge money ,long term money, passive money, that’s where that could really happen and I think having a strong user base to help get you know a hundred reviews right out the door, drive all bunch of sales, that’s kind of it, so I guess my end game or my long term plan is to develop different markets, different place for pages and email lists and then I start launching my own products especially Amazon products. John McIntyre: I like it. One thing I think is cool here is that this highlight on this goal sort of, maybe like a key tenant of business, so just sort of how the game goes, which is where you, business is really taking, there is a funny it was a French guy who said it that it’s basically taking results from a lower area of view to Ohio, so that’s like going from my Tee Spring which is a decent area of view because it’s short term you’re gonna burn out a life time value on a Tee Spring costumer one T-shirt’s worth you know probably 10 bucks you get like 8 bucks profit for example. But if you can say take that, the result is generated within that arena which is also generated from probably copywriting, marketing skills, pay traffic skills that you’ve built up before that, just kind of like each stage, on one stage you’re doing freelance, on one stage you were kind of working for the dating companies themselves they give you an idea of how to sort of be a copywriter, take that result so that asset that you’ve built, which is both tangible and intangible in the sense that it’s in the brain, take that and become a freelance copywriter, take those skills and then launch an information product, take those skills and then launch a Tee Spring campaign, and take the skills that you’ve built up all the way to that point to launch the next thing. So there is this evolutionary process that I think it’s the one of the most inspiring parts in like stories like these like it’s not like this is only relevant to begin this, because I don’t think it is, I think the metaphor here is sort of like to read between the lines and kind of see that, that the game is not to go from, not to make a specific amount of money, but to really get, to get really really good at taking resources from wherever they are now, resources and assets, assets is probably the better word, to take assets from one area and move them into a higher area, so as a freelance copywriter you might wanna, you might be able to make say $2000 a month, same skills with bigger clients might be able to make 10, same skills with your own products and some pay traffic skills might be twenty or thirty, the same skills say, obviously well say Tee Spring and then you can turn that into what you’re talking about where if someone buys a golf T-shirt if they’re buying a golf T-shirt well they are probably a golf fan and golf fans buy huge amount of stuff. So you may find these raving let’s say raving hot markets, which are just, just buy markets right. Markets that love to get their credit cards out to buy stuff, because there is a lot of them out there, but sometimes they’re hard to find, and sometimes what appears that it’s getting, what appears that it’s going to be one of those markets like being like that so what you’re getting I think is one of the most valuable parts of this Tee Spring stuff, is you get your building a list of buyers, I think that’s the coolest part. Derek Pankaew: Yeah totally, a list of buyers as well as a list of markets that convert, and I’m getting paid to build this data as well.John McIntyre: Yeah, yeah. I mean it’s a pretty badass position to be in. Tell me what are some of the lessons that you’ve been maybe some of the lessons or some of the mistakes you’ve kind of worked through on your way with the Tee Spring stuff and what we expect to going forward. Derek Pankaew: Um, a lot of the time I’ve learned a lot in terms of pay traffic and paid ads, uh, I don’t know how much detail you want me to get into that, but definitely one lesson that I’ve learned is, yeah, is being really focused on markets. Because I used to be focused on the designs, the templates, the phrases on the shirts, and now I’ve just learned like a fantastic slogan and fantastic design to a market that doesn’t buy, that doesn’t do anything. And even like a so-so shirt that’s targeted towards a market that’s hot, will buy, so um, so yeah I’m really just focusing on the markets which changed, which really did change how I ran my business , because I used to just launch all my shirt from one fan page and then I’d build separate fan pages for everything I’d launch, that way if one does take off, and people start, if I run a shirt on one page, they’re gonna like the page even if there is nothing on it except the shirt, and that already starts to give me a few hundred people on the fan page to whom I can bounce ideas off of or ask like hey we’re thinking about launching this shirt, or hey these are three designs that we’re thinking of doing vote a, b or c and we’ll make the one that you like the most, or hey what are some of your favorite lines that you’d like to see on a shirt, the winner gets a free shirt sent to them, so I get free ideas that way, so just like focusing on markets instead of focusing on the product that was, that was a big lesson for me. John McIntyre: Um, that’s a keen one, that comes up in other than, I think everyone kind of finds out at some point in the journey, is that you realize, somewhere along the line that the product, I mean the product matters but what matters more than anything is the people actually, I mean there is a problem in the first place. How bad is that problem? It not even just about problems, I mean with golf people, there ain’t so much of a problem because they have passion and they’re just so passionate about that it’s more or less they’re in a sort of a pain until they buy stuff. And it’s like I can that right there what you just said that’s a key thing that maybe it takes a certain amount of experience to get it, but the sooner someone can understand that, the faster they will go, like the further and the more money they’ll make, and I like just to give I mean one example for what I’m doing now is I’ve taken, typically, uh you know auto responders for say you know from one to three thousand dollars, but the same stuff applied in different market, because if it’s an email sort of can monetize someone just buying a set of emails, a copywriter writes them, iy’s you know it’s not a big of a deal, but you take the same the exactly same thing, a lot of these are small, you know, small businesses, maybe they have a product that they’re selling maybe they’re about to launch, and on the other side of it though, is you’ve got say a company that sells luxury bathrooms for example for 40 thousand dollars a pod, and they’ve got a 10 thousand dollar growth profit Marge alright, so then and they’ve got a list of fifteen hundred leads that ask for cords but never got closed, and then we go like why don’t we sent out an email campaign of just six emails add to that list, we convert say 1% out of the whole think which is 15, 15 leads, which is a pretty terrible conversion from a fairly warm email list, you get fifteen leads at 40 grand a pod and you can make 600 thousand dollars for that company at 10 grand growth each, you’re making 150 thousand dollars growth profit to the bottom line of that business with 6 emails, so then the question is how much is that email sequenced with? Because the funny thing is if I’m talking to the CEO, the director of the company like that, he doesn’t wanna spend, if I told him oh you know I’ll charge you two grand for this he’s gonna laugh at me and tell me he’s gonna hire someone who actually knows what he’s doing, because two grands is way too cheap for what I can actually do for him, so by changing, so what I can do to make a little more sense he’s about to make say 150 dollars growth profit it’ll make more sense when I charge him 20 or 30 thousand dollars for him to make the six hundred thousand dollars. That would be more in line with, you know with the offer, and so the only thing that’s changed there is that it doesn’t cost me anymore to get those emails written, but it makes because of the market’s change from like a small business, a small online business like you know say someone selling an ebook to a company that’s selling to make forty every time they make a sale, forty thousand dollars, and so just by changing that one thing that that market with a different or different situation, the money that they can, the money that’s gonna come in from there is absolutely, like utterly different. It’s crazy. Derek Pankaew: Wow! I guess so I mean, Yeah I’ve never really heard of copywriting being discussed at the corporate level. John McIntyre : Yeah, I mean I’m having a lot of these conversations lately because, yeah, I’m starting, I’ve started to realize that a number of people on my back saying that I don’t charge enough and, so it’s clicking, to be honest, it’s starting to click for me, and you know, in many ways so I’m having a lot of these kind of conversations, and the only thing that matters you know when it only comes to marketing consulting to go how to get clients stuff, for the only thing that matters is , so you know when you’re in a non business market like golf it’s a little bit different, but we’re on the business market, you might sell, you can make somewhat a million bucks, then why, there is no reason why they wouldn’t pay 100 thousand dollars for them. It’s like a it’s a 100 thousand dollars to make 900 thousand dollars, there is no, it doesn’t matter if the campaign that you have to create to make that one million dollars and it takes you, you know five hours work, that’s completely relevant, right, so I think that’s another thing that I’ve learned, you know recently this whole idea worked goes into something, once you start playing in a bigger level it doesn’t it’s sort of a relevant to the whole thing, the real thing is the skill or the money, the value is you knowing how to take anything, like something like this, like emails, like a sales letter or a sales funnel or a Facebook campaign, and apply it in a bigger context. Because there are a lot of copywriters who could write Tee Spring campaigns right? Like, but, like, so I could probably write about that but right now like I just don’t have, I don’t know the process, I don’t probably don’t have the persistence to sit down for 12 hours a day and do it, or the discipline, but see there is that aspect like I’m gonna have similar, sort of like, similar to the main expertise. But I can’t make, like right now I can’t do what you’re doing because I don’t think I have that knowledge right now, so there is the value in business is often just knowing when to apply certain things, knowing how to apply a sales funnel, or emails, or you know Facebook ads, in an explosive context. Derek Pankaew: Can I share one more lesson that I’ve learned? John McIntyre : Go for it man. Derek Pankaew : Cool. So I learned, so I actually learned from Tony as well and I got to about 400 dollars a day within say about 3 or 4 weeks of getting started. And I just held steady at 400 dollars a day for two or three months, and I really didn’t, I never really broke about the 500 dollar a day mark, and then I was at DCBKK, the conference that we were both at, and I talked to a guy and said yeah I’ve got a system you know that’s working, I think I’m gonna hire someone when I get to Chiang Mai so that I can start scaling this and he said why would you hire just one person if you have a system that’s working for you, you know, if you’re gonna scale this then scale it, why would you hire one person. So you know that really got me thinking, so I landed I hired two people right out the gate and then hired a third person a week or two after, and it was basically within two weeks of hiring these three people that I broke through a thousand dollars a day, and then the same week we broke through two thousand dollars a day. So it was just, I think there is a tendency for me to wanna be cautious with like, Okay I wanna move forward try one person get everything ready and then take on the next person. When really like, and I mean, this might not be a, might not be a factor if I was staying in one place for a long time but you know realistically I’m only gonna be in one place for three, four months at a time, so if I only have three four months to make as much money as I can, and I really do have to just like hire three people right away, scale it and then move on to the next phase of the business once I’m done here. John McIntyre: Yep,Yep. It’s pretty badass man. It’s kind of funny that we’re talking about scaling like I wanna find some software or set up the text and set up the scale properly. But then what you wanna do is often like it comes back to things just like hire a couple people. Derek Pankaew: Yeah. John McIntyre : Like hire like people scale a lot better, if you google it, it probably would be a little bit different, but hiring a couple people is one of the quickest ways to scale, at least initially. Derek Pankaew: Totally yeah, as soon as I’m doing something, I wanna look for ways to not be doing that think. Ever again. John McIntyre: Yeah. Yeah. It’s in I mean it’s the other side of the business I guess you kind of, I guess level up and move up the food chain. That’s usually what happens, is you get better and better at doing a task once and then giving it to someone else, never touch it again. Derek Pankaew: Umm, yeah. John McIntyre: Cool man, alright we’re right on time so, right exactly right on thirty minute. So what’s the best way, if people wanna get in touch with you, maybe wanna, maybe they wanna ask you questions or just reach out and say cool story. What’s the best way for them to do that? Derek Pankaew: Uh yeah, I guess my email DerekPankaew@gmail.com. That’s De r e k P a n k a e w @gmail.com. John McIntyre: Cool. Fantastic man. I’ll have a link to that in the short notes, some of the notes as well at the mcmethod.com. Thanks you for coming on the show Derek. John McIntyre: Cool, sure. Thanks John.