Moving Away From SEO Agency Work Into Email Marketing Automation

So it’s definitely been a while since I’ve done any new blog posts here but I thought today would be a good time for it.

As many of you know, I’ve personally had lots of up’s and down’s when it comes to online marketing.

In 2016, I left a full time job and decided to focus entirely on making my own path as an entrepreneur.

I wasn’t 100% at the time what I’d be focusing on, but I wrote my story post 1 week after leaving to re-cap on the journey so far.

I ended up focusing nearly all of my time on 3 areas:

1. YouTube Channel – I built up my YouTube channel to now over 3000 subscribers. This has totally paid off from a profit and business stand point as I generate lots of ad revenue, affiliate commissions and new leads for my brand every month
2. SEO agency work – I maintained a fair number of SEO clients mostly outsourcing the bulk of the work to white label partners and doing some light communication work.
3. Digital agency courses and software – I created a bunch of offers around helping others start and grow digital agencies. I’ve had a good amount of success here making quite a bit of income from selling my own courses.

Taking a Break To Think About The Future

These last few months I had to take a huge break in my business and help my parents move into an assisted living facility.

To say the least, it was a ton of work because I had to basically take over all aspects of their finances, pay off debts, prepare their home for sale and find them a comfortable place to live.

This took me about a month and 1/2 while tackling multiple phone calls a day, following up on things, meeting with a lawyer, a financial advisor, multiple trips back and forth to their home and just cleaning out and preparing it for sale.

This all gave me a lot of time to think and being honest, for a long time I’ve been unhappy with what I’ve been doing as an entrepreneur.

I get lots of exciting moments and other times I get really down and depressed. I believe a big part of this being that I was making quite a bit of income all around doing “Agency” work.

Losing My Passion For Agency Work

I kept telling myself looking 5+ years in the future I didn’t see myself wanting to own an office, have employees or have any digital agency clients.

The idea of it didn’t excite me at all, and in some cases I sometimes would feel as though I’d rather be back in a job doing IT work then doing what I’ve been doing.

While I had some big “launches” and made a lot of income doing agency training products, I’ve personally lost a lot of passion for the agency stuff over the last few years.

Even closing these big $3500+/month clients didn’t really excite me, it just felt at the end of the day the only thing I cared about was the income and otherwise left me with no real happiness behind what I’m doing.

Over the last few years I started re-investing a lot of my earnings into working with mentors and learning everything I can about marketing online courses.

With that, I found one of the most exciting things for me was how often I’d use my email list and in a lot of cases had even automated quite a bit of it.

I’d build out a series of emails promoting one of my agency offers or an affiliate offer and basically let these email series just generate sales for me 24/7 on auto-pilot.

When I think about “why” I started doing all this stuff in the first place, it wasn’t so much about making tons of money for me.

It was more about how I could leverage systems and assets that would continue to produce income for me in the future so I could spend my time doing whatever I wanted. 

If I looked at anything I’ve done similar to this, most things I’d done required constant work. A big one of those things being SEO clients, even if I outsourced a lot of it I’d still know at the end of the day clients would leave and I’d constantly be needing to get new ones. 

While I was away helping my parents I was constantly able to continue generating sales from emails I’d written 3+ years ago in 2017.

This to me was the real “goal” of what I’d been going for all along.

The current problem came with the fact that I’d much prefer to be teaching something related to this exact process as a whole.

Making a Shift In Business

So as of this month, I’ve decided to transition my entire business into helping entrepreneurs with email marketing automation.

The primary goal is to help business owners create long term assets that will help them sell their products and services long term using evergreen email marketing campaigns. 

I just put the finishing touches on a training video and a short 20 page eBook you can get access to here all about this. 

(I’ve even already started writing my first 7 day email series for it)

I welcome your thoughts and moving forward I’ll be using the same brand, same YouTube channel and just focusing more of my content around email marketing automation. 

For those reading this, if you decide to enroll into any of my agency courses or training or also happen to be a current student I will still be answering questions and supporting you along the way. 

Don’t hesitate to email me or ask questions as I’m always willing to help those who seek it. 

Thanks for following along and I’m excited to see where 2020 goes from here!

-John