Did you receive Sean Mize's eMail Today? (Selling his business?)

I don't believe I'm on any of his lists (at least not anymore - underwent a mass unsubscribe operation a few months ago to cut down on the number of distractions in my inbox every day :p).

Interesting, though. Any mention of how much it's selling for?

I can't speak for him, obviously--but after listening to his audio pitch he sends you to a page where you input your name and email. He doesn't give a price, it's vague. He asks you to go to another page where you must opt-in to get his exact price.

Hi Mike,
I'm not on his list anymore so I didn't get the email. Do you think it has anything to do with the Google changes and the effects on EzineArticles? Since article marketing with EZA was a big part of Sean's business?

Now I'm really curious on the price...

Peggy

Interesting

I don't understand all the puzzlement. While there may be special circumstances contributing to the timing of the sale, it's only sensible to start any business with an exit strategy in mind.

Or were you planning to work forever?


Frank

I did not receive the message, just heard here. Bit wondering, how someone can decide such things? May be he got enough money and want to retire now. Whatever it be certainly, i think it is just part of the business - if Sean is no longer their, it will be a losing concern soon. The fact is he is selling the business that is totally depended on the man.

Never heard of him but 250k seems low. Especially when you got products for 5k.

Lee Mcintyre does 200k a month and I dont think he has products at 5k.
Jason Fladien the same.
Large scale product launches can make that within 2 weeks.

What I am getting at here is maybe that isn't his main focus and he wants to give priority to another business

Yeah, I understand people's skepticism for sure. One thing he mentioned was that he wasn't getting out of the business entirely, just selling rights to all of his materials. One thing he didn't mention in his laundry list of products he was selling was his list. That would obviously be a huge asset.

One thing he mentioned was that he wanted to devote his time exclusively to very high-end clients and not focus on teaching list-building and email marketing to beginners. He did say he wasn't selling the materials with PLR rights and that they couldn't be given away for any purpose. Also that one couldn't put their name on them--just that they could sell them and keep all of the profits.

One thing that wasn't clear was whether he was looking for one buyer or would sell these rights to multiple parties. I know many of his resource boxes take you to a 10k platinum coaching program after confirming. That seems pretty high-end to me, but I've also heard him mention in some of his programs that he also does consulting to people and businesses for fees much higher than this.

Like I said, I certainly can speak for Sean, and like you--I'm not privy to his innermost motivations. Maybe it's exactly as he stated.

If you're not familiar with Sean he offers his $15,000-a-month plan for free at the squeeze page below.

Internet Marketing | Internet Marketing Coaching | High Ticket Selling

It's 30 pages and on page 12 he gives statistics on how fast he grew his list and his earnings from it during his first year of article marketing. The numbers are kind of interesting. It's not an overnight road to wealth, but it's kind of interesting to see how fast things began to snowball after months 5-6 for him. If you do article marketing, you might find it an interesting read. --Mike

Well, some of your questions were answered just now. Just got a second email this morning directing readers to an info page about his sale, including his asking price...
http://www.secrets-of-internet-succe...iness/2011.htm

Well put, Martin.

One thing you mentioned that I wondered about as well: Is the fact Sean's name will stay on all the products a plus or a minus?

He does a lot of coaching, so simply having his products--or rights to his products--may not mean a lot. I just don't know.

There are a lot of Amish farms south of where I live. Yes, they can build exquisite houses and barns with a hammer, saw and brace and bit. But because they can do that by no means gives me any degree of confidence I could do the same. I cannot. The same might be true with the tools Sean is selling. He built something of significance with them; Others may not be so fortunate. Can't say. --Mike

Sean's email marketing might be a bit annoying as I see his e-mails almost every single day, but this guy really knows his stuff. I learned a lot from him even without paying a dime to buy any of his stuff.

Maybe I'm being overly skeptical here, but I can't see how this guy is earning a quarter of a million dollars per year - especially if EZine is a huge part of his business. Going by his profile page there, he's only averaging a little over 100 views per article. Choosing one random article, it doesn't seem to offer much: http://ezinearticles.com/?Product-Cr...ion&id=2781643

I realize he probably has other funnels and other article marketing accounts/niches, but this doesn't seem like an indicator of quality or success. If this is how successful article marketing is done, then I'm truly lost.

In order to truly buy his business you would want to receive all the articles (and the domains they point to).

That would be a decent investment, despite the hit ezinearticles has taken recently from the big G.

I don't think I would buy a business that was largely dependent on EzineArticles for traffic, considering the Panda smackdown on EZA.

In my real life I am a business broker. I don't know Mr. Mize personally, but in my experience in selling brick and mortar business many times the seller knows of a reason why the income to the business will be reduced. I would not be surprised if the Panda update figures large in this. Or it could be that he is just burned out and needs a rest.

I'll never understand why people consider being a #1 or #2 writer at EZA special. It's a PAID position, people. The ONLY thing that makes Mize #1 on EZA is the QUANTITY of his articles. Not the quality, the conversions, clicks or any other figure. He has the most; that makes him number one and nothing else. End of story and excuse me for yawning.

He only wrote the first 1,500 articles, then he paid for every article thereafter. (Plenty of excellent writers here on the WF have written far more articles than Sean wrote himself, and I'd wager that some of them are in this very thread and were at least as successful as Sean. Maybe more so, and they probably spent far less money.) Now don't start attacking me because I'm not impressed by this. All I am saying is that being number one on EZA is a result of VOLUME only.

If you want to be impressed by how much money he's spent on articles or on how effective of a manager he is, then I agree and he definitely deserves props for that.

But I've suspected something has been up for a while. The guy is mucking around here in the WF selling a $7 WSO. For a guy like Mize that's equivalent to scrounging for nickels.

I bought the WSO just to check it out and attempt to understand why the Mighty Mize is selling a $7 WSO. It came with some free PDF bonuses. While I haven't listened to the audio yet, I was pretty surprised to discover that Mize is LITERALLY teaching the following:

1.) Good writers should be writing at least 5 and preferably 10 500 word articles per hour

2.) The only source you'll ever need for research for your articles is EzineArticles.

Seriously?

Why any writer worth his/her salt would ever heed this advice I certainly can't understand.

I know, you're all going to tell me that he's made "millions" and so on, so whatever he does is successful and is clearly a method that works. That's great and I'm not denying that. I'm just saying that based on what I'm seeing, things probably aren't going well for Mize.

Of course, he could just be implementing his exit strategy as others have stated in this post. I tend to doubt that but it's possible.

And by the way; who develops successful business plans without an exit strategy? Ever applied for a business loan before? An exit strategy is a required component of the business plan that you submit with your application.

In my mind the exit strategy is just as important as every other aspect of planning a successful business.

If you have been a serious follower of Sean for the last few years, you'll realize he sends out "selling my business" emails once or twice a year. He's not actually selling his business. It's more like a franchaise thing I'd say.

Sean is more into selling a coaching program these days rather than his old article writing thing, though he remains very active in doing and promoting artilce writing.

I don't know if this was covered or not. I stopped reading halfway down.

I'm on his list and have gotten some variation of this offer continually for more than a year, possibly two. Each time the offer is a bigger and bigger version, and all lead to some coaching package.

I bought one of the packages (at $497) because I wanted it as a guide for something I was developing in my niche. I think he has a good model, but I'm not sure it is not something you can't pick up here, if you wait and listen.

So, from what I've been able to discern, Sean "selling his business" is a euphemism for selling PLR rights.

Kirk

I've read some people saying they could write 10 in an hour; however, I am assuming that is on a niche they know really well. If you need to speed up your writing, I recommend Jason's Fladien's report, "How to Write an Article in 7 minutes." It used to be available as a WSO, I think it still is.

Before I read it, it would take me 45 minutes to write an article, now I can do it in 12. I'm sure you're going to go back on "quality," just because you take more time on something, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's better.

If you are a slow typist and that is the reason it takes you longer, either work on your speed or get Dragon Naturally speaking.

I don't know if I could sustain writing that many articles per hour for 8 hours a day; however, I'm not an article writer for a living. It's just part of what I do. What I don't choose to outsource, I sit down and write, get it over with, and move on to something else.


What is unusual is that you're still doing it all manually. Sick Submitter is $12.99 per month and submits to bookmarking, article sites, and blogs, plus some.

You missed the one time fee for SEO Link Robot, but I think you can still get the discounted monthly price for $40.

There are some discount codes for Article Marketing Robot floating around.

I think when you are learning the ropes doing it all manually is actually a good thing, but once you have your system down, find a way to automate it as fast as possible.

What is your time worth? If you think you can't afford it, it would be better to work a couple weekends a month at McDonalds to pay for your automation tools and you would still be getting more IM work done with less time.

Or buy some fiverr gigs. Spending all that time on drudge work is crazy.