“My advice is to do what you’re passionate about. I think one of the big reasons I was successful was because I started in the baseball world, which was something I knew like the back of my hand.”

Brian Moran is the Director of Online Sales at Get 10,000 Fans. Get 10,000 Fans is a marketing agency and blog that teaches business owners how to attract new leads and make money off their Facebook fan pages. Brian had personal success utilizing Facebook marketing to promote his business, trainbaseball.com, and wanted to help other small businesses increase sales through social media as well. Get 10,000 Fans launched in November 2010.

Brian graduated from Grove City College in western Pennsylvania in 2009 with a degree in marketing. During his time at GCC, he played baseball for the Wolverines.

MO: Can you tell our readers how Get 10,000 Fans was established?

Brian: The story began when I graduated from college and started my first business, which was trainbaseball.com. I was trying, over and over, to get traffic to my website, and nothing seemed to work. I was utilizing Google SEO, AdWords, Yahoo! Advertising, Twitter, and YouTube, and every other source of traffic I could think of. Over the course of 60 days, I attracted over 10,000 fans to the Train Baseball fan page, which is located at facebook.com/trainbaseball.  I really wanted to show other small businesses what I did in the baseball industry, so I created Get 10,000 Fans in late 2010 to start teaching small businesses our Facebook tactics.

MO: When you started Train Baseball, did you ever think you would be teaching other companies how to grow their business through Facebook fan pages?

Brian: Absolutely not. It wasn’t in the plan from the beginning. I always wanted to stay in the baseball world. I had a dream of becoming a marketing expert, a trusted source in the marketing world who could teach entrepreneurs how to grow their small businesses, but I’d never done it. So Train Baseball really gave me the opportunity and the platform to create training products based on the success that I’d had in the baseball world. I did not ever think that I would be reaching out to small businesses about that.

MO: What is the most rewarding part of your business?

Brian: Receiving emails from happy customers is definitely the best part. Getting a chance to speak on stage and really see in people’s faces that you have been able to help their business is really rewarding as well. Helping people achieve the dreams that they set out for their businesses, for their lives, for their families, is enormous. Also, the baseball side is still really rewarding. One of my biggest passions is baseball, so when I get a chance to help young kids or their parents succeed on the field, I feel a great sense of accomplishment. It’s incredibly rewarding.

MO: What is your response to the saying “quality is better than quantity,” and how does that relate to Facebook fans?

Brian: I agree one hundred percent that quality is better than quantity. You can go out and get fans for free, or pay a small fee to a random company, but they’re not going to be targeted fans. And having targeted fans, people who are actually interested in your business and aren’t just people who click “like” without even thinking about it, are people who want your products and are willing to buy from you. Those are absolutely the kind of people that we try to teach our clients to attract. It doesn’t matter if you have 100,000 fans if none of them are willing to buy your stuff.

MO: With so many social media platforms available, should businesses be putting their emphasis on their Facebook pages?  Why?

Brian: Yes, because they can customize their pages. They can build custom tabs that will let them collect email addresses. Facebook lets you sell products. No other social media platform lets you do it; YouTube doesn’t, Twitter doesn’t, and  Google+ doesn’t. That’s why Facebook is the place to be. An important factor is that Facebook has the most users, so you can actually find your target customer there, but the biggest thing is that you can customize and really create a high-converting website within your fan page to actually drive sales. 

 

MO: What is on the horizon for Get 10,000 Fans?

Brian: We’re definitely going to be creating more software that lets our customers do things faster and easier. We’re going to stay on top of all the latest changes in training products to really help our customers and clients stay on the cutting edge. Later on this year, we’re going to start getting into how we do the behind-the-scenes stuff. I’m not referring to the Facebook side of things, but what goes on behind the scenes with our email campaigns, our product creation process, our product release process, and all those other things that we do to create success. We are going to start uncovering those slowly.

MO: What is your advice for other young internet marketing entrepreneurs?

Brian: My advice is to do what you’re passionate about. I think one of the big reasons I was successful was because I started in the baseball world, which was something I knew like the back of my hand. I could talk about baseball all day, and I was passionate about it. I was playing baseball on the side. It was something that I was hungry for, and I wanted to help other people. And that really helped me through my 8 or 9 months of struggle where I didn’t make a single sale and didn’t drive a single person to my website. It was just me – just me, my computer, and my dream of growing this big internet baseball empire. It was because of the fact that I was still passionate about what I was trying to teach that I was able to keep going. It led to other big opportunities down the road, like the Get 10,000 Fans business. Do what you’re passionate about and stick with it, even when it gets hard. When times are the roughest, that’s when you can be pretty sure that something big is about to happen.