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Hi everyone, my name’s Sean Malarkey. I know how important it is to build a relationship with people you’d like to do business with (after all, isn’t that what using Twitter is all about?) which is why I wanted to take a few seconds to talk to you about who I am and why I’m so passionate about Twixplode.

I was born into a military family that moved around quite a bit before deciding to settle in Ohio. It didn’t take long before Ohio was home, and we loved everything about it. Even when aspirations of being a professional snowboarder took me to Lake Tahoe when I was 18, I still came home to Columbus when the fun was over.

For the last ten years I’ve worked in the Real Estate industry. I started off as a mortgage broker, and five years ago moved into Real Estate investing. With two partners and more than 100 rentals to care for, you can bet I was busy. Add to that a small Real Estate brokerage we also owned, the money was great, but the workload become almost unbearable.

Part of my responsibilities when working with my partners was to handle the marketing side of things. As the internet evolved, I realised just what an important tool it was in marketing our businesses. I started learning everything I could about internet marketing, and became absolutely fascinated with the results that were possible.

Then in late 2006, I discovered the power of building a list. I’d added an opt-in form to our website for folks who were interested in being notified about new homes, and it didn’t take long to build a pretty good sized list. It was an amazing thing to discover the power of having a responsive list, and I watched intently as each time a notification email went out we’d have several phone calls from people interested in the home we’d just emailed them about. The more I watched, the more I learned, and the better I became at list-building and email marketing.

Enter Twitter… and the birth of Twixplode.

In February of 2009, I discovered Twitter. I already knew the power of having a large and responsive audience when marketing online, so the ease with which Twitter allowed you to build that audience was really intriguing. I started building a list of Real Estate investors who might be interested in deals we were sending to our lists, and it wasn’t long before my little group of followers was bigger than I could have imagined.

As the people around me watched my list of Twitter followers grow, they started asking me for advice on how to use the tool in their own businesses (both on and offline). I created a 5-day guide when it got to the point where I just couldn’t answer all the questions personally anymore; and it wasn’t long before that little PDF file had been sent around so many times, I was getting requests for an expanded version.

A few weeks later, my family and I were vacationing in Argentina. Being away from all the stress of my businesses was amazing; and the more time I spent with my girls, the more I realized that a change of scenery was in order. I thought about all those requests for an expanded version of my little Twitter guide, and thought “You know, Sean… it’s not a bad idea.” It was then I decided to create a complete course on how businesses of all types could use Twitter to market themselves more effectively to a HUGE, responsive audience.

It was that day Twixplode was born – and two weeks later, I walked away from the Real Estate business… and never looked back.

Interview with Sean Malarkey