Internet Business Mastery: Business Development and Internet Marketing for the Web 2.0 Age

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Sterling: This is Internet Business Mastery, episode 103.

In a world where bosses control your life, and thoughts of escape fill your mind, where inspiration seems dead and cynicism rules the masses. You have a desire to break free; you feel the need to take control. Now there exists a place where the secrets of freedom and wealth are given to those who believe. Internet Business Mastery.com – free your mind!

Sterling: Hello, and welcome to Internet Business Mastery online at Internet Business Mastery.com, I’m Sterling….

Jay: And I’m Jay….

Sterling: And we’re here to help you escape the ‘9 to 5’ and live the lifestyle of your dreams by turning your life’s passion into a profitable internet business, even if you’re just getting started today. On this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we have part two of how to achieve freedom of time with online business. And in the Quick Tip, we have a great tool for easily posting videos on your site.

We’d like to remind you that if you’d like to get a jumpstart on creating your own profitable internet business using our proven system, you can claim your risk free trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy by going to freeaudiogift.com.

So Jay, what’s been going on?

Jay: Let me paint a picture for you as I sit here. I’ve got my right leg propped up on the table next to me. My right leg you’ll recall is the one I fractured when you took me 4-wheeling in Utah, remember that? So I went to the doctor yesterday, everything’s good; walking on it now, don’t really need to use crutches anymore but it doesn’t quite extend all the way.

So it’s like okay, now I’ve got to get that leg extended before it’s too late…I’m like before it’s too late? What are you talking about? He’s like yeah, you’ve got to do some physical therapy and get that thing straightened out now or else it could be problems later. So I’ve got these two socks, I took two socks out of my drawer…I got this exercise off the internet and I put two soup cans in the socks and I tired them together and it’s draped over my right leg right now straightened out trying to weigh it down and get it flexing or extending all the way. So there’s the update on the leg.

Sterling: All that for fun.

Jay: Oh yeah, right. So the other thing I’m excited about though is the live event that we’re putting together. Everything seems to be…all the preparations are coming together, we’ve got the venue booked. I don’t think we mentioned in the last episode but we have been mentioning it in the newsletter and on the blog and stuff but it’s going to be fun, the first ever Internet Business Mastery live event. We’re calling it the Insider Workshop, we’re going to take people inside our business and share things that we’ve never shared before so we’ve been kind of prepping some of the content for that and you and I have been chatting about that so I’m getting kind of stoked for it even though it’s a few weeks away.

Sterling: Yeah, yeah I’m very excited. Why don’t you mention a couple of things that we’re going to talk about just for fun?

Jay: So yeah, so some of the things…this is all based on what people have been asking us about the most lately. So we want to talk about how to launch a profitable membership site, how to plan six-figure product launches, take people through an actual planning of a case study product launch right there in person live, tell people how to work less, have more fun, and make more money with their business.

That will be a lot of automation and streamlining, looking at the systems for our business. And then also showing people how to create a sales funnel that converts cash like crazy. So you’ve got to have that full back end to your business, not only just the first product but what are you selling next and what comes after that and how do you convert people from being prospects all the way to repeat customers? And so we’re going to go kind of even deeper into exactly how we, when we get together twice a year and kind of restructure what we’re going to sell and what our sales funnel looks like, show people exactly how that process looks for us, open up the curtain and show them inside.

So it will be fun. I spoke last week at the Glazer-Kennedy event; that was a lot of fun participating in that. I always have a good time in person and when we get to interact with our listeners, our followers, our market directly and so very excited in that respect as well to meet people in person. And I’ve been getting a lot of emails from people saying they’re super excited to be there so it’s going to be a lot of fun.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the live event, to get all the details go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/event.

And now the featured segment…

Jay: Alright let’s dive into part two of this freedom of time series. This is how to achieve more freedom of time with internet business. And in the last episode we talked about the benefits of having increased freedom of time through internet business things like, you can quit your job and make more money than you ever did with employment, work as little as 20 hours a week or whatever you decide.

We’ve worked as little as 20, we’ve worked as much as 40 when we need to and when we’re going through growth in our business. You can be more productive with your time, you can get more fulfillment out of your time, you spend more time with the people that you really want to spend time with – your family, your friends, whoever that might be.

And you get to decide what you do with your work time, and we love the business that we have because we have created a business that allows us to do the things that we naturally are good at, the things that we naturally enjoy, the talents that we like losing ourselves in and continually growing that we feel like we can deliver the best value with.

So now the question is, well how can you achieve increased freedom of time for yourself. So we’ve got five specific tips that we want to share with you today on how to achieve freedom of time. First of all, one of the first things you need to do is increase the value of your time. And that probably starts with realizing that your time does have a value.

I think we all realize time is a limited resource, we only have so much of it and the days are only 24 hours, weeks are only 7 days and we only have so long that we’ll be living on this earth so what is the value of each hour that you live? What is the value of that thing to you? And a lot of times obviously we use what do, our work, as a metric for the value of our time and I think it goes far beyond that.

But for simplicity’s sake, let’s go ahead and take that metric of how mucy your time is worth. Some people might say, “Well I work at the local convenience store and my time’s worth $8 or $9 an hour.” Or some people might say, “Well I’m a physician’s assistant, I make $20 an hour,” or somebody else might say, “Well I’m a lawyer, I charge my clients $150 an hour.”

And of course after he pays his overhead and his extra self-employment taxes and stuff, it’s probably about half or less of that. So the first thing we’ve got to do is try to realize and be honest where you’re at in the value of your time and then immediately try to get yourself to increase the value of that time meaning that whatever you do spend your time on, it brings you exponential amounts of money, not just some limited fixed income where you’re trading hours for dollars.

In the employee mindset, basically what we’re doing is we’re wholesaling our time out making someone else rich. And probably not doing the thing that we really enjoy most and don’t have as much control over that situation whereas with owning a business or owning investments you can make your money work for you or set up businesses that you can sell and make big paychecks or businesses that are making you money day and night like an internet business where we might be making money literally…the quintessential ‘while we sleep.’

We wake up in the morning, check our email, and there’s emails saying so and so just bought your product. So how do you get from that employee to more of a business or investment mindset, if you divide out 20 hours a week or 30 hours a week that you’re working on your business, by the exponential amount of leveraging that online business to make money, your time starts being worth $100 an hour, or $150, or $350. When I first started as an entrepreneur and realized this value of time mindset that I needed to shift, I figured my time was worth about…well as an engineer it was $25-$30 an hour, but I immediately set a goal that I wanted my time to be worth $100 an hour.

So on the employee side it was like $25, if I wanted to get to where I had a business that my time was worth at least $100 an hour. So as a shift between those two things, at one point I went to a place where I was kind of doing consulting. Now let’s do a kind of dollars for hours because one hour on the phone, or one hour working with a client I make ‘x’ dollars.

But I was very quickly able to get to where I was charging $75 an hour and then $100, and then $150 and I just kept raising it after that as my brand kept growing. And so one thing we do suggest is you might need…it’s appropriate sometimes to go from the employee to the self-employed area, then into the business or investment. And this is all in the idea of coming from a book that we both read by Robert Kiyosaki.

Sterling: Yeah, that is a very, very powerful book, it was called Cash Flow Quandrant. It’s one of those things where at first I was going, “Oh, I don’t need to read this book,” but this was the main issue that came out of it and really understanding this, it ended up being very important for me. I read it before I quit my employee job and it helped me look at this. And I actually went from employee to self-employed which I still was using my hours for dollars per se, so I had an eBay business where I spent the day answering questions, getting all the product together.
So I still was just now an employee again of myself and doing every other job there, and of course the goal really is to get to where you own a business and have other people doing that stuff. Like for instance last week let’s say in a half hour time had three employees let’s say, they’re our Virtual Assistants, so a half hour of my time made each one of their eight hours now have stuff to do.

So I made my half hour into…well two of them specifically, so I said I’ll make my half hour into sixteen hours of work if that makes sense. So you’re now not wholesaling your time anymore, I take that time and I make it exponential with other people, so they’re doing it. Now the final thing is like where you’re getting passive income where you’re not even doing something for it.

That will be the final stage and we’re trying to make that business stage work where we’re using a little bit of time and making it explode into a lot of time or we’re taking…like if record something in one hour, and then for the next three years we make money every day off of that one hour, that’s the kind of thing we’re looking for.

Jay: So you’ve got to believe in the value of your time and try to increase it. So if you’re in the employee field, see if there’s a way or a path for you to get into consulting or some kind of self-employed where you can charge more for your time and use that as a stepping stone into having your own business.

If you’re already in the self-employed field great, try to see if you can raise your rates and then obviously try to get to a point where you’re selling products or something where it’s more of a business stance where you make more money without necessarily having to work an extra hour to get it.

Sterling: Yeah and really if you don’t believe in the value of your time, nobody else will. If you’re at $20 an hour and you’re going wow I just don’t know what I have to say is worth $40 an hour, or a $100 or $200 an hour, then it’s very hard to make other people believe you’re worth that if you don’t believe it.

Jay: So step number one – increase the value of your time. Step number two is to start to build a powerful personal brand and this is one of the fundamentals of the whole system that we teach inside of the Business Mastery Academy is how to build this powerful personal brand that you can leverage and take to the bank for the rest of your life because you have such a loyal following, such a strong position in your market that just by creating a new product, more money comes in.

And the idea here is not just be another commodity, a commodity for instance would be – if you’re just a dentist in your city, just another person in the yellow pages, well that’s hard to stand out and a lot of times what a lot of people end up doing is dropping their price to compete and basically you’re playing a numbers game and vying for as much attention as you can by throwing money at billboards and all this stuff, and that’s just not an effective way to go.

If you can build yourself into a powerful brand, not just a service provider but becoming a trusted advisor to your market, to your audience. That’s where people are going to be…where brand loyalty comes in. People are going to be willing to pay good money just to work with you. And when I mentioned earlier that I was doing some of that internet marketing consultation for a little while as my bridge into the business quadrant.

And I would have people call me up and say, “You know what, I see your stuff everywhere I look. Everywhere I search Jason Van Orden comes up and so you’ve got to be the guy that I’ve got to work with, and I don’t know how much you charge but I’ve been getting great content from you for the last several months online, let’s work together.” I mean that’s where my brand led to speaking gigs, it led to all kinds of high level coaching gigs and that’s where it brought me money from.

And it wasn’t people out shopping for oh, well who’s the cheapest marketing consultant out there? They just wanted to work with me, so that’s the kind of situation that you want to set up – is building that kind of powerful personal brand.

Sterling: Yeah it actually reminds me too of a podcast that I listen to every week, one of my favorite podcasts. It’s by a guy, he’s a professional philosopher and he has created such a brand, he’s had over 20 million people listen to his podcast and he makes…I’m not sure the exact amount, the last time he mentioned it, it was barely under six figures from donations.

So he was able to create such a powerful personal brand, people are willing to donate, not even like buy specific products, they donate to him. That to me says you’ve got a really powerful brand that people will donate that kind of money to you.

Jay: Now that’s off of a topic like philosophy which most people would think oh that’s such a soft topic, like who pays for philosophy?

Sterling: Yeah exactly.

Jay: And this guy has done it, so yeah that’s a great example. So number three is to find the audience that you value and that values what you have to offer the most. So part of putting a powerful personal brand and part of the making the most of out of your time is working with the right audience. My first thought when I heard about this internet marketing stuff was to maybe go and teach musicians.

And I still have a passion for helping musicians and I have friends who are musicians and I try to help them out with their marketing when I can, but if I didn’t become my broader brand…and you know what, I know other people who are doing okay with it. Maybe they’re smarter than me but I was like sadly it didn’t seem like the people I was reaching with my message about how to be a successful musician, it didn’t seem like they had the money to pay me.

So I needed to find an audience that I still valued and loved working with but that had the money to buy and pay at least what I wanted to be paid for my time, the value that I put on my time. So now I teach online entrepreneurs, I teach them how to have fulfillment, and purpose, and freedom, and start a successful business. They see that direct link between what I share with them and more money and more time for themselves so they put a high value on what it is that I share and teach, what we share and teach on this show for instance, and so we had to find the right audience that not only were we thrilled to work with but that valued our time highly as well.

Sterling: Yeah exactly, now it’s funny because recently I had to advise one of my friends against a certain niche because of that certain thing. He’s a Hollywood friend and he wanted to create a business around budding actors, just actors getting started and needing to know all the little tips on getting started and stuff. And I reminded him how when we were both acting in Hollywood how absolutely broke we were at all times.

The biggest thing I bought in acting other than one particular acting class was a book on how to be a background extra in movies. That cost me all of $8, that was all I had the extra money for and so I was reminding him to think of that when you’re making this decision. You’ve got to find the people that can actually give you the value for the value you’re giving them back.

If it’s going to be very little return then you’ll have to make the decision well maybe this will be the one that’s just a business idea for passion. And if it breaks even then it breaks even, but like if you want to build something really big, you’ve got to find that audience that values what you’re going to teach and actually giving you that money that makes it so that you can live from that.

Jay: Absolutely. So we’ve got three things so far – increase the value of your time, number two, build a personal powerful brand and number three, find an audience that you value and that values what you have to offer the most as well. Number four is – work on your business and not in it. And that may be a phrase you’ve heard before and heard us say before.

It comes from a book called The E-Myth, it’s about creating a business that is a system. McDonalds, one of the reasons why they are so highly profitable is because it’s a cookie-cutter system that they’ve made highly efficient and they can sell as a franchise. We’re not necessarily going and saying create a franchise but that kind of system and teams and procedures that you want to put together, something if you keep in mind the idea hey, if I put this together, I could hand the manual over and sell this to somebody 10 years down the road.

Whether or not that’s your goal, that’s the kind of thing that you want to go for because that is going to allow you to remove yourself more and more from the critical pieces of the business. If you have to do everything then you have to step back from the business because the moment you stop working, well the money stops coming in and that’s not true so you want to create a team, you want to create systems.

Something we always like to teach is this process, this three-part process that’s streamline, automate, outsource. Take any process in your business, streamline it as much as possible down to the best practices, down to the most essential elements. See if there’s some tool or process you can use to automate it whether it’s an online tool, that’s one of the reasons why internet business is so great. There’s so many awesome online tools that can automate the pieces of your business and then if not outsource it.

Outsource it to a team member, hire somebody full time, part-time, get a firm to do it for you, have a part-time bookkeeper that works for you. We have all kinds of team members including somebody who transcribes our episodes, somebody who edits our audio, somebody who posts the content online. We’ve got project manager, we’ve got programmers, our team – now that didn’t happen all at once but over time we were constantly thinking about how do we make our business into more and more of a system. And the big goal for that was to continually increase the percentage of time that we spend doing what we’re best at, the things that we’re really good at, the high value things that we enjoy working at in our business and hand the rest off to others.

Sterling: Yeah and of course being able to do that leads you to be able to use more and more of your strengths and ability which is really, really important. And of course the first part of definite major purpose and fulfillment rather than you doing all the stuff that you don’t like to do.

And when you were talking about the quadrant, like the employee, and self-employed, and business owner, like this gets us closer and closer to passive income where we’re just doing the things we want and all the stuff that would kind of make us a self-employed person is done by automation or outsourcing.

Jay: The final piece of this, the final tip or step for getting freedom of time is to find the right channel. Here’s what I mean by that, the fundamental asset of your business is taking the value that you have and offering it to a loyal following of people that look to you as the trusted advisor.

So there’s you on the one side, the things that you’re good at, your passions, the value that you offer. There’s your chosen audience on the other side, these people that value highly what it is that you have and that you enjoy working with. So what is the channel you’re going to use not only to get the attention of those people and to grow your market, grow your customer base, but then also to deliver goods and services and your products.

Now this is why we like internet business as a channel because it’s very easy to turn into a system. Now our site and all the content on it are like employees for us, they’re out there working 24/7 to bring in new customers, to bring in new income. So these digital employees we don’t have to pay, we don’t have to give them benefits, they don’t need time off, they are easy to manage, they’re just out there.

Earlier in this episode Sterling mentioned working one hour to record a piece of content and have that content make money for you years later. I mean our Internet Business Mastery Academy has been going for over two years now, it’s been very popular, very successful. It’s the core of our business and the content that we recorded two years ago because we purposely made it so that it was that evergreen good content is still making money for us two years later.

So that’s the kind of power that you’re going for if you find the right channel to deliver that value through, so if you choose things like a membership site and so forth. Now we have actual employees as well but we don’t have an office, I think we’ve only met one of the people that works for us in person and we value all the actual employees that we do have but we’ve chosen channels that allows us to also automate quite a bit of our business into systems. And that’s why internet business is such a powerful channel and the one that we teach inside of the Internet Business Mastery Academy, so quickly to review the five steps of getting more freedom of time into your life.

Number one is to increase the value of your time, so if you’re an employee try to get into maybe the self-employed quadrant. Go read that Cash Flow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki, a really, really good book. If you’re already self-employed, increase the value of your time or start pushing yourself to creating your own product so that you have a business and you’re not just trading dollars for hours. And the Academy is a great place to learn how to develop those kinds of products.

Number two – build a powerful personal brand that you can take to the bank for the rest of your life. You can just create new products and bam, people are there and ready to buy because of that brand. Number three – find that audience that you value and that values what you teach the most. Number four -  work on your business and not in it; The E-Myth by Michael Gerber, great book for that, for learning more about that. And number five – find the right channel.

And of course the one we recommend is internet business, that’s the one that we teach. And that is how you can enjoy more freedom of time and all of those benefits that we mentioned earlier, and this is one of the things that we enjoy most about what we do is the fact that we have such control over our time, being able to take time off when we need to, go and see our kids perform during the day like Sterling mentioned in the last episode.

A couple of years ago, I was able to take a considerable amount of time off and go help my mom when she had cancer, or go move to Argentina because we wanted to. Our time is very flexible and that’s all because of the way we built this business. So those are the five tips that you can use to get those kinds of things in your life as well.

Alright, we’ve got a great breakthrough for you today. In fact this is one that came fresh from the Traffic Attraction Formula forums this morning. We have a kind of a mastermind forum area in there and people are regularly sharing their breakthroughs, and ideas, and questions, and things. And the moment I read this one this morning, I was like oh we’ve got to share this on the show, it’s just too good. Here is the headline of the forum post. It says, “Got Hit By a Car, but Traffic is UP 206%.”

Sterling: That’s an awesome title!

Jay: Right there you’ve got to read it. So this comes from Lorna Li and she says, “Even though I’m overjoyed to be alive and not very badly dinged up after getting hit by a car at 30 MPH while trying to make a left turn on a bicycle, I was getting really bummed out that I’d fallen so far behind on the Traffic Attraction Formula, especially since I was suppose to launch my podcast by now. Then I listened to the segment on the overwhelm and I realized I really just needed to take stock of my accomplishments, keep making progress and don’t become paralyzed by overwhelm. So here are my breakthroughs…”

And she shares six things, she says, “I am now an editor managing my writers, freeing up my valuable time. I have been participating in social media and now getting 30% of my traffic from Stumble Upon and Twitter. I hired a WordPress developer, my site redesign is in process and will be done soon including my Aweber integration. I have the first draft of my e-book giveaway, I can start list-building soon. I hired the Search Engine Optimization link building agency for the search engine optimization starting to build links to my site for not much money. Overall, traffic is up 206% since I started the course back in May.”

So Lorna, I don’t know…first of all, we’re thrilled you’re okay and didn’t get hurt. Second of all, I don’t know why you ever thought you felt like you were falling behind because that is awesome progress. And since starting the course a couple of months ago, having all that traffic coming in, and already having an e-book giveaway. I mean that’s great stuff so thanks for sharing that, we’re very thrilled for you.

And I’m glad you mentioned that little overwhelm, I think it was on a coaching call I threw in a 10-minute segment about how to hack through the overwhelm and not let it get you down, so I’m glad that helped and you were able to take stock of everything that you’ve accomplished. I know that me personally, I struggle with that sometimes being an achiever, I kind of just dismiss the little things that I’ve gotten done but I have to say I was incredibly impressed when I read that list of six things, so well done Lorna and congratulations.

Sterling: Yeah, absolutely. That sounds awesome, yeah not behind at all believe me.

Jay: And if you want to check out what Lorna is up to, you can find her at GreenMarketing.tv. Also, we just had a quick announcement. We wanted to mention again the live event coming up in September. It’s going to be taking place in Portland, Oregon on September 18^th. Again, an insider look at our business, going behind the scenes showing things we’ve never taught about before – membership sites, product launches, sales funnels, and a bunch of great things like that.

If you’re interested in grabbing a spot, we’re keeping this a very small event so there’s a very limited number of seats available. You can go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/event and we’ve made the price extremely reasonable. It’s not one of these $2,000 or $3,000 events. You can come for not that much, so go check it out – InternetBusinessMastery.com/event.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip….

Jay: Alright, we’ve got a Quick Tip for you and on this episode we’ve got a nifty little video player that you can use to easily embed videos on your site. And in the past we’ve used Camtasia videos that you can export from Camtasia and that works fine, but not everybody has Camtasia. And sometimes Camtasia player can be a little bit of a hassle to work with, so we were looking for something that’s just really easy whether on any website or on WordPress or whatever to embed a video.

And so the one that we’ve started using is called Flow Player. It’s free of charge to go ahead and try out and then they’ve got some nicer versions you can buy if you want as well. But if you go to FlowPlayer.org, you can check that out and it’s just a quick little tag that you put into a WordPress post. So they have a WordPress plug in version that you can add to your site and with a quick little tag you can add a video to your site as well. So check that out, FlowPlayer.org.

Sterling: Yeah and if you want to see it in action on the site, you can go to Internet Business Mastery and in the search type in online business money maker’ and you’ll bring up Jay’s current latest post and you can see how we use it on the site.

Now if you’d like dozens of other resources such as this one, you can find them in the Internet Business Mastery Academy, along with video tutorials showing you exactly how we use them. To get a 30-day no risk trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy, visit freeaudiogift.com. That’s it for this episode of Internet Business Mastery, until next time we wish you ultimate success in your internet business!

You’ve been listening to the iconoclasts of the 9 to 5, and the purveyors of freedom and fulfillment – Sterling and Jay. Sterling and Jay invite you to discover one of their most popular audio programs ever – The 3 Pillars of Designing Your Ultimate Internet Lifestyle. Visit freeaudiogift.com now and sign up for the free weekly Internet Business Mastery email newsletter and you’ll get instant access to this life changing audio presentation pulled directly from the content of the acclaimed Internet Business Mastery Academy membership community. Go now to freeaudiogift.com. Internet Business Mastery – free your mind!