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 109.

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 answer your questions about your online business and in the Quick Tip we share with you a video hosting service that we now use for sales videos to get dependable streaming, great stats, and even iPhone compatibility.

And we’d like to also 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, are you there? Are you alive after all this launch stuff?

Jay: Barely, barely, barely. No, I’m exhausted but I’m thrilled and excited. It has been quite a ride. I mean anybody who I guess who’s on our email newsletter list has been paying attention to Facebook, Twitter, all the different channels that we’re talking through, there’s been a lot of buzz the last few weeks not only through our own following and audience but lots of other people. Everyone talking about Traffic Attraction Formula which is our big coaching course that we just opened up to the general public over the last couple weeks.

And as of recording this last night at midnight, it closed for enrollment, and a grueling and exhausting few weeks. I know you were joking online that we had thrown the 4-Hour Work Week out the window there for a while just on purpose to try…sometimes you really kick it into high gear because you want to go through some massive growth and it’s just been really, really exciting to see so many people coming and seeing the free video series we put out there, the Traffic Attraction Formula video series, as well as all the new people who are listening to the show now.

So welcome, we’re thrilled to have you listening to the show. Our audience has gone up, our newsletter subscriptions have gone up just because of the amazing, amazing buzz that’s been out there talking about this course that we’ve launched. Because we’ve been doing this, lots of joint venture partners promoting it for us and everything. And so yeah, just to let you, the listener, know we’re going to share with you lessons that we’ve learned probably in the next episode we’re going to share some lessons that we’ve learned over this launch.
This is the biggest launch we’ve ever done before, we’ve done lots and lots of launches, very successful launches, mostly just kind of internally to our own audience, our own following, occasionally with other partners, but this is the first time that we’ve really got a lot of strategic partners on board, a lot of people who really wanted to promote this. It was a ton of work but definitely worth it because of all the great growth and new listeners and just the raised awareness altogether for Internet Business Mastery as a show and a brand. So that’s just super exciting and I’m excited to dive in and start working with all the brand new students inside of the coaching course.

Sterling: Yeah and for those that maybe have gotten annoyed in the past when we talk about only doing four hours of work a day, you can now be happy to know even on the weekend we were doing about 10-15 hours a day. So there you go.

Jay: Yeah it got pretty hairy.

Sterling: Back in our face, how about that?

Jay: I don’t know if I’ve done that since like a final project in college maybe where you’re pulling an all nighter. I mean this was by far more grueling than any project I had to do in college. I don’t know the last time I had to do something…of course we can’t complain too much, we’re doing what we love and we chose to do it, right. It was something that we completely took on ourselves so, it’s been quite the experience.

So yeah, stay tuned next episode and we’re going to share a lot of great insights on that. But we have something else in store for you this episode so let’s go ahead and dive right into it.

And now the featured segment…

Jay: So recently we were looking over the stats for the Internet Business Mastery show and we shared with you several episodes back that we had surpassed the million download mark, and so lots of great data in there about how many downloads for different episodes and all the different places all over the world that people listen to this.

And we noticed that the Q&A episodes, whenever we do question and answer type episodes, those tend to be quite popular, people really like doing that kind of a thing. So we thought it was about time that we got back around to that. And actually we have an extra treat even above and beyond that, we wanted to give you an excerpt today of a Q&A session that we did with our Academy students because people who are members of the Academy get to attend these regular question and answer kind of group coaching sessions that we do with them.

And some really, really great questions got asked last time so we wanted to share some of those with you because we thought these would be things that even our general listenership might be interested in and also just to give you an idea of what that kind of insider, what it’s like on those insider group coaching calls, Q&A calls that we do on a regular basis with the Academy members as well.

And so that is what we are going to play for you here right now is an excerpt from one of the most recent Q&A sessions that we did with our Academy members. So let’s go ahead and roll that right now.

So first one comes from New Zealand from Andrew. And he asks, “Greetings from New Zealand. My question is pretty simple, I joined the Academy very recently and working through Module one and about to start Module two. Once we select a topic, I have some good area of expertise that I am keen on, is it a matter of establishing a presence, starting to produce content and when you have some kind of following asking them what they want and taking it from there?”

And yes Andrew; that is exactly it. It sounds like you’ve probably been watching what we do or you have great sense for this or just been listening to the show a lot but that’s exactly the process where we’ll be taking this. Module 1 is all about let’s get some important mindset shifts in place. Module 2 is let’s choose the topic, and the audience, and how to design the basics of the business. And then Module 3 we’re going to get the site online, Module 4 we’re going to start creating some content and attracting a following.

And once you’ve done that, it’s very, very easy to start offering value in a way that people are willing to pay you money and in fact willing to pay you good money for it, and without having to be really salesy because you start building up that loyal following in a very magnetic way. So that’s exactly the direction that we’re headed with the Academy. The Academy has always taught, we’ve always taught with Internet Business Mastery. So yeah, you’ve got a great start on that and it all starts with getting the audience and that topic selected first of all.

And that actually leads in well to an email question that we got, somebody who was unable to get the call live but they sent us an email question. This comes from Rick, we have a Rick and a Nick who sent in emails…so here’s what Rick asks. “It seems difficult to get from the three last topic or niche ideas to select the one without knowing the things that are in the future modules such as whether the site will be a membership site or an info product, etc. It seems like we need more info before we can really pick that topic. What are your thoughts on that?”

And well, that’s a very interesting question. There’s a good reason why we started with talking about you and what you want. And what you want and what interests you and what your talents or skills or interests or passions are, are what you use then to determine the audience that you want to work with. And actually you don’t need to necessarily know…I mean yes, the direction we are going is making information products and perhaps eventually even a membership site if that’s appropriate for your topic but you actually don’t need to know what that product is going to be because that is actually going to be determined by the audience and the following that you attract to you.

Sterling: …which will be chosen ahead of time.

Jay: Exactly.

Sterling: Right, like that’s how we have it planned out.

Jay: So the important thing to do right now is to just concentrate in Module 2 on putting together the details about your topic, about your audience, and about what you really want which is also what Module 1 is about, you and your lifestyle design. So you determine what the audience is and then the audience determines what the product is going to be and what kind of content you’re going to put online. So right now, I know it might seem like a bit of the ‘chicken or the egg’ thing and in a lot of businesses they do that, they think okay, I need to know what the product is going to be first before I then go and decide what the audience for that product is.

But that’s actually a much harder way to do business. We want to have you determine what you want, an audience that’s appropriate to what you want and then attract that audience. And then based on what that audience tells you then create a product or service to fulfill that need and then it’s going to be much easier to make money, much easier to promote that product or service to them. But yes, that’s what we’re going to teach you about is information digitally based information products that will be delivered online.

And there’s a number of formats for that and that will be coming soon in future modules for the Academy for those of you who are just starting out. Alright….

Sterling: Yeah, I mean we’ve thought real long and hard about how this process works and tried to figure all that out ahead of time. What needs to be first specifically and how did it work for us, what other systems have we been through where we had to learn all this extra stuff before we even found out if the audience wants that. Like you don’t want to be picking a membership site and then find out that the audience actually just wants to be able to download a video, just one. And they just want it from time to time when they get around…like, you could have different business models but you don’t want to pick it ahead of time without letting the audience in on the process of telling you what it is that they want.

Because in the end, we just want to give our audience exactly what they want, not presuppose what that is and I think that’s where big businesses and offline businesses and people that even in Internet Business, they get it wrong. They decide ahead of time and just guess oh I think that they want this and that can be a big mistake. You might get lucky and just happen to pick the right thing but a lot of times I’ve seen that it doesn’t happen that way.

And to me it just makes far more sense to go okay, this is what I’m passionate about, this is the audience that I want to go for and then just go ask them, “Hey, what do you guys want?” rather than just go I’m going to give you a membership site and they go, “I don’t want a membership site.” Too bad! You will have a membership site or nothing! Like that’s what is seems like most people do so that’s why we didn’t add more before you choose that.

Jay: So bottom line, you determine the audience and then the audience determines the product.

Alright, next question. Andrew says, “I am someone who gets very excited about many ideas. How do you suggest someone might stem their natural reaction of, ‘wow I should do that,’ when they hear about another idea?”

It’s a natural tendency I think many of us who are attracted to entrepreneurship, we like variety, we like to try different things, maybe some of us have a little ADD. We like to learn about new things, try different things, and we’ve been there, we know what it’s like. But certainly focus is an important thing eventually. I guess the first recommendation that I have that comes to mind and Sterling, you can give your input; I would say have a good system for capturing those ideas as they come to you. Just so you know you have them there to refer to next.

And I’m assuming that this is referring to different topic or niche ideas about what your business is going to be about. One day you might be like wow golf, golf would be an awesome topic for me to do my site about. And then the next day maybe all of a sudden you’re thinking oh, I’ve always wanted to do a site about macramé, so that’s what I should do. And I would say just get those ideas captured down but once you kind of start in a given direction you need to focus and give that direction some time to develop.

And at some point if that one’s just not fulfilling you in the way that you had anticipated or maybe it’s just not performing as much as you thought. Maybe there’s not as much demand and people just don’t seem to be resonating with it, then go back to that list and try another one. It’s going to be that much easier the second and the third and the fourth time around.

Or once your first topic gets to a certain point that it’s providing the kind of income and results that you are happy with, then go ahead and start another site. That’s always a possibility too. But it is important to focus, so I guess just make sure you capture the ideas and give yourself permission later to go back to them. And then I guess the other thing I’d say is just to ask yourself, is there a reason why I’m getting distracted? Am I really just trying to kind of…it’s a lot easier to go from exciting idea to exciting idea than to actually take an idea far enough to find out if it’s really going to perform.

And that’s because we allow…we feel like whether or not an idea performs well or not is like this reflection on us, if an idea doesn’t do well well then that means we’re like fundamentally flawed as a person or as an entrepreneur, which is just not true. We’re always going to be learning new things, sometimes there’s factors outside of our control, it’s just a part of life – that feedback loop of taking action and course correction, then taking action and course correction, and that’s how we get to where we go in a bit of a zig zag. So recognizing that as well, what do you think Sterling?

Sterling: Well I know that when I first like learned about internet marketing and this whole internet business thing, something switched on in me that had never been on before. And all I could do, I mean I would wake up in the middle of the night with ideas. I was having ideas all day, I mean it was just like a floodgate opened. And I think I probably…I can’t say wasted because I learned a lot, but I tried a lot of different things and just let me mind and effort and time go in all these different projects rather than focusing and it was actually a guy in my mastermind group, maybe three and a half years ago, four years ago, something like this…he runs a site called WeBuyHouses.com.

I was telling him about all these ideas and telling my little group, there’s maybe six guys there…I was saying gosh, I’m not sure what to go on next and he knew about Internet Business Mastery and a couple of other things that were actually getting traction and this kind of thing. And I said to him, I was like, well how do you pick ideas? And he said almost exactly what you said, “I write them down and then I let them go. But I write them down but then I do not let them take any more time in my mind.”

“And I don’t play with them anymore,” he goes. He goes, “The reason WeBuyHouses and IBuyHouses,” he owns a couple of them like that…he says, “The reason those things are making seven figures a month is because I put my entire focus in it.” So at that time, that’s actually about the time that Jay and I, we were like hey, let’s do this Internet Business Mastery thing and make this our thing and see if we can get this to work. And slowly but surely over the next maybe year or so after that, we started closing down our other businesses so that we could focus on this.

And I am so appreciative that we made this decision because that changed everything for Internet Business Mastery. And I actually look at it now like a couple of years that we operated without doing anything to do with income, bringing money in from it feels like we wasted money and effort, and all sorts of stuff because there was just out there turning and working well, and bringing in all these people and we didn’t even have something to sell them at the time.

Meanwhile I was putting tons of time and effort into other things that have since not worked or I turned them off or they just weren’t making enough money to make it worth the effort. So I would definitely focus and what I do now is I absolutely if an idea comes to mind, I’m now to the point after over five years of doing this where I can analyze really super quickly and go, does that fit with my definite major purpose and all these other things right?

And I can go nope, not going to work for me. And we get offers all the time for different things and we’re able to make a quick decision because of that definite major purpose. We also know our unique ability and strength finder and all that other stuff. So I can make that process quick but if I could go back and do it over again…I still use Jot.com and I still pay the monthly fee for it and everything. There’s probably other ones that are even cheaper or free now, but I still use Jott.com and the second I think of it I push the button on my iPhone, I record it and then I put it in a file and leave it alone and let it go.

And then I get back to work on Internet Business Mastery. So that’s my thought on it, and I understand man. I constantly am having ideas, especially in the beginning when you’re like mind opens to this new world of internet business and giving of yourself to people and stuff. I totally get it, now it’s just time to pick that one and focus.

Jay: An interesting thought came to mind sharing that stuff and that is…you were talking about the fact that you’ve gotten better now at analyzing ideas as they…because the more you go along in this process, the more ideas are going to come to you, the more opportunities are going to show up, whether they’re in a different topic or in the same topic you’re already in. And the more product ideas are going to come.

And it’s necessary that you get better at filtering ideas quickly and then identifying the best ones and taking action on them quickly. And you’re not going to hold that ability to analyze things unless you allow yourself to see one through. First of all, the way we’ve learned to get better at evaluating ideas and opportunities quickly as they come to us so we can manage that phenomenon that just happens to entrepreneurs is that we focused and saw…the more that we focus and see one particular idea through the better we learn about ourselves and about the process and get quicker and more honed when it comes to analyzing and filtering those things.

Okay the next question comes from Glenn who is asking, “What do you know about Kajobi? Is this software all it is hyped up to be? Is it worth trying, has anyone had good luck with it?” Well and that’s being asked right now because of just today as we record this Kajobi opened up for the first time, it’s kind of been anticipated for a while because there’s been a few really big launches in internet marketing space that have used it.

For those of you not familiar, Kajobi in my limited understanding is a platform for running a launch, for releasing kind of a launch content and opening up a product over a couple week period. It’s also for delivering like a coaching course over time, a membership site. So it’s just supposed to make all that stuff really easy. There’s a good reason why we’re not promoting it right now and it has nothing to do whether or not it’s a good product because we just don’t know yet. We haven’t used it yet.

There’s a lot of people we know who have had…because it’s open to a very few select people earlier this year and a lot of those people are promoting it now because they said they had great experience with it. So people I trust have said that has really made their launches run more smoothly and things like that but we haven’t had the opportunity to dive in and use it ourselves.

I’m very intrigued by the idea of it, it seems to have a lot of features. When we launched the Academy over two years ago, the very first original Academy over two years ago there was a lot of features that we wanted in that website and it’s been a long time wait…at the time the technology couldn’t support what we thought a membership site should be and even over two years later we’re just starting to find the technology to put together that kind of a thing and that’s one of the reasons we’ve shifted into the new platform for Academy 2.0.

It does seem like Kajobi is trying for some of those things that we and other internet marketers have been wanting for some time in that kind of a content delivery management membership site launch managing type platform. But we haven’t had a chance to try it out. Will we try it out? Yeah, probably at some point if it seems compelling enough to maybe take a look and that’s when we’ll come back and let you know what we think about it.

Sterling: Hey, do you know how much it is?

Jay: Yeah, there’s three different levels. $99 a month, $199 a month, or $299 a month and it just depends on how big of a site or platform you need, how many people will be accessing it, how many admins, how much bandwidth you need for delivering your videos and things like that. And right now if you sign up I guess there’s a 14-day free trial, which is a pretty quick and short free trial. I mean you’d have to act quick I think to really put it through it’s phases in two weeks but…if it does everything that it says it does. I mean that’s not cheap, those prices but if it does everything that it says it does, could it be worth it? Yeah, absolutely.

I mean there’s services we pay that much a month for, and that’s because they just make our lives easier. Alright, so there you have it. That was some really great questions, we thought there would be some stuff you’d be interested in hearing, gives you an idea of what it’s like on those coaching calls. We all like to start those out with a bit of insider look at what we’re currently doing in a motivational or quick tip or idea that somebody can really put into action right away to impact their businesses is usually how we start out those calls as well.

So if you’re interested on getting in on the inside of those and having access to those regular Q&A calls where we get on and answer any question, any question that comes up we go through them and we give you the answers, the straight talk and really take you inside the business. So if you want to check that out and be a part of that then definitely make your way over now to InternetBusinessMasteryAcademy.com and get your risk free trial membership to the Academy.

Alright, we’ve got a great breakthrough that we want to share with you. This one comes from Karen Young who lives in Australia. She’s a student of the Traffic Attraction Formula Coaching Course and she shared the following breakthrough inside of the course mastermind forum recently. She said, “I’ve been doing a little work on a small niche website as the same time as my show and I got an email a few weeks back saying I received a payment as commissions on a product that I was promoting. It turns out that I made $100 of affiliate commissions on a product on the site, the first real money I’ve made online. And to top it off, the product I was promoting was that of another Internet Business Mastery Academy member.”

Awesome! So thank you very much for sharing that with us Karen. It’s always very exciting to see those first dollars coming in. It’s definitely not something to take for granted. I love hearing about this, I was just talking to somebody else recently who said a similar thing. He said they got their first…they were another Traffic Attraction Formula student. They said, “Look, I got my first commission check and it was just amazing because looking at that check I was thinking to myself look I just did it, I made money online. I did it once and if I do it once then I can do it again.” And that’s so absolutely true.

If you can do it once you can do it give times, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times and that’s definitely how this all builds up. So thank you very much for sharing that breakthrough with us Karen.

Sterling: Yeah, and I love the idea that she actually made it teaming up with another person in one of our courses. So they’re even helping each other out, making money together, promoting each other and just generally having that mastermind community where they’re helping each other out. I love that.

Jay: Absolutely, and if you want to see the show and website that Karen has been setting up through the Traffic Attraction Formula course, it’s a gorgeous site. Definitely check it out, you can go over to www.everydaypropertyinvesting.com.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: Earlier in the show we mentioned how we just recently did our big launch for the Traffic Attraction Formula and we’re going to share more insights and lessons learned from that. But our Quick Tip today actually comes from a brand new tool that we started using as a part of this launch. As you know, launches often deal with releasing a whole lot of video content and that’s kind of what builds up the anticipation and gets people all excited about the product that you’re releasing.

And so when you have lots and lots of partners mailing and lots and lots of people hitting the content, you want to make sure it’s going to play dependably, be able to stream easily, people aren’t going to have any problems. And these days, so many people are starting to use things like iPhones and iPads and other iDevices that, that kind of compatibility will play on that as well is pretty important.

Not only also to mention that it’s a good idea to be able to have statistics as far as how many people, not only how many people have watched the video, but how long are they watching the video. And so a friend of ours, a product launch manager by the name of Jonathan Drake recommended to it, he said hey check out Viddler which I’d heard of and I’ve had friends use it, just little things here and there, video sharing site.

But you can get a little bit more of a souped up account that gives you more bandwidth and more access to other features, so we decided to go ahead and give it a try. And I’ve got to say, it works spectacularly. It worked really, really well. The statistics were great, in fact we’ll tell you in the next episode in our next Quick Tip the stats tool that you hook up with Viddler in order to get the information about how long people are actually watching your video, what’s the average watching time and different things like that.

But really, really happy with it and in fact, we found out that just recently. I mean we pushed tons and tons of terabytes of data across their connections and it loaded up really, really quickly and minimal problems all across the board which is great when you know you’ve got thousands and thousands and thousands of people watching this video constantly. So Viddler.com, you can go and check it out. I’m pretty sure they have some free options as well but sign up and give it a try and then if you need some of the additional bells and whistles you can sign up for that in addition.

Sterling: Alright and other than stats and all that other stuff that is actually of use, the thing that I like about it is just completely a preference thing, I just really like the player. And anytime I see the YouTube player or there’s other players out there, I really don’t like the aesthetic looks of these players. And this is one of the top two, I like this one and I like we’ve talked about before I believe…FlowPlayer I think that’s what it’s called.

Those two are my top two in how they look and the playability and how they play and that kind of thing. So I really like that as well which is just an added benefit.

Jay: Absolutely. And incidentally I just found out, I was told yesterday through the grapevine. I guess the founder of Viddler was watching our launch and stuff because we had told them beforehand, we were going to be pushing a lot of data, just so you know, it’s coming. It’s going to hit your systems. And he got back and let us know that we were in their top twenty of traffic altogether over the last couple weeks. And they’ve got like 100,000 different accounts using their video service and so in terms of traffic to videos, we were in the top twenty.

So we were pushing a lot of data and it worked really, really well which was awesome. So that was just a recommendation we wanted to put out there. I mean this is going to work well for especially just mission critical stuff where you know you want it to work, you want it to stream well from dependable servers, give you those great stats and tracking and stuff like that. For more casual content go ahead and just post it on your website or use something like Libson or use the FlowPlayer and other things that we’ve mentioned in the past.

But Viddler’s kind of becoming our mission critical tool of choice so we wanted to share that with you in today’s Quick Tip.

Sterling: 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!