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

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This is Internet Business Mastery, episode 54.

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 InternetBusinessMastery.com. I’m Sterling…

Jay: And I’m Jay coming to you from sunny Red Rock southwest Utah.

Sterling: Nice, and I’m in sunny, sunny San Diego.

Jay: Double sunny! Take that!

Sterling: And we are 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, especially if you’re just getting started.

On this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we’re going to talk about how to start a membership site that generates a six figure income. And in the Quick Tip, we’re going to talk about the latest trend in WordPress themes.

So I’ve been wanting to ask you how’s the website coming? And how’s the blog, and when can I get it? When can I steal it?

Jay: Have you got that nifty theme yet?

Well, getting very close to launching the new blog design, and I’m excited for people to see it. I’ve been trying some nifty different tricks that I’ve been finding along the way here. But there’s one thing that saved me hours and hours of time in putting together this new WordPress theme, and that’s what I’ll be talking about in the Quick Tip. So I’m excited to share that little juicy tidbit of information.
But yeah, just been thinking about…well my site has been long overdue for a theme overhaul I’ve been wanting for the last couple of years to change that up. But yeah, just based on things I’ve been seeing and based on what we learned in the launch of our site, or the relaunch of our new theme this year on Internet Business Mastery is, just kind of come up with some new ideas of how to format things, and how to make it more friendly for new and repeat visitors to the site.

So I’ve got some ideas for a new interface for people to be able to browse the most recent podcast episodes. We’ll see if I can make the technology work for me, but I think it’s going to be pretty neat. So I’ll definitely let everyone know when that site is up and ready to go.

So what’s been on your mind, what’s going on in double sunny San Diego?

Sterling: Well first, we’re just knee deep in product creation right now. Obviously you and I are, and we’re going to be offering this new thing next week, something that we get constant emails about, and so we finally decided to make it available. And we’ll talk more about that a little later in the show as well. But one of the very cool things I’m really enjoying about San Diego other than the obvious is, there are a ton of meetup groups. Like, I love it.

So if you don’t know about Meetup.com, definitely check it out and look up your city, and see what’s going on. And if there isn’t a meetup group for stuff you’re interested in, you can start one really easily. But so far I think I’ve been here three weeks I guess now, and I’ve been to eight meetups. I can’t even believe it.

Jay: That’s social for you!

Sterling: Oh my gosh, I almost need a break from meetups. Actually, I’ve got one tonight and tomorrow night as well, and had one on Monday I had a podcast meetup here. But I love getting out and actually meeting people that do this same kind of stuff. I’ve met just an unbelievable amount of people. I met the guy that just Mac cast, as well as one of the writers of Life Hacker.

So I’m just meeting a whole ton of people, and I absolutely love it. But I wanted to suggest to people, if they want to get out or even start their own group of people to get together to talk about this stuff, definitely go to Meetup.com.

Jay: You know, it’s interesting you mentioned that, because recently…I mean obviously right now I’m living in Portland, Oregon. And we’ve decided we might stick around for a little while. We’re liking it, we’ve even bought a loveseat and a couch, so how’s that for commitment?

Sterling: Oh crazy!

Jay: But anyway, I was thinking more about, well hey, let’s meet some more people. We’re going to be around for a little while. And I started thinking about how did we meet a lot of our really good friends in New York City? And the truth of the matter is, it was a lot of meetups, whether internet business related, or podcasting related.

Just going to those kinds of things and meeting like minded people. And a few of the people became really, really good friends that we’re still in touch with. So yeah, definitely second that whole idea, especially when you’re the lonely solo-preneur at home, it does you some to get out and talk to someone every once in a while. So yeah, that’s a great way to meet people for sure.

Sterling: Yeah, they even had a geek bonfire. That makes me laugh, I love that.

Jay: Did they have geeks on the bonfire?

Sterling: Yeah thank God no, or we would have all been on there. But yeah, they had a bonfire on the beach, and every month they put that together, and we all sit and talk about internet business, and just geeky stuff I guess. Nobody talked about Battlestar Gallactica, I was surprised. But we did talk about business, so that was good.

Jay: Very cool. Well I’m excited about today’s featured segment, so let’s jump right in!

And now, the featured segment…

Jay: Alright, on this episode, we’re going to talk about how to start a membership site that generates a six figure income. So we’re going to give you seven secrets that’s we’ve learned over the past few months while launching the Internet Business Mastery Academy, which of course is the premium content site that we launched as a place we could dump all our latest content, and courses, and guide people to the escaping of the ‘9 to 5,’ when they want to get a whole system.

And that site is now generating a six figure income per year. Of course I haven’t been around a year, but that’s the monthly income when you add it up. That’s where it’s at. So these are things that are working extremely well for us, so we wanted to share these tips with you.

So let’s start with number one here. The number one tip to make your membership site successful is to make it a community, not just a content delivery mechanism. Now in the past, membership sites have been used…it is an effective way to get regular content out there. Somebody signs up, and they have access to a site where you can put up content digitally, and they can access that.

And so it is a very effective content delivery mechanism, but just leaving at that is definitely leaving a number of things on the table, a lot of benefit for you and the members on the table, as well as money that can be made by actually making it into a community.

And we talked about some of these benefits in the last episode as well. But one of the big ones is that it’s going to increase the time that your members stay in the site. So, your attrition rate as they call it is going to be lower. People instead of maybe staying two or three or five months or whatever, they’ll actually stay a year or two because they actually have that community element that they like, and are attached to, and want to keep around. So they’re willing to stay much, much longer as a member of your site.

Sterling: Yeah, the mastermind community within the community was considered the number one benefit from the site from a survey we do with our members. And this is really important to know, because they come for the content and they stay for the community.

Jay: Definitely, well put. So the whole community aspect is very important. So thinking of it that way is going to be a big part. So putting in elements where they can interact with each other, and it’s a place where people go on a daily basis even to interact with other people like them.

Sterling: Well, and I didn’t even realize how much people were dying for this. I should have realized by the fact that we both wanted something like this, but like right now within the mastermind community you can either talk to each other through the actual community, or you can get together and meet live in person. Like I actually just met with the San Diego group from the Academy just a couple of days ago, right here by the beach.

We all met up at a Starbucks and talked for like three or four hours together. And then they even have, one of the members, Shawn Newnon, started a Skype chat. So within the Academy, you can go in and you can be on this Skype chat, where you can ask stuff from members. And actually you and I pop on there every once in a while, and they sit there and can talk at any time during the day.

So if they’re having some problem with something they’re doing, they can get on the little Skype chat and ask their question there and somebody there from the community helps them. That’s stuff I didn’t even think of that, that that was going to come out of it, but you know, that kind of community, it’s like – how would you leave that once you’re in that?

Jay: Yeah, people want that kind of thing, and there’s so many great tools out there. So integrating those into your site, integrating forums, and using the blog comments and use live chat, and social networking type aspects, and use those things to facilitate the connections that people are looking for. And that will solidify the value that they get from your site.

Alright, number two is, make it a step-by-step system. Meaning in the content that you deliver, make it so that it’s A-to-Z, here’s step 1, here’s step 2, here’s step 3, and take them to that process bit by bit. We’ve seen a lot of membership sites out there that they “deliver incredible value” in terms they just throw up a whole lot of content, and there’s just tons of stuff there which is cool, but people get overwhelmed very easily.

So if they just go in there, and they see hours, and hours, and hours of audio and video, but they don’t know where to start, and they don’t know the process. Now they have to think a little bit more, and we have enough things in life to think about to piece it together into a system that works for us.

So especially in a situation where your membership site is you’re training people how to do a process, you’re giving them information, as much as you can make it a step-by-step process so you can avoid the overwhelmed and give them a sequence that goes through it bit by bit. And this is something that we concentrated on a lot in the way that we’ve put the Academy together.

Sterling: Yeah, I really hate it when I buy something, and then I’ve got to figure out what the steps are. I mean I figure I paid good money to not have to figure your system out. Like I want to know what do I do first? That’s it, then what’s next? I don’t want to have to search the whole site and go hmm, I wonder which thing I should do first? So yeah, definitely make it step-by-step.

Jay: Yeah, you get paralysis of analysis, and everything looks shiny then, and you don’t know which thing to focus on first. There’s a number of things that we do to facilitate this. I mean every segment that we post has action items, so they watch a video or they listen to an audio, and then it’s like okay, here are the one, or two, or three action items that you should do now once you’ve done this.

And everything is broken down into weekly action guides that get sent out every week, and it’s okay, here’s the amount of time for this week. Just take these few things, watch these few things, and do these things, and then you’re done for this week. And then next week, they get the next one.

So integrating those types of things into your site, there’s several ideas that you can use to make it a step-by-step system. And again, we’ve talked about attrition and the fact that some people will drop off after a while. They might be there for a month, they might be there for a year, but there’s always going to be some point, an average lifetime of the membership that you have.

And the biggest reason why that you will lose people is that they just get overwhelmed. They just feel like it’s building up, they don’t know where to start. They’re not getting through the materials well enough, and so it’s just a hassle. And so they end up canceling their membership, it just feels like too much. So the more you can avoid that the better.

Sterling: Yeah, I mean one of the reasons obviously that that happens is the lack of a clear path, so I hope we drove this one home.

Jay: Yeah imagine if a person is showing up to your site for the first time, are they immediately going to go, “Oh there, that’s where I should start. I’m brand new,” and they’re like, “Oh, this is the first thing I should click, this is the first thing I should do, this is where I should go first.” You’ve given them the sign post. So try to look at your site with that kind of new, fresh approach.

Alright, number three is, create procedures for everything. Create procedure lists for everything. Now procedure lists, this is on the administration side of things. You as the content creator, the manager of the site, you’re going to want to have procedures and systems for everything. Because launching a membership site is going to create a number of repetitive processes, things like posting content, and billing, and customer service, and recording the content.

You’ve got outlining, recording, editing, posting the content, all these things that you’ll be doing on a weekly or monthly basis to keep your site vibrate and progressing forward. And these are perfect for streamlining them, and automating them, and outsourcing these types of things. So you want to make sure that as you’re doing all these things you create a very step-by-step procedure list so that you or anybody else, somebody on your site, or a Virtual Assistant can then take that task over.

And then on a weekly or monthly basis, or whatever, take care of those things for you. So just start putting those things together from the beginning, or else it’s going to get away from you very quickly, but if you do this, then it’s going to become that kind of a system, that kind of a business where you can work less, but you can make more money.

Now the other thing to keep in mind, especially from a content perspective is to just create a schedule, and stick to it. Make it easy for yourself, you’ll know that every Monday this is what you put together, or every Tuesday you send this to a V.A., or on the 15^th of every month this kind of billing gets done, or the bookkeeper…so just have a schedule and stick to it, and it will make it a lot easier for you.

Sterling: Yeah, this is really important, is you have to have discipline as an entrepreneur. If you promise content to come out at a certain time, you better make good. I mean that’s like a very, very important thing. Like for instance, I bought a product from a guy nearly two years ago, and he said he would send the physical product out once we were done with the coaching course. And he still hasn’t sent it, even though I’ve personally talked to him, and he continues to promise it will be next month.

Now here the thing, like I have no trust in this guy, and I would never buy anything from him again. And I would never ever suggest to buy from him to anyone else. And I think internet business is very much about trust. Once you painstakingly earn it, then it’s really a shame to lose it.

And people, I just think this has something to do with as much as possible you want to stick to what your word is, especially if it’s just something you’re choosing not to do. So once you say it’s going to be, then have it be then.

Jay: Yeah, that’s a great point as far as that consistency. It’s both for trust and sanity. I mean it just works out better for everyone. And you know, when it comes to procedure lists, we’ve had some people ask about seeing our procedure lists, because we’ve been talking about them a lot, and how they’ve made everything work so great in running our membership site.

So we’re definitely looking at how we can make those available at some point, probably in the Academy, and maybe to the advanced membership that we’ll be launching next year. So you can watch for something like that soon.

Alright number four tip is to include a Rolodex. And what do we mean by a Rolodex? This is kind of…the Rolodex is the old fashioned contact system. I mean I’ve never actually personally used a literal Rolodex in my life, one of those things where you roll through and it’s just got a bunch of cards with everybody’s phone numbers in alphabetical order or whatever.

But the idea here is it’s a list of all your contacts or tools, or recommended resources, all the vendors. I mean you as an expert, as whatever you do, you’ve built up this stuff. I mean much of it you might even take for granted now, just little things; little pieces of software, services, or a vendor, or a freelancer that you use on a regular basis that has done good work, or has worked out really well.

And for other people, this is a really big deal to have that kind of information just readily available, because it’s a big pain whenever you need a new tool to do whatever in your business, you just want a quick recommendation. Who can I trust? Where should I go? And so giving that kind of information to people is incredibly valuable, and especially when it’s on the web, on a membership site like this in the form of links.

And people absolutely love links; they love something they can click. They love to have a recommendation of – it’s like click here, check these guys out. I used these guys for this, highly recommend it; give it a look now. People love that kind of thing.

Sterling: Yeah, this idea is so interesting and important, I have a friend that’s making an entire business out of links to cool and useful sites, and nearly all the big internet guys have agreed to join venture with him because they understand how important these links to resources are.

Jay: Yeah, we’ve seen it time and time again, whether it’s on a site, whether it’s in a product, whether it’s in a live presentation at a conference. People just go nuts for the part of the course or the person who’s speaking, or whatever where it’s like they gave them a dozen links to go and check out, a dozen recommended tools that just do nifty things and make their life easier, or make things more fun for them.

And so after seeing that again and again, we’re like okay, it’s very obvious there needs to be a focus here. People love to have those resources, they love getting things they can go and get. It’s like that big of accomplishment when you’re telling them here’s two things you should absolutely check out, so immediately they click on it and go check it out, and benefit from that.

And so there’s a lot of value in that kind of an experience. So the basic idea here of a Rolodex is not new, I mean information marketers have been doing this for several years. Whether it’s throwing a sheet of paper and a product, “Here’s your million dollar Rolodex,” and it’s a list of all their recommended resources, or it’s just a list of links on a page. But with the Academy, we took this to the next level, and this is something we recommend you do as well.

For the Web 2.0 era, we made it a multimedia type experience. There’s videos and audio, there’s tutorials and there’s not just a ‘here’s tool “x” that we use everyday to do this.’ It’s ‘we highly recommend tool “x,” and here’s a five minute video to show you exactly how we use it,’ or ‘we recommend you implement it in your own business.’ And so it’s taken that whole idea to a new level, and the response to that kind of thing has been really good.

So number four would be not just to include a Rolodex, but to include a multimedia Rolodex experience.

Sterling: Yeah, I’m not sure why no one had thought to do videos and tutorials on exactly how they use the resources before, but I love going through the resources that we use and showing exactly how we use them. I mean that’s one of the parts I really enjoy.

Jay: We’ve starting seeing people now copy this idea of doing the multimedia.

Sterling: And in fact create businesses doing it.

Jay: So there you go, you’re getting it right here on Internet Business Mastery, take that idea, and copy it. It works, and it works incredibly well.

Alright, tip number five is to seed your membership site with some key customers. So when it came time to launch the Academy, it was actually as we were getting closer, it occurred to us, we were like you know, we’ve got two rounds of coaching students that we’ve done in the last year, and so some of these people are going to want to be a part of the Academy.

Should we give them a discount or something, a special deal since they were already coaching students, and have spent good money on that? What should we do? And then I think it might have been you Sterling, you said, “Let’s just give it to them for free,” and really I think that is one of the best things that we’ve done.

Because now these people are in there, they’re already well acquainted with the way that we teach to do internet business, they’ve had some success of their own having taken the coaching course. And so now they’re in there teaching others, and setting a whole tone of the community, and of the interaction.

And so just kind of from day one – kaboom, there was people in there just getting things going and making it very interactive, and helping people out. And so it didn’t take as much time to get that momentum going right off the bat. And so that was a great idea for us to take that and seed our site with some of the key customers that we already had.

And we just gave them free lifetime memberships to the community. And I venture to say it’s more than paid for itself in just the value that it’s added to the community, and the way that it’s elevated the benefit of the whole thing for everyone. And of course they’re just more solidified as very happy customers, because we’ve gotten lots of emails.

It’s like, “Wow, I can’t believe you’re giving us this incredible value, yet again over delivering.” And people are just incredibly grateful, and one guy in fact just recently, you were telling me about that group you went to Sterling. You said the guy said he’d spent literally his last money on our coaching course, and so things are building up in his business and getting to the point of starting to make money.

But when he saw the Academy, he was like, “Oh man, I really want it.” And all of a sudden unexpectedly we’re like hey, you get in for free as a former coaching…and he was ecstatic about that. And it may seem like a bold move, where you’re like, “I could get extra money if they want to sign up,” but we found that it worked out incredibly well for us.

Alright, tip number six is to make it a multimedia experience. You might be thinking if I launch a site, what should it be? Should it be a bunch of articles, should it be a bunch of audio, should it be a bunch of video? And our answer would be, all of the above, if possible. And there are definitely ways to repurpose and make it work that way.

And often we’ll just send stuff off and have it transcribed so that we have it in text as well. And everyone likes to consume content in different ways. And so that’s why we use audio, and video, and transcripts, and even interactive flash presentations within our Academy to deliver our content.

And so that’s something that we highly recommend. I mean recently I was poking around at a membership site, and probably 80% of the content is text. And for some people, that might be perfect, they like to just skim the text. Me, I prefer to download an audio and take it on the go if I can while I work or something like that.

Sterling: Yeah, me too.

Jay: So I find that I actually have a hard time wanting to come back to that site, because it’s not delivering it in a way that I am wanting to consume the content. And so the more of a multimedia experience you can make it, the better.

Now we get asked all the time how we create our screencasts that we do all our tutorials with, so that’s where we record our computer screen. Maybe it’s a Powerpoint, or maybe it’s demonstrating how to do something on our computer. And so, people ask well how do you make those? How do you publish them to the Academy?
And the answer to that question is Camtasia, which is definitely an online content creator’s best friend. In fact, recently a new version of Camtasia came out, Camtasia 6; it’s something you can download a thirty day trial of and try that out. And in fact, I was just talking to the people at Camtasia this morning, they’ve got some more exciting things in store. So there’s an extra recommendation for you, it’s an easy way to make multimedia experience out of your membership site.

Alright, tip number seven, secret number seven – make sure you choose the right platform, or the right software to run your membership site with. Of course you’ve got a lot of logistics here to take care of, you want it to all be automated where somebody can come they find out oh, they’ve got this membership thing they can join.

They can process the order, get their account, and immediately log in right away. Every month when they renew, that’s automated. And if they don’t renew, if the credit card fails, or if they cancel, then obviously their membership gets cut off. You want that all to be automated, so you need a good platform that’s going to do that. And of course to protect all the content so that only members can get in to access that.

So this is something we did a lot of looking around at, we’ve also done more even since still looking for the ideal platform. But we can share with you some of the things that…the problem is the ideal platform doesn’t exist, because everything we want it to do is sadly still way ahead of where the technology is at. But we can share with you a few of the things we’ve learned along the way.

Up until probably in our book a couple of years ago, one of the biggest and most popular – and even for many internet marketers the biggest and most popular platforms for running a membership site is a service called MemberGate. And if you Google for MemberGate, you’ll be able to find that online.

But we’re going to tell you right now that MemberGate is a big ‘no.’ And of course it’s extremely expensive, and that’s not the reason why we would say to shy away from it, although I guess that might be one.

But sadly after even paying some big money to get into access it, we found out very quickly it was not going to be able to do many things that we wanted a membership site to be. So if you do come across that one, our recommendation is going to be to not go into that direction.

Sterling: Yeah, after we bought it and played around with it for some time, there’s just too many little things that we want to do that again, are ahead of what’s out there right now. There’s a lot of social things, and just stuff we were like, “Can we do this?” “No.” “How about this?!” “No.” We’re like, “Oh man! We’d love to use it!”

Because I know right now I have lot of internet friends that absolutely love their MemberGate site, but they don’t need some of the things that are absolutely essential for the Internet Business Mastery Academy system that we teach. So, as great as it can be for very basic sites, it just was a big no for us.

Jay: Yeah, one of the biggest reasons is it just doesn’t have the social networking type features that we’d eventually like to integrate into the site. And we even talked to them about it, and if it’s coming down the pipe. And they said, “Oh it’s not a priority right now. It could be a year.” And we’re like uh, social networking is like two years old or more now already. So like when are you guys going to catch up? So yeah it became clear, so we began looking elsewhere.

Alright, so the solution that we did end up going with is something called aMember. Now this is a script that’s actually very inexpensive, I think at the time of this recording and what we paid for it was about $180 or something like that. And you just download that script and you can install it on your site, and you can tell it to protect any given file or any given directory on your site.

So it’s very, very handy. Whether it’s just a single simple HTML page, whether it’s a number of media files, or whether it’s a whole WordPress installation, like in our case. What we did was we installed WordPress and then had aMember protect the folder that we have that installed inside of. And the very cool thing is aMember has a lot of plugins to interact with things such as WordPress.

So for instance when somebody logs into our membership site, they’re also logging into not only the membership system, but that also logs them into WordPress so that the comment is automatically associated with their profile. If they go to the forums and comment, that’s automatically associated with their profile. So it logs them in across the board, even if we plug into two or three different pieces that we’re using to put the site together.

So there’s a lot of creative ways to use aMember, and it’s a very flexible solution. Now it is a little bit more technical, and as with all things there’s many things we still wish that it would do, or do a little better, but it has worked relatively quite well for us. So that’s one thing we can point you in the direction of to go and check out for your own membership site.

So if you’d like some more information about aMember and membership platforms, then go to GetMyMembershipSite.com. One more time, that’s GetMyMembershipSite.com, that’ll take you to a page on our site with more information about membership platforms.

So let’s go ahead and review really quickly…

Number one was make a community, not just a content delivery mechanism.

Number two was make it a step-by-step system, avoid the overwhelm.

Number three – create procedure lists for everything. That’s for yourself, and your staff, your Virtual Assistants.

Number four is, include a Rolodex, and not just a Rolodex, but a multimedia Rolodex. Take it to the next level for the Web 2.0 era.

Number five is, seed your site with key customers as members; whether you give them a deep discount or even free membership, it’s a great way to kick things off.

Number six – make it a multimedia experience. Let people get the content the way that they want to get it.

And then number seven is to choose the right platform. MemberGate, a big ‘no;’ aMember is what we are currently using. And there’s other things we’re looking into as well.

So there’s some insight on that. Now if you are already a member of the Academy, we encourage you and hope that you don’t just consume all the great content that we’re putting there, but also pay attention to how things are done, how we organize the site, how we run things, and release the content, because there’s a lot of lessons to be learned in just how we do things when it comes time to set up a membership site of your own.

Now of course eventually we are going to have a complete course in the Academy, to go through all the specifics of how to set up a membership site of your own, and to really peg these things down in a step-by-step fashion to the greatest detail. So you can be looking forward to that. So there you go, seven tips to launch a membership site for yourself that generates a six figure income.

Sterling: Alright, now we’ve got a question for you. What other membership site ideas have you seen as either a publisher or a member of a site? Please share your answers in the comment section of this episode post.

Jay: Alright we’ve got a few very exciting announcements for you. First of all, as Sterling mentioned in the beginning of the show, when we’re recording this; we’re in the middle of getting a launch ready. But when it releases and you hear this, if you’re hearing this right away after it comes out – which will be, let’s see – December 18, we’ve got a very special product that’s going to be launching.

And there’s going to be a special holiday deal on that, and it’s Seasons 1 and 2 of Internet Business Mastery. This is something that people have been asking for, I mean not a week goes by that people don’t ask for this, and that’s the past episodes of Internet Business Mastery that we had previously taken down.

But clearly people want to get their hands on them, and so we’ve put together a very special package deal that you can go and check out for getting the first fifty episodes, which we’re calling Seasons 1 & 2 of Internet Business Mastery.

So at the time of this episode being released, that will be up and ready. And if you go there right away, you’ll still be able to get in early on the holiday special at GetIBM.com. Again that’s GetIBM.com. Of course IBM stands for Internet Business Mastery.

And if you’re hearing this in the future after the holiday special has passed, that’s fine. It will still be there, it just won’t be the same super special holiday deal that we’re putting out to the email newsletter, but you can still go to GetIBM.com and check that out and get access to episodes that haven’t been up for some time.

So going all the way back to what has it been? A little over three years now when we started the podcast originally. So hours of great content, juicy content.

Sterling: Yeah, it’s over thirty hours actually.

Jay: Sweet! That’ll get you by for a little while, at least a couple days. Alright, now we want to congratulate a couple Academy members in Internet Business Mastery community members, some very exciting stuff going on. So we wanted to share this just for everybody…it gets me excited and I think it will be very motivational for others to hear this as well.

Tell us about Patrick, you were talking to him earlier this week about some of the success that he has been having. So what’s Patrick’s story there Sterling?

Sterling: Yeah we’ve got a huge congratulations to Patrick who’s a member of the Internet Business Mastery Academy who made over $10,000 last month off of his site. And his site is GreenExamAcademy.com, and his site teaches about how to take an architect test that people have to take. And he’s got an ebook that teaches them how to do it.

And in fact, through going through the Academy, he’s setting it up to be a membership site as well. But yeah, his first month, over $10,000, and he’s been the Academy now for several months. And I just barely met him for the second time a couple of days ago, and he was at the mastermind group that we all got together and talked about this. And we talked about other ways to launch his stuff and that kind of thing.

But this is amazing, like his first month he makes over $10,000. It’s just so awesome to hear that kind of thing. And he’s got huge plans for the future. And it’s for a product for architects. So I love hearing all the different things people do for business.

I mean we’ve got somebody who does project managers, a shot with learning Indonesian, I mean it’s just really cool to hear what people can make money off of, the things they’re passionate about.

Jay: Yeah, this was an impressive story; I mean he’s only been a member of the Academy just a couple months now. And I remember asking you yesterday when you were telling me this story; it was like okay, well has he been doing this several years or whatever?

I mean $10K is not unheard of to make that quickly, but this certainly was very exciting to hear somebody who…I mean he lists the bold actions that he in the mastermind community, he was listing these bold actions that he took. He just decided, “Yeah, I’m going to do this, put a survey out. Okay I’ve got that back, now I’m just going to put the ebook up and see what happened, then I’ll put a little special coupon code, and the first day $800 bucks…”

And I remember reading that and going, awesome! $800 in your first day, great! And then you told me the other day, it ended up being $10,000 that first month, and I was like holy cow, that’s so awesome!

It’s just incredibly cool seeing how quickly things can happen when you do get in there and take those bold actions. So big congrats to you, Patrick.

We also want to wish a Happy Independence Day. This is where we’ll cue the big band music.

Sterling: At some point, this will be a big intro.

Jay: We definitely want to recognize people who have escaped the ‘9 to 5,’ and celebrate their Independence Day. I remember my Independence Day…let’s see. It would have been August 15, 2003. So every time August 15^th comes around, I still remember that day.

But recently he posted in the mastermind community that he had escaped the ‘9 to 5,’ here is what he wrote on November 25^th:

“Today is absolutely my last day of work at my job, I felt that App-Shop has been doing well enough for me to focus 100% on it. And I also believe it really deserves my full attention. So this is it, six months of taking bold action is about to pay off.”

So big congratulations to you, Matt. And if anybody listening wants to check out his site, it is App-Shop.com. And his business is focused around development, and selling of iPhone applications, which is become a huge industry in just a matter of just a few months.

So he did a great job of identifying a good opportunity, and an excellent opportunity, and a new industry there. And of course, we’ll have links to all these different things that we’re mentioning in the show notes back at the site. So congratulations to everybody there, and that is the announcements for this show.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: And now it’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip. We kind of teased everybody at the beginning of the episode that in launching my new blog site, I’ve come across something that has saved me hours, literally hours of time in putting together the new design, and layout, and some of the features I wanted to have in the site itself.

Now of course WordPress is very cool, because you can easily apply a new theme or template, and just immediately all your hundreds, or thousands of pages have the new design. You can switch between designs easily, and there’s lots of free themes out there.

Sometimes there’s some good ones, however, there’s a very recent trend in WordPress themes that’s become more and more popular. And I think it’s because WordPress is becoming so popular that now enough businesses use it, that it can actually be profitable for people to make more money in the WordPress themes type industry or business.

But there’s this trend called Premium Themes. And basically premium themes usually indicates that you pay a fee, it might be $30, $50, $100, $150 is usually the type of price points that I see for these themes. And if you pay, and there’s obviously a nicer design to it. Now it’s not going to be 100% unique, meaning that somebody else could buy that theme as well, and that’s why it’s not $2,000. It’s only $150, or $50 or something.

But you’re going to get a higher quality design; often they’re much better search engine optimized. Also a lot of times, these premium themes have some very cool extra features for your sidebar, maybe a video viewer on the sidebar, or other really cool things like that.

And so you don’t have to customize things as much, because usually all the really important stuff has been done. So I’ve just found that instead of a couple of years ago, what I would have done is gone and found a free theme that was pretty close to what I wanted and then I would have had somebody spend some time. I would have given a big list of what I want to tweak, and then would have to hack the code quite a bit.

Now with premium themes, you can not have to wade through hundreds of lousy free themes, and you can cut to the chase on the higher quality stuff that’s ready to go with some very cool extra features for you.

So we’ve kind of narrowed down the list of premium theme vendors. There’s a couple in particular that we particularly like, one of which I recently bought a theme from for my new blog site launch. So we’ve prepared a special page at GetMyThemes.com. If you go to GetMyThemes.com, that will take you to this page that we’ve put together where you’ll find three recommendations, well at least at the time of this recording of putting it up there.

There’s three recommendations of quality premium theme vendors that have some great themes for you to check out for your next WordPress site redesign. So give that one a look.

Sterling: Now if you’ve like dozen of other resources such as this one, you can find them in the Internet Business Mastery Academy along with video tutorials of us showing you exactly how we use them. And 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 Iconiclass 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 free builders 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 the life changing audio presentations, 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!