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 56.

“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!”

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

Sterling: And I’m Sterling. And I almost said, “I’m Jay,” because it seems to go after Sterling.

Jay: Yeah, I’m Sterling AND Jay…Did you guys know this is exactly one person that’s doing every single show?

Sterling: We just change our voice a tiny bit.

Jay: Yeah, I’ve heard about a radio show host that does that. He’s like all the characters, and dupes people all the time.

Sterling: Nice.

Jay: That would be pretty fantastic. Anyway, 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 business, even if you’re getting started today.

On this episode of the Internet Business Mastery, we’re going to talk about six specific ways to make 2009 the best year ever. We’re just entering a new year, and we’re going to help you get it started with a bang. We also have a quick tip for you – we’re going to talk about the tool that we’ve always wanted for Twitter, and it is finally here! We’re going to talk to you a little bit about that.

So Sterling, we’ve just got back from a couple weeks off. This is our first full week back in gear, full time, taking our minds out of the game for a couple weeks for the holidays which was nice and fun. We feel like we’re off to a good start with 2009. What’s the feeling coming back and getting out of here?

Sterling: Well I think, yeah I’ve been incredibly excited this week, and it wasn’t tough to come back actually. We’re talking to a friend yesterday and he said, “Yeah, its tough coming back after having a couple of weeks off like that.”

But for me, I was so excited to come back because there’s so many goals and things that we want for this year, that it was nice to come back and get that started. But after a nice relaxing couple weeks off, which is kind of funny because we almost didn’t take the time off.

It seems so weird now, I’m like, we’ve got to take some time off! Because we were going to start planning another launch and doing all this, well that would have meant we’d be working every day but maybe Christmas day. And we finally were like, nah, let’s not do that.

But again, it’s nice to come back and there was very specific things that I notice lots of people writing about – goals and this kind of thing. And I always see these things, and most of the time I read them and just go, “What?! What are they talking about?” So luckily the stuff we’re going to talk about in the featured segment, this is the entire process of what I do, and we do, to make these things actually happen. So putting all this into effect this week was awesome. I had a great time doing it.

Jay: Yeah it’s a very energizing time of year, whatever it is about the new year, the fresh start – a new chance, or whatever. I think as cliché as it may seem, I think it’s a good thing to try to take advantage of that energy that just comes around this time of year that we all feel, and a lot of other people are kind of doing the same. And so we definitely made the most of it ourselves and come up with some good stuff. So I’m excited to talk all about it in the featured segment. So let’s go ahead and dive right in!

“And now the featured segment…”

Jay: So let’s talk a little bit how we can make 2009 the best year ever. Definitely the beginning of the year you’ve got lots of hopes and aspirations. And we talk a lot of about your ideal lifestyle, moving forward in that, starting your new business, taking your new business to the next level. Wherever you’re at in all this process and the things you’re trying to accomplish, certainly there’s the next level…the proverbial next level that you want to reach.

So let’s talk about some of the suggestions that we have, in fact six specific things that we’ve done and seen big results from. And we like doing these things at the beginning of the year in order to help us to make sure the year that we’re at can see exponentially more success than even the last year.

Alright, so let’s go ahead and start with number one, and I know this is one you like quite a bit Sterling. So maybe you can tell us a bit about it, and you just wrote a blog post on this. But, first step is it all starts with the definite major purpose, and then the things go along with that as the fulfillment factors that we talk about. And you want to review that and refine your definite major purpose and your fulfillment factors.  So what is the importance of that for you?

Sterling: Here’s the interesting thing I’ve found with any sort of goal setting that I kind of mentioned in the chit-chat. A lot of people say okay, here’s how you do goals. You figure out what you want, you set the goal in the positive; you put a date on when it needs to be achieved, and all this kind of stuff.

And I did that for years, and most of the time I’d have 200 goals. Like some people are like “Write everything!” And what I’d end up finding out is that by the end of the year if I was lucky, I achieved one of them. And throughout the years, I could tell even just a few years back, this happened to me constantly – that for whatever reason I didn’t have by maybe February, I forgot about the goals. Or by March, I hadn’t even looked at them since March, when the next week would come up.

And part of what I kind of found was that if there isn’t some sort of ‘why’ behind the goal, other than ‘I want a Ferrari.” I mean if you’re working a job where let’s say you make $20 an hour, and you make a goal out of no where, ‘I want a Ferrari by next year,’ like there’s just something very big missing there.

So that’s where the whole definite major purpose came along. For me, if you know what the purpose let’s say of your life is, you design what that very specifically is, then that can help you design what goals you’re going to have for the year. And if you align them, your goals to your definite major purpose, then all the better it’s going to give you kind of the fuel, or the why you’re doing these goals.

So that’s why that was the big thing for me is, having that definite major purpose. And this year, I did refine it a little bit, and we actually have both of our definite major purposes posted on our InternetBusinessMasteryAcademy.com page. We put them there so other people could see what we’re actually going towards, what fulfills us, and what our purpose is. And I took that and have refined it just a little bit, added a little bit to it, refined some wording so that as I’ve designed my goals this year, it was crystal clear for me that that’s the direction I wanted to go.

Jay: Yeah I think it’s all about being mindful of what you really want, what you really think, what you really believe in life, what fulfills you in life. Because if you’re not mindful, then you are being acted upon by forces that you’re not aware of, but are very, very real. And they’re often coming from within you, and maybe this all sounds very esoteric and nebulous, but even last week we were talking about the fact that you realized that in a way, you kind of had this secondary definite major purpose that was in opposition to the very thing you were really trying to accomplish.

And so people set all these goals about weight loss, or whatever, right? But if you don’t understand what it is that you’re really going for, or what your real beliefs are about weight loss and what it means to you, and what you’re trying to achieve with that – better health so that you live longer for your children’s sake, and to be with them, and enjoy family – or whatever the case might be. Your internal beliefs just end up opposing each other, and then you hit these brick walls, get frustrated and you don’t know why.

And so not being very specific about what the definite major purpose is, well then you might have five different purposes that unfortunately, there’s a disconnect, and maybe some of them work the one against the other. What happens if you’ve got two trains pulling in opposite directions? Well then it’s going to rip the whole thing apart.

Sterling: Well and I have an exact example about that, one of the things that we did actually talk about was one of my purposes was that I absolutely wanted to help other people get freedom as well as myself. So I had this as this huge purpose, but what I didn’t realize is that there was this little secret purpose that was actually ruining my daily life – which was how easy can I make it for myself today?

If there’s an internal question that’s, ‘how easy can I make it for myself today?’ that’s actually above the one that I’ve written down and want to be, then anytime I’m deciding what I’m going to do every single day…like I’ve got my goal in front of me. ‘Write this blog post to help people with this,’ and that fits the purpose that I’ve stated, that I want to help people with freedom, blah, blah, blah. But instead it filters through, how can I make it so easy on myself today?

Well the answer to that is not write the blog post, like not do those specific steps that’s going to lead me towards that goal. So I had to really look inside and make sure that I get those little secret things that end up being stoppers towards my goal, and get rid of those and get really clear on what my actual definite major purpose is.

And this is something that we actually go very in detail in the Academy, but we wanted to at least put it out here so that people can start thinking about that. And of course you can go to the site and look at the blog posts that I wrote about, ‘Goal Setting is a Waste of Time.’ But it talks about setting up your definite major purpose.

Jay: So that’s number one, it all starts with the refining and reviewing your definite major purpose and your fulfillment factors. Because everything else should point to those things, and you’ve got to make sure that’s all congruent.

Alright, number two is to review and refine your organization chart. So now we’re obviously getting a little more into the internet business aspect, because we’re framing this all within…this is after all Internet Business Mastery, but this is in a way is the whole framework for your business. This is where it all starts with your business.

And we’ve talked about organization charts in the past, I believe we’ve done a video on the site about it. And even if you’re the sole entrepreneur, the sole person at home, an entrepreneur – you’re running the whole business, you’re wearing all the hats – you need to know what are all those hats that you should be wearing right now in order to maintain the standards within your business that you need to, and move things forward, and achieve the goals and definite major purpose that you have for yourself.

And so everything we do, our weekly GTD (Getting Things Done), our weekly review of our goals, our next action, deciding what projects to work on, deciding what Sterling’s going to do, what am I going to do, what are the most important tasks right now, all this is framed around that organization chart.

After I went through my definite major purpose, we both opened up this organization chart to review okay, what are our different responsibilities within the business. Is there anywhere that’s being neglected? What are the most important ones right now, and it all pointed back to that organization chart. So you should be making that up, and again, you might be the one that’s filling all those roles. And maybe at some point you’ll hire an employee, or a V.A., or somebody, but right now you are the marketer, and the product manager, and the content producer, and the affiliate J.V. manager, and all these things that might be within your business.

So that’s extremely important, and we have some other material that you can find on the website. We talked a little bit about that we go very specifically into…we’ve got whole segments and examples of how we put that together inside of the Academy as well. But it all starts with that organization chart when it comes to your business.

So number two is, review and refine your organization chart. Number three again, because we’re talking about business here in internet business, is to set income goals. So whether you’re just getting started, and this is day one of trying to build your business, or whether you’ve already got a couple products in the bag and are moving forward, there’s that next level of what do you want to reach?

Maybe it’s the goal to have that extra $1,000 bucks a month so that you can go on a nice vacation. Maybe it’s that goal to have an extra…to replace your current income with your internet business. Maybe it’s the goal to be able to upgrade to a new house, or whatever…and this may all go back to your definite major purpose and your lifestyle design of what you want your life to look like.

But you want to set income goals that are obviously going to match that. For instance, recently Melanie and I realized you know we’ve enjoyed all this traveling, we’ve enjoyed Portland, the city we’ve always wanted to live in, and we’re enjoying it right now. But we’re also thinking very seriously about going back to New York City because it does fit so many things that we enjoy ideally in our lifestyle.

But we want to be able to upgrade our lifestyle next time we go back and so what do we need to do with our income in order to make that happen, and to move to that next level in the lifestyle design that we have? And so the decision to more to New York was based on each of the definite major purposes that Melanie and I both have – the things we want to have in life when it comes to family and our professions, and things we want to accomplish, and the diversity that we enjoy having around us.

A big city like New York supplies that, so that decision was based on the definite major purpose. And so now that is trickling down to income goals, okay well what kind of income do we need to make in order to go back to New York and live the kind of lifestyle we want to in New York? So that’s what the next step down, is to set those income goals. And we have a whole spreadsheet that we’ve put together for Internet Business Mastery, we’d decided how much we want to be making halfway through the year, and how many memberships we have to have in the Academy and different things like that.

And I’ve done that for my podcasting business stuff as well, and that stuff’s in front of me. It’s in a spreadsheet, we’ve made plans; we tweaked variables and see it visually in front of us, and regularly review that as well. Now this is some other area of your life, maybe it’s obviously the specific numbers that you want to reach for – weight loss, or the specific numbers you want to reach – the number of people that you teach how to read, if that is one of your definite purposes to reduce illiteracy in the world. Whatever it might be, so that is where the specific numbers start coming in. So set specific goals, and in the case of internet business, we’re talking about setting specific income goals.

Alright, number four is backwards plan these goals. So you’ve set that income goal that reaches a certain lifestyle design, so now you work backwards. You’ve got a destination. So if I want to go on a road trip, I go to Google Maps, and I type in the destination, and I’m looking at what highways I have to take and where I’m going to fill up on gas, or do I need to stay a night here or there. I may call a friend and say, “You’ve been to such and such a city, can you tell me where I need to go?”

This is something we applied very much back when I was in a band and we knew what we wanted to achieve with our band. So we talked to other bands who had achieved those things and said, “Look, you’ve been where we want to go. Tell us how,” and we could then see the steps and begin working backwards.

Well what’s it going to look like one step before that? Okay now, what does that look like one step before that? Now I know you have a whole process for this Sterling, maybe you can enlighten more and expand on that even more, the backwards planning process. I know you have a blog you’re putting together about that.

Sterling: Yeah I’m going to do a video showing how I do it with mindmaps, but I mean you gave a great example. I basically let’s say you’ve got this very specific goal, and that’s the end point. And then I basically go okay, what happened right before I got the goal? And I’m just figuring out kind of a reverse engineering of what needs to happen to get that goal.

So let’s just say they’re ten steps to achieve the specific goal. And that’s going to be much more indifferent for every single goal, but just for this example – ten steps, and so the end goal I stepped one thing back to step nine and say, what’s going to happen right before I achieved the goal? And I write that down.

And then I say, what’s going to happen right before I do step nine? And I go all the way back to where I have step one, which is what am I going to do next? And this is a huge thing for me, because again, I put out these goals for so many years. It’s like, I want to make 5 million dollars. Well, it’s like how do you ever possibly think you’re going to achieve that if you don’t know what the first step is?

Well what’s the first step to making 5 million dollars? You know, like what is it? That’s like a crazy thing to go, I have no clue! And if you backwards plan this, you can keep coming back to where you’re like, well maybe the first group of steps in that goal is to create your own internet business right? And then after you get that business going, then there’s steps within that business that’s going to get you closer to let’s say 5 million dollars, and then there’s going to be real estate holdings.

I mean that would be a humongous goal, and to just say that without knowing what’s going to be your first step, and be able to backwards plan is what made it so I was achieving most of my goals throughout let’s say my entire 20′s. I was making crazy, crazy goals, and some things I did get, but it wasn’t because I made it easy on myself.

Like this certainly makes it much easier to backwards plan and figure out right now, get right down to knowing what that first step is. And even if you aren’t sure some of the steps, at least if you can get back to what is the thing I need to do today, or this week to move forward on this goal? That’s going to help you much more than just having a goal, “I want 5 million dollars!” So that’s kind of…and again, I’m going to make a video and I’m going to put it on the blog at InternetBusinessMastery.com that will show you how I do it within my maps.

Jay: And so for us in Internet Business Mastery, we set income goals that we want to reach by half way through the year, and then by the end of the year. And so we looked at okay, what’s the vehicle that’s going to reach…if I’m going to drive to Florida for a road trip or something, I’ve got to decide, okay how am I getting there? Is it going to be train, by car, or whatever?

And so for us, we’re like okay, the vehicle that’s going to get there is mostly going to be our Academy memberships. And so we can set numbers for that, and then like okay, to reach that number we can work backwards and go okay, we’ve got JV launches, we’ve got these different traffic things, and we start setting monthly milestones, and working backwards.

And then we can see all those numbers stack up in the spreadsheet we put together, and same thing for this goal for going to New York City. Well we can think, right, for that we’re going to have to be making…maybe I’ve paid this thing off and have bought this, and have “x” amount of money put away, and then we work back from there. And it always helps if you can visualize that thing in the future; maybe that’s why it’s hard.

I mean there’s nothing wrong with saying hey, I want to make five million bucks some day. But maybe that’s why people say you’ve got to be around and hang out with the kinds of people or somehow engross yourself in that kind of a thing, because honestly I don’t even know what it looks like to have 5 million dollars.

I mean I kind of have an idea, maybe I see Donald Trump on the TV, but I’ve never ever been around that kind of money. So giving yourself something you can visualize, and if you don’t, well I don’t know – maybe you subscribe to the Robb Report, I don’t know. Or maybe you find a millionaire friend you can hang out with, or somehow get yourself to where you can visualize and like you said; ‘I don’t even know all the steps!’ Well start hanging out with people who have arrived there so that you start seeing and visualizing some of those steps, because it’s so important to be able to do that.

So anyway number four is backwards plan every goal, and as you can tell we like that to be a very visual process, and experiential; some of you can feel as well as a very logistic process as well in all of the planning.

Alright, number five is a evaluate all the different products or projects that you’re working on that will help you move forward in that. I already mentioned for our income goals for Internet Business Mastery, we’ve got five or six different vehicles we could pursue. We could increase our affiliate income more; we could launch a new higher level of the more advanced level of the Academy. We could start getting sponsors to sponsor the show; there’s all these different ideas that we’ve had that we think about. Okay what are other income streams? And at some point as entrepreneurs, you get all these ideas, and you want to go after them all, and it’s really hard to pick and choose because it’s just so fun to think about doing every different one.

Or maybe you’re afraid of choosing the wrong one if you don’t try them all. There’s all these different kinds of things as entrepreneurs that push us in different directions. But it’s always when you focus, and are very specific, and pick maybe the one or two things you are working on the most that we’ve seen the most progression for ourselves, and for others.

So how do you pick and choose when you’ve got all these ideas and opportunities coming at you, and somebody’s like, “Hey! You should write such and such e-book, that’d be awesome!” And you’re like, oh that’s a great idea, and then you add that to the list. And suddenly it stacks up to be way too much.

Well something I like to do especially at the beginning of a new year, but even sometimes throughout the year to recalibrate is, I’ll do a whole spreadsheet and I’ll list all these things out, and I’ll have all these different factors that I put out – things like how passionate am I about each of these things, and how much cash flow potential is there, how much work is it?

I come up with a rating scale, and I put it all in this matrix on a thing, and I can see how the numbers stack up, and then I can sort it in the spreadsheet and see what floats to the top, and then I see what kind of emotional response I have to what I’m seeing based on those specific numbers. And whatever process you use for you, there should be some kind of weighing out so that you can pick the one or two specific things. I mean we knew six months ago when we launched the Academy; we’re like okay, this is the thing that’s going to get all our attention.

We’re going to maintain the podcast because we have to, that’s our bread and butter, but this is what we’re focusing on – this is our vehicle, and we can’t get distracted. This is what we’re putting our time into.

Sterling: Yeah all the other things that were coming in like, should we write a book, should we create this physical course, should we do infomercials? Like all these different things, because you’ve got your goals set, you can take the list he’s talking about, and all these possibilities for this year, and we can look at that with our goals and go, which one is going to take us there, but also with what we’re most passionate about?

Jay: So recently posted in the Academy for the first time the actual template of the Excel spreadsheet that I use and video about it. And it works extremely well for me, so definitely if you have an Academy membership, you can check that out in the Rolodex. But again, whatever process works for you, there should be this step has to take place. Some kind of evaluation of the products, or projects, or vehicles that are going to help you move towards…through that backwards planning process that you did and eventually arrive at the income goals, or the ultimate major purpose that you’re looking for.

So now we’ve arrived at the sixth and final specific suggestion or tip that we have here. And this is really a big one, and one that I’ve been trying to implement for myself for some time, and maybe a couple years ago when I first tried to do this, I don’t know, maybe I just wasn’t ready for it. But it’s a big step, and you definitely you have to be very good at forming new habits. But it’s all about your time management and your productivity.

And one thing that we’ve just put together for ourselves and is extremely helpful, and already we’re seeing the results of how this is helping us out is to have a specific time budget, and time log.

Sterling: It actually makes me laugh, yesterday when we were going through the time budget, I mean there were times when neither of us are saying anything. We’re looking at it, and going, “Wow. That shows everything!” Like instead of going okay, because as a ‘solo-preneur,’ somebody that works from my own house, there’s nobody telling me what I have to do at any given moment, there are times when I’m like okay, so what’s next?

And a lot of times rather than choosing based on something like this, like this time budget, or this log that will show, okay here’s what I’ve got budgeted when I planned it earlier. Knowing full well my goals and what needs to happen to make those goals, instead of doing it that way, I would normally go, “Hmm, what do I feel like doing?” And then suddenly I would think of the latest episode of some show that I wanted to watch. Or I wouldn’t mind watching Deadwood again, that’s what I feel like doing!

So I mean it’s like when you’ve got that time log and you use it especially with a calendar, I mean I use it with the Google Calendar now. I’ve got that all plugged in so I can just say oh, it’s almost 2:00, and 2:00 is traffic generation for two hours. But it was just funny to me that we’re both just sitting there, and I’m going wow, I don’t know what else to say. It’s like taking it all to the next level.

Jay: Yeah and maybe some people if they’re still trying to grasp what it is that we’re talking about, let me try maybe another concrete example. Let’s say that you have part of your definite major purpose and your lifestyle design, and let’s say to own a home of your own in a specific place. So you know that that’s there, and you have that, and you visualize it. And then you backwards plan, and you decide okay, what has to happen is we need to tuck away $500 a month to save up for the down payment, and whatever else so we have the money to buy new furniture for the house or whatever. So you come to that point.

It doesn’t do any good to just say okay, we need $500 a month. And then you go about your life, and you get your paycheck, and you throw it in the bank, and you feel like going out to eat tonight and you do. And then you go and you buy yourself your new game console, and then next thing you know you’re like, I thought we were putting $500 away, but you’re not.

If you’re not tracking it, how do you know? And so really, what you’re probably going to need to do is put together a money budget. So it’s like okay, we plan on spending this much on groceries, and this much on rent, and this is how we are going to have that $500 left over. And then we’re going to put it in this account and not touch it. So there is a plan and process, and a tracking – a tracking and a planning before the fact, and then a log after the fact so that you can actually see it happening over time.

So take that kind of a budgeting thing, or one other quick example would be weight loss. Well I know I want to lose some weight this year, and I’ve found a vehicle, a certain diet I want to do, and I know I’ve got to have a certain percentage of fat in my diet, and a certain percentage of protein, and a certain percentage of carbohydrates.

Well how am I going to know that unless I’m actually mindful of it every day, and I have a way of tracking that out, this food budget that I’ve put together for myself so that I can see okay, yeah, I budgeted my meals right. I did so much fats, and proteins, or whatever.

So I’m trying to give some concrete examples, okay now bring it back to the time thing. Well the first step of all this, I mean if this idea is overwhelming you, the first step of all this and we highly recommend doing…and we’ve talked about on Internet Business Mastery as much as two or three years ago is just keeping a time log at least after the fact of how you did use your time, so you know where your time went.

So whether it’s on Google Calendar, or a myriad of other cool programs out there that you can use, so you can go back to the day and go…okay…one of the reasons I did this was just so I could know okay, it’s been eight hours, I can stop working now, I need to stop working now, so I don’t end up working twelve or fourteen hours, but that’s another topic.

But just find some way to log your time. That would be at the very least a first step. Well and then to take that to the next level, it’s like okay, well before the fact planning out how you’re actually going to budget your time. If we had this income goal for Internet Business Mastery, and we know that we have to get so much traffic increased every month and so many JV partnerships every month that are going on, then what kind of time input is it going to take?

Last two months Sterling and I, we’ve been talking about JV partnerships, and we’ve done a few things here and there, but we’ve looked back to the two months and we’re like, how much time did we really spend on JV partnerships if they’re so important? And we’re like oh dang, maybe a couple hours in the week or whatever. And it’s like, that should be 25%, or 35%, or 40% of our time if it’s like the critical thing for reaching our goal.

So now we had this whole custom spreadsheet we put together, and every week it’s planned out. It’s like okay, this amount of time for this task, and we’ve the outlining of the podcast, we’ve got a recording of the podcast. We’ve got this, that, and the other, and it’s like okay, and this is going to leave 25% of the time, and we block it out. So I can like, it’s like okay, for this week on Thursday I have a 2 ½ hour block to just do JV launches or traffic generation.

And so now you’ve got that thing to gauge against, and this does many, many things for you. It keeps your tasks from expanding to take more time than they should. It forces you to renegotiate, you know if all of a sudden we want to take a trip next week to go to a conference, we have to look at that time budget and go okay well, what are we going to give up?

And so going back to the buying a house example, if you’re putting $500 a month away, but now all of a sudden you really, really want that big screen TV, well it’s going to force you to negotiate and go to your budget, and go okay, if we want this that bad, what are we going to give up? Or are we going to not do the $500, or whatever…so it forces you to renegotiate.

Sterling: Well and the cool thing about this is too when you’re looking at it, you can make decisions so clearly, it’s not based on your emotions in the moment. And when I said that at the beginning of this little part, when I looked at this thing and was just like, we’re both quiet just looking at it going, wow. It was because now there is no doubt in my mind we can achieve all these goals, because we have every single thing in place.

We clearly know the path, we know exactly what needs to happen, and then when you’re dealing on a daily level, you can see – here’s exactly what needs to happen. Four hour block needs to be put here to do this, and if we do that every single day, this can happen. And if we don’t, instead if we’re like yeah, today I’m not feeling it, and I’m going to go do something else, because you just don’t know. Then obviously you can’t achieve those things, I don’t know, it was very, very exciting this final little leg of it all, because all the other stuff was in place. It’s just like taking everything to that next level.

Jay: Absolutely, and it’s one of those things that now I’m doing it, I’m like man, I wish I’d done this a long time ago. And everything is done in moderation, and of course you have to form some very good habits to stick to something like this. But this is the kind of thing we highly and strongly encourage people to work towards because…if you’re wanting to lose that thirty pounds, and it’s just not coming off, you’ve got to have some charts to look back and look and go, okay why is this not working?

It’s like well, I guess I’m not actually working doing as much exercise as I knew I needed to, or man I’m eating 60% carbs when I knew it needed to be 45% or whatever. You’ve got to have something to look so you know why. Otherwise you are just guessing, it’s like well if we’re not making the money in our business that we want now, well why is that not happening? Well now we can look at the spreadsheet and go wow, I’m only spending only 5% of my time on marketing, I guess that can have something to do with it.

And it’s very easy to lose track and maybe even delude yourself a little bit about what’s going on in actuality. So tracking is the key to life! I think I Skyped that to you earlier. It’s like man, I’m realizing tracking is the key to life. And maybe this sounds very Type A, but and here’s the problem. And this just really came to me, I mean you mentioned how you had this conflicting definite major purposes, and I think sometimes when I thought about planning my blocks out ahead of time or maybe that requiring me to want to get up at a very specific time every day, I think that was conflicting with a part of me who was like, no my definite major purpose is just to be free as a bird, and feel like I can do whatever I want.

Sterling: If I want to go to bed even later I can, if I want to do anything.

Jay: You know what? Right now I just really want to read this article on this blog that looks like that’s going to change my life. It’s like whatever, just your whims. And certainly more freedom is what we’re going for, but we’ve got to keep that in check, because if I’m just trying to be as free as a bird right now, and not have to worry about oh planning my time, well then what do I want more? Do I want to achieve that lifestyle back in New York, do I want that? Or do I just want to be able to get up whenever I want, and spend my time however I want, and just stay where we’re at. So you’ve got to decide, you’ve got to renegotiate those purposes with yourself and make those decisions.

Anyway, I guess that’s a lot right there that we’ve talked about.

Sterling: We’ve went on and on…

Jay: As you can tell, we don’t feel strongly about this at all.

Sterling: Nope.

Jay: So quick review here, the six specific steps for making 2009 the best year ever. Number one, review and refine your definite major purpose and your fulfillment factors. And if you want some examples of that go to InternetBusinessMasteryAcademy.com, and the information page is listed right on there, and on the information page our DMPs and fulfillment factors.

Number two, review and refine your organization chart.

Number three, set some specific income goals.

Number four, backwards plan so that you can reach those goals.

Number five, evaluate the products or the projects, or the vehicles that you have at your disposal and pick the one maybe two that are going to get you there the best.

And number six, create a time budget or a log so that you can track.

Because reaching that definite major purpose, reaching those goals, it’s all about daily action. It’s all about then how do you spend the time, and what are the activities that you do, and are they matching up? And if you don’t track that, then you will not be able to know, you will not be able to make that progress. So come up with some kind of system, and we’re definitely going to put together for the Academy members a video and some examples related to this time budget, this custom time budget thing that we came up with.

So you can be watching for that and the Rolodex in the near future. So there you go. We definitely want you to have the best year ever in 2009 when it comes to your life plan, your business plan, and everything that you want. And we definitely want to hear all about it as you move forward towards reaching those goals.

Sterling: Alright, now we want to know what you think. What is your most fulfilling goal for 2009? Please go back to the blog and let us know in the comments section.

Alright, as usual we have a couple of announcements, and the first one is – we are working on launching the biggest development for Internet Business Mastery since the launch of the Academy. And the best part about this is it’s going to be totally free!

Jay: Sweet!

Sterling: That favorite word – free! But we really, really need your help in part of this. And what it’s going to be is, it’s going to be an actual video show. It’s looking like it’s going to be a weekly video show, and we’re trying to figure out what to name this thing. We’ve got a lot of ideas, but we want your input on what to name this show.

So, if you’d like to help us name the video show, please go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/videoshow and there’ll be a little survey there to go ahead and we’ll have some names there that we are interested in, and we’ll even have a place if you’ve got a name that you think is better, that you can send that in.

And that’s going to be coming actually really soon. We’re going to be flying to Salt Lake, the studio’s in Salt Lake, so we’re going to be flying there every month to shoot this thing, and we’re going actually in a few weeks to do all the beforehand production. And we’ve got to have a show name, so if you can help us do that, that will be awesome.

Jay: Yeah, we’re putting some real time and investment into this thing, so we’ll see where it goes. But clearly there’s some opportunity there, and besides Sterling’s been itching to get back on TV ever since he did that episode of whatever show it was you were on!

Sterling: Although the one thing this has helped us both on as well as going okay, I think it’s time to lose that Internet Business weight. I don’t want to look like a complete bus on the show. So yeah, like on Twitter I’ve been talking about the whole “I want to lose 30 lbs by the end of February!” So it’s going pretty good so far, but anyway yeah, lots of stuff coming up with that video show.

Jay: Maybe I’ll even cut my hair, we’ll see.

Sterling: Crazy!

Jay: Alright, and then just wanted…had a cool in the sense of comments here…you posted that blog post about goal setting as a waste of time. And lots of great response to that, and then there was one cool one that came in from Lindsay B who’s actually an Academy member as well.

And she wrote, here’s a fragment of what she wrote, “Honestly the writing I’ve done to get to that point and beyond hasn’t really been in line with what I’m realizing my definite major purpose is.” I guess I should say I wanted to explain, Lindsay, she makes her money…she makes a good income from writing on several different blogs, has lots of affiliate income and stuff coming in from that.

So she’s doing well for herself, but she’s saying, “Honestly the writing I’ve done to get to this point and beyond hasn’t really been in line with what I’m realizing that my definite major purpose is. So what is my DMP now? Over the next couple years, I want to transition from making money from running advertising and affiliate programs on my site (in other words enriching corporations and fueling a consumer drenched society) and devote my time to teaching and doing work that matters.”

So and hopefully I’m sure she does have a good definition of what that means to her, teaching and doing work that matters. But, that sounds like a wonderful thing, and this is very cool because this is an example of clearly she is doing well for herself, and probably reaching the point that she has been part so far of making this all happen so she could have the extra freedom and meet her needs through her income.

But it sounds like she’s doing some refining of what that DMP means to her. And what’s so cool is that once you have achieved more control and freedom, and financial stability through having your own business, and you have the ability to do more things that matter to you or to society at large, when you’re in constant survival mode, just scratching by and all your time and energy is just drained by a job you hate or not making enough money to be able to really reach what you want to do, well then you’re in survival mode and you can’t do these things that “matter” nearly as much.

I thought that was a really cool interjection and sharing that she had there on the blog. So I wanted to share that with everyone here in the show. So thank you very much Lindsay for sharing that.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: Alright of this episode’s quick tip, we’ve got a new tool that coincidentally that both of us jumped on using this last weekend independent of each other. And then we talked on Monday, “Oh yeah, I just started using that!” And it’s a tool that we’ve been wanting to see something like this for Twitter for a long time.

Twitter is something that’s a micro blogging site, of course where you can post little short things. And I guess one way you can think of it, we always talked about how important it is to have your email list, and that’s like your key thing for connecting with community. But in a way, Twitter’s just a way to connect with maybe the hyper followers, the people who like to have even more insight scoop from you.

That’s one use for it, but anyway there’s been a couple drawbacks to Twitter in that sometimes you like to follow lots and lots of people, but I’ve always thought it would be really cool if I could break these people in groups. Sometimes I just want to go into Twitter and just catch all my friends and family’s updates. I’m not thinking about work and stuff, I just want to know what’s my family up to, what are my friends up to? Because a lot of them use Twitter.

And sometimes it might be cool to be like hey, I’d like to know what the Academy members who are on Twitter are thinking or dealing with right now. So I can go and just see their updates, but up until now Twitter…and still on the Twitter site, it’s all just one huge stream, and you can end up with…I mean you definitely miss stuff, because you can end up with hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of updates that come through, and it’s just not possible to keep up with all of them, especially when you are as popular as Sterling is.

Sterling: Well actually to be honest, I wasn’t following as many people as I wanted to, because I didn’t want to get overwhelmed. Like I didn’t want to have too many people talking all day and not be able to see certain things, and now I can go back and follow far more people with this particular tool.

Jay: And the one other thing that was sometimes a frustration for me with Twitter was that sometimes…everyone uses Twitter a little bit differently, but sometimes it’s a chat platform, and I use it that way every once in a while. So people do reply to other people’s updates, and so you are looking through the latest stream of updates from the people you are following, and 50% or more of them are actually just replies to other people.

And depending on how much time you have, sometimes I go there and it’s like I don’t have time to be watching other people’s conversations. I just want to see updates, direct updates that people sent about themselves, not just a reply to someone else. There’s no way to filter those out.

Well now there’s a tool that helps you get past both of these things, helps you create groups, and helps you when you don’t have the time to look through everything, and filter out any updates that are replies to other people. And so what we’re using now to connect with Twitter and follow all our Twitter followers is a program called Tweet Deck.

Now ‘Tweet’ is the lovely word that both of us are such huge fans of. A Twitter update, a single post to Twitter is called a Tweet. What a lovely word! So a Tweet Deck is the deck on your computer, it’s a program on your computer where you can go and it grabs all of your Twitter updates and can categorize them for you.

And the cool thing is you can set up different columns with different groups, and so I can go through and I’ve created a group for Academy members. And so all of the Academy members there, updates are going into one column, and then I’ve got one for like Portland people, so that people I’m wanting to connect with and meet new people in Portland, they’re going in there.

I have one for all my family and friends, and so forth. So it’s very handy to have this broken up into groups so that like you said, depending on how much time I have, or what my purpose is at that moment, I can use the updates in that kind of a meaningful way. And then you can also create a watch window and filter things out. So you can create a filter that watches for certain words, and only brings up Tweets that are mentioning certain words. So if there’s a hot news story you want to see what people are talking about or if I want to know every time somebody mentions Internet Business Mastery, I can have a column that brings those up that way as well.

And I can filter out, I can have a column that filters…if I go and I want to see, right now I don’t have time to watch all the conversations going on, so filter out all the replies so I can get rid of the replies and just see actual direct updates from people. So it’s been very, very handy and has been tremendously streamlined. Our usage of Twitter…now the only danger is you don’t want to leave it up all day long, because by default it makes noises and puts up notices. And so definitely turn those things off and don’t have it sitting there staring at you as a distraction. You need to be judicious, Twitter can definitely be a waste of them, but however it’s an incredibly powerful tool when used well.

So we highly recommend checking out Tweet Deck as a tool for using Twitter. Is there anything else in particular that you liked about it Sterling?

Sterling: No, those are the things that I do as well. But I wanted to also mention that if you’d like to follow us on Twitter definitely find this episode show notes, and I’ll have links there that will help you go follow each one of us.

Jay: Absolutely. So to find Tweet Deck you can go to www.tweetdeck.com and it runs off of the Adobe Air platform or whatever. So it will work on both PC and Mac which is pretty darn cool too.

So give that a check out, that’s this week’s quick tip.

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!