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

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This is Internet Business Mastery, episode 57.

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.

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, even if you’re just getting started today.

On this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we’re going to talk about mastermind magic, double your progress with a power pier group, and a quick and easy way to make your blog posts really pop.

So what’s going on Jay?

Jay: Just like that huh? What’s going on?

Sterling: That’s it!

Jay: I can tell you exactly what’s going on, and what’s been going on because I have it all right here. Not only in my Google Calendar, where I have logged my time day to day, but also in my time budget where I plan my time beforehand exactly what’s going to be happening over the next month.

And I gotta tell you, I cannot say enough good things about this new time management and goal setting system that we’re both using for Internet Business Mastery. And I kind of chuckle, because it’s like five and a half years of being on my own, doing my business, being entrepreneurial without the ‘9 to 5,’ and this has plagued me for five and a half years, and it’s about dang time I figured out how to get past.

I mean this solves so many things for me, and it’s about time is all I can say. So, I’m just thrilled about the way the days zip by, the way I feel about the productivity that’s getting done, and the way we plan out these priorities, and make them happen.

I don’t know, I guess why, I guess before I just felt like on planning ahead too much is going to be counter to the freedom that I’m looking for as an entrepreneur in my business. And it’s not at all the case, I feel more free than ever now with my time. And so we talked a little bit about some of the stuff in our last episode, but I guess I’m just hitting it home again, because it’s freakin awesome.

Sterling: Yeah, I completely agree. And it’s funny because we’ve gone through several kind of time management periods in the business where we’re like okay, we’re going to do this, and this way, and blah, blah, blah. And it finally I guess fizzles out each time because of that mentality of hey, I don’t want to have a schedule. That’s crazy! We’re supposed to be internet entrepreneurs where we can do it whenever we want. But what ends up happening is I end up spending half the way it feels like even when I’m not doing work, like even if I go for a walk or a bike ride, or go to the gym or whatever, I’m thinking of oh, here’s ten other things I need to do.
And I wasn’t keeping track of wow, I didn’t just work two hours, I worked seven, and I’m still thinking about it all day. And then that stuff kept happening and now it’s so beautiful to just have okay, I’ve got today, I’ve got a two hour traffic block. And ahead of time once a week I go through all the things I need to do, and I just put it all into the calendar. This traffic time, I’m going to get 500 more keywords, and then I’m going to do this, and then I’m going to do this, and then when I’m not doing it I try not to think about it as much as possible.

I love it myself, I know this last week I have to say our first full week of implementation on this whole time strategy thing I think has been the best week I’ve had in probably six months. I feel like I’m so laser focused, I love it.

Jay: Awesome. So I’ve got a question for you.

Sterling: Oh, okay.

Jay: What would be your top prediction for 2009?

Sterling: Well okay, I know that I see all sorts of people doing prediction shows, and my prediction is we will never do a prediction show. How about that?

Jay: That’s a good prediction, oh my god.

Sterling: I don’t know what it is, just prediction shows aggravate me to no end. Like I don’t really care about possibilities, I want to know what I can do now. So it’s like as of saying that, I want to also point out that you did a blog post recently about marketing opportunities for 2009 that are happening right now. Not predictions, what may work, what may not work. Make a prediction, and then three months later, the company folds and what a waste of time that’d be.

But I wanted to mention that the one specific thing that you mentioned on that marketing opportunities blog post was the iPhone apps. And since then, I’ve done a little bit of research on it, and it just blows me away. I’m completely excited about it, and it reminded me of an episode one or two back, we talked to Matt who does iPhone apps, and I’m definitely going to be contacting him saying okay, what do we do? I want to make an iPhone app.

I’ve got some ideas, what’s next? Help us out, because to me that’s one thing that is absolutely just exploding right now for sure.

Jay: And I’m looking here at Twitter right now, because as we record this, like right before we hit the record button, I put a Tweet out there that said, “It has to be said prediction posting shows are 90% useless,” and I’ve got a couple different responses here. One listener asking you, “Can you give me a little more detail on that?” Somebody else has re-tweeted it, that means they agree with what’s going on.

Somebody else talking about how we do a fantastic job of just giving them information that they can use, and I guess I’ll go ahead and expound on this listener here who’s saying, “Well can you tell me a little more detail on why you think that?” And it’s simply this, it’s that too often…I mean the formula we always try to follow is, tell them now why it’s important to them and what they should do about it next.

And certainly talking about trends and things that are up and coming, and bleeding edge, that’s all fine and great, but too often this rash of posts and podcasts and things that show up in January are more about what they hope will happen, what’s in their best interest to happen. I mean you can see the definite slant in their own personal biases and what they’re saying.

And I watched a video recently on YouTube with a bunch of predictions, and got to the end and I’m like okay, I can’t name one thing that you’re telling me what I should do now given that information you just gave me. And I think too often they do a disservice to the people who listen or read them, because you get to the end and of a sudden you feel frantic. You’re like oh my gosh, I’m going to miss out on something! I’ve got to do something about all these; I’ve got to tackle them all now all at once!

And so it’s like, that’s just not the case. Tell them why it’s important now, what they should do next. I’ve even made the point in my ‘Three Marketing Opportunities for 2009,’ it’s like you don’t need to do these right now. If one of these seems to resonate with you, pick one and go for it, and try it, and see where it goes for you. So anyway…

Sterling: Yeah, and there are things that can have action taken on them today. The moment somebody reads that they can go okay, I’m going to go try this. I’m going to go work on this, as opposed to you know in six months this might be something of value. Well so what? And the funny thing is we talked about and have been doing Twitter – you much longer than me – but we did it way before it became popular.

And the example is that a lot of the marketing guys came in and I would say, “Late!” or “At least for the early adopters.” And they surpassed us by 18,000 followers. And my point with that is, if you’re three days late, if somebody’s prediction actually becomes real, and you’re thinking wow, six months ago had I followed a prediction, I could have been in on…

We’re on the cutting edge of this stuff no matter what. Most of the people I know still don’t even know what Twitter is. So I mean, we’re still ahead of the curve no matter what, rather than wasting time listening to predictions and trying to go oh, what do I do with a prediction? But anyway, that’s just my little pontification about the uninterest in predictions.

Jay: Nice. Alright, end pontification and ranting, as much fun as that would be at times. It had to be said, like I said in Twitter. Alright, well, pretty excited about this episode’s featured segment, so let’s dive right in…

And now, the featured segment…

Jay: Okay, we’ve got another two part-er for you. When we started outlining this, we realized there was just too much to say. So we’re going to break this one into two, but it’s all about masterminds. We had a couple questions recently by email where people were wondering, how can I put together a good mastermind? And what’s the importance of it? And how do you run one to get the most out of it?

And so we threw down all the ideas we could come up with on the benefits of it, how does it work and the guiding principals of a good mastermind, and how you can find group members, and how you can put one together, and how you should run it. And in this episode we’re going to talk about the benefits and how it works, and the principles. And then the next episode, we’ll go into the rest of that.

But of course a good place to start would be the whole question of what is a mastermind? And the idea of a mastermind group comes from Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich,” which gets talked about quite a bit in the internet business/internet marketing/entrepreneurial type circles, because it’s full of a lot of great principles. But this is probably one of the most impactful for me out of the whole book is the idea of a mastermind.

And here’s actually a quote from the book. He says, “The coordination of knowledge and effort of two or more people who work towards a definite purpose in the spirit of harmony.” That’s kind of his definition of a mastermind. And he says, “No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third invisible and intangible force which may be likened to a third mind.” So it’s the whole ‘the whole is greater than the sum of the parts’ type cliché there that definitely applies to this type of a situation.

So we’re talking about a group of like-minded people coming together for the benefit of everybody, and kind of pool their experience and ideas for the benefit of everybody. And by coming together you all end up benefiting more than whatever it is that you have to put into this effort of being in a mastermind.

So let’s talk about the benefits then. We’ve jotted down several here that come to our minds. And number one would be that your income is directly affected by the type of people that you hang out with, and even the income of the people that you hang out with.

Now we’re not necessarily condoning snobbery or anything like that, but there is absolutely when it comes to the way you think, the way you act, the types of things you aspire for are going to be affected by the people that you hang out with. So if you aspire to be a successful entrepreneur with a certain income level, you should make sure that on a regular basis you hang out with those types of people and discuss with them, and are motivated by, and have an exchange with those types of people.

One of the second benefits is that there is an accountability and encouragement that comes along with being a part of a mastermind. Of course as an entrepreneur, we are solo-preneurs, meaning working at home alone, maybe sitting in front of your laptop doing your stuff. And we both try to get out and do our walks, or work at a café every once in a while, and all these different things in order to not feel completely isolated in our lifestyle.

But it’s nice to not have to work by yourself all the time; to actually have people that you can interact with for the sake of having some accountability. They help hold you accountable to your goals, and also encourage you in what you’re trying to accomplish. And of course that’s something that comes from being in an office setting with coworkers and things like that. And then also when you’re working on your own, you have to actually kind of form that group for yourself. It’s not naturally surrounding you.

Number three is you get to pool your experience and everyone gets to benefit from everyone’s experience put together and moves together faster. Because if one of you hits a brick wall, there’s a likelihood that someone else in the group knows how to get past, or has some definitely specific ideas to get past a certain hangup or potential pitfall that one person in the group may be having. So there’s an accelerated progress that goes along with that.

Sterling: Yeah the one thing I would say about this especially is, in the mastermind groups I’ve done it’s so great because, people have the different experience. So I’ll know how to do say membership sites and this and that, and I’m having a problem with something that’s completely unrelated that I’ve never taken the time to learn, and another guy in the group is like, “Oh that’s what I do every single day.”

I can go, here’s the ten things to do right now. And then I can exchange, “oh well have you thought of turning this particular product into a membership site?” or whatever, and we talk about that. It’s such an interesting thing, because the whole idea of pulling your experience, then I don’t have to go out and spend however much time he spent learning to become really good at whatever he does.

He can just tell me the “Cliff Notes” version of the last five months of knowledge that he’s gone out and seeked out and gotten, and just give me exactly what to do right now, or the fast way to do it. Or a lot of times in my groups, some of the things that are missing is social media, so we’ll talk about podcasting, and talk about different things that they can do right now with the social media stuff.

And then one guy, he knows how to do banner ads. So he’ll go, “Here’s how you do the banner ads, it’s really simple. Don’t do this, everybody teaches to do this, but don’t do that, do this instead.” Those are things, pooling your experience and knowledge, just sitting home alone or even with business partners – like we have each other, Jay and I have each other to bounce things off of. But still, we only have so much time in the day.

You add eight more members that are all doing completely different things, and now you’ve got the whole ‘two minds become a third intangible,’ now you’ve got twenty-five minds with just these eight, or whatever. It just keeps getting bigger and bigger like that. I love it.

Jay: Absolutely. Can you tell? Are you excited, can you feel it? Well and when you get all those minds together, obviously great insights are going to come up throughout an hour meeting discussing with those kinds of people.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my time – well there’s hopefully many things I’ve learned – but definitely one thing I’ve learned in my time as an entrepreneur is that often it can be one key insight that can just completely change things for you, completely take things to the next level, double your income, or whatever the case may be.

So when you are meeting regularly with that kind of mindshare – mindtrust sometimes people call it – the likelihood of coming across that one key insight you need for the next big leap just increases exponentially.

The fifth benefit is that you need objective input to protect yourself from your blinders, because we all have them. We all have our blinders, we all have our weaknesses, those things that we don’t see maybe just a bit of reality about ourselves or our business that we’re blinded to because we’re too close to it.

Maybe we’re too emotionally invested in it, and this is something I’ve learned…and I believe I’ve mentioned it on the show before…this is something I learned the value of when I was in a rock band with people and writing music together.

And we’d go to the studio to record the music, and for the first few years of being a songwriter and recording artist, I always felt like I had to be an island. I had to be the solo artist, and everything just came out of me and I was able to write all the perfect songs by myself and then go and finally tune them perfectly on my own in the studio.

And I finally figured out that there’s all these blinders I have about my music and my art, and as soon as I bring an external force, a producer….I mean there’s a reason why a producer separate from a band comes into the studio throughout the recording process. Because a producer is that third party, a more impartial person that can pull the best out of the music out of the band.

And all of a sudden I made big leaps in the product and the music that was coming out on the recordings when we started involving a producer in the process. And it’s exactly the same thing with your business, is that we need those objective sources of input to protect us from our blinders and help us see something that we may not be recognizing.

The sixth thing is that you get a boost of confidence about your ideas. I don’t think there’s anybody who doesn’t like to when they have an idea to at least get a little bit of validation from here or there, or bounce it off someone and have them go, “Yeah! You know what? That’s a great idea!”

And immediately your confidence is boosted and your motivation and ability to go and implement that idea is magnified by the fact that you just bounced it off a few people and had them go, “Yeah, great stuff!” and then forward you go.

The seventh benefit is that it’s just an incredible source of energy and motivation. I don’t think there’s ever been a time that I haven’t exchanged stories with entrepreneurs, or been at a conference, or even in a mentoring situation where I’m helping somebody out. It just gets me amped, it gets me pumped. Or when I hear somebody’s success story, these are the things that just motivated me.

When I hear that somebody’s done something and just succeeded at it, it makes me want to go and do the same. So anytime I’ve gone to a mastermind meeting, I come from those situations just with a great increase in energy and motivation to go forward in my own business.

Eighth thing is probably pretty basic, a need that a lot of us have, and that’s just a bit of social interaction. It can get a little lonely sitting at home as a solo-preneur working on your computer, and I think it’s a little healthy to interact with human beings once in a while. So having a reason to get out and talk to people is not such a bad thing. And so, social interaction is also a benefit of that.

Sterling: Well and for the first time I just kind of accidentally started a new mastermind group here in San Diego, because I left my mastermind group that I’ve been with for years in Salt Lake.

And I’ve been kind of looking of starting a more high end one here, and I actually got together with an SEO expert that I hang out with and another guy that has a five figures a month site that he does. And we all went and played Frisbee Golf which I guess they call Disc Golf, and yeah definitely I was like really, there’s such a thing as a course? Like an 18 hole course, like golf?

And yes there are; there are many actually down here. And so we all went to one and again, we’re all internet guys. And it actually happened naturally, we’re out playing Disc Golf, and of course it’s like four hours or something. And we actually didn’t do the whole thing because we started getting hungry and decided to leave.

But I ended up learning on the course, so now I get to play a type of golf. Like that seems to be the place you’re supposed to meet, and do all these type of interactions with business people.

Well I ended up learning a bunch of things about Twitter. I actually considered myself like really knowledgeable about how to use Twitter. And as we were all talking about what we did on Twitter, some things came up that I had no clue about.

And I’m like oh my gosh, here we are just playing, and we’re supposed to be out just having a social interaction, and it made me realize we should do this every other week, come play Disc Golf just to get out. Because of course here, even in January I think it was 82 or something on the course. And I was like, this is how the mastermind group should be at least every other time.

So we’re out, and we’re just having a great time just telling each other, oh here’s what I use Facebook for, here’s how I did this ad. The SEO expert guy, he was telling me a couple different things we could do with Internet Business Mastery that he saw that we’re not doing.

And he’s just telling me as we’re playing and having a great time, and of course we all have our iPhones. So every once in a while, we’d stop and I’d use the whole .com app and jot down exactly what somebody said to go do so that later I could come home and figure out all the things I was told.

And that was a social interaction as well as I’m getting like these great pieces of information that can actually make me more money, I love it.

Jay: I guess there’s a reason so much business is done on the golf course.

Sterling: Now I know actually since I don’t actually play golf.

Jay: If you can’t swing a club, maybe you can throw a disc.

Sterling: Oh it’s so much easier. The funny thing about it is, you have a different disc just like you’ve got clubs. Like I thought we’d just have a Frisbee and we’d be throwing it around. Oh no, there’s a Frisbee for long, then there’s a Frisbee for short, then there’s a putter. I mean some of these guys have six different Frisbees just to do one hole they still call it I think.

Jay: That’s amazing, I did not know that. There are all kinds of things right here on Internet Business Mastery.

Sterling: Exactly.

Jay: Alright, well the ninth benefit and final benefit we came up with here and this is absolutely one we’ve benefit from in Internet Business Mastery is just getting top notch recommendations for professionals that you can work with. I think we’ve found V.A.’s in the Phillipines through the mastermind group that Sterling was in, we’ve found copywriters, we’ve found accountants…

Sterling: Yeah, our tax guy.

Jay: Yeah, our tax guy. So if you need somebody to be part of your business team, it makes a lot of sense to just get a recommendation from somebody you trust who’s operating in a similar realm or on a similar level to you, and has had good experience with that person. It saves you a lot of time in that respect. So we’ve benefited greatly from that kind of information coming from mastermind groups.

So those are the nine benefits that we came up with, and we’re sure there’s other ones and would love to hear them from you if you have them. But as you can see, it’s a very beneficial thing to have a mastermind group to attend on a regular basis.

Sterling: Alright, so you might be wondering, how does the mastermind actually work? So here’s a couple of things that we’ve wrote down as to how the mastermind works. And the first one is, usually we meet in person, even though it can also be online through IM, or forum, or even by phone. And actually with the Academy, we’ve got a mastermind group that goes every day all day; you can just go in there and ask questions, and it’s through Skype.

And I believe one of the guys that set it up originally, he even does phone calls once a week. Another guy that knows how to do this whole internet business stuff, but definitely in person is best if possible.

So the ones that I probably got the most value from were the ones where I went there, I actually met the guys, we became friends. We see each other, and you get that interaction in person where after the mastermind group you can go do things, go have lunch – we do that all the time as well.

And even the big paid mastermind groups that I’ve gone to where there are eighteen people in it, afterwards we go to dinner, and everybody’s chatting, and everybody’s having a great time even after we’ve done all the business side. And you forge friendships and stuff where you can even do J.V.’s.

In fact, we’ve got a J.V. partner right now that I talk to all the time, his name’s Dean Hunt. And he does social media, he gets on the front page of Digg, and all these crazy things that he does, and he’s somebody we just hung out after the mastermind, and became friends. And now we’ve got joint venture stuff together, and there’s like this extra thing I think that comes with meeting in person.

Now next, generally a good mastermind, especially one where you’re going to do at least monthly would be two to eight people. That’s a good number, although I’ve been to one where we had eighteen people. But that was a little more formal, we only met once every three months, it was really targeted. It was an all day event; actually it was a two day event to be able to get through eighteen people.

Now if you’re going to do a smaller two to eight person one where it’s just local and you try to meet at least monthly or whatever, but there are different ways you can do it. You can meet weekly, obviously bi-weekly, or monthly. And monthly is really the minimum to getting this thing really flowing and really going. And you’re going to want to find people that are actually going to commit to doing it.

Because one of the things that I’ve found specifically is, we’ve found people every once in a while that would come to the meeting on the months where they were supposed to get help, and then they wouldn’t come on the other months.

Jay: Convenient.

Sterling: …which breaks the whole reason for doing it, because when it’s not your turn to kind of like get the help, let’s say every other month you can propose an idea or whatever, then of course they’re gone and we don’t get their help on the months they’re not there. So you definitely want to find those two to eight people that are really willing to come do it, and then just find the amount of time.

Like my one in Salt Lake, we went every three weeks. That was when we could all get together for, and it was really rare that if somebody was off at a seminar or whatever, then obviously we would either reschedule it if too many people were gone, or just every now and then that would happen, one person would be gone.

But it’s really good to find people that are going to actually be there every time. And one of the things that you specifically do is, you’re going to share ideas and goals to help everybody move forward. So for instance, one of the ways we did it is the first half hour (we would do it I think two or three hours depending on the group), but the first half hour we would all go around the room and say generally what was going on.

And then we’d actually do forty-five minute chunks where a person could teach something big they’ve learned recently, like some sort of traffic thing, or how they’re using V.A.’s or finding V.A.’s or whatever, and in our particular mastermind group, that’s always important.

Or they could tell a problem that they had, and that’s basically how it worked. They’d get about forty-five minutes to do that. So most people for twenty minutes would say, “Here’s an issue I have, what do you guys think?” And everybody throws out their ideas on how it works or what they think about that problem, or how to fix it. And then the other twenty minutes or so would be them saying, “Ooh, I just found this cool thing called Jah.com.”

And that was something we did over a year ago, and everybody got all freaked out about that, or some new place to find V.A.’s. And then it goes to the next person, and then you do two or three people depending on the amount of time you can have. And that’s basically how it works.

Jaoy: Very cool, and we’ll definitely go into some more details on how to run one, and set up the agenda, and some other ideas in the next episode. But hopefully by now you have and idea what a mastermind is, kind of how it works in general, and the benefits that you can derive by being part of a mastermind.

Now there are a few principles that you should be aware of when it comes to being part of a mastermind. And these are the principles – for the masterminds that have worked best for us – these are the principles that were common in each of those.

First is that it should be a balanced group in terms of the experience level, the income level. If it’s a whole lot of newbies and a whole lot of really experienced people – people who haven’t made a dime yet, and others making six or seven figures a year online, well then there’s going to be an imbalance.

And I think for obvious reason is kind of hard to make that work out. This is supposed to be kind of a meeting of the minds in a common arena where you’re kind of at the same level of experience and the same types of goals to move forward. So that’s one principle that’s pretty important.

It should be compromised obviously of like-minded individuals who are along the same lines, but you want to find people who have similar thoughts about money, and about life, and about business, and risk, and about goal setting.

If you think about some of the people maybe that you’ve talked to about your goals or aspirations, or things that you’re doing with internet business, there’s always those who are very intrigued, those who are very supportive, and then there’s those who are immediately naysayers and pessimistic, and don’t want to hear about it.

And so you want to…obviously the idea here is to be motivated and move forward together. And so you want to find people who have similar ideas about money and life, and business. There’s lots of networking groups out there in every city, you can find them. And they’re the groups that get together in the mornings, a lot of times they’re self employed professionals, and I’m sure those people benefit from those groups.

But if these are all people who are happy to work their ten or twelve hours a day as a professional and not looking to work less in the amount of time, and get more things done, and raise their income through internet business; well you know, it’s not going to do you any good to mingle with those people.

They don’t have the same kind of mindset about life goals, and money, and business, and risk. So you want to find people who are trying to aspire to the same types of things that you are.

Sterling: Although I will say this, not to take away at all from this, because you should definitely want to start with the like-minded, but once you find people who are like-minded…so for instance in mine, we all were doing Internet Business Mastery, we’re all generally positive people. But then there were still differing opinions about internet business.

So you kind of want that though, because we had people who absolutely believed in internet business real estate, where they had forty sites at any given time. And they were putting all their time into forty sites, and then you’ve got completely differing opinions of one guy that actually was making the most money, and he says, “I don’t believe in having multiple sites, I believe in making one the biggest thing ever” which he did.

The guy was crazy successful, and he had a completely differing opinion. But that’s within the fact that we were all internet entrepreneurs, we were all generally very positive about internet business, and we all understood that world. So it was kind of nice every now and then within that all of us being similar to have differing opinions and things like that so you can go oh, well which way do I believe? So just a little side note with that.

Jay: Well that’s an excellent point, I’m glad you made that point because yeah, if everyone’s agreeing all the time, then you’re actually not going to benefit and learn things. Yeah, you want discussion, and even disagreement sometimes. So yeah, that’s a good point between like-mindedness and the foundational principle, and then just a good healthy dose of differing opinions, and differing experiences that’s going to be beneficial to everyone.

Alright, another principle is that everyone needs to attend and participate. So Sterling already touched in this a bit, and it’s just really important for preserving the momentum of the group, that everybody be present. And so if there’s not this commitment, and it’s just like well, whenever I get around to it, or if it’s convenient.

You’ll find it’s really hard to maintain a mastermind if one week or one month, or whatever, there’s two people and the next there’s five, and then all of a sudden there’s certain people  who don’t show up for three more months, and all of a sudden they’re showing up with all their questions. It doesn’t work that way, so everyone needs to attend, and everyone needs to participate on a regular basis is definitely a guiding principle.

Okay, and the final guiding principle is that everyone should be obviously goal oriented, dedicated to continual learning, to continual progress. There’s different attitudes towards self improvement, and goals, and moving ahead in life; some people are just happy to go day in and day out and live their lives as is, and that’s what they do.

But if the goal overall for you being part of a mastermind or of a mastermind in general is for everyone to benefit, and grow, and move forward, and progress in their business, well then everybody needs to be the type of person who is goal-oriented and wants to continually learn new things, open to learning new things, and wants to progress in their business.

So those four basic principles being balanced in terms of experience and income, finding like-minded individuals, finding people where everyone will attend and participate, and then finding people goal-oriented and dedicated to continual learning. If you find those principles and use those as you put together and run your mastermind, it will definitely help you get the most out of your mastermind group.

Sterling: Alright, so we’ve got a question for you, and the way you can answer is you can go to InternetBusinessMastery.com and find the blog post for episode 57, which is what this is, and just make a comment there at the bottom of the blog post. And the question is: are you a part of a mastermind group?

If so, what benefits have you found with being part of a mastermind group? And we also have a take action here: start thinking now about what you’d like to get out of a mastermind group.

So next time in Part 2, we’re going to discuss several tips on how to find group members, as well as give a step-by-step process for putting together a group and running it successfully.

Jay: Okay, we just have a couple quick announcements for you. First of all, we are having the first ever in person mastermind meeting at Yanik Silver’s Underground. If you’re interested in participating in this first ever in person mastermind, where you can get together with Sterling and I, and talk to us one-on-one about your business, go to MeetSteringAndJay.com, and in fact you can even take part in that mastermind for free and we tell you how and all about it at MeetSterlingAndJay.com. That’s going to be limited to only five people, so you definitely want to check that out quick.

Sterling: Yeah and I think we already have three signed up, how many? We’ve got two spaces open left, something like that.

Jay: I think yeah, it’s running out quickly. So it’s definitely one you want to check out very quickly.

Sterling: First come, first serve!

Jay: That’s right! And then on the blog, we had a comment from Craig who said, “You mentioned in your last podcast, you were looking forward to going to more live events this year. If you could pick only one internet marketing seminar this year, which would you go to?”

And actually that ties right in to what I was just talking about, because we’re having the mastermind at Yanik’s Underground, Online Underground Seminar. If you remember last year we interview Yanik Silver, and we both attended his…in fact I flew back from Buenos Aires, Argentina to attend Yanik’s Online Underground Seminar.

Of course the answer to that question is going to depend on exactly what it is that you’re trying to accomplish in your business, but the answer for us is clearly Yanik’s Online Underground. The caliber of people that we met we’re able to network with, and even the things we learned at it, it was a thoroughly enjoyable and beneficial experience.

So if you want information about Yanik’s Online Underground Seminar, you can also get that at MeetSterlingAndJay.com.

Sterling: Yeah, and this is my third year, I’m excited to go yet again!

Jay: Awesome.

Sterling: Alright, so in response to my backwards planning goal video, Scott Smith asked, “Great and useful video, Sterling. Thanks! Just wondering, is there a reason you choose Mindomo.com over MindMeister.com? I’ve seen you guys recommend MindMeister.com before I believe.”

Okay, and these services are for mindmapping. And the reason we mentioned MindMeister before is because we can collaborate in real time, both of us. So I can be adjusting things on a mind map, while Jay’s also logged in on the same mind map making other adjustments to the mind map.

And we do that for our ‘Getting Things Done,’ our GTD meeting that we do every single week. We open up Mind Meister, and we go in there, and that’s where we do all of our planning. But when I’m alone, and it’s just me, I actually use Mindomo. And the reason I do that is because it looks and feels exactly to me as close as possible as you can to using a service called MindJet, and that’s a more expensive mindmapping program that you can get, a more high end.

And the Mindomo looks very similar to that, which on my destop now, which I’ve kind of gone away from; I have MindJet. And now I want everything to be online, so I’ve been using Mindomo a lot more. And the services are really super cheap, I can’t even remember at this time, I think Mindomo is like $6 a month at the most – something like that.

But that’s the reason I use the different services. Now again, if you’re going to collaborate with other people, that’s the whole thing with Mind Meister. And I just like Mindomo still.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: Alright, now we’ve got an Internet Business Quick Tip for you, this one’s all about a quick and easy way to make your blog posts really pop.  Well one of the things that you’ll notice that we do in every single one of our posts, or at least 95% of them is that we include an image. And it’s actually quite inexpensive to find top quality professional images, and legally (of course) get these photos that you can use in your own blog posts.

So what we do is we sign up for a service that for very cheap you buy credits, and now it’s gone up a little bit. It’s about $1.50 per credit, and you can spend these credits on professional stock photography. Stock photography’s just gotten really streamlined and inexpensive now to purchase for somebody like a blogger.

So the service that we like to use is iStockPhoto.com. And we just use their smallest, for using on the web, we just need their smallest image size, which is perfect for…in fact a lot of times I end up shrinking it even a little more to use in the blog posts, and it costs one credit. So for $1.50 per blog post, you can have an image to plug in there.

Now you’re thinking $1.50 for a blog post! But how many blog posts do you really put up in a month, and even if it’s ten, or twenty, or thirty, it absolutely seems like a worthwhile thing to spend thirty or forty bucks a month. And it’s not even that much for us, I don’t think. Just to really make your blog and your site more eye catching, because photo pulls people in, it gives a point of interest for your blog post, it gives immediate context to your blog post.

And like they say, a picture’s worth a thousand words, or a million words, or whatever the saying is. So we definitely highly recommend using photos or pictures in all of your blog posts, and the source again that we use and recommend is iStockPhoto.com

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!