Escape the 9-to-5 and live the lifestyle of your dreams by transforming your life's passion into an extremely profitable internet business—Start your Online Business now.

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This is Internet Business Mastery, episode #59.

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’re here to help you escape the ‘9 to 5,’ and live the lifestyle of your dreams by turning your life’s passion into a profitable internet business, even if you’re just getting started today. Now on this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we’re going to have the first part of a new series we’re doing called “The Online Business Blueprint,” which is basically going to be how we do our internet businesses step by step. How awesome is that?

Jay: We’re kind of going back, I think we did we did way back in the first year of Internet Business Mastery, a series – it was like a four part series on launching an internet business. But clearly since then we’ve done all these coaching courses, we’ve got the Academy, refined our system even more, added more stuff.

We thought it’s probably time we kind of gave the ‘A to Z’ step-by-step process over again. So here it is, and it’s going to be some good stuff.

Sterling: Yeah, and then also in the Quick Tip, we’re going to have a resource that will deliver your media and content faster to your community. So it’s been a tough couple of days with decisions and all this kind of stuff, so what’s been going on for you with this Jay?

Jay: You know, it’s pretty crazy, I can’t believe some of the sudden 90 degree or even steeper left-right turns that our businesses and decisions have made here. But it’s a testament to the whole lifestyle design thing, because whenever you come down to these hard decisions, you just bring it right back to that – the definite major purpose, to your fulfillment factors, to the lifestyle design that you’ve drawn out, and you just litmus check it.

You go okay, am I really taking this in the right direction? Because you know, you get going at the light speed as an entrepreneur, all these opportunities coming different ways. You are around exciting people with exciting things who want you to be a part of it. You come up with ideas of your own, and try to put them all into the fire at the same time.

And then next thing you know, you’re like wait a second. And every once in a while you’ve got to step back, and hopefully yank yourself out of a tunnel vision. And so it’s been a couple days of doing that for ourselves. But I feel good about the decisions we’ve made.

Now we’re not going to go into any specifics right now, but we’ll definitely be talking a little bit about some of that stuff in the near future. But anyway, just to emphasize again the importance of lifestyle design. I mean what it came down to for us in these decisions was look, like we’ve worked so hard to build this brand, and a certain way of doing things on our terms to have the life we want.

And so this opportunity A, B, or C; are these things really furthering that thing that we’re ultimately going for? And sometimes that leads to some hard decisions, but they become a lot easier when you’ve got that all laid out in front of you, that’s for sure.

Sterling: Yeah definitely, when I look at a decision now, I can look at my definite major purpose and go okay, one of the parts of that purpose is freedom and teaching freedom. So does this fit in with that? Am I creating myself a job, or am I creating more freedom? So it just makes it so simple to say oh, well that’s a yes or a no. That’s it!

So yeah, that helped a lot with the decisions this week that we’ve been making as well, and even what direction to take certain other parts of our business, so yeah, sorry to be kind of cryptic about it. Mostly the point about this is that once you have a definite major purpose, it helps you design your life. Then when decisions come in, it makes it much, much easier to actually decide what to do because you can see if it’s bringing you closer to your lifestyle design or further away.

Jay: Yeah, and incidentally that’s in the first part of this blueprint. And we’ll be talking more and more about that. So it all ties in together really well, so we’ll be going into this more. It’s not something that’s not just step one into online business blueprint. It’s something you do in step one and you refer back to all the time.

But I guess with that said, that may be the perfect time to go ahead and jump into our feature segment, and start going through the online business blueprint.

And now the featured segment…

Jay: Okay, so it’s time to dive into the newly updated online business blueprint. It’s going to be a multi-part series. We’re going to go through the eleven steps – the eleven specific steps that you can take to go from just starting out, to a successful and profitable internet business.

And this is the exact system as we apply it to our own businesses, and also an overview…and obviously in not quite as much detail, but definitely an overview and step-by-step laid out blueprint for you as we do it in the same order inside the Academy as well.

So as we already kind of intimated, step number one of this online business blueprint is to design your ultimate lifestyle. And so, maybe we should talk just a little bit more about why lifestyle design is important. But as we kind of already stated, it’s just that beacon, that litmus test, that thing that…the whole goal here is to find more freedom in life, find more fulfillment in life, to create something that you enjoy in life, rather than being beholden to a job, or a boss, or a project, or things that just don’t bring you what it is that you’re looking for, and ultimately end up making us feel like we’re settling, or making us feel like we’re trapped in circumstances that really we don’t like.

And too many people just put up with that, and deal with the status quo. So the first step in yanking yourself out of that is to decide well, what do I want my lifestyle to look like really? If I’m not ruled by the status quo, what would I want it to be like? What would I like it to look like?

And part of what we want to do here in Internet Business Mastery is to help people to realize – it’s like look, you can make those things happen. You can design those things in your life and have many of the dreams, and aspirations, and fulfillment factors that you’d like to have in your life, and that the life that has been dictated to us by society is sure, one way to go about doing things.

But the whole thing of oh, you’ve just got to buckle down and get your degree, or go get a job and work ‘9 to 5′ for 50 years, and then you can finally retire – that’s not what we’re subscribing to here. So how do you design a lifestyle that’s outside of that particular mindset or paradigm?

Sterling: Yeah, really the first question that is out there when you’re designing your life is, what kind of life do you really want? Now most of the people I know, and I hadn’t done it until this whole internet business world opened up to me, and I had to finally ask that question. But this is a huge question, and this is the question that we talked about in the last segment – the chit chat where you will come back to this over and over again once you actually design what kind of lifestyle you want.

And it’s like what kind of life do you really want? Do you want to trade a day job for a job you own, where you are working twelve hours a day? Now, as much as I’m kind of making that sound crummy, some people do it. And they love it, and we have a friend that works twelve to twenty hours a day in his internet business, and absolutely loves doing that.

For us, we kind of wanted to create a business that lets us live the way we want to. Like have location independence, work wherever we want. Jay’s been a testament to that, traveling all over the world living wherever he wants. Time independence, work where we want, we wanted to work less – think kind of ‘The 4 Hour Work Week’ book. And we also wanted to have the ability to outsource as much as possible.

It’s very important to think of all this ahead of time. And my example of when you don’t think of this is, when I started, I actually did an eBay business that meant shipping out manuals and educational CDs, and the like. And that created the fact that I had to ship every single day, and I had to actually make the CDs, print the manuals, put them in binders; all that kind of stuff.

And in the end, the more successful I got in the business meant the more work I had to do, because I was doing it all myself. And I hadn’t thought it through and actually designed the lifestyle, I was just like, “I’ve just got to make as much money as I can on the internet to make more money than I did in my job.” And I just didn’t think it through, so I ended up, the success I actually got ended up being more of a burden because I was working way more than when I had a regular job.

And it was because I didn’t think it through, and actually ask that question – what kind of job do you want? Or what kind of life do you want, and what kind of lifestyle do you want to live on a day to day basis? And then design a business around that.

Jay: Now if somebody’s listening to this and thinking, okay, cool, how do I go about defining my own definite major purpose, and my own fulfillment factors, and my own lifestyle design? Now we do have ‘The 3 Pillars of Lifestyle Design’ audio that’s available at the website. So if you go back to InternetBusinessMastery.com and sign up for our free email newsletter where we send you tips every week, you get free access to that program that walks through very specifically the process that we use. And if even gives you a checklist and a worksheet to go through for designing your own lifestyle.

Well another piece to ask yourself, and once you’ve designed what that lifestyle you want is, well then you have to ask well, what’s the vehicle by which I can achieve that? Obviously we live in a society where yeah, you do have to make money. Now we do maintain, you don’t necessarily have to work dollars for hours, meaning you only make money for every hour that you work.

We do think that you can create something that you can actually work less over time, and even have it grow and make more money over time. But you need some kind of business, some kind of vehicle by which you achieve. You earn money, and hence then are able to leverage that money into the freedom and the lifestyle that you want.

Well obviously this is Internet Business Mastery, so internet business is that vehicle that we personally chose, and we think is one of the best ways going about designing a lifestyle of your own, because of the location independence that it affords you. I’ve been able to live wherever I want as long as I have internet access, to be able to go online and do my business.

A lot of times when I would talk to people in Buenos Aires, people would be like, “Well how can you live here for three months? What did you do? Did you get a job down here?” I was like, “No, I just have a business.” They’re like, “Well how do you run your business from a different country?” It’s like, “Well that’s the nature of the business, I have people from all over the world who work for me, I have people who are from all over the world who are my customers, and that provides the money for my lifestyle.”

It could be automated; it’s very profitable, especially since we’re talking here about information products, where people will pay for your expertise. People will pay to connect with an expert who will solve a problem, or heal a pain in their life or their business for them. This is the information age, and the cost to put together information products is actually very, very little.

You can make one this week versus some physical product that you have to prototype out, test out, and have something made up, and then tested again. When I worked as an engineer, it could be a year long product cycle to get something out. And that’s not the cast at all, it’s like you can make something quickly, get it to market quickly, adapt it quickly.

And you can mark it up – rather than two times markup, that stuff we made when I was an engineer – you can mark stuff up ten to a hundred times more than the cost it cost you to put it together, because it’s the information that people are paying for, not the physical thing itself.

Just all those factors come together to mean that internet business is an ideal vehicle by which you can provide for and create your ultimate internet lifestyle. Now another important piece of this first step of designing your ultimate lifestyle is the mindset shift – the thinking paradigm, the way you think, the shift or change in order to get into the right place to succeed in internet business, and to succeed in designing your own lifestyle.

And there’s all kinds of beliefs, and value statements, and things that determine how we behave, and how we think. And how we think determines how we behave. So things we’ve talked about on the show like money, how do you think about money? How do you think about your time and the value of your time? Do you believe that $10 an hour is all your worth, and your wage job is adequate?

Or do you firmly believe that you can be worth a $100, or $200, or $300 an hour? And that you can have a business that provides for that even without you having to work a certain amount of hours for that to happen. And of course we go a lot more into detail about these specific mindset things in the Academy, but we’ve also talked about them in the past on this show here.

So those mindset shifts happen by associating with the right kinds of people, reading the right kinds of books, being very self-aware, looking at the beliefs, and the fears, and the value statements that currently dictate the life that you have created for yourself, whether willingly or otherwise right now.

And what can you do to change the ones that are maybe preventing you from taking a step forward to what you ultimately want in life. So mindset shift is also key – continual learning, and self evaluation, and shifting of that mindset is going to be important in this process.

Sterling: Yeah, and really it’s so rare that online business educators ever even talk about something like mindset, and in fact none that we’ve found. Anything that we’ve went through, nobody ever spoke about mindset. And the funny thing is that I found that it was one of the most important things for me to handle, was my mindset about this stuff.

And even now, we both deal with mindset issues that kind of get in the way of going to the next level. But luckily, like we said, we know what our definite major purpose is, what we’ve designed our life to be. We can easily come back to that, and that helps make those decisions.

And really if you don’t address it in the beginning, then you won’t even know why things are getting in your way, or why you’re not allowing yourself to go to the next level because it’s just all these little mindset things that stop you from success sometimes.

Jay: Yeah, and not only look at them in the beginning, but then continue to at every step. Revisit and re-evaluate at times and say okay, has my mindset slipped back into a certain mode, or things like that? It’s a continual process, and that’s just going to be part of the cost of this journey, is committing yourself to that process as you move forward and incrementally go to each new step, and even leapfrog to much bigger levels of success in your lifestyle.

Sterling: Well and a good example of that is our new way of using our time, and using this very specific plan now to do time. We were very into that, let’s just say a year and a half, two years ago, we had all these time things in place and whatever, and then sometimes things just slip.

You know, like you were moving a lot, and I was getting ready to move, and things started slipping. And it’s good every once in a while to go hey, wait, the things that I actually put into place have now slipped and are really loose. It’s time to look at the way I’m thinking about that again.

Jay: Absolutely, that’s the number one step in the blueprint, is the lifestyle design element – design your ultimate internet lifestyle, and what you want it to look like so you know the goal that you’re shooting for.

Alright, so if internet business and information products are the vehicle that we’re going to use, then you’ve got to decide well, what is the market that you’re going to go into? And so, step number two is going to be choosing a profitable niche, or a profitable market in which you’re going to build your business.

And the thing that we talk a lot about here is you can take your passions, and your expertise, and your hobbies, and turn these things into a money machine, and even things that you want to learn more about. You’ll get varying opinions about how important passion is; we definitely put a lot of emphasis on that personally, because maybe we’re just passionate people in our lifestyle design.

But finding something that you can really just go after, and deliver incredible value within a certain market, and whether it’s scuba diving, or meditating, or macromay is another one we like recently just because it’s a cool word I guess. Whatever your chosen area, you might be thinking, well what do I know? What do people care? It’s like you know what? The world is a big place, and whatever your particular interest or expertise is, you’re very specific type of law that you practice, or your particular angle on freelancing and graphic design.

Whatever it is, there’s other people out there who are interested in the same things, who can benefit from what it is that you know. And people in this world are looking for leadership, they’re looking for people to stand up and go, “Look, I’ve got good information, here’s something you can follow, it’s a system, it’s proven, I’ve put it all together. I can be a trusted source.”

And when they find that, and attach to that, people will pay good money to have access to that kind of thing, because it solves a pain. It makes their life easier. So you choose a niche in which you can turn your passion, and your expertise, or your hobby, into a money machine for yourself.

Sterling: Yeah it’s funny because I’ve heard other people say don’t worry about the passion part. And like you said, maybe it’s just because we’re passionate people. But if I don’t have like a deep desire or passionate about something, it’s so much harder to trudge through some of the business stuff, and like it would be really hard for me to do business if I had to do all the boring stuff of selling diet patches, or mortgages, or something I have no interest in. It’s like call me crazy, but I want to have passion for my business, not just for the money.

Jay: And when we talked about that in the Academy, we had a couple of people go, “Well why isn’t money enough?” And in the beginning, I’ll admit, early on in my business sometimes it was like I just want to do the thing that’s going to bring me the cash fastest. But I’ll tell you, in my experience over and over again, when I’ve just chased the money, it’s not worked out nearly as well for myself.

So, that’s why…we absolutely talk about find a viable market, make sure it’s a market where there’s people who are ready to buy, and willing to buy, and have a need and a desire that they’re aware of, and that you have a solution for, and all those things. But it’s important to make sure that it’s something that you’re actually interested as well.

Now I won’t say that there’s not some business people out there who go ahead and just thrive off of chasing the money. And maybe you’re one of those kind of people, but a lot of the people – myself included, and both of us that we’ve associated with – have had that element of also finding something that they can sustain themselves with, because again it’s about lifestyle design and what’s going to fulfill you.

So if you’re one of those people who can be fulfilled just off of being a marketing junkie, and a money magnet, then maybe go for it. But obviously consider all of those things as you’re choosing what niche you’re going to go into. So this is all about choosing a market, and then offering incredible value to them. I mean we’re not talking about any kind of slick deals, or get rich quick, it’s about finding that niche, finding out something that they really want, not just something that you think that they need.

I mean this is the backwards process that we’ve talked about a lot of businesses do, they come out with, “You know what would be so cool? Here’s a great idea!” And they go make a widget, and then they finally put it out to the market to see what they think, or see if they buy, and it falls flat because they never actually managed to ask the market what they wanted first.

So we always advocate finding a need in the market, or more specifically, what a market wants – a want that they’re aware of and then finding a solution that fulfills that. And in doing that, you offer incredible value, and there’s a value exchange for what you’re offering in turn you get money, and attract a community to yourself as you build yourself up as an expert within that market. So choose the market first, and then choose your product.

Sterling: Yeah, and I think it’s much, much easier to offer that incredible value if you do have kind of the passion for the niche, which is why we kind of take that angle with all the stuff we teach. Because it would be so much harder for me to talk all about a diet patch that I maybe didn’t even believe in if that ended up being my market.

And I also wanted to mention about the ‘choose the market first and then choose the product,’ this just happened to me this week. An old buddy of mine came down from L.A. and wanted to talk business, and just chit chat. And we were walking around the beach talking about this new business idea he had, and he wanted to make it really big and had all this information about it, knew what he wanted to do with it. And we talked about it for a long time, then we came into my place and did a little research for him to see if the market was even viable.

And actually after all that talking, and all that time, we found that nobody was looking for that, nobody wanted that particular thing that he had. Now okay, two things happened with that. Number one, it sounds like kind of a bummer, because he really wanted to do it. But the great thing is, had he done it he would have been really, really sadly mistaken and put all this time and effort into something that didn’t work.

And we were able to in just a few minutes time research it, and find out that it looked like it’s not going to make him any money. So it could of saved him two years of trying to make this business, when it wasn’t even a viable business from the beginning. And that’s why you want to choose the market first, and then choose the product, because again, without that research he would right now be working on that business, and it wasn’t even a business that could make him money.

Jay: Yeah, and so many people dive right in, and maybe that’s just the entrepreneur mindset. And we absolutely advocate bold massive action, but a little bit of thinking up ahead can really save you a lot of heartache. But here’s another reason why we love internet business so much and that is that you can prove an idea so quickly. Even if you do take action and it tends to be a misstep, and sometimes it will be, you can recover so quickly because it’s not like you put out a ton of money to create the product.

It’s not like you put out a ton of money to get online, it’s not like you waste a ton of time seeing if anybody will buy. And if they don’t, you move on to the next idea. And that’s fine. A lot of successful people have done exactly that, had to move on to the next idea. And you know, I think a lot of people get just too hung up on this choosing a niche.

I know it seems like a very heavy idea, and you’re like oh, I want to choose just the right one, what if it doesn’t work out. Then all my hopes will be dashed, and then I’ll have wasted time and money. But you know what; it’s not that big of a deal. It’s so easy to stand back up, brush the dust off, and move on.

In practical terms, I know sometimes you can get your emotions all attached up, especially if it’s something you’re very passionate about, and you’re just really hoping works out. But I would encourage people to not be so afraid of this. And we talk about a whole list of factors that you can use in the Academy for determining if something is a viable idea.

And a lot of people say, “Well give me a formula so I can find out if it adds up to be more than the threshold of ‘x,’ then I know it’s a good idea.” But it actually doesn’t need to be that complicated. And you probably guess just by some of the things we’ve said right here, and in fact I’ll go ahead and list out several of the criteria we give.

And then of course if you’re a member of the Academy, you can go and refer to that whole long list of factors. But obviously one of them is, does the niche provide for your definite major purpose in your lifestyle design?

Number two is, are you passionate about it?

Number three actually seems a little bit negative, but actually is a pretty big one that we’ve learned to trust and use – and that is, what does your gut tell you about the viability of the niche?

Number four is, how quickly can you act on it, and see what the market tells you? I mean the best way to know is to just get it out there quick and see, does the market buy? And they’re going to tell you, and again, just making internet business lets you know quickly if that is the case.

Another one that surprises people sometimes, is their competition in the market? That’s actually a good thing. That means if other people are making money in the market that you can too. If you go and find that there’s absolutely no competition in the market, yeah maybe you’ve found a gold mine, but chances are that other people have tried and it just hasn’t worked out for whatever reason.

So that’s just a handful of the list of things, factors you can consider. But just diving in and doing some research on what people are searching for and looking for online, and you can find a lot of interesting information in this realm.

So that’s number two, choosing a profitable niche. Number one was design your ultimate internet lifestyle. Number two is choose a profitable niche.

Alright, number three – automate, and streamline, and outsource your business. Now this one’s a little bit of a strange place, because obviously you might be thinking well, I don’t have a business yet. How do I automate, and outsource, and streamline it?

And really the reason we bring this up in the Academy in the third course is because we want people to be aware of the type of business they should be building. Because too many people dive in and again, next thing they know they’re a year or two down the road, and they’ve just created a twelve hour day job for themselves, and they’re not achieving the lifestyle that they wanted because their business has taken over their lives.

So the more you’re aware of how to avoid that right up front, the better chance you have of creating business that is going to make you more money as you actually work less over time. So obviously your business needs to…you need to pick a business that’s going to fit your lifestyle. We both knew that we didn’t want to have employees that we had to go to an office and manage, or hire somebody to manage.

We have a team of over a dozen people who work with us all over the world, but none of them are employees. They’re all freelancers, and we’ve never met any of them in person, and that’s fine. That works perfect for us. And so that’s something in the structure of our business that we planned from day one.

So with every step basically, there’s this process of can I eventually create a system out of this that can be streamlined, and then maybe outsourced, and then even automated potentially through different systems. And that’s another reason we love internet business, there’s so many ways to automate the things that you do with your marketing, and your product fulfillment. And you can create a business that makes money for you at night while you’re in bed without any employees even working for you.

And so that’s such an awesome thing. So we create systems for everything. We create procedure lists for everything as we go along. So once something has been streamlined, we see is there a system we can use to automate this, or if not let’s go find somebody to outsource it.

So in the end, we are only doing the things that we really love, that we’re really passionate about. And if we find ourselves going, you know I really shouldn’t be doing this. I just don’t really enjoy it, we start thinking as quickly as possible who can we give this to? How can we hire somebody to take care of this for us?

So that’s why we bring up this automated streamline outsource, because this is the business philosophy that you should be thinking about right now.

Sterling: Yeah even just this week, we have a weekly meeting where we talk about all the business stuff and what we’re doing this week. And it’s becoming more and more a normal occurrence for us to go, what don’t I like doing? And okay, that’s three hours a week I put into something I don’t like doing, what do I have to do to get it to be to a Virtual Assistant so I don’t have to do it anymore?

And I honestly so wish I had of even known or even trusted that this works when I started, because there is so many things I trudge through doing. I mean I learned how to use Dreamweaver and HTML, oh my gosh. I wish I didn’t know any of those things. I wish I could have started with okay, I’m going to hire a Word Press guy from the beginning instead of me looking through how do I use PHP and all this stuff that I learned that I really absolutely did not want to know.

And now we have people doing all of that for us, so we can focus on the stuff that we really, really like. And knowing this again, at the beginning when you’re designing your business will help you so much more. I think I probably wasted two years easily of the three and a half I’ve been doing business, just on doing stuff myself. And still again, in our weekly meetings together we have to go, what am I doing that I shouldn’t be? To remind ourselves, we still don’t have to do stuff we don’t like!

Jay: Absolutely, just this week giving ourselves an extra kick in the pants again. I caught myself on a couple of things, so I mobilized three new people for our business this week doing different tasks for us. And I gave myself the challenge of, you know what? If I run into something like that that I start having that feeling of ‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ I gave myself the challenge to go and find somebody in fifteen minutes of less to take that over for me.

And actually I did it, one was through Elance, one was just through a Google search. We’ve used Twitter before to find people. Somebody we mobilized to work on stuff for us this week came from a referral from a colleague. So eventually you get to where you can add team members and even get rid of them if you have to very, very quickly. And that’s the kind of state that you want to be in.

So it’s all about building a team over time, and this is probably going to consist of freelancers, or Virtual Assistants to help you run your business. And again, our team consists of at least a dozen different people. Not a single one of them is an employee, and I don’t think we’ve met any of them in person actually either. We’ve chatted with them…

Sterling: I haven’t actually spoken to any of them; it’s all emails and IMs.

Jay: …or instant messaging. I think a couple I’ve talked to on the phone, and actually I did discover that one guy, the one that you got the referral for, he did tell me, “Yeah actually I met you once.” I was like, “Really, I’m not putting a face with the name.” He’s like, “Yeah, I was just briefly at a conference. I stepped out of the bathroom and there you were, and somebody introduced me to you, and it was like three seconds and that was it.”

So I was like oh, I actually have met one person. I mean he was in Ontario, Canada of all things, and it’s funny now he’s working for me. We have met that one…so I guess I have met one of them it turns out. But yeah, that’s the kind of team that you’re going to build for yourself.

So from day one you want to be thinking about that. Yeah, at the beginning you’ll be wearing a lot of different hats in your business, but we’ve got a whole mind map. We’ve mind mapped out a dozen different hats that we wear in our business, and the ones that we’re responsible for, and we try as soon as we can hand that hat off to somebody else, hand them the procedure list, hand them the system, and say here you go.

You wear the hat, and just report back to me so that I know that it’s moving forward like it should. So automate, streamline, and outsource your business as you go along, should be the ammo that you use. So there you go, that’s the first three steps in the online business blueprint.

Number one, design your ultimate internet lifestyle. Number two, choose a profitable niche. And then number three, automate, streamline, and outsource your business as you go along.

So that concludes part one in this brand new series, and the next part we’re going to go through another handful, probably another three steps in this online business blueprint to get your step-by-step from point A to point B, from A-Z. From starting your own internet business, so definitely come back next episode for all of that.

Alright, we’ve got just a couple of announcements for you this episode. First of all, we want to remind you we’ve put up a new page where you can quickly and easily go and connect with us on Twitter. The reason we encourage you to do so is because first of all, there’s a nice community of Internet Business Mastery listeners and Academy members forming on Twitter.

They interact there, but we’ve been shooting out questions and getting feedback on shows through Twitter. So that’s a great place to get your input on the show, if you’d like to hear about a certain topic, or if we put out a question – like what are your top questions about topic ‘x,’ then you can have a direct impact on the content of the show.

So you can go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/connect in order to get the quick and easy instructions to sign up for Twitter. And again, that’s free. It’s a free service, and extremely useful in many, many ways. So we highly recommend checking that out.

Sterling: Yeah, you might as well go there and see what all the fuss about Twitter is. Check it out and get involved.

Jay: It’s growing insanely fast. I mean Facebook obviously is still the king. It was surpassed Myspace and is the king of all social media networks. But Twitter is just blowing up. And actually right now, I tell people, well what’s the one social network I should start with? You should say just give Twitter a try, just because it’s so easy.

It’s so easy to just start out and start giving it some use, and start seeing some benefit from it. It’s a great place to get going in all this social networking stuff.

Alright, we just wanted to congratulate a couple Internet Business Mastery community members. In fact these are some Academy members who are letting us know about some success they’ve had recently. The first one is Kurt with UndercoverLawyer.com.

This was a breakthrough for January that he shared. He said on Christmas Day, actually it was the very end of December, he said, “On Christmas Day, received an email notification from Aweber that my list had 2,000 subscribers. I felt like having a list of 2,000 meant I was for real. So that Aweber email notification was actually my favorite Christmas present this year. And for me it felt like a big breakthrough into legitimacy.”

That’s definitely a great milestone, I’ll tell you, 2,000 subscribers does take a bit of time to build up, but I know some people making some decent money with even a couple thousand subscribers on their list. So that’s no small achievement, and definitely worthy of congratulations. So thank you for sharing that with us, Kurt.

Sterling: And also D. Williams said, “My breakthrough is that I quit my job! It was completely bringing me down. I’ve been learning from you guys for about a year and a half, and I have two products already bringing in some income. Fortunately we have enough money to give me several protected months to really get my income into the green.” Congratulations. Quitting your job is the big thing, so big, big congratulations on that.

Jay: Yeah, we love hearing about that, and it seems in the last couple months, and especially now that the Academy has been around for a few months, it’s definitely increasing the rate in which we hear about people’s personal independence days as we like to call them – their Independence Day. Mine was August 15, 2005, is that right? Nope, 2003. What year are we in?! 2003, August 15 is when I quit my job.

So I’m at about five and a half years right now. But it’s still very exciting to hear about…I can still remember what it felt like on that day. I love hearing other people who achieved that same milestone for themselves.

Sterling: Yeah, mine was October 15 of that same year, although it took me another year and a half or two years to even get into internet business. I was doing something else first. But yeah, I remember that weird feeling I had driving away from the dream job that had taken me like seven years to finally get. There I am driving away going, “I’m outta here! I quit!”

Jay: And look at you now.

Sterling: Look at it now, yes!

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

Jay: Alright, in this episode’s Quick Tip, we’ve got a resource for you that’s going to allow you to quickly deliver your content, your media and content faster to your community. Of course when you’re doing a lot of audio and video and even images to some degree, it’s important to deliver that content quickly to your audience. If it takes a long time to download, or to stream, or to start up, it can be a downer on the whole customer and user experience, and maybe scare visitors away from your site.

So we’re getting to the point where just the amount of content that you have on your site is becoming significant. It’s a very important part of what you’re doing then you might want to consider having a special place for just serving your media out to your audience. So what I mean is you have your host that hosts your website, and then you have another place where you host your media.

And another thing that this does is it just speeds up your overall site, because for instance if you’re running WordPress on a host, then that host has to bring up WordPress, has to go to the database and grab all the different posts, and it has to bring up images. And then if it has to go and grab media at the same time, it’s got all these different jobs it’s trying to do, and it can kind of slow the overall process down.

Especially if you’ve got a podcast and you release a podcast on a day and throughout that day lots of people are downloading the podcast. You might start seeing that lag happen. So one thing that we’ve started doing is hosting the media, audio and video in a separate place from the site itself.

And we did that from day one with the Academy, and it’s definitely made it easier to deal with as well. So a very popular place for doing this is AmazonS3. And you might be thinking, well isn’t Amazon a book seller? Why are they hosting media? Well as you can imagine running the largest retailer online is not a small job, and they have tons and tons of infrastructure. And they’ve figured out how to deliver things quickly, and they have lots of servers and probably stuff that they’re not even using part of the year, because they’ve got to be prepped for Christmas when they do need all that infrastructure.

And so they’ve come up with some very interesting services that business, and web developers, and websites can use to host and run pieces of their website, to help speed things up. So S3 is kind of like a little storage place, you can use it for whatever you want. You can use it to backup stuff, you can store your media files there. That’s what we do, we store media files.

So AmazonS3, we’ll have a couple of the resources that tie into AmazonS3 over the next couple of episodes. So if you want to check it out, go to Aws.Amazon.com/S3. ‘Aws’ stands for Amazon Web Services, and S3 is the name of the service. So Aws.Amazon.com/S3 is a recommended resource from us for hosting your media so it can be delivered quickly, be downloaded quickly, and streamed quickly to your audience.

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!