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This is Internet Business Mastery, Episode 63.

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 as always, 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 we’re going to finally wrap up the multi-part series Online Business Blueprint, and this is part five. And in the Quick Tip, since we’re dead in the middle of seminar season. We’ve got a site to help you save big on airfare for any of your business travel to these seminars or wherever you’re going.

And also, so much of the first of a sudden, we’d like to remind you that if you’d like to get a jumpstart on creating your own profitable internet business using our proven system, claim your risk free trial membership at the Internet Business Mastery Academy by going to FreeAudioGift.com. Whew!

So Jay, are you still there?

Jay: After all of it, still here, barely.

Sterling: So what’s going on?

Jay: Well you know, something’s been on my mind lately, and that is wanting to check in with our community, check in with our listeners, something that we’ve always like to do now and again is to put a survey out there and kind of find out what’s on the mind of the people who are listening to our show?

And of course this is something we talk about a lot, the importance of finding out what your market wants and giving your market what they want, delivering incredible value to them, and that way your business is going to grow a lot better. And we realize it’s been a little while since we’ve done something like this, because incidentally we just did a segment in the Academy all about the importance of surveying and finding out what your market wants.

So I guess it dawned on us, hmmm, it’s been a little while. Maybe it’s about time to put together a little survey and put something out there, and find out what’s the latest thing on their minds? What can we do to take the content to the next level, or shift things a little bit and make sure that we’re addressing the main concerns and needs that our listeners have?

There’s a lot going on in the world, and in business, and in the economy, and people have a lot of different concerns and things on their minds. And we want to make sure that we’re doing whatever we can to help address those things in the context of internet business, and taking control of your finances and your life, and creating your own circumstances through the power of internet business.

So that’s what I’ve been thinking about, how does that sound to you?olHAfter

Sterling: Well yeah, one of the things as we were doing that piece in the Academy, one of the things that occurred to me was, we did the last survey I think for everybody maybe over a year ago or somewhere around a year ago. And it’s funny to think, but I can’t believe how much the world has changed in the last year.

Like a year ago everything in our business was about lifestyle, right? The Tim Ferriss’ ’4 Hour Workweek,’ and ‘create this ultimate lifestyle,’ and ‘live on the beach,’ and all this kind of stuff. Whereas now, especially here in the U.S. with the economic worries and all these banking frauds and other stuff going on. People I think have shifted out of ‘how do I live on the beach next week?’ to ‘how do I survive next week?’

Like I just watched all this stuff happen to my stock portfolio, it’s down by half. Like I’ve got family members that it’s almost wiped out their retirement fund. So they’ve got completely different issues now as compared to let’s say a year, maybe a year and a half ago. So we just felt that it was time to check in with everybody and again, help you direct us as to what direction you want us to go with Internet Business Mastery the podcast for sure.

Jay: Well there’s a big marketing lesson here, and that is, your marketing will always be most effective when there’s a good message to market match. And one of the key elements for doing that is as many marketers say…there’s a phrase that a lot of marketers, and salesman, and copywriters say, and that is, “You need to enter the conversation that’s already going on in your market’s mind, in your prospect’s mind, in your audience, your customer’s mind.”

So what are the things that they are already thinking about, asking themselves, and the worries and some of the trouble they have to surmount. You need to enter that conversation and then add to it. Of course in order to do that, you need to have a good sense of what that conversation going on in their mind is. And that’s definitely where surveying can really help out.

So with that said, we definitely feel like it’s time to reach out to our audience and in order to help us deliver better content to you, we’d love to get your input. So we’ve put together a brief survey, and this survey can be found at InternetBusinessMastery.com/poll – like taking a poll. And it will just take a few minutes of your time and it will definitely help us take the content of this podcast and make sure that it’s really addressing the needs that you most have, the things that you’re most thinking about when it comes to your life, your business, the things you want to achieve and how we can help out with that.

So please make your way over there and just take a few minutes, and that will just help this whole experience of Internet Business Mastery go to the next level and have this value exchange that takes place be even better for everyone involved. So that’s what we would invite the listeners to do.

Alright, with that let’s go ahead and jump right into the final segment of the Online Business Blueprint in our featured segment.

And now the featured segment…

Jay: Alright, so let’s finish up our series on the Online Business Blueprint. This is part five, and this is going to be the last two steps in what has been our whole process A to Z of how you can set up a profitable business for yourself.

So in the last segment, we went over steps eight and nine which were…number eight was all about email marketing and setting up your email list, to stay in touch with your market and to sell to your market. And step number nine was to start generating massive daily traffic to your site and products, and to build your list up.

Alright, so now today we’re going to go to steps ten and eleven. Ten is about product creation, creating a product that your customers will scramble to buy, and step number eleven is how to convert your site visitors into cash. And obviously that’s what we’re going after here is to make some money with internet business.

So product creation – some people might be thinking okay, we’re in the fifth and final segment and finally they’re talking about creating a product. It’s about time! And you know, understandably so you might be like, wow how did we get this whole way and not even have a product?

Well if you’ll recall we talked about how a lot of people do this backwards. The right way to do it is to find your market, then find out what they want and give them the product that will fulfill that want, give them something that they’ll scramble to buy. So everything up to this point has been about finding your market and establishing a relationship with them.

And when you do that first, well then the product creation, and the marketing and sales, and all that stuff is going to go a lot more smoothly. You’re going a lot more likely to hit it out of the park rather than have these duds and come up with this great idea you think is a perfect product idea, and then you put it out there just to find out it flops after wasted time, and money, and energy, and it just drains you.

That’s what we’re trying to avoid, that situation. So find the market first, and then find out what they want, and then give them that.

Sterling: Well, and at the end of this segment, we’ll tell you how to create the exact product that they want with no more guessing, and that’s a big, big thing.  A lot of people just go, “Oh, I’m going to make this for them.”

“Well how do you know they want that?”

“Well it seems right.” And believe me, in the Academy we talk about one of my friends that created a product and went through all this hassle, and time, and effort, and tens of thousands of dollars to bring this product to market and nobody bought it. And he wondered why. And when I said, “Well,  how many people said they wanted that product?”

And he said, “Oh I just figured they did.” Uh, painful, painful!

Jay: Well and you know, he wasted a lot of months of his life, and it’s unfortunate. It does not need to be that way on the internet especially. So we’re going for long-term viability here, that’s why we’ve gone in this direction. And again, it’s because a lot of businesses do this backwards.

We want you to have a business that’s going to be around for years to come, it’s going to find that loyal following and it’s going to make you more and more money as you work less over time. And so by setting up the foundation first in the right way, you’re going to be able to do that in the long term. So that’s what we’re going for.

Sterling: Yeah, definitely. Our specific strategy is about long term for sure, not just following some trend that will work for like six months or so and then disappears. And we’re really about talking about replacing your income for the job you have now and not just for a while, possibly for as long as you want to run the business.

So that’s the difference, there are some other systems where you do it super, super quick and you make some little thing that’s based on some little trend, and it might go away very soon. And you just keep doing that, and this is more of what we talked about is the ‘head of the tail’ product, the big empire that you have in place that can run with you as the expert and can be built up as big as you want it based on obviously the niche, and that it’s a long term thing.

Jay: So now, the beginning of this process is going to be to create a funnel. Now obviously we’re not talking about a literal funnel, we’re talking about what is called your sales funnel, or also we like to refer to it as the relationship building, community building funnel as well.

And so this gives us a visual…obviously a funnel has a wide top and a narrower bottom. And the funnel is a process that you step your prospects and your customers through that moves them gradually towards taking bigger, and more committed actions, and eventually spending more and more money, and become a lifetime customer.

And each step, there’s going to be some action that moves them to the next level of the funnel, it moves them down the funnel. Now some people are going to drop away at each step of the funnel. Some people might come and enter the funnel by opting into your email list, stick around for a while and decide no, this is not for me, I’m not ready yet, and then they’ll take off, and they don’t ever spend money.

And that’s okay, but the purpose of this funnel, this process of putting it into place is to filter out and find who are your best customers? Who are the ones who are going to be lifetime customers, spend good money with you, get great value from you, and become a loyal fan, and tell everybody about you? So every step of the way is engineered in order to identify and move those people through the process.

So at this point you want to be thinking about, and having an idea of how you want to progress people through your funnel, your products and services. And so to give you a little idea of what a funnel looks like, it’s going to start at the top just pouring in prospects, pouring in traffic if you will to your content and to your site.

So if somebody finds your podcast in iTunes, or they come to your blog on your site,  or they see a video in YouTube, they see somebody share something from you on Twitter, and that is their first connection, that first contact with your brand, your presence online. That’s when they enter into the funnel on the top, and the first action, the first step of the funnel is to get them to give permission to have an ongoing engagement with you in terms of either subscribing to your podcast, or your blog, or to your email list, or following you on Twitter, or friending you on Facebook – something where you’ll have continual engagement with them and be able to get more content to them, and establish the relationship and hence move them through the funnel.

Then at some point, they’re going to buy their first product. So we start with the free content, and for instance with Internet Business Mastery, that’s our podcast most likely and also our blog. But yeah, we get search engine traffic to our blog, we get traffic through iTunes and other directories to our podcast, people share our content on Twitter.

And they connect with our free content, they connect with out voices, they read our blog posts, they see what we’re about and they connect with that. And then we try to get them back to InternetBusinessMastery.com and opt in to the email list. So that’s the next step in this funnel, and that email list opt in is all over the place and you’ll notice we have a call to action on the podcast here. So that’s definitely a primary action to move people through the funnel is getting them onto that email list.

And once they’re on the email list, that starts stepping them through an auto responder series, and each of those emails are designed to move them forward in the funnel, and eventually get them to make more commitment into wanting to move forward with Internet Business Mastery, and actually buy a first product of what we would call an entry level product.

Sterling: Yeah, an example of one of the entry level products that we use, you can check that out at InternetBusinessMastery.com/seasons, and that’s Season 1 and 2 of this podcast which is the first fifty episodes. We put them on CDs and we put them up as a product to get people into the system to see what we’re about and hear all those episodes, which of course you can’t get anymore on iTunes. And we created that into a product, so that was kind of our entry level product.

Jay: Now the great thing is going back and listening to all those old episodes that they’ve bought, they just continue to connect more, and learn more, and get more value, and so that’s going to obviously make them want to go…the ideal customer’s are going to want to go the next step and in some businesses that might be…for instance our Seasons 1 & 2 package is $97.00, and so that might be an entry level.

And other businesses might be even cheaper, but often it’s something in those kind of price ranges. But then at some point, maybe you offer another product that’s $200 or $300, so the price break points kind of graduate upwards as you go. But relatively soon, you want to be thinking about…our suggested model and also what we do, you want to be thinking about inserting or making a part of your funnel what’s called a continuity program.

What we mean by continuity program is, a situation where they’ve signed up, they’ve given you their name and information, and a credit card, and they’re paying every month to get some kind of product or service from you, whether that’s a newsletter that goes out every month, some kind of membership site that they’re a part of.

And so they’re paying you regularly to have access to these tools and this content, and we’ve talked in past episodes about how powerful membership sites are, and this is a great model for building up passive income and keeping those people around and loyal to you, and spending money with you month after month and month. And obviously, that builds into a large lifetime value for the customers who you can get into that continuity program.

Sterling: Yeah, and our example of course is the InternetBusinessMasteryAcademy.com, you can see that that is the next step in our funnel.

Jay: Now the next principle that you want to be a part of your funnel is what we call ascension. And what that means is that this is a part of the continuity program, and there’s different levels in your continuity. There’s a beginning basic level, the entry level that they’re paying you every month to have the basic access. And then at some point there’s going to be a group of those people who are ready to move on to the next level, and have even further access to you, or even more advanced content.

And they’re still going to pay you month to month, but they’re going to become a part of maybe some exclusive mastermind group, or they get the extra supplements to the newsletter, or they get access to a special part of the membership site that gives them more advanced content.

So you’re graduating upwards, and you’ve probably seen this with some different programs. Sometimes very commonly you’ll see somebody who’s got like a silver, gold, and platinum level kind of thing, and each of those levels cost more, but as they buy into the more expensive model or the more expensive levels, they’re getting increased access to you and the premium content.

So the goal is then to identify the people in your continuity program who you can then move up the ascension levels, and hence they’re moving forward in your funnel as well.

Sterling: Yeah, so an example with us is we are at the time of this recording, we’re just finishing up the design on our next level, which is our Platinum group because people want direct access to us so that we can help them directly with their sites and that kind of thing.

And you can check that out at InternetBusinessMastery.com/platinum and that will show you kind of an idea of what we’re talking about here.

Jay: Yeah, we’ve had some members inside the Academy, right now as of this recording there’s just the one level inside the Academy. But we’ve had some members say, “Hey, I have my site up now, I’m making some money. I want to go to the next level, I want to have more access to people who have reached a certain level, are making a certain amount of money, more access to you guys,” and so that’s why we started putting something together to give them that.

I mean this is what our market wants, this is what they’re looking for. So that’s just going to be ascension in that continuity level. And then of course at some point you can have really high ticket programs, or high ticket seminars, things that cost a couple thousand, a few thousand to attend. Maybe it’s an annual or a bi-annual set of seminars that you have, maybe it’s some really high end training where people come on scene at their office – whatever that might be for your market.

The ultimate thing is when they’re buying the high ticket programs from you, and obviously that brings a lot of profit for your business as well as a lot of value to them.

Sterling: Yeah, and this actually…we don’t have an example for yet, but that is to come. We haven’t done a seminar yet, or had the really big ticket stuff, but believe us it’s coming.

Jay: So yeah, you definitely want to take your funnel as far as you can, especially as far as your customers are asking for stuff, so adding all these different levels are important. So we just bring this up now so we can start thinking ahead to what this might look like for your business, because a lot of businesses don’t do this. And so they only have what’s called the front end, it’s like the ‘one and done.’

Buy this one thing, and then they’re no longer a customer and you need to have this progression of stuff that people can buy from you. You keep them around, you extend their life as a customer and the value that they get from you as a business, as a leader in the market.

So if you don’t design this out now, then you’re going to be likely to end up the ‘one and done’ front end only business, and you’re going to leave thousands and thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars on the table in doing that.

Alright, so now the actual product. Well let’s talk a little about this entry level product and what it might look like. Well first of all, we suggest that you start with what’s called a digital product, meaning a product that’s delivered through the internet. So they come to your site, they see some sales material, some information. You invite them to buy something and then it’s delivered to them right there, automatically, through the internet no matter what time of day it is.

And the logistics are easy for you because it’s automated, it’s happening literally while you’re sleeping, and it’s also instantaneous for them. And the reason for this is just there’s a lot of logistics when it comes to having to package together a physical information product in the form of manuals, or CDs, or DVDs.

And there’s a time and place for that, and we certainly go into more detail in the Academy – digital versus physical products – but for your first product when you’re starting out, your first business especially. We suggest just go with something easy, make it a digital product, some kind of audio that you deliver online or an e-book, or just something that’s downloadable, automated, easy.

And that’s something that you can test quickly, see if it’s working, and later on you can add the physical aspects of a product, or have other products that you actually ship out when the time is right for them. Alright, so let’s just list out quickly a few different product types that you might consider.

First a very popular and obvious one is e-book. This is usually a PDF download, and maybe thirty, forty, fifty pages, and maybe three hundred pages. It all depends on the market and the type of information, but it’s a very popular type of product because it can be downloaded. The value is in the information itself, and so even though it’s a book so to speak, you can charge….I mean I’ve seen e-books for $100, because the information is that valuable that’s inside. So the e-book is a great place to start and often a very good entry level type of product.

Another type of product would be what we call the multimedia course, or sometimes called the course in a box type of thing. Now this could be digitally delivered, or it could actually be physically shipped in a box, but this is where it may consist of several reports, or manuals, or PDFs, and it has audio and video, and tutorials, and tools, and checklists, and it’s a system.

This is a system that walks them through whatever process you put together. An example of this would be the coaching course that we started a couple years ago when we first had the coaching course. It was essentially a multimedia course system delivered through the internet, and now that has evolved into what is the Academy, or a monthly membership program.

Another great type of product that you can do is what’s called the teleseminar. This one’s very effective because everyone’s got a telephone. All they’ve got to do is pick up and call into a conference line, and they can have that training. And you can reach lots of people. I mean I known people who have done teleseminars for thousands of people at a time.

And so it can be an hour, two hours of you sharing information. Maybe you’re interviewing somebody, maybe you’re taking questions, but the teleseminar is also a type of product that you can sell. And you can record that and deliver that to them as well, that they can listen to later.

A variation on that would be the webinar where people call in and they’re talking through a teleconference teleseminar system, but then also there’s also the web aspect where they can watch maybe slides on their screen, maybe it’s a screencast where you’re showing them stuff on your screen, they can see your screen. And so there’s some services that will help you out with that if you’re interested. But the webinar is also another popular product type.

Sterling: Well and we just did one recently, and I’m beginning to like them more and more. I know that everybody has different ways they learn and what have you, but the webinar thing was really cool because as we’re talking about stuff, we were able to throw stuff up. I just love that.

And people go, “Oh well what is that?” Boom, you throw it up, and just show it right there, live and they can ask questions about it. It’s pretty cool, I like the webinar thing.

Jay: Yeah, that live interaction is definitely very effective, and people react very well to it. That’s something I enjoy quite a bit too. Then one of the mother of all products is a seminar, like a live seminar. And actually this is one of the first products that I did, interestingly enough was a live seminar. And you book out a conference room, or you book out a room at a college or a hotel ballroom, or whatever you think you can fill.

You put together a presentation, maybe it’s a whole day, maybe it’s a couple hour workshop, maybe it’s two or three days long, and you sell access. You fill the seats, and people come to learn from you. And you can make a lot of money doing live seminars, there’s definitely a lot of logistics to them though, but obviously if you do do this make sure you record the seminar.

That’s what I did for my very first product, is I recorded the seminar and I turned it into CDs and a manual that I then sold online later for a couple years that made money for me too.

Sterling: Well and interestingly enough, I mean we’ve both now done live seminars and recorded them, and made money off the DVDs. But I can say before the idea behind the live seminar was that there was a higher perceived value I think of people coming, but I think that’s starting to change finally as the technology with webinars and stuff, are changing.

Because if you can still get live access, it seems like you’d almost be willing to pay at least the same amount, because for a live seminar it’s going to offer the same value if you don’t have to pay for hotel, travel, getting to the airport, getting from the airport, all that kind of stuff.

So it seems like some of these other ways are raising in value. Because again, I know a lot of people that thought to do the higher end stuff you had to do a live seminar. But things are changing, I like it.

Jay: Yep, that’s a great point. So that gives you several ideas that you can think about when it comes to choosing what products you might put into your funnel plan, what your first product might be. Again, digital’s a great way to go, or something that can be delivered easily, you don’t have to ship it out. So e-book would be great, multimedia course, digitally delivered would be great.

And maybe even a teleseminar would make a great opening type product. So give that some thought based on your market. But the important thing here is actually, you want to make sure you survey your market before you make a definite decision on what that’s going to be. You want to put out to your list, or by driving traffic through pay-per-click or something to a survey.

Ask your market, what are your top questions, how hard has it been to find the answers to these questions, what would you like to know about most? What would be the type of product that would be most interesting to you, an e-book or a multimedia course, or a coaching situation through teleseminar?

And get that feedback so you can make sure your initial product is one that’s going to fit the needs of your market. We were talking earlier in this episode about surveying the audience of Internet Business Mastery again, and it’s just a very powerful…you’ll get lots of insights, and it’ll help catch any assumptions that you might be making that are actually not the best assumptions, because you get that actual feedback from the audience.

So the tool that we like to use for this is SurveyMonkey.com, it makes it real easy to put together a survey, and send it out to your market, and then get a compilation of that data back to you. So make sure you absolutely do this before you commit to what that first product’s going to be.

Sterling: Yeah, and this whole ‘survey your market’ thing, I love with such a passion because rather than guess or wonder, or give your best educated guess, you can just ask. I mean it makes such sense, but for some reason in let’s say regular business, there’s so much of this ‘let’s just put something out there, it seems like people want it.’

Or ‘this is what people need,’ that’s the death of a product right there, just saying, “Oh, people need this so I’m just going to put it out there,” without knowing if they do or not. And I actually at a little Meetup group here in San Diego, I get this question from time to time when I’m talking to people about internet business.

It’s like, “Well how do you know what product, which product you should do?” And I’m like, “Oh, that’s such an interesting question, and easy to answer. You ask.” This is actually very profound, to say, what product do you bring your market? You just simply ask them. I mean that’s a huge thing, I can’t bring that point home enough. I just love that idea, if you want to know, you just ask.

Jay: And that brings us to the final step in our Online Business Blueprint, and that is to convert the site visitors into cash. So once you’ve got your product, how do you know take that product, put it on your site and make it so that the people who are visiting your site will now pay cash to get that product?

Well this all starts obviously with something called the sales page – the place where they go that you drive them to, some kind of landing page, something they click through to. And one form of the sales page that I’m sure many listening to this are familiar with is the long sales page with all the information, and there’s all kinds of back and forth about what’s effective and what’s not. And is the long page dead?

But the truth of the matter is, they still work. Your sales page may be a long copy sales page like that. It may be a shorter form or a video, there’s been some very effective things with video being done, demonstrating the product and showing it. And after ten minutes or so of showing it, inviting them to buy.

And that’s something that you’ll have to test out for your own business. Now this is a huge topic, the topic of copywriting and creating a sales page, and how to put them onto that page, and then get them to read, get them excited, and get the urgency going. It’s all those persuasion techniques to get them to buy, and we could talk for episodes, and episodes, and episodes about copywriting, and I’m sure we’ll do one in the future on copywriting.

But one of the quickest and easiest pieces of advice that we could give you on this right now, well there’s a couple. First of all, one if that you should start studying some copywriting. Now you don’t need to become a master copywriter yourself, but you need to understand some of the basic principles of it so that you can be more effective in your own marketing, but just also so you can recognize good copy.

And if you’re going to have other people write the copy for you, you can recognize when it’s being done right. So that’s definitely some that you should start, bits of studying right now. I was told early on in my entrepreneurial journey that copywriting was one of the skills that would increase my income more than anything. And even though know we outsource some of that, I’m glad I spent a good amount of time studying that.

And still today I try to hone that on an ongoing basis as well. So that’s the first piece of advice is to start studying it now and make it part of this journey of becoming a more successful business person. But the second thing is that the quickest and easiest way to get started with your copywriting or your sales pages is just swipe liberally.

Every good copywriter out there borrows from other copywriters and other marketing pieces all the time. It’s what they do, they see a masterful headline in something that they’re reading, and they cut it out and put it in a file folder. They see a great sales letter online, they save it, they put it into a specific folder, they have a system that they can refer back to.

And they just have hundreds of headlines, they can go and pick one and adapt to what they’re doing. And of course you just can’t word for word take somebody’s sales letter, but you can take powerful phrases that you see and adapt them to your market, adapt them to your voice. And they’re just proven headlines, proven opening statements, proven pieces of copy that have been used over and over that convert, that do a good job of moving the people through the sales letter and getting them to buy.

And so one of the best things you can do is find people that you know are good copywriters and just read the sales letters that they make. And then even borrow from their sales letters, and see how they construct things, and do similar things for yourself. So that’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to get started with your sales pages and creating good copy to begin with. So start creating a swipe file for yourself.

Now we mentioned you should start studying, so here’s a few people…a couple people where we have learned copywriting from. And we definitely recommend that you do so as well. The very first person I started learning copywriting from was Dan Kennedy. We’ve mentioned his name many, many times on the podcast. He’s been a business mentor to us, and definitely is a copywriter himself, has been paid “booca, booca” bucks by people to write copy for them. So he’s a great person to learn from, and he has several courses available to teach you effective copywriting.

Sterling: Yeah, the one that you can check out if you want to see something he has to offer. This was actually the first course that I got on copywriting, and I’ve gone through it a couple of times. Every now and then I have to go through parts of it again just to remember, because there’s quite a bit of stuff. But you can check that out at InternetBusinessMastery.com/copy.

Jay: Alright, another source that you can go to is CopyBlogger.com. We’ve interviewed him in the past on the podcast, and he’s got an extremely successful blog, does extremely well teaching people how to write effective copy. He’s a great copywriter himself, so definitely check out CopyBlogger.com.

Just lots and lots and lots of free and powerful copywriting advice there on his blog. Of course the other thing that you can do is just hire a copywriter. Now this is always a tricky thing, especially for a newbie in business because copywriters are not cheap. It’s because it’s the skill that pays the bills, they get paid a good amount a money.

You can try to find if you can an up and coming copywriter, but you’re going to get what you pay for too. About the best thing that we can suggest is maybe see if there’s somebody who’s willing to do it for a percentage of the profits that are made. They have a share of the sales that goes towards them, and so they’re making money based on the performance, and after money is coming in.

If you don’t have a lot of money to pay them up front, you can try and make some kind of agreement there. So that’s one suggestion we can give as well.

Sterling: Oh, and I love that one. I love our copywriter. I love writing his check, even though it’s been the biggest check we’ve written out to anybody every month. That’s the one I absolutely….there’s no pain involved in writing his check.

Jay: Totally agree, totally agree. Okay, so you put together a sales page, it has all this information, persuasive copy that gets the person excited about buying your product. And down at the bottom, there’s an order button, and they click on that order button, and what happens? How do they buy? How do you take their money?

Well there are a few different pieces that you need to have put together in order for this to happen. And the payment process is made up of three different things. First of all is the shopping cart, and this is a program that will manage…have all your different products set up in your shopping cart, and it takes their information, and it checks their address, and collects all that info and puts into your database. And then it sends the credit card info off to what’s called the gateway.

And the gateway checks, and does that verification to make sure okay, is this a valid number? Does it match the billing address, is it not expired, etc. etc.  And it checks to see will this go through. And then the merchant account is actually the person that pays you the money after the transactions have been done.

When you use a Visa card to buy something, it’s not like Visa is paying directly money to that merchant. It’s actually a merchant account, which is much like a large credit account that actually pays that vendor. So at the end of the day, the vendor sends in all their credit card stuff and it gets processed, and then the merchant account sends the money to their bank account, and essentially is giving them a short term credit of ‘here’s all the money and transactions you’ve put through today,’ and later they are paid the money through the Visa system and everything themselves.

So you have to set up a merchant account in order to be able to take credit cards through your own shopping cart through your own site. Now, there’s a couple services that we can recommend for doing this. The shopping cart service that we use, you can find at GetYourShoppingCart.com, it’s the shopping cart that we’ve used for quite a while, and it does really well for us. And they’ve got a great system, it’s very affordable given the service that you get.

The gateway and the merchant account often come together, and you have to sign up for a merchant account, which usually requires having some kind of credit check. And there’s one that we found that’s relatively familiar with the whole information marketing/online marketing business. Lots of internet business people use their service, and so they’re a good one…because you want a merchant account provider that understands your business.

And there’s all these tricky things we could go into and talk a long time about it, but you have to keep your merchant account person happy, and stay within all the parameters, otherwise they can actually freeze some of your money, and hold onto your money. And there’s all these tricky things, so you want to have a good merchant account that you trust, and they have a good relationship with and understand your business.

So you can find out the one that we use, and a number of internet marketers use, by going to GetMyMerchantAccount.com. And like we said, the gateway service usually comes along. You sign up for your merchant account, and you get that and they sign you up with a gateway account, which you’ve probably heard of something called Authorize.net is a very popular gateway provider. And they’re kind of the bridge between the shopping cart and the merchant account.

So those are the pieces that you put together, and there’s one other option that’s worth mentioning, and that’s Paypal. Paypal is not exactly a merchant account, although they do now have a merchant account service. If nothing else, you can use Paypal as kind of an interim beginning type thing. It’s definitely one of the options you can use, we’ve provided as one of the payment options for our stuff as well as the shopping cart service that we have.

So that’s a great place to start out as well, as with Paypal.com which will allow you then to take credit cards over your site. And I think it goes without saying, you’ve got to have credit cards, you’ve got to take credit cards, or else you’re dead in the water. There’s no way around it these days.

Alright, so that brings us to the end of the Online Business Blueprint. We’ve talked about how to create a product, we’ve talked about how to convert your site visitors into cash. That is the eleven step A-Z system for creating your own profitable business. We definitely invite you to go back and listen to all five parts again just to fill in those holes and follow them along as a blueprint. Because that’s how we design it, this is the exact process that we use, it’s the exact model we’ve used and that we teach our students in the Academy that we go into detail on.

It’s the one that students have followed and built up businesses that for many of them make five figures a month now even. So this is a process that works, and that’s why we’re teaching it to you here in these five episodes of Internet Business Mastery. Now if you want to get more in depth step-by-step tutorials, videos, audios, checklists, everything to walk you through this process in more depth, then obviously we invite you to go and check out the Internet Business Mastery Academy and try a risk free trial which you can find at FreeAudioGift.com

Sterling: Alright, so we want to know what you think. What ideas do you have for your first information product? Please let us know by going to InternetBusinessMastery.com, click on episode 63, and give your answer in the comments section at the bottom of the post.

Jay: Now it’s time for announcements and big breakthroughs. We had a nice breakthrough story that we found here in the Academy mastermind community forum. This one comes from Zane Miller. And there’s a nice little principle that’s taught by what he shared here. He’s a relatively new Academy member just getting off the ground with launching his site.

I noticed it looks like he’s got something up now and moving forward, and he’s defined his niche. But anyway, let me go ahead and read what he has to say. He says, “New Ground is a site I usually waste time on when I’m looking for creative inspiration, and just to get a quick chuckle.  The other day I found an animator on there that I really like, and have been talking to him via email for two days now. I proposed a joint venture to share ad revenue since his videos are getting a lot of notice around the web, yet he doesn’t know how to monetize his craft, aside from driving traffic to his freelance animation site.

He’s just as excited as I am about this, and we are brainstorming ways to efficiently and effectively create content for the teeming gamer masses. In addition, I have a designer who is equally excited about redesigning my site, and now it is a big hurry up and wait game. Thank you again Jay and Sterling for putting together such an amazing site and courses, without them I know I would never have been able to put all these random ideas to work.”

So it sounds like his niche is in the gaming field, and the principle I really like at play here is, he went out in this community he’s a part of, and he found somebody who had great content. A talented person, a very creative person, that did not know how to monetize or market their own content, so basically he approached them and said, “Look, let’s join venture. I know how to market, I’m learning this stuff, I know how to put on a good web presence, we’ll take your content and my know how, and put them together and we can do a revenue share on the stuff that’s made.”

So that’s a great way to get off the ground. If you’re looking for what’s my niche going to be, where am I going to get content? There’s a lot of people out there, a lot of potential partnerships that you can put together, and finding the right people to match up with.

If you’re going through the Academy and learning all the great marketing information, there might be somebody out there who’s already an expert in their field, or already has great content that you can team up with, and put something in a joint venture type capacity together, and get off the ground right away.

So well done on that Zane. Now I was looking to find his site URL, we’ll put that in the show notes. I need to check with him and see what that is, but I know he’s just getting his site together. So I need to make sure he’s got that up and ready, but we’ll put that in the show notes if you want to check out what Zane is up to. So that is the breakthrough for this episode.

Sterling: Yeah and I definitely like that idea too for some people that are a little worried about being an expert. There’s actually a guy in my little mastermind group here in San Diego who his wife is an expert organizer. She teaches people and businesses how to organize, and so rather than him starting his own thing, he puts his time and effort into building her as the expert.

So she can create the videos and things and he runs the entire other side of the business. Now why couldn’t you do that if for some reason you’re a little nervous about being the expert, or having to be the one on camera or talking. Find the expert, and support them and make a partnership that way.

Jay: Absolutely, it’s a powerful way to go for sure.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: And now it is time for this episode’s Quick Tip. We know that coming up and throughout the year, there’s lot of great seminars and things that people might want to attend. We have the occasional business trip that comes up, or maybe a lifestyle design vacation, you know? May as well, when you’re starting….

Sterling: Fiji! Hello, Fiji! It’s time for Fiji!

Jay: Oh that’s right, here we go.

Sterling: Scuba diving in Fiji….

Jay: We’ve been on this particular side a lot lately for different trips we’ve been considering. This is the one we turn to to find the best airfares, because you can check within a given day or two if you’re flexible, and it searches all the different airlines, and Travelocity and different places.

Our site of choice for travel is Kayak.com. I just think they’ve got a great interface and I’ve always been able to find an excellent deal when I go to Kayak.com. So we definitely want to bring that one up, because we’ve been using it so much lately, so we figured it would be a great one to share as a Quick Tip as well.

And they’ve got not just the flights, but hotels, cars, etc. etc. And they’re constantly improving their interface, so I just really dig it. How about you Sterling?

Sterling: Yeah, I use it almost every time. The only times I don’t is when I test it against whatever I hold my….I can’t remember what they’re called – like SkyMiles and all that kind of stuff. I check it against that just in case. But usually it beats out certainly any regular site like Delta or something like that, it usually beats that out by a lot.

Jay: Awesome, so if you’ve got some travel coming up, definitely give that one a try.

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!