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

Brought to you by: FreeAudioGift.com

This is Internet Business Mastery, Episode 64.

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 have an interview with the master of outsourcing. He works about seventeen hours or less every week, and on this episode, he’s going to explain why much of what you know about outsourcing is wrong.

And in the Quick Tip, we have a tool to track how many subscribers your WordPress blog has. Now quickly, we’d like to remind you that if you’d like to get a jump start on creating your own profitable internet business using our proven system, claim your risk free trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy by going to FreeAudioGift.com.

So Jay, what’s been going on with you for the last couple of weeks?

Jay: Well, I’ve got to say I’m really like the decision that we made this week to actually strip a full 33%, a full 1/3 of our hours, to reduce our work load by that much, meaning that a 1/3 of the hours that we were working every week for Internet Business Mastery we decided that we’re going to do without those, and we’re going to start working less.

Sterling: Yeah work smarter, not longer.

Jay: And I’ll say it’s about time, I’m feeling pretty good about it. Of course largely and mostly thanks to the topic that we’re going to be talking about today – outsourcing, which John Jonas, a friend of ours, is truly the master of. And for whatever reason there’s a lot of things we quite haven’t gotten right about it even as much as a year ago when we tried to hire some full-time people, which is what he teaches.

I don’t know, we weren’t patient enough with it or something, but I’m pretty thrilled with how things have turned out in the last two or three weeks of us implementing some of the things he taught us. And now look, I’ve got an extra ten or so hours a week I’ve got to figure out what to do with myself, so I’m liking that.

Sterling: It’s so crazy and the great thing is, we interviewed him what maybe three weeks ago or so, and we jumped all over it. We hired two full time V.A.’s for our business, I know you hired one, and I’m about to hire my own, just for myself personally. And it’s such a weird thing because think of it, 33% for us actually ends up being 10 hours.

10 hours every single week we got rid of because of hiring these guys, and making the decision that we’re going to work smarter. It was again partly because of this interview, and it was triggered by this interview. And I was like, 10 hours a week! I don’t know what to do now with myself! It was already, we weren’t even working close to a 40 hour week, but it’s one of those things where that decision made it so I’m like okay, I guess I’ve got to pick up a hobby or a language, or something.

Jay: Yeah, well I highly recommend Macrame.

Sterling: Yeah, it’s about time you take up knitting.

Jay: My wife would love that.

Sterling: Yeah of course she would. But yeah, so we almost got down to the 17 hours he works, because that’s what his thing was. He talked about how he doesn’t work any more than 17 hours a week. And it just suddenly occurred to us like, why are we working more than that?

So it’s a great interview, and let’s get to it.

Jay: Awesome.

And now the featured segment…

Jay: Okay, well as we’ve already alluded, we’ve got a pretty exciting interview on this episode’s featured segment. It’s with a friend of ours, John Jonas, who is the founder and creator of the system that you’ll find at GetReplaceMyself.com. And he’s truly the master of outsourcing, and when we had this conversation with him that you’re about to hear, it totally blew our minds.

Sterling: And completely changed our business, I mean everything changed our entire life. I mean without getting too extreme about it, it really was an extreme conversation, so…..

Jay: Just to give you an idea, this guy – he walks the walk, he doesn’t just talk it; he does it. And this morning I was chatting with him a bit on Skype, and we were talking about his schedule, and he’s like, “Yeah well, let’s see. I got up and showered and had some personal time, ate breakfast with my kids. Then my wife got up, and she took my son out to something fun, so I watched the other girls.” Then he said he reviewed some stuff that he had done the day before, and then she got home, he went golfing. And then he came home and ate lunch, and then he finally sat down at the computer at noon to maybe do a little bit of work.

And he said he’ll probably work until like four, and then he’ll go out work in the yard, and probably hit some balls around in the backyard, because obviously he’s a golf fanatic. And that’s a typical day for him, so that’s pretty enticing stuff. He’s got all this time to spend with his family, and to go golfing, and it’s because he has mastered this whole bit of replacing himself or duplicating himself by hiring people from full time Virtual Assistants from the Philippines, and that’s what he’s going to talk to us about in this interview. So let’s go ahead and queue this baby up.

Jay: Hey everybody, it’s Jay here, and I am joined as usual by Sterling, as well as our special guest for this interview. In fact, interestingly enough I believe this is the only person now that we’ve interviewed twice for Internet Business Mastery, so that is quite the honor.

Of course it was a different topic before, but we have back on the microphone – it’s been a couple years at least, but we’re back on the microphone. John Jonas with us from Utah, and you’ll recall last time we talked to him we were talking about keyword research, and Keywordtopia. But his real strength and where he shines is with outsourcing.

And every time we chat with John, or we’re around John, things are flying at light speed about my ‘Philippine V.A. this,’ and ‘my Philippine V.A. that,’ and ‘everything that I outsource,’ and everything he hates to do, and so he gets everyone else to do it for him.

So he has become the master at outsourcing his life, somebody who’s truly living something akin to the 4-Hour Workweek. So thanks John for coming back and joining us to chat about this much envied lifestyle that you’ve created for yourself using outsourcing.

John: No problem guys, I know it’s like 11:15 my time here, and just so you know, I just finished reading in the morning, I just got off the treadmill, and spent some time with my kids, and I slept in this morning, and now you guys are making me be at work because we had an appointment scheduled.

Jay: Nice. I guess you haven’t figured out to outsource your exercise yet is what you’re telling us.

John: No, I haven’t figured out that yet. I don’t really think that’s possible either. If it was I would have figured it out.

Jay: Well awesome. Well as usual, we want to start out just giving you a chance to introduce yourself a little bit, and just tell us a bit about how you became an internet entrepreneur, and just a few examples of ways you are making money online.

John: Well I started number one, when I had a job, I graduated from college and I had a job for eight months. And when I had that job, the only goal was to quit that job. That was my single goal.

Sterling: Perfect start.

John: Right, and the reason was, I would get a phone call from my wife once a day saying, “You just missed the cutest thing your son did.” And I was gone, and I hated it, I hated it. Not to mention, I was a terrible, terrible employee. During that time, I ran into Traffic Equalizer, I put up a site; I made $2,200 without doing any work. And that was the end of my job right there.

Jay: Nice.

John: Obviously Traffic Equalizer worked for some time and then it stopped, and I had to evolve. And so I had to learn new things, I had to learn marketing, and I had to learn sales, and I had to learn different things about websites, and I had to learn how programming does not make you money. And for me, it kind of got to the point where there’s so many things I know I should be doing, and I’m not getting those things done.

And there’s no way to get them done, it’s impossible when you’re doing the work yourself. And that’s kind of when I started getting into outsourcing, and figuring different things out, and it totally, totally changed my life once I figured out how to do it the right way.

So a couple of the things I have that make money, I have a couple software products – Keywordtopia is one of them that make me money. Undercover Profits is another one, I have a couple different information products, I have some e-books that…the information products are not in internet marketing. I have some training not in internet marketing, I have some affiliate websites not in internet marketing.

For example, one of my guys built…whenever I say ‘one of my guys,’ I mean one of my guys in the Philippines. I have a business that he built for me that makes me $10,000 to $15,000 a month. In that income as an affiliate where he did all of the work, so that’s one of the things. I have another one that makes me $3,000 to $5,000 a month where another one of my guys did all the work. Just things like that where I didn’t do the work, I just had to understand the business, because I had already figured out how to do outsourcing the right way, which is very different than what most people think.

So that’s a little bit about me and where I come from, just so you guys know. I don’t know if you guys know this, but Keywordtopia back when you interviewed me about it; that was completely built by my guys in the Philippines.

Sterling: Oh wow, I didn’t know that.

Jay: So eight months is all, that’s cool. I think I did three years, and I’m feeling pretty good that I got out after three, because there’s plenty of people who do ten, twenty, thirty years as an employee and realize, “Man, I hate this.” So eight months, that’s really good. That’s probably one of the lowest numbers I’ve heard.

Sterling: Yeah, I was over ten years and hating every minute of the actual employee part. Like you, it’s so funny because I think that a lot of times, let’s say entrepreneurs, they just really do make bad employees. Like everything I was about was basically in my own way outsourcing and automating so I didn’t have to do anything even in my job.

John: If I would have known what I know now about outsourcing, I would still have that job. I would just make sure I was telecommuting, and I wasn’t doing any of the work.

Sterling: Exactly.

Jay: Interesting.

Sterling: That’s great.

John: So when that’s your only goal is to quit that job, I guess that’s all you do is you work for it. You work towards that goal, so….

Sterling: Exactly. And so for beginning internet entrepreneurs, what are your top three tips for starting an internet business right?

John: Wow. Three tips, I think what we just talked about, that goal, is probably one of them. To say, I am going to work at this until I make it work, because it does work. I see thousands of people succeeding, both my customers and other people’s customers. I’ve seen it thousands of times, it works, there’s no question about that. So I would say having that goal and that determination to not quit that would probably be one thing.

My second thing would….can I have four?

Sterling: Sure.

Jay: Sure, we’ll give you a bonus, we’ll give you a little lead way.

John: My second thing would be to find something that works and stick with it. People find so many different bright shiny objects, is what I call them. They jump from one tactic to another, they never really get good at anything, and it never works, and I did this. You’re going to fail in doing this; it’s just a matter of having that goal, sticking with it, and sticking with the same thing until you make that thing work. Because once you’ve made it work; everything changes; everything changes. So that’s number two – stick with something that you find that works.

Number three would be make sales. I think a lot of people get into the internet stuff and there’s so many different things, there’s so many new things that they forget that your number one goal is to make sales. And so they get off on doing this little thing correctly, it’s blogging or it’s articles, or it’s adding these tweaks to your website or it’s making your website look really good. And they forget that this is about making sales, it’s not about how cool looking your website looks.

I’ll give you a good example. I have a good friend of mine who just developed a system for short sales. It’s a great time for that. And he put up this website, and I kind of helped guide him through it, and he was over here the other day telling me about it, and he was like, “Yeah, now the only problem is it just looks so crappy. I want it to look so cool! Like, look at this website! This would look so good, and that’s how I want it to look!”

I’m like, “What are you talking about? Are you making sales yet?”

“No.”

“Well what difference does it makes how good your website looks? It’s not going to change anything if you’re not making sales.” And that was a good eye opener for him, and that’s a good reminder for a lot of people. So that was number three.

Number four, learn how to do outsourcing and learn how to do it the right way, because it will change everything about your business and your personal life. It will change how you think about how you run your business, it will change how you think about the possibilities of your internet business, it will change how you think about things that you learn, it will change your ability to implement things.

I think that learning outsourcing the correct way, I have seen more people succeed because they learned that than all the other people I saw succeed combined before I started doing that, because they learned outsourcing the correct way. So those are my four things.

Sterling: Well the outsourcing thing, it’s absolutely incredible. Like now for Jay and I, we talk all the time about, “Okay, what are we doing that we shouldn’t be?” It’s such a hard thing because I think as entrepreneurs, a lot of the entrepreneurs that I know we get in that mode where we’re just used to doing everything. Because once you realize, “Hey, I’m on my own, I’ve got to do all this,” for some reason it just seems normal to learn everything and do everything.

So now it’s like, why the heck are we even working a small amount of hours? It should be even less! And it’s just a mindset that yeah, for somebody that’s absolutely a beginner, obviously that needs to be one of the top things you think of right at the beginning. And yeah, it’ll change everything. Once we started getting guys to do stuff for us, you quickly see how if you have that guy do that for two hours a week, that’s two hours less you have to do that.  And then you start thinking of a hundred things you can do that way.

John: And it’s amazing how having things get done in your business and having them get completed, not just done halfway. It’s amazing how that will affect the success of your business.

Sterling: Absolutely.

Jay: Well I was just letting people know on Twitter that we are interviewing the outsourcing master, so we’re going to have a couple questions from Twitter in a little bit. But first, let’s switch gears to outsourcing now, something that you really excel at obviously. And I’ve heard you make a bold claim, in fact you kind of intimated at earlier, much of what people are being taught about outsourcing is actually wrong, and even some of the kinds of things Tim Ferriss talks about in his book. So can you elaborate a little bit on what you mean when you make that kind of a bold statement?

John: It is my experience that basically everything that people know and basically think about outsourcing is dead wrong. Even to the point where when people ask questions, I’ve had lots of people say….like you just asked on Twitter, ‘what questions do you have about outsourcing?’ The questions that I get aren’t correct, because of what people think. What people have in their mind about what outsourcing is, is totally wrong.

So let’s talk about, if I can talk about that for a minute. So, what most people think about outsourcing, especially in the internet world, they think Elance. ‘I’ve got to go to Elance, and get something done.’ They think ‘rent a coder’ to get programming projects done, or script done, or Scriptdance, or Odesk is the hot one right now. And it’s totally wrong.

There’s definitely a place for those websites. There a use for Elance, there’s a use for Odesk, but as an outsourcing method that is so secondary to what people should be doing that people don’t even realize this. Here’s the problem with Elance, and I’m going to group all these sites into Elance. So with Elance, you go and you have a project you need done. You need something done. You go there and you say, you do a little bit of research and say, I need this done, are there people that can do it? Yes, okay great.

Now I’ve got to write a description of my project, what I need done. And you’ve got to make sure your description is perfect so that you get the right person. Then you have to manage the bids, and you’ve got to go through these bids and you’ve got to read them, and you’ve got to look at their resumes, and you’ve got to say, ‘Oh I think this one’s good, oh I think that one’s good. Oh man, which one do I pick?’ And you randomly pick someone.

Then you have to go back and make sure that your description is perfect, because if not you’re wasting their time, you’re wasting your time, you’re going to end up babysitting, you’re going to get the wrong product. It just is not right. Then when you get the product back after picking that person and having them do it, you have to worry about is it done correctly? Is it done exactly? And then you pay them only to find out, whoops this is not right, or something’s wrong here, or I need something fixed, or I need something added, and you can’t. You have to go back to Elance and repeat the whole process, right?

Which you spend as much….because I’ve done this enough, I know. You spend as much time doing this as if you would have done it yourself. Which obviously, sometimes you can’t do it yourself, you don’t know how, or you don’t want to, or you have other things to do. It’s just not really outsourcing, it’s just giving yourself a different job right?

Here’s the other problem with it, once that person is done you never benefit from their knowledge again. If they learned anything from it, if you taught them anything, if you gave them access to whatever it was, you never benefit from having spent that time ever again, which is a big problem, which means you just have a job, right?

Okay, so let me tell you really quickly what else outsourcing also is not, and I know that I am going to offend a whole bunch of people doing this.

Jay: I’m already offended. No, I’m just kidding.

John: Outsourcing is not about India. I know that in the United States, when you say outsourcing, the first thing people thing is outsourcing to India – a call center. And that’s the only thing they thing about, go to India. Or people think about China also, which is so wrong for outsourcing. Okay so India, they are good people, they mean well, they just think differently than we do.

So I always get this, “Oh, but I tried that before and it didn’t work.”

“Where did you go when you did it? “

“I hired a V.A. in India.”

“Well, there’s your problem.”

And yeah, I just offended a whole sub continent, and I’m okay with that, because I’m not going to give you guys any B.S. right?

Jay: That’s a large subcontinent too isn’t it?

John: It is, and it’s not just India. It’s that region of the world, Pakistan is included in that, Afghanistan – workers from there. It’s the same thing, okay? And I’m not going to elaborate a whole lot more other than to say if you’re only experience in outsourcing is India, you need to try something different. That’s number one.

And if you’re going to outsource, if you go to India, you will come back to me and say, “Oh man, that was such a terrible disaster.” Okay? So then, what is the right way to do outsourcing? And totally different than what most people think. And the craziest thing is, this is everything you ever dreamed about outsourcing but didn’t think existed, it does.

So in today’s society, you really need to be a knowledge worker. If you’re expending time implementing tactics, if you’re spending time putting up blogs, and blogging, or doing article marketing, or creating videos to submit to get traffic to your website or submitting your site to directories, or doing SEO, then you are falling behind.

And I’m going to make that as a blanket statement in internet business, period. You are falling behind if you are doing this stuff on your own. Anybody who listens to this probably has enough knowledge for three to four full time people to do the knowledge that they have in their heads. So do you guys disagree with that at all?

Jay: Nope, you’re speaking right at me.

Sterling: Oh yeah.

John: But you can never implement that, number one because there’s three to four people, and if you decided to stop learning and implement it, it would take you like two years to implement all that stuff right? And then if you stopped learning, how far behind would you be in two years?

Sterling: Oh yeah.

John: So what people need to do when they’re outsourcing, is become a knowledge worker, and understand their business, understand the processes, understand the marketing, understand the sales, understand the purpose, understand the goals. And then have other people implement that for you, right?

And not just have them implement it for you, because you can have that done on Elance, but automate the implementation so that in the future as you do those things over again, you don’t have to be involved at all, right? So there’s no India in implementing, there’s no Elance in implementing, and there can be at times. But for the most part what people need to do is hire a full time assistant, programmer, SEO person, whatever it is – in the Philippines. Now when I say in the Philippines, I mean specifically, strictly, only in the Philippines, who is Philippino.

I don’t mean go into eastern Europe, I don’t mean South America, I don’t mean in the United States, I don’t mean China, obviously not India, I mean in the Philippines, period. And there are some reasons behind that, and I’m just going to go through this very, very briefly because I cover this for free elsewhere that people can get.

But basically as a people, their culture is very different than anything else I’ve ever seen anywhere in the world. They’re honest, they’re hardworking, they’re loyal – like super, super loyal. They’re super well educated, they speak American English, they’re not entrepreneurial, they want to make you happy, and they think like Americans, which means you tell them to do something, it gets done right the first time.

And since they want to make you happy, if they don’t do it right, they will go figure out how to do it right to make you happy. So you don’t have to go back and babysit them. It’s such a different mindset than anywhere else in the world, and also it’s a totally different experience when you do this. When you go to the Philippines in hiring someone to do your work for you, so as an example Tim Ferriss talks about don’t use brickwork or something like that, in India.

Most outsourcing courses I’ve seen will tell you to go use Elance to get something done. The difference is, when I hire someone in the Philippines, I’m hiring that person to work for me full-time permanently. Imagine what a full time person can do for your business. You guys know, you have full time people working for you in the Philippines right?

Jay: Part time people in the Philippines.

John: You do part time, you guys have got to get full time people because once you have them full time – this is their only job, their job is to work for you, their job is understanding your business. And this is why I was able to have them build me businesses that make me $10,000 to $15,000 a month, $3,000 to $5,000 a month. We’re starting another one right now that’s already making $1,000 a month, we’ve been at it for two months.

So they understand everything about my business, they know everything we do is online. They understand what a mailing list is, they understand what a website is, they understand what a sales page is, they understand what a squeeze page is, they understand what a blog is. We can do all of these things now, they could do them on their own now, because they work for me and only for me full time, and I taught them a ton of stuff. And now anytime I want something done, I send them an email and it gets done.

And if it’s not done the first time I say, “You know, this isn’t correct. Go figure out how to make it correct,” and they go get it done correctly.

Sterling: I love that.

John: I have six full time people working for me; it costs me a total of $2250.00 a month for six.

Jay: For six?

John: Six full time people.

Jay: For 240 hours a week?

John: It includes three very good PHP programmers, one of whom is also a very good graphical person. And it also includes three content, webmaster, or whatever people, one of whom speaks perfect English, and I have her writing sales copy for me now. The other one is pretty good, and I kind of have him acting as a project manager now, he’s been with me for three years, and he understands everything so he’s kind of project managing.

The other person, her English isn’t so good, but I hired her because she was asking for $100 a month on her resume, full time. So for $100 a month, I don’t even care. Do you know what I have her doing right now? I have her uploading my personal pictures from my desktop to my Flickr account, because I got tired of doing it.

Sterling: Nice.

John: She logs into my desktop every night when I’m done working, around 4:00. She asks me, “Can I get on your computer?” “No, I need 5 more minutes, hold on.” She logs in, she uploads my pictures, and I don’t have to do it anymore. It’s so awesome.

So my people cost me anywhere from between $100 a month to $550 a month full time. $550 a month for a good PHP programmer – very, very good.

Sterling: Awesome.

John: So I hope that kind of changes and helps people understand what they previously thought about outsourcing is totally wrong. When you can hire someone for $200 a month who can do whatever it is that you’re doing. They can set up your blogs, they can write articles, they can submit the articles, they can do video marketing, they can do your SEO for you, they can get links, they can submit to directories. They can use Myspace, and Facebook, and Squidoo, and they can do those things correctly and they can implement the MSN loophole thing, and they can implement whatever else you’re learning. They can implement those things for you.

And when it’s going to cost you $200 a month for full time work…..

Sterling: That’s insane.

John: It changes everything, right? That totally changes how business works, right? Communication problems aren’t an issue with the Philippines. They think like we do, they speak good English, they’re very Americanized, their whole culture is. They don’t have credit cards; they’re not going to rip you off. Well my guys have credit cards now, they have my credit cards; they have all my credit card information. They’re super, super honest; so they’re not going to go and steal your hosting account. They’re not entrepreneurial, so they don’t want to go out and copy your business model; they want a paycheck from you, which is so different from an American.

Sterling: I know it’s so hard to figure that, if they know your entire business, I mean this is a question that I get from time to time about what level of information you should give your people. If they don’t know your whole business, why don’t they go out there and just copy it? Like Americans, you would actually consider they would most likely do that.  But I remember you talking about this before, yeah….go ahead.

John: Four times of hiring Americans, and realized this just doesn’t work, because they see what I’m doing and then they’re like, “Oh I can go do this on my own, see ya later.”

Sterling: Exactly.

John: Philippinos, they’re not entrepreneurial, they want a paycheck. That’s number one, so they don’t want to go do it. Number two, it’s difficult for them. How are they going to get paid? How are they going to cash an American check? They can’t. Often they don’t have a bank account. Paypal is brand new in the Philippines; most of them don’t have Paypal accounts. They can’t get money as an affiliate in Paypal. And if they do, what are they going to do? They don’t have a bank account.

I’ve been doing this for three years, obviously it’s never happened to me, and I’ve never seen it happen to someone else, where someone rips you off. So, not an issue.

Sterling: Well there you have it, part one of this incredible interview with John Jonas. And then on the next episode, we’re going to go ahead and play part two of that interview which will end the series. We’re not doing a five part series like we just did, just two!

Now if you want to get more from John about outsourcing, you can go right now and sign up for his free audio about how to replace yourself. You can get that at GetReplaceMyself.com.

Jay: Alright, we have just a quick announcement and then some very cool comments and breakthroughs to share with you. The first thing is we want to let you know that we have opened up a early alert list, an early notification list for that platinum coaching group that we kind of briefly mentioned before. And so if you go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/platinum, you definitely want to get on that list.

These are the people that are going to be moved to the front of the line, get the latest information, be the first to be notified of this list as the details unfold, and when it finally opens up. And that’s extremely important, because there’s going to be just a very limited number of people we’re going to let into this group, because obviously we want to be able to attend to everybody’s needs, as we help you directly move through your internet business and reach the kind of success that you want. So visit InternetBusinessMastery.com/platinum to get on that early alert list today.

Sterling: Alright, so we’ve got this comment that came in, just this fantastic comment that we wanted to read for you. It’s from Ross Alber, and it says, “Jay, Sterling, your Academy is incredible! I’ve been around the block a few times, and have taken a few left turns in my life. I really appreciate you guys, what you do, and the genuine passion that you seep into everything in the Academy. One reason your site and the reason IBMA is so good is that it forces me, the member, to live consciously first and then build a business around that.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve hit a plateau in my life, or a crisis in my life, or to realize again that I’ve lived unconsciously for the last six months, or the last five years, etc. It’s like being a pinball machine, where you just bounce off the bumpers and sooner or later you wonder why you are in the same place you were before six months ago, a year ago, or even ten years ago. And the answer is because at least for me, I haven’t lived consciously or passionately. And there’s no better way to go through life than to know who you are, what you are, and what you are not, and to be passionate about who you are, and what you do.

In fact I have found even the hard way, that I can’t be fulfilled unless I live consciously and mindfully engage myself in activities – personal, professional, recreational, and business, that I’m passionate about. I appreciate what you do.”

That’s an awesome message. I’m so glad somebody gets it, like they that was our big deal, especially the first course in the Academy was, build this business around an awesome life!

Jay: Yeah, and I love how he puts it about living consciously. I mean it’s very, very true. There’s something that is just….in my years of being an entrepreneur, I’ve seen it over and over again. And that is that to succeed in business and entrepreneurship, you have to be a very self-examining self-aware person, and you need to be conscious and mindful of the kinds of things that he’s talking about. And so that’s why from the very beginning of Internet Business Mastery back in 2005, we’ve always put such an emphasis on mindset, and lifestyle, and those kinds of things because it does directly impact and lead to then finally reaching….what is success if it’s not to know who you are, and what you’re about, and what you really want, and making that happen.

And then yes, internet business is a great vehicle for that. So yeah, I was thrilled when I read that. It was a lot of fun, and I certainly appreciate him taking the time to write that. It’s very fulfilling for us to hear how our information is received, and perceived, and enjoyed by others. So thanks Ross for sending that email, we really enjoyed it.

Sterling: Yeah thanks so much; that was awesome to hear.

Jay: Alright, got a cool little breakthrough here from Internet Business Mastery Academy. This one comes from Taural Rhoden who wrote in and said, “Last night before going to sleep, I sent out my first sales mail to my mini list of people, less than 95 people. This morning the first thing I saw in my email inbox were order confirmations. It was an awesome feeling, it really confirmed for me that all this online business stuff is actually a viable income source for me. It made me so confident that I decided to take some time off of my day job as a consultant in May and June so I can really invest some serious time and money in my product.”

So that’s awesome, we love hearing about when people get those first sales coming in, and even with a tiny list, those sales started coming for him. And it’s just going to continue to grow from there, so thank you Taural for sharing that great breakthrough that felt good to you.

If it feels good to you, we want to hear about it, and it feels good to us. And if you want to check out what he’s doing, you can go to TauralRhoden.com and hopefully I’m saying your name right there. I know we’ve interacted online, but I’ve never actually heard your name said. So that’s spelled TauralRhoden.com.

Sterling: And that’s so awesome, he got sales off just 95 people on a list. I mean we live it every day, we don’t have gargantuan lists in any of our businesses, and we still make an incredible living online. And it’s not about having 50,000 or 100,000 people although that will be great if we get to that. But you know, 95 people solidified the fact that this is real to him, that’s awesome.

Jay: Absolutely.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: On this episode’s Quick Tip, we’ve got a nifty little tool for measuring the number of subscribers to your WordPress blog. Now we’ve talked about a tool called FeedBurner; it’s a free service that’s now owned by Google. It has been for a year or two now, and it’s a great service for getting metrics and stats about your subscribers. And if you are using WordPress blog, which you should be, because that’s what we teach, then you definitely need to check out a plugin called FeedBurner Feedsmith.

FeedBurner FeedSmith is a plugin, it very simply allows you to forward your feed over to your FeedBurner account. Now why would that be important? Well, a lot of people make the mistake of when they burn their feed and put it into FeedBurner, you’ve got your original feed address, which might be…which for me it’s JasonVanOrden.com/feed, and then you’ve got your new FeedBurner address, which I think for me is like Feeds.FeedBurner.com/JasonVO.

Well I want everything forwarding to that same place so that if they happen to be subscribed to the FeedBurner feed or if they happened to be subscribed to any of the feeds that WordPress generates, that it all gets shunted to the same place, and FeedBurner is going to be measuring every last person.

So that’s what FeedBurner FeedSmith does. So make sure to forward all those people over there, because if you don’t do that forwarding, then the number you’re measuring is only the number of people that are subscribed to the Feeds.FeedBurner.com feed address and not if they happened to be subscribed to any of your WordPress ones. So if you have a WordPress blog, absolutely look up this plugin, install it, get it set up. It’s called FeedBurner FeedSmith, and the easiest thing to do is just go to Google and Google FeedBurner FeedSmith. They don’t have a really easy URL to get to it in classic Google fashion, but definitely check that out, and get that installed if you’re not already using it.

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!