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This is Internet Business Mastery, Episode 65.

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 a cubicle escape story with Shaun Noonan. Now this is the first of a new series of interviews that we will be releasing regularly through the podcast feed. The second part of our interview with John Jonas is going to come out next week. And then on the Quick Tip, we have a handy tool for finding out if someone is ripping off your content.

Now 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 for you?

Jay: Well I guess I’m just excited about this new interview series. I mean there’s so many people in the Internet Business Mastery community doing awesome things, and we’ve had great feedback when we’ve done interviews with people before, and it’s always inspiring for me to hear people’s stories, and I learn something every time we do an interview. So it’s great to get that…I think it’s valuable content for our podcast listeners. So I’m excited now to regularly do these interviews, and put them out as an additional show on the feed. So it’s going to be fun stuff.

Sterling: Well and people ask us all the time if we’re going to add more shows because right now as it stands we do two a month. So here was our chance to go, okay, let’s do three a month, how about that? And we’ll do these cubicle escape stories since we love them so much as well.

Jay: Yeah people listen to us talk about internet business and the fact that we do what we do, and hopefully that inspires people. And people do email us and say, “Oh, I love listening to everything you guys have to say,” but there’s something about hearing other people talk about their experience as well. And there’s always going to be something in other people’s stories that somebody in the audience might resonate with and get inspired by. So I think by bringing this content in will hopefully inspire that many more people, and many more people get past whatever sticking points that they have. So I’m excited for the value that I think people will get out of these shows, and it’s going to be very cool.

So by all means those listening, let us know what you think of these interviews, and we’ll adapt things accordingly. But I think it’s going to produce some good things.

Sterling: I agree.

Jay: I guess with that we’ll go ahead and dive into our feature segment which is a pre-recorded interview with Internet Business Mastery Coaching Course alumnus and Academy member, Shaun Noonan.

And now the featured segment…

Jay: Hello, it is Jay here on the line. I’ve also got Sterling with me, and a very special guest. This is an Internet Business Mastery community member, actually someone we’ve been interacting with for quite some time, has been listening to the show for quite some time. And it’s just been thrilling to watch everything that he’s been up to the last couple of years.

So we wanted to get him on the line, and pick his brains of what bits of wisdom or things that have worked well for him, and we find it inspirational to talk to people about their stories. So with us today we’ve got Shaun Noonan of LearningIndonesian.com who has previously been a coaching course student, and a very active member of the Internet Business Mastery community, in there all the time helping people out – of course many people appreciate as do we. So thank you very much Shaun for joining us today and giving us a bit of your time to chat with us.

Shaun: No, it’s great to talk to you guys again.

Jay: So I guess the logical place to start is…and I guess I should mention this is the second time we’ve interviewed you. It’s been a long while back shortly after our coaching course we interviewed you, but it’s always fun to check in again because I know you’ve done lots of stuff, and your life has changed in different ways. And one of them I guess is you’ve got married in the last couple years since we last talked to you. But tell us a little bit about I guess your story, how did you get into internet business and information marketing? What brought Shaun Noonan to this whole internet business thing?

Shaun: Sure, well I sort of always thought that somebody I would build a website that would make a trillion dollars, and everybody would want to join up, it would have a trillion users. I kind of came out of that whole dot com world of  ‘if you build just the right website and it goes virally, you’re all set.’

Sterling: Don’t we all start with that illusion? That sounds very familiar.

Shaun: Yeah, so if you make something and put it out there, somebody’s going to buy it, right? So I had that mentality for pretty much all of my adult life until I sort of woke up. Actually taking the coaching course from you guys I guess it’s going to be two years coming up in August, and yeah, since then I just had this mental shift of ‘well if you build something that people want first, and then you bring it to them, they’ll buy it.’

So kind of just this whole mental shift from that whole angle…so going back since the coaching course, my first project was LearningIndonesian.com, which was basically an online language program, audio based. I looked at launching into iTunes, and as part of my niche research I saw that there wasn’t any Indonesian podcasts of any value there already. And I realized no, there’s some other resources out there, there are commercially published programs, you can go to a bookstore and buy one, but there didn’t seem to be a really good one online.

So I realized podcasting would be an excellent medium to deliver and find that audience and get it out there, and I would really be the only one doing it for this particular language. So I went with that, and sort of based on the whole building a community from the coaching course, and built up the website, launched it when it was good enough, and built a steady list off of that, and started surveying and marketing, and launched a product into it, and it worked really well.

Since then, in the year that that project has been active and running, I’ve since done a complete redesign of the site after really connecting up with the audience, and reworking the site to fit their final expectations. And actually it was just three weeks ago that the final redesign went out, and I increased my income by 25% just from converting better on the new site for new visitors.

I know, it’s this wacky stuff – you make one little change and then all of a sudden, 25% raise out of nowhere.

Sterling: Well speaking of your audience, who would you say your primary target market is, and who are you trying to reach with this content?

Shaun: For Learning Indonesian, it’s basically just people who want to learn the Indonesian language primarily for travel, but there are other secondary purposes like they might have in laws or family that live there. And as I discovered after launching the podcast and getting to know the audience a little bit better, it turns out that the vast majority of them are actually Australians that go there for the summer.

Indonesia’s sort of their Caribbean, if you’re in the U.S. you’ll sort of get that reference. Hope on a plane, fly for an hour or two and you’re sitting on a beach drinking the equivalent of Corona’s and chilling out. That’s what Indonesia is for Australians, and I realized there was a great market there that was sort of untapped. Other than that, U.S. and European travelers also travel there quite a bit. So it’s a nice demographic to target, and the other part is I happen to be a member of the other demographic which is – my wife is from Indonesia, and I need to be able to communicate with my family. So it became and important thing for me to learn it, and so I realized maybe some other people might fit that as well. So we sort of target both of those groups.

Sterling: So you ended up getting out of the ‘I don’t know what my mother in law is saying….” She made you learn it anyway, huh?

Shaun: Yeah, once you get to a certain point, there’s possibly deniability. So at this point that’s all out the window.

Jay: Well clearly you know who your audience is, and you have a sense of okay, who are these people who want to learn Indonesian, and what are they wanting to do with it? And that’s awesome to hear that description, I mean I think anybody out there who currently has a business or wanting to start one, I mean hopefully you can do exactly what you just demonstrated, what Shaun just demonstrated for us, and that is to be able to rattle off a couple minutes of ‘well I think primarily this is the person that seems that’s interesting in my content, and this is why, and this is what they’re wanting to do, this is where they’re from.’

And those kinds of insights are so valuable when it comes to making your business work, and making a business that makes money as well, because clearly you’re able to give them what they want more easily when you have that sense in mind.

Shaun: Yeah, absolutely. And that profile sort of builds up over time. You install Google Analytics to get an idea of where people are actually physically coming from, you look at the map and sort of get that idea. And then you start emailing with them, you interact with them on Twitter and you make personal connections with them, and you start to mentally build up this idea of who your perfect customer is.

And you find out that there are many, many copies of them out there, and if you focus on delivering that type of product that would satisfy that type of a person, then it’s repeatable and you just keep doing it, and they’ll buy. It’s that easy.

Jay: Yeah, awesome. So you went into this Learning Indonesian niche, and choosing that first niche is a hard step we find for a lot of people. They get kind of hung up on it; some people are like,  “What do I really know anything about?” And I think they vastly underestimate their own interests, and knowledge, and passions, and value it would have to other people. But how was that process for you? How did you go about choosing what your target market was going to be, and choosing that original niche for yourself?

Shaun: Well you know you have to be a little skeptical of your own thought process sometimes. So probably the best thing to do is to just make a list of every little thing that you’re into. And it could be something from all the way back when you were…maybe you played baseball when you were a little kid, maybe you played t-ball or something. But sort of evaluate your life, and make a giant list of all the things you are into, and that’s a great place to start.

I mean you don’t want to go down the path of launching a business on something that you’re not personally invested in. I mean I tried that in the past, and I tried that since learning Indonesian, and I’ve never been able to sort of chase the money, if that makes any sense. Something looks great, something looks good on paper, and then I realized well, I don’t really have any personal investment in this. And I can’t sit there for hours, and hours, and hours and interact with this demographic when I don’t really like what I’m talking about.

Sterling: We know that all too well because if we were chasing the money, we’d be doing weight loss products and selling mortgages, and the all-famous porn.

Jay: Well I’m glad you bring that up, because I think…that’s why in the end when people are like, “Oh, what’s the formula? What are the numbers?” In the end, we’re like, “Well, really the primary criteria we use is, what’s your passion and interest, and what does your gut tell you?” because in the end, that really ends up making much more difference than okay, did such and such number reach such a threshold and the formula came out to be more than five? Or whatever the magic number people are looking for, so you bring up a great point there. And I think that’s dead on, what you’re saying.

Sterling: Well and one of the other things that I was going to mention too real quickly is that…in the Academy we talk a lot about this because of course, this is one of the number one issues that people have – what am I going to sell? And if you make that list like you’re talking about of all the things that you know and have fun doing, and this kind of thing, and you’re still not able to find something, it’s also what do you want to know?

So let’s just say that in your instance, you’re thinking, gosh I need to learn Indonesian. And as you’re searching through all this stuff, you find that that’s actually a viable market. You’re like, wow, I get to become the expert and do what I wanted to do anyway and learn Indonesian, and have the fulfillment of that as well, so just a little side note on that.

Shaun: No, that’s like dead on, because it’s something that you are personally driven to do. It has to be something that you’re really interested in, and that could mean something you don’t know yet, something that you need to learn, something that you put on your list of ‘hopefully someday I’ll be able to do this,’ your hopes and dreams, and that kind of thing. Just dig in and start working on it.

Sterling: Absolutely. Now okay, so you’ve got Learning Indonesian, and we were wondering if you could share some examples of how your currently making money with learning Indonesian, as well as any other sites you have, and it’s just basically what are you making money with on the internet?

Shaun: Okay, sure. Um, so I’ll start with Learning Indonesian. Basically this was started with the explicit goal of building an audio-based language program that people could purchase. I wasn’t quite sure which way it was going to go, if it was going to be a prepackaged product, if it was going to be scheduled webinars, it could have been sort of anything.

And I think that you guys would recognize that you can’t really know that until you sort of ask people. So after a lot of heavy surveying and figuring out what it needed to be, it turned out that people wanted either to be able to purchase it as a downloadable package, or to have a monthly subscription – which would have been cheaper but would have given them access to new material as it was put out.

So learn on their own time and retain membership to that, so it turned into a very simple membership site. In fact I think we use the same membership software that you guys use for the Internet Business Mastery Academy. It’s just very straightforward and makes a lot of sense, so it’s a monthly membership. And the way we do it is we pre-sell months in order to make it less expensive in the long run, so we can give them a bulk discount on pre-purchasing months.

And as of today, you can purchase three-month, six-month, nine-month, and twelve-month, and we’d have since the launch, we added the nine- and the twelve-month, and that has turned out to be very popular. So just surprisingly people want to go out and buy a year out from where they are today. So that was an excellent surprise, and it turned out to make an interesting dent on the income.

Sterling: When you get somebody to prepay for the year, I mean we love the monthly continuity, imagine getting the entire year paid for right up front. That’s awesome.

Shaun: Yeah, and since then we’ve done a little bit of experimenting with doing travel affiliate marketing in that niche, and it was a bit of a surprise, but realizing that nearly everyone turned out to be travelers, we were able to find some affiliate programs that tied in with hotel, travel, and travel guides and that kind of thing.

We started experimenting with that against the list, and that’s turning out to be an excellent match, so that’s in development. As I said, I tried to go down a couple of different paths last year, and it seemed whenever I turned back and focused on the thing that I really enjoyed and really loved, I was able to grow it a little more, better than I could have if I had branched off and tried to build ten different sites at once.

Even though I do it full time, it turned out that splitting my attention that way didn’t turn out to be something that worked for me. So what I’ve done is, I’ve taken some of that time – because learning Indonesian doesn’t have to be a full time project – I’ve taken some of that available time and I’ve started doing a little bit of consulting.

Going back, one of the things I realized I liked about having a job was being able to work with people, and have co-workers and people that I could mentor, people that I could learn from. And I spent a good amount of time connecting up with people and I found that I really like doing consulting as well, it’s something…you think well, if you didn’t have to work what would you do?

And as it turns out, I wouldn’t mind doing this. So you get to sort of free your mind and realize yeah, I really like working with people. So internet marketing’s great, but sometimes you don’t get to pick up the phone and talk to people.

Sterling: Yeah it’s interesting we see in the Academy, we’ve seen that you became kind of the unofficial mastermind group consultant. Everybody knows Shaun, and he’s helping everybody. We’re like this is just amazing, plus you’re teaching them from the course – from the stuff that we teach – and from the stuff that you learned as well. We’re like he’s like the unofficial guy in charge of that mastermind group.

Shaun: Yeah, it’s just I’ve always enjoyed connecting with people, and I really…to kind of shift away, I’m not interested in building a giant internet marketing program that everybody could buy, and go down that path, because there are a lot of other people doing it. And it doesn’t have anything to do with connecting one-on-one with people, which is what I really like out of the whole thing anyway. I like connecting with people, and I like internet marketing as a discipline.

And between those two things I’ve found that that translates to wanting to help people, especially in the beginning, get started in internet marketing, and help them solve every little problem they happen to have. And so I said well why not just start doing that too?

Jay: Yeah, I mean so you find it very fulfilling to spend some of your time doing that?

Shaun: Oh I love it, I mean I could do it all day, I mean if I didn’t have to eat, sleep, or whatever I’d probably be on the phone talking to people about internet business. What am I doing right now with you guys?

Jay: Well I love that because it points out something that I think is important. I know we talk about lot about the principle of not working dollar for hours, and levering things so that you can work less and yet make more money, and so forth which pushes us away from consulting and things like that. But you’re right; it can end up being a very like secluded thing sometimes.

So in the end, what’s most important about all this is, well, what fulfills you? And that’s what we talk about in the first course in the Academy, is like well, know what it is that you actually want in your lifestyle and fulfillment. So for you, you’re like part of my life still needs to be about directly connecting with people one on one, well that fulfills me.

And yeah that might not be the best thing on paper when it comes to the leveraging of my time, but ultimately what I’m going for here is fulfillment, and so yes, I want to spend some of my time doing this. And so making that deliberate decision all goes back to knowing what it is you want your lifestyle to look like. What are the factors that fulfill you most? And that’s why you make that decision even though it’s not the most logical thing when it comes to looking at your profit loss statement.

Shaun: No you’re absolutely right, it’s not a financial decision, its a fulfillment decision. And it has to make sense financially, but it’s by and far a fulfillment decision to begin with. And I think getting back to when you want to work on your first project, once you sort of…I guess not to belabor the phrase…but once you knock one out of the park, and you’re making money, and you’re doing okay, and you’ve got all your bases covered, and you’ve got some free time – then you can start to think about some more options that you could take. And I mean that’s where I’m kind of going down the road with this new thing.

Jay: Awesome, I love it. That’s such a key principle. Well let’s talk about fears, actually fears and freedom from fears is something that Sterling and I have been talking a lot about lately, because clearly freedom is a theme of starting your own business. People want to have more time to spend in the ways they want, more time with their family, more time away from doing things for other people, rather doing things that they want.

But finding that freedom inevitably leads to facing fears, whatever those fears may be – fears maybe of not feeling as secure, fears of failing, whatever…they’re all a little bit different. But there’s some common ones we all run into in internet business. What are maybe one or two fears you’ve had to face along the way, and how you overcame them in this process for yourself?

Shaun: Sure, I had started with a list before I quit my job. I made a very long list of the things I liked about my job, and the things I didn’t like, and I made a third list of the things I’m afraid to do. And this actually came a little bit out of the 4 Hour Workweek, I think there were some similar exercises – try to imagine what the worst thing is and play that out.

And I think you have to be again, sort of going back, I think you have to be skeptical of your own feelings, and just be as…break it out, and be analytical about it; make your list. And so I had listed things like ‘I will not make enough money to pay my mortgage,’ ‘I will lose my car,’ ‘I won’t have enough money to pay for the things that I have today, let alone the things that I’ll have later,’ ‘I will not be able to get another job again,’ these are some legitimate things that I think a lot of people worry about.

If they imagine their career and they imagine if they had a gap on their resume, what that would say about them, and they sort of burn their safety net of being able to go back to a job. And I think in writing it out, and playing it out in detail about what I would do to mitigate all of that, I think that made a huge difference. Yeah, you have these fearful feelings, but get them out on paper and just attack them rationally, and try to break it down.

And in the case of income, I thought well, I have a little bit of savings in the bank that can cover my bills for a little bit as the business ramps up. I have a steady growing list of customers, and they have expressed desire for the product that I’m going to be selling, I just need more time to fill it out. And I’m like, well I’ve got people here that want to buy from me, I’ve got a product to sell them, and this fear about whether it’s rational to cut my income doesn’t make sense because there is demand and there is a good product to offer.

And then I realized well, if I’m running a business, a profitable business, and I choose someday to shut it down and go get a job again, isn’t being sort of President of your own company better than ‘sat on the couch for six months,’ or whatever? So being President, I’ll take that one.

Jay: I like that a lot, I mean I did something similar. I wrote them down and then I talked them out with my wife, and I think rather than keeping them in your head and pushing them out, maybe everyone having a different way of dealing, but it does do something whether talk about them or pull them out to paper and see them in front of you. And like you say, be able to think through them, and maybe let yourself feel some of the emotion of like okay yeah, I’m afraid, and just kind of play that out in your mind like okay, what’s really the worst that can happen rather than stuffing it and saying oh I don’t want to feel that fear so I’m not going to do anything, and I’m just going to go back to watching TV and going to my job and whatever.

It can be very, very insightful if you just do go through that exercise, and you know what, just right down as many as I can just so I can see them in front of me on the page. And I found that incredibly helpful for myself when it came to that decision time of oh my goodness, am I actually going to quite my job kind of moment. So I like that a lot, thanks for sharing that.

Shaun: And actually one last point on that, I had to sort of consciously make the decision and say, am I the kind of person who overcomes a fear like this to get to the next level? And when I decided that about myself, I moved past it. So it’s just one of those things, you have to sometimes pull the trigger on.

Sterling: Alright, so now that you’ve got through the fears, the next question we wanted to ask you…first I’m going to preface it with – on the show we’ve talked a lot about how internet business has impacted our life, and how Jay can travel and live wherever he wants, and I’ve been able to move and live on the beach, and just these basic situations of how different things are because of internet business. So we want to ask you, how has this internet business affected and impacted your life?

Shaun: Well sure, and you talk about travel. Well that’s actually the first thing I can mention, I’ve been able in the past six months to travel one full month out of that, and be sort of detached from having to be located in one place in order to operate the business. And setting up an automated business that requires occasional email type interaction or customer service stuff, I was able to basically detach myself from where I am, and I can then a month out of six travel very easily.

The difficult part there is that my wife has a job, and she has generous vacation, but there’s only so much that we can do with it. If it weren’t for that, we would probably be spending half our time on a beach in Bali. And it would be perfectly fine, and the business would operate just fine without the physical presence.

The other aspect is, I’m not Tim Ferriss – I’m not out there trying to bungee jump off a mountain or anything like that. I like a very simple life, I like solitude; I like being able to do simple things like go grocery shopping. Like before this interview, I did a week’s grocery shopping and there was no one in the supermarket. I mean just little things like that I found have made me feel a lot less stress, feel a lot happier about the choices that I’ve made in life, and I can just spend the time doing the things I want.

One more thing is that I found that I’m able to sort of pay myself first in time, to borrow something from Robert Kiyosaki in ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad,’ sort of pay yourself first is his motto when it comes to when you earn income, you should be putting it in your bank account before you pay your bills, and you pay your taxes and all that. It’s a great concept, but I’ve sort of brought it into my life and said, well I should pay myself first in the things that I find very rewarding too.

If I want to wake up and start work at noon instead of right away, and maybe watch an episode of the Daily Show before I get started, I do that. And I don’t have these things in the back of my head saying well I wish I could get to that. I do the things that I enjoy when I want to do them, and I fit the work around that. So I pay myself first in time, which I’ve found to be incredibly rewarding. And it may not sound that sexy, but it’s a great place to be I think.

Jay: No it’s huge, that pay yourself first in time. I mean you’re absolutely right, I mean just ask Sterling what time he gets up every morning.

Sterling: I get up about 11, and it’s funny, I do almost exactly the same stuff as you. I have built my life around not having to be in line ever. That’s my big thing; I don’t want to be in line, I don’t want to wait. So I go to my Whole Foods market at about one in the afternoon on a Tuesday, nobody’s there. I go to the gym at night, about 11 at night, like I’ve designed this whole thing so I can go there and not have to wait or be bothered by that kind of thing.

And I was even able to do the same thing with where I live, it gets very busy on the weekend and it’s hard to drive around and get where I need to go. So I just move my weekend to the middle of the week so again, I don’t have to wait or be bothered by traffic, and that kind of thing. But yeah, that stuff is very similar.

Shaun: No it’s great; I’ve started to shift a little bit of my weekend to Monday, which I think a lot of people could appreciate too.

Sterling: Well and we were just finally able to get to the next step where we’re putting into a position where we can take four days off, or three days off completely if we want to.

Jay: Well and it is a little…I like to call them ‘lifestyle hacks,’ they’re little things that you do, like shifting your weekend to Tuesday and Wednesday because nobody’s on the beach and you can go there in solitude. Just little things like that, because of the control you now have over your time, or maybe a little bit of…I mean if all you do is replace your income, but now you can pay yourself first in time.

Even if you’re not a millionaire, but you’re still hey, I’m making the full time healthy stable income I had when I was a ’9 to 5′er,’ but now I’m able to actually go away for a few days if I want, or have my weekend be when I want it, or shop in the middle of the day, not have the commute in the middle of traffic like they do. They make a huge impact on your mental wellness and your stress-freeness in life. So that’s a very powerful principle, that’s awesome.

Alright, so let’s…I’m sure some people are wondering – well what are some of the big lessons that Shaun has learned. Are there a couple tips for somebody who’s just starting this journey themselves or is relatively new at it. What are a couple tips that you could share with them, things you have learned along the way that have helped you to succeed in internet business?

Shaun: Well sure, I think the first one is an absolute most important conceptual thing about internet marketing, is about who you are selling to. Think about what you can offer them, and how you can relate to them. It’s more important that you find your customer than you go out and make something, and then see who will buy it. So I think the most important thing there is to discover the demographic that you love selling to, and then find the best thing that you can deliver to them.

And it might not be what you came to expect, but in the end you’ll be very fulfilled because you’ll be offering something to a group of people that you can really relate to. So number one I think that’s probably the biggest thing. And then the other thing is there are…when you get started in internet marketing, you get sort of bombarded left and right by a billion different people or what appear to be a billion different people, maybe they’re just five guys sitting someplace in a master lair somewhere in a Pacific island. But they’re all trying to sell you stuff.

And it’s probably the case; I mean there probably are some internet marketing bond villains out there that all run the show. But there are a lot of people out there that are trying to sell you something that if you do it, you’ll make a ton of money. And I think the most important thing that people have to be at that point is just be skeptical of what is being given to them.

When somebody sends you a link, it might be an affiliate link. You’ve got to appreciate where it’s coming from, get to know the people that you’re learning from, and make it more into a apprentice/master type of relationship and really find people that you can relate to. Find people that will follow a style, a business that you can appreciate, and probably as important as that, that you can attach yourself morally and say I like the way this person does business. I like what they’re doing, and I want to learn from them.

So when you go out sort of guru shopping is the word, find people you can really relate to, look at what they do, and look at what they’re teaching, and go with that versus just grabbing whatever e-book happens to show up in your inbox that day.

Sterling: Guru shopping, I love that. That’s so awesome.

Okay, something for us that we wanted to know for ourselves, but how has the Internet Business Mastery Academy affected your life?

Shaun: Sure, well I was a coaching student prior to that, so you guys gave me an excellent framework in which to construct how I’m going to be putting my future business in. And by the time the Academy came back around, I had found that I had through you guys, and some of that guru shopping you just kind of talked about, I learned a lot of different stuff that I could do.

But from my point of view, I found that the Academy is a great place to meet people to work with to find potential partners for stuff. And I think if you’re just starting, finding partners is a useful thing. But if you’re just starting the courses are going to be very, very useful to you. And they’re going to be what I got in the coaching program, but I don’t know how much longer it is, but I know it’s a lot of material.

I mean how much more material would you say is in the courses versus what was in the coaching program?

Jay: Well there’s been obviously a couple of years of time for us to improve upon and add to, and we’re constantly adding to the membership site. I mean in a way that’s why we liked going with that model, because not only could we help more people, but it could be this thing that just continually organically…you know we like to say the Academy’s this living thing, because it’s constantly being added to and changed according to what the members ask for or say. And so yeah, there’s definitely a heck of a lot more in there now even above and beyond that original coaching course.

Shaun: That’s sort of…I think for people who are going to come in, they’re going to find a lot of very useful courses that are going to structure their thinking the same way that I learned from the coaching course. I think it’s even going to be even better at this point because it brings in more of the social media aspects and that kind of stuff. Personally though, I’ve found the networking aspect to be the most useful, and I think as you guys know, when I first came in and I saw the forums, I sort of lit that up. And I thought that was the reason for being there, and I had a great time with it.

Sterling: The Shaun Noonan lair….

Jay: For anybody who is listening to this and wanting to find you online and what you’re doing, where can people go to find you online?

Shaun: Sure, well you can go to LearningIndonesian.com if you want to see sort of how I’ve implemented this in a non internet marketing related business. So a business that actually sells a product that average everyday people want to buy, you can see sort of how I do that at LearningIndonesian.com.

And I’ve just started up a personal blog at ShaunNoonan.com, and I won’t spell it out for the benefit of the people here, but hopefully they can get a link to it or something. That’s where I’m going to be talking sort of about my…I guess sort of what I’ve talked about in this interview, and my take on things, but more importantly so I can connect to folks over the idea of one-on-one mentorship and consulting, and anything that people might need in terms of connecting up for any kind of hand holding or strategy.

And one thing that I wanted to sort of experiment with is helping people to stay accountable to their own actions, so yeah, basically being sort of a boss or even an accountabili-buddy, or whatever it takes to help people get through some of the sticking points on a one-on-one basis. When you’re all alone taking courses, sometimes there’s that missing piece of – ‘I just need somebody to kind of help me through a sticking point.’ I’ve love to be able to demonstrate that through my personal site.

Jay: I mean that’s something we’ve seen you do many times for people in the Academy, is help them get past a little sticking point, because now you have a couple years under your belt, and certainly you’ve been through the motions and figured out a few things for yourself, and far more than a few things. You’re a man of action, which is one thing we’ve loved watching over the last couple of years.

So I think that will be a great resource if people want to check out what you’re doing, or get your help in coming past a sticking point. I’ll go ahead and spell that out for people – ShaunNoonan.com, because I know it’s not the most obvious….

Shaun: That’s why I was going to say a link might be a better way to go.

Jay: Yeah, we’ll definitely have a link in the show notes for people interested in checking that out as well.

Well thanks Shaun for taking the time today to talk to us, thanks for all your help in making the Academy a wonderful place and helping the people in there, and in being a valuable member of the Internet Business Mastery Academy. We definitely appreciate all of that, and have just been thrilled and excited to see everything that you’re up to. It’s very fulfilling to watch other people succeed in internet business, which clearly we are very passionate about as well.

So thank you Shaun for all of that.

Shaun: No, thank you guys for putting this information out there, building stuff like the coaching course in the Academy where people can go and learn. In a world where there’s so much out there, having a cohesive training program that sort of starts you and ends you where you need to be, that’s gold. So thank you guys for that.

Jay: Well we love it! Alright, Shaun, I’m sure we’ll be interacting with you more online. Until next time, have a good one.

Shaun: Alright, you too!

Jay: Alright, just a couple of announcements, and then an email breakthrough story from a community member. We just want to remind you that we’ve got the brand new Internet Business Mastery platinum mastermind group that will be launching very soon. As the release of this episode, the early notification list is open and if you are at all interested in this, you definitely want to get on that early notification list to make sure you get all the details and early notice of when it opens up, because there will be only very limited slots. And obviously those are going to go quite quickly considering the number of people who listen to this podcast and are on our list.

So I guess a quick explanation of kind of the idea of this mastermind platinum mastermind group. We’ve talked about the importance of masterminds quite a bit recently on the podcast, and in that interview Shaun mentioned, we were talking about how the Academy kind of built on the content that we taught in the coaching course. But one big difference when we were doing the coaching course, that was a limited number of people and they got direct access to sending questions in to us, and talking to us.

So we’re kind of bringing that idea back, and taking it even more to the next level in terms of now it’s not only going to be a coaching situation, but also a mastermind situation with all kinds of networking and interaction as well as mastermind calls where you bounce ideas around not only with us but with other people who are ready to take it to the sixth figure level, or if they are already there who want to double that.

So that’s kind of who we’re looking for to put into this exclusive platinum level mastermind group. Sterling, do you have anything else to add to that?

Sterling: Well I think one other thing to mention to that is a lot of people ask us when they’re going through the Academy or when they’re thinking of joining the Academy, they want to have some direct access to us and direct Q&A’s, and being able to talk to us directly, that kind of thing.

And this is one of the things that we decided, let’s do this again because we really enjoyed doing the coaching course, and that did transform to the Academy. And this way, we’re going to do kind of a hybrid and a high level of both, how about that? Alright, where’s it at? Where can you sign up for the Platinum early list?

Jay: Alright, you can go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/platinum and get on that early notification list. Now for those who might be listening to this in the distant future, maybe you just pulled this out of a time capsule, then there will be other details about how you can get on the wait list for the next time it opens up. But that is the place to go for all the latest info.

Alright, we’ve got a great breakthrough, in fact this one just came in this morning. In fact, I don’t think you’ve even seen this yet Sterling, but this is from Ralph Burns who has been in the Academy. He bought the Product Launch Formula course that we recommended recently, and got in on that whole incredible deal that we put together. I’ve exchanged a couple of emails with him about some things, and then found this one in my inbox this morning, and it was really nice to read. And I’m very excited for him, because he makes a little announcement in this email. Let me go ahead and share this with the listeners.

He says, “Well I’m not one to gush, my wife says I keep it all bottled up too much sometimes, but enough of the psycho analysis. You guys have made such an enormous impact on my life in opening up avenues within the internet I never thought possible doing something I absolutely love and turning it into a business.

The next step is my first product launch, thanks to your recommendation for the Product Launch Formula, which is also great, your step-by-step process to live the lifestyle of your dreams is absolutely amazing and I cannot thank you enough. My liberation day is set for July 1^st. I have lots to do before then, but your guidance and assistance is the number one reason I know I’ll get there.

Thanks much, and I do hope to meet you guys at some point. Warmest regards from a raving fan, Ralph.”

So that’s very cool, congratulations on getting the liberation date, or also ‘independence day’ as we like to call it. Let us know how that goes; we’ll definitely be excited to hear how things continue to progress for you and your success Ralph.

Sterling: Well and hopefully he’ll end up on an episode of this – The Cubicle Escape Show.

Jay: That’s right, we’d definitely love to interview him about that. So you can find Ralph at SalesManagementMastery.com.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: Alright, let me share one of my deep woes with my internet business lately.

Sterling: Uh oh, what’s that?

Jay: I’ve got what we call our ego feeds, some people call them, where you’ve got like Google Alerts and different things out there notifying you every time your name shows up on the internet?

Sterling: Okay, yeah yeah.

Jay: So I was reviewing those recently and I’m looking at this blog and I’m like oh, let me see what they said about me. And then I’m reading and I’m like wait a second, I wrote this. And then I look at their next post, and their next post, and I’m like these are my posts! What are they doing on their blog? And I’m realizing basically this person is just importing my feed and ripping it off and posting it on their own blog as if it was their own.

Obviously, not a very nice thing to see, sadly it just happens. There’s only so many things you can do about it to some degree, you’ve just got to wait for those people to burn out and go away. However, I do have a little tool that can help people discover this kind of thing going on.

There’s a website called Copyscape.com, and you can go in there and search and put a page in, and it will show you all these different places that that content is showing up online. And so you can kind of browse through and see okay, it’s a search engine or directory, or is it somebody like ripping off my content and not giving me credit for it?

And it’s a handy little tool that you can definitely use, and I think they have some premium offerings if you want somebody who can more aggressively watch that for you. I guess as a bonus Quick Tip, if you do see that what are some things you can do about it?

Well, you know, one thing that we do, you’ll notice we always link to ourselves in our blog post, and one of the reasons for that is so if they rip us off, at least we’re getting a link out of it.

Sterling: Yeah, at least something.

Jay: Some, because I went and searched in the Whois database, and I looked all over the site, there’s no contact info. I mean sure I’d love to send a ‘cease and desist,’ and of course it probably wouldn’t do a dang thing.  For all I know the guy’s probably in the islands somewhere, I don’t know.

So you know, sometimes there’s not a whole lot you can do, but at least that way you’re using it against them and they’re linking back to you, so people will find you. You get a link, maybe you’ll get some traffic and people will see, oh it’s maybe back here.

So use Copyscape if you want to find some of that stuff, and then just remember to maybe link to yourself if you see that your content is getting ripped off. You can always try reporting it to Google, they do have some web master tools where you can report and say, “I think this is a spam blog,” and it might take them a while. Eventually what happens is these people do fall down in the search engines and they go away.

But there you go, there’s a little Quick Tip on how to deal with I guess the internet pirates out there who would use your good name for their own profit.

Sterling: Well I guess the one other thing you could do from time to time is write a post about how if it doesn’t say the name of your site at the top of this, it’s been scammed by a complete scumbag that’s stealing your….something like that. And they’re doing it automatically through RSS feeds, so they wouldn’t know that it’s there, there it is saying these bad things about them. If you’re not seeing this from my site, it’s been pirated….

Jay: …by a thief. And if all else fails, you can email Sterling and he’ll hunt them down.

Sterling: Oh yes, please send those to me.

Jay: Aikido throw them or something. That’ll teach them…

So give that Quick Tip a try and see if that doesn’t help at Copyscape.com. We will have a link to that in the show notes back at the site.

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!