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

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Sterling: This is Internet Business Mastery, episode 78.

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 Internet Business Mastery.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.

On this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we have the seven reasons why online business and life are so awesome. And in the Quick Tip, we share a tool for creating your own online video channels as well as a tool for visually planting your sales funnels. 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, you can claim your risk free trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy by going to FreeAudioGift.com.

So Jay, you’re home. You’ve been traveling forever it seems. What’s been going on? Tell us of your many travels.

Jay: It does seem doesn’t it? Uh, I just got back from Blog World Expo which was a lot of fun, mostly just because I saw a lot of very cool people there, a lot of Internet Business Mastery listeners, a lot of colleagues and friends in the new Media Space bloggers, podcasters, and things of the like.

So it was a lot of fun, I got to speak which is always something I enjoy quite a bit, I love teaching which I do in the podcast and in the Academy, but there is just something about being up in front of people in a crowd that I enjoy that live interaction. So that was really cool. And I found a lot of cool tools, I got some interviews, the Academy members will get the full scoop on all of that stuff.

But one of the things I’ll be sharing in the Quick Tip was something I discovered at the Blog World Expo. So that’s what I’ve been up to, I mean the big thing coming away from Blog World Expo was that the people who were really serious about making money with their content, they were all looking at how to sell premium content, and it was mostly people talking about membership sites.

Sterling: Well, it’s about time.

Jay: The people from WordPress Wishlist Member which is a membership plugin for WordPress, they were there, and we got to meet them, Stu and Tracy.

Sterling: Did they try and talk you into changing the Academy over to Wishlist?

Jay: Well no, they didn’t, however they would be thrilled if I used them on my next project which I’m thinking about doing. I told them there was a few things missing, but they said, “Hey, we’d love to hear, so please by all means let us know what you want and sign on as Wishlist members.” And even Membergate was on site, and the infamous Ryan Lee who likes to talk about membership programs as well. He spoke at Blog World Expo, there should have been far more people in his session than there were.

So it’s just kind of interesting because you know this event versus an internet marketing event to see some of the different perspectives on making money with your contacts and stuff. So those who were really serious about making money with their new media content as content creators seem to be doing the best with premium content and most specifically with membership sites.

So that was the big take away, I guess that’s something obviously we already knew and talk about because that’s what we’re doing ourselves.

Sterling: Yeah again, years later it’s finally good to see that filtering into the outside of the internet marketing world I guess.

Jay: Yep, so anything new and exciting with you?

Sterling: Well as you were off playing and enjoying yourself in Vegas, I was toiling in the sales funnel. But actually sales funnel work, just redesigning our systems, creating new systems, and still working with our new marketing manager and having a good time seeing all of that come along. I really love tightening things up, so we’ve talked about the fact that when people come into your sales funnel, it’s like a bucket with water and you’re trying to pour as much water into the bucket as you can.

And you’re trying to keep as much of it as you can and it’s interesting to see the bucket let’s call it. Like for instance, most businesses have a lot of holes in the bucket. So you’re just losing a lot of water all over the place, and basically what I’ve been doing this last week or two is trying to figure out which holes are there and trying to plug it up so that we can keep more of those leads and convert them better and stuff.

And for me once I visually see it out on a screen in some sort of visual representation and can print it, and make notes on it, it actually makes me very, very confident or more confident in the internet business. So I absolutely love seeing that, so it was actually a pleasure working on that.

Jay: Yeah that’s a good analogy, the bucket. I mean it’s like traffic generation is turning up the faucet so more water is coming towards your bucket. And then you’ve got conversions so that hopefully more water goes into the bucket than spills out onto the ground and then you’ve got retention of customers to keep it in the bucket other than leaking out the bottom of the bucket. So it certainly is a lot to look at, but I’m excited to see what you guys have come up with. That’s awesome.

Well on today’s episode, I guess we’re going to be having a little bit of a different discussion. So let’s go ahead and dive into the featured section about why internet business, and life in general are awesome.

And now the featured segment….

Jay: Alright well in this featured segment, we wanted to have a bit of a discussion about some of the things that we’re the most excited about, that are awesome about internet business, some things we’re really grateful for in internet business and life in general. And we have thanksgiving coming right around the corner as of the recording and release of this particular episode.

So we thought it would be an appropriate discussion to have. So we sat down and kind of put together a list of seven reasons why online business and life are so awesome. So I guess I’ll go ahead and kick it off with my first one that I have on my list. And that is relationships and the ability to create and maintain them online has just gotten a lot easier and a lot more powerful these days.

And really relationships make or break your business, I mean the people that you know and associate with that encourage you, staying away from the ones that discourage you, or drawing appropriate boundaries with them, it’s about finding the right partners, finding the right mentors, finding people to mastermind with, finding people to learn from, finding people to teach, creating relationships with your customers, and all these things are just immensely earlier these days with all the different media and channels that we have on the internet.

We have social networking, we have ways to produce our own content and put it out there to get the attention of people, we can comment on people’s blogs, we can Twitter with them, we can participate in forums and all these…over the last four or five years of doing this new media online, podcasting internet business stuff, I’ve met a lot of fantastic people.

I mean it was awesome actually just looking at Tweet Burner this morning, just seeing people broken up into different groups that I follow, business friends and customers, and other people who engage with me. And it’s just really cool to see all these faces, all these people that I’ve met and because of cool technologies like Twitter and Tweet Burner, I’m able to very easily keep in touch with these people and have acquaintances and friendships even from long distance that then benefit my life and hopefully benefit their life as well.

And so it’s just really cool to have those kinds of things, especially with broadband and internet and iPhones, and latops and notebooks and all these things that are always connected to the network, a high-speed network these days. Connection which is a fundamental human need, an important part of business, is just extremely easy these days.

So you can create relationships fast and you can maintain them very, very easily. So that’s one reason why I think the internet, doing business online is awesome and also that life in general is awesome right now. What do you think about that?

Sterling: Well one of the things as you were talking about that I was just thinking the people that I now consider my best friends, the people I hang out with on a weekly and sometimes daily basis, I actually got them all through my interests and my passions from the internet. Now I hang out with them in real life, and just many of them happen to be here in San Diego, but that’s a pretty big realization

So yeah, it’s a fascinating thing, and actually just speaking of life in general and how awesome this relationship thing is online, it also includes my family as I use Skype to talk and see my family including my kids when I’m not with them. So at any given time, if I’m not with my two daughters and they’re both online, they’re both on Skype. So when they come online, we see each other and they’ll tell me about their day. And even think like with Facebook, if I can’t go to one of my daughter’s soccer games my other daughter, she can just record it and throw it up on Facebook, and I can see what happens.

I mean this just blows me away how cool life is now, and when anybody is cynical about Facebook or Twitter or something, I just think you are not seeing the big picture with this. Because my mom even is on Facebook, and does the little updates. And there are things, I talk to her once a week, once every other week and there’s certain things you can talk about on the phone and share, but with these technologies and the ability to create and maintain our relationships.

I can see stuff she’s done, she just went into the mountains of Salt Lake, took a bunch of pictures of the changing leaves and all the stuff that she’s into, whereas I probably in a month when I see her again, she might forget to show me those pictures or share something she’s into, and I can see it on a daily basis on Facebook and engage with her about them. It’s so fascinating, so yeah, I love that one as well.

Jay: Yeah I was just chatting with my mom on instant messaging because she’s usually online. Well she’s at work and she’s asking me about the documentary and she’s commenting on things that she’s seen me…and she’s seen this process unfold because I shoot little updates out through Twitter and Facebook about it, so she gets to watch that process.

And like little thoughts that I might have had off the cuff like you say, next time I talk to her on the phone or in person I might not think to say oh yeah, I was sitting in class and this thought about my documentary came to me. But when I shoot it out through this life stream so to speak, and I found an amazing statistic recently, it’s like 19% of people on the internet in the U.S. post status updates, whether that’s to Myspace, Twitter, or Facebook or something like that.

I mean that’s actually an amazing number, it jumped….

Sterling: From the entire U.S.

Jay: It jumped from like 11% last year – post regular status updates online. Whether it’s just to a few family and friends or whether it’s to customers and fans, and colleagues worldwide, 19% of people…that’s pretty amazing.

Sterling: Yeah, that’s crazy.

Jay: So that’s number one – the ability to create and maintain relationships online. Number two – what do you got?

Sterling: Learn from and teach the world! And what I mean by this is, we now can learn from just about anywhere. Like for instance, you can now take Harvard classes and learn from people you might never have had access to ever. And it’s all now online. I mean we just got invited to help teach and talk to a class, where was it? What state was it in?

Jay: Aren’t you forgetting it’s a college in southern California?

Sterling: Yeah, I mean this is just crazy that we would have access to talk to this college class, just because of this show.

Jay: We’re going to lecture over Skype. That’s pretty amazing!

Sterling: Yeah, and not only that, but you also have the ability to teach the world. You can become an expert and teach anyone anywhere with the internet. This is just absolutely crazy; knowledge just never has been so accessible. To me, this is absolutely an awesome time to live because of that, because I am so into learning and then being able to share the knowledge that I have with others. I just cannot imagine living in a time where you would have to go to the library if there was a library.

And there might be 200 books, and that’s the extent of your knowledge. The amount of knowledge that I can take in is absolutely amazing to me. Anything I can think of I can go on and so far…well maybe there’s not a Macrame podcast yet. But there might be, we actually joke about that but there very well might be. Every interest I’ve had I’ve been able to find some information in the way I like to consume it is just awesome.

Jay: We were meeting with a friend yesterday for lunch and he conducts symphony orchestras; that’s what he studied and that’s what he does now. And he was telling us that whenever he’s like thinking through what kind of program when he’s invited to conduct a symphony through the program, and what music he wants to do. Or maybe they have a program already and they’re okay, these are the pieces we’re going to be playing and he’s saying that if there’s a specific piece that he can’t remember, he’s never gone to YouTube and not found somebody, a video of somebody playing that piece to remind him of, oh yeah that’s what that song is or to get an idea really quickly or pulling that up on his phone.

And talk about niche, and so obviously a huge take away here for anybody starting an internet business or becoming an online content creator is, there are people out there ready to consume whatever it is that you want to put online. Huge, huge opportunity, both on the learning side as well as the teaching side of things. So that’s pretty awesome.

Sterling: I was going to joke about that yes, it’s awesome! Everything’s awesome right now!

Jay: And that kind of leads into number three, which is something for both of us is that, the idea of really knowing and doing what we love most in life – there’s a reason why we talk about this first thing in everything we teach, it’s the first course inside the Academy. Or I have a couple of New Media coaching groups going right now, and the first thing I talk to them about is well, who do you want to reach out to?

Who really is the target audience that you can do your best work with that you want to deliver value to? And so many people don’t necessarily know or going to have a good answer to that. Like well what is it that I want to do most in life, who is it I want to do work with, or who do I want to benefit? I want to help fathers who adopted children to be able to integrate…it’s like going back to the whole niche thing.

If you want to maybe…you’re in a second marriage and you both brought kids to a new marriage, and you have to learn and go through all these things bringing your families together, and now it’s your thing in life that you would most love to go and help other mixed marriage be able to thrive and bring these families together and form a new family – awesome! It’s like figure that out and figure out opportunities online to go and do that.

So both of us have figured out, well what fulfills us most…well let me put it this way, I started my talk at Blog World Expo basically telling the story of being an engineer, being disenchanted with that, quitting my job and then spending two years just really trying to figure out what makes me happy. It wasn’t until I found out, you know what’s really missing is I love to teach people. And all this deal making and real estate, it’s not connecting with what really my strengths and passions are.

In the end I’d like to teach people and specifically I’d like to teach them things that bring them increased freedom and empowerment to do what they love in their life, and teaching people small business, internet business is a great way to do that. So to specifically know that, the things I most want to pursue in my life and are going to make me the happiest that are related to teaching others and that’s something I could do.

So at the beginning of the speech or presentation I said, “Look, there are a few things in life I’d like to do more that I’m doing right now in this conference with you in this room, is to talk about these kinds of things and teach these kinds of things to you.” So I was very grateful to know what it is what I love most in life and to have all the tools on the internet to be able to do that, to teach people worldwide these things that empower their voice and empower them to go out and do what they want and then benefit other people’s lives. So that’s a very powerful concept and that’s the first thing that we teach in the Academy.

Sterling: And number four is you can develop and cultivate your passions and interests like never before. This kind of relates to doing what you love, but this also relates to your ability to find and cultivate passions and even having the ability now to take a possible passion and make a living from it, and feed your family, and be able to do cool things from passions, is just awesome. Let’s see how many times we say that this particular episode.

So for instance, I was able to find and meet up with a group that is trying to start a private school here in San Diego, something that I really wanted to be a part of, and now I’m on their board of directors thanks to Meetup.com. Like how would I have ever found out that they’re trying to start a very specific school that does this thing called unschooling that I really was interested in. Like the likelihood of that…without the internet I don’t know how I would have found that out. I guess she would have had to advertised in the newspaper, and I would have had to just read it that one day, I don’t know.

But these abilities to do this kind of thing, and Meetup.com is actually a big hub for a lot of social things for me. I mean there are so many groups especially here in San Diego who meet up on all the different interests and passions, so I don’t have to just do it online, I can actually meet people and be with them in person as well as do it online. And then as you’re finding and developing your passions, once you’re able to figure out what they are, you can find out if this is something you can do for an online business. It’s just a fascinating time because we can do that.

Jay: I’ve been talking about working on this documentary right now, and that’s something I’ve wanted to do in the back of my mind, but the only reason I’m doing it right now with this particular program and class here in Portland is because one night I happened to be going stir crazy at home and needed something to do, and a quick internet search told me hey, there’s this little film festival and it starts in a half hour and it’s here in Portland.

And it’s like oh, awesome, I’m going to go to that. And yeah, so a quick search on the internet led me to that, led me to find out about this organization, led me to find out about their classes, led me to sign up for the classes, and now here I am doing something I’ve always wanted to do which is to make a short film. So that is pretty amazing that those things are right at your fingertips. And it’s important to find those things, I mean obviously we talked about life balance so you don’t get all sucked up into your business.

And it goes back to lifestyle design and okay, if you want to design your business so you can have a life that you want, well what do you want to do with that life? I mean when you’re to the point when it’s not forty or sixty hours a week that you’re working, say it’s only twenty. What do you want to do with the other parts, what are the other things – passions and interests that you want to cultivate? Yeah, a lot of great resources online to help you do that.

Number five – awesome thing brought on by online business and just technology and things today is, location independence. And this has definitely been hit home for me over the last year and a half, couple of years living in New York, moving to Buenos Aires, Argentina, traveling around the states for a while, now being in Portland, but even walking in the street or when I’m commuting on the train and I flip open my iPhone and I check a few emails or read a few blogs and bookmark a few things I want to share on my blog later, I’m always getting things done on the go if I need to and claiming that down time.

But most of all it’s being able to live wherever we want, and we moved to Portland because this is a city that we wanted to experience. And we almost moved back to New York and that’s still somewhere we want to go, but we were free to decide within a very short window of time, we’re talking within a few days we decided, we wanted to stay in Portland for another year.

And so here we are, and it just doesn’t matter, it doesn’t affect us in the slightest because we organized our life in such a way that we can live here, we can live in Portland, we could have gone to Panama to live for six months if we wanted to because all the tools and things that allow you to work from just about anywhere today. I mean everyone that we work with for Internet Business Mastery, they’re all located from around the world – everywhere from the Philippines to Canada to other places in the United States, and even in the UK sometimes.

And IM chat, and Skype, and email and all these things, our business keeps running. Wherever you or I happen to be located which is completely awesome.

Sterling: Yeah, this is very, very cool. I was just going to list a couple of places and maybe you can too that also play a role as my office. So number one – the beach. I mean literally really the beach. I go out sometimes with my laptop and sit out there. Now I have to be close enough that I can still get my internet at the beach, so that helps.

Jay: Are you serious?

Sterling: Yeah.

Jay: So you sit on the beach and you’ve still got wireless, so you don’t even have to sign up for like a Verizon or a Sprint card or anything like that.

Sterling: No I don’t have that at all. Also, the airport. That’s not quite as great, but at least while I’m sitting there waiting for something I can work if I want to, or do whatever I need to do. Salt Lake, when I’m in Salt Lake visiting family – my dad’s house, my mom’s house, my brother’s house, visiting my sister – every one of these places if I needed them to be, or I’m staying with them, those are my office.

When I was in Belize on a scuba diving trip, that is now my office if I’m there, again with iPhones and even laptop…now unfortunately Belize their internet access was a little spotty, but I was still able to get my emails out that I needed to that one particular day, normally I don’t want to be on a vacation having to work. But I do have the option of taking care of things very quickly if I want to.

I mean I could go on and on even on the airplane if I want to, can be accessing the world at any given time. I mean sometimes we take these things for granted, but I just wanted to mention that, that’s an incredible upside to an online business. I’m not stuck in Wisconsin somewhere because that’s the only place where this job is, and let’s say I don’t want to be there. I don’t like snow, I really don’t. Obviously that’s why I live in San Diego.

But if that was the only place where my job was, that’s my life. And now we’re in a position with this online business thing, you can absolutely tailor your life as much as humanely possible to exactly the way you want it, and that is awesome.

Jay: What is it again?

Sterling: It’s awesome.

Jay: You know what’s awesome is that now the trend is, you can fly in a seat through the air and still get internet access.

Sterling: Yeah, has everybody seen that YouTube video yet?

Jay: Yeah, you definitely ought to. That was a good one, but yeah, now the airlines are, now they’re starting to put wifi…which I don’t know, it might be a downside because sometimes it forces me to not have the internet and to sit down with a pen and paper and think some things through. But now you’ll have the option, and that’s still pretty cool. 30,000 feet above the earth and you can get internet access, I mean that’s pretty cool. That is pretty awesome.

Alright, so that’s location independence. That was number five. What do you got for number six?

Sterling: Well okay, it’s what we’re calling long tail media and technology. And what I mean by this is, we now have the ability to produce and consume information in written form, audio form, video form, even watch and consume from our phones. We can actually create it from our phones if we’ve got video on the phones and we can consume the information standing in line at the bank. I watch the exact video content I want to while I am on the elliptical machine at the gym, I don’t have to watch the one big TV that has CNN or something I have no particular interest in.

I can at all times be involved in consuming information or entertainment that I want. That’s awesome. Again, it’s about freedom. Like the big thing for me in my life when the top definitely major purpose for me is freedom. And that even includes not having to watch commercials, just like every aspect of my life is chosen by me. I can actually hardly believe it when I see people standing in line doing nothing. This blows me away, or like last time I was on a plane I had got the iPhone going, listening to something and I looked around, and 90% of the plane was just sitting there waiting for us to land, not talking, not reading, just sitting there. I was like, what are they doing? I don’t know what they’re doing!

And again, being able to…the way I consume my entertainment now, I don’t have to watch commercials. Now when I go home and let’s say I’m hanging out with my dad and we’re talking and then we decide to watch something on TV, I have to freeze the television with the DVR, and talk for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes so that when I start playing it I can skip the commercials, because it makes me insane. And I keep asking him, I’m like how come you don’t just record these things instead of…and he’s like, “I’m just used to the commercials.” And I’m like, “What?!” Two and a half minutes every couple of minutes you’re losing watching things that you have no interest in.

It just blows me away, and one of the other things is you now have the ability to be more in charge of your time and what you see than ever before. Again, that’s the whole long tail thing. Like I don’t just have to go to the movie theatre and watch the five movies that are out, I can be very specific with every aspect of my life. I mean now I consume information because of the way technology is now and because we’re in a world of long tail media.

Jay: Absolutely, I think switching over to an iPhone was probably one of the best lifestyle investments I’ve made in the last couple years for that very reason. It’s amazing the number of things I can do or access, or consume with one little device in my hand. It’s insane.

Sterling: Well, and after one of the Meetup groups I was at, there was a group of us and we were like okay, let’s go get something to eat and we were in an area that was a little bit unfamiliar to us and I opened up the iPhone, open up an app and it’s an app called Around Me I think, and I just went ‘restaurant’ and it picks everything based on your exact location. You can do ratings, I mean this is just crazy. When in history have we ever been able to do that? Never!

And guess what? It’s awesome.

Jay: Alright, well that brings us to the final number seven, and I guess there’s kind of a theme to some of the stuff that we’ve been…a theme of independence and freedom and choice, and deciding what you want and making what you want happen in life, which is always a theme we have in Internet Business Mastery. So I guess to cap it off number seven for me is freedom and autonomy in general, and our ability these days to achieve that for ourselves.

And when I’m talking about okay, I’m grateful for freedom, I’m not just saying the usual idea of people saying, “I’m so grateful to live in a free country.” I’m talkinga bout something very, very different here. This is something that happens, I mean my mission in life is to find more freedom for myself and help others find increased freedom. And that’s on many levels, I’m not just talking like a political freedom, I’m talking one that starts at the level of an individual being very self aware of yourself and what you want, and the beliefs and feelings – emotional and mental psychological tapes that play in your head that cause your life to play out in different ways. And sometimes we can very much be enslaved by those things, so it starts at a very basic level like that and goes all the way up to autonomy from government and other systems, it’s amazing the number of systems we’ve become dependent on these days, and the number of illusions we buy into that cause us to really when you think about it be enslaved by certain aspects of the society and systems that we live in.

All the way from an individual level to the family level to a government level, so on and so forth. And these days we have billions of opportunities for increased freedom, and I guess this is something we can talk about forever not to get too in depth by it, but I guess it’s just a question of asking what is true security, and it’s become very, very….the juxtaposition of this has been very, very evident over the last year or so with the ‘economic climate’ that we’re living in.

There’s people out there understandably living very much in fear because they have a job or they’ve lost their job already or they have a job and they’re afraid of losing it any day because job loss is a common occurrence these days. And people say, “I haven’t gotten a raise in three years, so my income is not keeping up with inflation,”  and things like this. So what does that do, it enslaves your life in so many ways when you’re afraid of and subject to your job, and whether or not you’re going to keep your job, and the boss and whatever he wants you to do in order to keep him happy so you don’t lose your job.

And having to live in a certain place in order to keep your job, and we just think of all the ways that that effects and essentially slaves your life. Now maybe you have chosen the exact job that you love and it happens to be in the exact place in the world that you want to live and that every day you get to work with people that are just fantastic, and you do have control over your own time and your boss isn’t the kind of person who makes you do ridiculous things and jump through hoops just to keep him happy. If that’s the case, awesome – I hope you do feel free in that situation.

Sterling: And we want to know your name because you may be the only person.

Jay: But over the last several months, a year or plus that we see these things going on, and hear this from people around me it’s like wow, I’m just so grateful to have my own business, to know the things I know, to be able just to create my own opportunities, to have a business that’s growing and making me more money in a time when most people are just hoping not to get cut from their jobs and they’re not getting raises at all.

When you understand the entrepreneurial principles and the internet business concepts and fundamentals that we teach, you’re able to give yourself your own pay raise and you need time. You can go out and find and create new opportunity, and your time is not limited because you know how to do that in a scalable way. So you can add more and more on to your business without having to work harder like the employee or the self employed dollars for hours type person. It gets you out of that dollars for hours type person, it gets you out of that slave to dollars per hour, slave to time, slave to employment.

And society taught for many, many, many years that employment was security and security was freedom, freedom from stress, freedom from worrying where your next paycheck would come to. Well that’s certainly been flipped on it’s head now, and that’s why it’s like I was just doing better and better because we’re going wow, that was a bunch of bunk that I was taught.

It was like where is the security now? And afraid for my wages for next week and being able to buy food. When you understand the opportunities that are out there online and with your own ideas and your own passions and your own expertise that you can go out and create for yourself, all of a sudden you’re no longer afraid. You could take my business away from me tomorrow, and if something happened…I realize something could happen, my business could go poof for whatever reason.

Something crazy could happen, these things happen. It doesn’t matter because you know what? I know I have the skills to pick up and make something else happen very, very quickly tomorrow. And so I can distinctly remember when that fear of like oh man, what if I’m going to have to go back and get a job again some day to support myself when I finally realized I’m never going to have to get a job again in my life because I now have the skills and the confidence and the ideas necessary to create whatever I need for myself to live the life I want to live and provide for myself.

I don’t need to be a millionaire, I don’t need a mansion, I just want freedom, and that’s what internet business has provided for us. So freedom and autonomy is number seven. Do you have any additional thoughts on that?

Sterling: I think you’ve covered them all, honestly all of these different reasons like the relationship and the ability to create and maintain them online, learn from and teach the world, to know and do what we love most, to develop and cultivate your passion and interest like never before, location independence, long tail media and technology, and freedom and autonomy. I mean the great thing about all of these is that they lead to more happiness, and that’s why we think that these reasons are so awesome.

Jay: Because happiness is awesome.

Sterling: Yeah, happiness definitely has to be what is it the highest, one of the highest principles and reasons for life, to get some happiness in there?

Jay: That and Chipotle burritos. Did I mention the grand opening of Chipotle, I mean the apartment complex we live in downstairs ground floor. And tomorrow morning Chipotle Burritos, I mean outside the US, people might be scratching their head going, “I have no idea what that is,” but it’s goodness in a burrito. That’s all I can say.

Sterling: They better reserve a spot for you every day.

Jay: That’s dangerous, because there’s a lot of calories in those things.

Sterling: Are there?

Jay: Add the guacamole and sour cream and now it’s like, I mean as of tomorrow morning I could leave the seat I’m sitting in right now and be eating one of those burritos in like three minutes flat.

Sterling: And you have the freedom to do so.

Jay: And I have the freedom to do so, which is completely awesome. Alright well there you go, that’s kind of our special episode digging into seven reasons why online business and life are so awesome right now, which is kind of in the vein of being happy, and there’s a lot of tough stuff going on out there right now and we realize that, but we wanted to also recognize there’s a lot of really great stuff out there to access.

And in the spirit of thanksgiving here in the states in North America, we thought that an episode with a little bit of optimism and the things that we can be happy about and that can bring us happiness would be a great episode to have. So there are the seven reasons that we put together, and we’d love to hear yours. So make your way back to the blog for Internet Business Mastery #78 and let us know what is the reason why life is so awesome for you and why internet business is so awesome for you right now and share that with the whole community back at InternetBusinessMastery.com in the comments for episode #78.

Alright, we’ve got a quick breakthrough for you this episode. This one comes from Academy member Marin Kate who says, “I launched my first ever membership site and have gotten great reviews as well as quite a few sign ups and members considering it’s only two weeks old. So that is going way better than expected, I’m incredibly happy with the success so far. I haven’t even search engine optimized or barely used the Adwords at all and I’m getting lots of registrants. The site is up at Tweeterpreneur.com.”

She says as she continues, “I started five months ago on Internet Business Mastery Academy and I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about internet business except what I learned by selling on eBay. This course really can work if you work, work, work at it and just don’t give up. So that’s Tweeterpreneur.com and we’ll link to that in the show notes so that’s awesome. Marin, we’re thrilled to hear that your membership site is going well and that only a few months into this process you’ve already got some continuity income going, so as you heard us say at the beginning of this episode, that is definitely the way to go create something where people are paying you month after month after month, so congratulations.

Sterling: Well and considering she knew nothing about internet business and working on the internet, and here it is just a few months later and this is actually another reason why life and online business is so awesome.

Jay: Is so awesome, and she’s clearly a doer. I mean that’s one reason why I wanted to share that is, I love it when I see people take information and just bam, run with it. They get going because that right there is the secret to success – massive, bold, quick action. And then you just keep going to bat, keep going to bat.

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

Jay: Alright, let’s dive into this episode’s Quick Tips plural. We’re giving you a two for one on this episode, in fact from now on we’re going to be doing it that way. We decided we both wanted to get in on this action, we both were going to give you some kind of Quick Tip, something cool, a link or resource that we thought you should be checking out because we’ve been using it recently and it’s been working well. So Sterling, let’s start with you.

Sterling: Well there’s just too many out there to do one an episode.

Jay: There is too many out there, so we’re taking it up a notch, we’re kicking it up a notch. What’s your Quick Tip for this episode?

Sterling: Well speaking of in the chit chat I was talking about being able to create my sales funnel visually. I have an online service but it’s called Gliffy.com. And what it is, is it’s basically a diagram software and it makes it so that you can create flowcharts, and diagrams, and floor plans even, technical drawings and that kind of stuff, but I use it to do the actual sales funnel. You can do arrows, if the person says yes they go over to this particular line of boxes and have actions. If they say no, they go over here.

It just makes it so it’s really, really easy to map out your sales funnel or auto responder series, you can map out what happens when you come to the landing page, if they do actually sign up they go over here and a bunch of things happen. If they don’t, a popup box comes up, there’s just so many cool ways to use this to make it again so you can see it visually. And then I take that visual representation and I can make tasks out of it to make sure every single one of the visual items or action items on that page can get put together and action items created from it and make it so that everything on that particular sales funnel are put into place.

Once you see it, we go check it out and you can see what it looks like and you’ll see what I’m talking about. But that’s my Quick Tip.

Jay: So that’s Gliffy.com?

Sterling: Yep.

Jay: Awesome, well mine comes from my trip to the Blog World Expo. Like I said, I have some audio and video interviews, in fact video interview with these guys in the Academy, but I did want to share one Quick Tip here on the podcast, and that is I went through the whole expo floor and found two or three things that I was the most excited about. And one that I thought was really, really cool was a service called Yubby.com. And basically what they do is, you can go to their site and search for whatever key word you want, whatever your niche is and a certain topic, and they will search thirty or forty different video services and bring all those videos up.

And then you can start grabbing those videos quickly and add them to a channel, and then put them in whatever order you want. Then you can take that channel and you can imbed it on your own site. And then anybody else who likes that channel can take it and embed it on their site, and you get credit as the creator of that channel. And if you update and add new stuff to the channel, then that will automatically update on other people’s site.

So for instance, if you have a video podcast, you could use this to create a channel that people could put on their site to promote your video podcast on their site as well. Or even for content that is not your own you could go out and find great content because that’s an easy way to connect with your audience and offer them value is just go and put together the best of content on a specific topic and put it into a channel.

And the reason why putting it in a channel is so great is because their studies have shown that people are more likely to watch more content if it’s put into a channel format like that, you’ll keep them around longer and keep them looking at more stuff and be able to deliver more value to them and engage them for longer. So if you want to create your own video channel that’s extremely easy to use, go to Yubby.com and we will include links to that as well in the show notes.

Sterling: Now if you’d like dozens of other resources such as this one, you can find them in the Internet Business Mastery Academy along with video tutorials showing you exactly how we use them. 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 iconoclasts 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 3 Pillars 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 this life changing audio presentation 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!