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Sterling: This is Internet Business Mastery, episode 79.

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.

Now on this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we have an internet business success story with Matt Archambault who runs an incredibly successful membership site on how to draw.

We’d like to also remind you that if you’d like to get a jumpstart 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 what’s been going on Jay?

Jay: Well, um, I’ve been in the process of firing someone for us recently.

Sterling: It’s about time.

Jay: I mean we talk about the wonders of outsourcing, but it’s true that this whole hiring of people comes along with firing people sometimes as well, and that’s a lesson that we’ve been learning. Sometimes things change, sometimes things don’t work out, whatever the case may be. In our case we just felt like the work wasn’t been done like it should or as fast as it should, and sometimes not being done at all (was the sense we were getting).

So anyway, this year truth be told, this year with all the full time outsourcing and freelancers that we’ve been bringing on, it’s the first experience that’s I’ve really had as an ‘employer’ or managing a whole bunch of people, and that’s part of the territory, so there’s a bit of a learning curve there. And one thing I’m learning is you’ve got to be ready to fire fast.

I mean in some cases in fact, in fact somebody from our platinum group I was chatting with them instant message on the site the other day, it was Sunday Shields and she was asking, “Hey have you ever had to fire someone?” They said, “Well we have before, and I’m actually about to have to do it again.” And she said, “Well how long do you wait?” and things like that. I said, “Well, truth of the matter is, we probably waited a month longer than we should on this case.”

I mean my personality is that I want to give people the benefit of the doubt, give them another chance, and I guess the few lessons to share here is yes, you do want to tell somebody when they’re not doing something right, give them a chance to fix it, tell them it’s like, “Look, it’s not being done right, it’s not being done fast enough.” In this case one thing was we were not getting the daily emails, and I probably told him ten times that you have to send me the daily emails or else I’m going to assume you’re not working.

And so that’s just the beginning, but if your gut is telling you something’s not right, then you should probably listen, and it’s tricky. I mean obviously we’re working with people who are on the other side of the globe, and in some respects there’s a trust factor. We do want them to send those daily emails and obviously we see the output, and so I told them, “Look, if you’re getting the daily emails and things look like they’re taking longer than they should, or if the output is just not congruent with the amount of time spent,” – that was another thing, it had been a few weeks and not enough had actually been done.

And if it’s taking longer, I want to see a justification as to why. I want them to explain, well here’s why it’s taking so long, and we’re not getting that either. So I think the reason I waited too long or that we waited too long is just the thought of having to go and hire somebody else, it’s a process and obviously it’s a new variable in your business. But I’d rather have to go through that process than get four, five, or six weeks down the road here and now regret that it’s like wow, all this stuff that we hoped would happen has not happened, stuff that we were planning on.

So I think what I told her was I think the trick is just to get really good at hiring people fast and just get that process down and have a procedure for it so that you know on a moment’s notice. It’s like look, here’s the procedure, I know I can go in there, fire this person, and hire somebody else within a matter of a few hours if I needed to and just make that happen. And a couple things there is obviously you need to change passwords and things before you let somebody go, which is something I handed over to a Virtual Assistant. I said hey, can you go change all these passwords and let me know when that’s done?

Sterling: And by the way, really quickly to Dan our editor and Jennifer the person who transcribes the episodes, it’s not you! We love you, you rock!

Jay: Yeah, any of the freelancers that are actually listening to this episode, it’s not you!

Sterling: Well our editor and transcription person does it for sure, so we definitely want them to know it’s not you!

Jay: Can you imagine? They’re like transcribing every word of this and they’re like, “Um, should I stop transcribing right now?” Am I going to get paid for this? That’s a good point there to make. Interestingly enough, change the passwords and I already mentioned this to you this morning, it’s been two days since I changed the password and I’ve not heard from him saying, “Hey, what’s going on? I can’t get into the site.” So that tells you something, right? Not a good sign.

So for anybody listening to this going wow, okay yeah, what if I run into that? How do I hire and fire fast? We are going to put some procedure lists very soon in the Academy about this whole process of hiring and firing so that you have those to reference. What should I do when it comes time?

Sterling: You can actually see our exact…the procedure list that we developed to make sure this is a fast process and so that we don’t freaking wait. We can just say, “Okay this isn’t working out,” and not have to worry about oh, this is going to take a couple of weeks to find another person. What do I do? I can’t remember now. We just have this procedure list that makes it very easy.

Jay: So there will be emails and procedures and all the stuff there. So Academy members, be watching for that. We figured if we’ve been telling you the whole time outsource, outsource, freelancers, get it off your plate we better prepare you for the other inevitabilities that come along with being a manger and ‘employer’ as well. So we will definitely get that stuff posted. So that’s what’s been on my mind lately, and I guess that’s a little bit of a report for you since I’ve been handling that stuff as of late.

Sterling: Yeah, and you know just as a note to people, if you want to even learn how to use a Virtual Assistant, how to hire and all that stuff, the basics – I mean this is after you’ve already hired somebody and you might need to let them go – but if you want to learn the basics you can go to GetReplaceMyself.com. That’s actually what skyrocketed a lot of our abilities to find the right people.

Jay: And one of the…and in fact, exactly, that’s what one of the procedure lists points you to, but one of the things that’s most valuable that you get with your membership to GetReplaceMyself.com is you get access to the database of people in the Philippines with resumes and things, and it’s actually a database if you’re in the states and in some other countries. I know especially the states, they actually are not accepting new accounts for people in the states. So that’s the only way you’d be able to access this database altogether.

So that’s a good point, head to GetReplaceMyself.com for that. So, this episode is an awesome interview, so again, no Quick Tip and announcements at the end, because these interviews tend to go a little longer because we try to pack a lot of good stuff in there, but excited that we did this interview yesterday, and so we’ll be playing that here on the episode, so really excited for the stuff we have for you, so let’s go ahead and dive right into that.

And now the featured segment….

Jay: Hello everyone, and welcome to this special interview, this internet business success story with a longtime Internet Business Mastery listener and community member, an old coaching student as well as a member of the Academy. I’m Jay….

Sterling: And I’m Sterling.

Jay: And on the call with us today is Matt. And Matt, we are going to have to let you say your last name for us because I don’t even…I’m not sure I’m good with that one.

Matt: Oh well, I say it a different way every day myself. But we’re going to go with Archambault today.

Jay: I mean I could have said it….well that’s a French name right?

Matt: Yeah, it’s a French-Canadian name. You can say it without [jenasaqua], but we’ll go with Archambault.

Jay: If I would have said it the way that I thought, I would have added it with the whole, because I speak French, I would have added the whole French accent on it, but then everybody would have thought I was being pretentious or something.

Matt: Oh no, I hear ya. Matt is perfect.

Jay: Alright, awesome. Well thanks for joining us on the call, and you’ve been up to a lot of really cool stuff so we wanted to bring you on here. I was just going to tell the audience here a little bit about you. Matt graduated from the school of visual arts in 1990, he struggled for many years on his path to becoming a freelance illustrator, and after years of seeking answers on how to earn a living as an artist, he finally reached his goal of becoming a successful book illustrator.

So that’s very cool, I know people who wish that they could make a living doing that. Over his seventeen year career, Matt has illustrated hundreds of book covers for many diverse publishing companies. Along with running DrawingTutorialsOnline.com and MattsIllustration.com. Matt is also an adjunct instructor at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. Yay for New York! I’m a big fan of New York as we all know!

Matt is considered a trusted advisor and coach to many students teaching them both the technical kills and lifestyle design skills he has worked so hard to develop. Matt has committed himself to helping you get out of your frustration mode sharing his experience and knowledge acquired over the many years of working with both art directors and students. So I’m excited to see what you’re up to, thanks for joining us today!

Matt: Sure, glad to be here, it’s a pleasure!

Jay: It’s been a while I guess since we’ve chatted with you back in the days of being a coaching student, but we’ve had you on our radar and seen kind of what you’re up to. I was just checking out the latest with your site recently today, but let’s go ahead and start out with you telling us a bit about what brought you into this world of internet marketing and information marketing. What brought you to the point that you’re at today?

Matt: Well what brought me to this was basically, it was mid 90’s, my illustration career was going really well. I was asked to teach at the School of Visual Arts, I would say closer to 1999, and I just all of a sudden, a couple of classes were taken away from me at the school and the illustration jobs weren’t coming in as strong, and that in conjunction with reading a bunch of books. I know all of your listeners are avid readers and I’m an avid reader as well, and the book “Multiple Streams of Income” and the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” book changed my life tremendously.

And when I had that fear God put into me in terms of not getting the illustration jobs as much as I once was, just for a short period of time, I just started searching for answers. And I kept reading all these books and wondering what my next big thing in life was going to be while still chugging along doing illustrating and teaching. And one day I just said, well after reading those books, let me film myself.

I want to see what it would be like if I filmed myself in class making a video of myself teaching, how do I sound? And just one thing led to the next and before you know it I had a DVD up on my website because I was really searching for that multiple stream of income. I knew I had the teaching which was adjunct, not full time, and I knew I had the freelance jobs coming in. So I was like, what is that next thing that I could use in case teaching goes away, or in case I hurt my hand and I can’t work doing illustration?

And so I put that DVD up for sale on my website and it was crazy! I mean I just started getting all these orders in and I started following you guys through the podcast. This was I guess I don’t know, 2006 or 2007, my dates are probably a little off, but once I started following you and I started implementing the things that you were teaching, that’s when stuff started to take off. And I started making multiple DVDs, and then to make a long story short, I took your coaching course and your coaching course in the spring of ’08 I believe, changed it all for me.

Specific things that Sterling had said regarding membership sites and all the great things that you said as well Jay really sparked my imagination, and I was kind of already making money online but just doing the one off products and that’s when I got into the membership site. And I finished up with your course, and I remember school was over in terms of me teaching May 1^st. May 1^st I started my membership site, it was the same day and I launched it in August of ’08. And here we are now I’ve surpassed, 1,500 members have signed up to my site so it’s going pretty good.

Sterling: Nice! Wow!

Jay: Great story, I’m thrilled to hear that! Congratulations, it sounds like you are doing awesome, that’s awesome!

Matt: Yeah, yeah. A lot of the strategies that you guys mention, I’ve just implemented them one at a time, lots of trial and error, lots of trial and error with the site. It’s an ongoing process, it’s certainly not perfect, and I take all the things that you mention into consideration like the lifestyle design. I tend to be a bit of a workaholic and we were just talking before the call about getting some help with this site because it’s getting a little bit out of control, so yeah, that’s where I am right now and I’m doing really well with it.

Sterling: Alright! Great, yeah, so one of things that we want to say specifically, how are you making money right now, and who is your primary target market?

Matt: Well, how am I making money right now? Primarily through the membership site I have a monthly subscription and I have an annual subscription. And right now that is the chunk of my income, online. I also have the benefit of having all the DVDs that I made previously to the membership site, and still all of my content that is on the membership site is primarily video, so when I have time I take that video and I repackage it into DVDs.

So memberships, video, DVDs I sell, I sell them on my membership site, I sell them on Amazon.com, and I sell them on my original store that I created before the membership site. It’s an ecommerce site, and that makes me money and it just sits there and I haven’t touched that website in oh, I don’t even want to say – maybe eight months to a year I haven’t touched that website other than logging into the control panel and just checking my orders and once a week they go out. And so those are the four ways right now that I’m making the income.

Sterling: And really quickly, what was the name of your membership site for sure?

Matt: The name of my membership site taking your advice with the keywords was DrawingTutorialsOnline.com.

Sterling: Perfect.

Matt: Yeah, so the main keywords for my niche market getting into your second part of that question, my niche market is basically anyone who really wants how to learn how to draw, and there’s subcategories to that. There is a college student subcategory, there is a professional artist who wants to learn how to get better at their drawing skills, and there are also people who just like to draw for a hobby, it relaxes them.

So on my site I find I have a whole major mix with the people who have signed up, so I could niche it down a little bit more, but I think drawing is pretty broad. With me, it’s drawing realistically; I guess that’s the specific niche, not doing anything caricatures, just mainly drawing people realistically.

Jay: Very cool, now you mention…so the site has been sitting there, you really haven’t had to touch it for months and months. You just go in and look at the orders, while we’re on that topic is, how are the orders fulfilled? So the order comes in, and this is a DVD that you’re shipping out to people? So you have the membership site, but you also have DVDs that you’re selling, so that’s something that has to be shipped out? How are you handling that fulfillment process?

Matt: Okay, great question. And I was laughing about this earlier just thinking about what I used to do. My ecommerce site which is different than my membership site even though the membership site is an ecommerce site as well; I would get orders, I remember the power of the list when you guys spoke about your lists and I would send out an email and I didn’t have a huge list at the time. I’d get a whole bunch of orders in one day and it would just be me running to the post office, answering emails, packing the DVDs, I mean I was doing everything.

And I’m like, this is crazy! I’m starting like another job for myself, and listening to you guys you always have the big picture in mind which is awesome. So right now, who fulfills my DVDs is, my parents come over. This is my outsourcing, my parents come over one to two days a week and they sit and they just pack DVDs and mail them. And it’s perfect, I purchased a pretty high end duplicator here at home, I’ve always duplicated all my own DVDs, and now I have an automated one. And so my system works well for me in terms of the amount of DVDs that I sell. So the short answers is, fulfillment is Mom and Dad.

Sterling: Yeah, my Mom did my fulfillment for one of my physical business jobs for quite a while there too, that’s so funny. That’s the first people we’re like hey Mom! That was before I knew about V.A.’s and all that kind of stuff, well and even different companies that will do fulfillment for you. I was just like she was up for it, and I was like here you go, here’s how to do it.

Matt: Yeah, it works out well, I pay them, they come on over, it’s extra income for them, and I give away a free video with membership, it’s part of my plan. If you want to become a member of my website, there’s a $1.00 trial, and along with that $1.00 trial I give away a free portrait DVD for the monthly, and I give away a 5 disk DVD for the annual.

And so, it does add up. Right now they’re managing, it’s working out pretty good. It seems to be going pretty good right now, I don’t plan on making any new DVDs. I’m just mainly focusing on the main membership site.

Jay: Very cool, now so we’ve got a good sense of who your niche is here, you already mentioned that, what was that process like for you. I mean it sounds like it was pretty natural for you to consider something in the illustration/drawing/arts and kind of field like that for a niche, but maybe talk to us a little bit about that process because it’s a tough one for people, and they can get hung up.

Did you ever doubt that as your niche, or how did you arrive at feeling like okay, this is definitely what I need to go ahead and pursue? What was that process like for you?

Matt: Well you’re right, it was extremely natural, and I always thought that I had something good with what I was teaching at the school. I always got pretty good feedback from the students, and they’re like, “Wow, I like this, I’m learning a lot from you, and I never learned these things before.” And I said well let me just package what I teach in my class, I teach drawing in layers. And there’s several layers that you need to master, and then you apply those layers, or you think of those layers and you draw in your own style.

So the layers are really something that you use internally mentally, and it was very, very natural for me. I mean I did have some questions, do I do painting, do I do just drawing? Do I teach people how to become illustrators because that’s a whole other niche I have not explored. It’s a class that I teach at the school as well, but I took the lifestyle design stuff really into effect, and I’m like there’s nothing simpler than drawing with a pencil. You just pick it up and you start drawing.

With painting, that’s a little bit more complicated, even though painting is my main skill, and that’s what I did my whole entire life was paint realistic book covers, I’m like I don’t know if I want to film that. That’s going to be pretty nuts, because when you have to draw on camera and speak at the same time, that’s tough enough. And then incorporate the painting into it would be perhaps like a multi-camera task. So it was very, very natural, and it didn’t take me too long to get into it.

I was really lucky that I was already doing what I’m doing right now, I’ve been doing it since 1997, that’s when I started teaching and so it’s just a matter of setting the camera up in my studio and putting it right over my shoulder and just drawing. There were some questions. Now in terms of somebody else trying to figure out their niche, I’m a big believer and I think we think very similar, I would never do what I wasn’t passionate about. I mean that’s the thing, drawing is my life! And drawing and painting is something I’ve been doing my entire life, so for me it was a no-brainer.

Sterling: Yeah, I so love hearing when people are doing what they’re passionate about! I mean I have one of my brothers is an artist, and he’s always asking me about, “Can I do art and make money online?” And I’m like, “Yes! People are doing it!” I mean like you found the way to make it work, and this is so absolutely awesome.

Jay: And what’s really cool about your story is how…clearly you went down the path of passion, and then at the same time you tempered a little bit with some of that pragmatic thought going okay, well let’s see, there’s an easier barrier of entry if I just teach stuff that somebody can pick up paper and pencil and start doing what I’m teaching. And let me think about the content creation and what might be easier for the lifestyle I want.

So that’s awesome, it sounds like you found just the right balance there for yourself to do something you’re passionate about, but make sure that it fit your lifestyle and it was still practical for a business and maximizing the market potential there. So some great little tidbits to pull out of your story.

Matt: Yeah sure, and I’m leaving myself open for the future, because I always like to evolve. And I could always go to the painting thing next, and I can always go to possibly teaching somebody how to start off as an illustrator. Right now I’ve got everything loaded up in terms of my time, so I’m not going to branch out and spread myself too thin, but in the future I definitely will explore those other two venues.

Jay: Awesome.

Sterling: Well, and I’m just curious, does any of your students at the college there, do they know you have the site?

Matt: Well absolutely. This is the beautiful thing, I devote one page on the site as a homework page. So basically what I do is I put all my videos on that one page, and the beauty of it with teaching at the school is that I will never ever run out of ideas for content. I really do find myself in a unique situation, lately of course with the student’s permission I’ve been doing a drawing tip of the week with them where I give them exposure and I just take my iPhone and I film their sketchbook.

We were at the Metropolitan Museum of Art today and one student from Spain, his sketchbook is so good, and these students are so talented and I’m like let me film your sketch book, I’ve got to share this with all the people who are subscribed to my site and to my YouTube page as well. And it’s working out really well, they know that I have the site and I kind of find with the students at the school you’re either a person who loves to watch stuff online or you don’t, you’re like more of a personal interaction in the classroom.

But I find that most of the members of my site are people who would really like to be able to go to the School of Visual Arts. The School of Visual Arts is a really good school on the East coast of the United States, and they just for whatever reason they just don’t go there. And so that’s one of the books that I have for the site in terms of signing up to that. You’re going to get the same content I’m teaching somebody who’s paying $30,000 a year to learn for my low membership site.

So yes, they do know and they’re involved with it. I use the site in the classroom, that was another reason I designed these DVDs, to use them as like a recap for what I teach in the classroom.

Jay: Beautiful, that’s awesome.

Sterling: That’s very cool. Well okay, what fears have you faced along the way with starting your business and how did you overcome them?

Matt: Well the biggest fear since I am so a non-techy and I mean my whole 20’s I was like living in the 1800’s just like painting. So my first computer was a little iMac and my biggest fear was I didn’t know how to set up a website and it was about the HTML, and at the time I was just flying by the seat of my pants. I didn’t know anything about Virtual Assistants before I learned about your podcast. I mean that was my fear, I had my ecommerce site, I purchased it from the company and they’re like here it is, here’s your blank page.

And I thought I was just going to go on there and start typing in, but they’re like nope, you have a Mac, you can’t use our WYSIWYG, so I just had to learn the HTML, but I love being challenged like that. Like it wasn’t perfect, it took me a long time, there was a lot of screaming involved when I was trying to learn HTML. That was my biggest fear, having to deal with a blank page.

My second biggest fear was creating the content and it there was a lot and lot of trial and error involved in the content creation in the beginning. Do I show more of my face on the camera, do I zoom in just to my hand? Do I need to move the camera? What type of camera do I need? All of that stuff, I mean I really learned the whole business from soup to nuts all on my own.

Originally in terms of doing the video editing and all this, I still do it now, there’s some minor things like I said that I have outsourced, but for the most part I still do it all. But now it’s so much easier because I’ve done it, I’ve made all the mistakes and it just is like so easy because it’s all in my subconscious, I just kind of make it happen.

But those are my two biggest fears, a second part to that question – I mean I have fears now, I have learned all that stuff but as you grow, and as you get bigger, you’re constantly getting new fears. And I think that’s a good thing, and it’s one of my things like I always want to feel a little bit uncomfortable, I always want to feel a little bit uneasy.

And if I feel that way then I know that I’m growing. If I feel like I’m going to be totally safe and okay, I got this, I know how to do this now. I have some new fears and they’re pretty big ones. But I’m kind of going about it the same way, I’m kind of pushing through that brick wall and figuring out ways to deal with the new challenges that have arisen.

Sterling: Yeah I know, in the Academy we actually talk a lot about the fears because that’s one of those tools that you need to be able to get really good at is how to get through your fears and push past it because yeah, we go through it all at the same time too. We’re constantly going okay, what are we going to do next? And then it’s like oh, we’ve never done this! I hope it works! So you just have to get to the point where you can trust that you’ll make it work and there’s just very specific tips on helping people through the fears, but it’s always interesting to hear what fears people had and how they got through them, love it!

Matt: Yeah, it was amazing, I mean I second guessed myself slightly. I mean everyone listening to the podcast, I mean you just really want to go with your gut. When I was filming the videos, I filmed the video, it was like a big production and I have somebody come over and help me, and it was a big day. I paid that person and then I’d take the DVD and I’d watch it and I’d be like oh god, there’s a weird shadow on the paper, or my voice sounded weird, or I forgot to turn on the mic.

And little silly things like that and it’s just like everything else, once you dive into it and you understand that’s it’s not going to be perfect, it’s never going to be perfect, just got for it. Just start, and I started and today I do all the filming on my own, it’s very simple. I’m like very no frills, it’s all about teaching people how to draw and just content creation, it’s all about the great content.

So I just sit down, turn my camera on, turn the mic on and I just start drawing and of course I do it in sequence and I think about the course I’m going to teach. And maybe this would be a course on drawing portraits, so I get into that, but it was a lot of trial and error and a little bit of second guessing, but I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people over the years and it seems to be working.

Jay: Very cool, that’s some great tips there. Speaking of tips, one thing I want to ask you about since you have a membership site that’s been doing well, it’s been running a while, lots of members, and we’re big fans of the membership site model obviously. It makes the majority of the income for Internet Business Mastery, what are one or two tips that you’ve learned along the way while running a membership site?

Matt: Well gosh, you’re going to get a lot of feedback and you’ve got to be open and you cannot have an ego. You just have to listen, and it’s very easy to get defensive and you’re like, wait a second! I’m supposed to be the expert, why are you telling me that? But if you start to do that, you become closed minded, and so you have to pick and choose your battles. And I’ve learned to really listen to the members, because the members have some great ideas.

Now it’s impossible to please everybody, and I do my best. I have a forum and it’s for content suggestion and tutorial suggestions, and it’s impossible for me to get to every one, but the one main thing that I’ve learned is to constantly listen, be involved in the site. And I have a forum and I have something that’s very unique to my site, it’s a critique gallery. So all of the artists who are members, they upload their drawings and I critique them.

I check my page stats, and that is the biggest draw on the site is the critique gallery. So listen to your members, that is huge! And definitely be on top of the customer service because sometimes there could be a lot of simple little items that can cause a lot of miscommunication. Perhaps there’s something with a Paypal button that doesn’t go smoothly with the website, software, or maybe somebody is confused about what they were going to get when they signed up. They thought they were getting all the DVDs, so you really just need to be open and listen to the people.

Because there is a lot of information on my site and what I constantly try to do is streamline it. And so it’s just being open to listening and constantly staying in contact, I mean I stay in contact, I created a member only podcast, so each week the members sign up to a list when they first join the site and they get a podcast every week telling them what to do, keeping them on track, and I think that’s a really good bonus that I’ve added to my site just recently that I’ve never had there.

And it gives me an opportunity to stay in touch with them, I mean that is different than the drawing tip of the week. The drawing tip of the week is something that I would do to just create a buzz, make my brand nice and strong and get people to come visit the site. But the member only podcast is a whole different thing, that is where I’m sending people a podcast each week in their email inbox and they can listen to that on the go. And I think that’s a very important thing to have in a membership site.

Jay: So has the response been pretty good to that then?

Matt: Yeah the response has been good. There is a little bit of a lag because I just implemented it about a month and a half ago, so I have a lot of original members who haven’t signed up. Now on my member portal I have the opt in box, all new members automatically just get put right into that, but it’s my existing members who they’re slow to sign up to it.

But once they sign up to it, and most of them have gone through the content already, the members who have been with me a long period of time. But it’s working really well for the new members, and I send them a Quicktime video to watch a little bit bigger, and then I send them a podcast video to watch on their iPod.

Jay: Awesome.

Sterling: Yeah, those are some really great tips, and now what we want to know is what is the one most important tool you use on a regular basis to help make your business easier?

Matt: Okay, the most important tool that I use is Aweber. Aweber for me hands down is something that is huge because I use it for the member only podcast, I use it two to three times a week for my drawing tip of the week and that is a tool that I could not do without. I know there is a bunch of different…oh gosh I’m having a mental blank, maybe you guys can help me out with the term that Aweber is….

Jay: Email management I guess?

Matt: Thank you, yes. But I chose them and they seem to be working well for me, and that is something that I feel I could not do without because communication is everything. And once I learned to put in that opt in box on my home page and that started opening up the lines of communication.

The other tool if I’m going to throw in one more for you guys, I don’t want to talk too long is to me YouTube. YouTube is my entire business, everyone…I was very fortunate with my ecommerce site, they could not buy a DVD until they answer the question how they found me. And 99% of the people who found me, found me through YouTube. And that just reinforced it for me, and I still get that, I still get ‘I found you through YouTube…’ ‘I was looking through YouTube one night, and I found your videos.’ ‘I stumbled upon you in YouTube.’

And I know there’s a lot more higher quality video sites out there, and I use those as well. But YouTube is just something that is my entire business.

Jay: Well there’s a couple of awesome lessons to learn from that. First of all, obviously you want to ask your people where are they coming from? I mean we use a number of things to track, and it’s also on our signup form, where do you find us, and often the answer is iTunes or the podcast. So it’s really important to know those things.

Second of all, it’s interesting as I look at a lot of businesses, you should diversify your traffic generation as much as possible because obviously if all of sudden…I mean YouTube probably is not going anywhere and iTunes is probably not going anywhere, but what if. But it’s interesting, out of all these different ways you can generate traffic it’s usually just finally one of those…I mean in the early stages of a new business it’s usually just one of them hits, and finally bam! It snowballs an income of people, for you it was YouTube, for us it was iTunes and some of our other big success stories it’s been Google, or Adsense.

So it’s just interesting to hear and it can obviously going to depend on what your niche is, and so that’s why if you go out and try to do a podcast and you’re like okay, that’s what’s going to get me all my traffic and it doesn’t quite work and then you give up, well you might have just been one step away from trying the one traffic thing that would have unleashed the flood gates of traffic for your niche.

So it is important to pay attention to those things. And so that you’ve mentioned YouTube, I’ve got to ask you, give us a great tip for being found on YouTube, for using that as a traffic…I mean obviously you’re creating some video tutorials or something, putting them up there. But can you give us a tip or two about getting found on YouTube?

Matt: Sure, oh gosh – of course keywords in all of that, but I guess just be yourself. I mean I just started being myself, putting stuff out there, not really concerned again, going with the theme I guess I’ve had throughout this whole interview with not being perfect, but you’ve got to have good content. There’s a lot of videos out there, people doing drawing tutorials, the stuff has to be good.

And make sure when you start that you put stuff out there that people are going to want to listen to, that are going to want to watch it. So content is king, and that’s what I tell my illustration students when I’m trying to tell them how to get people to come to their blog, content is king, keywords, be yourself, and consistency. Don’t put a YouTube clip up or whatever, BlipTV, or any of the Vimeo sites, don’t put one clip up and then one month later do another one.

Try to be a little bit more consistent with it, keep them short. Mine tend to go a little long but I would say try to do one a week. I was doing like one a month, maybe one every month and a half. And when I first discovered somebody was doing one a week, then I discovered somebody was doing one a day, I’m like oh my god, I’m never going to be able to find the time to do one video a week let alone one a day. And now I’ve managed to fit in two, sometimes three a week. And a lot you learn and you grow, and believe it or not there’s a little iPhone camera that does the trick for me while teaching.

I’m always trying to be synergized, trying to do more than one thing at a time. So during lunch time at class, I use my iPhone camera and I just film a sketchbook and I just put it up there. Before when school’s not in session, I’ll just shoot a few clips and I’ll just put them up there. So just be consistent.

Jay: Yeah, consistency and we’ve done pretty well with Internet Business Mastery, but that’s one of the biggest things I’m working myself with my own content, I mean without a business partner there that I schedule to be at a certain time on an interview like this or to record together, it’s easy to be like, “Oh, I’ve got so many other things that I’ve got to do and then it slips and it slips. And it really does help a lot when it comes to getting attention and traffic generation to be consistent.

Like you say, give your market something that they want and put it out consistently so that they can anticipate and expect that it will be there. So those are some excellent, excellent tips.

Sterling: Alright, so as we’re wrapping up here, we’d really like to know how your internet business has impacted your entire life?

Matt: It’s impacted my life tremendously. When I was an illustrator, my whole existence resisted around somebody else’s deadline, a publisher’s deadline, and I would find myself working on Sunday nights to meet a deadline. And that after 18 years, 17 years of doing illustration really got old, and the whole part about having two classes taken away from me really left me vulnerable there around 1997. So what internet business has done for me is given me a little bit more control. Nobody’s ever in total control, but a little bit more control over my destiny.

Like I’m not worried about being laid off, I’m not worried about paying my bills. The money has been really unbelievable, I work hard for it. And those two items have give me a tremendous amount of freedom, and once you get that snowball started at the top of the hill, once you get that snowball rolling down the hill, it has a momentum all of its own. And my site now has a momentum and I’m able to have much more time, much more freedom.

What I keep doing is giving myself more work with that freedom, and I’m not doing what you guys are doing – shooting videos on the beach, but it’s just financial freedom, time freedom. I’m moving into a new home in three more weeks, November 24^th on North Shore of Long Island, ten minutes away from the vineyards out there. So a lot of good things have happened due to the internet business, definitely.

Sterling: Well you know the thing to also mention for people that are really new to this and even how powerful membership sites are, you were saying like 1,500 members, you have to really quickly to really understand the money side of these things, if you have a 1,000 members, and they’re paying you say $50 a month, that’s $50,000 a month!

These numbers are amazing! And even if you’re making $10 a month per member, and you’ve got 2,000 members, I mean the money is absolutely amazing if you give people like you said, give them what they want, let them be able to tell you what they want, and actually do it. I just want to drive that home how powerful membership sites are.

Matt: I agree. I mean I have obviously a different audience so my membership fees are going to be a little lower than say an internet business site, or a site that somebody’s learning about the markets and financial topics, but even with my…I think my sign up fees are extremely reasonable, and my site is pretty much accessible to everybody at the fees that I have.

Going forward, I’ll alter that and other sites I’ll develop, I’ll alter that. But right now, I think I’m at a good price point. I think it’s a little low, but I’m going to keep it there, but it’s working pretty good.

Jay: Pretty cool, well one thing that I was curious about from the beginning when you mentioned that…we talked about how you’ve done a lot of illustration and had quite a good career with that, what has been your favorite book that you’ve done an illustration for?

Matt: Oh gosh, um….

Jay: I totally put you on the spot there.

Matt: Well I’m going to say the topic of books has been…I even have a niche in illustration, and my niche in illustration (and this is going to make you laugh), 8-11 year old young reader books that taught girls about American History. And I’m a bit of a history buff myself so I loved getting into illustrating the books and getting the characters in costume. Like it was all Civil War, it was all Revolutionary War stuff and I just dug that topic.

I don’t necessarily have a specific book, some were better than others. It was more about working with a specific art director and how many changes they were going to give me. But one book for instance was called – it was a hard cover book – and it’s called “Silver Dollar Girl” and it was about a girl who went out west to find her Dad in the gold mine times. And that one was really fun, I really loved illustrating that book cover, that was a pretty one.

Jay: Very cool.

Sterling: Yeah, actually just looking at it now on Amazon. Very nice! Oh yeah, there it is!

Matt: Yeah, there’s some bad ones on there too, so don’t look too much!

Sterling: Yeah, this is great! Well, thank you so much for the interview and please tell us again where people can go to find you online.

Matt: People can find me at DrawingTutorialsOnline.com. Thanks guys!

Jay: Thank you Matt!

Matt: Yeah, speak to you soon!

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!