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

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Sterling: This is Internet Business Mastery, episode 81.

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 answer questions sent in by Academy members. And in the Quick Tip, we’re going to tell you how to create high def video content without breaking the bank, and what I did to create a three monitor set up.

And 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, I was going to tell you something that I just realized a couple of days ago, actually yesterday.

Jay: Awesome, what’s that?

Sterling: I’ve realized that I’ve now lived in San Diego exactly a year as of yesterday.

Jay: Very cool.

Sterling: And the cool thing is, just recently again a couple times a year I do an overhaul on the old goals, and I look at them just about weekly normally, but sometimes I have to go through and go, “Oh, I’ve completed some things, and now I’ve got to add some things in their place.” But it actually made me think as I was going through the goals I had completed in the last maybe year, it made me realize that moving to San Diego and being able to live on the beach and have the lifestyle I wanted was literally just an idea, a written goal a year and a couple of days ago.

So before I actually moved here, and the reason I wanted to bring up this point is that once you start actually setting goals and seeing them actually happen, you have to realize how actually powerful goal setting is. And let’s just say a year and a half ago when I decided you know what, I do want to move back to San Diego, because I lived here many…eighteen years ago or something I lived here for about a year when I was going to go to college down here, but since then I’ve always wanted to come back.

And again, let’s say a year and a half ago I just thought to myself…or maybe even two years ago, I really want to move back to San Diego. So all I did was I wrote it down, that’s my goal. And I would think about it from time to time, oh it would be really cool, and now that it is absolutely real and I’ve been living here a year, it just made me I don’t know, become fully aware of how absolutely important it is to have those goals and to understand that the whole point of it is that you achieve them.

And how powerful is that I just thought to myself one day, I want to live in San Diego! And now I am, I don’t know why it seems so exciting to think about that but it’s just a fantastic thing to understand that if you just actually take the actions necessary, all those things you write down is some day I want these to be goals to live this, it can happen.

Jay: Yeah, definitely. Well first of all, congratulations, that’s awesome. It’s interesting because you write down the goals and sometimes you get so set on working on them and thinking, oh some day, some day. Then all of a sudden next thing you know it’s like, wow it happened! And there’s definitely some interesting psychology behind that, but I’ve been feeling the same thing recently with moving into this new apartment here in Portland. And a little while ago we had what we call a future pacing exercise, thinking about what…not just setting a goal, but thinking about what will that look like, and being very descriptive about it, what will it feel like?

And there was a webinar we did during the summer if you recall, and we had people comment and put down some goal and what it would feel like. A lot of people commented, and we got a bunch of them. And I wrote down what kind of the next step of my lifestyle, what I wanted that to look like, where I would live and how it would look and some things like that.

And the last year and a half or so have been about portability, being on the move, living very simply, going to Argentina, kind of what felt like a temporary stay in Portland which is now extended longer. And so I wrote down in the summer in that blog post which you can find at Internet Business Mastery.com, you can go and see it. It described living in a certain kind of place, and I had a certain type of place we would live in, and the kind of location that would be in, and what it would feel like, and the kind of amenities it would have and all kinds of things like that.

And suddenly it dawned on me a couple of weeks ago, so we moved into a new place here in Portland a couple of weeks ago, about a month ago. And a couple weeks ago…and we’ve just been loving it, I mean seriously I’m regularly pinching myself. It’s just the coolest thing ever because we’re up on the 15^th floor with an awesome view and the nicest…and I should point out we’re not like saying this stuff to like brag, like hey look what we’ve done, this is meant to illustrate a point and hopefully inspire you in your own goals as you’re listening to this episode.

Sterling: We’re just regular guys that started doing internet business and all of a sudden all these dream things are happening because we actually took the action to do it. That’s the only trick to it is actually doing it, taking the action. But anyway, go ahead….

Jay: So yeah, the other night I’m lying on the couch in our living room looking out, so it’s night time. We have two big floor to ceiling windows that look out on the city and the river and bridges, and during the day you can see mountains. But it was night time, so it was cityscape that we were seeing, and we’re watching some movie on our Bluray player, and it just hit me. I’m like yeah, this is what I visualized when I wrote that down.

Sterling: Yeah, this was a dream!

Jay: Wow, I’m actually in it now! I’m actually living it, and that was pretty powerful, so it’s just exciting to think about cool, what’s the next thing I’m going to visualize and write down and figure out how to make happen?

Sterling: Well and that was kind of the point I was leading to is, as I was filling out my new goals, rather than thinking oh man, wouldn’t it be nice to have some of these new goals, I hope it will happen. I’m going, I now am designing the future, really! Not just theoretically, because I know that if I just take these specific steps, that’s what I’m going to look at…as I’m looking at these new goals that I wrote down and I’m going, in a year I’ll be living that life now!

I mean that’s just absolutely fascinating and hopefully what you take away is that really setting these inspirational goals and actually…not just putting them away until next year or six months from now, but looking at what you need to take action on next to get those goals.

Jay: And I think there’s power in…I mean it was really cool when you set those goals, having that visual element and the theater of the mind that some different goal setting books talk about. And thinking about what that will look like, and even more importantly what will that feel like because it was really cool to arrive in that moment and suddenly realize oh my gosh, I’m there. And it feels like I thought it would feel like and it looks like what I thought it would look like, and it’s like a reality now that was manifest, and that’s a very cool….

Sterling: But anyway, I just wanted to bring that up and hopefully that will inspire some people to write down some things that will really inspire them and have the belief behind it that they can actually achieve them. But anyway, let’s get to the…we’ve got a lot of Q&A here, so let’s get to it!

And now the featured segment….

Jay: Alright, we’ve got a lot of questions here we’re going to get through. These questions all came in from our Academy members. We sent out an email to them and said, “What’s on your mind, what might be holding you up? Is there a question we can answer to help you get past some of those sticking points in your business right now?” And we got a lot of great questions in, we’re going to get through as many of these. The first part of this program will be available here through the podcast, and then the entire Q&A program will be available inside the Academy.

So with that, let’s get to the first question here.

Sterling: Alright, first question is from Andrew and he says, “I’m a new member, I’m picking up the message that a common recommended strategy is to build a brand in an area of personal expertise. What would you say to someone who doesn’t consider themselves an expert in anything?” Wow. I’m sure this is a really common one, so we get this from time to time for sure.

Jay: Yeah, and if I remember correctly his email went on to say, “This isn’t just false humility, I just happen to be pretty good at a lot of different things…” and so yeah, I’m sure there’s a lot of people feel like they’re in that position.

Sterling: I just want to say really quickly that we do have a worksheet that helps you go through this in the Academy, that asks a bunch of questions, and I guess we could ask a couple of them if you want to start with some.

Jay: I guess we also want to point out that in saying “I’m not an expert at anything,” maybe we should define really quickly ‘expert.’ I mean we’re not talking you have to have a degree in something, we’re not talking that you have to have done something for ten years. You just have to be at the very least passionate enough about it to now dive in and learn a bunch, and continually learn in order to be able to create new content, and at least know more about it than the average person.

And at the very least if you have that, I mean if there’s a lot of things that you feel pretty good at, or just okay at, well then pick one that you’d like to really be good at, that you don’t mind diving in and get a couple books from Amazon, or finding an expert in your area to learn a few things from or do some research on the internet to pull some information together.

Now grant it, you’re probably not going to go and do a site on brain surgery in the next week or two, there’s going to be a few exceptions.

Sterling: Brain surgery for beginners! That would be a video series…oh boy.

Jay: That might actually go viral if you made those videos. So we want to manage some expectations there of what’s necessary. It is something you want to be doing, I am a believer of not just going and collecting a bunch of theory and then regurgitating it without actually diving in and doing it yourself. I shouldn’t necessarily say ‘doing yourself’ or at least knowing somebody who is doing it that is working along with you.

It’s like the college professor who’s teaching engineering, but hasn’t been in the industry for fifteen years, you could run into some problems. And it might depend on the niche too, but definitely check your expectations as to what’s necessary about what’s being an expert. But beyond that yeah, you dive into the worksheet to help you decide which one is best for you and that comes down to a number of factors, a few being passion and analyzing the market for things like well, do they have an irrational passion or an urgent pain that I can attend to that I can help solve, that I can give them information about and a few things like that.

Sterling: Yeah, I very much agree. Again, to drive the point home on…it can just be something right now that you would like to be an expert in, and you go after it. That point I just wanted to nail home so that you don’t get stuck with going, “Well I’m good at a couple of things, but I wouldn’t consider myself an expert,” but again, it doesn’t have to be what you know right now. You can choose it, there’s a lot of people that start with that.

Like I’m looking at a new market right now that I do have some knowledge in, but to be able to be an expert and to speak to the community as an expert, I’m studying everything I can on the subject, and trying it out in my world and seeing what works and what actually works for me. And soon enough, I’ll be at a place where I believe I can speak to the community as an expert, so sometimes it just comes from your desire to want to, your desire and maybe passion to want to know a lot about a subject and want to possibly teach it to other people.

Jay: Alright, the next question comes from Damian. And he asks, “Can you market yourself and your products while keeping your identity private? The reason being is some people still have day jobs.” That’s an excellent question! Another one that’s very common, a lot of people run into that one.

And a great example of this is somebody that we’ve interviewed on the podcast, and that is Undercover Lawyer Kurt, and Kurt is not his real name, but he is an expert in the legal stuff that he does and he has a day job that could conflict with what….he doesn’t want to find out what his bosses would think if they saw his site let’s put it that way.

So he works under a pen name, or a pseudo name, whatever you want to call it, an alias. He uses a different name, in fact he goes as far as to, because he does audio content, he goes as far as to mask his voice using a piece of software that while he speaks it changes the tambour of his voice a bit so that it sounds different. But yeah, for sure you can…especially if you get to the point where you’re doing several different niches, and you don’t want confusion of your brand.

I mean if I were to go right now and do a site about scuba, well I might choose to use a different name over there just because my name is associated so much with marketing and internet business and new media and things like that, that there might be a bit of a disconnect and some people might be like well, when they search for me which is he actually an expert in? He has all these different things, so in that case it would be another case to maybe use an alias.

So both for privacy because of your job, or just because you are a private person, and also for branding issues if you want to keep things distinct, there’s nothing wrong with using an alias. And of course you might want to consult with a lawyer when it comes to things like doing business as (a DBA is what we call it in the United States) and making sure you dot all your i’s and cross all your t’s when it comes to legally doing business under a different name.

Sterling: Yeah, I mean there’s another couple of good examples of this, or I have a friend that is kind of a big guy in the real estate market, and then one of his side passions is urban survival. So he’s got an entire course on urban survival, he trains with navy seals and does all this stuff learning about this urban survival stuff. Like he even had bounty hunters hunt him down to see if he could evade them in case something happens, and all these different things that he does.

And of course in the real estate market where he’s definitely more of a main stream person, he’s got his identity there which I believe that’s where he uses who he really is, and then he uses an alias in the urban survival market. Just like you said, there’s no disconnect like they’re going, “Oh I want to learn how to do short sales from this guy!” And then you see him in like full tactical gear on another page with a big bowing knife and face painted, and taking over some small building or I don’t know what they do. But anyway…

Jay: I see how you find your deals!

Sterling: Yeah exactly. So I mean, that’s another one, and then there’s in the dating world there was somebody who had a certain name, and then they started using their real name in internet marketing. I mean there’s a lot of people who do this and us, when we started ours wasn’t the privacy of a job, but for instance I was using my  nickname of Sterling instead of my real name simply because I didn’t want my competitors to know it was me and start using the tips I was giving against me.

So you know, that was the specific reason that we started using our nicknames as our names on the show was because of that reason. And I mean there’s lots of reasons why you might want to use a pen name or an alias.

Alright, so next question is from Debra. “What has been the best source of traffic for you guys? Has it been the podcast?” Absolutely.

Jay: Yes. Definitely, we get a lot of traffic from the podcast.

Sterling: Yeah, not much money at all definitely, and like it’s been so good, but now we’re looking at other ways of putting this out there through the use of the podcast whether it be video and transcriptions, and all of these other things because the podcast traffic has been so amazing, and how much has the traffic cost us? Almost nothing! Just the production of the show cost, which is also almost nothing.

Jay: Now here is the principle that should be pulled from this, some people might here that and go, “Oh gosh, I’ve got to start doing a podcast!” And yes maybe you should, but the point here is that content marketing is where we have built our brand, amassed a strong following, and levered them into customers because we’ve built up confidence through our content. So whether you do blogging, whether you do audio, whether you do video, whether you do a combination of those, you definitely should be doing that because it’s just consistent creation of quality authoritative content that allows people to connect with us and get to know, like, and trust us that has attracted the leads and the customers that we have today.

And that’s why what we teach in the Academy between going from what’s your niche, I mean what kind of content you should be creating, how to build up the loyal community, and all that kind of stuff is a big part of the Academy. It’s because that makes for a very lucrative….

Sterling: …and sustainable too…

Jay: A business that you can take to the bank for the rest of your life, and that’s the strategy that we do, that’s the strategy that we teach. Now that said, once you’ve got that content, you go out and you try to get it be listed…highly ranked and listed in all kinds of search engines. And when I say search engines, I’m talking Google, iTunes, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter – these are all places that people are looking for connection, content, information, and you should show up in those places wherever your market may happen to be, as many of those as possible.

So that’s the strategy overall, and that’s what we do, and that’s what you should be doing as well. Now going along with that question, Jules from Australia says that she’s struggling a bit with traffic. She says, “Could you talk about how to get people up to your new site and get them to sign up? I just launched TwoMinuteBusinessTips.com and I’m not sure what to do to drive traffic without spending too much. I’ve tried Twitter with little response, posted drive traffic requests on the Academy, I’ve Facebooked it, what next?”

And really, this goes along with what I was just saying. I’d ask a few things, are you doing the regular content creation? Do you have a steady frequent consistent content creation strategy where you’re blogging regularly or you’re creating audio regularly, or you’re creating video regularly? And if you’ve got that established, well then make sure it’s search engine optimized and start getting it out to directories.

Go to the course, there’s a whole course on traffic, and make sure you go through that step by step and make sure you set everything up to work really well. Now a lot of the strategies we share are ones that just work solidly consistently over time. They’re not flash in the pan type strategies, they do take a little time to set up, but they’re also free or cost next to nothing which is why we share those and they work really well. But yes, they do take a bit of time and patience to snowball.

If you’re more anxious to say start getting traffic today, well that’s where you’ve got to start putting out some money, and doing Google Adwords or Facebook ads or buying some text ads inside of email newsletters or on a blog site or some things like that. So you’ve got that choice to make, just consistently keep plugging away at the free content marketing style stuff that we talk about in our traffic course inside the Academy, and we talk a little bit about Adwords as well. We start putting money down for something like Adwords and paid advertising.

Sterling: And just looking at his site, the thing that he’s done differently than what we teach is we definitely teach to drive people to a blog as kind of your hub of your business, and I’m not sure if you put in your information here you can go to a blog, but obviously you’re going to get the traffic from a blog and in many cases what we teach is a podcast. So I mean obviously Two Minute Business Tips sounds perfect for a podcast, maybe two minutes is a little short on content, but as far as a podcast…but I mean, it still sounds like it’s set up perfectly for the model that we teach.

And I probably, if I went with him through his business, have him go back to course five and six, and even into the content creation and how often how to create how easily create content fast and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, and there’s very specific ways to use Twitter, so we don’t know exactly how he’s using Twitter because we use Twitter and have great response. But there’s a specific way we do it, so and in fact I think we just put a video in the Academy on all of our newest latest tips on that. So Jules, I would definitely go in and watch that as well.

Jay: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, if you’re going to stick with the landing page and this is a fine landing page, video and it’s got the opt in and some things like that. But if you’re going to stick with this and not do the content marketing, then you’re looking at putting out some money to drive traffic.

Sterling: Alright, next question is from Jenna, “Can you discuss sales tax laws for downloadable products? I’m not sure if I’m in compliance or not.”

Jay: Well without giving any legal advice, any tax advice, any professional advice whatsoever, this is simply an example of what I do. And this is obviously in the United States where we live, our understanding and this could change so if somebody’s listening to this in the future…and the moral of the story is you’ve got to go talk to your tax guy, but what we have done because what we do is all digital information on the internet, there’s no sales tax.

There’s no physical goods being shipped anywhere. Now the few times that we have sold a physical good, we’ve only worried about collecting sales tax for the state for which we are doing business, but that might vary from state to state, again why you have to talk to a lawyer, or you have to talk to your tax guy. So for instance when our business is in Utah, where we formed the LLC, if we happened to ship a product to somebody in Utah, we would make sure to pay the sales tax on that.

Now that said, if you’re not collecting any sales tax at all for whatever reason because it’s all digital or whatever the case may be, your tax guy says well for what you’re doing you don’t have to worry about collecting sales tax is that you still have to file the sales taxes at least in the United States with your state. You have a thing that you have to file saying I didn’t have any. I actually had that bite me once where a couple years later after I moved out of Utah, I was living in New York, the state of Utah contacted me and saying, you had this business and we never…I mean it took them a long time to like realize and I didn’t even know I had done something wrong. And they were very understanding, I was like oh wow, I didn’t realize like you know, you didn’t file this thing so now you’ve got a $50 fee or something to pay. I was like oh, which was sad because it was only less than $10 of sales tax that they said, “Oh it looks like you need to pay some minimum….I can’t remember, it was several years ago.

But that’s when I learned this lesson about sales tax, it’s like oh maybe just because I’m doing internet business doesn’t mean that I ignore the sales tax thing. I still need to talk to my tax guy about this and make sure I am staying compliant. So there’s the main point that I guess we have for you.

Sterling: Yeah and it doesn’t cost that much to have your tax guy take care of that, I did it myself for a couple of years, and luckily apparently I was doing it somewhat right, but I really hated doing it. So I did finally give it to my accountant to take care of and it’s so much better to just give it to them. It doesn’t cost much at all, depending on obviously how much you’re doing, and that’s of course for physical products.

Digital products as far as I know like you said, again I don’t look at that stuff too much after other than signing it and going oh, that looks right. So we trust our advisors maybe a little too much, but anyway yeah, for the physical stuff and again, in the end we always have to say 50,000 times that we’re not CPAs, and we’re not tax guys. So definitely check with somebody, but that’s kind of how we do it.

Jay: I’m definitely not a brain surgeon.

Sterling: Really? Gosh, I thought you were.

Jay: Alright, although I have watched a brain surgeon on Grey’s Anatomy a couple times…maybe I could fake my way through it, I don’t know.

Sterling: I was just going to say that.

Jay: So next question comes from Reg, and another really common question. Reg is asking, “Is WordPress versatile enough to promote any kind of product or service, or is it more blog oriented?” And this is actually a question emailed to me by a friend, something like this recently, a friend who works for a state government and he’s setting up some stuff for them and was going to use WordPress, but doesn’t quite want it to be blog style.

And because they’re not quite as often put content out, and they don’t want commenting on certain pages, and all this specialized stuff, and in the end he’s like, “I don’t know if WordPress is the right fit for us,” and I did a couple searches within like two minutes I found just tons of examples of government sites that were using WordPress to run their site. And then what about companies, and I went and searched companies that use WordPress and immediately found a huge list of companies. I mean even the New York Times uses WordPress on part of their site.

I don’t think it’s running the whole thing, but the end point here is that WordPress is incredibly flexible. You can use it as a content management system just as much as you can use it for a blog meaning even if you’re just running a site that’s a little more static, you can still make WordPress do quite a bit. And it’s still very efficient because it’s still optimized and it keeps track of all of your different content.

As the site grows and grows, and grows, the site’s stored nicely in a database rather than having all these static separate HTML files or whatever language you’re using, stacked up everywhere and you start losing track of where all the files are. It’s nice to have a content management system that keeps that all in one nice place.

So I’d say just about whatever style site, certainly if you’re doing our style of marketing you can make WordPress work for you. I mean if you really want to go and try to use something else, okay fine, more power to you. All of our stuff is about WordPress and we like it because there’s such a huge community of people using it, it’s definitely like the de facto blogging software, and even for businesses, and being used for a lot more than just blogging.

Now that said, if you’re doing like an ecommerce site where you’ve got like shopping cart style, lots of different products that people can search through and do things with, well in that case you might want to look at doing…I don’t know, maybe there’s a way to turn WordPress into a nice shopping cart with lots of different things that people can search and bring up separate product pages, but I know there’s other content management systems that are specially designed to be that kind of a ecommerce site.

So in that case, I would go and look around and see. I don’t have anything to suggest there because we’ve never done that style of business. But that’s my thoughts on the topic.

Sterling: I agree. Actually I have done a non WordPress style site, and once I did WordPress and saw how it worked to do a business through that, I would definitely for myself not go back. So that’s about all I have to say on that other than what you said.

Jay: Alright, well that’s all we have for the free portion of this Q&A, so that gives you a sample of the Q&A’s we do regularly for the Academy. We thought those were some great questions that we wanted to share with the whole audience because again, those were questions that come up quite often and we definitely wanted to give the answer to help anybody listening.

But there’s a lot more questions where these came from that Academy members also sent in, and we are going to be answering those inside of the Academy as a special Q&A with the entire program in there. But we have more questions about how to integrate WordPress well with your affiliate program and your accounting, and payment system, and membership site, and keep that all nice. A question from somebody who’s still hung up on the idea of what’s good enough…when do I know I’ve got it good enough, I’ve got this perfectionism that I’m wanting to wait until everything’s exactly in place before launching, and I’m having a hard time getting past that, which is something I’m sure a lot of people run into; people asking questions about how much time we spend in our business, and some things like that, so the answers to those questions will be available inside the Academy.

If you’re listening to this, and not yet an Academy member and interested in giving it a try, you can go and try that out at FreeAudioGift.com, that will tell you how you can get your risk free trial to the Internet Business Mastery Academy.

Sterling: Alright, so we’ve got a breakthrough real quickly we’d like to tell you about, and it’s from Russell Voles, is that how you say it?

Jay: I imagine, that sounds right.

Sterling: We need a couple Smiths or Johnsons or something. Anyway okay, so here’s what he wrote in, he said, “I finally found my niche.” Yay, Russell! That’s the huge thing! Okay he says, “These questions helped.” So these are the questions that helped him find his niche. “Number one, what am I really good at doing? Number two, what kind of people do I like doing things with? And three, what subject or activities interest me? And number four, what are my true strengths?”

Then he goes on to say, “After two months of searching, I kept finding that I really enjoyed coaching people, writing, and public speaking. The problem is I’m not an expert in any of these activities, the only things that I’m an expert at are selling and managing sales teams. So I asked a very important question, if I was to pick a niche in sales management, what would I blog about? Well guess what, in 15 minutes I came up with 45 blog post ideas and that’s when I got excited. The next day I launched HelpMySalesTeamSucks.com.” I love that title.

Well congratulations Russell, I mean obviously the first major step is picking a niche, and we’re really glad you were able to do that. And he comes from the Academy right?

Jay: Yep, he’s an Academy member.

Sterling: Perfect, I thought those questions looked somewhat familiar….so thanks Russell for sending that in, and let’s get to the Quick Tip.

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: Okay, as we mentioned recently, we’re going to start doing two Quick Tips every episode. Each of us is going to come up with something we thought that was cool that we recently found or had been using, or something that we thought we wanted to share with you, the listener.

So my Quick Tip is about recording video content, and more specifically recording high def video content. Now we’re getting to the point where high def is becoming more and more common, so for some of your content you might want to think about recording it in high definition just so you have that option of releasing it in that way as that becomes more of a universal format moving forward.

And the really cool thing is you no longer have to buy like a thousand dollar camcorder in order to record in high def. In fact now, you can get small little portable video recorders that do high definition. Of course a couple of years back, the flip came out, the Flip camera which is quick and easy, we did recordings very simply and plug in by USB, and then they came out with the high def for less than $200 which is pretty amazing.

However, my Quick Tip pick is not the Flip camera because actually there’s always been one flaw with the Flip that has kept me from endorsing it or really using it myself and that was that there was no option to plug in external audio, to plug in a mic externally to get that better audio sound. And really good audio can make or break your video content, people can be very forgiving of just so-so video quality as long as the audio is good, because that just keeps a continuity going, but if your audio is not very good, if the mic is just a cheap little built in mic or has a lot of room sound and things like that, then it can be harder for the viewer.

So recently Kodak who is obviously very well known in the photo world came out with a little video player called the Kodak ZI8 and it has high def, a bunch of other great features, it’s just very similar to the Flip, very easy to use. And it has an external mic input as well, and I recently did some video recordings with that and I plugged it straight into my high definition TV with an HDMI cable and in fact it comes with a HDMI cable, plugged it right in and watched it on TV and it looked really, really good. So I was impressed, it’s highly recommended, it’s only like $160 I think I spent at Target for it, maybe it’s a $180, I’m forgetting.

Sterling: Well now you tell me, what am I going to do with my $1,000 HD camera?

Jay: Well I imagine if you’ve got the room to set up that kind of a fancy HD cam on a tripod and stuff, you’re probably still going to get a nicer quality, but for quick on the go and if you don’t have the money to spend then by all means Kodak is a great way to go. So check out the Kodak ZI8, that’s my Quick Tip.

Sterling: Nice, and mine is about upping your productivity with multi monitors. Now if you’re only running one monitor what are you thinking? If you’re going to do internet business, you need more than one monitor. Well the graphics card that I have on my actual desktop allowed me to have two monitors, so I’ve been running two monitors for quite some time. But because of all the social media stuff and the constant Skyping from business partners and such, I didn’t want to have to keep getting out of what I was doing even if it was a quick hot key to go look and see what’s going on.

I wanted this third monitor so I could just have that that’s dedicated to any of the extra stuff that’s constantly happening through the day. So I actually because one of our friends, John Jonas, who runs the GetReplaceMyself.com site, I know he runs four monitors. I actually gave him a call, and he was able to very quickly figure out what I need to do. And what that is, is you need a second graphics card. So I was just going to tell you that the way I did it, I have a G-Force 8800, that’s what I was running my two monitors on, and then I went and got a G-Force 9800 as well and was able to add the third monitor.

And I’ll tell you, productivity does go up because if there’s anything I need to copy and paste from one place to another – like let’s say I’m doing my stats and I have to go over here and copy some stuff on one page and come back, I can just have that in one monitor. I don’t have to flip back and forth between windows, I mean there’s all sorts of very cool things I can do. And now my entire peripheral vision is filled with monitors. It’s actually kind of weird, I feel like I’m in a space ship or something. And actually on Facebook I threw up a picture of what it looks like under my Facebook profile if you want to give that a look.

But that’s the way I did it and it was under $300 including the monitor because I just got a Samsung monitor at Costco and the graphics card was just over $100, and now I’ve got a third monitor.

Jay: So are you going to go for a fourth?

Sterling: You know the moment I feel I need it, now I can, because I’ve got that one more…because each of these graphic cards come with two monitor hookups, so I am…that is a possibility at any given time. So I may just do it some time, I know that our buddy Andrew actually does his other monitor and he stands it straight up so it’s long ways. So when he’s reading any of his emails, he can just read…so that sometimes makes me go…do I really need that? Okay, well not yet, but maybe soon.

Jay: Wow, well I’ve been tempted to add a multi monitor setup with some of the video editing and things that I’ve started doing with the documentary and such, so I may have to look into that. We’ll see.

Sterling: Yeah, you definitely want it with editing. We had two and three monitors when I used to edit as well, so very useful.

Jay: I’m actually thinking about hooking up my…because my Mac sits close to my big LCD screen, so I was thinking about hooking up my LCD screen as a monitor so I can see the output over there. And then I’d have my timeline and stuff on my Mac, so that….

Sterling: Yeah then you don’t have to look at this tiny little window that has your actual thing playing…

Jay: Yeah, I think it looks good!

Sterling: Yeah it looks really good in a 2×2 space.

Jay: If I’m watching it on an iPod maybe! Well that’s cool, I’ll have to check out…well I saw the photo and it looked like quite the command center.

Sterling: Oh yes.

Jay: Very nifty.

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 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!