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.

Brought to you by: FreeAudioGift.com

Sterling: This is Internet Business Mastery episode 82.

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 the desire to break me, 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 – 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 help you live the lifestyle of your dreams by turning you life’s passion into a profitable internet business even if you’re just getting started today. On this episode of Internet Business Mastery, we’re going to talk about how to start an online business with the least amount of money. And in the Quick Tip, we’re going to talk about a new old device for making your videos more interesting.

Now before we get started, 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, what’s been going on lately?

Jay: Well there’s something I wanted to chat about a little bit, we got an interesting email recently. Of course we were promoting the Product Launch Formula that Jeff Walker launched, and that did incredibly well with lots and lots of people who signed up for Product Launch Formula and for the deal of the year that we put together.

In fact, there are more Internet Business Mastery listeners taking the course than from any other source because we were the number one affiliate, which was awesome. A lot of people jumped on board to get that awesome deal and as you can imagine somebody emailed us and was wondering, “Well why are you guys essentially giving the farm away?” Because the deal was, you buy Product Launch Formula through our affiliate link and then we give you lifetime access to the Academy and my brand new podcasting course.

So in his mind he’s like, “Well you’re giving your course away, you’re giving your Academy away, and then what are you left with? Why would you give all that stuff away?” So I thought it would interesting to chat a little bit here on the show; it’s a fair question. And really there’s a lot of different motivations I guess that we have for doing a great deal like that. I mean first of all, the commission – it’s a very healthy commission. The Product Launch Formula, it’s a $2,000 course and we do get $1,000 of that for every person that buys, so we’ll just get that up front, it’s definitely one motivator.

Now that said, we only promote it because it’s a product and a course that we believe in, money is not the only thing that got us to promote that course by any means, there’s a lot of other courses that we could promote and make good money off of but they aren’t a good fit for the audience. We don’t think it’s as good of a course as it should be for example.

Sterling: And one thing to note also is that out of what just over five years now of doing the show, I think we’ve promoted maybe three courses the entire time. Just to show you, we’re not promoting courses every month like some people are doing with the email list, where they’re just turning over their email list twice a month to somebody. Out of the entire five years, there’s three including Product Launch Formula, I believe three.

Jay: And one of those didn’t go over quite as well, and we responded to that, we haven’t promoted it again since then.

Sterling: Well even though we liked it, but people didn’t like the offer and a lot of things.

Jay: Yeah, even thought we thought that it was great information, the response – we listened to that. So some of the other things that we get out of doing this promotion is…and then there’s a good business lesson to learn out of this and that is that you need to know what the lifetime value of a customer is in your business. So that means for every new customer you get, and the average amount of time that they might stay a customer or the average amount of stuff that a customer buys tells you that every customer you acquire is worth ‘x’ amount over the lifetime of that customer.

And we know what that amount is more or less for the Academy. The Academy is something where people are always coming and going and some people have been around well over a year, and some people might have only been there for a few months, but we know what the average is, so we know what that amount…and the amount that we earn off the commission from Product Launch Formula is more than what that average might be. So in the end we’re actually ahead of the game by acquiring an Academy member, somebody who’s in there consuming the stuff and bringing value to being a member of the Academy, and we’re still making just as much or more than we would if they had joined and stayed the average amount that most members stay inside the Academy.

Then on top of that, there’s the fact as I just stated, we were the number one affiliate for Product Launch Formula which is not an easy task to do. When you consider you’ve got people like Frank Kern, and Mike Filsaime, and StomperNet, and the list goes on – names that are well known in this market and people who have very, very large lists and even though relatively speaking, our audience and list size is smaller than those people, we outsold them.

So that obviously gets the attention of not only Jeff Walker, so there’s a social capital that builds up. One of the quickest ways, and Jeff said this in our interview – one of the quickest ways to get the attention of somebody is to do really well selling their stuff as an affiliate. So not only that, but his other top ten affiliates who are all A-listers in internet marketing business will notice that we outperform them and that we did an awesome job. The proof is in the pudding, we have an awesome relationship with our audience.

And when we recommend something, they’re thrilled and happy to get that information, and they respond, they react. And so there’s a lot of proof there, and that social capital builds up. But then in the end too, yes we want to make money, make a living and we want a viable business but our mission is also to bring increased business acumen and increased freedom to people, and we knew that was kind of a package deal that really would give somebody everything that they needed.

Between the podcasting element and our internet business system, and then knowing how to launch a product in a powerful way the same way we’ve done it. That’s everything you need to do anything that we’ve accomplished with Internet Business Mastery over the last several years. So it is just a complete package that we’re happy to offer, and we’re thrilled that so many people took us up on that deal, and that now they’re going to be in there with Jeff Walker.

And we hope to help those people maybe form a mastermind of some kind, and that is going to increase their chance of really making something impactful happen in their business and in their life. So all those things add up to it makes business sense, it makes fulfillment and definite major purpose sense, it makes sense when it comes to getting the attention of the people and building up new partnerships and relationships within our field. All these things make sense for us, and that’s why we’re able to make the offer such a deal even though at the surface it might seem like wow, you are giving everything away.

Sterling: Yeah, definitely there’s a lot of numbers in there to consider, but one of the things that I was just thinking as you were mentioning this is the whole package, and we did videos on it as part of the launch, but it made me remember back when we were creating some of the courses in the Academy, we had discussed at one point possibly putting in an entire course on product launch, and it actually makes me laugh now because after seeing the Product Launch Formula how big it is, and how extensive, it’s almost like wow, talk about biting off more than you could chew, it would have been five courses to make up with what Jeff did.

And this was the smarter decision, to just let him do what he does best and we learned from him in the first place and just add that together in one package.

Jay: Absolutely, that’s a great point. So anyway, I think there’s some good lessons, hopefully that explains where we’re coming from better, but also there’s some good lessons in there to learn for your own business behind those reasons why for making those business decisions, and the offers, and what you do with your list, and how you offer your products, and how you package things in interesting ways. And it just goes to show that when you’ve got a great offer, people will respond when it’s a good message to market match and clearly it was in this case. So we’re thrilled that it turned out that way.

Alright, with that let’s go ahead and dive into our featured segment….

And now, the featured segment…

Jay: The question we get asked quite often is, how much does it cost exactly to start your own internet business? And we had the opportunity recently to remotely lecture and answer questions for a college class up in Northern California, and that was one of the things that they wanted to know. So it kind of sparked the idea of hey, it might be a good idea to do an episode kind of about breaking down some of the different expenses.

I know we talked kind of in the past generally that one of the reasons we really like internet business is you can start a business quickly and for relatively very little money. A lot of people when they start a business, they go and have to find investment, or they have to go and use a credit card for several thousand dollars or much more than that even to get whatever kind of inventory or tools that they need, or even a location for that matter.

Sterling: There’s an example for that I wanted to give real quickly here, and that was before I looked into doing first it was the real estate investing, and then finally internet business, but before that I actually looked at what it was to buy a franchise. And at the time I didn’t even know how much it was going to be, but what I found was at the time they were called – it’s now called Jamba Juice, but there was this other one Zuka Juice is what it was called before.

So I actually just found this little small town right outside of Salt Lake City where the people that owned the original franchise, so it was all up and running and ready to go, and I went and looked at it. And here’s the interesting breakdown, right off I’d have to pay $30,000 up front, they were saying it was making a profit of $100,000 a year. And then I was like well is that gross or net, so the difference being gross is, that’s just including how much money came in for the year, and the net is how much money you as the owner get to keep after all the expenses, right?

So they said it was the gross, so after everything there was a profit of about $30,000 a year. And they said obviously if you want higher than that, you would have to come in as the manager and pay yourself like $15.00 an hour or $12.00 an hour and work full time to bump that up to maybe $50,000 a year. And at the time I was just thinking isn’t that insane? I’m going to pay $30,000 to get a job that’s lower than the job…I’m like, I’m going to buy myself with $30,000 and I’m going to buy myself a manager job at a Jamba Juice basically, because obviously to quit my job and just have that franchise, I would have had to work it because $30,000 a year is a lot less than I was making.

But anyway my point being is, to put up $30,000 and that didn’t count a bunch of things, the different taxes and the building, and all these different things that you had to pay, and that was for an established business. Now to start from scratch, I even looked at McDonalds and all these other ones just to see, and it’s huge, huge money. So I just wanted to paint that picture first that before I even looked into anything else, I actually looked at a couple of more real business let’s call it or what do they call…offline business, just a regular business where you have a shop and people come in and buy something from you.

And that was the initial thing, and that was in a little town outside of Utah, so that was low price meaning that even that $30,000 if you were to do it somewhere else, it would have been a lot more.

Jay: Yeah, it would be interesting to compare against that, especially once we break down and give you an exact total for internet business, and the freedom that comes along with it and the….I mean $12.00 an hour, you can make a heck of a lot more than that with internet business. I mean there’s really no cap on what you can do and the possibilities that are there. You don’t have to live in a particular place, you don’t have to have employees, you don’t have to show up somewhere everyday.

When you add all that up and say $30,000 for that, well I’ll pass thank you very much.

Sterling: That was just the up front money, so it was $30,000 plus there was all the expenses I would have to start paying right off before there was any income, so just to paint a bigger picture, there’s a lot of money.

Jay: And that’s the other thing to keep in mind as we go through this is, it’s all about ROI as well. And so of course with buying a business like that you want to know well how quickly can I make my $30,000 back and then start getting up and beyond that? So that’s the same thing you want to consider in starting an internet business. It’s like if I’m going to spend ‘x’ amount to get started or ‘x’ amount a month, how quickly can I be in the black?

And there’s so many businesses out there that two or three years in, they’re still not in the black, they still have debt that they have to pay off, and they still have investors that are waiting to get their money back. So that’s a huge thing to keep in mind as well.

Sterling: And when I looked into that business, they were very proud to say that my investment would be returned within the first year, meaning I put $30,000 and they said that the net profit was $30,000 a year, so they’re going look, your $30,000 will come back the first year plus your expenses would be two years. If you go wow, it will just take two years, now in some investments that would be good, but this that we have with this online business is completely different, makes what I just said, that example, seem crazy almost.

Jay: So obviously if you’re going to have an internet business, you’re going to have a place for it to live online, you need to have a website. So that’s going to start by getting a web address, by getting hosting. The web address is what people type in to find your business, the hosting is where the site lives and we use 1&1.com for registering our web domains, and that cost less than $10. I think it’s like $6 or $7 for that, if you go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/domains that will forward you to the place that we use to buy web addresses. So right there we’re up to a whopping $7 so far.

Sterling: Right now it’s up to $8 something, but it’s under $10, and when we first started it was like $6, so it’s like up $2 a year. And that’s for a whole year, that’s not for a month.

Jay: Yeah…hosting – well hosting you can get started right away for under $100. A lot of hosts like you to pay for a year up front, some of them will allow you to pay month to month, and it’s a very competitive space so the price is always changing. I was actually looking at our suggested host this morning and they were right now if you pay the whole year in advance it’s under $5 a month that it averages out. So it’s like $60 for your first year, which is incredibly cheap.

Now that’s always fluctuating around, but for all intensive purposes it’s never been over $100 to get your first year of hosting and have a place for your website. So we’re looking at under $10 a month or about $100 up front to get your hosting, a place that you can start installing and putting your website and selling your stuff from.

So for our recommendation for hosting, go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/hosting and that’s where we send people in the Academy, a lot of people in the Academy have been using that, and we still have sites ourselves who are hosted on that web hosting as well. And we picked that because we’ve had good experience with them, with the customer service and the price, and the features, and it’s easy to get WordPress installed on it and some things like that.

Sterling: Yeah, and to keep in mind too that anything that we’re talking about and suggesting, it’s because we use it again, that’s our big key is that these are things that we use.

Jay: Now with the hosting now we spend about $100 a month on, but that was like five years into it and we’ve got the Academy running on it, people who are paying $100 a month themselves. So then obviously we’re a little more cognicent of having a higher level hosting. But it took us a while to get to that point and to need something that expensive, and it’s probably actually more than we necessarily need, but we just wanted to absolutely play it safe and just say look, let’s just get something that’s not going to be any trouble at all for us. But every business when we started out, when Internet Business Mastery started out, we used hosting that was less than $10 a month.

Alright, something else you’re absolutely going to want right up front is email management system, and you might be thinking well I don’t have an email list yet. But the point is that the moment your site goes live, you need to be collecting emails, because that’s the whole point of this. The biggest asset – the money earner of your business – is going to be in the people that have found your site, and they like what you have and they’ve given you permission to keep in touch with them, to send them an email newsletter, to send them content, and then to send them offers eventually, and that’s all in your email list and in the relationship that you maintain with that email list.

And with that our email list for Internet Business Mastery, we definitely would not make as much money as we do whenever we promote something, whenever we have a launch, whenever we click and buy, it’s the email list that really gets the response for us, and so that’s something you want to build from day one.

When somebody comes up to me and says, “Hey, I’ve got this business and this site, will you check it out real quick?” the first thing I look for is – do they have an email list? And sadly, 80% of the time they don’t, or if they do it’s buried somewhere on the site where it’s hard to find or they don’t have a good reason why for people to sign up, a good incentive for people to sign up. And I say right there, that’s the number one thing I’d say to change that now today.

And to do that, you need to sign up for a good email management service, you don’t want one that is free, you don’t want one that’s cheap, you don’t want one that your host just says oh, here’s a piece of software you can install on your site. You want a service that that’s all they do and they do it really well because again, that’s where the money in your business is. We could lose everything in our business tomorrow, and as long as we have our list, a way to contact the people we have a relationship with, we could get back making money at no time at all.

So get a good professional email management system from day one and get that web form put on your site. The one we’ve always recommended is Aweber, right now for starting out it’s $19.00 a month and you can find that at GetMyEmailList.com. So right there, we’re up to let’s see, let’s say $10 a month for hosting, and the $19 a month for Aweber, so about $29 a month that you’ll be paying in ongoing stuff and we’ve spent about $100 on getting our web hosting…actually that was including web hosting. So we’re up to about $30 a month, or if you paid the web hosting in advance, you might get a bit of a discount on that as well.

Once you’ve got your hosting, now you’ve got to set up the site itself. Now some people might go, well I don’t know how to program a site, so do I need to hire somebody? Do I need to go get a programmer to put a site together for me? And that was how things were done back in the late 90’s and the mid late 90’s, web designers and web programmers were making big bang just putting sites up for people because there weren’t that many people that knew how to do it well and it was the big thing is everyone’s got to get a site now.

Well now everybody’s got a site, and web designers are becoming more of a dime a dozen – sorry to any web designers out there, but there’s definitely a lot more people doing that now. And it’s sad when people come to me and they say yeah, I just got a brand new website up and I spent $5,000 on getting it up but I don’t have any traffic and nothing’s going on, so what do I do now? And I just think that it’s unfortunate when they spent $5,000 to get their site launch because the truth of the matter is you can get a site launched for almost free.

We use a software called WordPress that we’ve talked about many times, and we give full tutorials on that inside the Academy because it does such an awesome job at running your website and making it easy for you to update your website so you don’t always have to go out and contact a web designer or a web programmer to change things, or launch things, or put things up for you, you can do it yourself. So that saves you tons of money right there.

We have all the tutorials you need inside the Academy to help you launch and to install WordPress, and configure it the right way, and learn how to start using it, or you can go and pay somebody. Go to Craigslist or Elance.com or something like that, for $50 or less you should be able to find somebody that can install and setup WordPress for you. WordPress itself is free, WordPress.org is where you can go ahead and download that. So right there again, very inexpensive to get a site up and going. No need to spend $2,000, $3,000, or $5,000 dollars, you can spend less than $50 to get your site up now.

Sterling: And how many videos, every time I look at the videos it’s been a while at since I’ve looked how many videos, we’ve got like twenty-something videos. Now some of them are only three or four minutes long because they’re showing one specific thing, but I forget how many videos we did on setting up WordPress so it’s simple.

Jay: Very detailed, yeah. Step by step.

Sterling: And it’s funny because they have a thing called the 5-minute WordPress install, but yet we have like twenty videos setting it up. It’s not quite….

Jay: It’s teaching people how to use it too.

Sterling: Yeah, of course.

Jay: Alright, site design – well you want your site to look nice. I mean out of the box, WordPress is pretty bland, but the nice thing is it’s really, really easy to make WordPress look nice because you can just apply what’s called a theme or a template to your site. And there’s tons and tons of free templates and themes out there, and grant it some of them are horrible, they’re not very well put together, the designs not that great. And then there are some beautiful free designs out there too, so with a little bit of your time and looking around and finding the right fit for you, you can get a site design for absolutely free.

Again people might be thinking, I’ve got to go spend $1,000 or $2,000 or $3,000 dollars to get somebody to design a really, really nice site for me. And maybe someday you will do that to get something custom and exactly the way you wanted it. But for now, for getting your site up and going and making money, go with the free route, or at most go and get what’s called a premium theme so at least you know there’s a certain level of design quality that’s gone into it and that it’s coded really well, and you don’t have to dig through quite so many ugly looking themes out there.

So for about $70, $80, to $100, you can go and buy a premium theme that you can use on your site. And to get some ideas of where you can go get some great premium themes, go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/premiumthemes and we have a few links there of places to recommend – so site design anywhere from free to at the most $100.

Sterling: Well and I think how long did we go with a free theme, like two or three years?

Jay: Two or three years, yeah. We were making some good money off the coaching courses before we ever…and yeah, now I think back to that first design and I’m kind of like wow, even now we have the money to spend to have somebody design a nicer theme, it’s kind of crazy. I think back to that, and holy cow…but it worked, it did the job. We got up and we got running, and we got attracting a nice audience, and we got people paying us good money for our products and services, so it absolutely worked.

Sterling: And again, the thing to keep in mind while you’re listening to us talk about how much it costs to start is, this is what it cost us to start so this is exactly how we did it when we started for sure.

Jay: Yep, exactly for Internet Business Mastery. Alright, payment processing – the time is going to come when you’re going to need people to process credit cards, or be able to buy things through your website. That’s the beauty of internet business is that your website’s out there selling for you day in, day out, 24/7, 365, 2 am in the morning or in the middle of the day, it’s up and people can buy your stuff the moment they come across it.

So you need the right kind of service to be able to accept credit cards and the days of hey fax your order in, or mail us a check are long gone. But the good news is that there are plenty of free services that get you up and going with that right away. Paypal for instance, Paypal.com – you can get going with the payment processing and the setup buttons and things on your site so people can buy right away.

Or I know we have students who use Ejunkie to sell an e-book. Ejunkie makes it real easy for you to sell an e-book and have people download it and it just processes the orders for you and so that’s another place you can go as well. Now as you get a little bit further along, you do want something that’s a little bit of a nicer customer database, maybe has an affiliate program, you’ve got some more bells and whistles with your cart, and you can get some of the data and reports and things you want every week and month to look at. And that’s when you might want to start looking at something like 1ShoppingCart, and getting a merchant account, and stuff like that.

So for more information about our recommended shopping cart, go to GetYourShoppingCart.com. But I should mention, I mean for instance we’ve got some Academy members who I know are making several thousand dollars a month and still just using Ejunkie to do it. Alright now, another thing you might want to think about is starting a business entity of some sort.

You can do business as a self proprietor which means that everything just goes…again, this is the U.S. but there are similar things in all the countries out there, but you can do business as a self proprietor which means that you basically are just doing it through your personal tax statements and all the liability will hit you personally if anything happens with the business. So just to make things more official and have some liability protection and some tax advantages, it’s not bad to start up a business entity.

In the U.S. what we do is we start an LLC, and there’s a few different ways you can do this. There’s go to OfficeMax or an office supply store and get the forms, they might be $15-$20 solution, maybe $30 at most, and then there’s all the way up to write them up yourself and go down to the office and post them yourself, and in that case you probably don’t spend anything at all, but how confident are you in your ability to make sure you get it right so that there aren’t any problems in the future if anything does happen tax or legal wise with your business.

Or you can go all the way up to just paying a lawyer to do it for you, in that case you might spend $400 to $500 and they just make sure it gets all filled out, in fact they probably just have their secretary fill it out and then have them file it at the offices for you, and then it’s all done. And that’s kind of…if you don’t want any of the headache yourself kind of way to do that, so somewhere in between is the option of using a course that we promoted. We had Darius, he’s a lawyer that has talked about this in the past, we had an interview with him.

That interview is in the Academy for people to listen to, and it’s a great course that walks you through how to make sure to put an LLC together in such a way that if there are any legal or tax problems, everything is wrapped up nicely, dotted your i’s, crossed your t’s and you know that you’re legally set and aren’t going to have any problems with that.

So for more information on that course you can go to InternetBusinessMastery.com/LLC. So again, for the business entity, anywhere from between $300-$500 to get that done for you, so it’s just going to be a personal preference of how much you want to do now to protect against any potential headaches later.

Sterling: And so here’s how we did it originally. At the time, I think actually we were both in Utah and it cost me about $60, I did it online because in Utah you can fill out your LLC and even pay online, and then they give you a PDF to print up saying you’re a legal entity. And then just recently in the last few months got together with a lawyer that looked at it and then said, “You’re now to a point where you need to really beef this up. It’s time to go to the next level.” Just like with other things like with our hosting, with other services, we started out with a lower end…just the beginner package and then as things start happening you have to jump up to the advanced package.

Well the same thing was true of the LLC and again, it seems obviously but we’re not lawyers in any way. This is just how we had done it, so take our advice as just that, it’s how we did it.

Jay: It’s not professional advice that’s for sure.

Sterling: Yeah, not on this stuff that’s for sure. But when I talked to the lawyer he’s like, “Oh yeah, we’ve got to go through this and hook you up.” So it’s costing us about $400 bucks for him to go back in and just make it more solid, whatever they do. I don’t know what lawyers do other than annoy me, but…

Jay: Add a few fancy words and then charge you $100 per word that they add.

Sterling: Yeah, exactly because I was actually just joking before we did the episode that I was looking at an S-corporation that this lawyer did for me. And it looks almost identical to the thing I had originally done on the internet, but anyway. So hopefully it’s taken care of, and by the way I mean this is one of those things that could be considered optional. Now I know there are people who have started their business and are still running their business making really good money without even doing the LLC, but I was very clear on wanting to protect myself, to protect my home, things like that because I didn’t want the things to fall through the business onto my personal family and stuff whereas the LLC helps with protection against that thing.

Jay: Alright, the next thing you’re going to need is a product. Now with a lot of traditional businesses you have to get a product manufactured and prototyped, or you have to go and find a provider, and maybe you buy stock at wholesale and you turn around and sell it at a profit. But when we’re talking about internet business, we’re specifically talking about information products which means that it is just a matter of putting together yourself or maybe hiring somebody to put it together for you or with you.

But an e-book is just your time to put it together, and there’s no manufacturing, there’s no production. You can sell videos online, you can sell audio online, you have a membership site, all these things are digital product, nothing physical has to be manufactured or put together or shipped, fulfilled, anything like that. So it’s pretty much just your time to get your first product going, and that’s the way that we teach it as well in the Academy is how to take your ideas, your passions, your expertise, something that you want to offer value in and put together some kind of digital information product that doesn’t cost you any money up front, but that you can sell at a very high margin and make good money off of just by digitally delivering that through your website and that’s another one of the beauties of internet business.

Sterling: Yeah, and I do know people really well that started by doing an e-book and what they did was, they actually had a ghost writer write it, and they told them exactly what needed to be in there and found somebody that knew about that and paid them…one person I’m thinking paid $600 for their first e-book to be written. So I just wanted to mention that’s on the high end, there are other possibilities, but when we first started of course, we just did our own which was just our time.

Jay: No, the next thing is you’ve got to get traffic to your site. If you’ve got a site up, you’ve got product there and ready and available, obviously you’ve got to get people to be aware of your site. Now the good news is, the things that we teach most are either completely free to get traffic from, or very, very inexpensive. I mean the real center of the whole business philosophy we teach is content marketing which means that you’re regularly putting out great authoritative content in your niche that’s going to get the attention of your market and magnetically pull them towards you, get them to kind of start to get to know you and trust you as a leader, and they stick around.

I mean this is the exact same thing we’ve done with the podcast, they stick around and listen to you and when you make offers, they’re ready to buy, and that products there through your site to go and get, and that’s how we drive a whole six figure business right there is just through content marketing. So that’s next to free, I guess in our case we bought a little bit of audio equipment because we were doing a podcast. Some people blog, which is just in your time to write the articles that you’re putting up.

But in this case it’s just consistency and writing good stuff and putting it out there on a regular basis that’s going to attract people to you. Now there’s hundreds and hundreds of different ways to get traffic to your site and some of them do cost. You can do advertising; you can go out there and do Google Adwords or paid ads in text newsletters, or pay for advertising on Facebook. You can go out there and do mailings if you wanted, even in mailings and ads in magazines. There’s a billion ways, but if you don’t have an advertising budget to start, yes it might take a little more time to build up some momentum but you can start now and for free just by following that kind of content management strategy that we teach you inside of the Academy. So there’s so no cost to speak of when you start out.

Sterling: Well and for us our main first bit of traffic came from our podcast in iTunes, which the cost was actually what like ten minutes of setup time? And obviously we had the podcast and blog website set up as far as the going out specifically to get traffic was iTunes for a long time, a couple of years at least, it was just iTunes and any of the other podcast aggregators which altogether took maybe an hour to set up so that they all knew we existed? And that was it.

Jay: And we just produced great content consistently, month upon month, and our audience started growing, and then we started making money.

Alright, one that gets overlooked quite often is mentorship, and I’m sure it gets thought of as being an optional thing. I know people think oh, I’ll just be able to figure it out on my own and that’s certainly a route you can go, but in our experience it’s really those moments where you start getting guidance from other people, when you start collaborating with other people in masterminds and getting mentorship and getting ideas and bouncing ideas around and getting feedback. And essentially it’s about calling ahead, finding out from somebody who’s already at the spot you want to be at and saying, “How do I get to where you are?”

I mean think of it like if you were going on a road trip and you needed the map, or you needed to call and have your friend give you directions to their home, that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about here. Now mentorship, it can come for free. You can go and find somebody to be your mentor, the thing you have to keep in mind is obviously somebody who has been there and have done it and is doing well at it. They’re going to value their time very highly and they may have an altruistic desire to help other people but they have to be very selective of about what it is that they do.

So you have to make it worth their while in some way. If you are going to go for free mentorship, you’re going to really have to look around and find the right person and find out what can I do for them? How can I help them in their business. Maybe I can do some grunt work for them, this is something I learned the value of when I started with real estate investing. I found a real estate investor in the area who’s doing quite well and I worked for free for him for several months going out and looking for houses and meeting with home owners, and doing a lot of the grunt work for him.

And in exchange for that, I was able to see his business and be around what he did, and get tips and pointers and that is what eventually helped me get my first deal done and be able to quit my job and move forward into my own business. So it came down to mentorship, but at the same time I also paid to go to some of his seminars and I paid for thousands of dollars of other real estate investing courses as well and listened to those constantly while I was in the car.

I found mentors, and that’s where this whole idea of how do I get out of my job and start a business? That idea went from being this thing, I was just like I don’t know how to get to that point to actually doing it and turning in my two weeks notice and making something happen. So you’ve got to decide which way is going to work for you, but eventually you are going to have to pay for some kind of guidance, some kind of mentorship. And that’s why we put together something like the Academy because there’s a lot of things that we wish that we had known, that somebody had told us early on when we were first starting out and that we could have had more specific guidance in this style of business that we wanted to do, so that we didn’t have to figure out so many things by ourselves and take months and years of time to get to that point.

Sterling: Yeah I definitely wish that I had of done that more in the beginning, I know it wouldn’t have taken me as long to get where I am now if I had done this. And I think now looking back, I think it might be the most important expense as it can save you huge amounts of time and money in the future because you can learn the ins and outs and not have to trudge every single mistake and pitfall there is out there from somebody and just get those kicked out of the way right by paying for it up front if you can for sure.

Jay: Alright, so basically we’ve got anywhere from on the low end you’re going to have to spend let’s say $100 on hosting, $19 a month on your email list management, and you can get a free site, you can free WordPress, you can use Paypal for free. You can kind of figure out how to start the LLC yourself, again that’s your decision to make and you can create the product for free, you can get traffic for free and then I guess it would be a matter of mentorship.

So we’re talking that for as little as $100 and maybe $30 a month, actually $20 a month for Aweber if you paid…because it’s a $100 up front for the web hosting, and then $20 a month for Aweber, that’s how much you can start a business for, which is just insanity when you think back to the story that Sterling talked about with $30,000 to go and buy something like a franchise or…

Sterling: Or to buy a $12 an hour job….

Jay: That’s insane, and so it’s a very affordable business here. It’s the kind of thing that you can put that money into and within a few months start seeing results. I mean that’s going to vary for you, but there’s none of this going way into debt and waiting for two years just to find out if you’re going to be profitable or just to find out if some bigger company is going to buy you so you can make money, or just to find out if that was a bust of an idea so we just wasted all that money. This is the kind of thing you can get into quickly and for very little money which is why it is the style of business that we’ve chosen and the style that we teach others when it comes to how can you start having that financial freedom?

How can you have more control over the circumstances of your life and get out of that job that you hate and start doing something that fulfills you more. I think when you think about that freedom and fulfillment, man $100 plus $20 a month is nothing, nothing at all to pay for the payoff not only in the money ROI, but just in the life fulfillment return on investment that comes. I mean that’s an investment I would make day in and day out, I’d make it any time at all when you consider what small of a price it is.

Sterling: And we have.

Jay: And we have, so there you go. That kind of lays it out for you, and I mean on the high end even at most, even if we took the high end of things here – $100 for hosting and Aweber and then maybe you did pay $50 for somebody to install the site for you and you did pay $100 for a premium theme and you did pay somebody to help you out with the LLC, we’re still talking maybe $500 and then another $20 a month, it’s still on the high end very, very little.

I guess our hope in breaking that down is to make it sound like it is very doable and for you to just dive in there and take action. We’re in the holiday season as we record this, so if you’re one that celebrates Christmas, buy yourself a Christmas present that’s going to keep on giving for years and years to come. I think freedom and fulfillment is a great thing to treat to yourself and your family or your loved ones, and the people around you who that affects as well, to have such a significant life change come along with that.

So do it, today!

It’s time for the Internet Business Quick Tip…

Jay: Alright, we’re jumping right into the Quick Tip, no announcements for this one, because we’re going a little bit long here, but we really have a really cool Quick Tip. If you’ve noticed recently we put out some videos promoting the Product Launch Formula, and there was a couple where I was writing on the screen, which if you’ve ever tried to do that in Photoshop or anything else where you have like a pen tool and you’re writing with a mouse, it’s next to impossible to have handwriting resembling anything legible.

And actually I got this great idea after watching a video on Pat Flynn’s site with his awesome architecture guy’s handwriting that he’s probably picked up from architecture school, and I was like how did you do that? And he told me well there’s this pen tablet that you can plug in into your computer and you can write on it like it’s actual paper, it has a texture kind of similar to paper and after getting kind of used to how it works, you can write a lot easier. And Camtasia has some awesome pen tools right there, so if you’re doing a screencast, you can write right on top of the screen and point to things and write things out.

And immediately this was like wow, this is awesome! I mean I guess if I thought about it it seems pretty obvious that they would have pen tablet tools out there, but I don’t know why it never occurred to me to go look and actually go get one. I mean I ordered one like within five minutes of talking to him. I was like, “Well, what’s it called?” and I went and ordered one off of Amazon. It’s really cool, I’m really digging it.

So and here’s why it was great is because I think there’s just a cool…first of all not many people are doing that, and so by doing that kind of adds a different element, something different than what people are used to seeing than just your standard slides flipping through a screencast kind of thing. Second of all, there’s just kind of a more intimate feeling to like writing something out for people on the screen, and then I enjoy it because it takes me back to teaching some classes in college and you’re at the whiteboard writing on the whiteboard. And I like that kind of thing in a teaching atmosphere where if something comes to me I can just write it down real quick for people.

So I’ve really enjoyed using it. The tool that it is…the company, it’s the Bamboo Pen & Touch, the company is Wacaom, so if you go and search for that, we’ll have a link on our website on the show notes. So you can go to InternetBusinessMastery.com, find the blog post for episode 82 and we’ll have a link there. And you can also Google for that, the Bamboo Pen & Touch. And there’s a few different versions out there, and I think that I just got their standard one, and it’s sitting right here on my desk and I’ve been using it and loving it, and looking forward to using it some more. So for content creators, I definitely recommend checking that one out.

Sterling: Now is that PC or Mac or does it do both?

Jay: It works on both.

Sterling: Both okay, cool.

Jay: Yeah, and a great tip that Pat gave me, because I told him I was still getting used to what kind of pen settings to make it look nice and stuff. And I guess when he does it, he goes into Photoshop and just kind of sets up a slate of sort that makes a nice kind of design and then he draws on top of that. And Photoshop has…Photoshop’s really expensive, so if you don’t have it then you’re kind of out of luck on this one, but he said there’s some really nice pen tools that react well, because it’s pressure sensitive, this pen touch tool is pressure sensitive.

And that’s one of the things that makes it look more like real handwriting because based on the pressure you’re touching with, it responds to that. Because when you write with a pen, it’s not like perfectly even in the pressure all the way through whereas when you’re just clicking around with some kind of mouse tool on a cheapy little program, there’s none of that pressure sensitivity, and so that’s why it looks a little more block and not as nice as real handwriting and things like that.

But it’s worth trying out, and there’s some cool little things you can do with that. So I think if you’re looking for something to either make your content creation easier or just to take it to the next level, then it’s definitely worth trying out. I believe I got mine for around $80, so it’s not cheap, cheap but it’s not super expensive either. But I definitely recommend it to anybody who’s listening to this and going hm, that sounds interesting.

Sterling: Now if you’ve like dozen of other resources such as this one, you can find them in the Internet Business Mastery Academy along with video tutorials of us showing you exactly how we use them. And to get a 30 day no risk trial membership to the Internet Business Mastery Academy, visit freeaudiogift.com.

That’s it for this episode of Internet Business Mastery, until next time we wish you ultimate success in your internet business.

You’ve been listening to the Iconiclass of the 9 to 5, and the purveyors of freedom and fulfillment – Sterling and Jay! Sterling and Jay invite you to discover one of their most popular audio programs ever, the free builders of designing your ultimate internet lifestyle! Visit freeaudiogift.com now and sign up for the free weekly Internet Business Mastery email newsletter! And you’ll get instant access to the life changing audio presentations, pulled directly from the content of the acclaimed Internet Business Mastery Academy membership community. Go now to freeaudiogift.com! Internet Business Mastery – free your mind!