The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build a rewarding online business? Today’s episode is going to get you started on the right path…the proven path to taking your idea, your message, and your passion and turning it into profits.

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Time Management is Dead: How to Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with Richie Norton

My Best Affiliate Marketing Advice for the Holidays

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The Proven Path for Building a Rewarding Online Business

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to build a rewarding online business, one that you are both passionate about and brings in profit?

Well, today’s episode is going to get you started on the right path, the proven path to taking your idea, your message, and your passion and turning it into profits.

Hey, what’s up?

Welcome back.

My gosh, I have not been this excited about an episode since episode one.

Maybe I’m just super stoked because we are starting a phase in our business.

We’re really going all in on promoting my book. Just going to be completely transparent.

We’re going to talk about my book, turn Your passions into Profit today.

And this book came about, I mean, really as a the irony is not lost on me. It came about as a passion project.

It came about as something that has been on my heart, in my mind for eight years, Seven, eight years now.

And I was sharing this on an interview yesterday that it just took five years to really start to put my money where my mouth was to start actually writing the book.

This book full transparency.

I wrote this book in one of the busiest seasons of my life, professionally running two big launches.

I wrote the first quarter of the book in about a week and a half, two weeks, about 2 hours a day.

I wrote the entire rest of the book over the course of the next 84 days and 17 to 20 minutes a day.

I literally set a timer for 17 minutes.

If the timer went off and I was at a stopping point, this little tip for you writers out there, I would type my notes for the next day really quick, 20, 30 seconds and be like, talk about this, this don’t forget to tell this story, this.

Boom…! And I’d write that out, and then I would be done.

So sometimes I’d finish in 17 and a half minutes.

If I hit the 17 minutes mark, I was like, no, I need like, two more minutes.

I had that barrier or that buffer there.

That’s why I put it the timer at 17 minutes, not right at 20 minutes.

But I finished it 98 days, most of which was 17 minutes a day.

I wrote 1170 word manuscript that we then with my publisher, I had to cut down to 820 and speaking of publisher, I ended up getting my dream publisher.

If you look at my bookshelf, my dream publisher, my dream distributor, if you look at my bookshelf, almost a third of the books up there because they’re mostly small business entrepreneurship books, they’re published by Ben Bella and or Penguin Random House.

They’re distributed by Random House, and I ended up getting both.

I got my dream publisher, Ben Bella, and I got my dream distributor, Penguin Random House, the biggest publisher in the world and so one of the lessons there is to think bigger.

I wasn’t thinking of that.

Full disclosure, I was not thinking of getting such a big publisher in a big distributor and I had a friend that I talked to about something completely unrelated.

She was asking me about the book, and she said, what?

Why are you thinking so small?

Like, no, Matt, this is Wall Street Journal bestseller.

I’m like, no, it’s not.

I’m not trying to get Wall Street Journal bestseller.

I’m just trying to get my word out there.

We might sell 200 copies over the course of a year or so, but this is more like a message that I want to get out.

It’s not about big publishers like, yeah, but you’re going to spread more of the message if you hit the Wall Street Journalist seller list.

I’m like, oh, okay.

She’s like, let me introduce something.

She introduced me to a guy who got me thinking bigger and set up a meeting with Ben Bella.

And next thing you know, we signed the contract and it was, you know, again, my dream publisher, my dream distributor.

So today I’m going to read a little bit from the book, and I want to share a chapter that I love.

So this is exclusive for you podcast listeners, by the way, for you listening to the podcast.

This is an exclusive.

I love this chapter.But we had to cut it from the book due to length.I mentioned we cut out 35,000 words, half of a book in and of itself.

And they were like, no, we got to get down to 75,000 words.I’m like, I got it down to 82.You all are just going to have to deal with that.

OK, that’s good enough.That’s within 10%.And so, just real quick, go to passionsintoprofitsbook.com.

Two things.If you go there, you can preorder the book.

Secondly, if you’re interested in joining the launch team, helping me to launch this book, passionsintoprofitsbook.com/LaunchTeam.

And when you go to either, you’ll see we’ve got so many preorder bonuses, it is absolutely insane.

You’ll see the sales page for the book there, and it walks through exactly what the book is all about, helping you to start grow and monetize an online platform to share a message with the world.

To realize this is important, realize you deserve to create a good income doing what you love.

That’s the thing.This isn’t about just the passion or just the profits.It’s about both.I want you to have both.I want you to have both.

I love what Dan Miller said about the book.He said, here’s your blueprint for serving well, living well, and leaving your dent in the universe.

Dan Miller, one of my dear friends, author of 48 days of the works you love.

And again, you can preorder your copy, get some amazing bonuses.

I’ll share about those later passionsintoprofitsbook.com

Now, for the official audiobook, which you can pre ordered, I think you can preorder pretty soon the pre order will be available for that.

You can preorder the physical book right now. We hired a professional narrator to do the official audiobook.

Someone who’s booked my publisher said we like, here, like the three candidates to do it.

I recognize the guy’s name.

How many audiobook narrators do I know? Like two.

And I recognize the guy’s name because I just finished a book.

He did the audiobook of a biography of Ben Hogan, the famous golfer from back in like the maybe fifty’s, I think.

And I just finished listening to a biography and I was like, I recognized the name.

Just remember seeing it on the book cover, on the audiobook cover, and I was like, no way.

And then I went back and I started going through like, books that he’s done.

I listen to that one, I listen to that one.

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I listen to them, like, oh my goodness, this guy has done like five or six audiobooks that I’ve listened to in the past year.

And I really do. It’s weird because it’s kind of weird. I love the guy’s voice.

So we hired him to do the audiobook. I’m super excited about that because it’s just going to be better.

It’s going to be better. But today you get to hear me reading some of it.

So I’m going to dive right in and start reading some of my own books here for the first time ever, the world debut.

So I’m excited about this. So let’s dive right in.

Starting with the dedication.

The dedication.

There’s a quote there at the beginning.

It says, “people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” That’s from Steve Jobs.

To you, the crazy ones who think you can change the world.
You can and you will. This book will help you to do so.

Introduction Lands:

The gladdest moment in human life is a departure into unknown lands. —Sir Richard Burton, British explorer

Whether you’re just starting out with your platform or you’ve been doing this for a while, but you haven’t experienced the success you know is possible, this book is for you.

In it, I reveal the steps it takes to go from your passion, an idea, a desire to help others, a message that you want to reach the world to profit.

You will learn how to actually build a profitable business around your ideas, your story, and your passion.

I started this introduction with a quote from Sir Richard Burton the Gladys moment in human life is a departure into unknown lands.

That quote aptly describes my journey to this point.

I’ve repeatedly departed into unknown lands, and they have truly been some of the most exciting, joyful, happiest moments of my life, how I got here and discovered my passion and ultimately built a successful business around it has been a long, strange trip indeed.

Sometimes I’ve been on top of the world, other times it feels like the world is crashing down on me.

I’ve been through the start up phase multiple times.

I built the following from scratch I’ve moved from niche to niche in search of fame and fortune, only to find that my true passion and purpose was right there in front of me the whole time as I’m writing this book, I’ve been publishing online for more than 20 years.

I’ve written the equivalent of 84 of these books in the form of blog posts, articles and emails to my audience.

I published more than 450 hours. That’s roughly 53 nonfiction audiobooks of podcasts and videos.

And the first half of that journey could be viewed as a complete waste.

If you look back at the first 2 million words I wrote or the first 200 hours of audio and video content I produced.

That had nothing to do with what my mission is today, that had nothing to do with what I’m truly passionate about.

It was hard, slow moving, and incredibly unprofitable.

Today, however, I’m truly living out my passion and purpose while continually seeing an increase in my impact, influence and income.

I’ll share more about my journey and how you can avoid the long, painful process and the following steps.

Once I clearly define my passion and purpose, I was able to work with some amazing clients such as Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi, Jeff Walker, Ryan Levesque, Michael Hyatt, Shark Tank’s Kevin Harrington, Zig Zigler’s company, Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Lewis Howes, Stu McLaren, Jeff Goins, Ray Edwards, Rich Schefren and Brian Tracy, among others.

Some of these folks were my idols and virtual mentors as I came up in the business world.

Today, many of them are friends, and in this book I share various lessons I learned from them.

Not only have I worked with those legends, but I’ve also worked with tens of thousands of beginning bloggers.

Podcasters, newbie YouTubers, and brand new entrepreneurs.

They’ve been students of our courses, coaching clients,mastermind members, blog readers, podcast listeners, video viewers, and they’ve helped spread the word about my platform in this book.

I’m forever grateful to them and inspired by them every day to share and spread my message.

My mission with this book is the same as the mission we have in our company to help you build a business that serves you and others.

To help you spread your message, fulfill your purpose, and enjoy every single minute of it.

To help you turn your passions into profits.

Why?

Because I genuinely feel that your message can change the world.

Your comfort zone says otherwise.

Your comfort zone says, school taught me to keep my head down, raise my hand to speak, get a good job with health insurance, and maybe, just maybe, my 401K will allow me one day to make a difference. That is the lie of your comfort zone.

Your comfort zone is the devil on your shoulder telling you that you can never truly make a difference.

It tells you that your work doesn’t matter and that the message clamoring to leap out of you will always be restrained by societal pressures and bills to pay and the ringing words of all those who have laughed at the dreamers.

If you’re reading this book and have an awakening to the reality that our economy is drastically different than it was 20 years ago, I need to tell you something.

It is. Our economy is drastically different than it was just ten years ago. It’s probably going to be different in three years or 30 minutes.

We’re all messengers now. You are a messenger. And messengers are defining this new economy. The entire premise of this book hinges on one belief the world needs your message.

The world needs your message, but it will not wait. Passively or patiently.

The world needs your message, but it will move on without it.

You want to share your message, but fear tells you not to.

Fear tells you that it doesn’t matter. Fear tells you that you don’t have time.

Fear beckons you to listen to the devil of your comfort zone, to be ordinary, to play it safe, to keep your head down, your nose to the grindstone and to not fly too close to the sun.

Fear is a liar. Safety is a liar. Your comfort zone is a liar.

And I hate to break this to you, but those you trusted the most, your parents, teachers and icons, probably lied to you as well.

As author Seth Godin points out in his book The Icarus Deception, the ancient lie is that Icarus flew too high and died. We’ve been told the lie that if we fly too high, stretch too far, dream too big, or dare to be different, then we will die. And most of us have bought right into it.

No more!

What no one ever told me (and probably never told you) is that Icarus was also told not to fly too low. The moisture from the sea would have ruined his wings too. We were only told the part that kept us down and subjugated us to suppress our message.

It’s time to fly. It’s time to fly high!

Strap on your wings, my friend. Fear won’t fly with you. It will only try to drag you down.

The time is now. Take flight.

Because you are an artist. You are a messenger.

Are you ready to turn your message into a profitable business?

If so, I have a few simple instructions before our journey begins.

THE WORLD NEEDS YOUR MESSAGE

As you embark on this journey, I encourage you not to do so because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Because it is important. Because the world needs your message.

Because there are potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in the world right now desperately waiting for you to share your message with them and lead them to a better place.

Because you are willing to accept the challenge, unwilling to postpone, and because now is the time!

I will do everything in my power to make it easier by sharing my experiences, lessons, and systems for your journey, but it’s important that you follow the steps in this book in order.

Don’t skip ahead! Take Step One, then Step Two, Step Three, and so on.

Skipping ahead will lead to confusion, chaos, and ultimately to you giving up.

Each chapter will focus on one specific step to take. I will use my own experience of stories, as well as those of our clients, students and others, to emphasize key points and deepen the learning.

Now, numerous studies show that we learn more, retain more, and implement more, and we learn through story rather than just wrote lessons.

What I teach in this book has worked for me. It’s worked for countless others. It’s led to some amazing stories.

I’ve seen people take what I teach in this book and go from having a parttime, money losing business to running a successful, profitable, fulltime business.

I’ve seen people grow from a few dozen followers to a few thousand and more.

And I’ve seen average people with extraordinary messages and passion in every niche you can imagine, take their stories and turn them into platforms that reach the world.

Does that sound like something you would want?

In this book, we’re going to cover the ten steps it takes to go from passion to profit, all of which begin with the letter C.

That’s a clever, marketer’s way of helping you remember them.

I’m going to share practical lessons in each chapter, as well as helpful exercises at the end of each chapter.

THE EXERCISES

I cannot stress enough how important it is to do the exercises at the end of each chapter! You likely don’t suffer from a lack of information, but a lack of implementation.

You likely don’t suffer from a lack of information, but a lack of implementation.

Failure to complete the exercises will leave you finishing the book and applying none of the lessons.

So rather than having a head full of knowledge and no profits to show for it, commit to doing the exercises and you’ll complete this book ready to grow your online business.

THE DECLARATIONS

One final note before we embark on this journey together.

You’ll notice throughout the book that I call on you to make declarations.

These are verbal affirmations that you should make out loud. Yes, out loud.

They may feel corny, lame, or awkward, but they are important. If you’re listening to this in public, I don’t expect you to shout them out the moment you read them unless you want some weird looks and possibly expulsion from whatever establishment you are listening to this end. But save that declaration for later.

Don’t skip them. Don’t dismiss the power of these declarations. I can’t promise that declaring, for instance, that I am bringing together a community will lead to your success immediately.

I can 100% assure you that declaring this will make your success much more likely.

Changing your mindset and your beliefs is just as important, if not more important, than giving you more knowledge or changing your tactics and strategies.

So, do we have a deal?

I promise to be open and sometimes embarrassingly transparent in sharing my story.

I promise not to hold back and sharing what you need to know to go from passion to profit.

And you promised to do the declarations, do the exercises, and take it one step at a time.

If so, raise your right hand and stayed after me.

Just kidding.

I’ll save the declarations for later. Let’s go.

So from there, I share the steps, and we’ll talk more about those in some episodes coming up.

Step one clarify who you help. In this chapter, I share how to get clear on your passion. I share three questions that you need to ask yourself and to be able to get clear on that passion.

The key to clarifying who you hope is to be intentional.

You get to choose who you help. You get to choose who your audience is.

If you try to serve everyone, you end up serving no one. I walk you through how to set up or how to create your ideal customer avatar.

It’s so much more in the first chapter. Step two is about committing to leading.

That’s the title of step Two.

It’s important to acknowledge that leadership isn’t easy. People say different things about leadership. It’s scary.

I feel so inadequate. It’s hard.

But leadership is a choice, and I walk you through how to commit to leading, and how to embrace your fears.

I don’t know what leadership is and isn’t.

At the end of step two is a leadership commitment that you can fill in and sign.

Step three is to capture attention.

Not get attention, not wait for attention, but capture to, like, grab the attention.

And I talk about how to stand out, and I share the five attention triggers in that chapter.

Step four convert your visitors into subscribers.

If you haven’t picked up on this, all the steps begin with the letter C.

By the way, this is all about building your email list, and I share why you need an email list.

I talk about lead magnets and how to create a lead magnet, what makes the best lead magnets, how to name a lead magnet, how to ask people to be on your list.

Step five is convene and cultivate community.

People come for the content, but they stay for the community. And I talk in this chapter a lot about some of the advantages of being small people, like, why don’t I have much of a community? Cool.

Take advantage of that. How to cultivate that community.

Your job as a leader is to take relationships from transactional and one on one to relational and many-to-many.

I talk about how to build a culture. Culture comes from the Latin word cola, which means to protect, inhabit, and cultivate.

I share some examples of revolutionary leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Jesus, and Muhammad across different religions, business leaders, politics, and society.

These were transformational leaders. These are people who got their followers emotionally involved, excited, and focused on the future.

That’s a key element in revolutionary leadership, which we talk about.

I share the seven core elements of revolutionary leaders, and I talk at the end of that chapter about how to actually be that leader who convenes and cultivates communities.

In step Six, I talk about championing their cause.

I share how every story needs a hero and you have the opportunity to be a hero. And then I walk you through the steps.

There are nine of them to champion their cause. Step Seven is about creating Raving fans, and creating your next-level avatar. We call them Gwen’s in our company.

And these people who engage with all your content, share it with others. They become an evangelist for your business, your products, and your message, and they love you.

They love what you do and they love what you stand for.

I share ten ways to create Raving fans.

I share the seven archetypal roles.

I believe I’ve shared these before in a podcast episode recently.

The master maestro, the hesitant hero, the jolly German, the eager enthusiast, the venerable visionary, the revolutionary rebel, and the cordial caregiver.

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I walked through exactly what those are in step seven of the book.

Step eight, condition your audience. I talk about how to condition your audience to read your emails and click them and actually engage with your content.

Step Nine, the longest, is one of my favorite commitments to Monetize. I talked about starting affiliate marketing, the reasons why you should, how to get accepted into affiliate programs, why people buy, and why you suck at selling if you do copywrite visualization. And then in step Ten, I talk about creating consistent content.

I share a ton of strategies in the book on this.

The key really is just to be consistent, but I walk you through what we call the ICE Framework Idea Creation Engagement.

So the idea generating concepts for potential content, the creation actually producing the content and the engagement, which is the most important part.

So I walk you through that idea phase, the creation phase and the engagement phase, and talk about the real purpose of content.

It’s not just to create content for content’s sake. It’s to spread a message, to gain subscribers to Monetize, a message.

And really the number one reason is to serve those who consume it.

So that’s the rest of the book in the moment. I’m going to share that hidden chapter that we had to cut real quick.

Just want to tell you about the preorder bonuses when you get the book. I mean, right now we have an early bird, depending upon when you’re listing this, an early bird bonus if you order before, I think it’s like

December don’t quote me on this.

Like December 15 or so. We have an early bird bonus in addition or no list, no problem course to get you started, monetizing even without a list.

So that’s worth $197. So the total value is almost $1,000. We’re at like, $982 with that.

It’s crazy what we’re doing, because we want to get this in as many hands as possible.

So we’ve got a bonus on developing your ideal customer avatar.

You know, the book touches on it, but this one takes a deep dive.

We’ve got an exclusive live training and Q and A event. We take step ten, much more in depth on how to create consistent content.

We’ve got an email marketing master class.

We’ve got our Passions to Profits training vault again, like 10 hours plus of training, total value of $785, plus the early bird bonus that you get.

So all of that at passionsintoprofitsbook.com, make sure you go check that out and preorder.

And if you’re interested in joining the launch team and actually making some commissions, passionsintoprofitsbook.com/LaunchTeam.

So let me jump into that secret chapter, the one that’s never going to see the light of day in the book, but that I originally wrote, that I actually loved.

Here the launch pad. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

President John F. Kennedy in his speech at Rice University advocating for public support of the space program.

Today we have views of the Earth and all its glory at our fingertips. If you want to see what a small town in Burundi looks like, it only takes a matter of seconds.

But just six decades ago, perhaps during your own lifetime, that was a pipe dream.

But then the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, challenged the nation’s collective intelligence and willpower.

He challenged us to go to the moon. When President Kennedy went before a capacity crowd in a large football stadium, he was really going before the entire American population.

In it, he asked why some say the moon. I don’t know why I feel like I should do my John F. Kennedy impersonation here.

Okay, I’m done.

Why choose this as our goal?

That’s terrible.

It’s going to start over.

So why choose this as our goal?

And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain?

Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?

Why does rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the moon.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.

Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.

In his speech, Kennedy painted a portrait of space as being a new frontier.

He called upon the pioneer spirit that characterized the American legend.

He invoked a sense of destiny comparable to the famous Lewis and Clark voyage.

Instead of reaching the Pacific Ocean, we would soon reach the moon.

He created a sense of urgency in his speech, in part due to the Soviet zone efforts to also reach the moon and in part to his understanding of human nature.

Without a sense of urgency, the desire to take action and maintain a course would wane.

And one of the reasons why his speech is widely remembered and still quoted today is that it emphasized a key tenet of the American dream the ability to choose one’s own destiny.

This was dramatically contrasted with our Cold War enemy’s policy of choosing their citizens destiny for them.

An entire generation of American children grew up believing that anything was possible, all because one man dared to call them to something greater, something higher, something dangerous and challenging.

Now, though, Kennedy did not live to see his dream fulfilled. It was in July 1969 with the Apollo Eleven mission.

The cost, in terms of both money and, sadly, lives, was great, but the reward was even greater.

As you embark on this journey, I encourage you not to do so because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Because it is important.

Because the world needs your message.

Because there are thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, or even millions of people in the world right now desperately waiting for you to share your message with them and lead them to a better place.

Because you are willing to accept the challenge, unwilling to postpone, and because the time is now.

So that was the last introductory chapter leading into the steps in the book.

And while I know why we had to cut it, because we had to cut a lot, I think it’s important for that.

The time is now.

We’re not going to do this because it’s easy. We’re going to do it because it’s hard.

No one said that building a platform, building a business, spreading a message, and having an impact and influence on the world was easy.

I can lie to you. This book doesn’t make it easy.

It doesn’t.

Does it make it less frustrating?

Absolutely.

Does it make it less difficult?

Does it make it more possible?

Yes.

Do you get to avoid some of the pain that I went through?

It took me 15-20 years to figure this stuff out.

You can figure it out in a book.

Couple of weeks.

Yes.

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It makes it easier, but it doesn’t make it easy. I don’t want to set it on realistic expectations.

This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is a build a platform that lasts, that makes an impact, that has an influence on the world, that changes people’s lives, and build a great business for you, provides a great income.

I don’t know, for you, that income, it might be six figures, might be seven figures, might be eight figures, might be nine figures.

I don’t know. I really don’t.

So my question is, are you willing to accept the challenge? Are you willing to make now the time if it is, go get the book?

Preorder it now. passionsintoprofitsbook.com if you’re interested in joining my launch team, passionsintoprofitsbook.com/LaunchTeam.

If you got any questions about the book, the launch team, or anything at all, you can text me at 260-217-4619.

I’ll be happy to answer any questions you have and then come back for the next episode.

I’m going to talk about how to get crystal clear on your audience.

Got a two-part episode or two-part series on that.

How to get crystal clear on your audience.

You have too many people we talked about this with.

Step one, getting clear on who you’re serving.

They aren’t clear on who they help.