Since quitting my full time job 18 months ago to make money online full time, I’ve set aside a budget of a couple thousand dollars every six months or so to invest in one major product launch from the guru’s of online marketing.

My first large investment into a program like this since quitting my job was Frank Kern’s “Mass Control 2.0” program, which I thought was phenomenal – even though I haven’t even used it for its intended purpose yet. The course teaches you a step-by-step process of putting together a marketing strategy for a product launch from start to finish. Even though I haven’t done a product launch with it yet, the information I learned in the program has already paid for itself a few times over.

A few months ago, another program called The Video Boss came out and once again it was one of those two thousand dollar products. I originally told myself that I would only pick one product to invest in per year, so when The Video Boss first came out I couldn’t decide whether or not to invest in it – in fear that something better might come out shortly after.

However, Andy Jenkins offered a 30 day money back guarantee on the program so I figured I would at least try it out for 30 days to see how I like it. Sure enough I loved the program, and learned so much about making videos online. Once again, the program completely turned what I knew about making money online upside down and gave me a totally new perspective on things.

By the time the 30 day trial period was up, I had already begun producing The Paulymath Show, building a following of friends and subscribers on my YouTube channel and I had already recouped more than half the cost of the program.

A couple of months after that, Frank Kern released List Control, and I felt a bit disappointed because as much as I loved The Video Boss program I wanted to learn from Frank Kern as well but I had already used up my “budget” for shiny new Internet Marketing programs.

I hesitated, and didn’t sign up for the program even though it too offered a money back guarantee. At first I justified my decision with the fact that I hadn’t even finished going through The Video Boss program yet so it wouldn’t be wise to invest in yet another program.

My First Epiphany

As I saw a few people implementing what could only be Frank Kern style list building tactics online, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had missed out on what must have been some amazing training from ultra-cool marketing genius Frank Kern.

That’s when I started thinking about my beliefs relating to investing in Internet Marketing programs. Somewhere along the way I had created this self-imposed limit of only allowing myself to invest in one or two high-end programs like Mass Control or The Video Boss per year. Shelling out $2,000 a pop for programs like that isn’t a small investment so you want to make sure you’re getting the most out of each program, right?

Well, I started looking at my numbers a bit and I very quickly realized that in almost all cases the Internet Marketing programs that I have taken, have paid for themselves almost immediately and have produced long term income improving results for me – even if it’s sometimes hard to measure that at first glance.

I went back through all the programs I invested in for the last few years, from the smallest eBooks such as Joel Comm’s “Google AdSense Secrets 4.0” that I bought in April 2008 for $9.95 all the way up to The Traffic Boss program which required an investment of over $2,000. I looked through the investments and realized that almost without fail they all paid for themselves very quickly. Joel Comm’s book paid for itself in less than 24 hours, and I learned a whole tonne about how Google AdSense works which I later used to grow my affiliate marketing campaigns with AdWords.

Going through each program, one at a time it became very clear to me that investing in the right online education is a no-brainer. That’s when I realized that this self-imposed limit of not investing in more than a few programs like this per year is ridiculous. Any serious entrepreneur should embrace learning, especially from people who have proven themselves to be top-notch players in our niche.

So my first epiphany was to stop limiting myself and to allow myself to take as many online marketing programs as I wanted, provided I felt they provide value and as long as I could utilize what’s taught in them to at least recoup my investment.

Being a scanner / polymath, this was especially exciting for me as I thrive on learning multiple things at the same time. I don’t know why it took me this long to realize this, but once I removed this limiting belief I felt so liberated.

Of course, as luck would have it three more top Internet Marketers came out with programs.

Outsource Force – by John Reese

John Reese’s Outsource Force program promises to teach its students how to effectively build a team of outsource workers to help you build your online business.
Outsourcing has never been something I took very seriously. Besides hiring an artist to design my mascot and hiring Unique Blog Designs to do the original Blog theme for me a few years back, I’ve mostly done everything else myself in my online business.

It’s not that I have a problem delegating things to other people as I formerly managed a team of 10-15 full time employees in my corporate life and regularly delegated everything except the main decision making tasks to them. I never really embraced the power of outsourcing because I had some bad experiences when trying it out a few years ago after reading The 4 Hour Workday by Tim Farris.

In The 4 Hour Workweek, Tim opened up my eyes to the possibility of outsourcing and so I tried contacting some outsource companies to see what kind of people I could hire and for how much, and I was mostly disappointed with what I found. Most of the outsource workers I found were difficult to communicate with, weren’t particularly skilled at their craft and actually wanted wages that cost more than someone I could hire locally here in North America.

I like the concept and idea of outsourcing, but I had so many questions and fears about it that I basically just ignored it and left it alone. I figured that I would just do everything myself until I got big enough that I could afford to hire full time helpers here in Canada and avoid all the hassles associated with outsourcing overseas.

John Reese’s Outsource Force program totally changed all that for me. The processes and techniques John teaches in the course have totally changed my mind on outsourcing and in fact I have already hired and utilized several outsource workers since starting the course.

Local Business Money Machine by Kevin Wilke

Another program that was recently released was “Local Business Money Machine” by Kevin Wilke from Nitro Marketing. I heard about this program when I got an invitation from Frank Kern to attend a webinar he was doing with Kevin.

As some of you may recall I was a student of Nitro Marketing’s “Nitro Blueprint” system way back in 2007 when I worked with a full time coach/mentor who helped me to launch this Blog. Anyway, up until I got that email from Frank Kern I had no idea that Frank Kern and Kevin Wilke even knew each other, but after listening to the seminar I was totally sold on the program. Frank’s endorsement of the program also helped, but really the main thing I loved about it was that everything in the program made total sense.

The Local Business Money Machine program teaches you how to help local businesses to leverage the Internet to market their businesses in our shrinking economy in a time when traditional advertising and marketing strategies like putting an ad in the Yellow Pages or relying solely on word-of-mouth advertising just aren’t cutting it anymore.

The concept behind this program made total sense to me especially since I’ve done a lot of one-on-one consulting with small business owners over the last few years and everything that Kevin was talking about made total sense to me. The issues and struggles he was describing were exactly the same issues my clients were having as well.

I decide to invest in the program and have been going through the training within it for the last few weeks as well. So far what I’ve learned has been absolutely phenomenal.

Guru Mastermind by Eben Pagan

This is yet another program that came out recently and I also decided to invest in this program as it really seems up my alley in terms of the content that it teaches. I actually haven’t had a lot of time to go through the training in this program yet as I’ve been focusing a lot of my energy on getting the other two programs done but I expect to be diving into this program very soon.

My Second Epiphany

As I’ve been going through all these programs from these top Guru’s of Internet Marketing, there has been one major concept or “secret” that they’ve all be talking about when it comes to making money online.

Even though each of them is teaching a different program on different ways of making money online, they all follow a system of doing things – a mindset – of how to build successful online businesses and how to make money online.

Here’s what I’ve come to realize to be the three main “secrets” of the top Guru’s when it comes to making money online.  I’ve heard these dozens of times before but I mostly ignored them up until now.

Make Money Online Secret #1 – Systemize Everything As Much As Possible

It may not sound like a “secret”, but it is absolutely imperative to learn how to systemize everything in your business.

As an entrepreneurial minded person, and especially as a scanner / polymath, systemizing things is not the most exciting thing on my list of things to get done. In fact, I avoid it like the plague. My daily “todo” list is very intuitively driven so I hate following any kind of pre-set system for things.

However, it is this exact lack of systemization which has preventing me from growing to my full potential and making money online in a much larger capacity than I do now.

I always looked at systemizing things as a process of stripping away freedom from me. By making a process or system that I have to follow, it prevents me from just doing things on the fly in an unstructured way that I enjoy.

However, this lack of structure has kept my online business small and prevented me from fully tapping into my full potential. Also, I now totally realize that systemizing everything as much as possible will actually bring more freedom to me, not less. Let me explain.

Within any kind of business there are always processes involved in making it work. For example, one of the processes that makes this Blog work is the process of me writing, editing and publishing Blog posts at least on a semi-regular basis. Without new content, this Blog would die. So one of the processes that keeps this Blog alive is me writing content.

However, I have not systemized the process of writing Blog posts at all. For example, I don’t have a formal / systemized process in place to capture new Blog post ideas, so many Blog post ideas fade away and disappear before they are ever given a chance. I’ll be driving in my car and have an awesome idea for a Blog post but by the time I sit down to write a post when I get home a few hours later, I will have totally forgotten about it.

Capturing ideas can be systemized through the use of journals, audio recorders or by simply using the voice recorder function on my iPhone.

Another example of a lack of systemization related to my Blog is that I don’t have a formal system in place for finding and utilizing high-quality images to enhance the message of my Blog posts. Typically after writing a Blog post, depending on how tired I am or what time it is when I finish writing a Blog post, I’ll either spend hours looking for nice pictures to enhance my posts or be totally too lazy to do any of that and will just publish a post without any images.

The process of selecting, purchasing, editing and adding in photos into Blog posts can be totally systemized. A system that does something like that would also help my Blog to establish a more cohesive and standardized look and feel to it.

Systemizing everything possible is of paramount importance to making money online. Without it, the next two “secrets” aren’t really possible.

Make Money Online Secret #2 – Automate Everything As Much As Possible

Once you systemize any part of your business, it now brings about the possibility of automating that part of your business. For example, once I systemize the image selecting / purchasing / editing process for my Blog, it will allow me to automate parts of that process.

I could use software, create a script or hire someone to write a script or software that will handle parts or all of the process of editing / resizing and uploading a photograph to my Blog. It’s not hard to automate something once you’ve broken it down into the individual task level, but first you have to go through that process of systemizing things into individual tasks.

It may seem like a tedious process to go through, but the beauty of it is that if you take the time to systemize things, it will allow you to automate certain things with scripts, software or services available out there that can handle that work for you, taking it off your shoulders so that you can focus more on the things that you do enjoy.

I’m no stranger to automation. In the company I worked at before, we invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into building automation tools that saved us a lot of time and more importantly saved our sanity from doing tedious, repetitive tasks that nobody enjoys doing.

It’s quite amazing what you can automate nowadays with a little bit of software and some ingenuity.

Through automation, we can liberate ourselves from manually doing all the crappy boring stuff so that we can accomplish more in less time and with less effort – but first you need to systemize.

Make Money Online Secret #3 – Outsource Everything As Much As Possible

As awesome as automation can be, some things just need to be done by a human being. Some things just can’t be automated yet, or maybe you don’t want to automate them for a very specific reason. So what do you do with tasks that you don’t want to waste your time doing, but that can’t be automated? Well, you outsource them to someone who does enjoy doing those tasks.

As I mentioned above, I used to have a pretty negative opinion of outsourcing. The few times I tried outsourcing things, I was pretty disappointed. However, I now realized that is because I was doing everything the wrong/hard way.

First of all, I wasn’t systemizing / automating everything I could before even trying to outsource. See this is where most entrepreneurial-minded people make the fatal mistake with outsourcing. We try to outsource the one thing that you shouldn’t bother trying to outsource – creative thinking. As entrepreneurs we are natural problem solvers. We think in terms of solutions. Someone comes to us with a problem and instantly we have twenty different ways to solve that problem.

The challenge is that you don’t want to try to outsource by approaching people with problems and expecting them to solve them for you. Outsource workers are not consultants. Let me offer an example to illustrate my point.

Ineffective Outsourcing:

• You hire a virtual assistant to help you.
• You then instruct your virtual assistant to “Find me three cool people to interview this month on my Blog”.
• You then wait and watch in agony as your virtual assistant fumbles their way trying to accomplish this totally ambiguous task that you would have no problem accomplishing.
• After several failed attempts, you throw your hands up in the air and declare that “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”.

Effective Outsourcing

• You first create a systemized approach to identifying, profiling and contacting potential interview candidates in your niche.
• Once you’ve totally systemized the process so that it can be followed by a six-year old kid, you see if there is any way any parts of the process can be automated through the use of software, scripts or services already available.
• Only then do you hire a virtual assistant who you then give very specific instructions on how to do what you want them to do.
• You spell out every little piece of the process to your virtual assistant and get them to follow each step exactly as you’ve planned it out.
• If any part of the process doesn’t work as planned, you don’t blame your virtual assistant – as long as they followed your instructions. Instead you adjust, modify and improve your system and try again.
• Eventually the system begins to work and you’ve now fully systemized, automated and outsourced that part of your business. Congratulations, pat yourself on the back and work on the next part of your business to systemized, automate and outsource.

This is the main big difference between the million dollar Internet Marketer and the barely struggling to get by Internet Marketer. The big guys realize that their main job is to focus on the few things that they are absolutely brilliant at – and then to systemize, automate and outsource everything else.

That is the real “secret” of making money online in a big way that I’ve been totally seeing every single top Internet guru applying in their business, and in every single case they all fought it at first (like most entrepreneurs do) and now they all say that they wish they started sooner.

I’ve begun my process of systemizing, automating and outsourcing everything that I don’t totally enjoy and love – which will allow me to focus a lot more on where my genius is at.

Are you still fighting the idea of systemizing, automating and outsourcing?

Where in your business can you start systemizing today?