Using the power of outsourcing and delegating, and creating a system/framework to better run your business and personal life, the ultimate goal of the 4 hour workweek is to work just 4 hours a week.

Top affiliate Jeremy Palmer had written that he had been working as many as 80 hours a week since May while working simultaneously on his affiliate campaigns and putting together his groundbreaking affiliate training program, the Black Ink Project 2. Not to mention the new version of his Optimize My Site software.

So is it possible for a successful business owner to work just 4 hours a week, especially those who’re active practising affiliates, rather than mere book or ebook authors?

It boils down to a couple of principles that you need to master if you’re going to cut down your time commitment to your business AND grow it simultaneously.

Here’s 3 steps to getting started:

• You can’t avoid SOME gruntwork: There’re some things that can be outsourced and some elements that just cannot. What you should be doing yourself: developing the basic concept, refining it, optimizing it. Negotiating and networking with likely partners and distributors to collaborate on the project or distribute once it’s ready. There’s some degree of legwork involved in it, especially if you want to put out a quality product or service.
• Be award of financial ratios: The biggest challenge in creating a $1 million business is letting go of the $10/hour jobs. Unless you like it, consider outsourcing almost everything (aside from the “gruntwork” mentioned above). The only way your business can be made autonomous is if you make yourself redundant/obsolete. Go for a 1 month holiday and if the business is running without you (aside from a few brief cellphone calls and emails), you’re doing ok.
• Always be scaling: In the sales world, sales guru Tom Hopkins has the says “Always Be Selling”. As a business owner, you need a paradigm shift to think about how to continually scale your business, and harnessing the power of passive income. This may mean creating more products and services where your personal presence isn’t required, this may mean creating a second tier of consultants or specialists who can deal with your customers, instead of them having to come to you all the time (even if they’re paying you $10,000 or $100,000 a month). If you’re focused on growing your business AND maintaining the same level of service quality, you’re poised for phenomenal growth. My friend Amit Mehta has mastered this skill and it’s interested to see how his business runs pretty autonomously.

Earlier this year, I had a great Friday Podcast session with Jeremy and invited him back for another chat.

He’s recently launched 2 new projects (one of which isn’t officially launched yet).

During our conversation, we talked about:

• Generating long-term income from your affiliate sites
• Creating “thick” (as opposed to thin) affiliate sites
• How to invest in your niche to maximize your success and profit
• How to create sticky and compelling sites
• And too much great stuff to list here…

Here’s the podcast link:

Here are the resources Jeremy mentions:

• Black Ink Project 2
• Black Ink Project – project site
• Optimize My Site (no longer available)

First off, the site has undergone a design revamp:

Looking very sharp.

Yesterday (Monday), my buddy Amit Mehta presented his series of Pay-Per-Click strategies – the slides and recorded presentation are available for download.

Today, SEO specialist Aaron Wall will be presenting SEO and linking strategies.

It looks like the Black Ink Project will get many new affiliates off to a flying start.

On Friday, I’ll be presenting a session on social marketing strategies and building your online brand.

If you don’t already have access to this quality training, you should register at:

–> The Black Ink Project

It takes a lot to get me out of bed early in the morning, but Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project kicked off to a great start today.

Jeremy talked about his start in affiliate marketing and the niches he’s in (dating, web hosting, music downloads, VOIP, online marketing), as well as criteria for shortlisting and testing viable niches.

More importantly, he also talked about a number of niches he “failed” at and eventually dropped.

If you’re not already generating a 5-figure income from your affiliate marketing efforts, you ought to sign up for Jeremy’s 20 session, free (yes…it’s free) training at the Black Ink Project.

I’ll be presenting content later in the series, and as the program picks up steam, I know that more than a few Super Affiliates are going to come out of this program.

The first week of training kicked off at 3pm PDT and continues the rest of the week.

Check out the full schedule and register at: Black Ink Project (limited spaces available).

The call recordings may be available 24 hours after the initial session.

Also, find out more about Jeremy Palmer’s strategies from his appearance on a recent episode of the Friday Podcast.

Note: US and Canadian BlackInkProject members have a toll-free number to call in. I made a long distance call, but it’s great to find out that webinar provider WebEx (a Cisco company) is providing real-time audio stream too.

Out of every 10 new start-ups every year, 5 of them will go belly-up in the first year.

Out of the survivors making it past year 1, another 50% of them will cease operations at the end of year 2.

And so on, until only the top 1% make it at the end of year 5.

[The stats are across all industries and according to the company registrars that help these companies and sole proprietorships incorporate]

I don’t exactly know the stats for individuals coming into internet marketing, but I think it could be something similar.

A case in point, I’ve helped sell coaching programs, where we work 1-on-1 with new internet marketers, or people who say they want to make a living on the internet. These guys shell out close to $10,000 a head to enroll in these programs. They’re all fired up in week 1, just raring to go.

You ask them to research 5 websites, they research 50. But somehow when it comes to implementing the project later in the program, there’s some resistance and inertia to getting started.

Some may blame “affluenza” or middle class syndrome. If there isn’t an inner fire to succeed, it’s going to be difficult for anything to happen.

One saying that I’ve been telling new marketers is “If you do nothing, nothing will happen. If you do something, something (which may not be what you expect) will happen”.

The inner game – inside your head – is ultimately going to affect your outer game (what you do).

And everyone has had some experience with “structured procrastination” – “I don’t know if it’s really me” , “I’m not sure if this is going to be a meaningful project”, “I don’t know how I feel about this” or [insert your favorite excuse/reason here].

So in life, there’re going to be the people who sit and do nothing. Then there are the people who go out and do something. And the third group who sit there and blog about it.

Which group do you want to be in?

I was just looking at the updates for Jeremy Palmer’s BlackInkProject which we discussed in the last Friday Podcast. Out of the 1,000 people who signed up (the program closed within 24 hours), 759 have filled in the survey…In order words, 24.1% or about a quarter of the people haven’t taken action yet.

If you can’t take 5 minutes to fill in a survey, imagine the inertia to get your first campaign going…

Incidentally, Jeremy has opened up a BlackInkProject wait list and there is a possibility he might be opening up more places.

My budyd, Amit Mehta’s also put up a blog about the value of persistence worth checking out.

If there’s a lesson in all of this, it’s that you need to climb over the walls to get to the big rewards. If you can’t even get over the small wall to get to the next level, success is going to be a long time in the making.