Internet Business Blog by Jack Keifer

Probably one of the biggest challenges in running your own internet business (or nearly anything requiring self discipline for that matter) is fending off the distractions.  None of us are immune to it.  I've let myself take my eye off the ball more than once as I fell prey to distractions.  

Back in 2005, I decided that I wanted to get into the world of online business.  I started out the way most probably do.  I would spend hours surfing the net for information.  Hang out in the forums and buy all the latest products that offered the magic button that would do it all for me.  You know, the marketing equivalent of the "easy button".   Other products would include the "how to" stuff.  Surprisingly, many of the info products did have some valuable information within them.  The key was applying that info.  Only 2% ever really apply what they learn anyway. 

Well, now I was armed with lots of knowledge, it was time to turn it into experience.  Let's see…  hmmmm, I like playing guitar & I kick butt on Van Halen's Eruption, why not make a video tutorial?  Yeah, my first product!  I sat down to map out my strategy with the TV playing in the background.  Eventually, the program playing in the background was so "interesting" that I watched the rest of it.  Ok, the first night is shot.  The next night I left the TV off. Now to get down to business, but first, I better check my email.  Hmmm, an interesting new post in the forums.  Better go check it out.  Before I knew it, I blew another couple hours.  Other distractions seemed to come at me everyday.  The phone, email, friends dropping in.  It was a continuous cycle.  

After about 5 weeks, I was still no closer to starting my tutorial.  I looked back and began to ponder my situation.  I realized that I had just wasted over 5 weeks of my life that I could have dedicated to my new pursuit.  That 5 weeks was gone forever, never to be recovered.  I began to realize that I was actually welcoming these distractions!  I was programmed for failure.  I was one of the typical 98% who get involved with internet business.  I knew that if I were to have any chance of success, then a radical alteration of my thought patterns was in order.

I knew that I had to develop a procedure for eliminating distractions and begin focusing on the task at hand.  I set aside 3 to 4 hours a day to dedicate solely to my business, starting with my guitar tutorial.   Since my J.O.B. already consumed 8 + hours of my day, I was only left with about 4 good hours. The first thing to eliminate was the TV.  TV is the single most destructive device that you can have in your house.  By eliminating the TV factor, I easily had freed up a couple hours.  I was never much of a TV watcher, beyond the Discovery & History Channel, but distraction is distraction.  I had also unplugged the phone & let friends & family know that I would not be available during these hours.  Email was not to be viewed until my work was completed for the day.  At some point, I had also deleted the forums from my bookmarks.  I had read a post by James Brausch on the evils of the forums and how one's income was inversely proportional to the number of posts they had under their belt.  This made perfect sense to me, once it was pointed out.

It was amazing how quickly I had my first product ready after following these simple steps!  Now it was getting exciting!  I started out on eBay while I was getting my website together.  I already had a Paypal account that I opened around 1999 or 2000. I soon opened a Clickbank account upon completion of playkillerguitar.com.  

The transformation was staggering! I was getting things done and making money at the same time.  I was learning that the best way to learn was not from the forums, it was by DOING!!! Once I realized this everything changed.  The 2% crowd are doers.  The 2%ers don't think about taking action, they just take it.  If you find yourself caught up in this distraction cycle and actually enjoying it, then you must make a decision.  Are you going to waste another day? Another week, or even another year?  Where do you want to be in January 2009?  Give it some serious thought and decide whether you really want to break off your romance with that deceptively pleasurable thing called distraction.  If you do, you won't regret it.  Your biggest barrier to success will finally be yesterday's history lesson!

It appears that James Brausch has relocated his business blog!  He is now located at jamesbrausch.org.  I'm curious to see if he will be letting his readers in on the mystery of why he moved.  

His location is well established with top rankings in the search engines along with a page rank of 5, it's interesting to ponder the reasoning.  Being the master of search engine reverse engineering, perhaps James is up for another challenge.  Perhaps to prove that he can take a new site and crank his rankings in a relatively short time using rasof (his very effective website optimization product to obtain high search engine rankings).  Perhaps a .org domain carries more weight as an authority site in the eyes of Google?  Hmmmm, these are only speculations of course. I am by no means an expert in reverse engineering of the search engines.  For that matter, his relocation may have nothing to do with ranking at all.

Another reader commented that he may be expanding his presence because of his posting power via his intern program.   Whatever the reason, jamesbrausch.org has a clean, fresh new look with the familiar mug shot in the upper right corner.  Sooner or later James will come clean to his readers as to his motives.  Until then, I'm sure he'll enjoy reading the speculation circulating around the net!

Many people in my experience who bring up the subject of Internet Business, or "Internet Marketing" as commonly referred to by the forum junkies, seem to always have a reason that they are in the same boat now as they were a year ago.  A common response is "I've been trying to do internet marketing for the past year, but I just haven't gotten anywhere yet."  Oh? Trying?  Why are you trying?  Trying is not going to make you successful!  DOING is the only way.   I can sit in front of my computer and TRY to turn it on, or I can actually DO IT by reaching over, pushing the power button and turning on the computer.  The first is Non-Action (trying), The second is ACTION (doing). 

One reason people use the "trying" excuse is from being short on funds.  So you say, "I'd like to create a product, but I don't have the funds to buy the software that I need to do it."  Sorry, that's just another lame excuse.  Did you know that you can get all the software that you need to make an info product for free?  It's true & I'm not referring to the pirated stuff either, it's all open source, and they will empower you to declare your freedom.  That is, if you're ready to drop the excuses.  Here are some of the goodies out there:

Camstudio

One of the best types of information products to create is video products.  Customers see the best value in video products.  You can allow your customer to peak over your shoulder while you take them step by step through a procedure.  For example, I created an internet business blogging course using Camstasia, a paid equivalent with with some fancy, but not essential features.  With CamStudio, you can create your product from start to finish and within hours have your own product ready to sell to the public.  I've used Camstudio in other projects and it performs exceptionally well.

Audacity

If audio based information products or audio books is your bag, you should check out Audacity.  This is an audio editing suite where, like Camstudio, you can create an audio product from start to finish and have your own info product ready to go before you know it.   There's a ton of audio formats available including those for streaming and podcasting!

Open Office

If eBooks are your thing, or if you simply want a great alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office suite, Open Office is the way to go!  I frequently use Open Office myself and love it.  Frankly, I'm amazed that such a quality product is free!  You can do everything (and more) with Open Office that you can do with the Microsoft version.  Plus, if you are using the Word Processor to create your eBook, you can export it to a .PDF file when you're finished!  No need for shelling out 600+ bucks for Adobe Acrobat!

Gimp - PhotoShop Alternative

 If you're looking for an image manipulating program, this is a great one.  This is the same open source software that I used to create the header graphic on my blog tutorial info page.  In my course, there are three videos stepping you though using Gimp to create the header.  If PhotoShop and other image software are too pricey for your budget right now, Gimp is a great alternative.  This software has many photoshop like features and will enable you to create professional looking graphics, headers, banners and more.

Ok, now that I've eliminated the excuses for not having the money to buy the stuff that you need to make an info product, you know what the next 3 steps are:

1. take action

2. take action

3. take action!

Brendan Brewster has posted his top ten Internet Business blog list.  I made the list based on the top Google rankings for the term "Internet Business Blog" (without the quotes).  

I find this quite interesting, because jackkeifer.com is almost a year old (probably keeping me out of the Google sandbox), but my blog was only just recently relocated here.  I currently reside on page four.  I have been using James Brausch's Rasof to help in my webpage optimization for the search engines.  After just a couple of weeks, it seems that I've already propelled into the top few pages of Google for this term.  Hmmmmm, that's gotta say something for Rasof!  Currently, the term "internet business" itself is still in the stratosphere for me, but the night is very young, in organic search engine terms.

Brendan Brewster has an interesting blog and I've been following it for the past few weeks and like what I see.  It has a nice layout and interesting articles.  Just like me, Brendan has also recently moved his blog.  Brendan is one of the few who really take action on their desires and has been quite active on his blog and product promotions.  At the moment, Brendan's business is related to affiliate marketing, but his blog covers much more than that.  I wouldn't be surprised to see him release his own product at some point soon.  I think that Brendan has the 2% mindset required to make the sky the limit.  

Of all those who participated in my "testimonial" special for the AmazingCloaker last year, Brendan was the only one who held up his end and actually followed through.  That just goes to support that 98% will never do anything, while the 2% will be the true successes in 2008.

Keep up the great work Brendan! 

Everyone who has created or sold a product has to to deal with refunds.  No matter how great your products are, you're gonna get them, it's just another fact of life.  When I first started making digital products, I used to take it personally to a small degree.  I say a small degree because logic has always dictated that this is a normal variable in doing business.  Yet, human nature may dictate otherwise, at least in the beginning anyway. You can't help but to wonder in the back of your mind what was wrong.  Did my product suck?  Was it over priced?  Maybe I'm too much of an amateur and it's showing through.  Maybe they're just gaming me to get a free product.  All kinds of things will go through your mind if you dwell on it.

Fortunately for me, refunds are few and far between.  Maybe that's because I only have 4 digital products offered to the public so far or maybe its because I'm a stickler for quality.  Whatever the reason, I'm certainly not complaining.  Normally, a refunder will give a reason when requesting one.  That's OK because it can help me to determine if there's something that I can improve upon.  If they refuse support & insist on a refund shortly after purchase, most likely they're just ripping you off.

I wrote a script that I use to blacklist refunders from future purchases & specials.  It works great.  So why the script?  Sour grapes?  No, strictly business.  Many refunders are habitual and not the quality customer that you want to keep.  You're better off filtering them out from future purchases.  The only customers that count are the people that actually USE and appreciate your products.  Those are the quality people that take their business seriously.  Those of you who buy my products and / or who simply enjoy & follow my blog are what I care about.  

Don't let it get you down if you create a digital product & end up with a refund or two right in your first week.  It's going to happen at some point & unless you intentionally created a shabby product, the refund has absolutely nothing to do with you.  Just write it off.  The percentages are ALWAYS going to work in your favor anyway!  Your CURRENT customers are the ones that count.  Be there for them if they have a problem with your product.  A little communication goes a long way.  They'll thank you for it and will be back again the next time you have a product that they can use.

Ok, if refunds are scaring you from making your first product, get over it.  No more excuses.  Get busy and make 2008 the year that you took control of your freedom! 

Last week I published a blog post called "Alexa And Its Alternatives".  This post was inspired by an article from Richard Lee's website.  Richard shrewdly pointed out that there is quite a search volume for "alexa alternatives" by people who have the Alexa toolbar already installed.

By offering information to these visitors, you are allowing yourself an instant Alexa boost.  I did this partially as an experiment to see what would happen.  When I posted the article, my Alexa rating was around 3,550,000.  Being that this is a newly relocated blog, that's about right.  Within 2 days after my post, my Alexa rating increased to 1,575,267.  That's over 2 million points!  I have to say that those are pretty impressive results.

To be fair, I got an incredible traffic surge for my "Reality Shift!" article which probably influenced the rating as well.  The data shows, however, that the bulk of the Alexa boost was directly related to the Alexa post.  That was pretty cool!   

I also want to thank Richard for the acknowledgment on his blog & the awesome Alexa idea!

One thing that I have in common with a vast majority of those who have entered the internet business arena is coming across a super hyped up sales letter with great sales copy leaving you convinced that this system or product is the long lost missing link to instant success.  I think we've all fallen for it at one time or another.  The massive pre-launch campaigns stirring up waves of excitement across the "internet marketing" universe.  Counting down the days to the initial release so that you can be first to get in on the new revolutionary technique guaranteed to take the internet by storm!

Fortunately, those days are long behind me.  Yeah, I'll admit it, I was suckered more than once in my earlier days (2005-ish).  Before you become internet business savvy, you are hungry for information on how to get started.  It's also a common myth that you can slap up a website, stick an affiliate link inside and you'll be an instant millionaire within a week.  Fortunately I wasn't that naive, but the lack of knowledge & experience is exactly what these hucksters play on. 

Here are seven warning signs that I learned to identify as I became clean & sober from my days as a marketing junkie. 

1.  "The Little Known Insider's Secret the Internet Marketing Gurus WON'T Teach You"

Here's the little known insider's secret that the marketing gurus WON'T teach you:  The secret is that THERE IS NO LITTLE KNOWN SECRET!  Anybody that will define their goals, take action, follow a proven path on their goals will succeed.  Failures chase opportunities.  Don't be an opportunity chaser, stay focused on your goals.

2.  A kazillion bonus items

Why are they trying so hard to impress you?  Maybe to make up for shortcomings in their product, hoping to reduce refund rates? Hmmmmm

3.   "Own the full resell rights for this ebook!"

In my personal experience, I have found PLR products to be primarily re-hashed material that you can find for free anywhere on the internet.

4.  Multiple pics of the farrarri, mansions & and of course, the yacht!  

The old "dazzle the sucker with images of what they will attain after buying into the secret" routine.  This is a pretty typical but effective copywriting technique.

5.   Clickbank screen shots of thousands of dollars in generated sales

I have to wonder how many of these screen shots are photoshoped.  Not convincing "proof" in my book.

6.   Get rich with no website, no experience and no effort

If you're serious about internet business, you need a website, experience, and it does take effort.  As far as experience goes, the more effort you put into your business, the more experience you will gain.  And effort begins with taking action.

7.   Cash in on the micro-niches!

Huh?  Do you really believe you'll become a millionaire selling designer flea collars for hamsters?  Did the "big names" in marketing succeed because they worked micro-niches, or is it because they played in large markets like e-business.

Bonus Round

8.   The better deal after you pay technique

As a buyer, it would really irritate me when I was sold on a product, did the deed and paid my $47 bucks and then I'm hit with the two part "thank you" page, stating that I have a one time shot at getting the "Premium" version with ALL the extra info for an additional 50 bucks.  UGGGGH!  Isn't it a wonderful feeling to know that you have just been duped into the watered down version? If you want the "real" full product, you need to shell out more cash now or the opportunity is gone forever!  This is a pretty low trick in my book.  You're better off cutting your losses right then & there! 

Well, there you have it.  I could probably go on for days!  This should be a useful guide to help you to avoid getting stuffed in the future.  If it looks like a golden opportunity that will soon disappear forever, just remember this:  The keyword is "opportunity" and as I said in example number 1, failures are opportunity chasers.  Don't be one of them.

Many times I have been asked by people "which is better, affiliate marketing or creating your own product and marketing it yourself?"  I suppose that a lot of that depends on what type of goals you have and the business model that appeals most to you.  Some people are drawn to affiliate marketing because of the "set it and forget it" mentality. 

Affiliate marketing can be appealing in the sense that you get paid a commission just for recommending a product.  The visitor clicks on your affiliate link and a cookie is then set which allows the affiliate to receive a commission if the visitor happens to purchase the product.  If your websites draw a decent amount of traffic, you can make a pretty sizable income without the hassles of customer support, dealing with refunds, shipping and other headaches.  Serious affiliate marketers pull in a comfortable living with income that is quite passive.  Using a method of capturing email addresses to build a list for promoting  products and offering useful information is important.  They also have essential tools in their arsenal for product & keyword researching, PPC (pay per click), and link protection (also known as url cloaking).  My product, the AmazingCloaker is one such url cloaker.  The AmazingCloaker has an added feature of embedding a cookie into your web page to simulate a click through which will asure that you will still receive your commission in case some hairball bypasses your affiliate link.

On the down side, affiliate marketing can be a tough game to master.  Getting traffic to your website is a big one.  Blogging is a great way to attract traffic and promote your product without spending a fortune.   The trade off is that you have to constantly come up with fresh content to make it work.  Pay per click (PPC) such as Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Marketing, MSN, etc can be a viable way of drawing a ton of traffic and still turning a profit if you know what you're doing.  If you don't, you can blow a lot of cash right out the window.  Finding the right products to promote can also be a challenge.  Affiliate marketing isn't the effortless lazy man's way to make money that the so called "gurus" will have you believe.  It takes time, effort and dedication to make it work, just as with any business.

My personal favorite is Product Creation.  I believe that if you truly want to "make it" in the internet business world, creating your own products is the key.  Creating a product should only take a few hours (or a couple of weeks if you're into eBook writing) to create.  Once your product is created, you simply create a sales page and you're in business.  Of course having an established blog and/or network of websites to promote your products is an excellent advantage.  If you don't, then it should become a part of your business plan.

Having your own product will allow you to offer an affiliate program in which you can build an army of affiliates who will be more than happy to promote your product.  It should be a quality product that offers value to your customers, of course.  Once you release your first product, just rinse & repeat.

Now the down sides of product creation.  By marketing your own products, you have to offer support for your product, deal with refunds, etc.  In my experience, creating a product with a high quality standard reduces the refund rate significantly.  Even with the highest quality and best documentation, the refunders and time vampires are unavoidable.  Its just a fact of life.

So which is better?  In my opinion, creating your own digital product is much easier and more profitable.  With a little effort in the beginning, your products will continue to produce income over and over again.  Some people prefer getting their feet wet with affiliate marketing and then evolving into their own product creation.   Whichever route you go, just remember that taking action and sticking with it will guarantee results.  Stay focused and stick with it.  Success will follow.

As I promised a couple days ago, I now have a review ready of Richard Lee's Blog Content Roadmap.  If I was only given three letters in which to describe Richard Lee's product, I could only put it two ways: Wow! & Bam!  This is just the ticket I was looking for.  It's not often when you buy an info product that you can walk away in the end feeling excited and ready to apply what you've learned!  In my experience, most info products make me feel short changed.  Some products have even gone as far as causing my body to physically contort straight into an anti-gasm!  Is that a word? Oh well.   

Richard, this product is fantastic!  It's worth well above your asking price of 50 bucks.   There is absolutely no fluff in these videos.  This is a straight up, get down to business pure meat & potatoes gold mine of information!  The videos are very well articulated and Richard doesn't miss a beat.

The main video is called the Blog Content Roadmap video.  The first subject in the video covers why we should post daily as opposed to occasionally or just a couple times a week.  This is a topic that is debated quite often by some of the forum junkies.  The reasons given by Richard for posting daily are spot on in my opinion.  In fact they are undeniable!  It's as simple as that.  Richard lists quite a few reasons as well.  some of which I never really considered before.

Next, Richard delves into the mechanics of writing.  The first mechanic, getting down to writing your blog, points out something that you should absolutely NOT do!  It also happens to be something that I've been guilty of in the first degree every day!  At this early point, I already knew that I was on to something good!  Other sections of writing mechanics includes a system for capturing ideas, creating an idea incubator and what he calls the "bullpen" where the best ideas are ready to be brought out.  By this time I was already formulating ideas in my head for optimizing my blogging.

The next area covered is "The System".  Richard Lee includes a .pdf file containing the same system that he uses himself for creating content on his blog.  This is a nice addition.  His system is mapped out so that you can adopt it directly to your own blog, or simply use it as a guide for creating your own system which is more tailored to your particular subject matter.  In fact, the system is designed to encourage this. 

In the next part of the video, he gives pointers on discovering your own formulas for creating great content for your blog.  I was impressed with his methods for creating great content.  Although creating great content is very good, it's not going to get you very far if you can't keep it going on a regular basis.  This is where Richard Lee really delivers on an already great system.  By the end of this video you have all the info you need to start blogging quality posts every day.  Richard also maps out a challenge at the end.  He has a task list mapped out for you to follow for each day for six days.  If you take him up on the challenge and follow the list, I'm convinced that you will succeed.  I'm going to take the challenge starting today.  Simply repeat the steps in the system every week and you just can't lose.  Don't just take my word for it.  Stick around this blog and see if you don't see regular and (hopefully) quality posts every day!

As an added bonus, the roadmap is rounded off with another video which shows you a free tool that's available for getting ton's of content ideas sent directly to your email every day or once a week! What an obviously cool idea!  

I'd like to offer some cons about the Blog Content Roadmap to give some balance to this review, but I honestly can't think of any.  I'm a thoroughly satisfied customer.  That's kinda strange, because I'm pretty good at identifying the flaws in a product.  If Richard ever releases this into a physical product, I think it would be useful if the video's were also in a DVD format for more flexibility.  

After viewing the videos, I can honestly say that I have a new sense of empowerment.  I no longer feel that I'm a slave to starring at a white screen with a bad case of writer's block hoping that maybe tomorrow will be a better day.

If you're serious about taking your blog to the max, then you owe it to yourself and to your readers to get the Blog Content Roadmap today!  By the way, there are no affiliate links in this post.  My recommendation is based purely on the merits of the product itself.  On what I've seen here, I have a feeling that I'm going to be a fan of Richard's products for a long time to come!

I never really took Alexa very seriously because of how easily alexa ratings are skewed depending on the type of website you have.  It can be an indicator of what type of traffic you attract, but not necessarily an indicator that you attract a lot of traffic.

You may have a website that doesn't attract a user base that would typically have the Alexa toolbar installed. In theory, you could have a relatively decent traffic volume, but show an alexa rating around 3 million.  The lower your Alexa rating, the better your score (kinda like golf).  On one of my first eCommerce websites, I had a pretty decent Alexa rating which suggested to me that many of my shoppers had the alexa toolbar installed in their browsers.  I found that quite interesting.  With that said, my alexa rating on my AmazingCloaker site is a modest 466,617 as of the time of this writing.  AmazingCloaker.com is about 11 months old.  My handbag webstore was less than 3 months old when it's alexa rating was around 96,500.  Hmmm.  

Richard Lee wrote an interesting blog post which details his findings with several other alexa alternatives.  The alexa alternative that I personally am most familiar with is Compete. As Richard points out, they claim to use an actual scientific formula.  With a combination of ISP logs, Toolbars, ASPs and Opt-in panels, they claim much more accurate results as opposed to Alexa which only uses data from the Alexa tool bar.

Alexa by comparison would give me skewed traffic results on my eCommerce site vs. my AmazingCloaker site.  If both averaged 1000 visitors a day, for example, and 600 of the eCommerce visitors had the Alexa toolbar, but only 200 visitors to my URL Cloaking website had the toolbar, then the Alexa rating would be vastly different even though the hits per day were the same.

Surprisingly enough, however, as your Alexa rating reaches the upper percentages (say 45,000 & below) your accuracy is also increased.  Because of the shear numbers of visitors, the ratio of tool-bared visitors will equal out to more accurate results regarding superior traffic over say a site with a 100k+ Alexa rating.  I believe that this "ratio factor" in high volume is what ultimately equals it out.  Alexa & Compete are the two that I pay most attention to.  I would agree that overall they offer the best indicators of how you are doing in the traffic scene.  I also have the Google page rank indicator installed on my Firefox browser which I like to monitor as well.  

I think that checking out alternatives in anything is normally a good thing, but for now I think that I will just stick with Alexa & Compete.