Internet Business Blog by Jack Keifer

Christmas is a season of surprises.  Even if you're a bah-humbug scrooge sorta person, you're bound to run into surprises at some point during the Christmas season.  Not that I'm one of the hum-buggers.  I just received an email from James Brausch as a result of signing up for a Christmas gift on his blog.  On Christmas day, I received a link to two of his high-end products.  One free month of Rasof and the Ranking Factors 2007 course!  What a great surprise!  $2000 worth of software & services!  Thank you James for such a generous and useful gift!  If you haven't yet signed up and are following his weblog, you're missing out.  Be sure to add James to your list of must-read blogs.  Also I wanted to note that I have now officially moved my Internet Business blog!  Previously, I

had my blog set up on the backend of my URL cloaking site - AmazingCloaker.com.  This did initially help to promote my product, but I knew that sooner or later, I would need to centralize my blog to better serve my readers while providing a larger selection of my products as they become available.  

In the most resent Google page rank update, I lost all of my page rank at AmazingCloaker.com.  Page rank, technically isn't really all that important.  Ranking in the Search Engines is.  However, this seemed like a good time to switch.  If you clicked on the amazingcloaker.com/blog link, you will have noticed that you were 301 re-directed to here.  I've had jackkeifer.com for several months now and it's time I put it to good use.  Although I may be temporarily set back in the search engine rankings as a result, it will pay off in the end.

I know, the blog has a sort of James Braush look & feel to it.  A lack of originality?  Not really.  James has a proven path to success.  Part of that path includes the way people perceive webpage layout, colors, etc.  Another part is how it is structured for the search engines.  I am trying to emulate the same successful variables much in the same way an up & coming baseball player would emulate the top players in the league. 

Back in the day, I used to play darts as a hobby.  I met a local dart player who was ranked #4 in the world for professional darts!  Richie & I soon became good friends & he became a mentor in the sport of pro darts.  Within 6 months I was competing in a Pro tournament and placed 5th my first time out.  This was enough to qualify me as a Pro and I received my official pro status for other types of tournaments. 

My point to all this rambling is that to be successful, you need to emulate the ones who have already made it.  If you can afford a mentor right now, then all the better.  Get one now.  James Braush happens to have a mentoring program available.  He has a proven path.  Check it out! 

Here is another chance to ask a question to one of the internet's top e-business authorities. Why would you pass up an opportunity like this?  Com'on, get yourself a blog and start askin'!

My question:

Do you see any "freedom system" potential with selling tangible goods in your own online stores, or would you see this as another J.O.B. trap?

 "Brick & mortar" business owners often work long hours every day in their stores, which essentially ties them down and robs them of their freedom.  As a result, they become tied down with a J.O.B. working many more hours than the average 9-5er.  The main difference being that the business owner potentially has more to gain with his time investment than that of the worker drone's.

An e-commerce store on the other hand is much more flexible and may offer the potential for more freedom while making a great income.  How would this fare compared to digital product sites? We'll see what input James has to offer on this. 

Is there a significant tax advantage to having an internet business in Costa Rica compared to the U.S.?

James Brausch occasionally offers open questions on his blog.  You may even receive a gift.  Don't forget to have your whois information up to date.

In my previous post about the CD Baby contest I gave a story about James' adventure with CD Baby.  James selected my post as the best comment and I have won a gift with the retail value of $10,000.  What is it?  I have no clue, maybe I will reveal the answer if its not a problem with James, or maybe I'll keep it a secret anyway. 

If your curiosity gets the best of you, then participate at James' Internet Business blog and show your support.   You'll soon discover that you will be an instant winner just by reading the free info available on the blog. You will be awarded with an amazing gift.   The gift of new found knowledge, of inspiration to become better than what you are now, and the roadmap to becoming a 2%er.  All you have to do is open the package.

Thanks James! 

I've been following the CD baby contest issue at James Brausch's blog regarding the facts stated by James and the stupidity defense presented by Derek Sivers, which are interesting to say the least!

Derek Sivers has claimed on several blogs that he has worked everything out with James and that he has won the contest by far.   This seems to be news to everyone except James himself who has repeatedly stated that CD Baby is still incommunicado.  We seemed to be faced with a staggering counter diction here. 

Would James lie to his readers over a silly contest to make Derek look bad?  I seriously doubt it.  Would Derek lie in an attempt to cover his own butt which is snowballing out of control?  Nah, he must be an upstanding guy, therefore I believe I have deduced the most logical explanation.  It is simply a misunderstanding.  Let me explain further how this miscommunication has likely come about. 

James was sitting at his laptop in tropical paradise Costa Rica and just clicked the record button to create an info product when at that very second he was zapped into space by extra terrestrials.  They then replaced James with an exact duplicate and zapped it back to Costa Rica an hour later.  The Automaton James was contacted by Derek and was told the good news about winning the contest.  "James" was very agreeable with everything that was discussed because the duplicate James was only functioning on the most basic cerebral levels.  After the conversation with Derek, the duplicate James began malfunctioning and was soon skipping down the street in his underwear singing show tunes from the '60s.  

The extra terrestrials were immediately alarmed by this so they zapped the duplicate James back to the mother ship and returned the real James back to earth.  They erased all memory of the event from James' memory to prevent psychological trauma of course.  James then glanced down at his laptop and noticed that there was an hour of silent serene sounds of the Costa Rican outdoors that had been recorded in his absence.  James not being the type of guy to waste a CD or an opportunity decided to release this wonderful CD to the public and launch a 24 hour special.

So my conclusion is that in reality, nobody is at fault.  Come to think of it, since Derek has the ability to change history, maybe he's an E.T. too!  Hmmmmmm!

What are the key elements that you factor in to establish an admission price for a live event?

I've decided to re-activate the comments portion of my blog.

To cut down and prevent spam headaches  I originally turned off commenting back when the blog was quite new. 

I decided to turn comments back on to make the blog more interactive.  With the combo of the Askimet and Captcha plug-ins, I think it's worth another shot. 

To have a true freedom system, what procedure did you create to make the transition from overseeing the intern program yourself to getting other interns to do it for you?

Every once in a while I come across a neat little gem while surfing the net. I like to share these with my readers, especially the free stuff! After all, you can't get a better price than that, right? I am a [tag]Firefox[/tag] user and rarely use Internet Explorer unless I'm testing a [tag]webpage[/tag] that I'm [tag]designing[/tag] or if I need to get on some backwards website that was designed for IE users only. One of the cool things you can do with firefox is that you can add many nice extensions to your browser. Some of my personal favorites are "Forcastfox", "Download Them All", and "[tag]StumbleUpon[/tag]". The newest member of my collection is "SEOpen", which has many useful tools for checking your page rank with [tag]Google[/tag], Yahoo, MSN, [tag]Alexa[/tag], etc. With the top 3 search engines, you can also check your [tag]backlinks[/tag], cache, indexed pages, pages that are related, and even translate too! On the Alexa button you can check your alexa rating, [tag]traffic[/tag], related sites, and backlinks. If that wasn't already cool enough, you also get an "Other Tools" button which allows you to Check DMOZ, analyze your links, check your [tag]keyword density[/tag], server headers, page size, robots.txt, archives, and whois info! Whew! that's quite a list and I didn't cover them all! If you value the importance of keeping your webpages optimized for the search engines, you might want to get this tool. It's free and you can also use it to check out your fellow marketers to see how you rank in comparison to them. [tags]SEO[/tags]

Creating your first website can seem like a pretty daunting task if you've never done it before. Sure, you can outsource the job to a web designer, but then you are giving up the freedom of having complete control over tweaking and changing things as you see fit. You are completly at the mercy of someone else's time table. Ok, you might be thinking, "yeah right, I can't even spell HTML, let alone learn it!" You may also have seen various [tag]web editors[/tag] out there that seem intimidating and are usually expensive too. Did you know that there are some great open source stuff out there? For example, Nvu (pronounced 'N-View') is a fantastic open source web editor that is FREE. I love that word. There are so many things out there available as open source, that you could literally build your [tag]internet business[/tag] using free tools. You can even create your graphics and logo with an open source (free) program called "Gimp". There's tons of documentation for this software and it has quite the following. I have to admit that I use [tag]Photoshop[/tag] myself for creating my logos and other graphics, but if I would have been more up on open source in the past, I probably could have saved some serious cash. Back to Nvu, if you can use a basic word processor or MS Word, you can build a web page. Nvu is very intuitive and easy to use. I also like the fact that even when working in WYSIWYG (Visual) mode, the generated code is very clean. Most [tag]WYSIWYG[/tag] editors are relatively easy to work with but generate messy and over bloated source code. I originally coded the AmazingCloaker website using CoffeeCup Visual HTML Editor. I thought it was a pretty decent product for 49 bucks, but the HTML code that is generated isn't nearly as clean as Nvu in my opinion. Sure purists will tell you to just do the whole site in HTML and forget about visually designing the site. There's a heck of a lot of advantages to knowing HTML, but saving time is my big thing, and I can knock off a basic webpage in less than 15 minutes with a visual editor. If I want to fine tune, or customize a table, I usually jump into the code editor and hand code it. You'd be surprised how easy it is to learn HTML. Anyway, I completely re-designed the [tag]AmazingCloaker[/tag] website using Nvu! I'm currently working on a new product which is a video course on how to design a web page from the ground up. This is geared for the [tag]internet marketing[/tag] beginner or intermediate level who wants to design a decent page, optimize it for the search engines and get pointers on writing good sales copy. I'll also round off the course by showing you how to set up a blog for your website using wordpress. Everything I will be using in the course will be open source software, so if you've ever wanted to get serious about internet marketing, but building that web page was too intimidating or expensive, then keep checking back. I'll be announcing on this blog when it will be available. The website where you can check out the course will be designed in my tutorial, so you will actually see the end result as the website itself! How cool is that?!