Category Archives: Product

What’s Your Wall?

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wall to success in online business pictureEveryone who has ever journeyed into the unknown in a quest to achieve something is going to encounter many obstacles along the way.  That’s just a fact of life.  Without these obstacles, there would be no learning experiences to evolve from.  That would be a pretty boring way to live life when you think about it.

I remember when I was getting started in internet business, my personal brick wall was analysis paralysis.  I was so overwhelmed with information from trying to absorb it all at once, that I would just find myself endlessly looping through the forums, checking out software and pretty much accomplishing nothing for hours & days on end.

I knew that I needed to start somewhere, but by reading the posts by pseudo experts in the forums, surfing from site to site, looking at other products, etc I was really a busy guy.  So busy, in fact that I almost had myself convinced that I was actually accomplishing something.

In reality, what I was really accomplishing was nothing.  I could justify my use of time because I was “busy”.  The bottom line however, was that my bank account was still an internet virgin.  Other than picking up nuggets of info here and there, I completely wasted nearly 6 months of my life circling around in a sort of holding pattern.

I had finally reached the point where I was getting disgusted with myself and decided to take stock of myself.  What were my real goals?  Ultimately, it was freedom that I was after, but what was stopping me from getting started?  Was it the fear of failure because of the humoring chuckles I would get when telling someone that I was going to make money online?

Maybe it’s just because I needed to keep looking until I figured out what the magic secret to online succes was.  Surely succeding online only belongs to the enlightened few that have stumbled across this “secret”, right?  Nah, the so-called ‘gurus’ didn’t know squat about this stuff when starting out either.  So what was it.  What was different about them?

Well, after stepping back and reflecting a little something hit me like a wet towel across the face.

These guys just took action, grabbed their online business by the seat of the pants and went for it.  This wasn’t simply a hobby for them, it was a business!  I suddenly realized that the real reason I was spinning my wheels was simply a lack of focus!

I had to decide on ONE thing to do, and then FOCUS on it and nothing else.  This is the single most important step to getting started.  Whether affiliate marketing is your thing, or creating an info product about something, or whatever.  Don’t get caught in the opportunity chasing trap.  Decide what you want and stick with it until you make money.

In my case, I decided to make guitar tutorials as my first endeavor.  Every evening after work I dedicated my time to creating a series of videos and eventually completed them.  I kept my focus, and followed through to completion.

That was around January, 2006.  I had worked a couple months on that first tutorial, partially because of inexperience, & partially because it was a software application with embedded video & guitar tablature.

I am still making a passive income off of those tutorials to this day.  Work once, get paid forever.  It’s a great concept.  If you keep repeating this concept, you can easily visualize how this will lead to freedom.

So what’s your brick wall?  If you take a little time to sit back and confront your wall, you are likely to discover that your brick wall is not a brick wall at all.  Instead, it’s simply a door waiting for you to take the action to open it.

Submitting to Blog Carnivals Can Be Painful

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pic from www.halfpixel.comLast year when I first started submitting to blog carnivals, I often wondered if it was worth it to go through all the tedious work of looking through the list of several hundred blog carivals to find the ones relevant to my blog post.

To be effective, the best way was to start at the beginning of the drop down list and scan through each listing until you find a blog carnival relevant to your subject matter.  Select it, fill out the form and click Submit.  Then repeat the process until you’ve made it all the way through the list.  Usually, it took me about an hour to do the whole list.  I kept coming back because the results were really making a difference.

The problem was that since I didn’t want to outsource it (outsourcing time consuming tasks is good by the way), I would have to muster up the ambition and time to do it.  That didn’t always work out so well.

I finally reached the point where I thought to myself “there MUST be a better way, Ugggh!”

When looking for a solution for this problem, I made the most logical move… I Googled it.  I searched for “blog carnival submitters” and a zillion variations of it.  I found a number of blog carnival submission services & some weren’t half bad.  Robert Phillips was way up there on my personal list.  I was pretty surprised that there was no software to handle this task though.  Heck, even if I had a submission service, I would find this very handy!

Well, being that programming is one of my favorite past times (I know, I’m a geek), and making money is another, I did the next logical thing… created my own blog carnival submitter!  Anyone following my blog for a while is likely familiar with Xingla Pro.

This is my favorite piece of software that I have written and I’m quite proud of it.  Today I just officially released version 3.

Xingla Pro 3 has some exciting new features that weren’t available before.

For example, Xingla Pro 3 now has a Quick Finder search feature.  Before, you still had to troll through the entire drop down box to build your list.  By saving your list, you still saved a ton of time with Xingla Pro 2, but I was still haunted by the tedious process of building the list itself.

Now with the Quick Finder, you can type in a keyword relating to the type of carnival you are looking for and it will list out all the available blog carnivals for that keyword!  Then you can simply select and add to your new list, or your current one.  Yesterday, I built a list of 23 carnivals relating to “internet business” and “making money” in under a minute.

The next thing that I felt the new Xingla needed was some way to let you know when you had dead carnivals in your list.  Blog carnivals come & go, and before you know it, you have a list speckled with dead blog carnivals.  You might think you have a list of 30 but maybe only 22 of them are still active.

This is where the “Check Inactives” feature comes into play.  Now you can simply click a button and it will instantly scan your list for dead carnivals.  You will then be shown a list of the dead carnivals and asked if you want to delete them.  Pretty cool stuff if I don’t say so myself.

Other new features include a smart dupe checker to warn you that a carnival already exists in your list if you happen to be modifying your list with new carnivals.

After filling out the form fields, you can now simply press the ‘Enter’ key to begin the Auto Submit process.  Previously, you had to be careful not to do this or the “Submit” button would activate from within blogcarnival.com.  Anytime I fill out online forms, just by shear reflex, I hit the ‘Enter’ button as soon as I’m ready to submit.  Adding the ability for Xingla Pro to auto submit upon detecting the ‘Enter’ key press was a natural evolutionary step.  It’s a convenient alternative to clicking the ‘Auto Submit’ button.

The Auto Update feature has also been improved.  I noticed that in some Windows configurations, people were not always able to update smoothly.  Now it should be a breeze for everyone.  Xingla Pro checks for updates in the background when you start the app.

Also, I’ve had numerous requests to to have an affiliate program for Xingla Pro.  As of today, Xingla Pro 3 now has an affiliate program with a 50/50 split after merchant fees.  At the moment this is a $47 payout.

Finally, Xingla no longer requires the Microsoft dotNet Framework!  I rebuilt Xingla Pro from the ground up in an entirely new programming language that is Win32, and doesn’t force its users into installing the dotNet Framework if they don’t already have it.

Some of my customers didn’t have the dotNet Framework on their machines which made for a long beastly install as it auto downloaded from Microsoft and configured itself. Afterwards, it required a restart of their PC just for good measure.  It kinda reminded me of the classic double glove slap… Wap-Bap!

Xingla Pro has a sleek new look, and my testing indicates that it’s rock stable.  If you have a blog, or are running a submission service, you should check out the video on the sales page here:

http://www.KeiferSoft.com/XinglaPro

BTW – Next week I’ll be raising the price on Xingla Pro to $147.

The Ten Commandments For a Stable Internet Business

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10 Commandments for a stable INTERNET BUSINESSThe ten commandments in the Hebrew bible is something that if followed, can certainly help promote harmony in our lives and in the lives of others.  It can be considered a basic road map of principles on which to live our life.  Life doesn’t come with an owners manual, so often times we learn the laws of cause and effect the hard way.

Stick your finger in the fire and you get burned.  Guidelines for our lives can help us avoid some of those un-pleasantries by heeding the advice given by others.  The learned ones who have been down that path and have made the mistakes so you don’t have to.

Well now, I give to you the Ten Commandments of Internet Business.  There was no trip to the mountain top with a burning bush.   No golden tablets zapped out by a divine presence. Just something to help guide and keep you on the right hand path.

1. You Shall Take Action

Action is the key to everything. If there were ever a magic formula, it could be summed up in one word, ‘action’. Poverty is merely the visible manifestation of inaction.

 

2. Diversify Your Income Streams

Never depend on one source of income. Once you have a stable source of income such as from your own product, diversify into other markets. Also, add affiliate income for digital & physical products, as well as CPA to your repertoire.

 

3. Diversify Your Traffic Sources

Never depend solely on one source of traffic. SEO is great, but then you’re at the mercy of the Search Engines. Same with PPC (Pay Per Click). Add other strategies as well (Blogs, forums, articles, E-Zine advertising, banner ads, CPM, etc.).

 

4. Forsake Not Your Customers

Supporting your customers is one of the single most important elements of your business. If customer service gets to be too much of a bother for you, just start ignoring them. They’ll all go away eventually. Oh, and so will your income.

 

5. You Shall Not Offer Junk Content

The quality of your content directly reflects the quality of your products or service. Going that extra mile for good quality content will pay for itself forever. If your site is full of scraped, auto-rewritten content, then your visitor will immediately pick up on it and go elsewhere.

 

6. You Shall Not Enslave Yourself

Define your goals before you go into business. Is it more freedom that you want? If so, don’t get caught in the enslavement trap by trading your own skills for money. You’ll find yourself working 15 hour days for a paltry income. Outsource the work. Collectively, you can get thousands of hours of work accomplished in a week instead of just 60+ and killing yourself to boot. Leverage & scale = profit and more profit!

 

7. You Shall Not Bear False Info to Your Visitors

Never mis-lead your visitors with hyped up information, false promises and fake testimonials. This kind of stuff will catch up to you fast, and will ruin the one thing that you can’t fix… your reputation.

 

8. You Shall Not Spam

This one should be obvious. Not only is e-mail spamming illegal, it can get complaints filed against you that can get your domain suspended. Also, spamming the forums & blogs accomplishes little more than pissing people off.

 

9. Honor Your Mentor

If you have a mentor or marketing coach, listen to what they have to say and carryout their advice. You may sometimes think that they are wrong about some strategies, because they don’t fit comfortably into your perception of how your business should work. Just remember that he/she has already been to the mountain and back, and you are still the grasshopper preparing for the journey.

 

10. You Are Commanded To Prosper

Sometimes it seems that society has made ‘rich’ a dirty word. It’s OK to be wealthy. Don’t settle for a mediocre existence. Think big! Don’t limit your ambitions to making just enough to pay your bills with a little left over at the end of the day. Be set for life. Our cup was not meant to be empty, or simply to be filled. It is meant to be continuously running over with all the prosperity, joy and good health that the universe has to offer.

 

Don’t miss out on the wonderful things that surround us in life. Follow these guidelines for your Internet business, and success will be yours for the taking.

Some Info on Link Cloaking & AmazingCloaker 5

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Best Affilliate Link CloakerAmazingCloaker 5 has now been released.  If you are a current owner of AmazingCloaker, the upgrade is free and automatic of course.

There’s a lot of improvements in AmazingCloaker 5.  One of my main motivations for AC-5 was to get rid of the requirement for the Microsoft dotNet Framework.  I’ve found that many people who purchased AmazingCloaker didn’t have the latest version of the dotNet Framework and it was pain to have to upgrade or install the latest version.  This was automatic during the install, but could make for a long install and restarting the computer.

AmazingCloaker 5 eliminates the need for the dotNet Framework, and now for those without the Framework at all, AmazingCloaker will install, because it has been redesigned in an entirely new programming language.

It is much more streamlined in design, and uses a fraction of the resources without compromising the great features that the AmazingCloaker is known for.

One of the most powerful features that the AmazingCloaker is known for is the embedded cookie feature.  You can create an embedded cookie and add it to your affiliate review or landing page. Your visitor will be cookied with your affiliate info, even if they don’t click your affiliate link.

What this means is that if they bypass your link, or simply don’t bother to check out the product, but then think about it and buy the product directly from the vendor, say a week later… You still get credit for the sale even though your link was never physically clicked.

And why not? You still took the time to put up your review page and educate the visitor on the benefits of the product, so why not receive the credit that’s due? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how quickly that these recovered conversions can add up.

Link cloaking helps keep your affiliate info hidden so that people can’t simply replace your affiliate ID with their own.  This is called link hi-jacking because your affiliate link has now become their affiliate link on their own purchase.  They are reimbursed the affiliate commission, allowing them to get the product at a discount, and at your expense.

Link cloaking isn’t all about security.  Most readers simply won’t trust a review of a product with an affiliate link.  This is because the visitor naturally assumes that the review is biased because you want them to click your link.  Credibility is reduced and they may either move on, or bypass your link… just because.

A cloaked link looks natural.  This is because it is pointing to a redirect page which still resides on your own website.

If you’d like to know more about how link cloaking works, it’s covered in the AmazingCloaker Help file.

You can get it here:

http://www.amazingcloaker.com/AmazingCloaker_help.pdf

You can see the video of the AmazingCloaker’s features here:

http://www.AmazingCloaker.com

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Using the Great Tools of The Trade

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Great Internet Business ToolsRunning your internet business efficiently goes hand in hand with using top notch tools. There are countless numbers of marketing tools out there that are claimed to make you the next top dawg in your market. There’s a lot of hyped up horse crap out there, but there are a number of very good quality tools that can really be useful in building and automating your business.

One such example is James Brausch’s Nemeas. Have you noticed lately that James has been selling a ton of domains at around 500 bucks a pop? Have you noticed that the domain names are all relevant to some market or niche of one sort or another? This is a prime example of someone who has developed a useful tool and not only markets it, but uses it himself. In fact, he uses all the tools that he developed every day in his business.

Like Glyphius, Nemeas is fun to use. You can use it to come up with domain names that can have the best chance of ranking well in the SERPs. Obviously, James did this for quite a long time, bought the domains and is now doing some house cleaning by selling off some of his “real estate” investments. So far he’s raked in over $11,000 in domain sales, and I probably missed a few when I was counting. When was the last time you made 11Gs house cleaning? How long do you think it would take you to make your money back from Nemeas doing the same thing?

One thing that really defines a good tool is something that is going to offer you a tangable return for your investment.

You can bet that any tool or product that you purchase from James will give you a handsome return on your investment.

There’s only one hitch, whether you purchase from James, myself or anyone, you have to do one thing… USE THEM! How many tools have you purchased for your business and then shelved them before giving them half a chance? I see a few hands going up in the back of the room. Ok, mine included. Remember, even the best tools won’t do you any good if you don’t use them.

When you are considering a purchase on a tool that may help your business, do you know if the marketer is actually using it himself? That’s pretty important, because if the developer doesn’t use it himself, then its a pretty good sign that its just a cheezy outsourced knockoff of someone else’s great idea.

I’m not saying that you can’t make a similar product to something that’s already released, but at least improve upon it in some way to offer some value to your customers. If you come up with something original however, then you are a true innovator.

As far as I know, Xingla Pro is the only blog carnival submitter out there at this time, but I’m sure its only a matter of time before the “me too-ers” will have their copies out. I use both Xingla Pro and AmazingCloaker all the time because they crank my revenue and save me a ton of time, and time is money, lettuce, greeeeen stuff.

With that said, Xingla Pro will always be the original and there’s nothin’ like the real thing. Whatever business you’re in, there’s a quality marketing tool that can put your business into overdrive if you give it the chance. Just remember before taking out that credit card, if the person that created the tools aren’t regularly using them in their own online business, then the chances are very good that you won’t either.

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Xingla’s First Review…

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Good LuckXingla Pro is almost 1 month old and I’ve been getting tons of great feedback from users and non users alike. Now Xingla has already received a great review from Mo’s online business blog at oibo.org. Thanks Mo! I really appreciate great and honest feedback like this. Mo also runs a blog carnival at oibo.org, so if anyone knows first hand how they really work, its Mo!

One thing that really impressed me is that Mo also has a blog Carnival submission service. Mo obviously understands the value that XinglaPro will provide for his service. He also went on to list other reputable services out there, which I consider mighty sporting of Mo to include these fine people as well.

You don’t have to have a service to use Xingla of course. Its for anyone with a blog that wants to build their search ranking and attract traffic to their blog / products.

Mo has even called me crazy in his review! Why?, you might ask… Check out oibo.org now and see what a real internet business blogger / blog carnival host has to say about it.

Original Offer Withdrawn

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Firstly, I must apologize for not being more clear in my last post. I clearly gave the impression that I wanted to offer Xingla Pro as part of the James Brausch intern package. This was not only James’ impression, but also the same gained from my readers. Here’s a quote from a very well phrased comment made by Trevor Neuman in the last post:

“Jack,

I can’t see James going for this offer… a key aspect of his Intern program is that it doesn’t cost his interns anything at all… and a 50% off special simply doesn’t fit that criteria.

Cheers!”

Both Trevor and James are correct of course. But… the intention of my offer was to make my product available at discount to any intern member as a benefit or perk for being enrolled in the James Brausch intern program. This isn’t intended to be integrated into the program itself.

Blog carnival submissions are one of the intern tasks in the program, so I was merely trying to establish relevancy to the product and it’s application to intern members who may wish to incorporate blog carnival submissions into their own procedure.

The sticky point that I didn’t consider thoroughly enough before making the offer however, was how I would validate who was an intern member and who wasn’t. This would be impossible without James’ help and would require an arrangement via email with one of his staff members. -bad idea.

The purpose of the offer was two fold:

1. The obvious one – it would increase revenue & exposure for Xingla Pro

2. It would add an extra incentive for some to enroll into the James Brausch Intern Program

It seemed like a cool idea at first, but lesson learned… consider all angles first before tossing an offer out on the table. And be careful how you phrase things when creating an offer.

Taken in the context that the intern program would be changed with a paid product would certainly be breaking a promise to his members as James eloquently put it in his response. He’s right of course, if that were the case. The last thing James would ever do is break a promise to those who put their trust in him.

After reading back through my previous post, I can now see why people got this impression. James, I appreciate you taking the time to respond! Now it’s time to put my tail between my legs, skirt away, and get on with the business of internet business! :-P

The Artemis Booster

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As you may or may not know, one very effective way to get traffic, and I mean targeted traffic to your blog is by article writing. When I first joined James Brausch’s intern program, I received a copy of Artemis which is an article submission software that contains an internal list of publishers in which you can submit your articles.

This isn’t your typical article submission software. With Artemis, you make some changes in each paragraph of your article at least three times. Now when submitting your article, Artemis will randomly shuffle the corresponding paragraph versions in your article for each submission to a publisher in the list. For example, one of 4 versions of paragraph 1 randomly shuffled, one of 4 versions of paragraph 2 randomly shuffled, and so on.

This in turn creates thousands of unique variations of your article instantly which allow you to avoid any duplicate content penalties by the search engines. The results is an 1875% increase in your article marketing efforts. As if this wasn’t already effective enough, you can turbo charge Artemis by using a large external list of publishers. But how do you get them?

Well, you could trudge through the search engines and spend hours putting a list together (not a great idea), you could outsource the job to someone else, or you can pick up a list of 1000 publishers from James Brausch’s web site who just happens to be running a 24 hour special right now.

This is an amazing deal and well worth the 30 bucks! I’m going to pick up a copy right after posting this blog entry. Another thing that James mentioned was that he would recommend products or services to new businesses that follow his methods. Well I’m going to boldly stick my neck out and make an offer to James. If James agrees, I will make my Xingla Pro Blog Carnival Submission software available exclusively to James Brausch intern members for 50% off the normal price! Blog Carnival submissions are one of his intern procedures and I feel that it would benefit them greatly. James, if you’re interested just let me know at admin[at]jackkeifer.com and we can work out the details for getting a special order link available to your interns, and a copy of Xingla Pro for you to check out.

Article Submission and Blog Carnival submissions are the two most powerful traffic and back-link building methods on the planet. If you’re an Artemis user, I would highly recommend taking advantage of the publisher list being offered at James’ Internet Business Blog now. If you’re not a user, quit screwing around and get a copy now so that you can build your business. Taking action now could be the turning point in your internet business.

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24 Hour Special

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Xingla Pro Blog Carnival SubmitterThe wait is over! Xingla Pro is now available. If you have your own blog, or you’re contracting yourself out to submit to blog carnivals, then you will instantly see the value in this software.

Blog carnivals are one of the most effective ways to monetize your products whether they’re your own products or affiliate promotions.

Back links are a major ranking factor for the search engines, especially Google. If you want to crank out major back links to your blog without having to endure the time consuming repetition of completing this procedure, then you need to get this software now.

Blog carnival submission should be a required procedure for any serious internet business owner.

Xingla Pro will be available for the next 24 hours for only $35. After that the price will increase to $100.

If you’re serious about your blog, you can get the software here:

http://kunaki.com/sales.asp?PID=PX00VODI8V

The special will end at 11:30pm EST (-5hrs GMT) on April 30th. At 11:31pm it will be too late.

Xingla Pro Beta Results

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XinglaPro Blog Carnival Submitter

The final release of Xingla Pro is ready to debut. I’ve received some outstanding feedback from those who have taken the initiative to test the software. I’ve made some big changes since the beta and I am feeling that Xingla Pro has reached the stage of completion.

Xingla Pro has an automatic update feature so users will always have the latest improvements. I’d like to thank those who participated, and you are certainly welcome to keep sending the feedback as long as you wish. I really appreciate all the useful information that you shared with me. This will enable me to give the greatest value to the users of this product.

I think that I will make this product a physical product available through Kunaki. I’ve been very impressed with the results that I’ve seen from James Brausch’s “conversion” from digital to physical, as well as others who have followed suit. The graphic pictured above for this blog post is my draft of what the CD cover will look like. I snapped this pic a couple years ago when I was in Beijing. I came across these figures as I was walking down a side street in the Bei-Hai area of Beijing. Beijing is in China for those of you who flunked geography class – LOL .

I will be submitting the software this weekend and will be run a 24 hour special at launch time. Xingla Pro is designed to save you a ton of time and automates the process of submitting to blog carnivals. At the same time, it allows you to keep your lists relevant to your subject matter so that you don’t get yourself banned from carnival hosts.

If you need serious back links and traffic to your blog, which also results in higher search engine ranking, then blog carnivals are among the best techniques for getting both. If you want to take the pain out of submitting to blog carnivals, then be sure to take advantage of the 24 hour special coming very soon.  :)