Internet Business Blog by Jack Keifer

Many people shy away from putting their products on a CD and shipping them out to their customers. After all, who wants to screw around with burning those CDs, getting labels for them, boxes, covers, packaging and handling the inventory. With a digital product, you simply create your product, upload it and collect revenue on your sales as people purchase and download your product. It's all automatic. An internet vending machine of sorts. So with all that said, why am I bothering to even bring up the subject of physical products?

Because what I just described regarding physical products is all old school stuff. Did you know that there is a completely painless and automatic way to create physical products? There's a company called Kunaki who will create, label, package and even provide a sales page with an order link and mail them out for you if you wish! You never even have to touch a single CD if you don't want to! Simply download their software and choose from many predefined templates for your labels & packaging. You can also create your own templates. You then simply attach your media and upload the entire contents to the Kunaki website for processing. You can do the whole process in all of 10 minutes.

The cost of producing the CDs are less than 3 bucks per CD. Want to sell them on Amazon? Kunaki will also barcode your CD jewel case covers to comply with their standards! When all is said & done, it can now actually take less effort to produce & sell a physical product than a digital product!

Even with all this, there are a couple of drawbacks even with Kunaki physical products. No affiliate programs & no way to do any type of multivariate testing. Well, it seems that James Brausch has come up with a solution. For affiliates, he has come up with a script to add to your paypal payment button which notifies Kunaki of the order and processes it automatically. This is great, because the biggest drawback I saw in the reseller program is having to risk purchasing a minimum number of the product, not knowing what your success level will be, plus messing around with shipping the product. Affiliate programs like Clickbank eliminate any risk or inventory hassles for digital products. Now it appears that James has solved this problem with Kunaki produced physical products, and I would definately be interested myself in promoting his physical products in this way. This guy's a friggin' genius (close to my level, heh heh) and if you haven't checked out his site, now is a good time to do it.

The second issue was multivariate testing. James has worked this out by using Kunaki's XML service to place orders to process to his own thank you page. With the combination of James Brausch's ingenuity and Kunaki's manufacturing power you have a formula that can't miss. He has bridged that gap between the digital and the physical!

[tags]physical information products, kunaki, digital products, internet business, affiliate programs, ClickBank, James Brausch[/tags]

Woohoo! I was chosen to receive a USB DVD burner from James Brausch, who has a great Internet Business blog. Thanks James! It took me about 5 minutes of effort to spout off what I felt and it paid off. Putting a little effort into your internet business can yield the same results! A minor change to your sales letter can double your conversions. Taking an hour to write a free report with some affiliate links or simply to show why your product is valuable can crank your profits instantly! A few minutes here, an hour there towards your internet business goes a long way when you add it up at the end of the week. If you have a hard time getting motivated, just decide to spend a few minutes on your business today & inspiration will come naturally. You may suddenly find yourself accomplishing great things that you weren't expecting just 5 minutes ago. Nike really got it right with the phrase "Just do it".

Probably the biggest challenge in any new business is taking that first step. You have a vision, you want freedom and a great income. Now you've resolved yourself to make the move. What next? This is where most people experience "motivational paralisys". If you're starting on your own, lack of information on what to do next can be a real blow to that initial burst of motivation. Here's some info that may help. When you've done your market research and have that new product that you created or are referring as an affiliate, or even retailing, you are ready to get your first website. The important thing is to get your website as soon as possible. Even before you have a clue about the design of the site, get your domain and at least put a basic framework or placeholder there. Or better yet, stick a squeeze page in there and start collecting names and building your list. Now you'll have a receptive audience already primed for your product when you're ready to "go live". The main idea here is to get the clock ticking on the age of your website. Google especially, takes the age of your website into consideration for ranking. Even if you don't plan to "go live" for a few months, get something there to get the clock ticking. Besides, this will also keep you commited to your goal, now that you've invested in the domain and hosting. When choosing a domain name, it's smart to use your best keyword in the name. If you're selling pellet guns, for example, then something like "bestpelletguns.com" would be favored by the search engines when some one searched for the term "pellet guns". Did you ever notice that many of the top listings in the search engines have the keyword you typed right inside their web address? Hmmmmm Choosing a host is another thing to consider. There are many out there, and depending on your needs, sometimes you have to be careful. I use dreamhost, because I like the flexibility of having "Crontab" available for my auto responder software. Some webhosts don't offer this feature, and if you're running any web based scripts for your sites, you may need to look closer at what the web host has to offer. Dreamhost also gives me the choice of two PHP versions and unlimited domains and MYSQL databases under one account! Also you're space and monthly bandwidth is insane! You start out with something like 10 gigs and it increases every month! When creating your home page, remember to design your page around your best keywords, but don't make it obvious, or over stuff your content with them, or it will have the opposite effect. Back to the example with pellet guns. Let's say that your are specializing in antique pellet guns and "antique pellet guns" is your top choice for keywords. Be sure "antique pellet guns" is in your page title, your heading, body (of course) and even footer as a inernal link to yourself. These are some small basic things that can make a world of difference. Even for google. The next step for cranking your rankings in the likes of google is to get back-links to your website. Create a blog, write articles and submit them, get active in forums (but don't get sucked in by all the bad advice that is floating around in these places). Getting back-links to your website is essential for high "organic" rankings in Google. If your back-links are coming from sites with a high google page rank, then all the better. These basics should get you started in the right direction. Just remember, taking that first step is the most important. Without action, it will never happen.

If you're an affiliate marketer, or even a newby to the whole marketing thing, I would suggest that you seriously consider creating your own product. With your own product you can keep 100% of your profits as opposed to a percentage from affiliate sales. With a decent sales letter and a form to collect email addresses, you can start to build a long term business that will give you solid results. You just need the motivation and the willingness to visualize, create a plan and take action. Creating a product really isn't that tough. Believe me, you KNOW something about something that someone else out there is itching to learn and willing to pay for it. Information products are in very high demand and can give real value to your customer. Think about it, let's say you are good at golfing, and you have a certain swing that gives you fantastic accuracy when driving the ball. Don't you think there aren't literally thousands of golfers out there that would love to know your secret? This one technique of yours could take their game to an entirely different level! What do you think that is worth to golf lovers struggling with their game? Think you don't have what it takes to create a product? You do. It's that simple, end of story. Before I created the AmazingCloaker, I was clueless as what my product was going to be. I took a study course by James Brausch called the "Info Product Creation" Course. He steps you through the entire process of creating a product starting with "Brainstorming" and market research. These are both very simple techniques believe it or not, that didn't take much time at all, but made all the difference in the world. This is exactly how the AmazingCloaker was born! The AmazingCloaker allows you to safely secure your affiliate links, but also gives you the power to generate extra profits using the cloaking techniques in my free report available on my main page. As I create more products, I will likely make this (or another) blog my central point for promoting all my products. James Brausch is creating a video product in his course, and he lets you "sit in" via 5 hours plus, of videos during the whole process from start to finish! Creating a video product is what I would also remcommend even if you're a programmer like me. The advantage of video products are that they have a higher perceived value and can be created much quicker than if you were writing an eBook or a software application. Support is also not so much of an issue. One thing that keeps affiliate marketers from stepping up to their own products is because they don't have to deal with support issues. eBooks & Audios / Videos will minimize support issues. Pricing is also very important. Don't price your product too low! You want to attract quality buyers. Selling something too cheap will devalue your information and people won't take you seriously. Not only this, but you will tend to attract the lowly bottom feeders that will waste your time with all types of petty issues. You don't need that. You are not a non-profit orginization! We are in business to become a member of the 2%'ers. We want to free ourselves from the bonds of the "wage slave" lifestyle! Am I right? So don't sell yourself short because of a lack of confidence. You want to start attracting quality people and positive influences into your life. Another thing to consider is releasing your product on DVD. You might be thinking, "Are you crazy Jack?! That would cost a fortune!" Up until I read about what James Brausch is doing with DVD products, I thought the same thing. It turns out that you can have your product produced on a CD / DVD through a third party company who will produce & package the CD complete with graphics, shrink wrap it and even handle the order page and mailing! It all comes out to around 2 bucks per disk and a few bucks for shipping if you have them ship it to your customers. They will even ship and properly barcode your products to Amazon if you are participating in the Amazon Avantage program! You simply download the software provided by Kunaki and design your CD/DVD with the builder using built-in templates, or your own graphics. Upload the info with your media and you're good to go! It's actually cheaper to produce your product this way! I am seriously considering offering the AmazingCloaker as a CD based product and getting into the Amazon Advantage program. If you haven't considered selling your products via Amazon, you should seriously consider it. Amazon gets 55% of the sale. Now before you click off this site thinking I've lost my mind for splitting 55% with them, think about this. If you were affiliating out your info product, you would have to do a 50 - 65% split with your affiliates to get a respectable amount of affiliates to push your product. This is no different, except that you have Amazon "affiliating" with you. This is like getting a Super Affiliate representing your product with thousands of targeted visitors every day! Ok, now you know what to do, so what are you waiting for? Stop what you're doing right now, get the Info Product Creation Course and start creating!!!!

Ok, I know that James Brausch has been in many of my blog posts recently, but I just had to share with you something interesting that he brought up regarding your voice and how it affects your customers. Your ability to speak effectively while demonstrating your product (or anything) in a camtasia video as pointed out by James Brausch may not be as easy as it sounds. You may be someone who outsourced your sales letter to a top rated copywriter for example. Thus your visitor may have an entirely different impression of you after he/she actually hears your voice for the first time. Do you sound like a mechanical putz? Hmmm, He got me thinking about my own series of videos for the AmazingCloaker. Even though I wrote my own sales copy, I couldn't help but to wonder what type of impression my own voice leaves on the collective public. I supposed if I were to critique myself, I would have to say that I need less pauses and faster speech in some areas. I think really, the key to giving your customers a good impression is to speak in exactly the same way as if your best friend was standing behind you watching as you explain what you are doing. I think that it helps also to have someone un-biased to critique your video after you're finished as well. My wife is very good at that, because if she thinks that what I have just created really stinks, then she will give it to me straight. I respect that because she helps me see things from a different perspective. When making a video, this is what works for me. I will first list out on paper the main topic areas. Then I will make quick notes in sub-topics on what I want to cover as I go along. Whatever you do DON'T WRITE OUT YOUR DIALOG WORD FOR WORD! Remember when I asked you about sounding like a mechanical putz? It just doesn't work with video. An audio file or CD may be a different story. Ok, now that I have a general outline of where I want to go, I can convey my message in a way that my customers are going to easily grasp. Making your customers feel comfortable with your product is extremely important, especially if it's a software product. Most people are already intimidated by new software applications as it is. If you can convey a friendly and reassuring aura into your customer's computer room, they will immediately feel confident that they made the right choice in purchasing your product. Even though I prefer to create both documented and video help with my sofware, I can certainly see the point that James has with only creating a Camstasia video to explain your software. It's a major time saver to put your help files in video format. At the same time the visitor can have the sense of actually seeing the software in action. Visual tutoring is really all that most small applications require anyway. If you create your own products or if you simply wish to have a video intro to a product that you affiliate with, the camstasia video route can be a very effective strategy. Maybe it's time you beef up your marketing plan with some video. Don't let the pro's intimidate you, give it a try, you just might surprise yourself and boost your profits at the same time!

Most people starting out in affiliate marketing pretty much have the same dilemmas. What software should I use for making my web pages? What kind of products should I promote? Do I need content? And the list goes on. Well here's my two cents for what it's worth. If you're already web savvy, Dreamweaver is an excellent product for creating web pages, especially if you are doing large multi-page projects. For strictly smaller websites & pre-sell or sales pages its pretty much over kill and over priced for what you need. When I first started on-line marketing, XSite pro was my weapon of choice. This is a sweet app that is designed specifically with Internet marketers in mind. It has a simple to use built-in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) page editor and templates to make creating a web page a snap. There are features for adding ad-sense ads, forms, navigation menus, buttons, and much more. You can optimize your page for the search engines, add meta tags / keywords, etc. Many people swear by this software and use it to generate hundreds of quality search engine friendly sites. Other great software for web page design is the Coffee Cup HTML Editor . This is my personal favorite, and is the software I used to design the AmazingCloaker website. The Coffee Cup HTML editor will allow you to design your website in an easy to use WYSIWYG editor as well, but also gives you the added convenience of having full control over the HTML code. I like to have the ability to easily modify (or clean up) my HTML code and this editor let's me do this very well. A very NICE app is also the BlueVoda website builder. You can build a web site in 30 minutes. It's easy to use and has many templates. You can layout your website exactly the way you want in the WYSIWYG editor. You can add multimedia, javascripts, plugins, the works. The only hitch is that it will only interface to a bluevoda web server. You could get around this of course by simply previewing your finished page and copy/paste the source code into wordpad and save as html. nyuk nyuk nyuk… Products that you promote should ideally be something related to what you like, but if you want to make any real money you need to diversify into many different products. Keep your web pages specific to your products of course. I use dreamhost, because you can host unlimited domains under one account! This means that everytime you come up with a new webpage/domain, you don't have to pay for another web host account to go with it. Just add it to your existing account. All you pay is the 9 or 10 bucks for the domain registration! In my opinion, this is the only way to go! Products that have recurring payment are great affiliate products to promote. Dating sites, membership sites of any kind, products that you would enroll monthly like hair loss products, anti-aging, etc are all excellent, because you get the option of residual income rather than the one time deal. Content. Yes, you need to do a little work and write content. It's really not that hard. If you've ever written an email to a friend, then you can write a review about a product. If you don't know anything about the product you are promoting, then "Google" it and find some articles and re-write the review into your own words. It's not cheating, and you'll be in business before you know it. Well, hopefully this little tidbit of info will get you pointed into the right direction if you're new to the game and feel lost and overwhelmed by all the horse-crap in the forums, junk "how to affiliate market" products designed to tease you but really steer you away from what the big boys are "really" doing, etc. Remember, 99% of any successful journey is taking that first step. You just got to resolve yourself to do it. Don't know what to write? Just start typing without trying to write a masterpiece, and you'll be surprised at what starts coming out!

As an affiliate marketer you probably enjoy a nice commission check every so often, or if you're already successful, then you enjoy them all the time. Money in your inbox is something you just never get tired of. The rush is always fresh, just like the first time! Seeing all the info products out there, such as e-books, videos, audios, CD's etc., I'm sure that you have wondered at one time or another what it would be like to have your own product. If you're like many people, you then probably told yourself why you could never do it such as "I'm not a writer", or "I don't know programing", "I don't have the time" (uggggh!), and the list goes on. Did you know that releasing an info product is much easier than you think? If you're not a programmer or writer try rentacoder.com or elance.com. For around 1 to 200 dollars you can have someone do it for you, and you keep all the rights to the product! After a few sales, it's all profit. Don't have any ideas on what to sell? Maybe you think that you have no talent for anything. Maybe no one is interested in what you're good at. Here's my response - HORSECRAP! If you know anything about anything, then there is someone out there who wants to learn more about what you know. I mulled around with the idea of releasing a product for nearly 2 YEARS before I finally got off my butt and did it. Looking back I can see what a pathetic waste of time it was, dreaming about it, spending all kinds of money on the "Next big marketing thing", etc. I was never much of a TV fan, so I can at least credit myself with that as a plus. So what got me motivated? Two things. One was that my student loans were killing me, and since my degree was in programming, I thought I better start re-couping my investment. Secondly and most importantly, I came across a very unique blog hosted by a very special individual. His name is James Brausch. James offers genuinely good information for free in his daily blogs. His products are fantastic, and if it wasn't for James, I'd still be off in dreamland somewhere. The first product that I purchased from James is a product called the Info Product Creation Course. This course starts out with a brainstorming technique that will allow you to come up with a marketable idea, even if you think you are devoid of all talent. It's simple but ingenious. James creates the product from start to finish and you are virtually right there, peering over his sholder from start to finish. He even shows you how to promote your product after it's finished. Also, you don't have to be a writer or programmer to succeed with this course. As a result of the info product course, I got off my skinny butt and created "The AmazingCloaker" along with this brand new blog. Plus a couple of guitar tutorials on another site (playkillerguitar.com). If I can do this stuff, there's no reason why you can't either. It just takes desire and the right mindset. No rocket science necessary. As you'll notice, the above link is not an affiliate link and James is not my personal buddy. I've never even met the guy before, but if you become a regular reader of his blogs, you will start to feel like that he is your friend. I believe that James really cares about saving as many of the 98% of the population as possible from going to their grave in debt and joyless. Yes, I'm convinced that he's got a good heart, but don't think he's a push over, because he won't waste a second of his time with difficult or unruly customers. He'd rather refund you and send you on your way rather than have you waste his time. Speaking of precious time, James is realeasing a Life Management course which looks to be worth 10 times its weight in gold. This is a physical product on a CD, which is sent via snail mail. I've already ordered my copy, and I would recommend that you do too. I will give my "critique" on the product as I use it and apply it. Give Jame's site a read. This is a guy who went from homelessness and addicted to methamphetamines 10 years ago, to being wealthy, living a joyful life, and debt free. If you don't think that's inspiration, then get off my site, you're stinkin' it up!

Did you know that cloaking your links are a great way to direct link with adwords or other PPC? Sometimes directly linking your adwords ad to your merchant's product page is the way to go when selling your products. Especially "physical items" through Overstock.com or Amazon, etc where the customer already knows what he/she is looking for. The problem is that Google has a policy that only allows one direct affiliate link per advertiser. That means that if any other adwords advertiser is linking to the merchants product page then you are out of the game unless you want to out bid the other guy. Often times it's the merchant himself that is linked to the product page. Doh! The way you get around this rule is to create a cloaked re-direct page. This way your actual URL is pointing to your cloaked page which in turn re-directs the visitor straight over to the merchant page. Google is happy and you are happy. Remember, if you're cloaking a clickbank link, you need to use a redirect page with no frames. This is my personal favorite type of re-direct page. The AmazingCloaker supports this feature with a simple tick of a checkbox.