Internet Business Blog by Jack Keifer

Xingla 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.

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.

This weekend I tested my newest product Xingla Pro. Xingla is a blog carnival submitter which takes the tediousness completely out of the task of submitting to blog carnivals. My first test involved using the “auto submit” feature where I submitted one of my blog posts to 26 different carnivals related to business blogs. The auto submit process took around 2 minutes. I have a 5 second delay programmed between each submission. This allows for the process to complete between each submitted carnival. I then checked my email and immediately saw 26 receipts of carnival submissions. The test was flawless!

The manual submit feature lets you cycle through the list one at a time so that you can fine tune your submissions by selecting extra categories that accompany some carnivals. In auto-submit mode, the extra categories are not used.

I finished up the weekend with getting the “add new” and “open list” features in place. It’s pretty much ready to roll, so you will be seeing a 48 hour special very soon. My next step will be to make the video tutorial and help file.

I’m really excited about this new tool and I can tell already that Xingla Pro is going to be a new personal favorite of mine.

Search engine optimization or SEO. Some call it the holy grail of succeeding online. Some view it as full of mystery and secret knowledge that only a few who are “in the know” can actually master. Still others like James Brausch will ask why someone could possibly think that they can optimize a search engine? Search Engine Optimization, optimize a search engine. Good one James. Perhaps WSO or web site optimization would be a more accurate term. Hmmm

Anyway, there are various ranking factors that influence how you will fare in the search engines. A few weeks ago James Brausch released his predictive analysis of the latest Google data. Here is his breakdown for the highest predictability results:

Nemeas (domain name & structure) Factors: 18.2%
RaSof (on page) Factors: 43.8%
Link Factors: 38.1%

What I’d like to cover are some of the on page factors that I have used that have given me significant results. First of all, you should know what keywords that you want to optimize your site for. I like using WordTracker for getting a feel for what terms the most people are searching for. Your stats are also a great resource for finding the keywords that people used to find your site via a search engine. Here are some on-page factors that you can use to crank your rankings:

Title - What you have in your page title is a biggie. You should use highly searched terms relevant to your site here. I’ve read that having your keyword(s) at the beginning or end of your title works best. I don’t have facts to back that up, but I’ve gotten my best results this way.

Anchor Text - This is the text in a hyperlink. For example - Internet Business Blog would be the key phrase that I would use in my anchor text to rank for “internet business blog”. Be sure to take advantage of anchor text. Many people waste perfectly good hyperlinks with totally irrelevant phrases such as “Click Here“. I’ve found many times that if I refer to another website with a good keyword, it boosts my own website for that term. Don’t forget the title text. You can enhance your link power with an extra phrase or word in your title text. This would go after your “href” URL. For example - <a href=”http://somesite.com” title=”great keyword”>

Images & Alt Text - When you add images to your website, be sure to name your image with a decent keyword. You’d be surprised how much extra traffic you could pick up from Google or Yahoo! image searches. Alt text is often ignored too. Use the alt text every time you use images.

Header & Footer - Bold text and <h1, h2> text in your header contribute to your on page factors as well. Even bolded text within the body of your content will make a difference. Be sure to have keyword rich links in your footer as well. The footer is a significant area to your on page ranking.

Obviously you will want to sprinkle your keywords throughout the body of your content as well. Don’t over do it and always write your content for your readers FIRST. If you don’t, your content will lose value by sounding unnatural and keyword stuffed. This will immediately drop your credibility down to the neighborhood of the MFA junk sites.

As shown in James Brausch’s stats above, domain name/structure and back links account for another 56.3% of the factors involved for a top Google rating. Deciding on your domain name and its structure comes before you build your website. On page factors come as you create your site, when you add new content, and when you’re ratcheting your site for better search engine results. Finally, getting back links is something that you always want to work on for the lifetime of your site.

Following these simple steps can boost your website from being off the radar to enjoying a high ranking in the search engines. By combining all of the three major ranking factors, you are bound to nail a top spot in the search engines.

Dr. Schmidt, CEO of Google announced that Google is no more as of Friday, February 22nd! The stunning announcement came shortly after noon today. There was a media frenzy when the news broke. Of course the first question was “what the heck happened?” Is this another Enron? It seems that the CEO, along with the entire board of directors have decided to give up all their worldly goods and are now moving into a commune in southern California, which is home to a little known cult who worship the mango root. Google is no more!

OK, as you have probably guessed by now, I made this whole story up. Why would I do that? To get you reading? No, actually to get you thinking. Suppose Google disappeared over night. How would this affect your business? Do you depend on Google for all your PPC advertising? Is a high ranking in Google the sole reason for your traffic? If so, you really need to rethink your business strategy. Putting all your eggs in one basket is pretty risky business.

By reading my previous posts, you’ve heard me say in the past how it makes much more sense to have multiple streams of income (products, affiliates, etc) as opposed to just one (J.O.B.). The same applies to your traffic. Traffic to your websites are the life blood of your online business. Just like brick & mortar businesses, if no one knows you’re there, it’s pretty tough to make an income. People with affiliate sites will often depend solely on PPC to monetize their sites. Some will focus on optimizing their websites for one specific search engine.

But suppose that you suddenly lose your ranking for your keyword because of an algorithm change, or your PPC costs triple because the Google mafia decided that they don’t like you anymore? Now what? Go back to working for the man for a living? Or do you have other traffic sources that will continue to keep your business running smoothly?

You will find that if you work into your system other avenues of traffic, then not only will your income increase, but so will your security. Maybe today a lot of people aren’t searching for your blue widgets, but a stumbler (StumbleUpon) happens to be promoting a blue widget convention in Toledo, sending extra traffic your way.

Never underestimate the power of diversity. Promoting yourself using “Web 2.0″ methods such as StumbleUpon, Squidoo & the like is one way to gain exposure. Internet business blogging is one of the best. Contributing worthwhile posts to blog carnivals will get you traffic and back links. Building your list! The larger your list, the more valuable it becomes. Forums are another way to promote yourself. But don’t spam, contribute to the community, or you will do more harm than good to your long term business. I’m not a forum fan, but depending on your business, it can be a good thing to work into your own routine or procedure for your interns. Oh, did I mention article marketing? This is probably one of the most effective and will generate traffic and back links very quickly.

The trick to article marketing is how you do it. James Brausch has a product called Artemis. This is an excellent product that allows you to change your article in to a few different variations. Artemis will then randomly shuffle the corresponding versions of each paragraph creating literally thousands of different variations of the same article. This way you will beat any duplicate content issues with Google, plus you will be submitting to real article publishers. I say “real” because most article submission sites are just junk repositories that are only read by other article submitters and scraped by content generator bots for the junk MFA (made for adsense) sites. You can customize your own Ezine and article list in Artemis for thousands of submissions honed for each article subject matter.

Google may not be going anywhere soon, but let the first paragraph be a wake up call. If you are depending on one source to monetize your traffic, you need to be working other techniques into your system as well. Don’t be a victim of a black Monday someday. When others are sinking without a life preserver, you can stay high & dry because your ship has the safety backups to kick in and keep it sailing smoothly.

Wanting to create a product and start a website?  Maybe you already have a website, or several websites.  When you purchase your piece of real estate on the world wide web, have you given any thought to your domain name?  No, I mean serious thought.  It's a common misconception that all the "good" names are taken.  So what makes up a good name?  Is it something that contains a short name and ends with a .com?  Maybe a 256 character string containing all your favorite keywords ending in a dot something?  Ok, that's a little outrageous, but just what does constitute a good domain name?  

One trick I like is to look over my web stats and see how people are getting to my websites.  My stats will show what keywords people are using in the search engines to get to my sites.  If I'm going to create another similar site, I could take a popular phrase such as "cloak my url" and see if "cloakmyurl.com" is available.  It isn't available, by the way.  But you get the picture.  A variation of this opens up possibilities.  Cloak-my-url.com, cloakmy-url.com, myurlcloak.com, etc.  If you're a techno-dounce, you may not have noticed that many of your top search results have your keywords in the domain name and /or, webpage name and subfolders.   

It's smart to have your domain reflect a popular search phrase.  Sure, this is only a part of the big ranking factor picture, but it can be significant to 15 - 20% and shouldn't be overlooked.  There's a great utility called Nemeas, created by James Brausch that works based on statistical data to help you create optimal domain names and link combinations.  An optimized link combined with an optimized folder / file naming convention can give you the edge that just may get you over the top.

Nemeas isn't for the casual dabbler in internet business.  The price is $135. The "doers" will see the value and potential returns from this powerful software right away.  If you're serious, and in the process of stepping up your game, this is "the" tool for a healthy foundation! 

Now you can promote your new website and product(s) by putting together a blog and optimizing it for business.  Not sure how to do that?  You can find out more by clicking on the link below:

http://www.jackkeifer.com/blogging-course

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.     

Google [tag]AdWords[/tag] can be your best friend, or it can bite you in the butt big time. I don't claim to be an AdWords expert by any means, but I can speak a little from experience from playing the game. When I began dabbling in AdWords, I had one strategy in mind. Use the shotgun approach with generalized keywords to get the biggest volume of traffic possible to my website (PlayKillerGuitar.com) and the numbers would take care of the rest. I was thinking that with a conversion ratio of 1%, I would make 10 sales per thousand visitors. Hmmmmm, easy money. I set up my campaigns and waited for the sales to come pouring in. Well they did, somewhat. I sold about 10 tutorials at 20 bucks a piece that month and made a cool 200 bucks. I was a king! Then came the debit from my bank account from AdWords. 250 bucks! YIKES! I didn't make any money, I lost 50 bucks! From there I tried using different keywords, lowering my bids, changing my ads, looking at competitor's ads and websites to try and get a clue on what they were doing. You name it, I tried it and still I was paying out the ying yang and ending up in the hole every time. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the heck I was doing wrong, so I did the next logical thing. Told myself that AdWords sucks and turned off my campaigns. Deep inside I knew that people out there were actually making good money, because I would see the same ads running week after week. Then I stumbled accross a book by [tag]Perry Marshall[/tag] called "Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords". I had to get on a waiting list because it wasn't released yet, but it was worth it. When it arrived it was hot off the press, a brand new release, and I got to say that it was the best 17 bucks I ever spent. Every page seemed to point out all the things I was doing wrong and illustrated the right way that it should be done. For one thing, I wasn't setting up my campaigns properly and my keywords were way too generalized. Your keywords need to be very targeted. Man was I green! I thought I was pretty savvy, but Perry Marshall showed me just how green I was. I learned other valuable things too like the importance of CTR (click thru ratio) and how to keep it high by pruning off the non-performing keywords. The strategy here is less traffic but quality [tag]traffic[/tag]. I started making a profit, even with my 20 dollar tutorials. AdWords still isn't my favorite form of traffic generation. I much prefer the free methods such as [tag]article writing, blogging, SEO[/tag], etc., but at least I can now say that I've tamed the beast, somewhat. PPC is a great way to get a brand new website rolling for your product until the free techniques start kicking in. That's what works for me anyway. I'm still on my way up, so who knows, maybe next year I'll look back and think I was crazy. This is what works for me so far, and when something works, why not keep doing it, right?

There are kazillions of blogs and other websites out there with the familiar adsense ads splashed all over the sidebars and integrated into the content of their websites. There are marketers raking in the cash selling e-books on how you can get rich with adsense and live the good life with an easy passive income. Then you have the software that will generate thousands of adsense "junk sites" as I call them which are supposedly optimized for the search engines and some that even add semi-relevant content pulled from random article sites. I guess what irritates me most about these software programs is that they contribute to the degradation of my search experience while I'm looking for answers on a certain topic. How many times have you typed a keyword into Google to research some topic and end up on 20 different junk adsense sites before actually finding something of value somewhere? These type of crap programs enable people to generate thousands of these "slum sites" which are plastered all over the internet. These bottom feeders are just wasting your time and grabbing a few cents from your wrong turn. It's no wonder that Google is forced into taking measures such as the "Google Slap". I once read an interesting article where Google's AdSense marketing was referred to as "CrackSense", I had to laugh when I read this phrase, because it rings so true! Think about it. You spend all kinds of time and resources building your business and attracting traffic to your website. Do you want your visitors to buy a product you have created? Maybe you have an affiliate site. Why would you want to sell your traffic off for a few cents, just so someone else can turn it into much bigger bucks? Shouldn't YOU be the one converting it into bigger bucks? I find this absolutely astounding! Ok, with that said, I have to admit that I have learned a lot about internet marketing over the past year & a half (and still learning). When I first started experimenting with marketing and set up my first website, I had those typical AdSense ads plastered all over the place just like the other chumps out there. But it didn't take me long to realize that I was throwing away what little traffic I was getting for a few cents. Sure, you can reason that maybe your visitor wouldn't have bought anything anyway, so why not have a "tip jar" to catch them on the way out? Maybe there's some merit to that logic, but I just can't help thinking that maybe that same visitor would have stuck around a little longer increasing the possibility of making that sale or capturing a new email address. Instead you sold them off for a nickel. I think I'll just stick to appreciating and maximizing the value of my visitors rather than pimping them off for next to nothing.

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.