Internet Business Blog by Jack Keifer

You’re starting your internet business, or you’ve already started it, but you’re working full time to pay the bills while your business gets off the ground. This is the predicament that most of us find ourselves in. How do you build your business when you have 40 - 60 hours per week tied up in trading your time for money (a J.O.B.)? In prior posts you’ve read different techniques for getting more time freed up for your business, such as ditching the TV, turning off the phone, avoiding forums, etc. But then what?

How dedicated are you to really building your internet business? Is there anything more important than your freedom? James Brausch wrote once that by walking out on your J.O.B., you would have the time and the freedom to really build your business. Imagine if you reached this level of freedom!

The typical reaction of course is “huh? Just walk out? Yeah easy for a millionaire to say!” Ok, with a mortgage, bills, and in some people’s cases, monstrous credit card debt, one would have to be pretty gutsy to cut off their only stream of income. On the other hand, one has to be pretty gutsy to have only one stream of income - a J.O.B.!

Ok, how motivated are you right now to start your internet business? How motivated are you to take your existing ones to a full time income? With a mild comfort level that a J.O.B. creates (false security), the sense of urgency isn’t really there for most people to get that internet business really cranking.

So now I’d like you to try something. Did you ever mess around on one of those trading sites like ScottTrade and sign up to play their stock market software with pretend money so you could learn the ropes of stock investing?

Try doing the same thing with your internet business. Pretend, right now that you just told your boss to stick it sideways where the sun doesn’t shine. You just walked away from your J.O.B. Now you have no income what-so-ever except for what you might be making online. Now what? How hard would you work now to build your business? Would you work like your life depended on it?

Let’s play a mental mind game called “I just fired my boss!” Put yourself in this scenario for the next two weeks and work your business as if your J.O.B. doesn’t exist, and there’s no J.O.B.s available anywhere.

Tell yourself that you need to make “x” amount to cover your expenses this week. Can you do it? Set a goal at covering your virtual expenses and start creating that video product. Now think about how you’re going to promote it. Post a preview on YouTube, start an eBay auction, blog about it. If you don’t have a blog, then start one. Promote your blog via blog carnivals. You get the picture. Play this game seriously and really challenge yourself.

If you don’t do very well the first couple of weeks, play again and see if you can top your results. If you play this game seriously enough, you will reach the level where you can tell your boss to go pound salt for real!

Need some more tips on how to start from scratch? Check out this book and put yourself in his shoes.

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. 

I was chatting with a friend a while ago about different aspects of running an internet business. I asked him if he was ever going to create any products of his own or just keep doing the affiliate marketing thing. He stunned me when he said that he had already written a couple e-books and was working on a how-to video. I asked him where his sales page was so that I could check them out, after all I was quite impressed that he already had two products. I didn’t know that he even had one! Then came the reply that explained why I didn’t know about them. He never released them. When I asked him why, his reply was that he didn’t think that they were probably good enough to actually sell to the public and that he would like to tweak them up someday.

Huh? After sending me copies of his work I was really astonished that he had never released them! The information was excellent and the e-books were very professionally done. Without trying to sound like that I thought he was crazy, I asked “are you freakin’ nuts? Why would you let these sit around like this?” Here he’s got two and soon to be three streams of income just sitting on the virtual shelf collecting dust.

I can’t help but to wonder, is he a rare exception or is this more common than I think? How about you? Have you started on a product and never finished it, or finished and not released it? I find this astounding. Why would one go to the trouble of making a product and not release it? Putting your product out there for the world to partake of, I suppose can be a scary thought to some. Before I released the AmazingCloaker , I recall thinking in the back of my mind “what if no one likes it?” “Suppose my refunds are 90 or 100%?” Sure, those can be intimidating thoughts, but I think everyone wonders whether their product is going to be well received or not.

The way I see it, if you never try to sell your product, you have already turned it into a loser. It’s like creating gold bars straight out of thin air, and then stashing them away vowing never to use them for life. Even if your product was more like copper coins rather than gold, coin is still coin, so to speak.

Don’t waste your talent or your time because of anxiety over how people will react to your product. If you put a sincere effort into your product which is useful to someone, you have a good product. Some people won’t like your product and will promptly ask for a refund, that’s just a fact. The majority will love it and you will begin getting great feedback out there from your customers. That is also a fact.

If you happen to be in this same boat, now is the time to get past this and get your product out there. Just creating products does not an internet business make. Selling and promoting them does. You took action to run with it, now complete it by taking ball over the goal line and making that touchdown.

Xingla Pro is now in beta and I am looking for 10 people to beta test my new product. Xingla Pro is a Blog Carnival submitter designed to take the tedium out of submitting to blog carnivals. If you would like to test out this killer app, just reply to this post. There are only 10 slots open. I will accept the first 10 comments.

By becoming a beta tester of Xingla Pro, I would like a testimonial if you like the software. If you don’t like the software, some constructive criticism would be an acceptable alternative. By giving your testimonial, you’ll agree to let me use it in my promotions of Xingla Pro. If you are serious about your internet business and wish to participate and give me feedback, then let me know before the slots are closed.

BTW - Those who hold up their end of the bargain will receive the full version upon release for free!

Xingla Pro will sell for $100 and will debut with a 24 hour special for $35. Subscribe to my blog announcement list if you don’t want to miss the special!

James Brausch made an interesting observation about an apparently dead blog at sabrinajefferson.org. Although the actual reasons aren’t really clear in Sabrina’s case, James suspects self-sabotage. Thus the subject I would like to touch upon. I’ve seen this myself on a few occasions where one is beginning to really get a successful foundation laid out when all of a sudden, things start going wrong. The spiral continues downward until finally, the business owner makes the command decision to discontinue the business and go back to a J.O.B. or start something else. With a little objective analysis, you’ll see that in many cases that those things that were going wrong were actually self-created. Sometimes the self-saboteur has no clue why the business is taking a nosedive. They trash themselves totally unconscious that the root cause is from within themselves.

What is the source? Negative beliefs. You can recite all the positive affirmations in the world to convince yourself that you will be successful and that your subconscious will be magically reprogrammed through these affirmations. Unfortunately, if your core beliefs say that you aren’t worthy or good enough for success then you will continue the cycle of self-sabotage until you can erase these limiting beliefs which shape your subconscious. Remember, you ARE your beliefs.

One way that you can help turn these negative beliefs around would be to set a high goal for yourself, and then break it down into small bite size pieces. Each time that you succeed in each baby step, you are slowly proving to your subconscious mind that success is something that you can make into a reality. Your confidence will grow with each baby step. Soon you will erase the old self-defeating belief and realize that you are capable of true success. Your belief will change and your subconscious mind will reprogram itself for success. Now you can begin to build a real business.

If you find that you continually crash your projects and never follow through on really building a lasting business, consider this. Your goals are probably not focused. They may not be focused because you really don’t believe that you will accomplish them anyway. Take this simple technique and map out tiny stepping stones for each day, building one upon the other to complete the big picture. Then simply do them every day. You’ll be surprised how many days of small forward progresses will propel you far beyond your expectations. As a result, you will see yourself in a completely new light. Suddenly, when you look in the mirror, you will see one of those successful people that you thought you could never be, starring you right back in the face. Trust me, you’ll love the feeling!

Jack is back. I was surprised last Wednesday with a bit of news that put me out of sight for the past 5 days. We have been waiting to close on the new house that we are purchasing and on Wednesday we received a surprise phone call from the finance company. They wanted to know if we could close “tomorrow”. Boingggg! “Tomorrow” being Thursday, March 20th. Major surprise. This home was something that my wife & I were working very hard to acquire because it fits all the requirements of the perfect dream home for us.

As a result, we successfully closed on Thursday and immediately began the moving process over the Easter weekend. We worked all weekend “bugging out” for the relocation. It was quite an exhausting experience as a result of such short notice. Because of this, we did much of it ourselves, but we were also lucky enough to have great friends and neighbors who donated their time to help in the cause. A special thanks to Jimmy G. & Rick for all your help! We couldn’t have done it this weekend without you guys.

Naturally, this delayed the Xingla project (Blog Carnival Submitter). Starting tomorrow, everything will be back on track. I noticed in my absence that Mohamed at oibo.org featured me as one of his featured blogs in his blog carnival. Thanks Mohamed! I very much appreciate it. Also, I hope that I didn’t make you (my readers) feel deserted for no posts in the past 5 days. If so, I apologize for that. I appreciate everyone of you who follow my blog and subscribe to my notification list.

Well, I’m off to dreamland now, it’s been a longgggg weekend and a longggg Monday! Good night all!

Are you new to Internet Business? Have you maxed out your credit cards on Internet Marketing “how to” ebooks, videos, etc.? And then just to be let down because, even though the basic ideas may be sound, there are some essential steps left out, so you just weren’t able to make it work.

There’s one thing that you don’t normally see in info products when you want to learn how to get in the game. That one “biggie”, or the missing link are the mistakes that can be made along the way. Every successful internet entrepreneur has quite the trail of mistakes left behind them on their road to success. What is a key ingredient in the success formula? Mistakes! Failures and mistakes are major building blocks to getting good at what you do. So why doesn’t anyone cover these most important aspects? Actually there is someone who does… Richard Lee! Of course.

Richard has a new website - www.internetmarketing101.com where as a beginner, you can learn all the essential knowledge of internet business to become successful. When he first launched the site (last week, I think), there were only 75 slots available. I’m not sure if there are still available slots at this time, but his free reports are worth the visit by themselves. Richard covers the mistakes that were made on his way to success in internet marketing. A definite valuable read for anyone wanting to take the plunge into freedom!

While you are there, I would also recommend studying his web copy. Very well done in my opinion. If you want to get on the right path to starting an internet business, look no further. You can check it out here:

http://www.internetmarketing101.com

Chances are that if you are reading this post, that you either enjoy a successful internet business, or that you are aspiring to build one. We all have different reasons for wanting to succeed in internet business. One of the biggest reasons for me is shown in the picture on the left. This is my wife, Tingting. This is an outtake from one of our wedding pictures. We were married in Beijing, China on June 27th, 2005. Having the freedom to spend time with my wife and creating great memories to carry with us into our old age is my most significant driving force to succeeding online. Having 10 hours a day robbed from us by an employer for the next 25 to 30 years is not my idea of a fulfilling life.

Today we went to the doctor’s office for an ultrasound. Tingting is now into 32 weeks and 6 days of her pregnancy. This is also my prime reason for success. Building memories will include our son Kevin. Yes, it’s a boy! We actually picked out his name in 2005. We had also chosen a girl’s name as well, of course. He should be arriving into the world around May 1st. Here’s a pic of today’s ultrasound. I highlighted and enlarged Kevin to make it easier to distinguish his facial features.

So, my question is, what is your inspiration for success? I am curious about what drives you to succeed. Is it the desire for freedom from a dead end J.O.B. and a slave driving boss? To enjoy life with your family? Or something else altogether? Leave a comment and share your story. I’d like to hear from you.

Exactly as he promised, James Brausch delivered his testing newsletter right away after posting my interest in receiving a complimentary copy of his Testing newsletter. My first reaction? Yikes! This is some serious stuff. James has picked apart so many variations of his sales page that its easy to see why his pages are super converters! I think most people who average 1 to 5% are typical. James is in the 18+ percentile! I say again… YIKES!

James covers every detail of his variable versions. For example. Testing 3 blank lines at the top of the “paper” versus no lines. Variations on color size and even length of the headlines. Testing content against nothingness. The information contained within the newsletter gave me some great ideas to test out on my own web site.

I think that the people who would benefit most are MuVar customers. The newsletter is a perfect compliment to getting the most out of MuVar. Non MuVar users would certainly benefit as well, because you can simply apply what works in the newsletter to your own site. The hitch is that different products attract different visitors and what works for one site may not be so great for others.

One thing that really hit home with me though was the features that I noticed about MuVar. Before I discovered James, I rashly invested in another multivariate software. This set me back over 500 bucks. It’s great software and serves me well. However, it seems that MuVar allows you to use many versions of each testing variable! Mine is limited to 2 to 6 depending on how many variables you choose. Thus I have to choose my variables carefully and figure out which variables that I want more than 3 versions of. Also, it appears that MuVar calculates visitor value for your web site! That is awesome! Not to mention keeping a running total of sale value & conversion ratio. My boss (wife) would shoot me if I switched (totaling $800… Rats!).

Do you remember the movie Wayne’s World? Remember in the music store when Wayne would kneel down on one knee in front of the Fender Strat that was locked inside the custom display case? Picture a MuVar CD in its place with a touch of angelic music as an aura glows around it. - “Someday MuVar will be mine… oh yes!”

I have to say that the testing newsletter was definitely worth the read. These are heavy duty stats, but they are presented in a way that makes for a nice read, plus they make sense. It’s not just a paper full of numbers & graphs, this is real usable stuff. Information that you can use today. If you’re a serious internet business person looking for the maximum return on your websites, this is some incredible information that is being shared. For only 25 bucks for a newsletter that is packed to the max with nothing but solid meat & potatoes without the fat, this is simply a no brainer to subscribe to.

Do you find that your internet business has hit a wall? Maybe you’ve only partially reached your goals, but now you’ve hit that brick wall. What could be wrong? Maybe you haven’t started your internet business yet. How come? Fear of failure is probably the number 1 reason that people never get off the ground, or let their business reach its full potential. No one likes to “lose face” by having their product flop. No one wants to admit that their website only received 2 visitors today.

Naturally, failure is something that we all prefer to avoid. It takes much less courage to win than it does to fail. Think of this for a moment. The greatest discoveries in history are all results of countless failures. Imagine all the rockets that blew up or crashed & burned before we ever got into orbit. Suppose we collectively just said, “hmmpf, that didn’t work, I guess rocket flight is impossible”. So much for the moon.

You have to dare to fail. You strive for success of course, but when something flops, find out why. Maybe you wrote an eBook guide on the best hotels in the Caribbean. You didn’t sell a single issue. Do you toss the idea completely? Maybe. Or maybe the fact that your website was called “AlaskanSnowBalls.com” with an unrelated sales page featuring your book had something to do with it. Sometimes a small tweak will make all the difference in the world.

The important point is don’t let the fear of failure stop you from succeeding! If you didn’t take action because you’re afraid of failing at something, then you’ve already failed. Ok, that wasn’t so hard was it? You’ve already failed by being afraid to fail! The sun is still rising in the morning, people are still going about their business, and you are none the worse for wear. Ratcheting your business to be the best it can be is done by taking your tiny failures or flaws and using them to your advantage. Failure must be used as a tool. These are the road maps to success. Never give up. Most people give up when they’re just on the verge of success. Have you been initiated into the ranks of failure yet? If so, congratulations! You have now found the key to success!