John Dilbeck Musings

Over the last few weeks, Cognigen has introduced four new services related to long distance phone calling, domain registration, webhosting, and wireless service.

PNG Power 3000 — Flat rate long distance service with 3000 anytime minutes for $29.95 per month. No need to switch long distance…

HostingWithUs Web Hosting Service — Quality web hosting from $5.95 per month! No setup fee nor a 3, 6, or 12 month prepay to get our low prices. Be sure to check out the features and low prices on bulk reseller hosting which is ideal for online marketers who have many websites. (I know I’ll be getting one of these accounts later this month.)

DomainsWithUs Domain Name Registration — A domain name of your choice, registered at $9.75 per year. Search all the extensions. All popular features are included.

FonCentral Specializing in T-Mobile — Great personal and family plans, get a free phone with up to a $100 cash back. Cellular portability available!

These are the four newest products available from Cognigen. You can see all our services at my Cognigen sales site.

In addition to the products listed above, we offer services from some of the best telecommunications businesses in the world. You can choose from long distance calling services, bundled local and long distance, 800 toll-free services, high-speed Internet access (including DSL, T1, T3 and higher), phone calling cards, dial-up Internet access, broadband phone (VoIP), dial-around long distance, conference calling, voice messaging, web services, wireless cell phones, satellite TV, computers and more. Many of these services are available to both residential and business customers — often at the same price!

All products are not available at all locations. The web page for each product will help you determine what is available at your home or office.

I appreciate your business!

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been redesigning my 21st Century Sales site. I’m busily expanding it to offer great resources for people who want to build profitable home businesses.

While there are many types of home businesses, this site is targeted towards online marketing and sales, with an emphasis on earning income by marketing affiliate programs. I’ve found this to be an excellent way to build extra streams of income without having to invest a lot of money.

Of course, as with any business, it takes time, effort and some money to build a business to the point where it starts returning a profit. Normally, I expect to put in three to five years and a lot of time and money before I start earning a profit. This has gone faster than any other business I’ve ever started or helped to start.

In the past, I’ve had to invest many thousands of dollars up-front and then put in the time and effort to make things work.

With this business — my home-based online marketing business — I’ve been able to invest as little as three or four dollars every day (around $100 per month) and I’m already earning a growing profit all without incurring any debt.

It’s not financed by loans or credit cards, and that’s a first for me. I love being out of debt.

Now that it has reached the breakeven point, I don’t even have to invest the small amount I was spending out of pocket each month. Overhead, advertising, and promotional expenses are now coming out of revenue, and as I reinvest a substantial portion of that revenue, I look forward to watching the business grow even faster.

You, my customer, have made this possible and I appreciate it. I’ll continue to offer the best products, services, and opportunities I can find along with tips and advice based on my continuing research.

I appreciate your business. Thank you!

21st Century Sales is one site in my growing network of Dilbeck Marketing websites. There are several more on the drawing board and I’ll be introducing them over the next several months.

Everyone has a passion in life.

There are thousands of companies that offer a way to build a website. There is only one that offers a way to explore your passion and tell the world about it.

Perhaps your passion is a hobby or a business. Perhaps you want to help others. Whatever it is, there is a right way and a wrong way of presenting it to the world over the Internet.

The wrong way is to get a cheap web host and put up a website that recreates your brochure. Who’s going to find that?

The right way is to write about your passion. Build a website full of excellent content that offers information others want to find.

In the offline world, it’s all about location. In the online world, it’s all about information.

If you provide good information, the search engines will rank it highly and people will find you. This builds traffic, and a website with no traffic is just a waste of time and money.

There is exactly one company that will teach you how to write about your passion and build a website that automatically attracts targeted traffic with no tricks and no need for advanced technical skills.

Site Build It will help you tell the world about your passion.

It all starts by wanting to share your passion with the world — that’s where you come in.

I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I’ve been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother’s site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat — both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this.

On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he’d been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we’d have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site!

Since I didn’t know how they were breaking in and I’d done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything — including thousands of photos — to another site.

So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we’d been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups.

So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we’re moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month.

There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I’ll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up.

So, why am I telling you about this?

When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we’re running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers.

In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war.