30 Day Challenge effect backlash

A few of the blogs that I read have been pointing out the fact that the methods described in the 30 Day Challenge are just not going to work long term. I have to disagree to an extent. Let me explain:

The idea behind the 30 Day Challenge was to be able to make $10.00 without spending a dime. This means you can’t buy new domain names, hosting for a site, nothing. Everything you do has to be done on free services. So, when Ed Dale tells everybody to go sign up for Stumble Upon, all of a sudden, Stumble Upon is going to receive a few thousand new signups in one day. They are going to take notice. Same thing with tumblr.com. All of a sudden, in one day they started getting a VERY large amount of new signups, each with some marketing phrase used as it’s subdomain. They are going to feel the effects of the 30 day challenge and they are going to take action. And, since everybody created all their new pages in a 24-36 hour period, it going to be pretty simple to find and eliminate those accounts.

Had there not been several thousand, but instead a few dozen new accounts created on tumblr.com, it’s most likely that these would have slid under the radar and the purpose for creating these pages would have been realized. The purpose being only to TEST OUT A NICHE MARKET. The end-game here is not to use tumblr.com or any other free hosting service as your long term solution for keeping your content, but merely a way to test and see if it’s worth going to the trouble (and expense) of creating a new site with consistent content using your own domain name and your own hosting, etc, etc.

Give me your thoughts.

The rubber hits the road in the 30 day challenge

During the first two weeks of the Thirty Day Challenge, we spent a lot of time reading and learning and researching, but not a lot of time “doing”. The wait is over. On day 16, we were shown a new tool that we will use to build our pages where we will drive our traffic. That new tool is called tumblr.com. My team and I are all pretty sure that squidoo.com was going to be the place where we were going to host our content, but since google.com slapped them around recently, squidoo.com wasn’t going to work.

So far, messing around with tumblr.com, I have to say I like it’s ease and simple approach. Creating a blog-type site can be done in a matter of a few minutes. It handles all the heavy lifting and you can focus on just adding content. Bingo! What’s not to love? They also have several site templates you can choose from, and you can also create custom ones yourself. For the sake of the 30DC, we’re going to use a standard one.

So, I’ve picked my umbrella phrase, I have done my research and I have written my article. Time to set up a tumblr.com account. Since you need to have a unique email address for each tumblr.com account, I went over to google.com and created an email account. I then went back with my new account in hand and tried to set up an account at tumblr.com, but, amazingly enough, somebody else has already chosen my same phrase. Unreal! Jason was kind enough to point out that since I had created the Google account, I could just use Google Pages to create my content. Brilliant! 10 minutes later, I had created my page, formatted the text, added a photo and a link and I was all done.

So, check it out, here is my first content page for the Thirty Day Challenge. I’d be thrilled to hear your feedback. Also, while you are at the page, feel free to Stumble Upon, add it to your del.icio.us account, Twitter it or use any other Web 2.0 social networking tool to give it some link love. You know I appreciate it!

Next stop, top 10 on Google!

Slow going, but I’m sticking with it

The thirty day challenge is nearly 2 weeks old (nearly a month old if you count pre-season) and as of now, we have not been shown HOW we are going to make our $10 in 30 days. But, honestly, I don’t mind. As I’ve said in previous posts, I have been learning a LOT about some fantastic tools that are available. And, not everything I have learned has come directly from the training. There is a decent sized forum community and in the community there are dozens of people who have their own ideas on how to make a profit on the internet. The best part is, most of them are happy to share.

I have always known that there are a million ways to skin the Internet Marketing cat. And, no matter who you ask, you are likely going to get a different answer when it comes to which method is the best. The thing is, there is no BEST. For a method to be successful, it has to fit your knowledge base, or be easy enough that you can learn and use it effectively.

One of the new blogs I have been following is called 45n5. On top of writing a solid blog, they have also created a slick tool for creating an information mini-site in the matter of minutes. You can check out the free tool over at 19pages.com. I’ve tested it out on my local server and it really is as simple as he says.

Keep your eyes out for other time saving, money making tips, tricks and tools. Let me know what you find. If I find anything else cool, I’ll be sure to let you know.

30 day challenge 10 days in…

The 30 Day Challenge is moving along nicely now. After spending much of the first week wondering where in the world all this stuff was going, I can finally say that I see a light at the end of the tunnel. On day 10 we were given a bit more information on how to conduct our research and then we were given the weekend to catch up on everything we’ve learned so far, and we are supposed to narrow our key word searches down to two candidates that we want to move forward with. I currently have about 5 terms that I think have potential, so tonight I’ll try to narrow them down, or, I may just be an overachiever and run with all 5.

The market research portion of the 30 DC can be a bit tedious. You do the same thing over and over and over again. I finally got the idea to stream line my searching process and I created a tool that lets you enter your terms and it will pull up the 3 relevant result pages. You then pull out the proper information from the pages and either add the term to your list to continue with, or throw it on the reject pile. I have a VERY large reject pile at this point. If you want to try out the keyword search, you can find it here.

Day 1 and 2, getting your feet wet

Day 1 of the challenge was pretty simple, really. Not much to do, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something to learn. Day 1 could be summed up with the following list, in order, of the things we are going to do.

1. Market Research
2. Get Traffic
3. Generate Conversions
4. Create Product

When you first look at this list, it sure looks like these are out of order, doesn’t it? Why would you consider getting traffic or trying to generate conversions if you don’t already have a product? It’s simple, actually - why go to the trouble of generating traffic for a product that isn’t going to produce sales?

On day 2 we got our first real chunk of homework to do. We’re supposed to create a list of niche markets that we want to work in. After creating the list, we need to narrow the list down to 7. While you don’t need to pick 7 markets that you are well versed in, at least choose markets in which you have an interest in digging deep and learning about the market you are going to be promoting.

It was suggested that we stay out of the “major league” niches like fitness, health, dog training and refi/banking.

Finding popular niche markets to promote may sound like a daunting task. But, there are actually dozens of places you can go to come up with ideas for markets based on what’s popular on the Internet right now. Here is a list of places you can use to search for hot trends:

Google Trends, Yahoo Buzz, Lycos Top 50, AOL Hot Searches, ebay Pulse, Amazon New Releases, ehow.com and Google’s Most Popular.

Keep in mind, this list is nowhere near complete. I’m sure you already can think of several other sites where popular trends pop up. Keep your eyes open and a notepad handy.

Coming up tomorrow in the challenge, how to do market research on our 7 new markets.

If you haven’t already done so, go to thirtydaychallenge.com and sign up for the largest Internet marketing project around. You will NOT be disappointed!

Getting started with the 30 Day Challenge

Over the past few days I’ve introduced a few new people to the 30 Day Challenge. The problem is, they didn’t get the 2 weeks of pre-season build up that many of us got. Obviously, all the content is still available, but there is quite a lot to get caught up on in a short amount of time. So, for those of you who are feeling overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of information available on ThirtyDayChallenge.com, I’ve put together a quick and dirty list of things to do to get ready for the challenge.

Tools
There are some fantastic tools available to us that are not only very powerful, but best of all, they are free. Some of these tools you may have already heard of, some will be brand new to you. So, to get started, you should download and install the following tools or plug-ins and sign up at the websites that we will be using for the challenge. I’m not going to provide an explanation of why or how each tool is used as that’s going to be covered during the challenge. I’m just going to point you to what you are going to need.

And the tools are:

- Firefox Browser (Download). Many of the tools that you will be using are plug-ins for the Firefox browser.
- SEO for Firefox (Plugin)
- Firebug (Plugin)
- Del.icio.us (Plugin) Requires an account at del.icio.us
- Fleck (Plugin)
- Scribe Fire (Plugin)
- Search Status (Plugin)
- Session Manager (Plugin)
- Stumble Upon (Plugin) Requires an account at stumbleupon.com
- Twitterbar (Plugin) Requires an account at twitter.com
- Facebook (Social Network Site - create an account)
- digg.com (Networking / bookmark site - create an account)
- youtube.com (Networking / video site - create an account)
- itunes (MP3, video player - download)
- skype (Download) [note: I don't recall if they specifically suggested Skype, but he definitely mentions that he uses it and it's a great tool used for communication]

Another tool that you will definitely want to get is an RSS reader. During one of the videos Ed Dale suggests creating an account at bloglines.com. However, I’m already a user and a big fan of netvibes.com, which is also a free tool. If you don’t already use an RSS reader, you may want to go with bloglines so that if they explain how to do something specific using that tool, you aren’t left wondering how to duplicate it in a similar tool. The choice is yours on this one.

After you get all the tools downloaded, installed, signed up and whatnot, you will want to try and find a team to join in the 30 day challenge forums. This is certainly not required, but suggested by Ed as a way to share ideas and to help keep you motivated. Next, log in to Facebook and search for the thirty day challenge group and join up. Also, you may want to search for other friends who are already facebook members and add them to your friends list. Based on what I’ve seen so far, networking is going to play a big part in the 30 day challenge.

In day 1 of the challenge, Ed suggested that over the next 3 days the training and homework will be fairly light and then we will all have the weekend to catch up. So there is no need to panic if you haven’t had a chance to watch all the videos and listen to all the podcasts. Take your time. Get caught up and get ready to learn, earn and make some new friends over the course of the 30 day challenge.

Learning internet marketing with the 30 day challenge

When people ask what I do for a living I tell them I work for an Internet marketing company. Most of my work is focused on the technical side and I don’t really spend all that much time on the marketing side of things. I’m quite interested in the marketing side as I know that with a bit of work, there is great money to be made. I’ve made several efforts over the past couple years to do my own thing and none of them have really produced any great results. I had a one site that got to be really popular in a niche market for a few months and made me some cash, but overall, I haven’t been real successful. Hopefully, that’s about to change.

I was introduced to a site a week or so back called the ThirtyDayChallenge. Basically, during the month of August they run a course where they teach you how to go about making money on the Internet. The challenge is to earn $10 during the month of August using their techniques. I should mention that the site is free to sign up, the challenge is free, the training is free and all the tools that you will use during the Thirty Day Challenge are, you guessed it, free.

If you are at all interested in making money through Internet marketing, you would be silly to pass up this opportunity to learn from a group of Been-There-Done-That guys who already make a living in this field. That they are passing on their knowledge and techniques is awesome and should be taken advantage of. Not to mention the huge forum that is available on the site that already has over 2000 posts. If you are a Facebook user, check out the Thirty Day Challenge group, too.

If you decide take part in the challenge, find me on Facebook and add me as a friend so we can keep in touch on our progress in the challenge!

Best of luck!