Thailand lifts ban on Youtube
August 31, 2007
Just after the 30 day challenge comes to an end Thailand’s military government decides to lift the ban on the site. Going through a proxy was always an alternative, but it was frustrating and most of the time I gave up trying.
The official reason was that there were some videos that mocked Thailand’s monarchy. The unofficial reason was that former Prime Minister Thaksin who is currently living abroad while his arrest is being sought, was that he was using the service for political purposes.
Link building in the 30DC
August 29, 2007
It is interesting how the 30 day challenge is turning to more traditional methods of building traffic. The video I watched today was on getting links by posting on forums and blogs. It would have been nice to see something a little more original. Although the challenge is primarily for beginners.
I usually don’t spend much time trying to build links, but I have realized that I really need a lot more links to one of my sites that I am currently working on for it to be more successful. I have even been emailing webmasters today who I believe might link to my site.
The kinds of sites I look for are .edu sites and non-commercial sites that have some authority. Commercial sites are very unlikely to even read your email for a link exchange request. I try to write an individual email rather than just a copy and paste job. I also try to think of an interesting email subject. Emails with “Link exchange request” will get deleted by most webmasters.
I submit to a couple of free directories, I definitely try and get into dmoz and Yahoo. I don’t bother with paid directories.
To quote SEO expert Dave Naylor in an interview with Aaron Wall from SEO book, “If it’s really hard to get one link from a site then it’s worth getting… if all you have to do it click a button to add your URL then don’t you think it’s pretty worthless (eg. Blogs, guestbooks, directories etc..)”
I think it is a great quote and one that webmasters need to consider more. I know from my experience a couple of really good natural links brings in more traffic and link juice than a bunch of junk links.
Share in a frame
August 29, 2007
Sponsored post:
If you are looking for a unique gift you might want to take a look at Shareinaframe. Shareinaframe offers framed stock certificates for a single stock in popular companies. You can purchase Disney stock and Harley Davidson stock certificates.
The framed stock certificates could be a perfect birthday, anniversary, graduation or corporate gift. The certificate could be a great gift for children or young teenagers to help inspire their interest in finance and investing. For Disney fans, giving a Disney share certificate will certainly delight anyone of any age.
Orders can be made online or by calling their toll free number. Deliveries of the stock certificate can take up to 3 - 5 weeks, so you will need to take some planning to get your order in early. The frame with personalized plaque and a certificate announcing the gift is sent by UPS within two days of the order being received.
There are several different choices of frames and colors including Black Lacquer and American Classic. They charge $33 to process the order which you then also need to pay for the price of the single stock and frame.
The company also has an affiliate program which could work well on a gift or novelty website. They also give a free stock away each month. Click here to enter the draw.
Making money with Facebook
August 28, 2007
Internet companies are all getting on Facebook application bandwagon. Chitika have produced an application called ibought. Affiliates earn $1 for each person who adds the application to their profile.
I haven’t logged into my Chitika account for a while, but it seems like they have been doing a bit of work with their interface and adding new features. I haven’t had much success with Chitika, but if you have a product site like ipods or mobile phones it should work well.
Niches uncovered
August 26, 2007
Just as I previously wrote not to use that great niche right now, 45n5 has compiled a list of all of the niches people are working on in the challenge.
My niche is also in the list! Perhaps the idea to use tumblr was a bit of a mistake, but at least people could see how quickly you could get into Google and start ranking for keywords. I do feel a little sorry for the people who spent time doing research to find that great undiscovered niche and put up a tumblr blog.
I have taken a bit of time off the past week so I need to spend some time trying to catch up on the thirty day challenge and some of my other projects I am currently working on.
I recently purchased a new website and currently working on the transfer now. It’s a nice looking site and I should be able to better monetize and market it better than it currently is.
Total bankruptcy
August 25, 2007
This excellent web site, www.totalbankruptcy.com provides a comprehensive review of the bankruptcy process. The site is easy to navigate, and the information is well-written and clear. In addition to providing information about Chapter 7 and Chapter13 bankruptcy, the site discusses common economic causes of bankruptcy, such as job loss and medical expenses. Another section offers information and advice on the period after successful discharge of a bankruptcy.
The site offers a free consultation with one of their bankruptcy lawyers. The consultation requires completion of an online form covering motivation, bills, assets, and budget. Filling in the information would be a good exercise for anyone who has debt. A debt calculator is available to help you determine debt level.
The bankruptcy lawyer locator gives you an address, maps, and driving directions. One tiny glitch is that some addresses with directions in them, such as 1st Ave. N, have been entered as 1st Ave North, causing an error and requiring another click to get to the map.
A quick prowl through a section on celebrity bankruptcy reports that Abraham Lincoln declared bankruptcy when his grocery store failed, in addition to documenting bankruptcy filings by famous actors, singers, athletes. Besides this section, which will make you feel a little better, there are links to outside resources such as message boards and debt counseling services.
Don’t use that great undiscovered niche now
August 18, 2007
I found quite a few different niches using the free keyword tracker and Google trends tool provided in the 30 day challenge.
Surprisingly sudoku had quite a few keyword phrases that fit the required number of searches and competitive search phrases. I tried registering “sudoku tips” at tumblr and found someone had already taken it! I know that there are other sites, I could have used, but I decided on targeting the phrase “free online sudoku“. There is another reason why I am targeting sudoku, which I will be revealing later.
Search phrase Competing sites Number of searches
free sudoku games 869 110
free online sudoku 30000 260
sudoku tips 21,700 365
If you are wondering why I am writing about my niche, well if you have discovered a fantastic niche using the keyword tools I would suggest not going through with it now. Everyone is following Ed’s teachings, so it is fairly easy to see what other niches people are working on. The less popular social networking sites have all of these tumblr blogs being submitted, obviously people from the 30DC. “How to grow tomatos”, “Ballroom dancing shoes” etc.
So if you do find a great niche, wait until the 30DC challenge is over before you start working on it.
Update: Amazing but I am now ranked 13th for “free online sudoku”. If you had any doubts about the 30DC, everything I have done so far has worked as they have taught.
Market research and search engine traffic
August 16, 2007
I took a six hour bus trip today from Koh Chang back to Bangkok and re-listened to some of the podcasts from the 30 day challenge. It got me thinking a bit about what Ed is teaching and how I have done my own market research up until now.
One of the main emphasis’s of the challenge is market research. Or more importantly, doing market research focused on search volume. Up until now, I have thought of an idea for a website, looked around for competing sites and thought of ideas of how I could come up with something better.
I haven’t placed much emphasis on researching keywords. This is probably one of the many reasons why the ebooks I have written have performed so badly. What you might think of as a good idea, might not be what people are looking for on the internet, no matter how great you think your book is. I wrote a guide to living in Japan and to date have only sold a couple of copies. It was something I wanted to write anyway and sometimes I think of just putting all of the content on my website and placing Adsense on it. The .net of the domain has a fairly active forum which I just discovered the other day.
If you are looking to making a quick buck, I think you need to do market research, just as Ed is teaching in the Thirty Day Challenge. Typical sales pages for information products will tend to rank only for a few targetted keywords, which is why it is so important to find searches that have a high volume and little competition.
If you want to build a website which has long lasting value, I think keywords are important, but I think you also need to see where you can create value in your website over your competition. If your site has good SEO and gets well indexed by Google, the site should perform well from long tail keyword searches.
If you have read the book on the subject, you will understand the value of the Long Tail. Building a website in a competitive niche can prove successful, if you are prepared to be patient and spend the time promoting and marketing the site.
Great tool available from the 30DC
August 14, 2007
Wordtracker have developed a great tool for uncovering niches for the thirty day challenge.
Even if you aren’t doing the challenge, you can still use the tool. The tool compares the data from Wordtracker with the results from Google trends.
The 30 day challenge team has already verified that the term “male yeast infection” gets around 500 searches a day. The results from wordtracker also take into account MSN and Yahoo searches. The 30DC is concentrating purely on ranking in Google, which is why they are trying to estimate the number of daily searches using Google trends.
The whole idea is finding a niche which has less than 30,000 competing sites. This is defined by doing a search with inverted commas around the phrase like “Tokyo hotels”. This is the first test. The next test is that the phrase gets at least 100 searches a day. Tokyo hotels passes on searches a day (270), but fails on competition (1.4 million pages).
The phrase also needs to has something which you could possibly create a product around or has affiliate programs which you could join and promote. It took a while but I found one such phrase just now. It goes against my principle of creating sites/content on what I am interested in, but I want to try and follow the 30 day challenge to the letter. It’s a bit of fun if you like games or challenges (better than doing a sudoku puzzle).
Another test is when you look in the top search results, how many web 2.0 type sites do you see. Presumably we will be using web 2.0 sites like Squidoo to promote or niche pages, so if all of the results are web 2.0 properties it is going to be hard to make the strategy work.
Even if you have just heard of the 30DC you could try out the above tool using various combinations of keywords. All of the videos so far have been leading up to this point, so you could possibly still skip all of them and just find a keyword combination that first passes the main test (keyword search versus competition) and then proceed to the affiliate programs/web 2.0 site test.
One valuable lesson I learnt in sales
August 10, 2007
I once had a job in retail. I hated the job, but I did learn some valuable lessons.
My boss told me about one employee she had who could not sell high priced items. The person was fine with lower priced items, but not the high end stuff - where the real money is at. My boss came to the conclusion that the employee could not afford the items herself, so she had trouble selling them.
I think you can apply this same lesson to internet marketing. Just because you might not like something (long sales letters, opt-in boxes), it does not mean you shouldn’t use it on your sites. Just because you might not spend a thousand dollars on an internet marketing course, there are plenty of people who will.
You need to test everything and use whatever works.
