30 day challenge 2009 starts today

The thirty day challenge for 2009 started today. It is an entirely free course helping people to make money online. Last year I was too buy working on a site for the Beijing Olympics, but this year I want to complete the whole challenge. It will go through to the end of August.

I really like what they teach and if you look at many other programs, they basically revolve around similar themes: find a niche, build a website, get traffic and monetize the site. The methods might be presented in different formats, but that is the basic formula for making money on the internet.

The 30 day challenge gets thousands of people join every year, but many people lose interest towards the end. Before you invest in any other internet marketing programs, you should at least try the 30DC.

If you are an existing business owner or you might already be making money on the internet, you will still get a lot out of doing the challenge. The material is also presented in an easy to understand manner and doesn’t presume any special technical or business knowledge.

Let me know in the comments if you are also planning on taking the 2009 30 day challenge.

Way overpriced internet marketing products

It seems to me that internet marketers are really testing the waters as to how much they can charge for their products.

I listened to a podcast with a “Social Media guru” and it was mildly interesting and I later got an email promoting their product. I didn’t really have much intention to buy, but I wanted to see what they were selling it for. I gasped when I saw the price – $2,497, or four easy payments of $697.

Of course the program is “limited” to the first 200 people, before the “doors are closed”. I don’t plan on shelling out $2000 to learn about Twitter and YouTube, so in honesty I can’t really comment on whether the program is worth the money.

I think learning about social media is important and it is a good way to promote your business, but to me I think it is something that is pretty easy to learn by yourself.

There has been so much written lately about twitter and how to make money from twitter, yet twitter the company is struggling to find a successful revenue model.

I have participated in the 30 Day Challenge which is a free course and you can get a pretty good idea from completing what these kinds of programs are all about. The fact is, like with the 30DC most people start these programs with good intentions, only a few go on to complete the whole challenge.

30 day challenge preseason starts

I did the 30 day challenge last year and the pre-season is just starting up again now. I learnt a lot about online marketing and has really helped me with my websites.

If you are an experienced marketer looking for something new or totally new to internet marketing, I strongly suggest you take part. It is a lot of fun, a good opportunity for networking and you might learn a thing or two.

The 30 day challenge (30DC) site is here: www.thirtydaychallenge.com. It is free to take the course and there is no pressure to buy any of their other information/courses.

One thing I learnt from the 30 Day Challenge

Once thing which really got me thinking about the 30 Day Challenge is that if you have a new idea for a website, you don’t necessarily have to go out and purchase a new domain for it. There are services like Squidoo that allow you to set up your own one page website.

I have been working on a couple of pages the past couple of days to sell affiliate products on and to promote/build links to some of my other websites. Squidoo already has traffic and ranking, so it is possible to quickly get some good keyword rankings rather than creating a whole new website.

If your lens does well you can then consider starting up a new website. It’s a great cost-free way of testing a new market. Creating a site like this could take around 1-2 hours or even less. Create a couple of links to the site, make sure you have some affiliate links in your new web page and you can then forget about it.

You aren’t likely to get super rich from doing this, but I would be fairly confident that without doing any further work to your page you should be able to generate a couple of sales a year from your site. Hubpages is another Squidoo type clone that has been getting a bit of press recently.

I you don’t have any money to invest in your new internet business Squidoo and Hubpages are a great way to get started. Also if you have zero technical skills, these sites are very user friendly and are a great way to enter the world of affiliate marketing.

By building lots of websites, pages on these networks, blogs you are building up your “Internet Arsenal”. Sometimes blogs will work and sometimes a squidoo site will work. The important thing is to test all of these different methods.

It might seem like a lot of work, but I generally spend a few hours setting something up, put some affiliate links in and include some way to analyze traffic. Get a couple of links to the site and then forget about it. If I make some affiliate sales, I then go back and check where I was getting traffic from, add some more content and research any new affiliate programs.

You could summarize the process like this:

Idea -> Create -> Monetize -> Analyze -> Improve -> Repeat

Thailand lifts ban on Youtube

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

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.

Niches uncovered

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.

Don’t use that great undiscovered niche now

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

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

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.

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