For those not sure what the 30 day challenge is it is simply a 30 day crash course on making your first dollar online. If you can make $1 there is no reason why you can’t replicate the process to earn $100, $1000, $10,000, etc. In fact I think you will be surprised how easy it is to make $1 online, the real challenge is maintaining the discipline to keep growing and promoting your sites. Making money online may not be rocket science but it does take a fair amount of dedication and repetition.

The thirty day challenge focuses on the most popular and accessible way to make money online, affiliate marketing, and is primarily aimed at beginners, however I always find a few gems which I believe also makes it worthwhile for more experienced marketers.

There are a ton of videos this year (over 100 I believe) to digest so hopefully by following my blog you will be able to save some time and skip the ones on topics which you are already comfortable with.

You can access all of the videos here http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/training/

So lets get into it!

Thirty Day Challenge Introduction

Ed Dale (30 Day Challenge mastermind) discusses workload and how to tackle the thirty day challenge. Mainly common sense applies, don’t try and digest too much info at once, take bit sized chunks and take your time. Patience is definitely a virtue when it comes to internet marketing!

If technology is not your biggest strength then there is extensive information on what tools are required and how to use them in the preseason build up (scroll to the bottom of the page).

A Magnificent Symphony In Four Parts

If you are familiar with the 30DC (thirty day challenge) you will already be familiar with Ed’s “magnificent symphony in four parts”.

The four parts being:

• Market Research: There is virtually endless amounts of niche markets which can be explored and in later videos the 30DC team will show you some powerful ways to find niche markets which are virtually guaranteed to be profitable.
• Traffic: This one is a no brainer and there are some tools which will be showcased to easily find keywords which have traffic.
• Conversion: Getting traffic is one thing however if people are not in purchase mode i.e. have a problem for which you have a solution.
• Competition: Obviously you want to make the process as easy as possible so you will learn how to identify keywords which you can easily rank for. Probably one of the biggest mistakes people make is going after keywords which are far to competitive.

Finding a Niche Part 1

One of Ed’s side kicks, Dan Raine, discusses techniques on finding a nice.

• Tip #1: Carry a notebook to take down ideas. You never know when you might have stumble across a great idea so it pays to get them down on paper. If you have an iPhone then make the most of it!
• Tip #2: For beginners take on a niche which you are interested in and passionate about. This makes it much easier to create content on and trust me, the more content you can create the greater your chance of success. Providing it’s useful, good quality content of course!
• Tip #3: Magazines can be the best source for finding niche ideas. Not only magazines themselves but take a look at what people are advertising within the magazine.
• Tip #4: Target a micro niche. A micro niche is a niche inside a niche, these are a great way to enter into a market with the least amount of effort. Once you dominate a micro niche you can target other micro niches in the same niche and eventually go after the niche itself.

  By targeting all of the micro niches within a particular niche over time you will find you actually start to rank in the search engines for the niche itself, effectively killing two birds with one stone.

  My explanation of a micro niche
  Market: Guitar
  Niche: How to Play the Guitar
  Micro-Niche: How to Play the Bass Guitar

Drill down into a niche as far as possible starting from the bottom and work your way up. Your odds of being successful will be greatly improved if you follow this advice.

Finding a Niche Part 2

Finding a Niche Part 3

Autoposting Content on WordPressdirect

Another tip on Adwords is to run two separate ad groups one for the search network and one for the content network, the reason being is that your CTR for the content network will be extremely low which in turn will ruin your search network CTR.

Also make sure you keep your keyword groups very tight,

Manage Your Google Adwords PPC Campaign

Visit www.perrymarshall.com for a more in depth and accurate course on Google Adwords.

Finding Keywords For Your Adwords Campaign

Add Keywords To Your Adwords Campaign

Points to not from this video are that when split testing you do not need to switch an ad on or off to ensure the best ad is displayed as mentioned in the video as Google automatically displays the ad which has the highest CTR. You simply need to add as many ads as possible and Google will do the rest.

Also mentioned in the video is to simply add the broad, phrase and exact match of your keyword however that is not necessarily going to give the best results. If you have your keyword entered as broad match then Google will display it for keywords which it believes are related to your keyword which may not convert well therefore it\’s best to start off with exact match first and then try phrase and broad match if you have success.

I would recommend spending additional time learning about the nuts and bolts of Adwords rather than just jumping right in because it is important to do it the right way otherwise you will find yourself spending money on keywords which aren\’t going to convert and also paying too much per click.

The best advice I can provide in regards to Adwords is to start off with a small budget and keep your keywords highly targeted. The more targeted the keywords are to your niche the more likely you are to generate a sale. If you are successful with your highly targeted keywords then you can start to experiment with broader keywords.

One of the leading experts in running successful Google Adwords Campaigns is Perry Marshall. He has a free 5 day course on his site www.perrymarshall.com

Getting Started With Google Adwords

Google Adwords has made many, many self made millionaires because of how powerful it is if used the right way. It is also an easy way to become broke if done the wrong way. The key to Adwords is to start off slowly and closely monitor your

How To Increase Traffic To Your Blog

If you are getting traffic and not making any sales then again it is time to go back to the drawing board. I would look at reasons why I am not making any sales and try a few things first before giving up on that particular niche. At least one sale for every two to three hundred visitors is something you should aim for.

Do You Need To Change Your Affiliate Promotion

There are actually much easier ways to do this, there are several free tools on the net which can find out this for you. One is www.seomoz.org/rank-checker

For serious internet marketers you will eventually have dozens if not hundreds of keywords that you want to keep track on and using the above method of checking one at a time is just simply not an option as it would take too long.

A tool I use to monitor my rankings for all of my keywords for my many sites is called SEO Elite.

Check Your Blog Ranking In The SERPS

Article marketing is one of the most widely used techniques to drive direct traffic and build links. There are literally thousands of article directories on the internet so there is a lot of potential to obtain a heap of back links. You can submit your articles manually or you can use article submission services which automatically submit your articles for you.

The top 3 article distribution services are

1. Unique Article Wizard

2. Article Marketer

3. iSnare

If you are anything like me you are probably starting to find all of this content creation time consuming and tedious. Luckily there are many affordable “ghost writers” who will write articles for you on virtually any topic. You can find writers on www.guru.com and www.elance.com

Another tool which creates articles for you is called Instant Article Wizard which you can find out more about here www.instantarticlewizardpro.com

Upload An Article to Ezinearticles

Update On WordPressdirect

Day 15 is about setting up a Weebly site. You will start to see over the next few days that it’s all about putting up as much content as possible all over the internet pointing to your own site. By putting content on well established “authority” sites and linking to your own site you are building a lot of trust with the search engines therefore improving your rankings.

Setting Up A Weebly Site

Ed just does a quick overview of Google Analytics and how you can monitor your traffic. Google Analytics can tell you a wealth of information and is an extremely powerful tool. The best way to learn how to use it is just to spend time pushing all the buttons and seeing what they all do. Some of the important things you will want to look at is the search traffic data and what keywords people are typing in to the search engines to find your site.

Think about this, if you are getting traffic for a particular keyword and you are ranking say 26 imagine what would happen if you managed to rank in the top 10 considering only 2% of people click on the second page of results.

A good idea is to check the sites ranking above you for those keywords using the SEO tool for Firefox and determine if you think you can outrank them. Look for sites no older than 3 years with few back links as they will be easy to out rank.

If you aren’t receiving traffic and your site is indexed then you may need to re-evaluate your keyword and target something with less competition. The worst thing you can do is keep promoting a keyword which isn’t performing. Don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board and start your market research again.

If your site isn’t indexed then you need to get more back links, it’s as simple as that. Building a Squidoo lens and social bookmarking it should get your site indexed in 24 – 48 hours max.

Using Google Analytics To Check Your Blog Stats

Don’t forget to social bookmark all of your content!

How To Create A Hubpages Site

They key is to make sure you optimize your lens your your chosen keywords in the lens title, lens URL and scattered throughout the lens. The more info you can add to your lens(es) the more traffic pulling potential it has and the more likely other Squidoo lensmasters are to link to it.

Also make sure you use the maximum number of tags which I believe is about 40, as each tag you use creates a back link to your lens from the Squidoo tags pages.

GuruBob also shows today how to find content on your niche using Market Samurai. The find content option of Market Samurai has a pretty cool feature which creates an RSS feed of content pulled from a large variety of sources which you can add to your Squidoo Lens.

Today’s Videos

How To Create A Squidoo Lens

Find More Content Using Market Samurai

]]> http://www.wealthontap.com/30-day-challenge-2008-day-11-how-to-create-a-squidoo-lens/feed/ 0 http://www.wealthontap.com/30-day-challenge-2008-day-10-30dc-rss-submission/ http://www.wealthontap.com/30-day-challenge-2008-day-10-30dc-rss-submission/#comments Sun, 10 Aug 2008 10:58:04 +0000 Mike Law http://www.wealthontap.com/?p=788 Today is a day off…sort of. The only thing required today is to submit your blogs RSS feed using the TDC RSS Submission service www.thirtydaychallenge.com/members/tools/rsssubmit.php

The tool is simple to use you simply enter the URL of your blog, your feed URL and your main keyword. You can also add secondary keywords in the tags field and a short description which should also include your keywords.

Another tool I use for RSS Submission is called RSS Submit, you can find out more about it here www.dummysoftware.com/rsssubmit.html

Submit Your RSS Feed To RSS Directories

The first place to go is Google Groups www.google.com/groups where you can locate groups specific to your niche market.

To find forums related to your niche simply type your main keyword into Google with forum appended. For example if your niche is ‘golf’ you would type ‘golf forum’ in to Google.

The key here is to add value to whatever discussion you are participating in, if you spam these sites you will have your accounts banned and will be wasting your time.

A tool which I recently posted about called Comment Kahuna finds blogs and Squidoo lenses related to the keyword you enter which can comment on.

The other thing taught today is how to find out if your site is indexed which is simply a matter of typing ‘site:yourdomain.com’ into Google.

If your site is indexed it will come up in the results, if not you will get a message saying “Your search – site:yourdomain.com – did not match any documents.”

It can take some time for your site to be indexed however by building your back links the time will be reduced.

Today’s Videos

How To Get More Backlinks

How To Find Out If Your Site Is Indexed

Some believe that social media is going to become more popular than traditional search engines because of the fact it is voted for by humans therefore more reliable. Although search engines, Google in particular, are constantly making huge improvements to their search results they are a long way off being able to observe what a human can. Perhaps Google will start to factor in human submitted content to tools like Google Reader in it’s search results, if it is not already.

The advantage search engines have over social bookmarking sites is that they can process far more information whereas social bookmarking sites are limited by the amount of people submitting content. The majority of people who use social bookmarking sites are generally tech savvy people who all fit a similar demographic therefore you may find a lot of great content on the iPhone but very little on fishing tips. However as more and more people use social bookmarking this will become less of a factor.

Anyhow the search engines are definitely paying a close eye to social bookmarking sites and put a lot of trust in content which is listed there due to the reasons I just mentioned. This is why it is so effective at getting new content indexed. You will notice that social bookmarking sites rank extremely well and your bookmarked content will often outrank your own site especially if it is a new domain.

Social bookmarking is only one method you will be using to promote your site so don’t be concerned if you are not ranking on the first page of Google right away, the first objective is to get your site indexed then you can focus on increasing your rankings.

Something which is extremely important to know and was not mentioned by Ed in today’s training is that if you only bookmark pages on your own site then your account’s will be banned. Social bookmarking sites are highly susceptible to spammers so have very strict guidelines in place, in order to avoid having your account removed you need to use it as it was designed not as a self promotional tool.

A method I use is to bookmark new content which turns up from Google Alerts and throw in a few bookmarks to my own sites here and there but the key is to keep it to a minimum.

Today’s Videos

Bookmarking Your Blog With Socialmarker

Just the one video today which explains how to use Social Marker www.socialmarker.com which semi automates your bookmarking.

Summary of Day 8

Nothing surprising about today’s training, social bookmarking continues to be an effective tool for getting indexed just make sure you use it the right way!

See you on day 9!

You will also learn a method for tracking affiliate links using another service provided by The 30 Day Challenge team. You can access it by going into your 30 Day Challenge dashboard and scrolling down you will see a link on the left hand sidebar titled ‘TDC Stats Tracker’ or clicking here www.thirtydaychallenge.com/tracking/viewtrackers.php

All you need to do is click the new URL button and paste in whatever affiliate link you wish to track. You will then be provided with a URL which looks like this http://locatereviews.com/2052517237 which will redirect to your affiliate link location. You will then be able to track how many times the link has been clicked on.

I use Google Analytics to track my affiliate links which provides more data and also allows you to use URL’s which match your site such as yoursite.com/more-info/affilliate-product.php rather than locatereviews.com/2052517237

To do this you need to create a text document on your computer and use the following code

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/wealthon/public_html/wp-includes/feed-rss2.php:11) in /home/wealthon/public_html/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php(42) : eval()’d code on line 12

Replace the link http://www.domain.com/affiliate-link with your affiliate link and replace UA-000000-0 with your Google Analytics ID.

Save the document as affiliate-product-name.php

You then need to create a directory(folder) on your site called ‘go’, ‘more-info’, ‘review’ or basically whatever you like and upload the file into that directory. You should now be able to load the file in your browser and it will redirect to your affiliate link.

Today’s Videos

How to Setup Google Analytics

A video showing how to set up a Google Analytics account and configuring it on your WordPress blog.

How to Track Affiliate Links

How to use the The 30 Day Tracking link tracking system.

Add Tracked Links On Your Blog

How to add your links generated by The 30 Day Challenge link tracking system to your WordPress blog.

Summary of Day 7

Tracking is an essential part of any online business and provides you with extremely valuable information to help your business succeed.

Google Analytics is a great tool which I use on a daily basis to keep track of how my sites are performing and as it’s free it’s perfect for people starting out on the internet.

For those getting itchy feet we should now be moving on to the promotional stage where you will start to learn how to generate traffic to your WordPress blog and hopefully make some sales.

See you on day 8!

You have two options in regards to using your own hosting account which allows you to have your own domain name such as yourdomainname.com or using the hosting provided by The 30 Day Challenge which would look something like yourkeyword.topicster.com

Registering a Domain

If you are serious about starting an online business it is highly recommended to purchase your own domain. It only costs around $10 a year to register a domain so it isn’t going to break the bank and over time that domain will increase in value providing you continue to promote it. You also have full control over what content you add to your site and don’t have to be concerned with having your account deleted and losing all of your content if it is hosted elsewhere.

It is recommended that you add your main keyword to your domain. For example if the niche you are targeting is ‘titanium golf clubs’ then your domain name should be something like titaniumgolfclubs.com. If the domain you are after is taken do not add numbers i.e. titaniumgolfclubs123.com or dashes titanium-golf-clubs.com because that looks spammy to the search engines. Try something like titaniumgolfclubreviews.com or toptitaniumgolfclubs.com. Lastly don’t try and stuff too many keywords into your domain because that also appears spammy.

www.namecheap.com is the service I use to register my domains.

Hosting Your Site

Once you have your own domain you will also need to find somewhere to host your site. Hosting varies greatly in price depending on how much information you wish to store and how much bandwidth your site is going to use. Fortunately to run a blog you do not need a lot of space or bandwidth therefore a basic plan is perfectly OK. You can also upgrade your account at any time if you need to.

The hosting service which Ed recommends is www.hostgator.com which I also have used and highly recommend. The $7.95 a month plan is the recommended plan as it allows you to host as many domains as you wish however like I just mentioned you can go for the $4.95 plan if you only wish to have one site and upgrade at any time to add additional sites.

Installing and Configuring WordPress

Now that you have your domain and host set up you will want to install WordPress. You can install WordPress yourself by using Fantastico which you will find in cPanel or you can use the service which Ed recommends called WordPress Direct. The advantage of using WordPress Direct is that it installs several plug-ins and makes optimizations to WordPress which would otherwise have to be done manually. It also comes with 1,500 themes which you can choose from which again saves you from having to find and install it yourself.

The free subscription of WordPress Direct allows you to install up to 3 blogs and the paid service allows you to install up to 15. Most 30 Day Challengers wouldn’t require more than 3 blogs as you only need one per niche market therefore the free service is perfectly fine.

Today’s Videos

Awesome Software And Domains

A video showing you how to register your own domain name.

How To Setup Your Own Hosting

Dan goes through the process of setting up your hosting account at Hostgator.

Install A Blog With WordPressdirect

Ed shows how to set up a WordPress Blog using WordPress Direct.

Add Content And Publish Blog

GuruBob shows how to add content to your WordPress site installed with WordPress Direct.

Summary of Day 6

WordPress is a great blogging platform and has been pretty much the industry standard system for affiliate marketers due to how well they perform in the search engines and the ease of use. If you are serious about starting an online business then I highly recommend getting your own domain and hosting account.

See you on day 7!

Ed introduces a new tool from, yes you guessed it, Google, which allows you to easily make notes straight from your browser. The tool is called Google Notebook and you can get a plug-in for your browser here http://www.google.com/notebook/download

The goal for the day is to start writing some articles about 300 to 500 words long for each of your keywords. The more content you write the better but as a guide try and create at least ten articles.

Today’s Video’s

Find Article Content Using Market Samurai

GuruBob shows you how to use Market Samurai to find and analyze content on your keywords which you can then use to create your own content.

How To Write A Article

Ed shows you how to convert the content you have gathered so far using Google Reader, Google Notebook, Google Alerts and Market Samurai into your own content.

Summary of Day 5

As an experienced internet marketer I can tell you that becoming efficient at creating unique content is extremely useful as the more content you have the more traffic you can generate providing you are targeting the right keywords.

If English is not your first language or you really struggle to write content for whatever reason you can hire a ghostwriter to create the content for you.

See you on Day 6!

Ed’s method to test a market is to locate an affiliate product(s) related to your niche. There are dozens of affiliate networks where you can find products to sell as well as going directly to companies.

• The first step is to go in to Google and type in your main keyword for your niche followed by affiliate. So for example if I wanted to find affiliate products related to golf I would simply type in “golf affiliate”.
• Next you can go to affiliate networks to find products and here is a list of affiliate networks which you can join.

  PayDotCom
  ClickBank
  Shareasale
  ModernClick
  LinkShare
  Affiliate Fuel
  Commission Junction

• You can also become an affiliate at Amazon www.amazon.com. Amazon commissions are quite low but as Ed points out in the video we aren’t interested in how much we can make only that people are actually buying products in your chosen niche market. If people are buying your recommended affiliate products then that the provides the opportunity of creating your own product and making 100% of the sale price rather than 5%-15%.
• One place I don’t think Ed has mentioned so far is eBay which is another great place to discover niche markets. You can also become an eBay affiliate and promote any product that is on auction. Again commissions are low however their are millions of products in just as many niches being sold on eBay every day. To become an affiliate for eBay you need to join Commission Junction www.cj.com

So your job today is to find some products you can promote to test your market.

Today’s Videos

Finding An Internet Affiliate Program

A quick video on where to find affiliate products

Writing Your First Copy

Dan gives some tips on writing your first small piece of ad copy to promote your affiliate products.

Creating Amazon Affiliate Links

Dan explains how to create your Amazon affiliate link for whichever products you wish to promote to test your market.

Manipulating Images With Picnik

A tool which is going to be released for 30 day challenger’s is going to be released in the next few days (day 6 I believe) which is going to require your affiliate link from the previous video, a short bit of unique ad copy about the product and an image. This video shows you how to use a free online edit imaging tool called Picnik www.picnik.com to get your image of your product ready.

Overview of Day 4

Testing your market with affiliate products is very effective and some internet marketers make a lot of money simply promoting affiliate products and services however a lot of internet marketers would agree that having your own product is far more profitable for obvious reasons.

Dan mentioned a new function which I am assuming is going to be added to the Market Samurai tool, perhaps the ‘Publish Content’ function which will take the info collected above, compile it, and post it to a blog, maybe?