Thirty Day Challenge Update
I’ve not really posted as much as I thought I would about this year’s Thirty Day Challenge. In this post I’ll explain a little more about the philosophy of the 30DC, what you can expect to learn if you take part and what my plans are from this point on.
What is the 30DC Business Model?
In a nutshell – find a niche, test the profitability of that niche by driving traffic initially to a website which is monetized with an affiliate program, and then if it is profitable build a business in that niche by developing your own product.
The ultimate end game of the 30DC is to create your own product in the niche. This is often an infoproduct such as an ebook, course, membership site etc. The idea is that once you are able to drive traffic to a website, you can earn more money by selling your own product than by selling somebody else’s as an affiliate or by monetizing with something like AdSense.
The Art of Product Creation
To be at the top of the field as an Internet marketer you need to be able to enter any niche and be able to create a product in that niche. If you follow the money by going after lucrative niches where people actually spend real money as opposed to hobby niches where people like to read but don’t buy, then you can make some serious money.
The question is, HOW do you create your own product? There are usually two choices. The first and most obvious is to create it entirely yourself. You write the content. This is what I have done with my own products that you see promoted at the top of this blog. You might be wondering why you wouldn’t want to create your own product?
The main reason why people don’t want to create products themselves is that they might not have any personal interest or knowledge in the niche. It is damn hard to create a product around something you don’t know much about and have no desire to learn about. So the second option is to either hire somebody else to create it for you or to work with somebody who has the knowledge and find a way to tap into that knowledge to create the product.
My Niche Selection and Product Situation
Last year when I did the 30DC in 2007, I brainstormed every possible topic that I had any interest in and not one of them is a profitable niche. Therefore this year I already knew that if I was to find a profitable niche, it would be in an area that I don’t care about which also means that I would struggle if I wanted to create my own product.
What I decided to do this year was approach my niche research from the perspective of trying to find a problem to solve. I recently published a post about finding high paying niches and I used those techniques to pick a niche to use for this year and it is in an area that not only am I not interested in, but it is something that I can never experience first hand.
Let me give you an example of what I mean by that: a man can learn everything there is to know about pregnancy and he can become very knowledgeable in that area but he can never experience it first hand for himself so when he writes or talks about the subject, his words come from knowledge only and not experience.
It is my belief that the best products come from real first-hand experience. Also, for me personally, I just find writing about a subject I don’t care about to be boring as hell! I find it quite easy to write a 300-500 word article but creating an entire product would just be too much effort if I was not interested in the area.
Therefore when I started this year’s 30DC I knew that I would not see it through to it’s conclusion and create my own product so I decided at the outset to create more than one site in the niche and use purely 30DC techniques on one and then build the second one with AdSense income in mind and then compare the two.
Progress of my Niche Sites
I have 2 sites in development and two others ‘on hold’. For the two on hold I’ve registered a domain name, built the site, published a single post and bookmarked it. This allows the site to get indexed in Google and the domain to start ageing until such time as I go to work on it properly.
Both my niche sites are indexed but they are ranking very low in the serps – around position 400-500! Thus I’m not getting much traffic yet hehe! I am working on both at the same time. The aim is to create up to 10 articles on each site and build backlinks to allow it to rank. However, due to the Google Sandbox effect, it may take several months for them to rank properly as both sites have been built on brand new domains.
What’s Next?
I’m continuing with the 30DC however as I have not yet had my magic 200 visitors I cannot make any decisions as to the profitability of the niche which means that I have not followed through on the lessons about Google AdWords. I have seen the particular affiliate program that I have chosen to promote all over the place. I haven’t bought it so I have no idea if it’s any good.
The idea of the 30DC number 200 is that even with a bad website, bad articles and a bad sales letter you should still be able to make a sale with 200 visitors in a buying market. This means that if you’ve had 200 visitors to your website and you’ve still not made a sale of the product (whether it is an affiliate product or your own is irrelevant) then your market is no good or there is something seriously wrong with your site or product.
Until I get 200 visitors I can’t make that decision.
About AdSense
I crunched some numbers about AdSense recently and I was quite excited but here’s the thing… I did a calculation that assumed 100 visitors a day, a 5% clickthrough and an AdSense payout of $1.50 per click. That worked out at a monthly income for one site of $225. If instead, those 100 visitors a day were being sold my own product that was priced quite high at say $97, then with one sale in 200 visitors that site would generate a monthly income of $1,455 – quite a difference!
That is precisely why the 30DC boys encourage the creation of your own product. There’s another advantage too – those AdSense numbers are based on rather high payouts and not all keywords pay those amounts. I picked a niche for the 30DC that also did well in AdSense but of course there is no real correlation between AdSense and what you charge for your product. This means that in general, if you are up to the challenge of creating your own product then you’ll be able to find find more niches in which you can make money than if you rely purely on AdSense.
For me personally, I simply don’t want to create a product about a topic that I don’t have first have experience with. I can write about WordPress and about StumbleUpon but not about vintage electric guitars :-) That is why I am using AdSense – it’s easy.
I’m going to close the 30DC project at the end of this month and launch a new AdSense project which should run for several months.
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Bill Stevens
August 26, 2008
I’m also doing the 30DC and you have a nice take on things. I will say that I’ve learned some new stuff from 30DC so it’s worth that and it’s a lot of great free information and a good community in the forums.
The 25 day check with 1-2 sales out of 200 visitors seems a bit aggressive but at least it’s a benchmark.
Is the Adsense project you mention in the last sentence a site you’re going to create using a different model or…?