What I Learned from the Thirty Day Challenge

I have just finished listening to the Day 31 podcast. Ed had a little quiver in his voice and I feel a bit sad too. Seriously, how weird is that?? The Thirty Day Challenge was just a course on Internet Marketing so why would I be sad that it’s over? That’s just silly!

Wasn’t it Just Some Lame E-Course?

Oh but it was so much more than that. Now I am not one of these happy feely emotional types. Nope, I’m just about the bizniss! But for some reason, this whole challenge affected me more than it should have! When it first started, I wondered why they did all of the training with video. It didn’t make any sense to me. Wouldn’t it be quicker, easier and cheaper to just write stuff? Now I get it… I feel like I’ve got to know Ed over the course (and Dan, and Rob…). Their personalities shone through and you don’t get that with text. It’s great marketing!

An Introduction to Web 2.0

I’m not what you would call an ‘early adopter’. With software I still prefer C++ to C#, my car and my phone are both my partner’s cast-off’s. Same with Web 2.0. I hadn’t really got around to getting involved. I had toyed with blogs and that’s about it. As soon as the pre-season started I was introduced to a whole load of things that usually I would have just ignored.

Facebook - I had heard of Facebook before. A gamer friend of mine showed it to me and he had all his clan buddies on there. It looked a bit geeky and somewhat ‘adolescent’. I sniggered and thought about what a waste of time it looked. However, I was determined to simply follow along with the 30DC so I faithfully signed myself up. At first I still didn’t get it. I had a look at Ed & Dan’s profiles and just saw a whole mess of stuff in there - overwhelming! But over the month I’ve started to join groups, I’ve made friends on there, I’ve even managed to get in contact with old real-life friends that I hadn’t spoken to in years. Cool stuff.

Twitter - Twitter is weird. People don’t get Twitter. I’m going to write a post about Twitter :-)

StumbleUpon - So far with all of these tools when I looked at them they just seemed like a colossal waste of time to me. Ok I hit stumble, I get some crappy website, now what? However I have since learned how wonderful StumbleUpon is for driving traffic.

From an internet marketing perspective all of these tools have been useful but subtle. I have had traffic to this very blog from all three of these resources but all of them have given me great value too. If you are in a position now where you have toyed with these tools as part of the 30DC but felt that you never ‘got it’ hang in there. As I learn more myself I’m going to write some more about them in this blog.

Niche Marketing, Brainstorming & Keyword Research

The idea of doing some kind of marketing in a niche is not new. If you’re just starting out in internet marketing you don’t want to try and compete with the big boys so it makes sense to start small. But in this challenge I found some seriously useful ways of finding niches and especially doing the keyword research.

GTrends - what an awesome idea! At the moment it’s still very much a manual process but I’m sure the Word Tracker guys will come up with an version that will allow you to run GTrends reports on multiple keywords soon. The best thing about this tool is that you have a real insight into just how much traffic you can expect to get from a certain phrase and when you put so much effort into targeting that phrase, that information is pure gold.

Externally Hosted Content

By this I mean the way we host the content that we write on sites that we do not own - Blogger, Wordpress, Squidoo, Hubpages etc etc. I have to admit, I found this totally bizarre and quite uncomfortable at first. The last time I had worked in IM was back in 2003 and I don’t think those kind of sites were even around then. When Ed told us to create a blog and then told us to put just two posts on it I was confused. “But that’s not a BLOG!” I screamed back at the video… no it’s not. We are just finding places to hold our content. Once I got that through my head it got a lot easier.

I am one of those people who needs to see the big picture. I started to get it around day 24ish but the Day 30 material with Dan’s “Network” PDF really hit it home for me and it made sense. This technique is something I never would have thought of myself, and as we have seen it’s a wonderful way to get content ranked up in Google astonishingly quickly. This technique has been the highlight of the 30DC for me.

Link Building

I felt like the last few days of the challenge were almost overshadowed by the excitement and hype of everybody making their sales and it felt like the training itself wasn’t being given much attention (in the forums). I must admit I have done very little work using this material because so far I have been unsure if my sites were worthy of backlinks. But we’ve been given an awesome array of techniques there and once again, I’m just SO glad that Mike Mindel is around to give us the details in note form!

The Opportunity

It’s the 31st today and there is just a few hours to go before the deadline. So far the only money I have made is $0.10 from Adsense that was put on my Hubpage! So, unless I make a sale in the next few hours (if it’s playdough, I’d need at least 4 sales to get the $10) I have failed this year’s challenge but I don’t care! I see the big picture, I see the opportunity. It has me jumping up and down with excitement. I am literally dreaming about this stuff in my sleep! I think both Ed and Caro were in my dream last night and Caro was her little avatar as a life-size person!

I digress :-) Really I’ve enjoyed this course, and it even gave me the push to quit my job which I had been wanting to do for months. I think this has been a wonderful resource and not just the folks behind it but all the challengers themselves who have made the forums my second home for most of August. I’m so pleased this is going to be held open indefinitely.

I’d like to give out a HYOOGE thanks to all involved… Great Stuff!

Stumble it!