Wrapping Up The 30DC & Launching the AdSense Project

This year’s Thirty Day Challenge is now complete and my experience was very different from last year. A few points of note:

I didn’t Make The $1

I didn’t expect to either :-) The site that I created for the 30DC is still ranking way too low in the serps to generate enough traffic to create any sales. Mind you, I’ve had around 50% click through rate to the affiliate product which surprised me. No sales though but there’s only been about 50 visitors so far! To do the challenge justice I will not touch the site now until I have had the magic 200 visitors and at that point if a sale has not been made I will remove the affiliate offer and replace it with AdSense. This site is A01 in the table below.

This Year’s Challenge Was So Well Organised

Last year it was a bloody mess! This year they really organised it well. However I feel there’s a slight downside to this… It’s so well organised and so streamlined that I feel as though a lot of assumptions were made. I knew exactly what I was doing as I did it last year and of course I’ve been involved in IM for a year now but I wonder if newbies will really get the whole picture. The challenge ended without really giving the members an idea of where to go from here in terms of product creation. Perhaps that is still to come in the autoresponder sequence!

Some of The PreSeason Was Totally Unnecessary

Last year social media was a big part of the challenge. We were encouraged to form teams and to socially promote each others content in Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg and many social bookmarking sites. In this year’s pre-season we were told to join Twitter and Friendfeed but they were not used in the challenge itself. Even at the end of the preseason Ed put out a cheat sheet video saying that if you only have time to watch one video to watch the one on Twitter. Why? To get more followers for Mr Dale :p If people don’t get followers on services such as Twitter and Friendfeed then their use becomes somewhat limited so I thought this was pretty much irrelevant to the challenge.

Market Samurai Is Awesome!

As soon as I saw Market Samurai I fell in love with it for one reason – SPEED. It allows you to do in an hour what would have taken you a day to do manually. I never thought I would hear myself say this but I really think they are selling it too cheap. Why on earth aren’t they making this a monthly fee? Come on guys, it’s worth at least $50 a month and hurry up with the affiliate program so I can make a buck here :D

I’ve used it daily throughout August and with the latest features they’ve added for getting backlinks this is going to be a tool to be used throughout the entire process of researching, building and promoting a website. I’ll be talking about it a lot in this project and showing you just how I use it.

I Was Unimpressed by WordPress Direct

WordPress Direct is a system to allow you to manage WordPress blogs automatically. Let’s get one thing straight here – for the technically challenged its a godsend. If you found my ebook on WordPress useful then you’ll probably find WPD useful. It allows you to build a WordPress blog in minutes and that’s fine but it only takes me about 10 minutes to do it manually anyway. Plus for me personally I am a control freak. I want to tweak every detail of my blog and I don’t like things being done for me. I love automated tools but only if they still allow you full control.

One of the main features that is being promoted is the auto content posting feature. With WPD you can build your blog in five minutes and then it will automatically create and post content for you totally on auto-pilot – perflect for spam blogs! I’ll be talking about this in more detail in a later blog post (I have enough material for a serious rant so that deserves its own post!) but basically if you intend to create your own content for your sites then this isn’t all that useful. It might come in handy for keeping a site fresh once you’re done with it though.

The 30DC Process is Sound, But Not For Me At This Time

Here’s the process in a nutshell – research a market, use web 2.0 strategies to test the market quickly, one you’ve determined that the market is profitable you then become a proper marketer and build your product for that market and all that entails. Quite simply, I have no desire to create any products at this time in any niche because I am already active in the only two niches that really interest me – making money online and living a life that feels good. If I create any new products you’ll know about it from one of my two blogs but I have no desire to create a toenail clipping ebook and that is why the 30DC (and as a result, most Internet Marketing techniques) are just not for me right now.

However, for those of you who want to be proper Internet marketers then the 30DC is an excellent starting place but it’s only going to get you up to the testing stage. If you want to move on from there and learn about product creation, copywriting, autoresponders, PPC etc etc then you’ll need to go elsewhere. Of course many people start backwards by trying to do all that stuff first without first having properly researched and tested the market and this is where I believe the 30DC excels. I don’t think there is any better teaching about Market Research on the Internet than in the Thirty Day Challenge.

What I like about the 30DC is that it is totally hands-on – it shows you exactly how to do something. I’ve seen so many ebooks and video courses that spout this stuff and its all full of pure waffle – garbage that you can’t apply. I am a firm beliver in giving people solid information that they can clearly follow and implement. The 30DC does that.

Ed Dale Makes Money With AdSense!!

Sunday night Ed recorded the last of the live TV shows and this time he did it from London (I would have gone to the London meetup if I had known about it in advance) so it was on my timezone so I was able to listen in live. Throughout the challenge the example vintage guitar blog that the boys created got badly spammed by ed-haterz (anyone who becomes successful online attracts negative attention – it is a fact of Internetdom!) so they just threw up some AdSense on it. In the show Ed revealed that the site was now making $3 a day with AdSense and said that Caroline Middlebrook was probably laughing and yes I was lol!

This is a good time to clarify something – Ed doesn’t like AdSense but not because it is inherently bad, but because if you find a niche in which you can make money from AdSense then you’ll probably find that you could make a lot more money by creating your own product. However, that is more difficult and you either need some extra skills or the means to outsource. For a complete beginner, AdSense is just easier. Not only that but if you create a successful AdSense site you can always build it out later and create your own product later on.

Introducing the AdSense Project

Really, I’ve been doing this for a month already as I started a second niche site which I built along side the 30DC one but this one was geared towards AdSense. However I’ve spent most of the month doing research and the sites I have started are still in their beginning stages so this is a good time to start the project. I have now created a project page on the blog as usual and I expect this project to be quite long, around 6-12 months at least.

One of the things I want to do with this project is clearly show my progress in terms of the sites that have been built or are still being worked on, where they are ranking for their primary keyword and the income they have made. It would be too time consuming to keep such stats updated in real time so instead I’ll publish the latest figures on a monthly basis. As I’ve actually been building some sites throughout the month of August I can start this right now.

I’ll have two sets of stats – an overview that shows at a glance how many sites I have built and are still being worked on, and the financial progress. This will be updated once a month and displayed on the project page. Here’s the first stats for August:

I also have more detailed stats that breaks down each site individually and shows the status, ranking and income of each one. This allows me to see how long it takes for a site to go from inception to profit. First of all, let me give you the table and then I’ll explain what it all means:

Niche / Site

When I first started on the Thirty Day Challenge and did my keyword research I found a niche that looked good and identified several keyword phrases that could work. I am using a process of building a whole site around a single keyword phrase and therefore I’ll be building multiple sites in each niche. As you can see I have started work on multiple sites and I’m also working in two different niches.

Site Status

You will see four statuses here:

Content - this is the first stage and this is where I am building the site. The main work involved here is creating the content articles for the site and making sure that all the on-page SEO techniques are in place. I expect the site to get indexed in Google at some point here but rankings are likely to be very poor.

Links - once the site is built the majority of the effort goes into off-page SEO which is basically link building. I have a whole bunch of techniques that I intend to experiment with here and I’ll be discussing all of those at length. Hopefully as Google starts to pick up the backlinks I would see the rankings start to rise but that might still take months if the site is on a new domain (all the above sites are new domains) and finds its way into the Google sandbox.

Maint - once I have done a certain amount of backlink building I’m not going to do any more work on the site until it rises in the rankings and starts to get traffic and generate some revenue. There’s no point in doing a ton of work until you know whether the site is going to produce a decent income. Therefore once the content and basic link building is done the site goes into maintenance mode. Every month I’ll be checking the stats and if the site looks like it could be a winner then I’ll do a bit more work on it – tweak the existing content, build some new content, build some new links and so on.

On Hold - At the moment I am building brand new domains for all these sites though I might experimenting with buying domains later. For new domains one factor that causes them to go into the Google sandbox is simply their age – or lack of it. Google doesn’t trust brand new sites and therefore if I know that I am going to be building more sites then I will do a small amount of work to build the site and get it indexed and then just leave it to age the domain until I have time to work on it. This might allow it to come out of the sandbox a little quicker once I start working on it properly. In a later post I will explain exactly what work I do to put a site on hold.

Rank

This is the position that the site ranks in the serps. At first this will be quite innacurate as I’ll just be checking where it falls to the nearest 100 but when it ranks that low the traffic will be insignificant. Once it gets above position 100 I’ll track it properly using a serps tools. Also, rankings change all the time so whatever you see in these posts will simply be the position it was at on the specific day that I ran the last check.

Month Registered

The month in which the domain was registered.

Month Earning

The month in which the month first started generating revenue. Together with the previous column, these two dates will give me an idea of how long it is taking for the sites to start earning from the time of completion and it will also help me to see if it helps to put a site on hold or not.

Monthly Revenue

This will keep track of the average monthly revenue and will be calculated from the month that the site first starts to generate revenue.

This post is already hugely long so I need to finish it up. In the next post I’ll be explaining the actual strategy for the project.

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