TDC Day 26: Day 26 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. If your niche keyword wasn’t converting, you can still make some money from it.
2. Don’t see the past three weeks as wasted time if one set of keywords doesn’t work - you’ve learnt valuable lessons and next time round it will only be a few hours.

TDC Day 26a: Getting Money From Your Blog (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. GuruBob gives us a number of ways we can monetise our blogs even if we didn’t get that golden sale in 200 visits.
2. The main technique is ADSENSE. Get your blog ranked first and some backlinks before putting Adsense on it (because the presence of Adsense will lower your initial rankings).
3. Sign up for Adsense, you can use a Google account (eg for Gmail) if you have one or make one now.
4. You will need to have an active website to fill out the form, use your blog, you can add more later.
5. You will also need to be over 18, have a real mailing address and a telephone. If you are under 18, get your parent or guardian to sign up on behalf of you.
6. It may take a few days for your Adsense account to be approved - Google likes to get a human to check your website that it is not spam central and has content on it - if you’ve followed the 30DC process, you should be okay.
7. Once approved, you need to set up Adsense on your blog. Go to the “Adsense Set-up” tab and then select the “Adsense for Content” option. If you don’t have WordPress Direct then choose an ad type that will fit with your blog and follow Google’s instructions for setting it up on your blog.
8. If you do have WordPress Direct, make a note of your Adsense publisher’s ID (it’s in the top right hand corner of Adsense) and follow the instructions in the 30DC PDF. You may need to change the theme and then re-enable it again to get the ads to show. You should also choose a theme that is Adsense ready. You also can use the Banner Ad option on WordPress Direct (but you will need to set up an ad banner in Adsense first) - see the PDF instructions.
9. Make sure you don’t click on your own ads - this is called click fraud and will get you (not just your website) banned forever.
10. You can also PROMOTE OTHER PRODUCTS.
11. You can use other ad networks like Yahoo - for a list see the Ad and CPA Networks List PDF.
12. You can try a banner for a product that has a lower commission but wider appeal.
13. Try an Ebay product.
14. Later you might consider a CPA ( Cost per Action) product or a CPL (Cost per Lead). Basically you get paid (maybe $0.10 - $2.00) if one of your visitors does something like fill out a form on another site or buys a ringtone. It can take some time for a CPA Network to approve an application (weeks to months) and they don’t like brand new sites so wait until you have good rankings and traffic. See thePDF list.
15. You are unlikely to make huge amounts this way, but you could well make a dollar a day which is $30/month or $365/year - if you can do this with a few hours work then this is a good return.
16. The last thing to consider is that if your blog gets traffic and rankings for keywords, even if it doesn’t make sales, it still has value - you could consider selling it. Sitepoint Marketplace is a popular place to buy and sell websites.
17. Look through the websites that are being sold. GuruBob found one blog that less than 6 weeks old, was getting less than 50 visits per day, optimised for one keyword and was earning a monthly revenue of $4 - it sold fro $70. Others were priced from $50-$300.
18. To sum up, you can get value from a “failure” - consider setting up AdSense right away. When it’s a few months old, try a CPA network or look for general products relevant to your niche. Also promote other products in Amazon/eBay along with Adsense. Look at other ad networks. Consider selling the website.
19. If on the other hand your site is getting traffic and sales and you want to continue with your niche - look at tomorrow’s lesson.

TDC Day 26b: Ad and CPA Networks List (TDC, PDF)

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load - we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to - ie over August 2008 - it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.

TDC Day 25: Day 25 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Today is D-Day - you’ve got to make a decision.
2. Testing and Measuring is the secret to success - not holding onto dud niche keywords.
3. If your keyword doesn’t cut it, then let go of it and try a new one. You will be able to do all the actions of testing a new keyword in much shorter time (even 2 hours) because now you know how to do it.

TDC Day 25a: Time To Make A Decision (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. You must assess whether to do forward with the niche or to drop it.
2. But don’t worry about wasting your time with your work on your last niche - you’ve still got an asset which you can still use (more tomorrow).
3. Remember that when you do your next niche, you will be able to do these steps, much much faster.
4. 1st Decision Point - TRAFFIC:
   1. You need at least 200 people coming to your blog in a relatively short time frame. So 200/day is good but if you get 200 over 5-10 days then you’ll need to reassess it.
   2. You also need to be in the at least the top 3-4 for your broad match to be able to assess whether it is a worthwhile niche or not. If you are on page 20 and getting very little traffic then that doesn’t mean the niche gets very little traffic - it just means you are ranked badly and may need to do more work (and it may mean there’s too much competition in that niche) .
5. 2nd Decision Point - Affiliate Click Through:
   1. If you get 200 people going to your blog and less than 10% are clicking on your affiliate offer then you should consider changing to your second product. There could be nothing wrong with your niche or even your blog - it’s just a dud product. You need to identify exactly what is the problem to properly make a decision.
6. 3rd Decision Point - Conversion:
   1. If you are making a sale in once in every 200 visits to your affiliate then this is a good signal that you can keep continuing or “building out”.
   2. If you are getting your 200 visitors but not getting a sale per 200 visitors then you need to reassess. (Note that you must be getting 200 people to your affiliate offer page too, not just 200 people to your blog to make this assessment).
7. If you aren’t getting the sales (with at least 200 people visiting your affiliate offer page) then Ed suggests to:
8. Try another affiliate offer.
9. Move on and pick a new niche (you can still monetise the blog with techniques taught tomorrow).
10. Target more keywords. Create content for these new keywords and see where you rank.
11. Do you like the market? Is it something interests you? Can you spend a lot of time on it? Remember you will be working on it a lot. It’s too easy to be distracted when you’re not interested in a subject and then it won’t be your best work.
12. Ask yourself “Would you be fine going on Oprah to talk about the product that you are going to build your business in?” Ed tells a story of someone who built and headache site but wasn’t comfortable with that area so it wasn’t successful. He sold it to someone who took it onto Oprah and did very well.
13. Ed tells us that marketing on the Internet is NOT about: 1. Markets 2. Niches 3. People 4. Products / Services or 5. Small furry animals. He says it is about PHRASES - what your market types into Google. When they want something they rarely type in a really broad phrase like “golf”, they are more likely to type in “golf courses in Atlanta” or similar. Marketers try to identify those phrases and market to those markets searching for those phrases by what is called “building out” (you will learn how to build out this week).
14. Our goal is to dominate every phrase that people in our market type into Google, Yahoo and others. But for the time being we are concentrating on Google (it is the biggest). If you have an existing business or you are an artist, you can look at competitors. Ed gives the example of a musician who is in the same genre as John Mayer should use Market Samurai to identify and dominate all phrases that people use when searching for John Mayer.
15. In an ideal world, you would have the following for every phrase that has traffic in the niche:
    1. Yourphrase.com – the domain
    2. Your phrase blog
    3. Your phrase articles
    4. Your phrase Web 2.0 sites, like Squidoo, HubPages and Weebly
    5. Everything bookmarked. Every time you create a new piece of content, you socially bookmark it with a tool like Social Marker.
16. This is building out or expanding your phrases. You want the business to give you a steady stream of cashflow that you can reinvest into more domains, AdWords etc.
17. Set the goal to make a decision on your chosen niche keyword now. If you choose another market then set the goal to make this same decision again at this point. Now you have done it once, it is so much easier (and quicker), the second time round. And remember you don’t need to waste the work you’ve done on the keywords you’ve cut (more tomorrow).

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load - we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to - ie over August 2008 - it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.

TDC Day 24: Day 24 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. This is a rest day, so spend it learning more about copywriting - read the PDF report on How to write a killer sales letter.

TDC Day 24a: How to write a killer sales letter (TDC, PDF)

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load - we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to - ie over August 2008 - it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.

TDC Day 23: Day 23 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

TDC Day 23a: Wordpress Direct Content Software (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. If you signed up to Wordpress Direct, then check out “Manage Content Software” feature that allows you to auto-post content from sites like YouTube.
2. You shouldn’t do anything with this feature yet though - just look at it.
3. If you’re not using the Wordpress Direct service, you don’t need to do anything! (Just read the podcast transcript below.)

TDC Day 23b: Podcast with Ed and GuruBob (TDC, PDF)

1. Remember that the Thirty Day Challenge is about testing a market - it’s about making your first few dollars online to see that the market is profitable.
2. If your test market isn’t spending (or there’s not enough traffic) - it is no reflection on you.
3. You need to find another niche.
4. There are still plenty of niches with the >80 SEOT and <30,000 SEOC criteria in Market Samurai - if you’re not finding them, Rob suggests going back to the Day 2 videos and going outside of your comfort zone.
5. Also Rob notes that it is normal to move up and down Google’s search rankings. Point is if you turn up under a “site:yourdomainname.com” search, then you are in Google’s index and you can go back up again. If you were in the index and then have completely disappeared, that is cause for concern as you might have been banned. However, it is unlikely that this will happen as you will have had to have done something really bad! If you are banned, there’s little you can do - just move onto another niche.
6. According to Rob: “Our technique works 99 percent of the time, which is to submit your RSS feed to the RSS directories using TDC RSS Submission Tool, social bookmarking, building some Web 2.0 pages in Squidoo, HubPages and Weebly. Eventually Google should find its way to your site. When it finds its way, it will index you. Occasionally, it doesn’t happen as quickly as we expect it to happen, which is 24-72 hours. The only thing I can suggest is to build more links from different sites so that Google will find its way to your site.”

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load - we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to - ie over August 2008 - it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.

WARNING: If you haven’t got any sales yet, working keywords etc - you should not do the Adwords section. This can be very costly and is a bonus killer technique to push performing keywords up another level. It is unlikely to help poor keywords. Just continue with the Maximum Edge Technique for the next three days: write more good articles with good SEO (titles, keywords); Social Marketing; create authoritative backlinks; keep an eye on your traffic; look at how your conversion engine can be made better.

TDC Day 22: Day 22 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

SEE WARNING ABOVE

1. Today you are going to learn how to manage your Adwords so that your ads are completely optimised. You can quickly burn through money in Adwords so you must make sure that you are only spending money on keywords that are going to deliver you traffic.
2. Obviously, you should keep very tight control on your spending, including your Pay Per Click campaigns.

TDC Day 22a: Manage Your PPC Account (TDC, Video, PDF)

SEE WARNING ABOVE

1. Today you will learn how to “peel and stick” - the idea is start with a bunch of keywords in ad groups (remember one keyword per ad group with three derivations - phrase, broad, exact) - you will look at which ones have good click through rates (the ones that stick) and the ones that don’t (these you peel off - ie delete them).
2. Caro uses the term “body language” instead of “vintage guitars” but you should replace it with your own terms anyway. She also notes she bid a Maximum Cost Per Click (Max CPC) of $0.40 but suggests you don’t need to do the same, especially when you are just testing.
3. Look at the Click Through Rate (CTR) for each of your ad groups. You should have at least 1% CTR and you should really aim for 2% or more:
   1. Low CTR can be improved by improving your ad content so you should still be split testing ad text for the same keyword. If the ad has under 1% CTR, delete it and run another test ad.
   2. Look at keywords, some keywords will perform better than others - delete the keywords that have low CTR.
   3. Also look within the ad group to see if certain keyword derivations (ie phrase, broad, exact match) are performing well or badly. You can delete poorly performing derivations too.
4. Look at your positioning:
   1. You want to be in positions 1-3. There is some evidence that position 2 is the best.
   2. If you are spending a lot of money, not getting great traffic and only a 5-8 position then consider deleting that keyword.
5. Keep a constant eye on your campaigns, peeling and sticking - that is deleting poorly performing ad groups and/or keyword derivations.
6. Caro also introduces the Conversion Tracking tool - you can find it in the Campaign Management tab - it allows you to link tracking on your web page. It’s outside the scope of the 30DC but you can explore it.
7. Remember the aim is to get good CTR. That will depend a lot on the content of your ads. Caro recommends modelling other successful ads (but don’t just copy them). Also you need to experiment with your Max CPC. But this is all trial and error so you need to test and manage vigilantly.
8. Be responsible and careful - this was only a AdWords 101, there’s a lot more to learn but Adwords can be very rewarding if done properly.
9. Also remember that AdWords changes regularly so you need to keep up to date!

Because our Summary was over 25,000 words and was taking forever to load - we’ve split it up and posted them according to the date they were originally allocated to - ie over August 2008 - it’s easiest to access all of them from the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary page.

Note the quick links to the originating Thirty Day Challenge page (TDC), the relevant YouTube video (Video) and the transcript (PDF) for your convenience to help you access the study materials.