I thought I’d write a few of my thoughts on the Thirty Day Challenge. (If you’ve never heard of it, have a look at our Thirty Day Challenge Super Summary).

I recommend the Thirty Day Challenge to anyone who has a business online (or is considering taking their business online) as well as anyone else who is interested to learn more about internet marketing, with some provisos.

Don’t get caught up in the hype

There’s a lot of hype around the Thirty Day Challenge and I believe a lot of misconceptions. It is pitched by its creators as a free course that teaches you how to make your first dollar (or ten) online but a lot of people hear that as a course that shows you how to make your first million online. It doesn’t, there’s usually a lot more that goes into making a million dollars but the skills you learn as part of the Challenge will help you along the way.

What it will teach you is some really great foundational skills that you can use for any business and any market (if you are flexible and use your imagination).

The importance of market research (and keywords) Read the rest of this entry »

You may have done it, thought about doing it or heard about it.

We’ve created a few resources to help both people who have never heard about it as well as seasoned 30DC Challengers.

Check out our Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Super Summary as well as our Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary for a detailed action and information of this year’s Challenge. Once you’ve gone through the Challenge, use our Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Ninja Hit to save time.

If you’ve done the challenge and now have a website that you’re actively working on – we’re collecting great examples of 30DC websites so we’d love you to submit yours to our list.

PS If you haven’t already subscribed to the blog or our Newsletter, I recommend you do because in the next week or so, we’ll be putting together a special Thirty Day Challenge goodie that our subscribers will get long before we make it public.

A small secret, I’m a bit of a clubs junkie. At university, I am quite sure I held the record for number of clubs joined. At the beginning of each semester, I’d easily have joined up to about ten and sometimes even twenty clubs from everything from the Soccer club to the Swedish club (I don’t even play soccer and I’m not Swedish!). The cool thing about the internet is that there are so many groups and forums on the nichiest of niches, you don’t need to go anywhere except to your own computer to join them.

But this might be a problem if it means you don’t go anywhere else. Meetup.com is a service that allows you to start your own club (or “meetup”) focusing on a particular niche (or group of people) and it helps you find people online but the end result is to actually MEET UP in real life. Read the rest of this entry »

Photoshop is a brilliant program but it’s expensive and unless you’re a graphic designer, you’re unlikely to use the vast majority of the features that warrant the hefty price.

One of the best free alternatives is Paint.net - it was even on PC World’s Top 20 Products for 2007. No, it doesn’t have every single feature you’d find in Photoshop but it has everything you’re likely to need for the best price in the world – free!

Even if you have a super duper image editor like Photoshop, Paint.net is handy for quick little jobs as it loads really quickly and uses minimal resources on your computer – which can’t be said of Photoshop which can be like starting Windows for the time it takes to start up…

It’s available for Windows XP and Windows Vista. Note that it requires Microsoft’s .NET Framework 2.0 or higher to be installed (hence the “.net” of paint.net). Your installation of Windows may come preinstalled with .NET or else it should be packaged with the Paint.net download – if not you can read more about it at Microsoft (not recommended – boring if you’re not a programmer) or use Microsoft’s .NET Download page to download the newest version.

Here’s a screenshot from the application, showing some of the more advanced features:

I’ve added this to our Resources page – check it out for more free stuff!