Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Ninja Hit List

TDC 2008 Ninja Hitlist

Once you’ve gone through the Thirty Day Challenge once, use the Ninja Hitlist - it gives you all the necessary action and none of the fluff. It’s also structured so that relevant actions are grouped together, regardless of how we learnt them. If it’s your first time doing the Thirty Day Challenge, or you want a more detailed summary, then please read have a look at the Thirty Day Challenge Super Summary and use the Thirty Day Challenge 2008 Summary.

Set Up

30 Day Challenge Membership

Register then login at the 30 Day Challenge homepage
Find a team under “Team Talk” in the Forums
Start following people: Ed Dale, Dan Raine
Subscribe to the 30 Day Challenge Blog
Subscribe through RSS to Ed’s Twitter feed and Dan’s Twitter feed
Subscribe to the the 30 Day Challenge Forums or a sub forum RSS
Favourite Ed Dale’s YouTube channel and/or subscribe to it in your RSS
Go to Revver if you can’t access YouTube.
Join the Thirty Day Challenge Friend Feed Room. Make a bookmarklet here so that you can share items directly with everyone else who has joined.
Make a Friend Feed room for your team.
Read the 30DC Forum Rules.
Set up a link your FriendFeed in your 30DC Forum profile and it will add it to your signature on all your posts.

Set up online accounts

Join Twitter
Go to Google Reader - register a Google account if you don’t have one
Sign up with YouTube and remember your username is also your channel address so choose well eg youtube.com/eddale
Join StumbleUpon
Create an account in FriendFeed - Sign up whatever services you’re familiar with including your YouTube and Twitter accounts, sign up your Google Reader Shared Items page, in the “me” tab, and make a bookmarklet for your own feed (remember to post things to it)
Set up Socialmarker: under “how to use it” drag the small icon to your bookmarks toolbar in Flock/Firefox to create a submission bookmarklet
Go to Squidoo and create an account + create a bio (inc photo), accept Adsense
Go to HubPages and sign up + create a bio (inc photo), accept Adsense
Go to Weebly and sign up
Sign up to Onlywire.Add the login details for your social bookmarking services and you will get a “bookmarklet”, drag it to your bookmarks bar and it acts as a button to start the service

Flock Browser and Addons (will all work for Firefox too)

Download and install Flock - customise settings
Speed up Flock by following the instructions in the PDF
Set Flock’s Preferences/Options to use Google Reader as the default RSS
Install the Google Notebook extension
Install Google Global if you look at markets outside the US so you see Google results for different locations
Install SEO for Firefox/Flock and switch it off if the red highlighted no follow links bother you. Make sure that all modes are set to “On-Demand” or “Hidden”, not “Automatically” or else Google may give you a temporary timeout for accessing their database too much
Install Search Status
Install the Stumble Upon toolbar
Install TwitterBar - set up Twitterbar in Tools/Add-ons, test tweet in the address bar using Twitterbar
Install the Thirty Day Challenge Toolbar
Install FriendFeed as another search engine in Flock

Install Twirl

Install Twirl (and probably Adobe Air) and familiarise yourself with Twirl
Set up your Twitter account/s on Twirl

Market Samurai

Sign up for the 40 day free trial of Market Samurai.
Get a personal email link, click on this link.
Check out the Market Samurai tutorials in the Market Samurai Support section so you can become a true Samurai master. These videos are all downloadable.

Hosting

If you don’t have hosting, sign up with a cheap service. Ed Dale recommends Hostgator

Wordpress Direct

Follow the PDF instructions to install Wordpress Direct on your hosting (or alternatively learn how to install the open source original of Wordpress: Wordpress installation instructions.).
Learn how to add new content using Wordpress Direct (PDF) (or Wordpress:Wordpress instructions).

Miscellaneous

Find/buy a notebook - use it to write down ALL your ideas (start by writing down 10 ideas)
Learn about How to write a killer sales letter: read the PDF report
Download and read the free ebook of Software for your Brain by Michael Hewitt
Read Brain Rules by John Medina
Read Group Genius by Keith Sawyer
Read more about TDC support for Kiva

The Few Hour Challenge

Note while you can do the actions in a few hours, some of these steps require you to wait for a few days in between them. Also remember to give enough time to properly evaluate your markets.

Step 1: Find ideas

Look for ideas that interest you and are not too big.
Look in real life, go to Amazon.com or any of the sites on Ed’s PDF - just notice things.
Note things in your notebook.
Come up with 5-10 market ideas.
For each of those ideas, set up Google alerts or create a news feed for it in Google News and subscribe to it in Google Reader.

Step 2a (Market Samurai): Evaluate traffic and competing pages for niche ideas

Use Market Samurai (or Google AdWords Keyword Tool + Google Search) to find keywords that have 80+ hits/day and less than 30-50,000 competing pages for narrow search.
Your aim is to have 2 or 3 niches that meet these criteria.
Create new project or open an old one.
Click on the Keyword Research tool’s button
Leave options as they are (only “Google Synonym Tool” and “SEO Traffic Filter” should be checked). Hit “Generate Keywords”. Click on the “Analyze Keywords” button. You can specify filters (80 SEOT/50,000 SEOC).
Look at Trends graph for constant (not cyclical) traffic.
Choose keywords that look good to drill down in - repeat the process.
Create a list of keywords with at least 2-3 that fit the (80 SEOT/30-50,000 SEOC) criteria.

Step 2b (Manual): Evaluate traffic and competing pages for niche ideas (if you can’t use Market Samurai)

Go to Google AdWords Keyword Tool.
Enter a keyword into the box and “Get keyword ideas”.
Look at “Approx Search Volume: [month]” - the searches in the previous month; and “Approx Avg Search Volume” - the average monthly searches over the past 12 months.
Look for keywords with more than 80 daily searches
Go to Google.com to find out number of competing sites for these keywords
Enter keywords with more than 80 daily visits into the search bar using “quotes” around the keyword (phrase search).
Keep an eye out for related keywords, make a note of any for later use.

Step 3a (Market Samurai): Evaluate authority of existing competition in niches fitting Step 2 criteria

Look for niches with little backlink competition and what’s there is poorly optimised.
Using your list of keywords fitting Step 2 criteria 80 SEOT/30-50,000 SEOC), take one and make sure it has its own dedicated tab.
Click on the “SEO Competition” tool button, using defaults, click “Generate Results”.
Look over the matrix of results: DA = Domain Age (older sites are more authorative); PR = Page Rank (0-2 is green, 3-4 is orange, and 5+ is red - if there are many PR=5+ domains, you’re unlikely to outrank them, plenty of green and orange is fine); ALX = Alexa Ranking (the smaller the number, the higher the ranking and more authoritative the site); BLP = backlinks that point to the specific page that is currently ranking; BLD = backlinks that point to any page in that domain; BLEG = backlinks from .edu or .gov backlinks (higher authority backlinks); DMZ and YAH = listed in the DMOZ and Yahoo directories or not (source of more authority).
Look at On Page Search Engine Optimisation factors: Title: Is the keyword phrase available within the title tag of that page? URL: Does the keyword phrase appear in the URL? Desc: Does the keyword phrase appear in meta tags ? Head: Is the keyword phrase optimised in the header tag of that page?
Look at CA = Cache Age. The lower the number may mean higher authority as Google feels it is more worthwhile to visit it more often. It’s not the most reliable statistic.
(The next step is time consuming so it is more useful when you are determining the strength of the network you need to build to outrank a particular website.) Click on Anchor Text Analysis to see if the site’s backlinks are optimised for the keyword you’re researching and the pagerank (PR) of each of the backlinks. You will see a row of numbers 0-10 - this is PR 0 to PR 10. The numbers below represent the number of backlinked pages per keyword with a particular pagerank.
Make sure you have one niche picked that fulfills all criteria: traffic (80+ hits/day), page competition (less than 30-50,000 phrase matched competing pages) and SEO competition criteria (top ranking sites are not very authoritative).

Step 3b (Manual): Evaluate authority of existing competition in niches fitting Step 2 criteria

Open the Flock/Firefox browser, with the SEO for Firefox/Flock plugin installed and enabled. You should also have Google Global installed
(If you are looking at markets outside of the US.) In the Google search page, right click on a blank space and hover over the Search Google Global menu to access a list of countries. Choose whatever is your primary target market or look at several markets.
Look at the titles of the results to see how well the resulting pages are optimised for (ie match) your keyword phrase.
Click on the “?” to show number of backlinks etc.

Step 4: Find An Affiliate Product

Choose two affiliate products (one will act as a backup)
Type in your keyword and affiliate into Google, eg “vintage guitar affiliate” (without quotes) or use an affiliate network: eg Clickbank, Commission Junction, Amazon.
Sign up to any affiliate programs as required.
Get your affiliate link to your product - keep this copied and pasted somewhere handy.

Step 5: Set up tracking affiliate links

Go to the TDC Dashboard and click on TDC Stats Tracker.
Click on New URL: enter a name and description for you to recognise it, enter your affiliate link from Step 4.
Get a your new trackable link - keep this copied and pasted somewhere handy

Step 6: Write promo copy for your affliate product

Start with the promotional text of your affiliate product.
Break that text up so that you have a line for each feature mentioned.
Write a headline that draws people in: eg “discover” and “scoop”
Create an introduction sentence that makes the product really intriguing/special.
Rewrite the features so they sound more interesting and worth a lot.
Don’t mention the price too soon.
Aim for 30-40 word so keep rewriting focusing on 2 killer benefits that will give the buyer the killer advantage - you don’t need to have all the features listed so be prepared to cull.
Save the final draft in a folder in your Documents.
Save a picture of your product by right clicking on the image (Macs: control button + click) and choose “Save As”.
Using a photo editor or a free service, like Picnik, edit the picture so it has the right dimensions for future use (for Wordpress Direct, it should not be higher or wider than 150px).

Step 7: Research Article Content

(Market Samurai only) Use the “Find Content” option of Market Samurai: Select Ezine Articles and Google Blog Search and also Article City, Technorati and Go-Articles. Choose the number of articles you want returned. Save interesting articles.
Create a new Google Notebook (using the Flock/Firefox extension) named after your niche.
Go through your news feeds (set up in Step 1) in Google reader. Use the search bar at the top of the page to search for items with your niche keyword.
Identify stories with “Wow!” facts.
Add these interesting “Wow” clippings to your Google Notebook (right click, “Note this”)
When you’ve got a number of bits of information, click on “Open Notebook” to open your list of snippets.
Make sure you have enough information for 5-10 short articles.
Still in Market Samurai “Find Content”, search on other types (eg Yahoo Answers) look for search types with a number of results and click on the RSS symbol to save it to your clipboard - save in a text document for later.

Step 8: Write articles

Have both the Google Notebook and your text editor windows open side by side.
Write your own content based on the “WoW” fact - don’t copy it directly as that is plagiarism and most likely copyright infringement. If you quote, make them small amounts and make it clear that it is a quote. You should also always attribute where the information came from by linking to the original story.
Ed’s formula:
1. Headline with the keyword phrase;
2. First line with the keyword phrase;
3. Say what you liked about the story IN YOUR OWN WORDS or put your twist on it (maybe you disagreed) - spell out the “Wow” fact;
4. A couple of quotes from the story;
5. Link to the full story.
Prepare five to ten 300- to 500-word articles.

Step 9: Find a domain name

Use NameBoy and/or Namecheap to look for domain names.
Look for .com, .net, .org but not .info (they are often used by spammers) - don’t use more than one hyphen (again, looks spammy).
When you find a good one register your domain.

Step 10: Host your domain

Ensure you have hosting.
At your domain name registry, change your DNS servers (aka nameservers) to your hosting company’s (will usually look like ns1.hostingcompany.com, ns2.hostingcompany.com etc).
Wait up to 24hrs for this change to be recognised.

Step 11: Create a blog

Create a Wordpress Direct blog or install a normal WordPress blog.
Choose an approriate theme.

Step 12: Add content to your blog and publish it

Create a category with your keyword phrase.
Create a new post with Step 8 content
File the post under the above keyword category.
Tag the post with the keyword phrase

Step 13: Create a Sales Offer

In Wordpress Direct, you can create a Sale Offer (PDF) with your affiliate link in Day 5.
If you are not using Wordpress Direct, then create a new post with the Sales Offer and affilate link in your Wordpress etc blog (or if you are comfortable with blog theme’s coding, you can create a banner for your Sales Offer and add it to your theme.)

Step 14: Install Google Analytics on your blog

Sign into Google Analytics with your Google account and create a profile for your website.
Find your Google Analytics ID (eg UA-5298347-1)
Follow the PDF instructions to set up Google Analytics in WordPress Direct.
If you are not using WordPress Direct then place all of the code Google gives you, not just the ID in your footer.php file under Design>Themes>Theme Editor. Or you can install a plugin like Semiologic’s).
Wait 24 hours for Google to collect enough data for you.

Step 15: Add your tracking link to your blog

Edit your content so that it contains 1-2 links to your tracking link (any more and it will look spammy):
Select your keyword phrase and click on the link icon to turn it into a link (anchor text) using your tracking link

Step 16: Use Social Marker

Use Social Marker to submit it to the major social marketing websites, especially propeller, digg, Del.ico.us, twitter, and stumble upon.
Make sure you add tags and a description containing the keyword phrase and that the title and URL are correct. Submit.

Step 17: Create Forum/Comment Backlinks

Go to Google Groups and search under your keyword phrase (or your niche area if there’s nothing) - Find a relevant group and subscribe to it.
Do a Google search for your keyword phrase (or niche area) + forum to find relevant forums. Join an appropriate forum. If there are a few look for one with the highest authority (use the SEO for Firefox extension - see TDC Day 3b).
Know the rules of the forum and act in an ethical and ecological way.
Contribute to these groups and forums in a real and useful way - don’t just throw your links all over the place.
Leave comments on Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo.com:
1. Do a Google search for “keyword phrase site:squidoo.com” (without quotes, or substitute another Web 2.0 site like hubpages.com);
2. Choose the top ranked page and see if they have a guestbook where you can leave comments;
3. Try to say something useful that doesn’t look spammy and makes sense why you’d link to your page;
4. Squidoo lets you leave links inside your comment - use <a href=”http://www.yourpage.com”>Title of your page</a>
Explore your neighborhood and participate in conversations for five minutes a day. Aim to make a couple of links a day (eg 1 month = 40-50 links.)

Step 18: Check if your site is indexed

Do a search for “site:yourdomain.com” (no quotes) in Google, MSN and Yahoo.
If you are indexed, they will show up as a link here.

Step 19: Submit your blog to the 30DC RSS Submission Service

Go to the TDC Dashboard and the TDC RSS Submitter and submit your site.
Make sure you enter any additional tags separated by commas - try to have your main keyword phrase near the beginning of your brief description.

Step 20: Build A Squidoo Lens

Build a Squidoo lens.
Put you main keyword phrase in “What’s your lens about?” (This can be your title too)
What’s your goal for your page? - also make sure your answer has your keyword
Create a URL with your main keyword phrase in them - if taken use a hyphen or add a number to the end of the keyword phrase (eg vintage-guitars or vintageguitars2).
Tag your page: have your keyword phrase as “the best keyword for my lens is”, then add any additional keywords you might have in the additional fields.
Hit Done.
Make sure your have a bio.
Add more category tags - a total of 4-5 is good at the moment
1. Edit the Introduction section:
2. Lens Intro Title should be keyword optimized
3. Enter some content for that lens in Lens Description area - create this from information on your topic that you’ve found on the Internet. You can rewrite content from various sources, ensuring that it is unique;
4. Check your content is actually unique using Copyscape;
5. In your content, create a few bolded links to your Blog. Use html: <a href=”http://www.yourblog.com”>Keyword Phrase</a>
6. If you have more than one keyword phrase you can create a link for some of your lower level phrases (try a link for each first appearance).
7. Don’t over link, the less links the more powerful they are (no more than three) - italicise any other instances of your keywords only (don’t link them or you’ll over link) - use this html: Keyword Phrase
8. Upload Lens Photo;
9. Save it.
Edit the “RSS: Add your own feed” section:
1. Get your blog’s feed address and enter it here;
2. Edit the title of this section and put your main keyword in it (which should be the title of your blog too);
3. Set the headlines you would want to show to 4. You may go from 3 to 6. Include excerpt and set it to display HTML in the excerpt as you wish.
4. (You can also create paste the RSS link we saved in our Step 7 research)
Edit a Text/Write module:
1. Drag it so it is just above the RSS module;
2. Make a note of your affiliate product link or tracking link and the address of your ad image on your blog (you can find this by right clicking on the image and selecting “Copy Image Location”);
3. Delete the title of this module, and paste in your affiliate product link with a link to the image: <a href=”http://locatereviews.com/???????” title=”Vintage Electric Guitar”><img src=”http://www.yourblog.com/images/image.jpg” align=”center” /></a>
Edit the YouTube vids module:
1. Use your main keyword as the title of the module;
2. Type in a short description if you want (but make it general);
3. Let YouTube pick the video automatically for you based on your tags: make sure “Show thumbnail videos” is selected, and enter comma separated tags or keywords. Choosing 3 videos to display is good.
4. Save.
Leave the Guestbook module and delete the rest of the modules.
Publish your lens
Use Social Bookmarker to post original and quality lens to 10 to 15 social bookmarking sites and directories and click on Submit. Check Title, URL, and add a short description in the Text area and your main keywords as tags

Step 21: Create a Hubpage

Remember to be very conservative when it comes to linking, tagging and promoting your product to avoid a Hubpage slap!
Click on the Create a Hub button to create a hub.
Enter the title, it will automatically suggest the hub web address for you. Check that it has the right keywords.
Add some tags, do not use more than 3 additional tags.
Choose your commercialisation option: “High” in the Ads drop down menu, check both “content meets the conditions of the AdSense Program Policy” and “this hub may be considered commercial”.
Make sure you are aware of Hubpages rules: No Spam, No Adult, No Gambling, No Unfinished Hubs, No Deception (title and tags must match content), English Only, No Copied Content (even from your own blog). Keep up to date with them as they can change!
Build a basic hub.
1. Add an RSS feed: click on “rss” in the Content Capsules and edit. Enter your main keyword in the Capsule Subtitle and your blog’s feed into the Feed URL field. Set the Maximum number of items to display to 4 and Display method to full description. Make sure the “Don’t display this capsule” checkbox is unchecked.
2. Edit the photo module: Click edit to get the pop up editing box. Upload a photo or link to one. Put the image content on the top of the page (should press the Up arrow once). You can also use the Left and Right arrows to place the image alongside the left and right side of the text.
3. Edit the content capsule: Enter your main key phrase as the Capsule Subtitle. Add your content to the text area. Add a link by by highlighting the keyword text and then choose the Insert/edit link icon. You may want to choose “open in the same window” to encourage visitors ending up at your blog. You can also bold or italicise some of your keywords.
4. Be careful not to add too many links - 1 is safe, 2 may be okay, 3 is probably too much
5. Use the arrows to make sure the RSS capsule is after the content but before the comments module.
6. Click “Save Unpublished” to save your page.
7. Have a quick look over your HubPage and click “Publish Now”.
Go to your HubPage and use your SocialMarker button to publicise it.

Step 22: Set Up A Weebly Site

In “Title Your New Site”, enter the main keyword, eg Vintage Electric Guitar, and hit continue.
Go to the Designs tab, choose a design you like.
Go back to the Elements tab. Drag the “Paragraph with Title” element to the web content area.
Make the title your your main keyword phrase.
Edit Paragraph. Put a decent size article in there - at least a good couple of paragraphs.
Select the first mention of your main keyword phrase and click the Create Link button. As this is an outside link to your blog, choose “Website”, put in the address of your blog and click Save. Once back in the editor, select the link and click the Bold icon to make it bold.
If your design allows, change the header image if you want. Click on it once and it may give you the option to upload your own picture. If so it will tell you the image size in pixels required.
Click on “More” to add an RSS feed. Drag the Feed Reader icon under the paragraph you’ve made. It comes filled with the Weebly blog feed as a default. To change it, click on the RSS content box and the Element Options toolbar appears at the top of the screen. Put your blog’s RSS feed into the “Feed Address (URL):” box. Adjust the Width to 100% so it fits the entire page. Choose how many items you want to display on the page increase the text length to at least Medium.
When finished, hit Publish.
Choose to have it hosted as a subdomain of Weebly with your keyword phrase in the subdomain address. If your keyword is taken, use hyphens or make it plural.
Create another page in the “Pages” tab using one of your lesser related keyword phrases, follow Steps 7-16 to create more content.
Later, you can go to the “Elements” tab to add various content like videos or Google AdSense.

Step 23: Create an Ezine Article

Go to Ezine Articles. Know the Terms of Service for Publishers and Editorial Guidelines.
Hit the Submit Article link in the sidebar to go to create your account. Make sure you enter your blog address in the Web URL field.
Choose an appropriate category and subcategory.
Enter an article title in normal title case with your primary keyword. E.g. Vintage Electric Guitar - What You Need to Know.
Enter you keywords into the Keywords field
In Abstract/Article Summary/Teaser Copy write 2-5 sentences summarising your article in a way that will make people want to read it. A good method is tell them WHAT they will find out, only if they read your article.
The article content allows you to have HTML tags, so you can make your keywords bold (keyword) or underline them (keyword). Use one underline and one bold for the main keyword phrase, preferably near the beginning of the article content. Bold the subheadings and other part of the content to make the article appears more interesting.
In the Author SIG box, put a short description about yourself or your business and add a link to your blog. Eg: Ed Dale; Vintage Electric Guitars; http://www.hisblog.com
Spellcheck. Preview your article for any errors.
Agree to the Author Agreement. Submit your article - it can take 7-10 days to be approved.

Step 24: Assess Your Blog Traffic

“YOU CAN’T MANAGE WHAT YOU DON’T MEASURE.”
Go to Google Analytics choose your blog and from the list and click on View Reports.
Look at your traffic by Day, by Week, or by Month: See number of visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on site and percentage of new visits for the time period.
See what countries people come from. Does this fit with your target market?
Look more closely at Traffic Sources:
1. Click on the “view report link” in the Traffic Sources Overview box on the Dashboard;
2. Direct Traffic: % of people typing in the domain directly to get to the site, or from the browser’s bookmark;
3. Referring Sites: % of traffic brought in by sites linking to pages on your site (eg could be your HubPage);
4. Search Engines: % of traffic sent by search engine;
5. Top Traffic Sources show the sources of traffic for this site - you can view a full report by clicking on that link.
6. Focus now on the Keywords report - you should use it to create content related it if you’re getting a lot of traffic on certain keywords. When you sell your own stuff you can use this to see which keywords convert.
You should use this information to focus on is where the traffic comes from and which keywords the visitors are using to find your blog. The ultimate goal is to get 200 people a day coming to your site.

Step 25: Check your blog’s SERP ranking

Change your Google Preferences to get 100 per pages, also make sure the “Do not filter my search result” radio button is checked. Save.
Switch on the SEO for Firefox plugin.
Do a search for your main keyword using quotes (phrase match).
See where your blog ranks.
Search again, this time doing a broad match (i.e. without quotes). The number should be bigger, e.g. #56 (so further down the rankings).
Also do this for your lesser keywords.
Keep building links to make your pages rank higher.

Step 26: Decision Time

Get rid of any emotion - you don’t want to be a hostage to poor performing keyword.
Realise that successful people in business don’t see a negative results as failure they just view it as facts and act on it.
DO YOU HAVE 200 VISITORS? If yes, ignore the next few questions.
IF YOU DON’T HAVE 200 - analyse the situation, don’t take it as a personal failure.
WHERE ARE YOU RANKED? Where are you ranked for your broad and phrase match? If you are not ranked highly then you are unlikely to get much traffic, especially on phrase match/narrow searches. A top ranking usually gets about 41% of traffic, a number 6 position can get as little as 2-3%. If you find that you having good rankings for your phrase match but you rank poorly for broad match (where most of the traffic comes from), you need to put more work on your rankings with the techniques already taught.
ARE YOU NUMBER 1? If you are number 1 in the broad match and you are not getting any traffic, it’s a problem. Even Google’s data can sometimes be wrong. Be aware too that in some businesses, this doesn’t matter - you may only need one person a week and it could also be a keyword that converts much higher than one in 200.
WHAT IF YOU ARE NOT NUMBER 1? You need to work to get there in your phrase or broad match. If you do everything you can but you can’t improve your rankings, you may have to try a different phrase and then test again.
WHEN YOU HAVE 200, HOW LONG DID IT TAKE TO GET THEM? It’s not good enough to know that you have 200 visitors, you need to know how long it took to get them. You’re looking at traffic over time like speed = distance/time. Have a look at Google Analytics to see how much daily traffic you get. The ultimate goal is to get to 200 visitors a day (a sale once a day). If it happens over 4-5 days now, that’s okay too for now but you will want to consider your longer term goals. You could try techniques like having several blogs that together bring in 200 a day.
IF YOU HAVE 200, did you sell anything? If you did, you are on the right track. If you didn’t, remember that way back you were asked to pick two products. Swap in the other affiliate product and TEST how that goes with another 200 unique visitors. You can also try a soft sell in your next blog post - e.g. you could tell as story about having a long search for a product and then finally finding it and it answers all your questions, a real time saver. Ask your reader to check it out (if they are interested) and link to your tracking affiliate link. Don’t be salesy or pushy - that’s would be a hard sell not a soft one!
Make a rational decision on what’s the next step for your keyword.

Step 27: Act on your decisions

Look at your conclusion from Decision Time and see what is required:
- Swap out the product
- Create more authoritative backlinks
- Create more persuasive content (eg soft selling)
- More time (eg if it is a lumpy keyword - eg lots more traffic at the weekend)
- Choose another keyword

Step 28: Final Decision Time

Testing and Measuring is the secret to success - not holding onto dud niche keywords.
If your keyword doesn’t cut it, then let go of it and try a new one.
You need to identify exactly what is the problem to properly make a decision.
1st Decision Point - TRAFFIC:
- 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.
- 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) .
2nd Decision Point - Affiliate Click Through:
- 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.
3rd Decision Point - Conversion:
- 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”.
- 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).
If you aren’t getting the sales (with at least 200 people visiting your affiliate offer page) then Ed suggests to:
- Try another affiliate offer.
- Move on and pick a new niche (you can still monetise the blog with techniques taught tomorrow).
- Target more keywords. Look at what keywords, customers of your competition might use. Create content for these new keywords and see where you rank.
- 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.
- Ask yourself “Would you be fine going on Oprah to talk about the product that you are going to build your business in?”
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.

Steps 29-32: Building Out (For Successful Keywords)

Your aim is to have the following for every phrase that has traffic in the niche:

Yourphrase.com - the domain

Your phrase blog

Your phrase articles

Your phrase Web 2.0 sites, like Squidoo, HubPages and Weebly

Everything bookmarked. Every time you create a new piece of content, you socially bookmark it with a tool like Social Marker.

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.

Step 29: Building Out: On-Page SEO Factors - Find Lontail Keywords, Create Posts

Remember your keyword hierarchy in your micro niche, using the “vintage guitar” example:
1. Blog Theme Keyword: vintage electric guitar (204/32,600)
2. Category Keywords: vintage base guitar (137/11,500), vintage gibson guitar (137/20,500), antique guitar (112/9,740), vintage electric guitar (204/32,600).
3. Post Keywords: … (we’ll get these today)
Open your keyword folder in Market Samurai (make sure you’ve got the upgraded version).
Open one of your category keyword files - in the example “vintage electric guitar” and select “Keyword Research”.
Make sure “Google Synonym tool” and “SEO Traffic” (min=0) are selected and hit “Generate Keywords”.
Remove keywords that are not relevant to your blog.
Select the SEO Competition (SEO) filter and set it to 30,000 so it will only show keywords with less than 30,000 competing pages for the phrase match Google search.
If you find results that have more than 100 searches/day (SEOT) consider making these category keywords for the blog - but now for post keywords, we can go for keywords with much less traffic as long as there is little competition for them.
Take these keywords and create blog posts - put them under the most appropriate category in your blog (which usually will be the category keyword you originally started with). Remember to tag the post them with the relevant keywords. So if your longtail post keyword is “vintage silvertone guitar” create a post with that keyword in the title, post it under the “vintage electric guitar” category and make sure its tagged with “vintage silvertone guitar” and the category title “vintage electric guitar”. You should also tag it with your blog’s main keyword but in this case, it’s also “vintage electric guitar” so you’ve already got that tag.
You can also use Google Analytics: select “Traffic Sources” and select “Adwords” and “Keywords” look for people coming to the blog using keywords where there is no content - make content for these keywords if they have multiple visits.
If you don’t have Market Samurai, use the Google Adwords tool and Google search page as in Step 2a and3b.

(Optional Step -WordPress Direct): Building Out: On-Page SEO Factors - Auto Content Creation

Go to Manage Content Software, set up “Supervised Postings” for your longtail keywords.

Step 30: Building Out: Off-Page SEO Factors - Deep Linking #1

Create links to your posts on long tail keywords - ie deep linking.
When you’ve written a post, click on the Onlywire bookmarklet. Check the details are correct and that you have the appropriate tags. You can add a comment/note if you wish and hit “Bookmark Page” to submit.

Step 31 (Market Samurai): Building Out: Off-Page SEO Factors - Deep Linking #2

Use Market Samurai’s Promotion tool: Choose your keyword phrase, choose “Promotion” in the main menu.
Select “Squidoo” and hit “Find Backlinks” - it will then get 10 for you, hit “More” for another 10 and so on.
Analyze All to see BL: backlinks; PB: pingback (these are only useful for blogs); F: whether the site has follow links.
Find the lens that interests you most and make a comment (if possible).
Do the same for HubPages, Yahoo Answers and Weebly.
Find blogs and forums especially with do follow links (Y under the F column) leave comments (these will often let you have a link back to your site in a signature or linked to your name).
Check for blogs with pingbacks - Y under PB (Pingbacks).
Only for blogs that have pingbacks enabled, select the items you want to quote on your site by clicking on the checkbox/es on the left of the blog/s. You will then get a window open up that lets you easily create links for your own blog with a number of options:
- New Window: when someone clicks on the link, it will open in a new window
- List: turns the summaries into bullet points
- Table: puts a border around the summaries
- No Follow: makes links no follow
Check your results in preview box when you’re happy click on “Copy Code” - it will save your code to the the clipboard.
In WordPress or WordPress Direct, create a new post and make sure you are in the HTML tab.
Copy and paste the html code into your post editor and add a little text to make it more natural (Eg “This week in review” as the title and then “We’ve found some great blog posts on vintage guitars you might like to take a look at:” then the pingbacking link code). Save and publish the post.
Aim to have 5 - 15 deep linked backlinks for all of your posts - these can be a combination of social bookmarking links, blog comments, pingbacks or forum postings. You should still create links to your homepage - you will want the most number of links pointed to the home page, but you should also have a spread of backlinks that deep link (ie are linked directly to longtail posts).

Step 32: Building Out: Off-Page SEO Factors - Get authority backlinks (Market Samurai)

Open Market Samurai, your relevant keyword file and the Promotion tool.
Consider “DMOZ Submission” and “Yahoo Submission” if there is enough commercial value within the niche you are targeting. You may need to resubmit the DMOZ one, it is very slow.
Do a search in Yahoo Answers for your microniche keyword (example is “vintage electric guitar”), if you don’t get much then go up one level (eg “vintage guitar”) - select both opened and closed questions, hit “Find Backlinks”. (Yahoo does no follow but good source of human traffic).
For open Yahoo Answer, you can answer it and leave a link to your blog if you are logged into your Yahoo account.
For closed Yahoo Answer: you can’t answer it but if it is “Resolved”, you can leave a comment with a link to your blog. If it’s “Undecided” you can’t comment.
Consider social bookmarking the Yahoo Answers page.
Search for blogs and forums on .edu/.gov domains (eg select “Blogs: Wordpress (.edu/.gov)” and “Forums: phpBB (.edu/.gov)”).
“Analyze All” forum posts or individually and quickly see which forum posts have follow links (F), page rank (PR) and backlinks (BL).
Click on the results you like and register at the relevant forum and put your blog link into the signature on that forum and respond appropriately to the post. (Note you should also read the forum rules and comply with them.) - look out for forums with follow links.
Like with Yahoo Answers, when you answer a forum post you should make backlinks to increase the page’s ranking (eg using OnlyWire/Social Marker).
Do the same for other Web 2.0 sites - even though they may have no follow links they are good sources of human traffic.
Market Samurai may have useful after updates worth checking on for extra steps.