TDC Day 18: Day 18 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. In Ed’s words as I can’t put it any better: “Today is a decision day. By now you should have been getting traffic to your site. The question is, have people been buying anything? Have you made your dollar yet? No big deal if you haven’t because it’s probably not your fault. Remember how you are being told to choose two products? If you’re getting traffic in but the product hasn’t been selling, today is the time to decide if you switch out that product so you can test that as well. If you are not getting traffic or ranking to your site at all, then you need to really reassess what you are doing. It might be time to consider redoing the process. Remember, now that you know what you’re doing, you can really go through and do the stuff very quickly. The vast majority of people who had been successful were starting the project again from now and built through the rest of the challenge. And that has been the case for the last three years. Don’t get this wrong. You don’t have to start again. However, if you do, it’s no big deal. There are very successful people who have to start over again at this point. Today is an assessment and decision day. The good thing is, you are not making a decision on a gut feel. You are using hard data and fact. And that’s really important. By setting up the tracking and other stuff early on, you’ve really got the data to be able to make decisions. The forum is an incredible place to share information, and you don’t have to mention your niche there. You may see the stats from other people. Make sure that you talk to your team about your statistics. Let other fresh minds who are not so attached help you work through decision day.”

TDC Day 18a: What Does The Data Tell You (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Learn about the filters that you need to make decisions so you don’t have to guess.
2. Get rid of any emotion. Allison Reynolds refers those who are so attached to a phrase they can’t let it go as getting Stockholm syndrome. Remember that - you don’t want to be a hostage to poor performing keyword.
3. Realise that successful people in business don’t see a negative results as failure they just view it as facts and act on it.
4. Realise too that the next time you do this process, you’ll be able to do it so much quicker. And the time after, even quicker, etc. You will end up being able to do all of the 30DC Challenge in a couple of hours.
5. So if you get negative results don’t take it as a comment on you.
6. 200 THE MAGIC NUMBER – From Ed’s experience, you should be able to at the very least, make a sale once in every 200 people. This is actually not that great a result so if you don’t make at least one sale for every 200 people, you have to start to asking questions. 200 is the magic number because it’s hard to make a judgement on the worth of the product (or the product’s landing page) if you only have 10, 20, or 30 visitors. You should be careful not to make hasty changes when you have so few visitors, best to wait until you get to 200.
7. DO YOU HAVE 200? If yes, ignore the next few questions.
8. IF YOU DON’T HAVE 200 – analyse the situation, don’t take it as a personal failure.
9. 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.
10. 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. Don’t take it as a sign of failure – it’s just evidence that there isn’t the traffic – that’s why we test. In the next few days, we will learn strategies on what you can do with the traffic that you are getting. 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.
11. 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. This is Decision Day and only by doing this over and over again will you get good at it.
12. WHEN YOU HAVE 200, HOW LONG DID IT TAKE TO GET THEM? (If you have 200 visitors, welcome back.) 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.
13. 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.
14. 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!
15. Again, A FAILED TEST IS NOT A CHARACTER ASSESSMENT! Don’t have emotion here, see it as plain data.
16. Realise that picking up a failed test now has saved you huge amounts of time (and maybe money).
17. Go forward.

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 17: Day 17 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Get some rest, check your stats, hand out in the Forums.

TDC Day 17a: Checking Your Blog Ranking (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. This is an optional lesson – it teaches you some quick tips on how to check your blog ranking in the SERPs or search engine result pages. As i predominantly in Google.
2. Change your Google Preferences to get 100 per pages (the default is 10), also make sure the “Do not filter my search result” radio button is checked. Save (you’ll get a pop up confirmation).
3. Do a search for your main keyword using quotes (phrase match or narrow search).
4. See where your blog ranks. A quick way is to use the Find function of your browser, Ctrl+F in PC or the Apple+F in Mac and type in your blog name.
5. If you switch on the SEO for Firefox plugin, it should give you the actual ranking, e.g. #33.
6. You may look at the sidebar to estimate the position of your blog.
7. 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).
8. Also do this for your lesser keywords.
9. The aim is to keep building links to make your pages rank higher.

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 16: Day 16 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Ezine Articles is loved by Google because a human moderator reviews every article (i.e. no spam).
2. It will take days for your content to be approved but once it will bring in a stream of traffic day after day – remember, you’re spending effort instead of money for traffic.

TDC Day 16a: Creating An Ezine Article (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Go to Ezine Articles.
2. 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.
3. Make sure you’ve read the Terms of Service for Publishers and Editorial Guidelines so you know what you can and can’t do.
4. Choose an appropriate category and subcategory.
5. Enter an article title in normal title case with your primary keyword. E.g. Vintage Electric Guitar – What You Need to Know.
6. Enter you keywords into the Keywords field
7. 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.
8. The article content allows you to have HTML tags, so you can make your keywords bold (<b>keyword</b>) or underline them (<u>keyword</u>). It is very important that your content is unique and good. Caro uses one underline and one bold for the main keyword phrase, preferably near the beginning of the article content. You should also bold the subheadings and other part of the content to make the article appears more interesting.
9. In the Author SIG box, put a short description about yourself or your business and add a link to your blog. All valid URLs are automatically formatted or web site address so you don’t have to worry about putting in html <a></a> tags. Make sure you include the “http://” and do not put a period/full stop after the link or it will be invalid (eg “http://www.hisblog.com.” will not work. An example:
   • Ed Dale
   • Vintage Electric Guitars
   • http://www.hisblog.com
10. Spellcheck.
11. Preview your article for any errors.
12. Agree to the Author Agreement.
13. Submit your article – it can take 7-10 days to be approved.
14. Ezine Articles can be powerful things and will give you traffic as well as high authority backlinks to your blog. Yay!

TDC Day 16b: Wordpress Direct Update (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Read the PDF Instructions to find out more about the latest Wordpress Direct update:
   1. In Website Settings, you should fill out the Brief Description field as the All in One SEO plugin will create meta data that helps your search engine optimisation;
   2. You can report theme problems and leave comments that other users can see;
   3. You can reactivate deactivated plugins in your Manage plugins tab;
   4. Under Manage a post, you can click on “Make it sticky” (Sticky Post plugin) to nominate a post to always appear at the top of the blog. Afterwards, you can “Unstick Post” to stop it being preferenced.
2. If you don’t have a Wordpress Direct blog, don’t fret, much of this functionality is provided by independent plugins (search for them in Google).

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 15: Day 15 Introduction Video (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. You will be creating a minisite using Weebly as according to Ed, it works very well with Google and is a great place for you to put keyword specific content.
2. Remember to write good and worthwhile content. If you put up junk then you will do yourself no good and could be doing yourself harm. It should be a smooth process for your readers – they enter in a search term, they get content related to their needs, they’re happy. You should not be doing interruption marketing. The reader should not shocked by your page (ie by completely off topic or useless content) – they will just go away.

TDC Day 15a: Setting Up A Weebly Site (TDC, Video, PDF)

1. Weebly is similar to Squidoo and HubPages, but lets you build a complete web site with multiple pages.
2. Go to Weebly and sign up.
3. You can create multiple web sites on the same account. The free basic service gives you 5 web sites. Any more and you’ll have to go to the professional version ($4.99/month), but the free version is fine for now.
4. Be prepared to be patient, the Weebly web page builder can take its time to load changes.
5. In “Title Your New Site”, enter the main keyword, eg Vintage Electric Guitar, and hit continue.
6. Go to the Designs tab along the top of the page: Scroll through the designs/themes by clicking on the left and right green arrows. Hovering over a design gives you a preview of it. Choose any design you like by clicking on it, it’s not too important now and you can change it later.
7. Go back to the Elements tab. You can add content element by dragging and dropping “elements”.
8. Drag the “Paragraph with Title” element to the web content area.
9. Click on “Title. Click here to edit.” to change the title. Make the title your your main keyword phrase.
10. Click on “Paragraph. Click here to edit.” to add content. It is a good idea to put a decent size article in there – at least a good couple of paragraphs. This will give you a better chance to be indexed and ranked in Google.
11. Add hyperlink to the text by selecting 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.
12. Depending on your design, you may be able to 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.
13. Click on “More” to add an RSS feed.
14. 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.
15. The RSS feed box is updated automatically but it doesn’t look good. 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.
16. When you are finished, hit the big orange Publish button.
17. Choose to have it hosted as a subdomain of Weebly (do not register a domain or use your own) – use your keyword phrase in the subdomain address. If your keyword is taken, use hyphens or make it plural.
18. Create another page in the “Pages” tab using one of your lesser related keyword phrases, follow Steps 7-16 to create more content - any pages you create will automatically get the same design. They also automatically link to each other but if you want to create specific links, use the link button and in the link editor, stay in the “Your Pages” default tab and choose the desired page from the drop down
19. Later, you can go to the “Elements” tab to add various content like videos or Google AdSense.

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 14

1. It appears that Day 14 was on Tumblr and like TDC 2007, Tumblr slapped the Thirty Day Challenge again. So there is now no Day 14.

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.