March 9, 2009 By 2 Comments

All In The Family

Tonight my son and I signed a contract between ourselves. The contract states that I will pay him $125 (AUD) a week for the next six weeks. In that time he will complete Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge, following it to the letter and perform some transcript tasks I have. At the end of the six weeks he will hand over any niche sites he has built OR he will keep them and pay me back the money I have paid him.

There are certain caveats of course. If he does not complete the assigned tasks for that week he won’t get paid.

The goal here is to push him through the pain barrier of sitting down to complete the 30DC, while at the same time introducing him to the possibilities of earning money online.

I’ll keep you posted.

Matto

Matto

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August 30, 2008 By 16 Comments

Thirty Day Challenge FAIL!

Heh yeah I did not make my $1 this year within the 31 days. Not going to beat myself up about it, the last week has been disrupted and the wind went out of my sails.

The highlights for me this year have been the awesome tools. Those tools changed some of the atmosphere of the challenge itself.  Not a bad thing as I love the new and improved tactics we learned and used in 2008.

In years past it has been a real pioneering feeling of cobbling together various techniques, being resourceful in how they were applied and pushing on through the “unknown” using only real desire and a wing and a prayer you were going in the right direction.

This year it was as professional as it gets. Incredible labor saving tools with state of the art video teaching and interaction. Brilliant stuff and really inspiring as examples of how to run a training course in anything on the internet.  If I wore a hat I would be taking it off to Ed Dale, Gurubob, Dan Raine and the rest of the team who put together a fabulous learning experience.

The cons of the challenge were the people who did not know how spoiled they really were, and made demands that were just incredible. Demanding free services, one on one tutoring from Ed and others, immediate response to their inquiries (which 99% of the time were user error) and refused to lift a finger to help themselves. It is a double-edged sword when teaching people for free that it attracts people from all walks and all parts of the human spectrum (and some of those really are unattractive and ungrateful).

I am not going to dwell on the negatives though, if I run something similar in a niche I will be setting the ground rules very early in the piece, if you don’t like how it is done then here is your refund and see you later. Life really is too short to put up with ingratitude and rudeness.

Team Afterparty is kicking on. I am going to approach the gals with a proposition about a female mastermind group that I have in mind. All of us have shown we have strengths in different areas and I think we would meld together well.

All in all a fabulous year and the one that really drove home to me that I am in teh right place doing the right thing to get to where i want to go.

I can’t thank the 30DC enough for the opportunity to be a part of such an amazing event!

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August 22, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Crazy in the Coconuts

As August draws to a close, my self imposed hiatus from my projects is also coming to an end and it is time to start thinking about them again.

Let’s recap what is in the pipeline and get to the nitty gritty about what needs to be done

Sphynx Cat Book- About 1500 words from completion and needs photos added. Websites need completing with a pre-release mailing list created before hand. Hours 20

Niches – Thirty Day Challenge has absorbed me as well as added some missing pieces to what i want to do. Getting my head around what the exit criteria will be for niches and how I can template the whole process for rinse and repeats in the future. Hours 20+

Immediate Edge Project - This has promise if we can pull it off. I see no reason why we can’t do OK with it, but in such a short timeframe (11 weeks!) I am not so sure we will “win” the challenge.  Even so, if our product is good enough in the future it should be some nice residual income for some time. Hours 50

Local business project - This one involves doing something I really dislike, cold calling or contacting. I will be putting together an introduction package for the business and after playing with Screenflow on the Macbook, reckon it will be dead easy to do video examples. Hours 20+

Just out of interest, if you have a local business that you want to take global on the internet (or you have a website but it is not working for you) and you want to act as a potential testimonial after I have my way with your web presence, drop me a line.

Off net projects – Been on hold since the incident with the rock and the car. Planning to visit the property in September and I will be hoping to source some desert lime plants for testing. There will also be painting of the outside beams…blergh!

Back of my mind stuff - I have an idea for a “viral” kind of iPhone app that will go well with the immediate edge niche. Wonder how to get that into production…Also I have last year’s niche site for the 30DC that is now accumulating about 8 sign ups a day with NO promotion. I need to do something with that mailing list, maybe a JV with someone who can make a product…

So yeah, I have a bit to do in the next couple of months…

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August 12, 2008 By 6 Comments

Oh It’s True, It’s True

Been watching my tweets today? No? Well if you did you would have seen that I decided to do a speed run at doing the Thirty Day Challenge up to now in one day. If I am too slack to post each day, well i can do 12 days in one and post about it.

You might think something like  “She’s a witch! Burn Her!!”, or that I am insane, or both. Hard to tell at the moment with all of the cough medicine I have been taking.  Still it might seem a big deal to some people to try such lunacy but if you have a procedure you can do anything 10 time quicker than flailing around in the dark.

For 8 years I worked for IBM and in that time I wrote dozens of procedures. I wrote them for people who had no idea what they were doing, I wrote them for highly technical people, I wrote them for managers and I wrote them for people for whom English was a second language. Procedures rock, and this is coming from someone who gets off on chaos.

The Thirty Day Challenge lays out the steps so clearly and simply that once you have done it once, you can easily replicate again. Now I don’t expect a new person to all of this to be able to do what I did in one day, but you can definitely chop in half the time it took the first time, and the time after that probably halve again.

So what did I achieve?

7am started research using Market Samurai. I picked a high end market and drilled down to a three word micro niche.  Seriously with this tool you can pick ANY word and find a niche waiting for picking. That is just what i did, picked a word out of the air that I knew would like writing about. Simple.

Stats:  Searches 2433/SEOT 1021 SEOC < 50k cheated a little because I know I can  OCI 96%

Speed Niche Before

Speed Niche Before

The SEO page shows a lot of big name sites that you would probably know that sell or link to a page selling the physical item or a variation of it.  The parts of this table I personally thing are important are the BLP  (which the competition is sorely lacking in) and the BLEG (again lacking). The on page SEO title, URL etc I can kill easily having a blog set up, rather than an eCommerce site.

7:30am I bought the domain name. Now this might interest you, or it may not, but when I have a niche term that ends in an S (Market Samurai will tell which term is searched for more) naturally say like British Bulldogs I will buy a domain that goes like this www.britishbulldogsite.com . See what i did there? BOTH search terms british-bulldog and british-bulldogs are in the domain name. Google will usually be able to figure out plurals but I like to make absolutely sure that I am SEO ready for anywhere :)

8 am Dropped kids to bus stop while DNS resolved and returned to write content and eat breakfast

8:30am Blog is up using WordPress Direct dead easy (though they still need to work on cleaning the crap out of their templates)

9 am starting sourcing affiliates from Share-a-Sale who I use for my affiliate testing stuff  (and a couple of sites that sell pretty well).  Like i said, this niche is a physical product and there were a few good affiliate deals that pay 10% or more on pretty high ticket items.

10 am Affiliate pretties added, site proof read again (to be sure, to be sure) and then the bookmarking began. I manually used Digg, which I have to admit is something i would NOT normally do, good content will mean that people will do this for you, but this was for speed … erk ends justifying the means was never my strong point, must pay back my social networking karma on that one . I also fired up Traffic Android (wait for tomorrow on that one *wink) and went to town.

11am BOOYAH!! Site is ranked 5 in broad match (I don’t really care about exact match because I look at #1 broad as THE goal). That’s the site, not any of the social bookmarks. so 4 hours from NOTHING to a top 5 raking. Shit hot stuff!

Speed Niche after ranking

Speed Niche after ranking

12 noon broke for lunch.

1pm Site moves to 4th in Google. I write more content and post a second story. Set off Traffic Android to bookmark second page in a couple of hours.

2pm Nap time…yep still sick and rest and fluids are important

4pm Wake up and check site.  Ranking is now 3 for domain name and 5 for first post awesome!

5pm read more stuff for content, spend some quality time with family and order dinner

6pm Write this blog post before going to create Squidoo page and Hub Page.

7pm Up to date with the Thirty day Challenge and have a site already dominating the search term in 12 hours.

Not a bad day all in all.  Yep, the goal is still the same with this one. Get it earning cash and then flog it off… which reminds me about a little thing i pointed out to my 30DC team mates about Market Samurai… but I will leave that post for another day.

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August 10, 2008 By 4 Comments

My 30 Day Challenge Business Plan

After clarifying with WordPress Direct their affiliate program rules I have changed my business plan around what I was going to do with the blogs/business I created.

While the Thirty Day Challenge is pitched at the complete and absolute newbie, and this year these guys are going to be pumping out gold value sites (compared to previous years where they may have been silver or copper), I am not sure in the remaining days Ed Dale and Dan Raine are going to then teach an “exit plan”.

It’s cool if they don’t, the audience after all wants to START not finish, but for anyone in business you really should have a plan on where you are going and what you will do after you have got there.

At the end of the 30 Day Challenge I will have a cluster of 5 related blogs, all of which will be in high Google rankings and will be valuable as an advertising platform for those in that niche, as well as for any product I wish to push. I know the Challenge this year is going to go on into the product creation stuff which is GREAT, thing is I might give that a miss on most of my sites.

Why?

Well my business plan is going to be different for the whole cluster. I plan to sell the lot WITH an attached WPD gold account. This will be a test for me to get more into the internet real-estate side of things. Usually though, once you have sold a property that’s it… no more income from the site. Attaching a WPD gold account though means i will get ongoing monthly payments from those sites from the WPD commission.

It would be smarter to sell each site individually with an account on each one to get the returns from many WPD accounts, and maybe that is what will happen if I cannot sell as a cluster.

…. more to come

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August 2, 2008 By 5 Comments

I Don’t Know How Ed Dale Does It.

Warning you may see a more direct side of me in this post you might not have wanted to see.

My goodness me, how on earth does he survive this part of the challenge every year? After spending a metric shitload of time (and I bet money as well) getting the whole event up running and with absolutely no hitches (well apart from kicking the power out on the first live video presentation) some people feel it is absolutely fine to get on the forums and bitch about the most petty of things.

I really do not understand people who choose to be like this (probably my very polite English upbringing). What does it benefit them to be seen as whiny complainers?

Talk about pearls before swine. The Market Samurai tool is a fabulous piece of work that will save people hours of drudgery. Last year we were measuring lines on our screen with bits of paper we had drawn on; this year we have an awesome project tool that looks great and works even better. I cannot sing its praises high enough.

Last year I could not believe that Wordtracker GTrends was released for free and said so, this year it seems that a group of people think that although they are getting better for FREE that they have the right to make demands about it. I would like to see them say the same to anyone else who offers a free sample of a product.

Really in the end, all the complaining is a smoke screen to cover the utterer’s own insecurity. The old “I knew it wouldn’t work because blah blah blah” …sheesh where is taking personal ownership and making the best of whatever is offered? I am compassionate, but not very forgiving when adults act like this.

Congratulations to Ed Dale and the team, to bring another great teaching event for free for those who want to take the opportunity. If only everyone was as grateful!

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July 29, 2008 By 4 Comments

Still Talking, Not Doing

Pretty disappointed with myself at the moment.  In one of those cycles where I am doing a whole heap of stuff, stuff that I ENJOY but am not putting it to good use making money for ME. I am helping people, demonstrating some pretty cool stuff (if I do say so myself), hanging out for the Thirty Day Challenge and basically actively procrastinating.

Like the  drum skin pulled so tight you can see through it, I am here there an everywhere making some great noise, but I NEED TO MAKE SOME SERIOUS CASH if I am ever going to be able to step out of corporate life sooner rather than later.

Is all of this activity raising my profile? I can’t really measure through traditional metrics. This blog is slowly climbing in readers, that might be a tick in that box.

I am stalled with a few projects and am not feeling the “buzz” I need to get them completed

I have this horrible feeling that I am waiting to “win lotto” with my internet work rather than striving for a comfortable reliable steady (smaller) income. While I have my day job as a safety net I don’t think I am as committed as I want, or need, to be.

Gary Halbert said in one of his famous letters something like* “rely on your strengths rather than the compassion of others” and I believe in that whoheartedly. I am not looking for charity or pity.  Just working through where I am and maybe striking a few chords with like minded people along the way.

* I would link to the quote directly but my ISP’s DNS is completely screwed at this moment.

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July 24, 2008 By 1 Comment

Ed Dale Mankini New Update

Developments in the Ed Dale Mankini saga need reporting on. Sure this blog post is just another way to keep my authority up on the subject, but I hey let’s be ridiculously transparent on this subject because there is absolutely nothing to lose (if only I had a sweet deal with an underwear retailer or something)

So the  Ed Dale Mankini Terapad blog has done what i thought it would do. Which is knock this blog off the #1 spot for the search term Ed Dale Mankini. There are a few reason why it would do that and I will probably talk about them as filler posts as we go through the month of August with the 30DC (after that i am SO not continuing this naughty naughty distraction which sucks up precious time).

I am keeping my eye on the specific Squidoo lens though. That is having another period of Google disappearing and it could make a Lazarus-like come back. Meanwhile this blog should sink in the rankings through time as it really isn’t focussed on the term and I need to stop posting mankini stuff here (as all this is doing is earning me a reputation of being slightly crazy!).

Time to knuckle down… only one week till the Thirty Day Challenge and I am getting pretty excited!

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July 21, 2008 By 2 Comments

Quality Is Not A Dirty Word

Inspired by a question from the Thirty Day Challenge forums.

Why is it that Internet marketers who are not huge names in the business seem to think that getting their work socially bookmarked by any means is more important than actually creating something of quality that will be naturally bookmarked by the people interested in their subject?

The “get ranked quick” crew seem to think that getting on the board quickly is the goal. But why? If your product/blog/article is excreta, you have just ensured that your reputation in the eyes of your audience has been tarnished. Same with social bookmarking and aggregators, you will lose anyone who is genuinely interested in what your subject is. And this is most likely to be a permanent thing.

Think about RSS feeds and FriendFeed. Have you ever gone back to somewhere or someone that produced crap and re-subscribed after dropping them? I know I haven’t as yet….if I think you are spouting rubbish then you are gone…. for good. It would take 100x more effort for those people to get back in front of my eyes than if they had written something decent in the beginning.

This is why I am against self-bookmarking*.

There is no better way to see what your audience wants. If you have done something that strikes a chord with your audience and they bookmark all over the place, you should be examining your piece to see what it was they liked. Was it the subject matter, the way you wrote it, the product they really want? Then reproduce it.

There is no reason why quality output will not rank as quickly as self-bookmarked, and the benefits will be million times more valuable than ruining your own reputation by doing it yourself.

Same goes for link begging. Wasting your reputation asking people to bookmark or link to your work is a stupid, short term gain for long term pain. Imagine you are a “normal person” who is using social networking tools as they should be used, and they see something like “Bookmark love please!!!!”. What are they going to think? Certainly they know that you are not writing for them, or  for any reason that would be beneficial for them.  I really dislike seeing people whore themselves out for a link like that… yech!

Create quality for your audience/market as your first priority, always.

* Disclaimer – I have self bookmarked some of my items for various reasons in the past. Mostly for testing or fun (like Ed Dale Mankini :) ). But 99.99% of the time I leave what I do to the whims of those I am writing/producing for.

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July 17, 2008 By 1 Comment

Ed Dale Mankini – Part Trez

After yesterday’s post about being the fly on the back of cows trying to swim past piranhas maybe it’s for the best I am swinging back to the Ed Dale Mankini thing.

Like a smoldering fire, there has been an explosion with the addition of a little extra oxygen as new players came into the fray from the outside. There goes the testing platform where I was pitting my PR0 blog against PR5+ social media type sites. I am serious when I say I am testing stuff. I really am!

I just put up a new blog on my favourite niche free hosted blogging platform. Last year I discovered it during the Thirty Day Challenge and was overjoyed to see the blogs I created ranking VERY quickly with NO social bookmarking. Let’s see if Google still loves them as much as they did a year or so ago (p.s. I still have two blogs on there that are rating great traffic and I have been terribly lax in updating …. for 6 months on one LOL!).

Let’s see how that blog goes, if it does well on Ed Dale Mankini then I will do a review on the platform and share it around.

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