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Thirty Day Challenge

Folks,

I have an amazing thing I came across and I want to share it. There is a course on Internet Marketing called the Thirty Day Challenge. It is totally free and only uses programs you can get for free on the Internet. It runs for 30 days in a row and they do one each year.

As I have insinuated in other posts elsewhere, I have been studying ebooks, watching videos, listening to mp3's until they are coming out my ears. There is some good stuff out there amidst a lot of schlock. I have learned legitimate stuff, spammy kind of stuff, very sneaky kind of stuff, even illegal kind of stuff, but I have never seen anything like this course. (It even puts those Blogger tutorials I liked so much in its hip pocket with some change left over.)

Incidentally, it is totally White Hat. These guys are not interested in monkey-business. I feel like I have encountered an oasis in the desert.

btw - I have nothing to gain from this endorsement other than making one hell of a good post. This is a fantastic program, these guys are giving away the entire farm for free and they are some of the best teachers I have ever seen on the Net.

In terms of Objectivism, there is a huge sense-of-life benefit. Ed Dale is the main video and podcast teacher. He is an Australian, a guitar player, and simply one of the nicest people on the Web bar none. His enthusiasm for each discovery or new resource is an almost childlike delight and the adjective he most often uses is "brilliant!" Every time I listen to him, I get the sense that I have taken a bath in good vibes. I want to stay in his world. He is overwhelmingly contagious.

(Even when negative, he is upbeat. During one podcast, he referred to the Nigerian 419 email scammers as "those very friendly people from Nigeria who wish to share their extraordinary good fortune with me," or something to that effect, and it was not said in a sarcastic tone of voice, but in a "whistle while you work" feel. I love this guy.)

The purpose of the course is to train you in the latest Internet programs and guide you through a project so you make your first ten dollars online within those thirty days. That may not seem like a lot, but the focus is on training you so you then go out into the world to make your fortune fully equipped to do so. It is not about making a fortune during your learning or get rich quick schemes. I don't know anywhere you can get that kind of training without paying through the nose, much less make 10 bucks for doing it.

Here is an economic fact for the naysayers and know-it-alls. One recent professor at a previous Thirty Day Challenge is Frank Kern. He released earlier this year a product called Mass Control (pdf, audio and video training in Internet marketing) which earned him about 24 million dollars in a short amount of time. Another offshoot is a thing called Stompernet with more gazillions in earnings. Google these things if you wish. They are all over the Web.

I feel like a child who has discovered a candy-shop with nobody around because I found where these guys came from.

The introduction to Ed Dales's podcasts is so charming that I am giving the clip below.

For those with difficulty with the online player, rightclick "Download clip" below and select "save link as" (or some similar wording depending on the browser). Then use an audio or media player on your computer.

Download clip

There is an inside joke about a pretty pink thong that I have yet to understand, but I am sure all wisdom comes to he who waits. :)

I recently started the 2007 Thirty Day Challenge from the online archives and on June 1 the preseason for 2008 is going to start, so I will be on day 19 (2007) and overlap for a bit for 2008, which I fully intend to do. There will be some extra work for a while, but who cares? This thing is formatted so that beginners receive enormous benefit but experienced people have enough to keep them more than happy. Anyway, the Internet is always changing and these guys are right on top of it, so it is good to recycle.

This course is worth a college education. I mean it.

Michael

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Michael, could you give us an example of a specific idea or strategy taught in the course? From your post, and from all the "information" on the Thirty Day Challenge website, it just seems like another get-rich-quick scheme about getting into the money-making business without providing an actual product or service.

Let's say I have an actual Internet presence; maybe I have a real estate license & am trying to get visitors to my website & get clients that way (www.tucsonbuyersmarket.com, hint-hint). Does this course go into how to drive traffic to your site?

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Brant,

Yep, Tierra Antigua is super for part-timers such as myself. $25 a month, small transaction fee & you keep the rest of the commission. And they're big enough to provide good office support & broker advice. I have nothing against Long, though. They're definitely the ones with the buyers around here!

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Laure,

It is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It is a ten dollar earning for taking a month-long course for free scheme. :)

I know get-rich-quick schemes and I know quality information. I know them well in this field.

Here is a small sampling of the quality books and courses I have read over the last few months: Rich Jerk, Honest Riches, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Multiple Streams of Income, Profit Lance (I am a member), Bum Marketing, Internet Marketing for Free, Squidoo Queen, Affiliate "Project X," Day Job Killer, Butterfly Marketing, Average Joe Marketer, Atomic Blogging, Blogging to the Bank, Guru Assassin, Authority Black Book, and I could go on and on. These are works I have actually studied cover to cover and this is just off the top of my head.

I would say that this represents about 5% or so of the things I have studied and there are many people who are not mentioned here. I have also been greatly influenced by many printed works, videos and audios of Armand Morin, Ewen Chia, Andrew Hansen (about the best on writing articles I know of), Jonny Andrews, Jonathan Leger, Russell Brunsen, Frank Kern, Ken Evoy, and the list goes on and on. You can Google any of this or these people and see that there is a lot of good stuff here. I have not mentioned one item or person in these two paragraphs I consider schlock (although many come with a large dose of hype) and the list is far from complete.

So imagine how much schlock I have read, too. It's disgusting. :)

When I gave my endorsement for the Thirty Day Challenge, it was from a position of knowledge. I have learned a lot from all these people and works, but this course is something really special. I think it literally belongs in Galt's Gulch.

Basically, here is a small overview of where I am headed with marketing. The most lucrative market on the Internet is selling information. (There are other good markets, especially if you use eBay, but I will stay with information for now to give an idea.) You find a niche market through keyword research (and there are excellent tools for this), research it to find what people want to buy, find and/or produce products that fill that demand and offer it to them. Along the way you create a list of customers and interested parties so you can offer them more stuff. There are many approaches and many techniques. The best way seems to be to give away a lot of good stuff along with selling the products. (The best of all worlds is when you discover a niche you love along with "schools of hungry fish.")

For affiliate sales (selling other people's stuff), there are excellent sources of products. Information products on Clickbank normally provide commissions of 65% on up, with 75% being common. So if you know how to choose good products that sell well, you do well. (There is a lot of schlock over there along with good stuff, so there is an art to choosing.) That is just one place (the biggest). One advantage is that it does all the payment processing for you, so you don't even need a merchant account to get started. But there are many good sources of affiliate products.

You asked about traffic. The Thirty Day Challenge teaches how to drive traffic, but it also teaches you how to be selective about the traffic you drive. What's the use of getting 10,000 hits a day if nobody buys anything or even clicks on an Adsense ad?

The focus in the 2007 course series is on Web 2.0 applications. Video and audio marketing are also covered. Traffic-wise, MySpace and social networking in general have added a new dimension to driving traffic, (the traditional ways being SEO, backlinks, article marketing and just plain content). A list of friends is basically an altered version of an email autoresponder list, so if you know how to work that and grow it, you should do pretty well. I have read enough to know where Thirty Day Challenge is going and I think it is (to use Ed Dale's term) "absolutely brilliant."

Here is a small taste. During the pre-season of 2007, he asks you to install Firefox with a list of add-ons (like SEO for Firefox, ScribeFire, Search Status, VideoDownloader, etc., which he teaches you how to use), among other resources. He also asks you to sign up for accounts at several places that you will be using to drive traffic (and other activities like making sites) during the course. One of them is Stumbleupon. Here are the two videos explaining the whys and hows. This is only an introduction to get used to the tool. How to use this to drive traffic is given later. You decide if the guy is a good teacher or not. (The videos are short.)

http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/blog/23/...bleupon-part-1/

http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/blog/24/...bleupon-part-2/

Personally, I had installed Stumbleupon a while back, but the explanations I found have always been a bit vague, so I never used it. Just not enough time. Now that I have seen these videos, things are very clear and Stumbleupon has become a enormous time-waster. :) It's fascinating to tell the truth.

That's enough hype. But to finish your question about traffic, having good constant high-quality keyword-rich content is about the best thing of all for search-engine traffic, and you can supplement that with traffic surges from Web 2.0 like Digg and broadcasts to friends lists. You can use paid forms like PPC (pay-per-click ads), but that is another issue with other disciplines. I am more interested right now in learning the free methods.

If you want to get down and dirty, you can do spam, use scraped content, do cookie stuffing, etc. (I even learned how to do a lot of that stuff, although I still consider myself to be a noob.) I don't seem to have an affinity for those methods, though. I can write and love to, so that puts me in another direction by nature. Also, the products I am interested in selling do not include penis enlargers and home mortgages. :)

The Thirty Day Challenge course is free and there ain't no catch. Do it if you want to. I highly recommend it. Like the guy says, he wants to get into your pocket the other 11 months out of the year, but not this one. This month is for learning.

Michael

(btw - I have yet to use any of this knowledge for OL. Still, we have a Google Page Rank 4 and an Alexa ranking of about 250,000. That is pure content driven. Not bad. Wait till I roll up my sleeves later down the line.)

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Interesting, but how about a good get rich quick scheme?

Brant,

Here's an idea if you have some time. It won't make you rich, but it will make you some quick money and you will even do some good for some special interest people (in an underhanded kind of way).

Find a well-traveled niche, preferably one where people are totally in love with their interest and show signs that they spend money on it. Say, exotic domestic birds (but there are oodles of other niches if you don't like birds). Read up on it a bit (Wikipedia is great and Google searches work wonders for fast information.) Join a forum or two (or three or more) and post on some blogs, but make sure they are places with activity. Dead places with few posts are not good places to find buyers. Let people in that niche get to know you by posting and being friendly for say about 10 posts +/- at each place.

Then, out of the blue, announce that someone just gave you three cockatiels for a present and you have no idea how to care for them. You are in a bind because you are worried you will harm the birds by mistake. What kind of birdseed is best? Temperature? Should they stay together? Anything that comes to your mind. Sound worried. Ask people to send you an email with suggestions and provide your email address. For drama, you can stress the urgency of the situation.

Then you will get a bunch of emails. Organize the information in them into book form using Word, do a rewrite to align everything into the same style, make a pdf out of it, set it on a download page, or even better register it at Clickbank, and set a price on it, say $47 (this is standard for ebooks, believe it or not, so nobody will be shocked). Call it Cockatiel Care Secrets or something like that.

You have an email list of people who offered you suggestions, so you can start by offering them the ebook. It will contain much more information than each provided individually, so they should be interested. Also, as this information was provided by people who love cockatiels, it will be top quality information. In essence, you can sell the same information they gave to you right back to them. :)

I didn't learn this one with the Thirty Day Challenge, I learned it at... er... another kind of place... but I wanted to show you that I actually do have a growing bag of tricks.

(Groan... I hope Ayn Rand is looking the other way in her grave right now. :) )

Michael

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She's busy right now.

But she asked me to watch you like a cockatiel.

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Actually, this just gave me a good idea. How about "Ayn Rand's Ghost" as a niche site to draw traffic, say, for monetizing with Adsense ads?

:)

Alas, the figures do not add up. In fact, Objectivism itself is not a good niche. Low number of searches. Relatively high number of web pages. Some traditional Objectivist products sell, like Rand's novels, but commissions are crap. Hardly any affiliate programs to speak of, either.

The real dust we see is the world leaving it behind in Internet commerce.

Michael

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Phil,

LOL...

There will be a moment in the not-too-distant future when all that will be left to watch (and it will be sudden when it happens) will be the dust from my tracks.

:)

Michael

Does that mean that people who want a record of various exchanges which have happened here had best start copying before those records disappear?

Ellen

___

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Ellen,

These records will never disappear so long as Kat and I are alive. I was just bantering with Phil.

I am even studying how to make some products from the best stuff here (and, yes, I intend to pay people if their work is included), but I need to wait until I can afford a research staff. Also, I still haven't found the right angle for good sales of those kinds of products, but I am sure it will come to me. I have been thinking a bit along audio and video lines.

Michael

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If I had a forum, I'd think about putting together a book, "The Best of the Internet Flame Wars". There is a lot of amusing stuff to be had! :D Unfortunately, I guess you'd need to get permission from everyone, including those that stormed off in a huff!

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Laure,

Flame wars would be a horrible niche. I get 3 searches daily on Wordtracker for the term, but 1,090,000 pages indexed by Google.

A good niche (for small niches) needs keyword phrases with more than 100 searches daily and under 30,000 pages on Google to be economically interesting.

But it would be fun.

:)

Michael

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Michael, could you give us an example of a specific idea or strategy taught in the course? From your post, and from all the "information" on the Thirty Day Challenge website, it just seems like another get-rich-quick scheme about getting into the money-making business without providing an actual product or service.

Let's say I have an actual Internet presence; maybe I have a real estate license & am trying to get visitors to my website & get clients that way (www.tucsonbuyersmarket.com, hint-hint). Does this course go into how to drive traffic to your site?

Hey Laure,

I am looking into this now. I am at day 10, in about 4 hours of work, but I need to go back and review it. It is a online marketing course, showing how to use free tools, such as wordtracker, google/notebook; google/trends etc. Ultimately how to use the internet effectively to drive a targeted audience to your web site.

What I have picked up so far is that phrases like "romantic realism" have almost zero presence online. But phrases like "art life" and "art power" are huge. What I have learned so far is how to test key words and phrases for their visibility.

I have also picked up on how to be notified automatically about relevant art things happening on the internet concerning sales, workshops, and aesthetics.

I don't have an overview yet of the entire course--but the man, Ed Dale, is educating correctly--taking you by baby steps to ground the foundation. I am sure by the end, I will have a complete overview. My guess is that this process gets you in touch with the people you want to be connected to, who otherwise would be invisible.

I will have to back track, and do the steps exactly and familiarize myself with them. It may start simple but I think it will start to snow ball.

My sister recently commented to me that "you cannot sell hidden treasures."

I am setting aside a few hours a day to do this, like taking a real class. Marketing is not a strong point of mine, and gaining experience in it doesn't come without effort. And I do know from the experience, how rewarding it is to reach people I connect with. Also, I do make over 50% of my sales from online, so it behooves me to understand the medium well.

I hope my initial summary is helpful.

Michael

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Michael,

If you are going to do 2008, we could do a team if you are interested. They like you to get into teams of 3-5 people. The idea is that social proof helps enhance the learning and keeps the enthusiasm up.

Michael

Oh, I am not doing the challenge, rather I am collecting the info and using it to my own ends. BTW, I just picked up the tool of Google.com/notebook and using that to organize my upcoming talk at TAS--its incredibly easy, and saves about half the time.

Michael

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Michael,

That's cool.

It occurred to me earlier that posting an invitation like that in public might have been awkward. I was going to alter it.

Now all I have to do is deal with the 7 years of therapy in front of me to come to terms with the identity crisis from rejection.

:)

Michael

I think closer to 7 hours of brooding is more than enough. ;)

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