The 30–Day–Challenge–Chronicle

Well .. Dale has been a bit lax here .. but such has been the intensity with which he has thrown himself into the Thirty Day Challenge .. that he has forgotten to go chart his progress for his own benefit and that of anyone else who may also be interested in what he is up to. But he is most excited about the results he is achieving … more on that in a minute.

Just back-tracking .. the Thirty Day Challenge started off with a bang .. and I was one of those who felt the buzz apparent on the chat box of the opening 30DC TV show.

The ‘lessons proper’ reintroduce us to the all important Magnificent Symphony which I commented on when doing last year’s Thirty Day Challenge, but for the sake of those unfortunate souls who may not yet have made it to my Profitable Home Based Businesses blog, I will summarize very briefly the main points Ed brought out. These four factors are always involved and have an order of importance which is universal ..

* Market Research .. this is everything .. you need to know if you have a market, or a niche within a market before you ever start to look at product .. and oh boy .. does the Thirty Day Challenge have the ultimate market reserach tool waiting for you! How do I know? I’ll tell you shortly.

* Traffic – without traffic you are not going to sell anything .. and it needs to be targetted traffic at that. Again, with this wonderful tool you will quickly find out just how much traffic is searching on any particular given keyword phrase, thus eliminating totally the old game of ‘guesswork’.

* Conversion – it is all very well having traffic but if you cannot convert that into sales .. then you need to question whether hanging around in that niche is the best course of action. Throughout the Thirty Day Challenge you will be taught a number of different ways to turn that traffic into a dollar.

* Product – comes in at the tail end. Have the first three parts set in place and the market will make it very clear just what it wants you to produce and sell to it.

Implement these four parts into your marketing strategy and be assured you will conquer and create a small business online.

Okay .. let me just wrap this up with an update of what has been happening with my chosen niche, black powder pistols. The blog is to be found at: http://blackpowderpistol.nzmkr.com. Within three hours I had a Digg post on Page 1 of Google, and a few hours later after placing a comment on an authoritative forum and doing another blog post I had the BLOG featuring at positions 1 and 2, 3, 4 and 6 on the exact keyphrases chosen and at 1 and 2, 2 and 3, 2 and 3 and 7 on the broad match for the same terms. The largest number of competing pages was 657,000. pages. And without this awesome tool available through the Thirty Day Challenge which you will learn about soon .. this just would not have been possible.

Oftentimes folks who have been Twittering have a problem getting their heads around FriendFeed, thinking this to be just a Twitter alternative. Nothing could be further from the truth and I thought it would be a good idea therefore to pull in a couple of the videos from Ed’s Thirty Day Challenge pre-season series, which explain these distinctions perfectly.

The first of the videos is Follow People Using Friendfeed

and then you are given some tips on how to get the very best out of this essential networking tool.

Tips For Using FriendFeed

Those looking to connect with me can do so at: http://www.friendfeed.com/diogene1.

Well with this post which briefly addresses the main points brought out in the last three pre-season videos, we will soon welcome in the start of the Thirty Day Challenge ‘proper.’ Truth to tell I’ve a bit of catching up to do to get right up to date .. but I couldn’t resist leaping ahead a bit to view the videos featuring over the first four days of the Challenge. Wow! And as for Market Samurai! Market what? Well .. you get to hear more about that a couple of posts or so out.

We are shown all of the various options for using the video lessons including some of the options we were likely not aware of and Ed goes on to explain his thinking behind some of these as well. If we choose to set up a playlist in Itunes we are shown how to do this and for those of us with older machines we are shown the VLC Media Player option.

Some of the very cool features of the incredible Thirty Day Challenge forums are explained to us and we learn that the forum is to be expanded out to become a ‘365 day thing’. So while there will be a focus on the Thirty Day Challenge content, topics will be expanded out so that we can discuss other things we may have learnt from other internet marketers and strategies relating to other aspects of internet marketing with which we are involved. The whole objective is to make this our “internet marketing home on the internet”.

Brilliant idea Ed .. way to go! Love the idea of pulling in all the new posts as RSS feeds! And I must remember to post my Friend Feed link here ..

Those of us who have just got on in to the Thirty Day Challenge will welcome the final video in the pre-season series – the Thirty Day Challenge Pre-season Cheat Sheet. And fantastic .. we have transcripts! Brilliant for those of us who are more reading orientated.

And … next .. on to the Thirty Day Challenge.

In these next two Thirty Day Challenge lessons Ed gives us a guided tour of his Friendfeed and emphasizes that with Friendfeed – you really do need to know how to drive it. It is important to take it all very slowly – and not try and just consume from it .. because the sheer volume it sends out will really get to you. He goes on to say that in truth – it is not that volume it sends out but your ability to create conversations around bits of content which is important. It is here that Friendfeed excels .. by achieving what many folk try to achieve on Twitter, even though Twitter was designed to be a micro-blogging platform and was never designed as a conversation platform like Instant Messaging, Skype, Friendfeed or even blogs for that matter.

Ed explains that Friendfeed can take any piece of content and provides a mechanism for us to filter and stream and then allow people to vote on whether they like it or not and it also allows people to comment on it, in a central place. We are taken by the hand and shown how to filter and dice and slice content to provide just the information that we are wanting our niche to see.

Friendfeed takes content from a whole bunch of different places and then provides a feed of everything we are doing. So, when someone is following you on Friendfeed they are seeing pretty much everything you are doing .. whether you might be using Flickr, YouTube or ‘Stumbling Upon’ a piece of useful content. The feed can also be imported into Google Reader.

The more contacts you can have with your market in a non ‘in-your-face’ way – the more successful you will be and in this regard Twitter and Friendfeed are two of the most powerful tools which have been implemented in internet marketing, this year, for fulfilling that exact purpose.

The ‘rooms’ functionality is going to be very useful for this years Thirty Day Challenge. Already our recently formed 30DC Kick-Ass Kiwi Ockers group has a room set up .. and I sense that it is going to be set a buzz.

Before I start waxing lyrical about this jaw dropping technology we are introduced to today .. that can have us in the no 4 spot on Google for our niche,  let me say to Phil the man .. wow .. you are just the greatest mate. The 30DC would not be the same without you.

The very shortest video to date .. but does this pack a punch!!  Kudos to Dan Raine for ferriting out this awesome technology.

This a way whereby Ed can help us find stuff on the internet using the ‘Add My Expertise’ button and then the ‘Subscribe’ button to links to our search results.

He asks us to imagine just what this can do for us in terms of our own niche. These amazing results have staggered even the most seasoned of marketers.