The 30–Day–Challenge–Chronicle

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.

Ed warns us that what he is about to share in these videos will ‘blow us away’ and that we will be able to completely dominate our niche with this .. giving us so many leverage options that we will be wanting to use in the Thirty Day Challenge. It will enable us to be completely informed about what is happening in our niche .. right across the internet.

We start off being shown how to create a Google account (if we don’t have one already), how to configure the Google Reader and then how to fill it with RSS feeds. The explanatory video Google provides is recommended viewing.

Thirty Day Challengers are introduced also to the Summize search engine and are shown how to instal it.  The feeds for Google Alerts, so vitally important in providing up to date information on our niche can also be added to Google Reader.

Ed also delights in sharing the ‘hidden secret’  which nearly no-one knows about and which will save us one hour a day . .  One can also see just how powerful the ’share with note’ facility is. I am sure that this will be put to great use once we are underway.

Finally – there is a bit of tweaking done to settings.  Ed recommends using the filtering function rather than having a number of different Google Reader accounts and we are also shown how to import our feed in from Bloglines .. useful for those of us who did the Thirty Day Challenge last year.

Well pre-season for the 30 Day Challenge 2008 has commenced, and I start to pick up on this blog post about half way through – so for those of you looking to earn and learn while you work from home , then this should provide you with a good overview as to what we are up to.

It will also help document my own progress throughout the 30 Day Challenge and my interactions with the 30DC Kick-Ass Kiwi Ockers group.

Hoping you that this will inspire you to take up the 30 Day Challenge yourself. The challenge is all about showing you how to make your first dollar online, so that you can earn and learn at the same time .