My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

Long time no posting on this blog. Hi everybody. I’ve been catching up with the 2008 TDC and what a difference a year makes!

I’m no longer a newbie. I’ve got over a year of internet marketing under my belt but not much income to show for it. In my life experience, that usually means one of the basics was skipped somewhere and I need to go back and cover the basics before moving on again, thus taking the TDC again this year.

Market Samurai absolutely rocks, hands down. Over the past year I’ve learned not to trust just one source of information, so I did all my niche research on both Market Samurai and on Google Keyword tool and Google search. Market Samurai is spot-on. I checked for every single set of niche keywords I was considering and Market Samurai and the Google tools agreed completely.

I’m happy that this year we’re spending a lot more time on marketing our niche sites. Last year at this time we were just putting up our sites and then the whole Tumblr-gate thing knocked so many of us out of the water it wasn’t funny. Still isn’t. For those of you who want to get on Tumblr to generate marketing and backlink content, be warned. They may again ban us all, well, you all because I’m not touching Tumblr with a 10 ft. pole.

Weebly is also in the running along with Squidoo Lenses and Hubpages. I love Squidoo. I have 32 lenses. This niche will make 33, and I have plans to go on to become a giant squid in the next 6 months. I’d do it sooner but I have more pressing and profitable things to work on right now. They might also consider me to be spamming if I create too many lenses in too short a timespan. Honestly, I never liked Hubpages although I do have one Hub. I may put a hub up for my current niche. But Hubpages recently had a Google slap. Squidoo was slapped last year but is back and better than ever.

Wisdom from last year: go out and find your niche neighborhood and comment on some blogs and forums. Don’t comment unless you can leave at least a 4-sentence paragraph or make a statement and ask a really good question (that would make two sentences).

Do a marketing article or two for your primary keyword blog on one or two other sites, then do another type of article marketing the next day, and another the next. Once your site is indexed add another article to your niche blog, then do some more marketing. When you do your social bookmarking for each post don’t forget to use the article permalink (not the general blog URL) or you will be banned by Digg so fast it will make your head spin.

Ed and company are teaching us the most important thing we need to learn for good marketing practice: do a little each day and keep it up each day. Over a week you’ve got a lot to show for your little bit of work each day. But if you go out and try to do it all in one day, you will look like you’re spamming. You don’t want to look like you’re spamming. Ever. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t spamming. If you look like you are then you are.

I’m also glad we’re around to Ezine Articles as of today. We didn’t get here last year until almost the end of the challenge, and it didn’t have any impact at all because it can take up to 7 days to get an article published. It wasn’t a waste to do it the big picture, but to meet the challenge you had to make your $10 by the end of August 2007, so Ezine Articles didn’t have much of a kick to help last year. This year it certainly will.

Another warning, if you use Comment Kahuna to find blogs and then comment on them, please read the whole article and determine if you have anything worth adding in a comment. Then write a unique comment for each blog article you read that you feel you can contribute to. I’ve come to the point that if someone just says nice blog or great post and leaves a link, I delete it. Nobody is getting backlinks off my blogs that I’ve spend at least a year working on for saying “nice post”. I would hope others out there would do the same and delete those tiny comments that people are trying to get a backlink from. The other thing I’ve done is remove the link from their name anchor text. The comment stays but there is no link at all. I already use nofollow but this makes sure that my blog doesn’t show up as one that has bogus comments on it.

In the future, after the challenge, you want to build Google PageRank and that means great content with great comments. One of my niche sites from last year’s challenge is now in search position number 1 on Google for broad match and phrase match searches. It also earns me at least $10 per month. It was never a big seller, but it’s nice that it pays the monthly hosting bill for all my blogs.

I’m going to stop here and remind you that the internet and the world aren’t looking at you, the Thirty Day Challenger and then you’re going to go away. They’re looking at you as someone who is starting a business and takes it seriously. Show that you do by looking long-term while you perform your tasks in the short-term.

Sherri
2nd year challenger

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Technorati Tags: article marketing, blog comment ediquette, market samurai software, social bookmarking, social media

written by joubess \\ tags: article marketing, blog comment ediquette, market samurai software, social bookmarking, social media