My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

Phrase Statistics

• total visitors through Aug. 28 - 304
• total page views through Aug. 28 - 635
• unique visitors through Aug. 28 - 258
• product 1 link clicks - 101
• product 1 CTR - 39%
• unique visitors since putting up product 2 - 44
• product 2 link clicks - 26
• product 2 CTR - 41%
• sales - none

SERP:

• broad match - 150 (no change)
• phrase match - 71 (positive change)

Discussion

I finally started getting some traffic from my Squidoo lenses and my Ezine article to my blog. Still no sales. I think I just don’t have the traffic I need to convert to sales. I need to do a lot more promotion tonight and tomorrow and hopefully will make a couple of sales by midnight Sunday, the end of the challenge.

This year’s challenge goal is $1, not $10. I just need to make 2 sales of either product to meet the challenge.

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written by joubess

As you can see, I changed the theme to the i3Theme v 1.7 snazzy pink for Dan Raine’s pink thong!

Sorry, couldn’t help myself. I just had to do it…

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written by joubess \\ tags: WordPress Theme

I’ve been thinking a lot about everything I’ve read about blogging being the new, reliable source of information, the new medium, the new what?

Webster’s definition of a blog: short for Weblog, a blog is a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

That definition isn’t much help. Blogging is a lot more than that, more like everything bloggers do and post. I’ve tried to equate my ideas with something we all mostly understand, like:

• blogging is like independent films
• blogging is like independently published books
• blogging is like cable TV
• blogging is like letters from a pen-pal
• blogging is like journaling for public consumption
• blogging is like your own op/ed page in the newspaper

Blogging is a little like some of these ideas and a lot like others. It seems to be the most transcendent medium available today, and everyone who chooses to can blog.

Blogging is like independent films

Many bloggers are also video producers, and their distribution network is on YouTube or other video sharing sites. Videos are also distributed on many blogs.

I embed a fair number of other people’s videos and picture slide-shows on my blogs. My Hurricane Katrina Pictures blog and On Being the Change I Wish To See blog have the most videos and slide-shows embedded in posts. The topics lend themselves well to multimedia.

Blogging is like independently published books

Blogs are collections of writings by an individual (or small group of individuals) and only read by a few to several thousand people. Bestsellers hit the “millions of readers” magnitude. Most books in print sell at least into the 5-figures (over ten-thousand).

Some day, our blogs may indeed become books that we publish independently, whether in print or via electronic media (ebooks). Some day, some blogs may become bestsellers with millions of copies sold. But that’s a future which remains to be seen.

Blogging is like cable TV

I think blogging hits this one pretty solidly. Blogs are written for the individual reader interested in reading about particular subjects or reading work by particular authors.

Like cable TV, blogs provide a gazillion channels to choose from. There is likely something out there for every taste. And if there’s not, you can create it yourself, like local cable TV channels produce local programs inexpensively.

I even have a blog about a TV show, Invader Zim.

Blogging is like letters from a pen-pal

As we read other people’s blogs and get to know them, their style, and watch their content unfold, it’s like getting letters from a pen-pal over a long period of time. More of the author is revealed in each post just as more about a pen-pal is revealed in each letter. We get to know someone we’ve never met and may never meet from their writings.

Sure, some people we know personally read our posts, but most of our readers aren’t people we personally know. Should the opportunity arise to meet a reader in person, it must be like meeting someone you’ve gotten letters from for quite awhile and you may know them better than some of your friends. The difference is you may have read a lot of their writings, but they may not have read a lot of yours.

Blogs give the reader a unique opportunity to respond to posts and take part in a conversation with the author by commenting. By commenting on blogs you enjoy reading, the author gets the chance to know you’re out there, and may even become one of your readers.

Blogging is like journaling for public consumption

This is also true. A few of my blogs are journals about specific topics in my life and the content comes from my daily experiences and thoughts. Many people write blogs about certain aspects of their lives. Some blogs are just like a personal journal that other people can stop by and read anytime.

This blog is one of those, and so are my Debt Free or Bust and Hurricane Katrina Pictures blogs. They give you a look inside my journeys of internet marketing and blogging for income, becoming debt free, and surviving Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. They are my personal stories.

Blogging is like your own op/ed page in the newspaper

I have an opinion and editorial blog, too. In this blog I can write about my opinions on any topic I choose. It’s my On Being the Change I Wish to See blog. I write about all the things in the world I think need to be changed, and what I’m personally doing to make those changes.

My personal rule on this blog is I don’t get to bring up anything unless I’m prepared to come up with a solution, discuss the topic (pro or con) and support my thesis, or actually do something about it. I didn’t have this rule when I started and developing this notion has made the posts of much higher quality and more relevant to my ideal of being the change I wish to see in the world. This ideal comes from the following quote:

• Be the change that you wish to see in the world. - Mahatma Gandhi

What is blogging like to you? Please leave comments and let me know.

Sherri Joubert

Trying to figure out what blogging is.

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I’m about to start working on lesson two of Blog Mastermind. In lesson one and supporting materials, it’s pretty clear that seven blogs are way too many to keep up.

I’m going to finish my home office organization project and then sell that blog because I just don’t have enough passion to keep writing about it. I’m also selling my red beans and rice recipes blog. There are a lot of other people out their much more suited to those topics than I am. If any of you, my readers, are interested in those two topics, I will be learning how to value their current content soon, and I’ll be putting a sales price on them.

I haven’t decided what I’m doing with my Invader Zim Episodes blog. I have been able to post to it somewhat regularly, and I really do love the show. I only wish it came on more often.

The blogs I’ll be keeping and posting to regularly are:

• Debt Free or Bust
• Hurricane Katrina Pictures
• My Thirty Day Challenge 3.0 (this blog)
• On Being the Change I Wish to See

Four blogs are still too many to keep up with, but since this one and Debt Free or Bust are more personal journal blogs, I’ll only be working to produce pillar content for two blogs most of the time. That should be manageable.
Pillar content includes articles, reports, white papers, podcasts and videos.

I really want to do a couple of series articles on my Hurricane Katrina Pictures blog. There is a lot to write about the long-term consequences of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita from environmental damage to the human cost, and what such a disaster brought to light about poverty in America. I plan to get the first one written and published over winter break before tutoring gets going full force again in January.

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I just finished reading Rich Schefren’s Attention Age Doctrine 2 free report. You can download it by clicking that link.

I believe Rich is right. The most valuable thing we have to spend today is our time. Time is now worth more than money. Getting our time in the form of our full, undivided attention is what is extremely valuable today. His thesis is we are all suffering from attention deficit, but it’s not a disorder. It is a lack of time to give our full attention to just about everyone and everything we do during our waking hours. We even sleep less so we have more of these partial attention hours.

The euphemism for it is multi-tasking, but in reality, it is not paying full attention to the multiple things we’re trying to get done at the same time. We need to stop buying the myth that we can multi-task successfully. Humans cannot multi-task in most areas of our lives successfully. We can invent machines that do things for us so we are free to perform another task, but we can’t actually write an article and talk on the phone at the same time without both the writing and conversation being negatively affected. We can’t cut the grass and play with the children at the same time. We can’t drive and read or watch TV at the same time, unless we’d like to cause an accident. We can’t perform experiments in the lab while attending meetings. We can usually walk and have a conversation at the same time, but we don’t walk much because it’s faster to drive. We can drive and have a conversation as long as that conversion isn’t a distracting or important one. Why? Because driving safely requires our full attention, and important conversations require our full attention.

Marketers of any kind who don’t realize this and change with this fact of modern life are going to find themselves shut out of peoples lives completely because we simply don’t have time for them anymore and we won’t tolerate their interruptions.

We all spend a great deal of effort guarding our precious time. We spend a lot of effort to limit the information overload we constantly experience. There is always too much to read, hear and see every day. We don’t want to spend a single second more than we have to on listening to, reading or watching advertising.

We have caller ID so we can block or ignore anyone we don’t want to spend the time to speak with (mostly telemarketers).

We have TiVO or DVR to save the TV shows we want to watch commercial-free, and we download subscription podcasts of our favorite radio shows to listen to them commercial-free because we don’t want to spend any of our time watching or listening to commercials. Commercials take up about 21 minutes of a 1-hour radio show. I have better things to do with that 21 minutes.

We have spam filters on our email accounts and pop-up blockers on our internet browsers. We have RSS feed readers so we can eliminate everything we don’t want to read accept that to which we subscribe. And if someone bores us or wastes our time, we may press the button to cancel that subscription in a heart-beat.

We drive through at fast food restaurants and eat while we’re driving. Some men shave while they drive. Some women apply make-up while they drive. Many of us talk on the phone while we drive. Being a distracted driver is dangerous no matter what the distraction, but we drive distracted anyway, and we add to the traffic problems in our cities with an increased number of accidents.

We cook meals while helping the children with homework. We have a conversation with our spouse while we empty the dishwasher just after we put a load of laundry into the washing machine. We read while we eat or while watching the news, or we ignore the TV news and read it online when we have a moment. We no longer watch much TV because it takes too much time. The shows we do watch are on our schedule or on our digital recording service.

Sitting down together as a family at the table for dinner is rare. It was the norm when I grew up.

It’s very hard for us to turn everything off, sit down together and talk to each other without an interruption. I don’t wonder why people have family problems or why friendships fall apart. Without attention to each other and effective communication, relationships fail.

Our work is less than our best if we don’t devote our full attention to each important work task. Sure, there are work tasks that don’t require our full attention, but the ones that do must receive it or suffer in quality. If that happens enough, we may lose our jobs to someone who can better manage to give his or her full attention to the tasks that require it.

I believe therapists make so much money because they provide the one thing we can’t seem to provide for ourselves, undivided attention for 50 minutes in a row.

Tutors make money because they provide uninterrupted attention for 55 - 60 minutes in a row on the subject in which the student is being tutored. Adults aren’t the only ones who are over-scheduled and stressed out. Our teens especially are negatively affected by an over-scheduled life. They enter adulthood already burned out.

Our attention is the most valuable thing we can give and get. So when someone takes the time to make you a gift or write you a letter (especially by hand) or send you a card in the mail or spends time talking with you one-on-one, think about how much attention that person was giving you. The item or act itself may not seem like much, but the attention they gave you is the greatest gift you can receive. Thus, we show someone how much we care about them by how much of our undivided attention we give to them.

When someone or something is really important to us, the most valuable thing we can give is our full, undivided attention to that person or thing.

Let’s filter out the distractions with all our tools and spend the time we do have fully engaged in whoever we’re with or whatever we’re doing that’s important to us. In simpler terms, we need to find the things in life that we say yes to, and eliminate everything that we say no to. And we need to stop feeling guilty about saying no. We need to turn down the rheostat on our lives. It will make everything in our lives better.

How does this tie in with my blogging efforts? I need to give my full, undivided attention for at least an hour or two each day to producing great content and marketing my blogs. If I don’t do that I won’t accomplish anything on creating an asset over time. By focusing for a relatively short period each day on two tasks, writing content and marketing it, it will pay off in a big way later. In 6 months I’ll have a significant amount of content and it will be consistently marketed. But if I remain unfocused and only write a little here and market a little there in a haphazard fashion, 6 months could go by without significant progress. I don’t want that to happen.

Does anyone or anything get our undivided attention? Yes, if we choose to give it.

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written by joubess

I successfully moved My Thirty Day Challenge 3.0 blog to its new home on HostGator with its own URL, mythirtydaychallenge3rdyear.com. You’ll see this new site change as I continue to work on the sidebar content and add new posts. New widgets will also be added to the sidebars. This theme has two sidebars, and I plan to make good use of the extra space.

It took less time to add this blog to my new host and move the blog content from Blogger because I have a little more experience with the host control panel and I called when I ran into trouble instead of trying to figure it out by myself. They have 24/7/365 phone support, so I’m taking advantage of it whenever I don’t know how to do something. I’m still on a steep learning curve, but it’s with WordPress now. As I learn more about all the great features of WordPress software you’ll see the blog change to include new features and functionality.

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Please let me know what you think of the new theme. Leave me a comment and let me know what’s on your mind.

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written by joubess