Remember, the content stays up, the challenge continues, the tools remain available, and it’s all still free. Sign up and take your own challenge!
Thirty Day Challenge
Mike Mindel’s blog will also continue to be available - yeah!!!
Still have until tonight at 11:59 p.m. Hawaiian time to win the challenge and be listed in the hall of fame, so get cracking!
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This is the last day of training, but we have until August 31, 2007 at 11:59 p.m. Hawaiian time to make $10 and win the challenge. Several people have already made their $10, and many TDC records from previous challenges have already been smashed.
The Immediate Edge uses the same techniques we are using in the 30 day challenge to start all of its projects before they are taken into a cost structure. Testing phrase without having to pay for it lowers the financial risk of any project. It just makes sense to not spend any money until you know you have something worth spending money on.
If we’ve done everything we’ve been taught up to now, including all the directory submitting and other techniques to drive traffic and raise PR, and we haven’t made a sale, we can start researching other phrases in our original brainstorming list. We could also brainstorm another list and start testing new phrases. Review Mike Mindel’s Day 29 Summary blog post and review all training that you haven’t implemented (and maybe some you have to make sure you’re doing it right). Review the 5 biggest mistakes challengers make and correct those if you’ve made any. (I made some and have corrected them).
Next Steps
The Thirty Day Challenge will continue after August 31, 2007. There will be more lessons as time goes on, maybe once or twice a month or more often as Dan and Ed’s time permits from the Immediate Edge. Anyone can start the challenge at anytime, and the forums, blogs, and training will still be available, although a bit rearranged to support a continuous project.
The TDC has taught us how to do everything manually so we know how everything works. Having to do everything by hand teaches you so much. We have the basics, the fundamentals. Since we now have all the pieces to the puzzle, we need to learn from our mistakes. Success, especially early on, can make you sloppy.
Once you have a phrase that pays, you will move forward to buying your domain and getting your site hosted and set up, but you will have to start spending a little money at this point.
List building - we will cover how to build lists in a future lesson
Developing our own product - another future lesson
How to use Pay Per Click correctly and effectively - you don’t go here until you’re making money for free. PPC was the core to the first two thirty day challenges. You only pay when someone clicks on your link. Other advertising is much more expensive than PPC. Once you have a phrase that pays, you know how much you can afford with PPC.
Dan put up a flow chart, which he calls The Grand Plan mind map, in his pdf training document for today. Be sure to read his pdf and listen to the podcast.
Well, of course it’s not dead, it just gets bad press from “talk too much” marketers. The snob factor around affiliate marketing is certainly there, but at the end of the day, affiliate marketing makes money.
First, there isn’t just one strategy. There are a lot of them. Dan will be showing us the typical approach he takes when entering a new market.
Dan often finds topics to research later while browsing the web or doing research on another topic. He writes the idea down in his notebook to look at later. Whenever he’s looking for a new project, he goes through his list for ideas.
By researching a topic and looking at the long tail phrases to see their traffic numbers (long tail means 3 or more words in the phrase). If you have several phrases with traffic but little or no Google Adwords competition a few sites targeted at the long-tail phrase, you might have something worth doing. A major mistake marketers make is ignoring the long-tail phrases and trying to go for the big competition markets. Start small, around the edges with very targeted long-tail phrases. That’s what we’ve learned on the TDC. Once you dominate the outer edge long-tail phrases, you can move up and start to dominate the bigger markets.
Find a good affiliate product that allows you to build a list. You don’t want to give the product producer all the list info of the people you send to his site. You want the information for your list.
Once you have your list of long-tail phrases with decent traffic, you narrow it down to the top 30. From your top 30, take the top 10 (measured by traffic) long-tail phrases, then choose two phrases from the remaining twenty to pair with each one of the top 10.
This gives you 10 articles to write targeting 3 long-tail phrases each. Once time passes and things grow, your two secondary phrases may be worth branching out to their own property. You can write your own articles or outsource them.
Next, you register a domain name to host your landing page (see nameboy.com for ideas). We’ve used free blog hosting in the TDC, and you can always move a blog to a domain you own later.
If you collect names to build a list, you need to write autoresponder messages to cover a few days. You can build a few Squidoo lenses to cluster around your landing page with value-added content, and then you’ve got to put it up on the net live.
So, in this first phase, you have a cluster of content sites pointing to your landing page or to a list building page which then points to your affiliate product.
People find the lenses or articles in Google, they join the list (which offers them free content and tips) and then they are taken directly to the affiliate page. Then every day they get some content by email and are asked to buy the product.
To recap:
Expanding Your Empire
Now you’ve got your foot in the door. It’s time to start prying it open and get more value out of your list.
There are more affiliate networks than just ClickBank:
You can fall into a trap of only using Clickbank because of the high commissions.
A. Take the initial visitor to the highest paying program first then try and sell them on other affiliate programs in the autoresponder sequence.
B. If you’re getting good results then you might go ahead and set up new content pages directly for the secondary affiliate product.
C. The next step is creating a load of related long-tail phrase articles and lenses, effectively doing the same thing as phase one but this time not collecting leads, just sending them directly to the affiliate page.
D. Link to subpages from your lenses and articles, not the main page, and vary the anchor text slightly. In the case of a blog, a single post is a subpage.
E. As time goes on you replace the affiliate product with your own product. And you don’t grow fast. Grow slowly to see if the phrase is actually a good, long-term business venture.
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Video by Rob Somerville
In most cases, you would use software to do directory submissions. The big directories are DMOZ and Yahoo.
The site addurl.nu is a free manual directory submission site.
Free software:
imwishlist.com has free versions of their directory submitter software and article submitter software. They also have paid versions that submit to more places than the free versions.
RSS Directories Software is available free at www.allscoop.com/tools/rss-submit
Using Yahoo Answers (answers.yahoo.com)
People ask questions and anyone with an account on yahoo can submit answers to those questions and leave trackback URLs and other contact information in the answer. Search for open questions. These are the questions still accepting answers. Under Advanced, click on “open questions” for your search criteria. Search for your niche phrase, or a broader part of it to find relevant questions to answer on the site. You can also submit questions you may want answer to.
The main point is to build back-links to your blogs or sites over time. If you cram a bunch of back-links onto a bunch of sites in a short period of time, you may get a Google slap. Work on this a little each day and allow your links to grow organically.
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Today’s lesson is by Ed Dale
First, don’t forget to do the back-linking, and keep it up so grow traffic to your sites.
Mistake #1
I was asleep during Wordtracker/Google/GTrends training. Failure to do proper research on your phrases. If you don’t do the research none of the rest of this is worth your time. Do the research.
Mistake #2
Strategy problems with a market; figuring out what people would buy. Most people want to sell something without finding out if someone wants to buy it. Do people buy in this niche? If so, what do they buy? If people don’t buy in your niche, go on to another one. Researching sales sites in your niche was part of market research.
Ask yourself is people are really going to buy stuff in this niche. Is the niche a seasonal one or a temporary one? Is it a continuous market? You need to know the answers to these questions.
Mistake #3
Not using your exact umbrella phrase in your URL, blog name, in the first paragraph (preferably first sentence in bold), and again at the end of your first post in italics.
Put up one post in your new blog and leave it alone until Google indexes it, about 24 - 36 hours. Then add more posts, but no more than three per day per phrase.
Mistake #4
Failure to do enough competition research, especially on the blog site you’re using. If someone else is already using your phrase as their URL, maybe find another platform. There are many good blog platforms to choose from. Instead of competing in the same platform, maybe find another one.
The other alternative is to put dashes or underscores between each word in your phrase.
Mistake #5
Putting your affiliate link at the top of your post instead of down towards the bottom. That’s like making an indecent proposal to someone and will probably result in no click-throughs and declining traffic.
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Link Research Video by Rob Somerville
This will be a manual process. Most of the time this is done with software. This will be about how to use Google and Yahoo to research the back-links of your competitors’ sites and for your own sites. Also use the SEO Firefox tool. Click on the links in the SEO information in Google search research.
Type into Yahoo: link:URL
Yahoo will return all links it can find for that URL.
You do the same thing in Google, link:URL, but Google will return far fewer links than Yahoo. Use Yahoo for back-link research.
?p at the end of a URL in search results means it’s probably a blog post. Those would be good to go to and read, and maybe make a comment and leave your URL in your comment.
Checking competitor back-links gives you ideas of who or where you might want to back-link as well. If a site is niche-relevant, you can leave a comment and your own back-link. This also tells you how much competition you really have in your niche. How many back-links are you competing with?
This is a manual process, but is useful process because it grows your links organically.
Blogs, Forums and Web 2.0
Search Technorati for your umbrella phrase or search blogsearch.google.com. Find other niche-relevant content where you can create a link back to your website. Click through to find blogs where it’s appropriate to make comments. Leave your id tag and URL and comment on the content of the page. This generates back-links.
To search for forums: “keyword phrase” forum
Forums can be useful, but watch for signatures being turned off, heavy moderation and no-follow links.
Squidoo and Hubpages
Google Search site:squidoo.com”signmyguestbook”keyword phrase
Search will return pages in rank authority order.
Google Search site:hubpages.com”submitacomment”keyword phrase
Might want to check out the CoolIris Firefox plugin. When you put the mouse over a link it allows you to preview it before you click on it. Saves lot so time. Makes browsing faster. See www.somercorp.com/gurubob/cooliris.html
Ed Dale’s Video
Pay attention to Rob’s videos and see Caro’s post about individual help on your phrases. A few people will get individual help.
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Many of us have happened upon a unique personal identifier that we use for ourselves. For me, that identifier is “joubess”. Rob Somerville’s is “Gurubob”.
You sign up at www.google.com/alerts.
I also set up alerts for each of my niches so I can follow what’s going on in them. I’ll see how much email that generates. If too much, I’ll delete those alerts accordingly.
Once you’re notified of a new alert, you can follow the link in the email and social bookmark it accordingly.
The biggest thing it does is establish when Google finds your content and indexes it, allowing you to be alerted at that time. It allows you to follow the distribution of your content and leverage it or even increase the distribution further with pushes in organic growth areas.
It’s best to use a single email account specifically for this purpose so all your alerts will be in one place, and nothing else will be going into that account. I’m using one of my gmail accounts with filters that automatically sort posts into archive folders and all I have to do is go to those folders and browse the content on thoses phrase or names.
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