My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

Well, it’s happened. The spammers have damaged it for the rest of us. All our Tumblr accounts have been suspended, good content or bad.

We’re only supposed to have 4-6 people in our teams. Ed Dale went on Facebook and found teams with hundreds of people. When they all were asked to give new blogs some hugs, those blogs got hundreds of hugs in a very short period of time. Not natural. So, they got suspended. But those of us following the rules were suspended too.

Apparently, some of the affiliate links were pure feces as well. This type of stuff is considered spamming, an attempt to manipulate Google, and Google doesn’t like it one bit. Google will find out quickly when you “bulk market” a new topic or page, and it will get you put into the Google Sandbox. That’s where your site goes until Google can decide where and whether you belong. The Sandbox means your site is crawled and indexed, but you get no page rank at all until Google can decide what to do with your site and its content. No page rank means you don’t show up in any search results.

Fortunately, I wrote all my content either in Wordpad or in Google Docs. When my Tumblr blog was suspended I put up a new blog on blogger.com and copied my content to it. I’m working on my second phrase this week. I had only been working on one phrase. I want to make time to come up with a third phrase as well.

Unfortunately, I’m not getting anywhere near the ranking in a short amount of time that I had with Tumblr over the weekend.

Whenever you socially bookmark a quality site, it’s like making a deposit in your bank account. Whenever you honestly give a site with poor content a thumbs down, that’s good feedback for the site owner to improve.

Again remember, no one site or umbrella phrase should contribute more than 10% of your traffic, sales, and profits. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

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written by joubess

Created my Tumblr blog for one phrase on Friday night (day 17). Started adding content on day 18 and finished adding content and affiliate links on day 19.

Posted at 1 p.m. CDT and started social bookmarking with Social Poster.

Google page rank #19 by 2:30 p.m. Amazing!!!

This post is deceptively brief compared to the amount of work it took to do everything I had to do to get my blog site up with two posts and an appropriate affiliate link. Now that I know what I’m doing, the next one will be easier, and I can see how this gets easier with time. It’s a matter of practice; practicing the skills and practicing writing great content.

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Social Poster and Ezinearticles. Can also use Associated Content for articles.

Articles that link back to your blog are gorgeous and intelligent friends.

Social Poster is a whole list of attention-getters that makes posting to them easy. So is Socialize This.

Add tracking to your blogs using either statcounter or Google Analytics (www.google.com/analytics). GAnalytics works well for Blogger.com accounts. They’re both Google based. Another plus about Blogger.com is Google actually encourages monetizing blogs with Adsense and allows all kinds of HTML, Javascript, and affiliate program links. I’ve moved all my blogs to Blogger and will keep them here until I find another host that has the same attitude.

Keep working on umbrella phrase sites and create more. Give them care and feeding (new posts regularly and social bookmarking). Keep them active and increase the links back to your sites. That will result in a natural increase in traffic which Google and all other search engines like. Natural or organic growth will cause the highest rankings consistently.

We’ll want at least 10 sites in different industries because we don’t want more than 10% of our total traffic coming from any one place or a single umbrella phrase. In other words, don’t put all your internet marketing eggs in one basket.

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Since I’m behind on posting my progress on this blog, I can warn you. Don’t use Tumblr. We were all kicked off for “spamming” or for “inappropriate content”. They didn’t like all the traffic we brought the site. Use any of the blog sites posted on Mike Mindel’s blog, except Wordpress. Wordpress doesn’t like affiliate links and blogs being used for search engine optimization (SEO).

The race starts today for the first person who can set up their blog(s) and potentially make a sale. This is the day the rubber hits the road.

Traffic Video (Ed’s overview):

• Watch Rob’s Tumblr blog video
• Put up content from all the writing we’ve been doing, Tell a story
• Link to affiliate product and don’t stress
• Write 3 more pieces of content per umbrella phrase, do this daily from now on

• Tumblr is our gorgeous, intelligent friend
• Netscape and Social Poster (social posting sites) are our attention-getters

Visit the forum and post to the sticky thread “I got ranked” when you get ranked. Post when you put your blog up and how long it took you to get ranked.

Read: “How to go from free to paid in 3 paragraphs”

Rob’s Tumblr Blog Video:

Our desired result is a good ranking in Google - at least in the top 10, top 5 is better, #1, 2, and 3 are the best.

Google updates its ranking calculations minute-by-minute, continuously, so you’ll see variations nearly every time you do a search.

Google Search –> Search Results –> Visit to your site –> Clicks thru to money page –> makes a purchase –> you earn a commission

To get this flow chart to work, you need this flow chart to work:

Your Tumblr blog or site –> Social Poster –> high Google search ranking –> puts your site in the top 10 –> someone can see your site –> they visits your site.

Go to www.tumblr.com and sign up.

Our Tumblr site URL will be the words in our phrase exact match: http://sausagemakingtips.tumblr.com or http://sausage-making-tips.tumblr.com or use underscores or dashes and underscores or two words together with a dash or underscore between them and the third one. The best is your phrase all together.

Rob likes Tumblr because there’s no distracting sidebars to divert attention away from your content.

• Put your phrase in your blog title
• Put your phrase in the first sentence in the description
• Put your phrase in the first paragraph of your posts and bold it.
• Scatter your phrase throughout your copy
• Put the last instance of your phrase in your copy in italics or bold
• Make two posts, a short introductory post and a longer, detailed post
• Put your affiliate link in the text of each post.
• Use a text link so it doesn’t interrupt the flow of your writing. You’re not there to advertise the product, you’re there to give someone a value-added experience and to click through and buy if that’s what they were looking for.
• You can enhance the look of your blog by clicking on the Goodies button

You don’t want Google getting any wrong ideas about what your blog is about when it’s bots crawl your blog. That’s why you highlight and keep using your phrase throughout your copy.

Dan Raine’s Video - 30DC Blog Site is up

Powered by Wordpress. Sign in with your 30DC login info and go to blogs.thirtydaychallenge.com

Set your blog URL as follows:

http://blogs.thirtydaychallenge.com/joubess/%postname%

This takes out extraneous information when you URL comes up.

My Catch-Up To-Do List:

• Find some affiliate products for my phrases
• Search umbrella phrases and read at least the content of the top 10 (top 20 is better)
• Set up my 30DC blog to point to this blog

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written by joubess

First off, we need to pick two affiliate products to use, one for each phrase.

Traffic in a Web 2.0 World

Our symphony of 4 parts is fundamental. It never changes. There must always be

1. Market Research
2. Traffic
3. Conversion
4. Product

The tactics and tools used will most certainly change with time, but the fundamentals will still be the same.

Getting into Google. Why Google? We’ve spent so much time with Google because Google has 50% of all the searches going on in the entire world. Everyone else shares the other 50%. That means all other search engines share only 50% of the search engine market. Google is really an important player. If you’re not popular on Google, you’re nobody.

There are 3 methods of internet marketing:

• Black Hat - are evil, unethical and use tactics and tricks to mislead and fool users
• Gray Hat - are borderline ethical and mislead users just a bit
• White Hat - are like the angels of internet marketing, the good guys and gals, do everything ethically, morally, and completely above board

Whatever we do, do it white hat style. The other two come and go, but the white hats can stay around for the long haul because they bring value to the table.

Metaphor for today’s lesson - nightclubs

Nightclubs are our sites and product pitch pages. To get into a really hot, swanky nightclub you’ve got to be one of the cool, beautiful people who is influential and gets waved into the club ahead of the line, no waiting. Gorgeous, intelligent and influential friends are like vintage wine, they’ve been around and are well known to be great people.

Google sees any new site as ugly. Very ugly. Old sites are like vintage wine. New sites are like pigs.

Why are you ugly?

• You’re brand new - you’re probably a spammer, Google likes old sites
• You have no friends - you have no links to your site
• You have no INFLUENTIAL friends - no authority sites linked to yours
• You look dodgy - you have opt in/salesy stuff on your page

Enter the 30DC process.

Trying to get into Google doesn’t work. The trick is not to try.

How do you get into the hottest nightclub in town? It’s who you know.

There are three players:

• Ugly you
• Gorgeous, intelligent friends
• The attention-getters

Gorgeous intelligent friends have these characteristics:

• Google loves them
• They allow you to write content (UCG-user generated content)
• They have tags
• They are actually happy to associate with you (aka: link to your ugly site)

The Attention-Getters have the following characteristics:

• They get noticed - they have high PR (page rank). Hey, Google, look over here!
• Sometimes they get noticed too much
• You don’t want your mom to know you’ve been partying with these people
• But, they are firestarters - the match to the gasoline, they get things burning for you
• Partying with them will end up with you in tears

They are the Paris Hiltons and Lindsey Lohans of the internet. You have one of them on your arm and you’ll get in because they are the firestarters. We won’t be needing Paris Hilton because we’re not trying to get into the coolest nightclub, just into the neighborhood bar.

Ugly site = money page. But you have to have one or you won’t have any conversion to sales.

Google “Dominiche”

This is where competition comes in.

• We want to be big fish in a bunch of very small ponds
• We’ll grow into being big fish and dominating big fish, but not for quite awhile.

We want targeted traffic. We want traffic from the people we want to sell to.

Look at it like Aikido vs. Boxing; a very smooth, flowing martial art vs two guys socking the snot out of each other. It works, but if you’re the one attacked wouldn’t you rather win than be left lying on the mat covered in blood? The martial arts are defensive. We use the opponent’s force against them by directing their energy where we want it to go, rather than letting them hit us.

You can also look at it like detours in traffic vs a quiet canoe ride on a blissful lake on a beautiful day. The majority of marketing on the internet is like a detour sign in traffic. They’re annoying as all get out.

We want to canoe ride, we want to add value every step of the way. If you search sausage making tips, we give you sausage making tips, and selling you something to do with sausage making tips.

Action Step

• Go to the top 10-20 phrase search sites and look at them, see what they do. Then do the same.
• Pay attention, take notes, learn from your competitors. This is part of your research.

Google also has video search, and if you tag them right you’ll do very well with them.

Tomorrow, we set up our blogs.

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written by joubess