My Thirty Day Challenge Notes

Watched the 3 videos and did the two assignments on my 7 chosen niches.

First assignment was to type in the niche keywords+affiliate into Google and see if your niches come up with any affiliate programs directly related to them. The reason to do this is in case you want to use an affiliate program and market other people’s products to make money. This is just a look and see thing. We haven’t gotten to traffic yet, let alone the product!

Second assignment was to type niche keywords into Google Trends (www.google.com/trends) and it will show you a chart of the search result trends and news items about those keywords. You can compare the news items to the trend data and see why a trend may be happening.

For example, bass fishing is seasonal and tends to have the greatest activity in the spring, peaks in the summer and falls off in early fall. Home organization is pretty steady except for spikes during the last week of a year and the first month of a new year. People probably make New Year’s resolutions to clean out the house and get it organized, but there is a consistent flat trend the rest of the year, so a lot of people manage to follow through with their organizing.

Bass fishing had related news items. Home organization didn’t have any news items. Spring cleaning has been going on a very long time in human history, so I doubt it will ever generate much in the way of news.

I recorded all my notes from the videos and my niches in Google Notebook. I love it more each day. It’s making collecting and organizing this information so much easier. Especially since I can click and drag items around to group them. I take lesson notes in one notebook and keep my market research information in another notebook. I also made up a notebook for Terms and Definitions. You can’t even get close to that kind of easy organization using paper, and it’s easier than using a word processor because the note items and tools are already formatted for taking notes and moving whole notes around.

I’ve used Yahoo Notes before, but Google Notebook has Yahoo notes beat by a mile. Yahoo doesn’t have the tools to make note organizing easy. Yahoo notes is searchable and notes can be put into catagories. That’s about its only plus over using paper.

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Days 4 and 5 are the weekend, catch-up time. I needed it to get completely up to speed on Days 1 - 3.

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I’ve learned about a bunch of tools that help your internet experience be much faster, streamlined, and content-specific.

Here’s a list:

Firefox by Mozilla - an internet browser that allows a lot of customization and fewer problems than Internet Explorer. For now, it’s also more secure, but with its growing popularity security issues will arise I’m sure. It’s easy to set up Firefox with custom toolbars to allow you to get to the information you want to see fast.

Once you have Firefox installed you can load add-ons (tools) to it that allow you to work faster and more easily. You can do this in IE, too, but I’m finding Firefox to be much easier to use and customize. See the 30DC pre-season blog for all the add-ons and tools we’re using. Scroll down to Summary of Pre-season Content. They aren’t just for internet marketing! You don’t have to be a member to view the blog or watch the pre-season videos or listen to pre-season podcasts. You do have to be a member to get the training. It’s free if you want to join and learn. Whether you’re interested in internet marketing or just in learning about all the cool stuff in web 2.0, it’s worth your time. Just the pre-season content will get you pretty far and then you can explore the tools at your own pace for your own purposes.

A list of the tools we’re using:

• Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar
• Firefox Custom Toolbars
• Firefox Session Manager
• Twitter - a quick way to stay connected online and by cell phone text messaging
• Facebook - social networking site (like myspace without all the pimping)
• Digg - site rating tool
• del.icio.us - web bookmarks with note and tag areas to file with each bookmark
• Technorati - blog search engine. Can bookmark blogs and content you like with Technorati Favorites
• Stumbleupon - install it, select your topics of interest, then push the button and see what you find. It’s great for idea generation and for exploring your favorite topics, but you can spend a lot of time stumbling, so use with caution!
• Google Notebook - online note-taking and web-clipping tool. Notes can be exported to Google docs web-based word processor
• Scribefire - makes blogging easier. Punch a button and write
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Search Status
• Fleck
• Meebo for instant messaging. All your IM accounts in one place on the web
• Flicker - for photos and images
• Email - whatever your address is that you check regularly

Bloglines - a blog and news reader for RSS feeds. I save all my RSS subscriptions to bloglines and I open one reader and see everything I want to see at one time. It’s also a button on my Bookmark Toolbar so accessing it is easy.

Try out Firefox and the above listed tools and add-ons. I posted a link to the 30DC blog in the sidebar that has all the tools and setup information you need to set Firefox up to run like a dream. You won’t believe how much easier taking care of your usual internet business will be. Not having to go to the bookmarks (favorites) menu all the time to get what you want is so much faster and easier.

This is the power of web 2.0 and the future path of the internet. The more you use it the more you’ll wonder how we ever lived without it. Just like we don’t know how we lived without email.

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Mike Mindel has a 30DC blog that summarizes covered material and augments the information. His blog has tips and articles to help complete the action items so the information is more useful and more accessible.

His blog also has an article about the difference between a niche, a market, and a niche market. See the article on his blog.

I’ve posted a link to Mike’s blog in the sidebar so it’s always easily available.

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Due to technical difficulty, day 3 wasn’t available until Saturday on iTunes, and wasn’t posted to the 30DC training section until Sunday.

I’ve listened to the podcasts and watched all the videos for days 2 & 3, and did the action items.

Day 2 Action items:

Brainstorm niches, just start making a list of every idea you can think of that people do, buy, want, need. I came up with 3 handwritten pages of stuff. Some were niches, some were very broad areas and some were markets. Even though brainstorming is done for now, whenever I think of another idea I put it on my list.

Pick 7 niches to research. Any 7, doesn’t matter which ones. We’ll find out later from our research if any pan out. If we need more, we go back to our brainstorming list for more niche ideas.

Day 3 Action Items:

Search each of the 7 niches using the free Wordtracker tool. You enter your keywords and it tells you how many average daily searches for those keywords have taken place in the last 90 days. Copy and paste the results (if any) into a text document or into a Google Notebook note. Just collect the data. Don’t judge it.

Search each niche keyword set you Wordtracked using Google and notice how many hits you get and how many sponsored links (ads) there are for each keyword set. Make notes of this info in the text docs or Notebook notes. Click on the ad links and see if they’re real products/services being sold to real people for real money, or if they’re just adsense survey sites people use to make click money. If all are adsense sites, that’s not good, but most of the time, if someone went to the trouble to make an adsense click site, there is a lot to buy in that keyword set.

I finished each day’s action items and await the big push that’s supposed to start Monday at 9 a.m. EDT (U.S.)

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I’m putting off reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows until I’m cruising along with this. If I start that book, I won’t put it down and I won’t keep up with my 30DC! So don’t give anything away about it!

Watched the video and listened to the podcast this morning. Took some notes on paper but want to start taking notes in Google notebook. Day 2 has been posted and I plan to do that during daylight today.

Server overload prevented Dan Raine posting Day 3 on Friday. The are installing another server. Found that out by using Bloglines. I subscribed to the 30DC RSS blog feed. Very helpful to have all the news and blogs I want to see all in one place.

Day 1 actually started on Wednesday and I’m writing this Saturday morning. Catching up. Had offline work to do that couldn’t wait.

The Magnificent Symphony of 4 Parts in order of importance and progression:

1. Market research - has never been easier than now online
2. Traffic - if no one knows about your product, they won’t buy it, no matter how good it is
3. Conversion - if you have to sell, you’ve got the wrong product/service. Whatever you market should be able to sell itself. You’re looking for buyers, not browsers.
4. Product - once you understand the markets, the products/services will be easy to see and choose

Action Items:

• Start jotting down ideas
• Review pre-season as needed to insure readiness for training
• If any technology problems arise, get them solved asap. Technology isn’t the issue here, using it effectively to work is the issue.
• Focus on the process

First Item: jotting down ideas. Brainstorm. Don’t edit anything yet. Don’t discount anything large, small, huge or microscopic. Just write ideas.

The most lucrative businesses are usually found in sub-niche markets.

Ask myself these questions: What problems do I have that I need solved? What would solve them? What problems do others have that need solved? What would solve them?

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written by joubess