30 Day Challenge Action List

This is an action list that was created for last years, 30 Day Challenge. All of the material can still be found on the 30 Day Challenge site listed below. I would highly recommend this list for beginners and advanced Internet Marketers, it’s packed full of lots of good stuff. Be sure and sign up for this years challenge which will happen in August 2008! David

Important Sites for the 30 Day Challenge:

Ed, Dan, Rob, and the team’s site: The 30 Day Challenge

Mike Mindel’s Blog: 31 Day Challenge Summary Page

The amazing Gary Halbert marketing letters for free: The Gary Halbert Letters

Pre-Season Summary

STEP 1 - Install Software

Firefox (If you are new to firefox check out firefox tweaks and thank Mindy Koch for the neat video)
iTunes (make sure to sign up for the 30 Day Challenge Feed)

STEP 2 - Download and Install the following extensions for firefox

Check out Mike Mindel’s blog for a description of each Firefox extension.

STEP 3 – Join the Following Sites

1. Facebook

Dan’s Profile

Ed’s Profile

Thirty Day Challenge Group

2. 30 Day Challenge Forum

3. Bloglines

4. StumbleUpon

5. Twitter

Add Ed and Dan

STEP 4 – Setup Skype

Skype
Pamela for Skype (call recording)

STEP 5 - Create your presence with Social Networking

Stumble Sites that you like using StumbleUpon.
1. TIP: Make sure you have rated and reviewed serveral sites, plus have a bunch of friends before stumbling your own site.
Add RSS Feeds that you want to read using Bloglines.
1. Make sure to add the 30 Day Challenge Blog RSS Feed !
Bookmark sites you want to read again using Del.icio.us.
1. TIP: Same with stumbleUpon, make sure you have digged and posted comments for several days before you post your own.
Post to your blog using ScribeFire.
Sign up for Flickr and upload image you will use in your posts.
1. TIP: Tag those images and link them back to your site!
Download Snagit (pc), Jing (pc) , or Skitch (mac) for screen captures.

(Check out Mike Mindel’s How I Do My Flawless Screen Captures)

__________________________________________________________________________________________

The 30 Day Challenge

Day 1 - A Magnificent Symphony Of Four Parts

Think abut niche markets (not products)

Day 2 - The Getting Of Ideas

Find 7 sub-niches and write them down

Use these sites to brainstorm niche markets and sub-niche ideas: ( thank surferduuude for many of these)

If your interested in more here is a very long list on Rob Taylor’s Blog.

Day 3 - The Getting Of Stats

Use GTrends and type in each of your 7 sub-niches.
Copy and paste the GTrends results into a text document for each of your 7 sub-niches.
Perform a google competition analysis by typing each niche market into google. Are there other people advertising products in this sub-niche?
Extra: still having problems finding a niche? Read this thread and Mike Mindel’s blog entry So What is a Niche Market Anyway?.

Day 4 / 5 Weekend No Lessons

Do further research on sub-niches and catch up with the pre-season if you haven’t already.

Day 6 - Noticing, Not Judging

Go to Google and type in your sub-niche + Affiliate.
Look for whether your sub-niche has affiliate programs
Look at right side of Google to see who is advertising for this phrase
write down affiliate programs for your sub-niche
Go to Google Trends and type in you sub-niches. Just observe the traffic

Day 7 - It’s Judgment Time - Part 1

Find Umbrella Phrases for each sub-niche.
Find a phrase match with below 25,000 - 30,000 competing pages
Find a phrase with 80 or more searches per day

Day 8 - The Most Important Day Of The Challenge

Using Google Trends, compare your umbrella phrase with male yeast infection.
Select an umbrella phrase with at least 80 daily searches and page competition below 30,000.

Day 9 - Just To Make Sure

Using the steps above, go from 7 niches to 2 niches.

Day 10 - And then there were two…

Type your exact phrase match into google and make sure that there are no Web 2.0 properties.
Research your two topics using google news and google blog search.
Take notes on your topics to gain knowledge of these areas.
Join related groups in Facebook, Google Groups, Myspace, Yahoo.

Golden Nuggets

Google you keyword phrase.
Take notes from 10 - 20 of the sites that google presents in the search results.
Joining the mailing lists for those sites.
Subscribe to the RSS Feeds.
Join the groups on Google Groups, Yahoo, Facebook, Myspace, etc.

Day 11 / 12 Weekend No Lessons

Catchup Time, write more articles!

Day 13 - Let’s Get To Work

Create three articles for each of your keywords. (6 articles total)
Put your keywords in the title and the first sentence of each article.
Extra: there are some fantastic copywriting tips in the forum by Trevor Crook:

Copywriting Tip No: 1
Copywriting Tip No: 2
Copywriting Tip No: 3
Copywriting Tip No: 4
Copywriting Tip No. 5
Copywriting Tip No. 6
Copywriting Tip No. 7
Copywriting Tip No. 8
Copywriting Tip No. 9
Copywriting Tip No. 10
Copywriting Tip No: 11
Copywriting Tip No: 12
Copywriting Tip No: 13
Copywriting Tip No: 14

Day 14 - Making Money American Idol Style

Write another three article for each of your keywords. (12 articles total)
Join some affiliate programs related to your 2 niches. (Clickbank, Amazon, See Mike Mindel’s List of Affiliate Programs for more)

Day 15 - The WHY Of Traffic

Write another three article for each of your keywords. (18 articles total)

Day 16 - It’s Traffic Time

Create a blog. (See Mike Mindel’s List of Free Content Platforms)
Write another three article for each of your keywords. (24 articles total)
Don’t post all of your articles on your blog.
Save some of the articles to post on new blogs that you create for your keyword

Day 17 - On My Command - UNLEASH HELL!!!

Install Social Poster.
Place Social Poster Bookmarklet onto your Firefox bookmark toolbar. This makes it easy to social post a website that you like.
Social Poster your blog and blog articles using Social Poster. Bookmarking your content helps you to get listed in Google and helps your ranking within Google.
Register with each of the 40 social sites that Social Poster lists.
Write another three articles for each of your keywords (30 articles total)
Create an Ezine Article relevant to your keyword

Day 18 / 19 Weekend No Lessons

So Catchup!

Day 20 - On My Command - Give Hugs!

Only ask 4 or 5 people to social bookmark.
Continue to explore social bookmarking sites. Check out Socializer 2.0.
Check out this insane list of Web 2.0 Sites to post on go2web20.net
Don’t worry about hosting your own sites at this stage. This stage is for testing!!
Don’t put the same article on more than one site. Google will give you a duplicate content penalty.
When writing your articles, put your exact umbrella phrase in the article title, first sentence, and last paragraph.

This is very important to get ranked in google.

Day 21 - The Big Picture

Write another 3 more pieces of content for each of your keywords (36 articles total)
Add one more web 2.0 property to your whole strategy. See Tip #17 - Decent List of Free Content Platforms.
You must use fresh content on each and every platform you choose.
You must use fresh content even if you setup the same keyword on different platforms.
Responsible social bookmarking by yourself and your team.
Extra: Read Mike Mindel’s So What is Quality Content Anyway?
Extra: Sites to check that content is original

Day 22 - On Testing And Tracking

Set up tracking to track visitors coming in to your pages with Google Analytics or Statcounter
Set up tracking to track visitors leaving your page and going to the affiliate page with TDC Stats Tracker
Record the stats in a Google Spreadsheet

Day 23 - To Convert A Mockingbird

Use todays lesson - S.U.C.C.E.S and create a new article on another platform (three is ideal, but my preference is four). If you use four different platforms (content holders e.g. blog, wiki, lens) hopefully you will appear four different times in Google. The more you appear the more chance you have of getting traffic.
Rent Made to Stick from the library and read it from cover to cover.
Extra: more about the S.U.C.C.E.S principle and the Made To Stick Blog.

Day 24 - Traffic - Go Or No Go

Is your niche cluster getting 100, 200 keywords a day? If yes, move on to conversion.
If no, create another cluster.
If another cluster doesn’t help, jump niche and start again.
If you have to start again, don’t worry. People have made their $10 inside of a couple of hours.
Your goal is 200 targeted visitors per day to your affiliate program.
Read interesting information about click through rate at Red Cardinal
If you have any questions about clusters check out this post.

Day 25 / 26 Weekend No Lessons

Big weekend to decide whether you should jump niche, time to catchup!

Day 27 - The Missing Link

Continue with what you are doing, do 3 articles for each of your keywords, keep sites fresh.
Use other Web 2.0 sites related to yours to create 1 way backlinks to your site. As a rule of thumb do no more than 3 a day to any one URL. Look in Search engines, RSS Directories, and Blog Directories for potential sites. Some examples are: Craigslist, Yahoo Answers, Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, and DMOZ.
Setup Google Alerts to update you when it finds new links specified by your criteria e. g. your user name or blog title.

Day 28 - Link, Link, Link To My Lou

Find backlinks in Yahoo using link: www.domain.com e.g. link: www.thirtydaychallenge.com
Use link: www.domain.com -www.domain.com to avoid including web pages inside the domain itself which isn’t helpful in our pursuit of backlinks.
Extra: check out cooliris Firfox tool here.

Day 29 - Links And Mistakes - The Penultimate Lessons

Review the 5 biggest mistakes and make sure you aren’t doing any of them.
Submit sites to AddUrl.nu
Use the free directory submitter from Internet Marketing Wish List to get your site added to directories.
Use the RSS submit tool to submit your site to the RSS directories.
Here is a post from Income Hero that has listed 263 Article Directories it would be worthwhile to submit to them as well.
Continue improving your sites