The Thirty Day Challenge Review

The Challenge

To make a buck online in 30 days – One Dollar – $1.00.

Ed Dale and his team put on another 30 Day Challenge this year that ran from August 1 thru the 31st.  Even though it ended in August, it really continues on so people can take it over and over for free.  Which means you could start a 30 Day Challenge every month or even two weeks assuming you refine your tasks down to that short of a time period.

Now, depending on where you’re at with your blogging or are even interested in making money online, there’s a lot in the 30 Day Challenge that you can use in your blogging endeavors.  The goal of the 30 Day Challenge is to make your first dollar online.  I did not succeed.   🙂   However, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a successful program.

Preseason

Prior to the 30 days of instruction there’s a section called Preseason For Late Starters which included some of the following information and videos about it all:

• Flock – Flock is a web browser that pulls a lot of social media together with your web browser and includes a blog editor.
• Twitter – An introduction to the social networking site Twitter and using Twhirl to interact with Twitter.
• Google Reader – An RSS reader that allows you to read multiple blogs on one page.  Well, it’s a lot more than that as you learn in the 30 Day Challenge.
• There are quite a few more tools in the preseason lessons including StumbleUpon, YouTube, FriendFeed to name a few.

I haven’t really studied in depth or applied making money online strategies but the 30 Day Challenge was good for me because it progressed in a structured way.  Whether that way is the right way or not to make a buck online, it did go through the thinking process and decisions you need to make when trying to make money online with the 30 Day Challenge way.

In The Beginning – Market and Keyword Research

In the beginning of your efforts to make money online the 30 Day Challenge way there was an important point made about doing market research up front before you do anything else.  The marketing side of things can take a little bit of time, from hours to days of research to get it right, so you’re not going down a path that you’ll never have a chance of making money at.

The 30 Day Challenge asks you to come up with some niches that you’d like to make money in. Various resources are pointed out like Amazon.com to use in your market research and to help you choose a niche or two or three to get started. A downloadable pdf is offered with a lot of ideas of where to look for a niche that might interest you.

Once you’ve selected a niche with keywords, you start to do some investigation into keyword research using Google. You’re also introduced to a product called Market Samurai, which is a front-end tool to help you do keyword research and so much more in one place. The Market Samurai tool is free for 40 days during the challenge and pretty soon you’ll have to purchase it for $69.00 and will eventually go up to $149.00.

Selling Products and Setting Up Your Site

After you’ve found a niche or two and you’ve done some market and keyword research using Google and Market Samurai, it’s time to look for a product a two to sell on your website, which will be a blog using WordPress blog software.

You step through the process of finding products to sell as well as what to name your blog so it ranks well in Google. It’s important and emphasized to get the market and keyword research right because you will ultimately try and make it to the front page of Google. Using a case study during the thirty day challenge you see how all this unfolds. Pretty cool really. Especially if you haven’t done anything like this before.

Getting To The Google Front Page – It’s So Easy 😉

Okay, the “It’s So Easy” part is tongue in cheek. It’s NOT easy for some of us to get on the front page of Google search results for your keyword phrase. However, after you’ve set up your site it’s time to try and rank higher in Google by using back links and other traffic building techniques that will help you get there.

Picking my keyword phrase and writing one 300+ word article, my niche site ranked on the 5th page of Google search results around 5 – 7 days after the site went up. It is currently hovering up and down on the 4th page of Google results when searching for my keyword phrase. That’s pretty good. The site is kind of ugly because of using a template but we’re only in test mode here. We only want to test if our keyword phrase has some Google Juice.

30 Day Challenge Offerings

During the challenge you have the opportunity to use a product called WordPressDirect that sets up a WordPress blog easier than it would be to do yourself. They’ve built in some automation during the process.

There’s a lot of WordPress themes to choose from at the WordPressDirect site and they are all SEO (Search Engine Optimization) optimized to help your niche site rank better in the search engines. WordPressDirect is free during the 30 Day Challenge but is ultimately a product you’ll have to pay for if you continue using it. WordPressDirect also comes with various add-on products to help your site as well.

My Results

Like I mentioned above, my niche site is doing pretty well without much effort. Now I need to decide if I want to pursue it.

This was the first 30 Day Challenge I participated in and I really enjoyed it. Now that I’ve been a part-time blogger for approximately a year, there are some things I’ve learned that at least allowed me to question or proceed with caution, or using certain tactics to rank higher in Google.

During the 30 Day Challenge I also found some SEO and Internet Marketing articles and tools that were interesting and came at the right time during this challenge to drive home the whole marketing being first point. I’ll share some more in future articles so make sure you subscribe below by entering your email address or subscribe by RSS reader by clicking on the big green RSS icon in the upper right-hand corner of this blog.

I have a few more keyword phrases I’ve been looking at and testing in Market Samurai. So I’ll keep doing some of the challenge to see how far I can go.

Also, a lot of the material in the course applies to blogging and promoting your blog. You don’t have to take the course just to try and make money online. There’s plenty of great information there to help you with your online endeavors.