I am loving the 30 Day Challenge. If you're not taking part, be sure to sign up now and start! The Challenge started on August 1, but you can still follow along and do the assignments. The videos and training will be left up until next year.
I have learned more about keyword research and everything else that I ever have before! And I love Market Samurai. It has made everything so much easier and I will be buying it after the challenge is over. I was looking at Micro Niche Finder, but with the training on MS from the 30DC, I know that I'll know how the use the product and will have experience using it.
Today's lesson was on Wordpres Direct and setting up our niche blog for the challenge. Now, I thought about this. WPD is offering a free trial of their bronze package for the challenge and it looks great. However, I don't like anything that I would have to upgrade at the end of the challenge and while it converts to a free forever account, I would lose the functionality that I learned to use within the 30DC.
Now the 30DC is for newbies who was push button solutions. I understand that. However, I know enough about Wordpress to know how to install plug ins and find a theme. So I am not going to use Wordpress Direct on this challenge. I have my domain name and hosting and I'm installing Wordpress and all the plug ins myself. Yes, it will take a bit longer and more of a learning curve since the 30DC training will not support going out on your own with the blog - they are focusing on WPD. But I feel better doing it this way.
July was good in terms of learning more about traffic, building backlinks, things like that. I've learned a few things not to do as well. I don't think I'm going to be doing any more CPA Polls for a while using Adwords, for example. I'm going to wait on that until I actually have a little more money to spend on advertising first.
I did get .77 in Adsense, mostly on one particular niche site. I know that's not a lot, but it brings my Adsense up to just over $60. And it only took about 4 years. Maybe in another 3 I'll actually get a payout? But really, I don't think I'm going to focus on Adsense to make money. Some people do, and that is fine, but there are faster ways to make money online. I want to focus more on CPA advertising and affiliate marketing. I also have my service business which did okay in July, but as that is my "business" income I don't consider that online income although I do use the Internet to find clients.
My transcription service business is slowly growing and I'm about to roll out a marketing campaign that I hope will bring in new clients and allow me to hire one or two subcontractors. The site has brought in about 52 visitors but no new clients as of yet. I have no subscribers to the RSS feed, but my goal with this site is to gain new transcription clients. I'm hoping the 30 Day Challenge will also help me with that as well as this new marketing campaign. Traffic for that site has come mostly from backlinks - a couple of ezine articles and forum signatures. So backlinks are important. The keywords that had people coming from Google are pretty specific so I'm going to use that information to write more articles for the site. For this site, I write the articles with the client in mind.
One of my niche sites that is set up to be an affiliate type estore is the one that's gotten most of the Adsense clicks but unfortunately no affiliate sales. However, I have discovered one product that is on the page that my deserve a niche site all its own. So I will be researching that particular product and similar products during the 30 Day Challenge to see if it would be a good niche site. This is also the site where I've receieved most of my Stumble Upon traffic. I'll be writing a post about Caroline Middlebrook's Traffic Rush course in the next few days. I just finished the free version and plan to go back through it again to remind myself of a few tips. But I've gotten a decent amount of traffic from Stumble Upon to this site. And again, a lot of the other traffic came from backlinks.
My online magazine has been steady and backlinks and forum signatures helped with that and I'll be using keyword information to write more targeted and specific articles for that site.
I'm still having issues with Google Analytics on my homeschool / personal site. I have the Analytics plug in but it doesn't seem to be working. I may have to input the code for Analytics myself for that site.
August is going to be spent mostly working the 30 Day Challenge. I also want to get this blog moved to Wordpress and my own domain as well. If you're not in the 30 Day Challenge, I highly recommend that you go ahead and join. You can catch up and they will leave up all the training so even if you start on August 7 you can just start on day 1 and go from there yourself.
This is the final video on setting up a PPC campaign for a CPA ad using the poll method. This brief video explains how to set up negative keywords for a campaign within Adwords.
Here is video number 4 on creating a PPC campaign using the Poll method for a CPA ad. This video shows how to use an Excel spreasheet to quickly upload ads using the offline Adwords editor.
Here is video number 3 on creating a PPC ad campaign using the poll method for a CPA ad. This video explains how to use a spreadsheet and the offline Adwords tool to quickly set up your ads.
I am so thrilled and psyched to be taking part in the 30 Day Challenge this year. This will be my first challenge and I'm really looking forward to it.
If you have no idea what the 30 Day Challenge is, it's a great FREE training period that teaches you all about Internet Marketing and the goal is to help you make your first $1 online. It sounds like a great program and many people swear by it.
