Update Day 14 - Day 31

New additions to the Web 2.0 week were Weebly(weebly.com) and Facebook Pages http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages. These came to light in Day 14 and should be used. Facebook pages is new and powerful so you want to be using it a great deal in your promotion campaigns.

I’ve been experimenting with Facebook pages a lot because I have seen many of the SEO gurus are using them to rank well and rank very quickly for even some extremely competitive terms. So the power of the Facebook domain cannot be doubted and should certainly be leveraged. I was just reading about Google caffeine, if you’ve been asleep at the wheel this is Google’s new algorithm which is due to be released any time over the next couple of months, and the articles I’ve been reading indicate that these Web 2.0 properties are given even more weight and ranking even better.

The guy in the article was talking about how his local business website had been ranking number one for the term he wanted but when he checked it in Google caffeine a couple of his Web 2.0 sites like e-zine articles and another page was out ranking his own domain. So keep this in mind.

Day 15

It’s all about micro-blogging on this day. They go over how important it is to bookmark your content on the powerful social news site propeller.com. And if you can make 10 to 15 friends there who will also “prop”, which is to vote your content up, the link will be even more powerful and can many times rank right in Google itself. You should leverage propeller by posting good content and getting people to vote for it so that it counts for more.

Also discussed on this day was posterous.com which is a micro-blogging platform that basically allows you to e-mail in your blog posts. This is very handy and extremely useful. The subject line becomes your blog post’s title and the body of the email becomes the body of the post.

The thing it also does is allow content syndication and distribution. There are a number of micro-blogging platforms and sites where you can load in your account information and any post you send through the posterous system you can go into your settings and allow those posts to also be distributed out to the various platforms that you have allowed.

Google reader — as you know Google has wanted to get in on the social networking and social explosion that is going on on the Internet. They’ve added many social features to Google reader including the ability to e-mail your friends, and post to your twitter or Facebook accounts.

It is still recommended to use posterous for your posting and content distribution/syndication because it is more flexible and allows more platforms.

Day 16

This is a rest and catch up day. They talk a little about their charity kiva and also ways to increase your IQ. Karl Moore gives tips on how to give your brain that extra little boost.

Day 17

It’s all about stats today. You have to track what your blog is doing in order to know if you’re headed in the right direction or barking up the wrong tree. The three things you want to check are:

1. Are you getting any traffic coming to your blog?

2. If so, are any of those people clicking on your affiliate ad?

3. If they’re clicking on your ad, is anyone buying the product?

The basic place you want to start is getting 200 visitors to your blog and making one sale. Then you can improve from there. If any of the three places is the cause of the breakdown then need to get that bottleneck fixed and working before moving onto the next step. For example, if you’re getting traffic to your blog but no one is clicking on your ad then you need to write a better ad or even test out a different offer in order to get people to click on it.

Your benchmark for a click through rate on your ad should be roughly 10%.

Day 18

This day talks about the different kinds of traffic you can get around the Internet. You already know a little bit about getting some traffic from Google’s unpaid results, Google also has paid results, other search engines allow paper click, there is forum marketing, and then of course there is some direct traffic you will get from links in content that you placed on other peoples sites and web 2.0 content holder sites.

This ISN’T an all encompassing list as there are many other ways to get traffic but these are the basics that will get you started. Karl Moore goes over the Pareto principle which comes from a medieval Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto. You probably know this as the 80/20 rule which means that 20% of your activity is going to get 80% of your results so you should focus on that.

Day 19

It’s all about setting up your Google adwords account and first campaign today. Since this is an area with a great volume of information and education I’m not going to go into the specifics here. The videos do a nice one job so you should definitely go to 30Daychallenge.com and check out the Day 19 videos if you have never set up a Google ad words account before.

Day 20

It’s all about split testing your ads and then of course adding more keywords so that you can get more clicks and visitors to your blog. You remember the golden rule:

More targeted traffic = more sales/more $$ in your pocket

Google loves to see smart marketers in their Adwords system. The main way you show them you’re a smart marketer is by constantly split testing ads on every keyword that you have. Basically, this means you should always have at least two ads running for each keyword. Depending on how much traffic and impressions a keyword gets you should only have at most three ads running per keyword. Unless, it is a super highly searched keyword that gets tens of thousands of impressions every day stick with the 2-3 ad rule.

Otherwise, if you have too many ads none of them will get enough impressions fast enough for you to make good decisions.

Day 21

Today it’s all about quality score and managing your Adwords campaigns. Quality score is fairly complex but the basics of it are the old-style on page SEO factors need to be optimized for each keyword, you want to add a contact us, privacy policy, about us, and a couple of links to Wikipedia or other authority sites related to the keyword. Also it’s good to load a few keyword related articles from e-zine articles or some other database onto your website so it’s a more fully fleshed out site.

Those are the basics to get you started and you should definitely go through the videos to see how you can maximize your quality score, which makes you pay the lowest cost per click possible, and manage your account on an ongoing basis by using as little time and as much leverage as possible.

The blog you have already created will have some of these elements in place.

Day 22

Today expanded into Google content network, which I have had excellent success with, as well as some advanced pay per click strategies and using the other search engines, Yahoo and MSN. There is also the Adwords calculator feature in market samurai that can tell you whether you’re doing good things and should continue with the campaign.

From my own personal experience I have on average paid 35% less per click on the content network than the equivalent keywords on the search network. And on average have been paying about 43% less per lead generated from my pay per click content visitors as opposed to my pay per click search visitors.

Day 23

Another rest and catch up day where they mentioned the Internet marketing this week podcast. Ed Dale, Michelle McPherson, and Paul Colligan get on this weekly show and occasionally have guests as well. It’s a weekly podcast which gets you caught up on all the weeks Internet marketing news.

Karl Moore also comes at you with another mindset lesson on how to put aside what other people think so that you can continue to do what you want to do and achieve your life’s goals. Don’t let the Dream Stealers negatively affect you.

Day 24

It’s go or no go in today’s lesson. If you have gotten 200 clicks on your ads and have no sales then you probably want to either abandon the keyword or the market. Or if you can stomach to pay a little bit more in your pay per click account you can test a different ad on another 200 clicks.

There’s a podcast for the training today which goes into much more detail that you can listen to.

Day 25

It’s all about what to do with your blog if it is a no go. Some of the suggestions are that you can test out dynamic ads like Google ad sense, eBay affiliate ads, or Amazon ads, or even commission Junction ads which you can do through the market samurai promotion module.

The other exciting option is that you can sell your site using the site Flippa.com. Ed is a master expert at valuing, buying and selling sites and he goes through this whole process of how you do this. So definitely check out the site selling video.

There’s also a video from Marty of WordPress direct that talks about how to manage your blog going forward and if you want to sell it how to easily do so and transfer to a different host very quickly and easily.

Day 26

Today is about finding those longer keyword phrases that are still related and also some synonyms that are related and likely to bring you targeted traffic that would make you more money.

The technical term is called semantically related keyword phrases but you don’t really need to know what that means.  Basically, you can think back to your old English class for those synonyms and homonyms.

For example, a guru might also be called a teacher, mentor, coach, advisor. These would all be synonyms in this case and therefore would be semantically related keywords if you were going after this market.

You can also look at your Google analytics data because it will tell you exactly what keywords people searched when they came to your website and you can specifically write a piece of content optimized for these keywords that were getting enough traffic to warrant the use of your time doing so.

Day 27

Today is all about the getting of more back links. The market samurai promotion module allows you to check out affiliate stuff and some competitors. There’s also the Pingback strategy which will find Word press blogs that automatically link back to you if you cite one of their story posts. And of course there is the finding and commenting on other blogs and Web 2.0 sites like squidoo which allow comments and a potential back link to your site.

Day 28

This is a cool day and one of my favorites because they talk about the importance of getting authority back links and how you can go about doing so. You can use the promotion module inside market samurai to find these high authority links from .gov and .edu sites all over the web. It allows you to search for blogs and forums and other sites which allow you to place a link or comment with your link in it on these powerful sites. And it tells you whether they are followed or no follow links which simply means that if they are followed links they will pass their power and authority onto your site which is good for your rankings.

Day 29

Today is all about avoiding the most common mistakes that marketers make when they first start out in the Internet marketing game. Ed has a roughly 20 minute podcast where he goes through five or six of the top mistakes so that you can avoid these without wasting your time.

Karl Moore comes back at you with his final video in the series on what the 30 day challenge means to you at this point in your life and what you want to do going forward.

Day 30

It’s all about moving forward from here and how to best proceed and expand your business. There’s a special video from Jason Moffett where he talks about how to leverage yourself and potentially do this SEO and pay per click work for business clients and some local businesses. Doing online marketing management for local businesses is an area that I am moving into myself because I see lots of opportunity there and it is much less work than optimizing for highly competitive international terms.

Day 31

This is the final bonus day of the 30 day challenge. It’s a short and quick video that says this is the end of the beginning of your journey. That first phase where you take your first steps is complete and now you have to continue on being persistent and consistent each day putting a little time into your business.

Overall, there were some new things especially regarding market samurai and WordPress direct in this year’s challenge as opposed to last year’s challenge. I recommend going through the stuff, especially things that you aren’t currently using or haven’t heard about before because it is worth your time to learn these things rather than bungle around attempting to figuring it out for yourself.

And now as the 30 day challenge is over I will focus in on one of the specific aspects they talked about that I have been heavily involved in…getting more social traffic and also converting that into dollars without alienating the same people that came from the social websites. This can be tricky to do but it is highly possible and as more people are flocking to the social and Web 2.0 sites you need to have your marketing messages in front of them without them feeling like you are the pushy salesman.

That is what the social traffic organization that I’m part of is all about…teaching you how to get social traffic without being the unwanted pushy salesman.