desgreen

"I accept the challenge!"

Tiptopcat

My 30 Day Challenge - Day 13

Today I didn’t do very much as part of my challenge. I created a Twitter account and I added an article to a couple of article directories with backlinks to my main website. I did a little more work on a new ebook that I want to incorporate as part of my sales offer but which can also be sold on its own.
I need to find out more information about how to publicise my website so that I can get more visitors. That is what I need to work on now.

Shay - I just read your post about how you use Twitter - very interesting, but I agree, it sounds really tedious. I am lazy and am looking for quick fixes . I need to be convinced that the effort is worth it.


That's all for now.


Tiptopcat

jezbiz

ok so, several days had passed since my blog went up complete with the whole package of 12 blogposts (6 are posted already) free ebook giveaway, 5 autoresponder series and paid product still under way. Now, my focus is on traffic now, I admit I haven't really been successful in this one, I know there's a lot of ways on traffic generation, and i've tried almost everything, from SEO, fb, twitter, articles, and it did drive some traffic, but then for only a short while, not very consistent... =( so I will try to follow closely the methods that you guys will be doing on this challenge.

Need Articles? chek my gig @ http://fiverr.com/markwilson

MariaVC

Hi Shay,
I too accept the challenge.

andrius123456789

I am in for the challenge. I found it only recently, but hey it will be how much I can make in less than a month.

bellsong

Thank you, Shay. I didn't know about sitemeter.com. Learning a lot here.

bellsong

Jezbiz, I want to learn effective free ways of getting traffic, too. It is my number one challenge. I know you can pay for traffic, but I want to learn how to get it with no cost.

bensonenterprise

I have to admit I have fallen a bit behind, there were some things I needed to take care of in my company but everything is almost completely sorted out and I will soon be ready to get back into high gear. I have even decided on what my paid product is going to be. Very excited to get back into this challenge.

I own a small writing company that takes the time to make sure you are pleased with your end product visit my site at http://www.ebookwritingservices.org for more details.

ShayB

If you're posting one-liners just to get your post count up, go elsewhere, please.

Judging from your posts, that would be my guess.

ShayB

I agree! It's tedious for someone who isn't on Twitter a lot and who doesn't care for Twitter.

I adore Twitter, so I do my Twitter-ing in-between other things.

(But it's why I wanted to give other ideas for traffic, because I know not everyone wants to work with Twitter. )

ShayB

DAY FOURTEEN

I'm taking a day off.

It's September 11th.

I'm taking time to spend with my kids, call my parents and tell them how much they mean to me, and send a note to our local police and fire departments and tell them how much I appreciate them.

I'll be around tomorrow.

bellsong

Povchev, I am amazed at 100 Facebook pages! how often do you post to each one. On a monthly basis, how profitable is this? I have 4 pages and have not seen any monetary benefit. I am just learning. Do you have any advice?

bjd461

What a wonderful thread - my thanks to you all.

I am one of those following along quietly in the background.

About autoresponder messages, I would like to share a little info I learned.

Some prefer not to introduce any selling until after a few mails. This is probably the traditional way, and nothing really wrong with that.

However, some will start to sell immediately. The main theory behind this is: your subscriber is in an 'active' mood since he/she just signed up to your list. So keep the momentum going by trying to sell something immediately. Its a little bit like an upsell.

The suggestion is to send something like the following:

Hello and welcome etc...hope you get lots of benefit from my email course about etc...But first i want to answer one of the most common questions etc...such as 'where can i find information on etc'...so you answer the question, leading into a sales routine.

Thats an abbreviated version, but hopefully you get the idea.

Hope this helps.

Brian

Tiptopcat

My 30 Day Challenge - Day 14

Today I didn't get anything done. It was a little difficult to get motivated due to it being Sunday, the day of rest, as well as the 9/11 memorial.

I spent the day with my family and watching the memorial service on TV.

My thoughts are with those in the States and those who lost loved ones home and abroad.

Until Tomorrow.

Tiptopcat

powerstrike

i want to join this challenge i guess i have some catching up to do

RickAllen

As predicted the only thing accomplished today dealing with IM was uploading a blog post before I left out this morning. Very looooooong weekend so will call it a night and go at it in the morning with some renewed energy.

PS: Looks like this may be a 5 week challenge instead of 4 for some of us.

"I can get you more sales without spending a dime more on advertising!" http://ThePRexpert.com Free video course, whitepapers and more.

alwayswillingtolearn

Hi guys,
I posted a comment looking for some guidance on this challenge. I was thinking of using a Blogger Blog to sell Amazon products to begin with.

Any insight on what I've posted would be appreciated.

Thanks!

http://HowToMakeGirlsLaugh.com

RickAllen

I'm no expert (yet) on this myself, that's why I'm doing this challenge to be able to better my IM skills. It seems that most of us are focusing on a smaller niche market to target prospects. My first reaction to your blog is... your offering to much to to many. Bottom line it comes across to me that your "just" trying to sell me something and not give me useful information or motivation to act. My suggestion is go back through and reread the post that have been made here and the leading steps that are being used.

Shay has mentioned it but not yet said much about the "funnel" that you need to lead prospects through. It generally begins with creating interest for more information... a free report and the like, then continued information to build trust and confidence in you then a sell (generally small) and building from there. Shay my have a different approach as may other here as well. It seems this process may be fast or slow depending on the niche. I have found with past products I have offered, that a "one size fits all" approach to mass general marketing is generally not a great idea, as it takes too much effort and money to do.

This challenge, for me anyway is mostly about using the resources we already have and finding ones that we don't have to market a product or service with no upfront costs. From that standpoint it has been very rewarding so far.

"I can get you more sales without spending a dime more on advertising!" http://ThePRexpert.com Free video course, whitepapers and more.

alwayswillingtolearn

Wow! Thanks RickAllen, reading your post I can see what you're talking about. I do have one blog that is very niche and I have been making sales with that so I would have to agree with your recommendation.

The blog that I have that's making some money addresses the male fertility issue that not too many men have relatively speaking. So it's really small - so I guess I'll focus more on that and maybe corner that market.

Thanks for the advice.

http://HowToMakeGirlsLaugh.com

Rodopi

Hi Jezbiz,

As an alternative to using a email file attachment for delivery of your files, I use a Free hosted Blog at Wordpress.com as a file repository.
Although it isn't much use as a Blog for moneterization and has many other restrictions i.e. unable to upload themes and plugins.
What it does provide is 3GB of file storage for Free per blog.

Here, you can upload your images, pdf's, ppt's, xls, docs etc and store them within your blogs Media Library.

All you have to do then is click on edit and copy the file link detail and paste this into your emails for delivery. You can also goto Twitter and tweet "Help yourself to this FREE report: enter link here"

This keeps all files in one place...no FTP-ing to various domains and folders etc.

OK, the FREE version doesn't allow Video and Audio files but the likes of Youtube can be used for videos until you get some money coming in.

Wishing you every success in all your endeavours.
Mick Gray.

johnspill

i like the make money with no money.

SPORTS AND FITNESS
http://sportswithcoachspillman.com/

Tiptopcat

OK - Now I have a mental block with regards to what to do next to get traffic to my site. Any ideas or suggestions?

Ta

Tiptopcat :confused:

alwayswillingtolearn

Hi Tiptopcat,

I'm just curious on how you've been trying to get the traffic to your site so far.

What I do to get traffic is use YouTube, and some article marketing.

The article marketing has not been doing as well lately but it does still get something done.

I'm looking to get a few hundred visits a day and right now I'm getting about 1/3 of that.
It's not bad, but not what I need in order to get the results I'm looking for.

YouTube has gotten me the most consistent traffic so far, but the conversions from YouTube are not that great - conversely the traffic from the article marketing is not that consistent, but the conversions are way better.

So I guess what I'm saying is I don't have a really good suggestion for you just yet as I need to refine my methods as well.

I'm sure we'll get some awesome advice in this thread.

http://HowToMakeGirlsLaugh.com

bellsong

Tiptopcat, I want to know too. Does anyone use backlinking services? I know that is a cost, but maybe after this challenge... I am wondering if they are any good.

As for free methods of getting backlinks, what else besides article marketing is there that is consistently good? I am relatively new at this and have had my share of CB products that were not worth a dime.

Just learning.

Thanks.

gbellsong

ShayB

Traffic

Lots of people have asked about traffic.

I posted this before (21 different ways to drive traffic), but maybe it got lost in the shuffle.

Take a look at this post:

Look here

DAY FIFTEEN

From here on out, driving traffic/getting conversions is my goal.

I use Twitter a lot, but I'll be posting about some other methods, too.

(Forgive my short posts. Still feeling awful. My mom is bugging me to go to the doc. Ugh.)

ShayB

A word about networking:

Don't forget about local people you can network with.

For example, my product and site are about weight loss. I can (and will) approach local businesses (weight loss centers, diet centers, gastric bypass centers, etc.) to see if they'd be interested in cross promotion.

ShayB

You know, since I've not been up to par and others have had some setbacks, I think extending the challenge for an extra week is a good idea.

Sales funnel - I'll talk some more about it, and more about the sales process and such.

And you're right - different niches are different in the approach needed, plus not everything is a "do this and only this" type of thing.

And yes - this challenge is very much a "use what resources you have" exercise.

Please look at my previous posts for some suggestions.

Take a look at my previous posts. Kim does a great job of outlining 21 different ways to generate traffic.

Backlinking can be good, but it can also bite you in the butt, so be careful. The post from Kim talks about getting quality backlinks with blog commenting, etc.

RickAllen

My internet service was running really funky today, so it was kind of hit and miss, even my banks system was down today. :confused:

I have a few more autoresponder messages to upload that I'm about to do now. So I think (I'll double check my points list) to start getting traffic now.

"I can get you more sales without spending a dime more on advertising!" http://ThePRexpert.com Free video course, whitepapers and more.

povchef

So far I've got enough posts scheduled to cover me till the end of the month, Auto-responder with 15 emails ready. Facebook and twitter account setup for website. From day 10 to now Day 15 I've been building backlinks and putting my website in front of my target audience.

I've taken one day for each method I usually aim for organic traffic so my keywords and backlink are very important.

1. RSS submission + Sitemap submission. I do use a mass RSS pinger later on in my backlinking but for starters I submit my feed to my list of 30 or so RSS submission websites.
2. Related Forum/Profile backlinks - Theses take a little bit longer to take affect but if you put them onto targeted forums you can get some referral traffic.
3. Blog commenting this is something I hate doing but keeps the backlinks looking natural (I would normally pay for this to be done)
4. Social Bookmarking. Although I don't include Facebook or Twitter in this I submit the homepage to about 30ish social bookmark sites.

A few tools I use/will use. A few have a paid version which I would normally use but for this I've set up new accounts using the free version of the tools.

http://www.dropmylink.com/ Great for finding blogs, forums, .edu's with your target keywords.
http://www.backlinksseo.com the free version is only valid for a short time but for this challenge will be long enough (just re sign up once it expires) http://247backlinks.com - same again free account though no limit on time but only 50 backlinks per day.

MariaVC

Hello everyone, I haven't given up yet. After saying yes to the challenge, I ended up with this flu bug. I must have stressed myself after saying yest to the challenge...who knows.

Accepting this challenge is definitely easier said than done. After several attempts to figure out which niche to focus on I decided on the Personal Development Area. I am passionate about this but the challenging part is definitely what to give away for opt-in and what product to sell. I am grateful to you Shay for this thread as well as your guidance. I would like to take this opportunity to thank those of you for generously sharing your resources.

I was totally stuck on what product to sell. I am gearing towards a newsletter for opt-in members and ...I believe I may even be able to pull off a product of my own in which I wll price relatively low as you suggested Shay.

I am thinking of mini meditation audio series. I would do the recording myself (definitely no cost but my own time) and get my son to play keyboard as background music (also free). I have heard him play very lovely pieces and in particular there are 2 so far that I have heard that sounds very healing that I can start with. I have never done this before and appears at the moment, very intensive. I have noticed some are using their aweber account. And since I already have one set up I would like to use this as well unless this not okay then I can quickly set up a different one. Aweber was $1 for the initial month only and was the reason I joined it. There is a monthly cost and the payment came off last week before I accepted the challenge. I want to make sure I am abiding by the rules.

This challenge will be good in making sure I follow through. Once again I am grateful for everyone's contribution. Coming back here to read what everyone has done and is doing makes me feel like I can do it as well. Thank you! :-)

ShayB

Hey, everyone.

1. Since I've been sick and others have had their stuff happening, I'm extending the challenge for a week. I updated the dates in the initial post.

2. I am still sick as a dog. Heading to the doc in the morning.

3. I am SO happy to see everyone's progress! Great things are happening!

4. I'll post some more later tonight. Going to take some meds and crawl into bed for a while.

RickAllen

Thanks for directing to this thread Shay. Lots of useful info here. All involved in this challenge need to take a look at this free report and thread, very useful.

"I can get you more sales without spending a dime more on advertising!" http://ThePRexpert.com Free video course, whitepapers and more.

RickAllen

Glad to hear your going to the Dr., Shay. This is hanging on for too long... trust me I put these things off as long as I can as well. :rolleyes:

"I can get you more sales without spending a dime more on advertising!" http://ThePRexpert.com Free video course, whitepapers and more.

The Herm

I'm not sure which day I'm on at this point so, I'll call this Day 6. Anyway, I was able to get some serious work done today:

- I've almost completed my paid product (which I will charge a cool $5 for), just a page or two more to write and hopefully will complete it tonight.

The way I've laid out my paid product is part informational and part review. I have reviewed 3 products related to my niche in the ebook that I'm writing (and included my clickbank links). My plan is to see if I have any impulse buyers for these products up front, then use these products again in my email series follow up.

This is my first info product, so I'm not sure if this is how the pro's do it, but it sounds good to me. Hey, you won't know if it works til you try it, right?

-Currently have 8 posts up on the blog and will now cut down to 3 posts per week so that I can concentrate on other aspects of the challenge.

-Here's what I have left to do:

1. Set up my FB fan page. I've already created the page, but haven't prettied it with links or design yet. Again, it's my first time putting one of those together so if anyone has any good tips on creating FB fan pages, please post a link or give some suggestions.

2. Create my email autoresponder series. Ok, so I have 3 products at 3 different price points. I plan on sending 5 messages per week for 3 weeks with the 5th message being a sell for one of my products. I will start with the lowest and go up from there.

3. Link my posts together on my blog and edit to include calls to action to encourage email signups. Still need to add my autoresponder, but didn't want to do it before I finished the ebook. Each post is primed for a call to action.

4. Set up some kind of sales page for the ebook. I've never done this either, but I hear that alot of people use e-junkie... however, they only offer one free week and it is $5 after that. Any other suggestions?

Well, that's it for now - til next time....

Tiptopcat

My 30 Day Challenge - Day 16

Yesterday I submitted a new article to ezines for the backlink. I also did a little bit of blog commenting.

I know I need to do more traffic generation work and this has always been my downfall.

Povchef - Thanks for the link to Drop My Link. I have found some great places to comment.

Here's that link again:
http://www.dropmylink.com/

That's it

Tiptopcat

povchef

It was my youngest sons 2nd birthday today so I got no work done and now have a headache anyway its always good to take a day off now and then

One last thing if you are building backlinks always make a note of the url the backlink is on. Every 500 or so take the urls and mash them into a rss feed - I use http://www.bulkping.com/ to do this then make a note of that rss and submit it to Pingler.com - I would suggest for new website to only do this at most once a week at least for the first month. (term of the challenge)

smokeythecat

Hi Shay !

I was lazy to mark that X button on the notifications and didnt notice this section just until today !

Hey , I am extremely delighted to be able to be part of this forum all thanks to my ITE teacher who shown me this forum last year during class .

Where we didnt take it into heart , but not until recently .

I have already got a blog going , but lost motivation until I saw this thread .


Cool Idea huh ?!

I was wondering if you are going to make this challenge something on going for months and maybe hopefully , for years ?

As because I have missed this month's challenge and I want to be part of this challenge , but I reckon its too late .

But would it be good if I start collecting info on my selected niche first , while I focus mainly on my the other blog ?


Cheers , Lester .


Keep the fire burnin' !

angiedc

I've fallen behind over the last few days, but ready to start on traffic. Still in it til day 30!!!!!

ShayB

2 updates:

1. I've extended the dates of the challenge an extra week. (See the original post.)

2. I have bronchitis. I'm taking a day or two to try and get myself back up to feeling human.

For everyone -

Please don't feel you need to hold back because of me. Keep moving with your projects! Just consider it that you've gotten an extra week to get that much farther.

RickAllen

Just a quick update for today. Life happens, not getting to work on this as much as I thought or would like. I did get 3 more autoresponder messages up tonight and opened a new Twitter account for this.

Shay, sincerely hope you get feeling up to par real soon. I get bronchitis a couple times a year, antibiotics are about the only way to knock it out.

"I can get you more sales without spending a dime more on advertising!" http://ThePRexpert.com Free video course, whitepapers and more.

WriterWahm

Sorry to hear what you are going through Shay. Take good care of yourself and don't worry about us. Just focus on getting well.

PM me if you want a romantic fiction ghostwriter.

WriterWahm

I have been MIA for some time, like @RickAllen said, life happens. In my case it was 9 of my blogs that got hacked. Lost 6 of them But life happens. On to my update.

Don't Know What Day I'm AT

I only got back to working on this challenge two days ago. Thus far:

1. I've created my Twitter profile and followed 11 people in my niche. I intend to put some of Shay's tips into practice.

2. I've also loaded my autoresponder with 5 messages - I'm using Getresponse and plain text. But I haven't put the form up on my blog yet.

3. I just completed the short report (11 pages) and I will soon add that to my blog. Thanks to the poster that suggested myecovermaker.com it is absolutely fantastic!

4. I am working on the product I intend to sell. I am compiling it from one of the PLR packs I created to sell so it's just perfect. I will re-write it a bit; but only a little bit.

I need to work on getting traffic now. That would be for tomorrow though and I'll take a look at the link Shay provided.

So, that's it. This is really hard work. Much harder than I first anticipated but I love the feeling. It is not beyond what I can do and I appreciate the accountability of coming here to report progress...it makes me keep at it.

On a brighter note, I woke up this morning to a sale of one of my PLR packs. That was wonderful after all the grief I've gotten from my hacked blogs.

PM me if you want a romantic fiction ghostwriter.

Thomas-West

@writerwahm,

I usually change my paswords every week to try to combat the hacker and to date that seems to working ok. This was a suggestion from a Hostgator teck when we were discussuing another problem I was having with a site.

Seems everyone is doing ok just some are further along than others. I just want to encourage anyone reading this thread to just start at the first instruction for the challenge and progress at your own pace.

I'm still haveing a problem with the traffic part of this, not getting much as yet.

alwayswillingtolearn

Dude,

It's never too late to get started. All you need to do now is some back-tracking and action taking!

In short...git er done!

http://HowToMakeGirlsLaugh.com

alwayswillingtolearn

Traffic has always been the biggest struggle for me. I've been researching and found that backlinking to high page ranked .edu sites really help with your sites exposure.

I even saw that someone here is offering something called linxbot - anyone ever heard of it?

http://HowToMakeGirlsLaugh.com

Tiptopcat

My 30 Day Challenge - Day 17 & 18

I submitted a fresh article to ezines on both days and I checked the ranking for my site. The good news is that it is ranked no.6 in google. The bad news is that it does not have a keyword rich name so no-one will be searching for the term.

It seems that traffic generation is the sticking point for most people. One reason is because it is difficult and the other main reason is because it is boring.

I have a feeling that, for me, the success of doing this challenge is having the opportunity to focus on one task for a certain period of time. I am happy with the work that I have been able to accomplish.

However - being happy don't pay the bills! LoL.

That's all for now.

Tiptopcat

The Herm

Hi folks,

Today is day 8 I believe. Here's an update on my progress:

1. I finished the e-book as planned. I'd say I'm pretty satisfied with it, it ended up at about 15 pages.

2. Designed the e-book cover using myecovermaker which someone else on here suggested. It worked great!

3. Designed my aweber email form with a picture of the ebook and a call to action. It's ready to go. I've made a small change of plans though - I'm going to give the report away for free for a limited time (30 days probably) to help create a sense of urgency and encourage sign ups.

4. Currently crafting my autoresponder messages. 1 down, 14 more to go!

Thinking about how I'm going to get traffic once that is done and I've got 3 things in mind:

1. I'm going to make some youtube videos. The niche I chose is pretty conducive to making some short, fun how-to videos (this is going to be a first for me as well!).

2. Article marketing - good old article marketing.... but I do have some articles that i purchased about a month ago on elance for my other site that I could adapt to this one, so that'll be easy.

3. Twitter - I started a twitter account about a month ago too and have a small following (very small, lol), but I think I'm going to leverage that in conjunction with my youtube videos and articles to help grow my following and get them to my site.

I have a question for the people that have delivered ebooks before however: do you prefer to send it as an attachment in the autoresponder email or do you direct people to a download page on your site?

I can do either - but if I directed them to a site, it would be at the address of the other on that I have, not the one for the challenge.

The Herm

This has definitely been my sticking point on previous projects. I've had the same experience of ranking for words that don't bring much traffic or words I wasn't even trying for with little to no traffic.

I think the thing here might be to try thinking outside the box in terms of generating traffic to your site.

Keep doing the article marketing because it DOES help but maybe try to find another mode of traffic generation to supplement that such as youtube videos or forums commenting or any combination of things you can come up with that you haven't tried yet (that's free of course).

We're going to have to be very aggressive with our traffic generation techniques for the 2nd half of this challenge.

RickAllen

Nice to see everyone is making progress along the way. I had planned to spend the entire day getting everything tweaked, but alas I ended up having to do some other projects so only got a couple more autoresponder messages completed and uploaded. This has taken longer then I planned for, I'm offering a 10 day mini marketing course as the bonus so it has been a bit involved even though I rewrote much of it from a PLR I had laying around, some of it was dated and I needed to insert how the QR Codes could be used in most of the lessons.


As this goes on, I've been thinking of offering PLR rights to this as well. It might be easier to expand my market that way... any thoughts?

Oh, I also setup a Twitter page, but at at a loss how to develop it, other then the suggestions Shay has given and a couple ebooks I have on it.

Out for a very busy weekend starting at 6am in the morning... so, again not sure how much if anything I'll get done over the weekend.

Looks like were all doing great and making progress and learning a ton. Hope our fearless leader Shay gets back in the grove soon... I'm betting shes knocked out right now... from personal experience.

"I can get you more sales without spending a dime more on advertising!" http://ThePRexpert.com Free video course, whitepapers and more.

zabereu

Oh!! **** how did i miss this o.k i`m gonna start the challenge today & gonna post my updates .Hope this is gonna work out for me!!!!!!