The lesson for Day 17 was all about social bookmarking. Now in the scheme of things, when this days training was put up on the 30DC site none of the Tumblr drama had occurred. Still, maybe Ed and Dan had a suspicion as to what would happen, or maybe other challengers were posting questions about what happens when their keyword phrase is already taken as a URL for the Tumblr site. Whatever the reason, Ed and Dan made it clear that Tumblr was not the Holy Grail of hosting platforms. The reason they chose it was because it had a simple layout, it was very easy to sign up to, it was new on the scene but yet was ranking very well with Google (meaning it had been search engine optimized). That's not to say that there aren't plenty of other blogging sites, etc, that aren't just as good in comparison. Actually, one forum member put up a link to an incredible site called Go2Web20.net that lists all the sites in the Web 2.0 arena. You can then search for specifics, such as "blog" and it will give you all the blog sites out there. Great site, very useful.
So Ed and Dan made mention of some other hosting platforms but they did say that the best way to do this was to use a number of different ones. The way Ed put it was that you should never expect more than 10% of your income to come from one site, no more than 10% of traffic, also. There's nothing wrong with having more than one platform promote the same niche either. So if you had an ongoing Blogger blog regarding your niche, you could also have a static Squidoo lens focusing on one area of your niche, but with links back to your blog and your affiliate products. That's my plan now that I have gotten my first Blog up to the way I like it, I'll start putting together a Squidoo lens as well. Then I'll have a crack at my second niche in the same way.
The 2 videos for Day 17 were in regards to a social bookmarking, and creating backlinks. The first video went through the process of getting your site ranked in the social bookmarking sites, using Social Poster. This is a great utility for submitting a site to many social bookmarking sites at once. It has a long list of sites to submit to, and once you have your site name, URL, description and tags filled in you just have to post those details at each individual site. The only time consuming part really is that you must first register at each site you intend to submit to - but even this stage is greatly streamlined using Social Poster.
The next video was about submitting an article to Ezinearticles.com. This is a site where people write articles for use in PLR (Private Label Rights) material. This is copy that someone has written that they allow anyone to use on their website for content. The smart thing, if you're going to use PLR, is to change the text around, as other people may be using the same content on their site and Google doesn't like duplicate content. So if you get something free like that it's always a good idea to re-write it to some extent. Changing one or two words per sentence should do it. The purpose of us 30DCers submitting articles to Ezine is that we are able to include a backlink to our blog/lens/whatever in the bio section, which is shown with the article, and just may entice someone who is interested in our article to look for more content and/or products. It's another boost in the rankings, as we know that backlinks from reputable sites means that Google likes us just that little bit more. I must get onto writing an article sometime soon.
So this was the point really where someone could make their first sale, once the social bookmarking is done and traffic starts to flow. On the actual Day 17 I was still struggling with writing content, but now I'm actually working on Day 17 stuff I look forward to seeing just how quickly things start to happen...
EDIT: Just a quick note to say that, even without social bookmarking, the blog site for my first niche turned up at #9 in the Google search rankings for the phrase match. I published the blog at around 8:30pm, and when I checked at 2:00pm the next day there it was. I made some more tweaks on the site to make it look a little better, put images in and what not, and then started doing some social bookmarking. I didn't go crazy with it, though. I only posted my site to around 10 bookmarking places, as I didn't want a huge surge of traffic to my site alerting Google that something might be a little "spammy". I then put an email out to my fellow team members (who I haven't heard from in weeks), to give me some "link love" - votes through socialposter.com. Who knows if I'll hear back from them or what they are doing, but I thought it was worth a shot. In the next day or so I'll start hitting up my contacts on Skype for the same thing. It's all about making the traffic look natural. Like some people have found it and told their friends about it, and so on.
By the end of the day yesterday I had around 100 people visit my site, which was surprising but very cool. The social bookmarking works, but I know that is just a spike due to the new listing. The real aim is to make me look good in Google's eyes so that I can then rank naturally high, and people will find my site simply by searching for my keyword phrase, rather than by checking social bookmarking sites.
Actually, at this point I can reveal what my first niche is and the site address. My first niche was for "best Wii games" - as in Nintendo Wii. You can view the blog at http://best-wii-games.blogspot.com
Showing posts with label tumblr. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tumblr. Show all posts
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Location Location Location
Day 16 of the thirty day challenge and we are moving the content we have written up into the wide weird world of the internet, in preparation of getting it ranked and having traffic swarm to our page and hopefully our affiliate products.
The first video was Ed going over the process we are to follow. We create the blog (our content site), which is our attractive friend. We then hit it with some social bookmarking (a process that will be explained further on Day 17). That is our attention getting friend, or friends as the case may be.
So the action points are:
1. Watch the Tumblr Video - check!
2. Create a Tumblr blog account - check!
3. Write another 3 articles for each of my phrases - crap...
I am actually understanding why this content needs to be written (well I think I do). It's my understanding that we not only need to get into the practice of writing content regularly, so that it doesn't become such a chore, but also so we can learn about our chosen niches (if we didn't already know about them), and hopefully become interested in them. That has certainly happened with me, although I am still behind in the content writing. I'm okay with that, though, because I know I can pump out the good when necessary, as one of my jobs back when I was working 9 to 5 was to write copy for newsletters and shop item descriptions - and that was for an area that I didn't have a great deal of interest in, so writing about something I am interested in will be a piece of cake.
The one thing I'm a little unclear on is just how regularly are we supposed to upload new content to our blogs. After watching the videos I didn't really see that mentioned anywhere. I notice that for both Ed's and Rob's niche sites they had two blog posts already in place, but I don't recall hearing either of them mention how often after that should we be adding to it. Is it once a day? Once every two days? I might have to jump on the forum and look that one up.
Speaking of the forum, I forgot to mention earlier that with the great 30DC toolbar that we were supplied with thanks to Dan, we are able to quickly and easily search the 30DC forums through Google. We merely type into the 30DC search bar the phrase we are looking for, then when the results appear on Google we click on the Thirty Day Challenge link on Google and it narrows down the results to only those from the forum. How cool is that!
After Ed's video we got a video from Rob explaining how we set up a blog in Tumblr, and some little tricks to use to help identify our keyword phrase to Google. It's important to put our keywords in the heading of the blog, as well as trying to fit it in the first sentence (or first paragraph if first sentence doesn't work). Also, bolding that first instance and italicizing the last instance of your keyword phrase will let Google spiders know that those words are the ones to focus on. I think having a different attribute on each is important, as Google doesn't like too much repetition, so having one bold and one in italics is better than having two bold key phrases. So don't go off and bold all your key phrase instances thinking that it will give you a higher ranking. It will likely do the opposite if anything.
So I was then left to open my Tumblr account and create my blogs. I got a good tip about GMail from one of the other challengers. He mentioned that with GMail, you can alter your original email address so that the same email can be used for all your Tumblr accounts. Let me explain...
With Tumblr, it is a case of one email address per account/blog. Unlike Blogger, you can only open one blog per account in Tumblr, which I do find restrictive. Anyway, I opened a GMail account as cardsagogo@gmail.com, and the tip is that if you make your Tumblr account email address "cardsagogo+yournichephrase@gmail.com", not only will you get emails going to your GMail account, but you can make "yournichephrase" any of your niches and not have to create a new email account for each phrase. Now that saves a lot of time and hassle. So I did all that and posted just one piece of content for each niche. I was actually running a little behind so didn't get this done until Friday the 17th.
As it turns out I'm kid of glad I only put up one piece for each niche. Overnight on Saturday the 18th, the guy who runs Tumblr went on a rampage on his own site, deleting blogs and accounts indiscriminately. He rationale was that he didn't want all us 30DCers using his blog for what affiliate marketing. He called us scum and eventhough he was targeting 30DCers, he apparently deleted several blogs belonging to people who had been using Tumblr for a while. Alarm bells obviously went up for him when there was a HUGE spike of traffic to his little blog site, as thousands of 30DCers, following the words of Ed Dale, went over and signed up and posted their content. Ed blamed the mass deletion on those who were using the 30DC process to produce spam-like crap content, rather than those who had genuine, original content in place. Personally, from what I read of the guy who runs Tumblr, I don't think it mattered. It certainly didn't matter to him which accounts he deleted. But hey, it is his site and he's welcome to do what he likes with it. If he doesn't want the extra traffic then that's fine. I know a lot of people got angry and probably started using Web 2.0 techniques to try and bash Tumblr. Neither of my blogs got the chop and they may have been because I was running late with signing up (not in the midst of the thousands of others), or that my blogs were of a technical nature - apparently the guy who runs Tumblr is an ex-IT guy so is partial to techie stuff. Who knows really, but I was in a quandary as to whether I should stick with Tumblr now or take my blog elsewhere. I didn't want to continue working on it only to have this guy decide to shut me down 1 week, 2 weeks, 6 months in, and have all that work wasted. On the other hand I had started and noticed that in less than 24 hours one of my blogs had reached #34 position in Google for the phrase match, without having any social bookmarking done on it whatsoever. I was now worried that if I started again I would be competing against this Tumblr blog. If I did start again I would have to change my content enough that Google didn't see it as duplicate. That wasn't a bit deal, and in the end I figured it was better to spend a bit more time starting up somewhere more secure, so I headed to the first place I could think of that hadn't let me down. Here.
I know down the track I will use other blogging platforms to host my content for future niches, but for now I wanted to just have the ease that Blogger affords me, so I started two new blogs with my niche phrase in the URL, and posted my first blogs for each, with revised content of course. I added in one affiliate link in each blog, to products on Amazon.com. I don't really expect anyone to buy that stuff, though. I'm now off to add in some tracking code so I can see if anyone is actually visiting these blogs.
The first video was Ed going over the process we are to follow. We create the blog (our content site), which is our attractive friend. We then hit it with some social bookmarking (a process that will be explained further on Day 17). That is our attention getting friend, or friends as the case may be.
So the action points are:
1. Watch the Tumblr Video - check!
2. Create a Tumblr blog account - check!
3. Write another 3 articles for each of my phrases - crap...
I am actually understanding why this content needs to be written (well I think I do). It's my understanding that we not only need to get into the practice of writing content regularly, so that it doesn't become such a chore, but also so we can learn about our chosen niches (if we didn't already know about them), and hopefully become interested in them. That has certainly happened with me, although I am still behind in the content writing. I'm okay with that, though, because I know I can pump out the good when necessary, as one of my jobs back when I was working 9 to 5 was to write copy for newsletters and shop item descriptions - and that was for an area that I didn't have a great deal of interest in, so writing about something I am interested in will be a piece of cake.
The one thing I'm a little unclear on is just how regularly are we supposed to upload new content to our blogs. After watching the videos I didn't really see that mentioned anywhere. I notice that for both Ed's and Rob's niche sites they had two blog posts already in place, but I don't recall hearing either of them mention how often after that should we be adding to it. Is it once a day? Once every two days? I might have to jump on the forum and look that one up.
Speaking of the forum, I forgot to mention earlier that with the great 30DC toolbar that we were supplied with thanks to Dan, we are able to quickly and easily search the 30DC forums through Google. We merely type into the 30DC search bar the phrase we are looking for, then when the results appear on Google we click on the Thirty Day Challenge link on Google and it narrows down the results to only those from the forum. How cool is that!
After Ed's video we got a video from Rob explaining how we set up a blog in Tumblr, and some little tricks to use to help identify our keyword phrase to Google. It's important to put our keywords in the heading of the blog, as well as trying to fit it in the first sentence (or first paragraph if first sentence doesn't work). Also, bolding that first instance and italicizing the last instance of your keyword phrase will let Google spiders know that those words are the ones to focus on. I think having a different attribute on each is important, as Google doesn't like too much repetition, so having one bold and one in italics is better than having two bold key phrases. So don't go off and bold all your key phrase instances thinking that it will give you a higher ranking. It will likely do the opposite if anything.
So I was then left to open my Tumblr account and create my blogs. I got a good tip about GMail from one of the other challengers. He mentioned that with GMail, you can alter your original email address so that the same email can be used for all your Tumblr accounts. Let me explain...
With Tumblr, it is a case of one email address per account/blog. Unlike Blogger, you can only open one blog per account in Tumblr, which I do find restrictive. Anyway, I opened a GMail account as cardsagogo@gmail.com, and the tip is that if you make your Tumblr account email address "cardsagogo+yournichephrase@gmail.com", not only will you get emails going to your GMail account, but you can make "yournichephrase" any of your niches and not have to create a new email account for each phrase. Now that saves a lot of time and hassle. So I did all that and posted just one piece of content for each niche. I was actually running a little behind so didn't get this done until Friday the 17th.
As it turns out I'm kid of glad I only put up one piece for each niche. Overnight on Saturday the 18th, the guy who runs Tumblr went on a rampage on his own site, deleting blogs and accounts indiscriminately. He rationale was that he didn't want all us 30DCers using his blog for what affiliate marketing. He called us scum and eventhough he was targeting 30DCers, he apparently deleted several blogs belonging to people who had been using Tumblr for a while. Alarm bells obviously went up for him when there was a HUGE spike of traffic to his little blog site, as thousands of 30DCers, following the words of Ed Dale, went over and signed up and posted their content. Ed blamed the mass deletion on those who were using the 30DC process to produce spam-like crap content, rather than those who had genuine, original content in place. Personally, from what I read of the guy who runs Tumblr, I don't think it mattered. It certainly didn't matter to him which accounts he deleted. But hey, it is his site and he's welcome to do what he likes with it. If he doesn't want the extra traffic then that's fine. I know a lot of people got angry and probably started using Web 2.0 techniques to try and bash Tumblr. Neither of my blogs got the chop and they may have been because I was running late with signing up (not in the midst of the thousands of others), or that my blogs were of a technical nature - apparently the guy who runs Tumblr is an ex-IT guy so is partial to techie stuff. Who knows really, but I was in a quandary as to whether I should stick with Tumblr now or take my blog elsewhere. I didn't want to continue working on it only to have this guy decide to shut me down 1 week, 2 weeks, 6 months in, and have all that work wasted. On the other hand I had started and noticed that in less than 24 hours one of my blogs had reached #34 position in Google for the phrase match, without having any social bookmarking done on it whatsoever. I was now worried that if I started again I would be competing against this Tumblr blog. If I did start again I would have to change my content enough that Google didn't see it as duplicate. That wasn't a bit deal, and in the end I figured it was better to spend a bit more time starting up somewhere more secure, so I headed to the first place I could think of that hadn't let me down. Here.
I know down the track I will use other blogging platforms to host my content for future niches, but for now I wanted to just have the ease that Blogger affords me, so I started two new blogs with my niche phrase in the URL, and posted my first blogs for each, with revised content of course. I added in one affiliate link in each blog, to products on Amazon.com. I don't really expect anyone to buy that stuff, though. I'm now off to add in some tracking code so I can see if anyone is actually visiting these blogs.
Monday, August 13, 2007
The Learning Phase
Day 10 of the challenge was about the gathering of information, and beginning to learn about our particular niches. I realise now why Ed had only wanted us to bring 2 niches into this exercise, as the work load begins to increase significantly from here on.
Ed started the day with his usual podcast, and then made a strange little video about doing one last little bit of market research. As he said it was something that was sort of hard to teach, but as experienced Internet Marketers, himself and Dan knew this technique more by looking than actually documenting the process. Anyway, he told us to have a look in Google and search for our niche keywords. We were then to look to the results to see if there were any, or many Web 2.0 results. By Web 2.0 he means results that include Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, Ezine articles, Tumblr blogs, etc...places where people are already using Web 2.0 sites to write about and possibly market niches such as ours. Now the reason I say this was a strange video was because once he had told us about this, saying that if our niche failed after we had done all the previous market research then this would probably be the reason, he told us to ignore what he had told us. I'm assuming he did this because the idea might confuse a lot of newbies (and I would have included myself in that group had I not been part of the Immediate Edge program - now of course, I know all about Squidoo and Hub and Ezine). Adding this into the mix could quite well add a level of complexity to the mix for a lot of people that they would simply crash and burn through frustration at not being able to understand the process at this point, and may very well chuck it all in. Ed made the video as to give full disclosure, so that if someone did do all the research but didn't get any traffic, then he could at least say that he had explained the reason why it had probably happened. I assume he believes that for this challenge it's certainly not an important enough part of the market research faze to be worrying, but at the same time it needed to be mentioned. I have the feeling it may have been more confusing to have made the video and then said to ignore it, but I understand why he had to do it, and I bet if there are experienced members in a team then they could probably go into more detail for the lesser experienced people.
Speaking of teams, I'm not sure if I have one anymore...at the start of the challenge we were all told that teams were the best way, and I got that and so asked to join a team. We got a handful of people together, I think 5 was the magic number, and I sent off an email to the guy who started the team saying I was interested. A few days later he sent out a group email with everyone's details, asking them to confirm that they still wanted on the team, and I sent off my confirmation. Since then I've had received maybe one email from each of them, only in response to me asking if the team was still a team. One of our team members started a Facebook group for our team, and only 4 out of 5 of us have joined it...the guy who started the team is the one who hasn't joined, but in his defense he says that he has been sick and needs to catch up. Mind you, the Facebook group has not had much activity since it was started, and the guy who started it, who is meant to be a member of my team hasn't even added me to his friends list despite me requesting to be his friend several days ago. I really thought there would be a bit more communication between team mates. I noticed in the stages of pre-season that other teams were doing teleconferencing on Skype, and coming up with fun team names, but getting correspondence out of my team has been a little like pulling teeth - nobody seems to want to communicate so I've pretty much resigned myself to doing this on my own. I know what people might say, well if YOU want to communicate then communicate...well, I HAVE been trying, and not getting much in response and I'm not the sort of guy who bangs his head on a brick wall for very long. Ok, that's my rant over...
The rest of Day 10 was about the gathering of information on our niches. For those who have chosen a niche they know little or nothing about, now is the time to learn. That goes for me, as the two niches I have chosen are both areas I know nothing about really. I just hope that as I learn about them I'm able to get interested. At the moment, though, it's just about getting snap shots of information and saving them in Google Notebook, a cool little tool for this exact purpose. Another fantastic technique that Ed has shown us is the way to be notified when new information on our niches comes our way. This process entails going to Google and doing a search for your niche under the Google News site. Now, in Ed's example his niche is "Free Speed Reading", but as it's a sub niche the news results are minimal, so he stuck with the umbrella phrase of "Speed Reading". Once he got his results he merely clicked on the RSS feed icon in the address bar of the browser, which took him to his Bloglines account and he saved the feed. This means now that anytime the word "Speed Reading" appears in a news article, Ed will get it delivered to his Bloglines account. Pretty bloody clever if you ask me. Then he did the same with the Blogs search section of Google and voila! He now has every blog that mentions "Speed Reading". Google, being the mother of all search engines, would pick up most blogs and news articles, and therefore Ed would receive a plethora of content which can be used down the track in the preparation of a product or sales page. Then it's just a matter of reading through these blogs and news articles, and seeing what makes you go WOW, or HMMM, and copying that into Google Notebook, storing it for future use. Hell, you may even learn a little about your niche along the way! Hats off to you, Ed, that's some cool IM shit right there!
So that's where I'm at right now. I'm concentrating on my two main niches, gathering information about what they are and cool things that others might find interesting about them. I haven't forgotten my third niche, and if I have time I will have a look for info regarding that, but it happens to be a niche that I already have quite an interest in, and know a bit about, so it's not imperative that I get stuff down during the thirty day challenge.
So, I'd better stop dribbling and get on with the learning phase
Ed started the day with his usual podcast, and then made a strange little video about doing one last little bit of market research. As he said it was something that was sort of hard to teach, but as experienced Internet Marketers, himself and Dan knew this technique more by looking than actually documenting the process. Anyway, he told us to have a look in Google and search for our niche keywords. We were then to look to the results to see if there were any, or many Web 2.0 results. By Web 2.0 he means results that include Squidoo lenses, Hub pages, Ezine articles, Tumblr blogs, etc...places where people are already using Web 2.0 sites to write about and possibly market niches such as ours. Now the reason I say this was a strange video was because once he had told us about this, saying that if our niche failed after we had done all the previous market research then this would probably be the reason, he told us to ignore what he had told us. I'm assuming he did this because the idea might confuse a lot of newbies (and I would have included myself in that group had I not been part of the Immediate Edge program - now of course, I know all about Squidoo and Hub and Ezine). Adding this into the mix could quite well add a level of complexity to the mix for a lot of people that they would simply crash and burn through frustration at not being able to understand the process at this point, and may very well chuck it all in. Ed made the video as to give full disclosure, so that if someone did do all the research but didn't get any traffic, then he could at least say that he had explained the reason why it had probably happened. I assume he believes that for this challenge it's certainly not an important enough part of the market research faze to be worrying, but at the same time it needed to be mentioned. I have the feeling it may have been more confusing to have made the video and then said to ignore it, but I understand why he had to do it, and I bet if there are experienced members in a team then they could probably go into more detail for the lesser experienced people.
Speaking of teams, I'm not sure if I have one anymore...at the start of the challenge we were all told that teams were the best way, and I got that and so asked to join a team. We got a handful of people together, I think 5 was the magic number, and I sent off an email to the guy who started the team saying I was interested. A few days later he sent out a group email with everyone's details, asking them to confirm that they still wanted on the team, and I sent off my confirmation. Since then I've had received maybe one email from each of them, only in response to me asking if the team was still a team. One of our team members started a Facebook group for our team, and only 4 out of 5 of us have joined it...the guy who started the team is the one who hasn't joined, but in his defense he says that he has been sick and needs to catch up. Mind you, the Facebook group has not had much activity since it was started, and the guy who started it, who is meant to be a member of my team hasn't even added me to his friends list despite me requesting to be his friend several days ago. I really thought there would be a bit more communication between team mates. I noticed in the stages of pre-season that other teams were doing teleconferencing on Skype, and coming up with fun team names, but getting correspondence out of my team has been a little like pulling teeth - nobody seems to want to communicate so I've pretty much resigned myself to doing this on my own. I know what people might say, well if YOU want to communicate then communicate...well, I HAVE been trying, and not getting much in response and I'm not the sort of guy who bangs his head on a brick wall for very long. Ok, that's my rant over...
The rest of Day 10 was about the gathering of information on our niches. For those who have chosen a niche they know little or nothing about, now is the time to learn. That goes for me, as the two niches I have chosen are both areas I know nothing about really. I just hope that as I learn about them I'm able to get interested. At the moment, though, it's just about getting snap shots of information and saving them in Google Notebook, a cool little tool for this exact purpose. Another fantastic technique that Ed has shown us is the way to be notified when new information on our niches comes our way. This process entails going to Google and doing a search for your niche under the Google News site. Now, in Ed's example his niche is "Free Speed Reading", but as it's a sub niche the news results are minimal, so he stuck with the umbrella phrase of "Speed Reading". Once he got his results he merely clicked on the RSS feed icon in the address bar of the browser, which took him to his Bloglines account and he saved the feed. This means now that anytime the word "Speed Reading" appears in a news article, Ed will get it delivered to his Bloglines account. Pretty bloody clever if you ask me. Then he did the same with the Blogs search section of Google and voila! He now has every blog that mentions "Speed Reading". Google, being the mother of all search engines, would pick up most blogs and news articles, and therefore Ed would receive a plethora of content which can be used down the track in the preparation of a product or sales page. Then it's just a matter of reading through these blogs and news articles, and seeing what makes you go WOW, or HMMM, and copying that into Google Notebook, storing it for future use. Hell, you may even learn a little about your niche along the way! Hats off to you, Ed, that's some cool IM shit right there!
So that's where I'm at right now. I'm concentrating on my two main niches, gathering information about what they are and cool things that others might find interesting about them. I haven't forgotten my third niche, and if I have time I will have a look for info regarding that, but it happens to be a niche that I already have quite an interest in, and know a bit about, so it's not imperative that I get stuff down during the thirty day challenge.
So, I'd better stop dribbling and get on with the learning phase
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