Well, I have this morning been trying to follow my thirty day challenge training and use Market Samurai to generate some interest about my websites and maybe even get a few backlinks one day, by making some appropriate comments on other people’s articles and blogs.  How frustrating this backlink building is.

ijumped poppy

Basically, I have just spent five minutes skimming a blog post, and typing in a considered comment – a quality comment.  I followed the rules as stated, and pressed submit.  What happened?  Well, back came a web page with a totally blank screen except for one big, bold, black word at the top – DISCARDED.  Well, thanks for that, Mr Webmaster.  Thanks for a user-friendly experience at your web site.  Thanks for the consideration.  Thanks for the badly-executed automated judgement that my comment was a worthless addition to your site, which actually it was not.

You know, this is one of the things that is wrong, very wrong with Internet Marketing.  If you are on someone else’s territory, whether it is a personal blog or a big blog site like hubpages, you are treated summarily by whatever rules they decide to enforce.  If they enfoce a new set of rules to the ones on site, well, that’s up to them, it’s their site.  If they send you a curt rejection message with no thought about the image it gives of their brand – who cares?   There is often a lot of unfairness, a lot of bad practice and a lot of sheer incompetence in how these sites interact with visitors who want to make a contribution of what is actually “content” for their site if only they could see clearly instead of going over the top with their trigger-happy condemnation.

It seems to me, to paraphrase that old song, that too many webmasters are “seeing the world through spam-tinted glasses – and EVERYTHING looks spammy now!!”

I am not yet used to this Internet Marketing world.  Every summary rejection of my comments on other people’s sites feels like the equivalent of someone punching me in the chest.  Not exactly painful, but not something you want to have done to you all morning.  I think I need to change my attitude a little.  I am taking it too personally.

Well, I have been thrashing around for a day or two looking for my next project and using the Market Samurai tool to research new keywords to chase after.

I was becoming more and more frustrated, and decided to ask one of the senior posters on the Thirty Day Challenge forum for some help.  He has posted some really useful information on the forum and was only to happy to share it with us all.

Here is the post, for which I am very grateful!

Dean’s Market Samurai Tips

Thanks again Dean.

Wel, great excitement this Saturday morning.  I spent the first couple of hours writing three more articles for my latest two test sites, and then allowed myself the luxury of checking my Amazon associates account for Thirty Day Challenge test site number two, the TV DVD Combi review site, and hey presto – the first sale for this site – a TV/DVD!  This means a nice £7 commission, which is Amazon’s ceiling for my newish associates account.

The thing about this is that the site only went live on 3rd September, some 16 days ago!  More than this, I have only had around 100 unique visitors to the site, of whom about 50 have clicked the offer advertisement – and one bought!  This is tremendous news, but could of course just be beginner’s luck.

Anyway, it has given me a great lift and is a lovely start to the weekend.  Oh, and of course I must thank the Thirty Day Challenge team once again for their excellent training.

It’s 8:45am as I write this.

Already today I have been working since 5.15am at the computer, writing articles for my latest Internet Marketing web sites.  I have written two articles totalling some 1500 words, and published them as Squidoo lenses.  I have also added them to a tool called Traffic Bug (which I was introduced to by the Thirty Day Challenge) to promote these articles.

http://ijumped.net poppy

All of this; about two-and-a-half hours’ work if I allow for the time out that I took for breakfast and a shower – all of this productivity – real productive work – has been completed before your average employed office worker even gets through the door and finds the way to the kettle to make that first cup of coffee in preparation for a gentle warm-up gossip and a leisurely scan through the morning’s emails.

But would I swap what I am doing to go back to office life?  Well, I might – but only under one of the following two circumstances:

1. It is my office and my own company

2. I am so broke that I am in danger of having nowhere to live and not enough to eat.

Onwards and upwards!

Well, the site I had abandoned as a no-go as advised by the 30DC process produced a sale yesterday.  This is a momentous occasion because it is the first commission I have ever earned from Internet Marketing.

It  is only £1.57, so cannot be considered significant financially, but it is very significant psychologically, because it is the first time in all my months of effort in online marketing that money has flowed in that direction!

So, having not touched Pushchair Stroller, my thirty day challenge site, since the “no-go” decision, I am now wondering what I should do with it.  There have been 110 unique visitors in over a month, which is pathetic, of which about 50 have clicked the offer, and 1 has converted.  So the ratios are fine – just the TRAFFIC that is missing!!!  And of course that lack of traffic was the thing that caused me to decide the site was a no-go because it is highly ranked so there is nowhere to go to get more traffic.  It’s still a dud site, but it’s encouraging that the click-through rate and the conversion rate are nice, which shows that I got some of it right and just need to apply the same process to different micro-niches that will get more traffic.  Yes they WILL!  I have two more sites up already, and two more that I have just registered domains for.  Therefore soon I will have four micro-niches on test, sort of overlapping time-wise.  I am just hoping for more traffic on these.

Right, no time to sit back – back to my link-building, content creation, article writing and keying pages into Traffic Bug (don’t ask..)

Oh, you may be wondering how this is going to fit into the big plan of my self-employment.  The answer is that I am giving it everything I have got until it works and I start to earn at least part of what I need each month, from Internet Marketing.

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster for the last week or so.

During August, I have been honing my Internet Marketing skills by following something called the Thirty Day Challenge, which is a free course designed to give you the tools and expertise needed to make “your first dollar” on the internet.  It as certainly been a very interesting course and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone starting out in the world of Internet Marketing.  It is also a good refresher course for those more experienced folk, because it brings you up-to-date with techniques that are changing all the time.  Oh and yes, it really is FREE!  The payback for the man behind it, Ed Dale and his team is that there is a paid advanced course, well more like ongoing coaching, that you can subscribe to afterwards – and even that is priced very reasonably – I got in with a special offer at 30 U.S. dollars a month.

For me personally, the 30DC as it is known was a great confidence booster.  Having said that, I have yet to earn my “first dollar”.  I built a test website as instructed, but unfortunately the keyword I chose was a dodgy one as I now know.  Let me explain:

I found a keyword with 800 hits a day and a low number of competing web sites – it met the criteria so I used it for the challenge, building my site and doing the article writing, marketing and everything else.  In no time, the blog was at number 1 in Google – a great start!  Unfortunately, the 800-a-day visitors never came.  One or two a day came to the site if I was lucky.  So what happened?

Well, with more knowledge now, I dug deeper into the keyword, which was “pushchair stroller” by the way.  I was suspicious all along that “pushchair” is a UK term and “stroller” is a U.S . term, but I thought well if Gooogle says 800 people a day are searching for this, who am I to argue?  Unfortunately, I underestimated the fact that one word of the phrase was used by only Americans and one word only by Brits.  When I dug deeper I found that only 50 a day use the exact term “pushchair stroller”, not 800!

Unfortunately, I did not check this “exact match” as the Thirty Day Challenge did not mention it.  Oh well..

Since then, I have built another two sites and I am shortly about to embark on number three.   As of now, site number two has few visitors and is languishing at number 80 in Google and that’s phrase-matched – but it is early days.  Site number three was indexed yesterday.  I am just yearning for some traffic and for that first sale – it will be such a confidence boost.

Wish me luck!