Thirty Day Challenge

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!