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Day 10 – And Then There Were Two

By Mike Mindel | August 11, 2007

This content has been summarised by Mike Mindel from day 10 training of the Thirty Day Challenge.

Personal note: Pay specific attention to todays lessons. Ed has done a great job in showing you how to leverage some very powerful Web 2.0 properties.

We’ve Travelled a Long Way

While it may seem as if we haven’t gone very far, we have actually travelled a long way. This year, unlike other years, we have really tried to focus in on the market research.

Why?

We know it works.

We have also got you to focus on smaller niches. Again, that’s the way to get started in this business.

Too many people try to start in the major legaues and they’ve never even picked up a bat. It doesn’t make any sense.

That is what Internet Marketers expect us to do every day, in every course they sell us on the internet.

The Thirty Day Challenge is about reversing that.

Welcome to the New Challengers

Normally we get a drop off in traffic around day 6 of the challenge. But we’ve smashed through that and traffic is still consistent and growing.

So welcome to all the new people who have joined!

How Web 2.0 Helps You

There’s a bit of a brouhaha amongst my fellow colleagues about whether Web 2.0 is real or just an evolution of technologies that have been around for ages.

You know what? It doesn’t really matter.

What does matter is it’s ability for one person, you, to get your message out.

It’s extraordinary really. We’re really going to move into that phase soon as we move out of the market research phase today.

Learn to Say NO!

Some of you have experiencing some frustration, maybe you.

You’re having a bit of trouble finding a niche that fits all the criteria.

I’m teaching you the most crucial lesson that anyone who has had any amount of success knows already.

It’s the ability to say NO. It’s so easy to say yes. Our brains wired and forty million years of genetics have programmed us to see the optimistic side of things.

We wouldn’t have survived as a species if we didn’t have that predication towards saying yes. Towards helping out.

However when it comes to business and making money, the saying of yes is a big problem. It’s too easy to say yes.

Accountants and lawyers say no all the time. But this is an uncreative way of saying no.

I’m taking about having a set of filters and rules which you abide by.

Think about what makes a great stock market trader? The ability to follow rules. A great poker player? follow and trust in your system.

We’re Giving You a Filter Mechanism

There is a bright side alternative. Imagine you’d gone with the first couple of keywords without doing the market research.

If you hadn’t of gone through this whole GTrends process, and many millions before you have done exatly that. You’d be shooting in the dark.

There’s a strategy out there called bum marketing which revolves around articles. If you’d written articles without going through the GTrends market research process then you would be very frustrated by now at the hit and miss results.

So you now have this filter – the ability to say NO. This will save you so much time.

The Edison Story

Thomas Edison took over 10,000 attempts to invent the lightbulb!

Thomas Alva Edison (February 11, 1847 – October 18, 1931) was an American inventor and businessman who developed many devices that greatly influenced life around the world, including the phonograph and a long lasting light bulb.

Dubbed “The Wizard of Menlo Park” by a newspaper reporter, he was one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention, and therefore is often credited with the creation of the first industrial research laboratory.

Edison is considered one of the most prolific inventors in history, holding 1,093 U.S. patents in his name, as well as many patents in the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

(From Wikipedia)

Just remember what Edison said:

“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” – Thomas Edison

Edison invented the light bulb after innumerable failed attempts and when asked why he pursued his quest even after 10, 001 attempts, not wanting to admit failure to which he simply replied,

“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

When Melinda & I (Ed) did the Wedding Planning Secrets initially, it took us 38 tests to get it right. Before it would make a profit. So you do have to stick with things and keep trying.

The keywords exist out there as you can see from the forums. Some with 500 visitors a day. So stick with it!

US Results

Garrett & PB’s tool have now been modified so that even if you’re outside the US they will to bring you the US search results.

There’s a huge number who are outside the US. Let’s face it, that’s where most of the traffic is. It’s the country with the most disposable income.

I do however notice that a few of you have found some good UK centric terms. You can do very well just focused on the UK market. But as a general rule we do want to focus on the US market.

But please understand. This is a world wide phenomenon.

The things we teach you here will work in any language in any country because it doesn’t matter what race, creed, color religion we all make decisions by having various chemical processes going on inside our brain.

Because of that fact we are the same. Our DNA is the same. We make decisions in fundamentally the same way.

I’d love to see people use this strategy to penetrate Central Europe, China, Spain.

I’ve (Ed) been fortunate enough to travel the world and in every country I’ve ever been to I’ve always seen information marketing – the same style of marketing which we’re learning.

Which is very cool.

Where Did I Learn to Say No?

Pretty much everything I’ve told you has been learnt from somebody else.

Where I read about this concept first is from Warren Buffett.

You might want to look up some of his stuff because he’s a brilliant man, very easy to read. He writes in the way a copywriter would write. I learned to say NO from him. Having a criteria which you stick to.

When we get to Monday, Day 13 we’re going to fish or cut bait. If you haven’t got a keyword, either borrow one from a team mate who has a spare one. But make sure everybody in your team has at least one keyword.

If you haven’t got a team mate who can lend you a keyword then I want you to look at your criteria again and go with the next best. I don’t want you to lock in to 30,000. If you need to streth to 32, 000 , 34, 000, 35, 000 then ok.

But don’t stretch it too much. That’s a fairly important metric.

Where you can fudge a lot is in which will deliver you 30, 40 visitors according to the GTrends technique.

Normally we would say skip that, it’s not worth doing. But in the context of the challenge, where you are learning how to pitch a ball, it will be worth cutting your teeth on.

Remember the magic number of 200.

If you’ve got a phrase that will deliver 30, 40 visitors a day, then to get to the magic 200 unique visitors a day you will 5 of keywords.

So you’ll have to work a bit harder.

The smaller you can get the better. By definition you won’t find a lot of keywords that get 80-100+ a day.

But in some topics you’re not going to find that. If you’re going to fish and cut bait on Day 13 then compromise on the number of visitors.

You can always create another page with another keyword and get more visitors.

Or alternatively just learn the whole process and you will have learnt a lot. You won’t have this frustration of falling further and further behind.

Remember people: the vast majority of successful Thirty Day Challengers started again on Day 14.

Doing this process the second, third and fourth time is so much easier. So keep that in mind.

That’s important.

Male Yeast Infection and Skew

Sorry you had to deal with that. I wish we had a better keyword.

You’ll also see that the the traffic has gone up.

It’s number one with a bullet.

There are tens of thousands of you using male yeast infection and you’re worried it’s going to skew the results.

It will at some point.

I don’t suspect it will in the very short term. At some point Google will update the data for that search trend. Based on what we’ve seen so far that is an average. It’s not taking into account the huge burst of traffic when we released this technique.

So. We’re always going to aim to have one comparitive term to offer up.

But really don’t rely on that.

We’ll teach you how to eventually get a number one phrase for your particular topic. When you get a number one phrase, you should use that

For those who are more experienced you may already have a number one spot in Google, and you can use those traffic numbers to give you an indication. That will give you the latest info.

But keep that in mind, hopefully not the next 3 or 4 days, Google will update the data and it will be skewed.

Always assume that the English language bar equals 500. It’s only going to go up because of the huge number of searches in the Thirty Day Challenge, so the bar will represent a larger number as a proportion against whatever you’re searching against.

So if you continue to assume it’s 500, you’ll continue to be pleasantly surprised by traffic which is higher than you expect. That’s a good thing.

The other way to do it is to calculate against 1000 searches a day because of the increased use. But that would distort the amount of traffic you would expect.

But remember to always use bad numbers and then you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Final Check: Seek Out Web 2.0 Properties

This going to be tricky. Something that takes me seconds to do might take you longer as you don’t have that much experience. You’re brand new to all of this.

If you don’t do this step you’ll still probably be ok. But if you’re not ok, then I want to tell you why.

We are going to be using Web 2.0 properties (StumbleUpon, Twitter, Dig etc) in order to get traffic for our site & to get it listed and ranked in the Google search engine.

We’ll also be doing it very quickly which is why we are after low competition.

‘Free speed reading’ will work ok. The traffic might be a bit low but it’s low competition.

There’s one final thing we need to check. I wish it was a check box thing. But it’s not. You’re going to have to use your best judgment.

Let’s look again at ’speed reading free’ in Google with exact phrase match (i.e. with quotes)

What I’m looking for are Web 2.0 properties in the basic free listings. Properties that would potentially block us from appearing. As I’m going down I’m looking and all I see are sites that would not block us. e.g.

(Note: You see all the blue stuff below each link

because I am using the SEO Toolbar plugin for Firefox.

It looks like this

at the bottom of my Firefox browser. If I click on it all the blue detail comes up, and if I click on it again, it all goes away).

An Example

Here’s an example of what Ed means. See this results page

See the mention of Web 2.0 properties like Squidoo & Stumble Upon.

That’s web 2.0 properties them is.

(Ok. For those who keep wondering why I keep saying things like that. See The Mary Whitehouse Experience . It’s from a comedy sketch called History Today).

The Important Point

The important point is that you don’t want to see any or many of these Web 2.0 properties. If there are already some properties listed for this keyword then this might stop this process or at least make it more difficult.

And why? Well we are using web 2.0 tools to promote our niches and we want them to appear on Google.

If these pages already appear via web 2.0 properties like Squidoo, Hub Pages then the playing field may be too level. Which makes it harder to rank. So a more experienced marketer using this strategy would probably not enter that market.

This single issue is the reason why you may not appear as quickly as you like.

A List of Web 2.0 Properties

So in summary. If you see lots of the above web 2.0 properties in your exact phrase listing then that is bad. If you don’t see any or very few then that is good.

Simple.

The Semi Finals

You’ve just the top two niches and now you’re going to spend the weekend learning about these niches.

In all likelihood you don’t know anything about them. Which is fine. You’re going to learn about them.

How To Understand a Topic Very Quickly

This is how to understand a topic very, very quickly.

Let’s go to Google and enter “Free Speed Reading” as an exact phrase match (with quotes) and click on Google News

There’s no results. Ok. Let’s try “Free Speed Reading” as a broad match (without quotes) and click on Google News

returns

Not very useful results. So now lets remove the noise word ‘free’ and concentrate on an exact match for ‘Speed Reading’

Ah. That’s much more targeted.

So remember, try your niche keyword in exact match (not broad match).

If it doesn’t give you any results then remove the noise words and concentrate on the core niche keywords for your niche.

In this case we removed free from ‘free speed reading’ and ’speed reading’ gave us some decent results.

There’s a whole bunch of news articles which is what we want.

Bloglines

Remember how we asked you to set up Bloglines?

See my article freak out, come back, join up for this and other web 2.0 properties you need to join.

Remember the little orange RSS symbol in the top right hand side of your address bar?

Remember how we got you to set up Firefox so that when you click on this icon it will default to Bloglines?

If you click on it then you should see this

That’s bloglines letting you add the Google News feed for ’speed reading’.

Now we want to create a new folder for the niche, in this case ‘Speed Reading’

You can leave the default settings and perhaps add a note

Now click ‘Subscribe’

(Note: Make sure you click on the checkbox under Available Feeds)

See your new folder in the left panel

and the results in the right panel

Now we have ‘Speed Reading’ – Google News in bloglines.

Don’t worry if you don’t see any results. Bloglines only shows updated items. So any time, anywhere in the world, there is a new article about ‘Speed Reading’ (with quotes) it will show up in Bloglines.

This is how we keep track of all our niches!

If you find yourself losing topics then click on the dropdown ‘Display items within the last’

and select either ‘All Items’ or ‘Last Month’

and your posts will come back.

Sorted.

You’ll understand that all of these news items are going to come in very useful.

Here’s a good one:

These posts are gold for us when we come to writing up our own content and articles.

Google Blog Search

Now click on ‘blogs’ down the left hand side of the News results

and look at all the blog posts on ‘Speed Reading’

Lots of them!

You’ll see all of the blog posts that relate to ‘Speed Reading’.

Again. You’ll see the orange RSS button in the top right hand side

and take into Bloglines (make sure you select your Speed Reading folder)

Now whenever anyone in the world adds a new blog post with ‘Speed Reading’, you will be notified in Bloglines.

Forget internet marketing for a second. Say you’re interested in guitars. Now you can track new information about guitars from your bloglines.

News Archives

This is where Ed’s second video ends but I just want to add some additional notes. If you go back to the Google News Search you will also see ‘Archives’ on the left hand side column under ‘News results’.

If you click on ‘Archives’

you’ll be able to see news stories going all the way back to 1930 and even earlier.

This is very useful if your niche needs historical information e.g. an inventor niche or a wartime service.

Ed Dale in World War I

Here’s a historical example. I entered ‘ed dale’ and selected 1935 and older to find

an Ed Dale that served in the World War I Draft from 1917-1918.

The Golden Nuggets Strategy

The low tech version is to use 3 x 5 cards and jot out things that are vaguely interesting. Look for posts that make you go ‘oh. that’s interesting’.

So lets take the first News article in the right panel of Bloglines

and click through

Look for the interesting point being made. If the article is too long, then click find (Ctrl + F on the Firefox browser), and enter the term ‘Speed Reading’.

The search bar is in the lower left hand corner of the Firefox browser

Now I do a search but nothing comes up. Which happens. So back to Bloglines and let’s look for another one…

Looks interesting so lets click through…

Looks ok.

Another tip. In any article that has any sort of interest, usually the first two paragraphs are going to be the most interesting.

If I want to remember the article, then select the first two paragraphs

then right click and select copy

People don’t use the right click function anywhere near enough. But you can blog about it with ScribeFire, Show Keyword Density, Tag, Stumble It.

But what we want to do is Note this (Google Notebook)

and here it is in Google Notebook

This notebook is brilliant. Once I’m logged into Google, every computer where I have the notebook installed (free) then I have access to this information.

You can also click on the little – sign to contract the article

and then the + sign to expand it again.

A Useful Notebook Tip

Click on the blue link that says ‘My Notebook’

and Google will open up a new tab on your browser.

which gives you more space, more tools. It’s a very useful way to gather information for your blog posts that you can transfer from computer to computer.

Here’s another example

click through

and here’s the interesting nugget

and Notebook it

and see now

we’ve got two entries.

Fantastic!

That will travel to every computer you have anywhere in the world. You can print them out, do what you will.

Remember the concept of leverage. There is so much you can do when you set up your browser properly.

It’s such a time saver!

Summary

-Mike

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Topics: Daily Summaries | 15 Comments »

15 Responses to “Day 10 – And Then There Were Two”

  1. Glen (SPARAR) Says:
    August 11th, 2007 at 5:00 pm

    Mike, just a note to say thank you for such a great review site for this challenge, it is a massive help and a place that i trust to catch up. it is truly appreaciated…

    keep up the great work

    All the best
    Glen

  2. nextebizguy Says:
    August 11th, 2007 at 6:12 pm

    Hey Mike, thanks a TON for putting all this together. I learn best by a combination of listening, watching, and having source material to reference. Your work here is filling in a gap and it’s helping me be more successful!

  3. Tom Says:
    August 11th, 2007 at 10:45 pm

    Mike,

    Thank you for such a thorough recap with screen shots. Very easy to follow.

    I hope you leave it online where we can refer subscribers to it. I started my blog to do this but since you are “doing it right” I can relax and bumble along with my postings as usual lol.

    I had a link to Gary Halberts Newsletter post containing the Golden Nuggets method on my clipboard but lost it. Went through the archives there and just can’t locate it.

    If you have it bookmarked I bet everyone would enjoy the link.

    Take care,
    Tom

  4. Bart Says:
    August 12th, 2007 at 1:11 am

    Mike,

    you summaries are the case in point why online video (in its present form) still isn’t better than well written content.
    There is so much hoopla about video for internet marketing right now, but until someone can readily skim a video and pick out just what interests them, the written word will win out.

    Yes, it makes sense to use both in your campaigns. But it is well worth noting that I will watch Ed’s videos once, and then I will use your summaries from there on out (often viewing them multiple times.)

  5. Mike Mindel Says:
    August 12th, 2007 at 1:40 am

    Thanks guys.

    I’ve been trying to find that Golden Nuggets newsletter for ages.

    Does anyone know a link?

    -Mike

  6. Mike Mindel Says:
    August 12th, 2007 at 1:40 am

    The way video needs to move forward is keyword rich & taggable chapter headings which you can skip to.

    It’s pretty obvious but who will be the first to do it?

    -Mike

  7. John Simple Says:
    August 12th, 2007 at 7:01 am

    Mike,

    That’s a golden idea, seriously. Somewhere in the post-production process, one would have to be able to add tags or keywords as markers.

    On the user end – the video player would have to allow the viewer to scan or skip through a list of those markers.

    Coming up with the post-production/playback software with those capabilities would probably be fairly easy for the major players – the onus would be on the content producers. It would take that much longer to get content prepped for posting.

    Maybe something like “Fleck” for video would work – give the users an opportunity to create and share their own markers.

    There’s my million dollar idea – or at least my two cents worth – I have no idea how one could monetize it, but it might be fun.

    I do wish I knew how to implement something like that – but the programming would be way over my head…There’s probably a brilliant Thirty Day Challenger who will be able to run with it – hope so…

  8. Shannon Says:
    August 12th, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    Thanks Mike. Excellent post.

  9. Day 10 Bonus - Golden Nuggets - Mmmmm | Mike Mindel - Thirty Day Challenger Says:
    August 13th, 2007 at 6:38 pm

    [...] Day 10 – And Then There Were Two [...]

  10. drazhardaud Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 4:36 am

    Let me the first man say WOW and hmmmm…..

  11. Cherry Yarrow Says:
    August 14th, 2007 at 7:52 pm

    Thank you ALL for the most incredible training tools and challenging course. It is totally awesome….. and I KNOW, ‘cos I have bought one of the “big name” internet marketing systems and got absolutely nowhere. Thank you Thankyou thankyou.

    One small gripe……….I cannot open the Golden Nuggets. They are in ” COMPUTER SPEAK” so I cant read them.

    Thanks again, Mike, Ed and Dan. You are “the business”

  12. .Bill Says:
    August 22nd, 2007 at 4:57 pm

    I have my two niches but am going on an act of faith in Ed’s teaching, because one niche using Gtrends gives 165 searches to 17,300 competition, whereas for the same niche Wordtracker gives 125 searches against Google competition of 2.1 million.
    It feels a little confusing, but ,being a newbie and no techie, (therefore totally ignorant of computer science), I’ll just “press on, regardless” doing just what Ed tells us to do, with faith in the outcome.

  13. Sheppard Says:
    August 30th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

    Dotto’s on all above!

  14. Summaries, Diary, Articles and Tips on One Page | Mike Mindel - Thirty Day Challenger Says:
    August 31st, 2007 at 5:39 pm

    [...] Day 10 – And Then There Were Two [...]

  15. » Day 10: And then there were two Says:
    September 12th, 2007 at 11:12 am

    [...] Mike Mindel’s notes are really useful  on this day too:   Mike Mindel Notes [...]

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