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Day 27 – Part I – Where Do We Go From Here
By Mike Mindel | August 27, 2007
This content is summarized from Day 27 – Where Do We Go From Here, presented by Ed Dale.
The Keyword That Keeps On Paying
We need to focus on a couple of key issues. The content today, delivered by Rob Somerville is all about the next stage. Once you’ve found a keyword that pays you need to make sure you keep your various rankings, and over time increase them.
Please use what we teach wisely and ethically. The reason for that will be obvious by the end of the podcast.
The Issues We’ve Faced
The extraordinary thing about this particular challenge is that we have had numbers that we would never have believed before we started. The issues we’ve had in this particular challenge are very much based on volume.
Planning
One is a planning issue like servers. That’s a solvable issue. The Thirty Day Challenge is huge and indeed the largest internet marketing event ever held. We’ve had to use the Amazon S3 service to cope with the terabytes of data being downloaded each day. It shows no sign of stopping until the 31st and the end of the challenge.
Structural
There was a more structural issue, which was very much highlighted by the whole Tumblr experience – now named tumblrgate. That was a real shock to me, not from the point of view that so many people were going to use the service, but that it was overwhelmed. I had no idea how small Tumblr was in comparison to Blogger or Wordpress. So 1,000 people signing up, let alone 10,000 signing up in a single 24 period would cause any system administrator to go ‘what the heck is going on’.
Spam… Spam… Spam
There are 25 other places to go for content and we’ve moved on from Tumblrgate. But in the calmness of what has happened people have been showing me (Ed) examples of what was being put on Tumblr. It was horrific. We’re not just talking about bad content or people that didn’t write their content well. No, we’re talking about the other end of the spectrum. We’re talking about the number of real spammers who are following along with the Thirty Day Challenge.
I knew we were doing ground breaking stuff but it was designed for beginners, to help them make their first $10 online. We’ve already surpassed the number of people who made $1 in the first year of the challenge (and we’ve still got four and a bit days to go). But these scammer types were using the method as well. So there were blogs like ‘how to get free speed reading tips’ all pointing to sex sites. This is horrifying as it’s completely opposite to the spirit and the intent of the Thirty Day Challenge.
So when Marco of Tumblr sees all these blogs which have content of this nature I can understand why he would react the way he reacted. It’s completely understandable. It was an extraordinary circumstance.
You always expect some people to ruin it for all the others, but because there are so many people doing this thing that obviously the ratio of spammers to the decently intentioned folk is still sizable. A hundred people can wreck a whole lot of havoc amongst those learning to market on the internet for the first time.
From Challenger to Challenging
We went from Tumblrgate to ****** gate. There are some who got on board and purported to be a challenger for the first few days and then tried to get some publicity by dumping all over it. I like well thought criticism but throwaway criticism for shock effect is something else.
But that’s going to happen too. If you do anything in your life of any worth you will get critics, particularly in public forums. It’s just life. I realize that’s going to happen. It’s unpleasant especially when it’s not thought out and so off base.
But for someone to do a comparison of digg vs. tumblr posts and then publish a list of 645 niches using that particular method on a blog – is well wrong frankly (Ed’s words were somewhat harsher but I didn’t want this post to get ranked for expletives).
I suspect it feels something like this
It’s not me (Ed) you’re affecting – it’s what you do to the confidence of people who are learning internet marketing for the first time. The person who puts in the hard yards is going to get the rewards. In pay per click for example where you are paying for your advertising it’s very easy for someone to come over the top and do no work and blow you out of the water. But what we’re teaching here is not get rich quick. Instead, hard work earns just rewards.
Can We Ever Do This 30 Day Challenge Again?
If you have 100,000 people running around the internet you’re going to cause a huge impact. Wherever you setup sites people are going to notice.
So we’ve had to make some hard decisions
We’ve Dropped the Special Sauce
After that list was published we realized we had to drop something we’ve been working on for literally eight months. The lab lead by Rob Somerville has been working on a particular process which would have guaranteed a no. 1 or no. 2 position for your keyword (under 30,000 competing web pages). We’ve had a huge number of meetings through the week to work out what we’re going to do. The scale would be okay but it’s the abuse that’s the problem. There’s no way we can control or track or work out who will abuse the system.
Regrettably, the only decision we can come to is to pull it. We know some of you are now thinking ‘Oh it’s a scam. There never was any special sauce.’ The people who have been testing it and know about it know that it works brilliantly (Mike’s comment: Yes. It does exist.)
But I’m sorry folks.
We just can’t have ‘how to be a wedding planner’ redirecting to ‘penis enlargement products’. People will notice. They won’t think about the 100% white hat SEO process, they will notice that the outcome is a porn site – then the cry of spammer is the only cry that is heard. Even though for 99.9999% of you would not use the process in your way. Sound familiar?
Is the Party Over?
Is this it for the Thirty Day Challengers? Can we cope with training 100,000 people in the future? We have this huge tidal wave of people and everywhere we point the tidal wave creates an effect. It’s a noticeable tidal wave. What can we do about it ?
One answer is not to do it anymore and maybe we should keep this stuff to ourselves. Do it quietly. Make ourselves a whole bunch of money and carry on like that.
It’s one way of doing it.
It’s not my style though.
Stem the Tidal Wave
Another way of doing it is to try and stop the tidal wave. How? Well there is a real obvious solution. Rather than close down the site at the end of August, we just keep it going.
Yup. You heard absolutely correct. We are going to keep the Thirty Day Challenge going. We are going to put up a new section in the teams section – the September teams section. People who want to start the challenge in September or October can do it there.
We have this extraordinary community. It would be such a shame to let it slide and lose all this momentum and all these incredible people. We have such an action based community right here. We’re going to keep it going. (Mike’s comment: Both GTrends and this Thirty Day Challenge blog will stay up after the end of August. The GTrends tool will remain free.)
Obviously we won’t be storming through the 30 days like we have been up to now. Where we are busting our testiculos humongous just getting all the content delivered to you, we can arrange the content so people who start in September, or October 12th or November 14th are able to use it and follow through.
We’ll set up monthly teams. Stats have shown us that if you do stick to a 30 day time-table and put yourself in a team then you are far more likely to succeed. So we’ll keep the forums going.
Some people have had some amazing results. If they keep earning $20 a day, every day, that adds up to $7,300 a year. That pays for a holiday or a car!
The Next Phase Is Product
This is really only the testing phase. The next phase is to have your own product and your own business. This is mystifying to a lot of people. What we’ll be doing next month is to continue to teach, not at the break neck pace we have, but one or twice a week we’ll teach you the things you need to know to get your own product done.
It’s not inside the Thirty Day Challenge so it may cost you money. If you want to do it quickly then get someone else to do it for you and since last year we’ve identified a lot of places to do things cheaply. Audio and visual are cheap. I also want to show you the audio visual tricks that I use to produce content because in truth you can produce your content for free. As long as you are comfortable talking into a microphone or sitting on a phone call or asking somebody some questions and recording it.
I want to take you down that path and we’ll do that in the next month or so and keep adding to the forum. In 2005 at the end of the Thirty Day Challenge we truly didn’t know if we were going to carry it on. So we thought we’d make it open source to anyone who wanted to use it. We were a bit ahead of our time because the tools that we have today in terms of social networking and open source are so much better. YouTube didn’t exist. There were no places to host your content. They just didn’t exist.
An Action Based Community
How do we make this a vibrant community, an action based community. The whole basis for why you’re here, even if you haven’t been participating is to learn a process, to learn about the Thirty Day Challenge. A process to get you started on the internet. So this huge forum, pound for pound, post for post is the largest internet marketing forum on the planet – in terms of daily posting volume.
Let me tell you, the quality of this forum and of past Thirty Day Challenge forums has been a step above the rest. I’ve been thinking a lot over the weekend about why that is. I think it’s because its all based around actions. As opposed to people discussing and intellectualizing internet marketing, or reviewing this or that product, or saying this person or that person is good or bad or in-between. All our focus is around action. It’s about doing something.
We might have our disagreements about x or y but it’s a disagreement over an action. We’re going to do something as a result of it. This forum is very verb based and that is a good thing. That’s why we want to keep going. If Dan & I and the whole team are going to keep this thing going, putting the effort to support the infrastructure then I think we need to have a few rules.
Some Ground Rules
Sharing Results
What hosting sites are giving you the best ranking results in Google. I know there are 2 or 3 ultra standout performers which are not Blogger or Wordpress in that list of 25.
But if I mention them, if I speak their name, they are ruined.
Simply because inside of this challenge, if you’re listening to this in August 2007, there are so many tens of thousands of people that the volume will cause a problem. Those snaking along for the ride will continue to spam the content platforms. As long as I don’t tell you, if you share them in the forum, that will turn the tidal wave into a nice little wave of consistent people going to those particular platforms. There are some platforms which are absolutely superb. I can’t mention them or they will be destroyed. We don’t want Tumblrgate 2 now do we?
The ability to share results is so important.
Action Based
The moderators will be briefed about this strongly that the decisions are action based. Not what do you think of x or y’s product. That’s not an action, that’s reviewing a product. If you want to do that, then do it elsewhere.
It’s about the process of the Thirty Day Challenge.
Updates
If something changes we’ll let you know. I think there’s a clear delineation here. You’ll be shocked to learn that Dan & I make money teaching 11 months of the year.
But if there’s something that impacts the Thirty Day Challenge method then we’ll put it out. How do we decide about this? Techniques that are free should be free. So I’m going to release a twitter report for free for Twitter, which is a free service. Free should mean free. That’s the clear delineation. Once people start making a decent amount of money online then they need to decide if they want to continue on in the business. They can get coaching from wherever they like.
Include Professional Marketers
I want to make this a platform where others such as Jan Vanderbeck, Trever Crook, professional marketers, who have created fantastic content for the Thirty Day Challenge can be formally included.
Not Like Other Forums
A lot of other internet marketing forums are for people who don’t know better. Or people who are trying to make a quick $7 report out of someone by selling some lame report. I don’t want the Thirty Day Challenge forums to turn into that.
No Fancy Headlines in Signatures
Here’s what you should have –
- Ways to contact you twitter, facebook
- Link to your blog.
Here’s what you shouldn’t have -
- Links that go to name squeeze pages. Nothing where the sole purpose of the page is to get your email address.
- No other promo based stuff in your signatures.
If you create great content without hook then they’re going to go to your blog to check you out. If you’re subtly asking for names and emails on your blog then that’s fine. I’ve got no complaint with that.
All I’m saying is be a contributor to the community. If the community loves your contributions they are going to seek you out anyway. They’re going to find your blog and look at all your content. There’s no need to be overt. This way, we can keep the community action based.
The Thirty Day Challenge Forums are all about action, all about discussion of process, things that work, things that don’t work, your results, site reviews. Positive, action based discussion. If we keep that in the front of your mind then there is no blunt force trauma ambush marketing. Prove your worth by contributing.
Beginners Should Feel Safe
This is a place where beginners will feel safe, where they won’t be marketed to and focused on action based stuff. That will be the absolute secret to the success for the Thirty Day Challenge going forward.
Is this an excuse for you to stop five days out? No way! You’ll never have a better chance than you have right now.
Use today’s lessons ethically and ecologically please.
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The resource mentioned at the end of the podcast was Michelle MacPhearson’s free Web 2.0 report entitled ‘Social Media Daily – Unstoppable Social Media and Web 2.0 Traffic Guide‘.
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Topics: Daily Summaries | 2 Comments »
August 28th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
Thanks for doing this Mike. There have been a number of times that I have not had the tome to put my full attention to a podcast, and having these summaries by you have been a godsend.
Thanks again.
August 30th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
Yes, thanks Mike. These summaries are fantastic!