My challenge is almost over as I’m off on holiday on Saturday. It’s been a learning curve as usual with lots of bumps along the way. My site is way down the rankings and I’ve realised I should have explored the quality of the backlinks to the top 10 sites before I chose the niche. I’d never have touched it if I’d known they were linked to by such high authority sites. Live and learn and very little lost.
My site will creep up I expect and if I’m lucky will reach page 2 of google. It will earn some adsense or might even get a few affiliate sales eventually. I’ve learned loads by doing this year’s challenge. It was really interesting to see Adsense from the buyer’s perspective as I’ve only ever experienced it from the publisher’s side before. I understand what’s going on a lot more clearly now.
Market Samurai continues to be just amazing and uber useful. Traffic-Bug is a bit less so and WPD still makes me feel ‘meh’.

#30DC The 3 Hidden Pitfalls of Day 20 That You Must Avoid
Did you click through from twitter??? Sorry, just practicing my copy writing skills!
Need to get down to some writing.
Oh and those 3 pitfalls? Here you go:
1. Don’t forget to post a new high quality, keyword optimised post for the blog every 2-3 days
2. When you write a new ad for the current campaign don’t use weak verbs. Remember to use power words like ‘discover’ & ’secrets’ etc. Re-watch Brent’s ad video first. So that we can learn the intricacies of split testing.
3. Take your time and test diligently. Don’t change lots of elements at once. Have a look at adding more category keyword based ads but don’t rush it!
Now to follow my own advice!

What fun!

More than one way to skin a niche – not good at metaphors, me?
I’m using up a £75 adwords voucher they sent me a couple of months ago to see if I can buy traffic to my first niche. Scary but kind of cool I’m assuming it will help me test the magic 200 faster but also I really wanted to learn how to use pay per click this year. I was too scared to try it last year. Congrats to me – I’ve grown!
That slowly growing confidence comes from the knowledge that more than 2/3rd of my income in the last 12 months has come from online activity. Slightly more if you include offline gigs that happened because of my online activities! WOW – amazing isn’t it?

Rewind and Repeat.
Back researching niches after a 2nd look at the urls in the matrix for my 1st my choice. They nearly all turn out to be authority sites for a much bigger market level key phrase closely related to mine. After hours looking for a niche and jumped too fast. Live and hopefully learn I’ll not totally abandon it of course. It might make me a little money in the end (either through affiliate sales or more likely adsense) I realise now that getting it on to the front page of google would take months not weeks.
I’m being more careful this time. Trying for slow, steady and dispassionate. I’ve identified a niche I’m interested in and I’m examining it really closely. I’ve noticed that although the grids and other figures look possible many of the key phrase domain names and their variants have been bought up. They are either re-directing or just coming up as ‘no name server’. They are not even parked. I think this is a bad sign and might tell me something about the competitiveness of the niche.

Amazed to discover on checking my site for duplicate content at Copyscape that one post flags up as not OK. It’s not one I composed in MS either but made up just out of my head. It flagged up as being a copy of an ezine article I hadn’t even read. I couldn’t believe how similar it was to what I’d written! Trite? Moi? Sheesh!
Original content – harder than it sounds! I edited my post till it passed the Copyscape but it’s made me think. I need to do this every time I write a new post for the niche. Words, turns of phrase, creep into our consciousness as we read and research. Then sit down to write and out they come.
Try it – http://www.copyscape.com/

Well, posterous, and twitter done. Adding them to rank tracker & traffic-bug wasn’t mentioned, so I didn’t bother. I still hate googlereader so I’ve set my alerts for the niche to mail to my gmail account – then I can forward to posterous, with a bit of editing and a comment. Better for me I think as I got very confused trying to get google reader to play nice. Still feeling vile after dentist.

Day 14 – weebly done, not convinced about facebook for my niche so giving it a miss for now. WordPress and blogger done yesterday. Work is a great distraction from the horrors of recovering from the dentist. A quiet weekend of writing sounds like just the ticket.
Phrase match fell back to 153 but broad search moved up to 217 Found another interesting affiliate product – this one’s a membership site so ongoing income.
Still think I might need to go back to market research if this phrase doesn’t move up the ranking soon.

Day 13 – and scribd fell out of the rankings again. No surprise there then. My main site is 530 broad and 136 phrase match. Too soon to be disappointed by those numbers.
There was a good reason why my Traffic-bug wasn’t doing much, an email to Michael revealed that, like all the first accounts created, it was ‘broken’! Should be fixed today. Ah well.
Onward and upward, new post on blog yesterday, Scribd, Hub and Squid all done & added to TB & Rank Checker.
So I can have a break till the new training comes out around 2. Goodness knows how people do this and work a day job! I watched the commuters coming off the train last night and felt so sorry for them. They looked so stressed and harassed. I might not be earning a fortune, yet, but I’m doing OK and I do enjoy life

Day 12 – Srcibd amazed me by jumping in at #10 phrase match (19 broad) this morning with my scribd profile at #12. A powerful domain then so important to get it right. I’ve made the best of my profile, extended it and added a mini article to it. It might bring human traffic so well worth doing. I also had a lightbulb moment – a quick e-book guide with active affiliate links might be worth while after the challenge. Put it on my list for future exploration.
The videos yesterday were clear but a bit misleading. Hubpages won’t allow more than 2 links including the rss module and loath over-promotion. They are so scared of another slap and keen to build the power of Hubpages not just get used for SEO. So just the 1 Hubpage link and don’t over use the keyword.
Squidoo – again not too many links & be aware that they now put ‘info links’ into your copy. This means that random words in what you write get linked to ads. Ugh! One of mine actually linked to my affiliate product I’ve edited it and linked it to my blog post but we’ll see if it survives.
I’m a little unsure why we’re using these as they are ‘no follow’ back links, I suppose they might build reputation & bring some human traffic. We all need to prepare for the day google stops working I suppose!

30 Day Challenge Day 8
Traffic Bug is let loose and is awesome. A few early glitches quickly resolved and it looks great.
My quote of the day came from Dan Raine on the forum:
“design is only 1% in testing a market.Results first, design tweeks later…”
I should work this on a sampler and hang it somewhere I can see it! I am such a visual person I can loose hours getting things to look “right” and I think everyone else is the same – surprise! They are not, most people could care less what my site looks like!
Tomorrow is a rest day I think.