Pyjamanating

I’ve been following some of Michelle MacPhearson’s 31 Day Internet Marketing Makeover course which began in early December and is tagged #31DIMM on twitter. The first day’s task was to copy a spreadsheet from Google Docs and put in loads of information about each niche or blog, and that could take 31 days in itself if you have accumulated a fair few. Then you had to evaluate which ones are worth keeping and make a plan for the rest, so far so good.
Most of the tasks since then have been reasonable and practical, such that the course as a whole is to be recommended but as of writing no new editions have been published for a few days so I’m wondering if the Makeover has run out of steam or hit some problems.

31 Day Internet Marketing Makeover

September was a month of two halves, I think. The first half continuing on from August trying to get the 30DC niches to work, and the second half consisting of some serious market research resulting in a couple of ideas and the starting of a new niche which began to bear fruit in early October. Teamwork helps too.

What I’m pondering now is the combination of optimising for niche keyphrases with the accumulation of traffic from long tail sources. Sometimes it seems like the obvious intuitive strategy, and at others like a contradiction.

There’s also the problem of an affiliate which pays after the end of a quarter in which the product was delivered, which is not good for cashflow.

August was a washout, weatherwise here in London, so staying in and working like crazy on the “thirty day challenge” and other things provided the best way of surviving without feeling terribly deprived of sunshine. I probably persisted with my two niches for too long. Always tantalisingly close to very high ranking and starting to get some traffic, it always looked as if one or the other of them would come good any day now, but that was not be within the thirty days, nor with an extra seven.

Perhaps more usefully than the exact method taught, is the adoption of some of the techniques learned to existing areas of expertise and experience. SEO for firefox, session manager, Wordtracker and various other tools, each quite humble but together making a powerful edge. Traffic is increasing already on some of my existing sites, and I’ll find a way to convert some of it eventually.

Anyway, September, yes. WordPress MU. PJN v 2. Amazon US ( not .co.uk) and making a product related to my major domain. It’s all there to be done, and a few days respite and relaxation as well. The best time of year. No more rush hour tubes and trains yippee.

I made a quick video because I think this new google search method may be important.

Uploading to Google Video now, and compressing for YouTube.

## showyoutube 8DlNi09M-_k 425 350 ##

but the thirty day challenge goes on forever!

Saturday morning and I haven’t checked my rankings yet. That’s because I’m growing tired of the let down when progress up the charts is painfully slow or none at all.

I’m building up a nice portfolio of ‘properties’ in two niches, and getting a little bit of traffic but I still can’t say for certain whether the niches are viable or not until they hit the top ten at least. I know I’m getting some long tail traffic already, coming number one for a couple of more obscure but highly targetted phrases. In fact I’ve added an amazon link with a hope of selling one particular book that way. It wouldn’t make me the $10 but a sale is a sale.

I’m slightly tempted by the challenge within the challenge, using my third niche that I never attempted, but it’s not an attractive subject to write about so probably not.

An email from ezines contained an interesting suggestion:

Think about your current article writing & marketing strategies and ask yourself:

“Have I fallen in the trap of producing new content (most time-expensive type of content to produce) when in fact I have dozens, hundreds or even thousands of articles already not being used from prior years email newsletters, archives, old ebooks, or any content that could be easily re-purposed?”

Article Submission To Do List:

1. Spend the next 10 days reviewing your existing content since the day you started writing articles of any kind.
2. Categorize them into “can re-use” vs. “continue to ignore for now.”
3. [Recycle Your Article Electrons The Easy Way!] Setup a plan to either edit them yourself or have an editor on your team prep the content into 400-1000 word chunks.
4. Submit by the tens of articles… creating time-leverage and greater impact without producing new content.

Content that you already own that is not leveraged is like leaving traffic on the table that should be surfing your website for many years to come…

So what this says to me is that I could be looking through all of my old blog posts and other writings to see if there’s lots of good stuff that can be SEO’d and put into play right where they are.

and while I think about it there’s a video I’d like to watch again from a conference about a month ago with some guy from google giving out a lot of good information about what google likes and how to improve rankings legitimately. I received it in RSS so maybe I can find it again by searching Google reader. Well no, strangely enough Googles own feed reader doesn’t have Search. How stupid is that?

“read this before making a couscous recipe”

I took today’s training to heart and sat down to write something authentic in the form of storytelling. It was fun and I used the new “Tumbled” theme from Davinian 

Here’s my story:

http://distributedresearch.net/couscousrecipe/

I just posted this to the Forum, so I guess I’m creating some duplicate content here by quoting it again. It’s about the process of getting an ezine article approved, and subsequent editing, but goes on to arrive at an important insight into a problem with my practice as a digital publisher.

After reading all the advice in this thread I edited the bio in my article whilst it was still waiting to be reviewed, so it didn’t point to my dead tumblr any more.

Then my article was approved and I got “expert author” status.

So for my first ever ezine article submission, it took approximately 4-5 days to get approved. I was happy with that, and started promoting the article just a little bit. Then I noticed a typo, right near the beginning – oh no!  It was one of those hard to spot typos like “the the” which the brain just corrects automatically without noticing. It was in the abstract as well. So I corrected  it by editing the article and removing the superflous “the”

result: My article has gone back into review and no longer exists at the published URL 

I see a pattern emerging, about the way I use the web. I’m a wiki editor. I publish stuff and then change it all the time. I do it with blog posts too.

Write – publish – read – edit – republish

It’s the read/write web.   2.0   interactive

But now I am learning that search engines don’t like me doing this. They want me to write an article, check it carefully, publish and then LEAVE IT WELL ALONE.  I’m going to find it hard to adjust.

I’ve managed to spend the morning writing and organising new blogs without being distracted by interactions. That seems to be the right way round to do it. Get the writing done first when you’re fresh, and then go and see what’s happening with the rest of the world afterwards.

I’ve done it.

I rescued the published content from my two tumblr blogs and set up new blogs on another platform. I’ve also tweaked the method I’m using after having got into a bit of a mess using a pen name.

I’m adopting a ‘real names‘ policy for everything I do, and then if I have any success with my niches I can be bulding my own brand at the same time. If they fail to prosper, they just fade into history. I’m not doing anything that I would not be proud of in the future.

The new policy also allows me to bring into play some other “georgeous and educated friends” that I know of old.

Hence ranking number six on google already for phrase search with one niche, ahead of the tumblr already! So I’ve added google analytics on both the new blogs to see if there’s going to be any traffic , and been donated a nice little piece of genuine web2.0 User Generated Content already.

The 30day challenge itself has hit a bit of a paradox, which is always a fruitful learning opportunity.

The paradox is this:

If you orchestrate lots of people together and point them to one platform via a daily instruction video, it raises the profile of the course well above the radar with risky consequences. So it’s better if the group spreads out and uses a variety of tools.

But how do you teach a large and relatively synchronous group how to use the tools if they are all different, so that diversity can be maintained and we can compare notes without drawing too much attention of the wrong sort?

Well I don’t know how it will be overcome yet, but initial thoughts are:

1) Teach the principles of how to select and evaluate a potential platform then provide a large list to choose from.

2) Organise into smaller teams and make each team specialise in a different platform.

Not an ideal social learning experience for the 30DC community, but I think we’re getting there. Well the promise from Dan that the community won;t be shut down once the 30 days is up, we are well positioned to turn into a formiddable internet marketing Community of Practice.

So that’s yet another coincidence which has made joining the challenge particularly appropriate to me, as I’m specifically interested in all of these factors:

• Web2.0
• Apple Mac
• Blogging
• WordPress Multi User
• Communities of Practice
• SEO
• Working from home earning money online

The only thing missing is Wiki. Watch that space!