Starting Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge-Preseason

Through the The30 Day Challenge (TDC) Ed Dale promises to teach you the secrets of Internet niche marketing. The goal is to earn $10 in 30 days without spending any money. Ed is quick to admit that $10 isn't much, but the techniques he shows you can build highly profitable sights.

The TDC has been an annual event for a couple of years now . Fortunately all the training material is on the web and you can start at anytime. As part of the challenge, Ed wants students to form teams. Not being much of a team player myself, I have decided to fore go the team portion and strike out on my own. For those of you who might be more sociable than me, new challenges start the first of every month.

Before Day 1 starts Ed has several "Preseason" video and podcasts to get you ready. I'm not a web novice, not by by a long shot, but I found several useful tips. Apparently, much of the challenge is based on social networking. At Ed's recommendation I've installed the following programs on my Firefox browser:

• SEO for Firefox: shows competitive data in search results such as page rank and links. Let's you do link anaylisis to compare your site's link to the competition.
• Google Notebook: Browser tool that lets you clip and save information from websites.
• Stumbleon: Social bookmarking site that lets you classify and comment on sites. I've been using this for sometime. When I'm interested in something I search Stumbleon to see what sites other Stumblers have liked.
• Twitter: Kind of a mini-blog to let people know what you are doing. I've been experimenting with this in my other job as a reporter. Don't forgot to get the Twitterbar download so you can post to twitter right from the browser bar.
• Bloglines: Awesome easy to use web-based blog reader. I don't know why I never set up a blog reader before. I love getting up in the morning and having all the new posts from my favorite blogs all in one place. It's a huge time saver.
• Del.icio.us: Another social bookmarking site to help drive traffic to your pages. Get the Firefox extension here.

Ed's training appears to pretty extensive. Last year the top finisher in the challenge made $7,000. Admittely most of the people who finished the challenge look like they made anywhere from a couple of bucks to about $100. I'll be blogging daily about my progress in the challenge.

Here's a video of Ed introducing the challenge. It's a year or so old, so remember you can now start the challenge at anytime.



Sign up for the 30 Day Challenge here.