Ed Dale's 30 Day Challenge - Day 3

Today was all about researching the niche ideas we came with yesterday. Ed showed us a nifty tool called GTrends from Word Tracker. Type in a keyword a phrase and Word Tracker shows you how many Google search a day there are for it.

Obviously if no one is searching for your keyword, you might want to think twice about building a site around it. Next,we did Google searches for our ideas to see if there were a lot of Adsense ads for it. Or as as Ed says:

"Are real people selling real stuff to enthusiastic people for real money?"


Here's how my niche ideas from Day 2 panned out:

• Iraq Jobs: 1,150 daily Google searches. Three Adsense ads directly related to work in Iraq showed on the search page with a couple of more for oil and overseas work, including one from the interesting sounding Danger Zone Jobs.com.

• Trikke: 1, 074 daily searches. This is a really cool 3-wheel fitness scooter. I know there is a high paying affiliate program available through Commission Junction.
  

• Payday Loans: 12,481 daily searches. The search page showed a dozen Adsense ads. Again, there are lots of affiliate programs available as well.

• Raising Earthworms: 19 searches! Ok, this one really bombed. I was a bit disappointed because I do raise earthworms. Apparently not a lot people share my appreciation of the little wrigglers. There were a couple of ads for worm bins and buying live worms, but with such low traffic, I'll probably not work with this one.

• Speed Reading: 930 searches. Good possibilities here, a dozen Google ads. Don't scoff, speed reading works. I took a course years ago and my reading speed is around 560 words per minute with 90 percent comprehension.

• Better Gas Mileage: 639 searches. Plenty of Google ads. With gas spiking over three bucks a gallon, I foresee the number of searches for this phrase going up.

• Raising Tomatoes: 239 searches. Again, another disappointment. Raising tomatoes isn't much more popular than raising earthworms I guess.

That's it for today. The Google Trend tool is free to use. Check it out.
Day 4 and 5 are catch up days. I'll be using the time to research more niche ideas.

Thirty Day Challenge - Day 1

ED discusses the the four basics of the challenge: Market Research, Traffic, Conversion and Product

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.