making money

Back in October 2007 I signed up for the Thirty Day Challenge. The idea is to make your first $10 in 30 days using only web 2.0 methods, without spending a single cent. I recently checked my Commission Junction account and found a payment of $25 for 1 lead. It only took 3 months but I finally made my first dollar using the methods from the challenge!

I stumbled across the 30DC website a little late. The challenge runs during the month of August and the aim is to work in small teams and attempt to make your first $10 online initially from affiliate products. As I was doing it in October the site was a bit quiet but all the materials were still available (and still are).

There was some great information I took away with me after doing the 30DC and now that I've made some money from it I thought I would reflect on the experience. Here are some concepts I took away from it.

Find the right market

This is crucial to the success of your niche site.

I set up a few different small sites, each quite different to each other, using Blogger. Two of the sites have maintained steady traffic from Google even though I haven't posted on either of them for over nearly 3 months.

The site I just received my first $25 from only has 6 posts (including 3 reviews, 1 tip etc). I tried to keep the advertising on it to a minimum, so it only has some Google Adsense and an eBay affiliate ad on it.

The other sites I created are getting no traffic at all. This could be because I chose poor performing keywords, the market is too competitive or various other reasons.

Finding the right market is one of the hardest parts of internet marketing and its something I will be continually working to improve.

Web 2.0 is your friend

One of the big lessons learned in the 30DC was that sites that have web 2.0 properties rank more quickly in Google than new sites hosted on your own domain. Using sites like Blogger and Squidoo in conjunction with your own site to help push traffic to you seems like a good idea.

Other sites like social media (digg, twitter, StumbleUpon) were also discussed and you can findout more about them on the 30DC website.

Use Google Trends to find keyword traffic

Another great tip was to take a keyword that you know the traffic for (eg. "male yeast infection" has 500-550 traffic per day) and compare that keyword to the keyword phrase you are thinking of using. By checking the bar graph in Google Trends you can estimate how much traffic your keyword will get from Google. This technique has become know as the GTrends Method and this is what we base our keywords on in the Niche Warehouse.

Although I did not make my $10 within 30 days I believe the 30 Day Challenge is a good way to get into internet marketing and would recommend it to everyone. You can start anytime, although the new challenge begins August 2008 - can't wait!