Day Eleven - Squidoo

Have you ever done a Squidoo lens? I'd heard of this before and looked into it once...can't remember when or why, but there. Anyway, today's lesson was about creating a Squidoo lens on our topic and using it to share content as well as direct folks to our blog.

Since Squidoo is a highly popular site, backlinks from there carry more weight with the search engines. So we need to use our key phrase wherever is reasonable. You can do so much with this!

I have an RSS feed from my blog, a link to my Amazon product (here's hoping) and videos from YouTube.

Just another way to highlight our topic and drive traffic to our blogs.

Let's see what tomorrow holds!

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Day Ten - Rest Day and RSS

I'm so glad that Ed, Bob, and Dan gave us a break today. This really helped me get a lot closer to being caught up. They did share one really cool gadget that TDC has developed for our use. It's called the TDC RSS Submitter.

All you do is enter your blog, the blogs feed address, and a brief description. The Submitter then submits your blog to a myriad of RSS Feed sites...and folks will find your blog!

Way cool!

Now to get caught up.....

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Day Nine - Backlinks and Indexing

Now that my site is up, and promoted slightly, it's time to generate more interest! A great way to do this is to create backlinks. Backlinks are links on other sites that point back to yours. When I first boldly entered into the world of Internet (I think my first website was at xoom...does that still exist?) you got backlinks only when someone else linked to your site from theirs. Now, with all the social web sites out there, you can generate some of your own backlinks.

One of the best ways to do this, and the way that Ed goes over in today's lesson, is through forum posting. There are tons of forums and groups out there on all topics from soup to beans. I found two good WoW groups through Google Groups, and a couple forums as well. Including my guild forums! Since my husband and I run the guild, I'm sure I can add a link to my new blog in my signature without causing trouble *grin*

The one thing to remember when doing this, is to make sure that when you post to groups and forums, you are actually contributing something of value. If you join and then spam all the forums with "Hey! Check out my new site!" not only will you get no traffic, you will probably be banned from the forum and give all internet marketers a bad name. So don't do it. Please.

At this point, our sites should have been up for a couple days (since I started late, it hasn't been 24 hours yet) and we might be indexed in Google. I actually found one of my articles in Google this morning that I'd used the Social Bookmarking technique on last night. Just type into the Google search box:

site:yourdomain.org

and Google will return all pages that it has indexed that match that domain. Pretty cool! Now for all my pages to be indexed....and ranked....and generate lots of traffic....and money....whew!

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Day Eight - Social Bookmarking

Those former 30DCers are so smart! Today, we learned about another new tool that wasn't even thought of last year. This one, Social Marker, was developed by someone who participated in the Thirty Day Challenge last year. This way cool tool will submit sites to a myriad of social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc. and save you hours of time.

Here's how you do it:

With the Social Marker on your toolbar, find the site you want to bookmark. Click on the Social Marker link and a page will appear, partially filled out with the important things from that site. Finish adding description and tags, then choose which sites you want to use. I wouldn't choose all of them - might be frowned upon by the spam police - and click submit. Social Marker then walks you through each of the sites you've chosen. SM has a header and footer in your browser so you can navigate easily to each of the sites and all your submission information is in the footer where you can copy and paste easily to the submission pages.

How cool is that? I submitted my second and third articles to Propeller, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, and Twitter in less time than it took to write this post!

I love this...and will use it for other things in the future, I know!

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Day Seven - Tracking and Analytics

Okay, have to admit. After seeing all the tools so far, it's easy to become jaded. Especially since this is the first time I've even attempted some of these tasks. But I am continually amazed at what Google can produce.

Case in point. Google Analytics. You can insert a small piece of code on your website and Google will track your visitors. How they found you. How many were unique. Even what part of the country they came from. How cool is that? And with WordPress Direct, you don't even have to insert code. Just extract your tracking ID from the code that Google gives you, enter it in a certain spot on your site information form and boom! WordPress Direct enters it on your site. Easy as falling off a log. (But doesn't hurt as much!)

I'm excited to see what Google will have to say about my site. I kinda feel like I'm standing by a lamppost on the corner in front of my store, wearing a trench coat and fedora. Whipping out my notebook from a deep pocket, taking my pencil from behind my ear, I make a tally mark on the top page right as someone enters the store. Okay, maybe not. You get the idea

The other cool thing today (and I hope I'll have access to after the Challenge is over!) is the TDC Stats Tracker. This is how it works (or how you work it!):

You enter in your Affiliate link, name it and click Add. The system generates a unique link that is a lot shorter than the original Affiliate link (think tinyurl or snipurl). Then, when you use that link on your blog instead of the original, TDC will track how many click's your link has had. Talk about cool! I've had my links up there for less than a day, and I've had almost 20 click throughs. Now if people would only buy!

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Day Six - Bringing it all together

Wow!.....if you have ever worked on a blog, this is truly amazing! There is some new software out there that will setup your WordPress blog and work with you on keeping it all updated and maintained. Now, I've only used Blogger before (hence the location of this blog) and while I like it, understand it, etc. you've got to admit that the template themes are just a little basic. I've tried WordPress in the past but got a bit confused at first and then HTML/Java  wouldn't work for me so I said, "Heck with it!" and went back to Blogger.

However, with WordPress Direct it's super easy! I just filled out some basic information about what I wanted, and searched through 70 pages of templates (that's around 700 templates) - several of them helped inspire some new ideas too...hmm....

Anyway, our tasks for Day Six of the Thirty Day Challenge were to get the blog set up, add one affiliate product, and one article.

Here is the site for my blog: http://www.wowquestguides.brighterplanet.com

I went with having the site hosted by WordPress Direct as it was free. If, at the end of this month, I decide to keep this up and really go wild with this, I'll buy my own domain name and hosting. Until then, let's invest nothing but time and see if there really is a market.

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Day Five - Content Generation

So I have this fabulous idea, SEO key phrase, products to sell....just need content and a place to put it! Today, Ed and GuruBob shared some strategies for tracking down content (ie: articles) for our blogs (to be created).

First, GuruBob unlocked a new feature in Market Samurai. We can now search for our key phrase in several sources looking for articles. MS will retrieve them from major sites (Ezine Articles, Google Blogs, etc) and will also analyze them. We can see when they were written, how many other people have linked to them, and more!

I used my key phrase (also searched some of the runners-up just for fun) and it is amazing! No more going to each site manually, typing in the key phrase, guessing as to stats and such... It's all in one place! This is another great way to test out your key phrase to ensure there is plenty of content out there to play around with.

Ed also shared searching in Google News and exporting feeds to Google Reader. There is a lot of content out there....and it's so easy to find an article that resonates with you and your niche that you can share with them. Write a little introduction and then link to the source of the article. Great way to get content - legally! - without scratching your head and saying, "hmmmm".

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