Internet Case Study

I have learned so much already with the Thirty Day Challenge, I can’t believe I have 25 days left! I’m just getting started!

A newcomer (like me) could feel overwhelmed by the enormous body of work that claims to teach Internet Marketing from beginning to end.  Instead of asking “where do I start”, I have been able to just watch the current day’s video lesson, follow along with the transcripts, and do the work assigned in the lesson.

Each day’s lesson is fairly short - usually around an hour - and the “homework” might take another 30 to 60 minutes, although you could easily spend much longer if you had the time. Each lesson is a manageable chunk of information, allowing me to learn something new every day and let it roll around in my brain for a while before working on the next lesson.

Finally, and most importantly, the program literally holds your hand and walks you step-by-step through every aspect of Internet Marketing. No detail is too small to escape explanation in this very thorough course.

In about a week, spending 2 - 3 hours per day, I have learned the basics of:

• Brainstorming Ideas (Day 1)
• Keyword/Niche Research (Day 2)
• Competitive Research and SEO (Day 3)
• Affiliate Programs (Day 4)
• Copy Writing (Day 4)
• Content Creation (Day 5)

Not to mention all of the tools I’ve either discovered or learned how to use more efficiently as a direct result of the 30DC lessons:

• Flock browser & extensions
• Twitter
• Twhirl
• Google Reader
• Google Subscribe
• Google Notebook
• Delicious
• Friendfeed
• StumbleUpon
• YouTube
• Amazon as a research tool
• Market Samurai
• Google/Adwords keyword research tool
• Clickbank
• Commission Junction
• Amazon Associates program
• Picnik.com
• ezine articles
• Google blog search
• Article City
• Technorati
• Go Articles

The first five days of the Challenge have reinforced that the most important thing is to keep moving forward. Instead of getting stuck on one step and (a) doing it forever, (b) doing it perfectly, or (c) abandoning the project altogether, the lessons in the Challenge have reinforced something that is easier said than done: just make a decision, take action, declare it to be “good enough” for now, and move on.

This is the only way to make progress, and when I make mistakes, I will undoubtedly learn from them.  But the important fact is that I am DOING instead of just LEARNING.  Success all comes down to the actions you are willing to take, and this course has helped me take action every day since I started doing it. I know this refrain is getting old, but I would once again like to thank Ed, Dan, and Bob for doing such a great job creating this course.

Over the weekend I completed the Day 1 and Day 2 lessons. I have learned so much already! I’m really excited to do the rest of the challenge.

Day 1 was primarily focused on gathering ideas. The first lesson provided some basic groundwork for how to approach website creation if your goal is to make money. I’ll give you a hint: you don’t create your product first. A valuable lesson.

The rest of Day 1 gave a lot of information on how to generate ideas using freely available and easy-to-use tools, plus a downloadable PDF with over 50 helpful links. These tools will all help you brainstorm different topics you might be interested in pursuing further. I have yet to fully explore all the tools and links provided, but I already have several ideas to research further.  If none of them pan out, or whenever I’m inclined to do some more research, I can go back to the resources presented in this lesson and I’ll probably find many more interesting ideas.

I took the handful of ideas I generated on Day 1 into Day 2, which was the best primer on Keyword Research that I could have found. Ed Dale, Guru Bob, Dan Raine and all the other amazing people at ThirtyDayChallenge.com are teaching a new, very powerful, still-in-beta tool (Market Samurai) which is going to be an amazing help.

But what really shined for me was the video tutorial of how to do manual keyword research using Google. This quick video gave me the exact 2-step process I needed to know to wrap my head around keyword research. This isn’t a difficult subject to learn, so if you already know it, you probably won’t find anything new here. But if you’ve been intimidated by keyword research in the past, I highly recommend this video.

I haven’t even installed the Market Samurai tool because I want to make sure I fully understand how to do the manual research first.  So I created a quick and dirty spreadsheet, opened up 2 browser tabs, and started entering keywords.  This is an excerpt of my results.

Keyword Research Made Easy

You can see that I searched for a lot of different phrases.  The highlighted rows indicate the “sweet spot” of my market research - adequate search volume combined with a fairly low number of competing pages.

Remember: I didn’t know anything about keyword research before I started this lesson, and now I have a couple of ideas to move forward with. I have already learned enough from the Thirty Day Challenge for it to have been a more than worthwhile investment of my time. I am really looking forward to Day 3.

Have an action-packed day!

Tonight I finished the Thirty Day Challenge pre-season lessons.  That involved the following tasks:

• Installed and configured the Flock browser
• Installed all recommended add-ons
• Created new accounts (just for this site) at delicious, stumbleupon, youtube, facebook, and friendfeed

What have I learned?

1. I now have a whole new appreciation for the depth of social networking. I had no idea that all of these different accounts could be linked together and basically provide a “life stream” of everything you do.  I need to give the whole concept some more thought and learn the finer points of the technique.
2. I have a better understanding how important it is to stay abreast of changes in the Internet landscape. A site that is doing well without using some of these powerful new tools, could be thriving beyond comparison by taking advantage of the available technology and the increased exposure it can provide.
3. The final nugget of wisdom and inspiration I am taking away from the pre-season lessons was in one of Ed’s final pre-season videos. He talked about getting out of your head, away from your computer, and noticing things around you specifically for the purpose of capturing ideas and inspiration that might be useful when doing market research. Notice everything and take notes. These ideas will be useful later.

This is a theme I’ve been planning to write about for a week or so, because I feel like as though a faucet has been turned on in my head and now the ideas are just gushing out. Ever since I started brainstorming content ideas, my brain has come to life. No matter what I’m doing - driving, running, playing with my kids, sleeping - ideas just pop into my head and I am compelled to write them down.

The post-it notes and scribbled notebook pages continue to multiply, and now my brain has started to focus on finding a more organized way to capture all of this information. In order to free it up to do the fun stuff, I have been casting about for a better way. I’m familiar with David Allen’s Getting Things Done philosophy and the idea of ubiquitous capture but I have yet to find and implement a truly effective system. I welcome your suggestions.

You have my solemn pledge that I will find the right solution (for me) and share that solution on this site in the interest of helping anyone else who is afraid the brilliant 4 a.m. brainstorm will be lost or forgotten by the time the morning coffee has been poured.

In the last couple of hours, I made some forward progress and thought I should share.

First, I signed up for the Thirty Day Challenge and did the three critical, must-do today tasks they told me to do. Easy enough so far.

Then I downloaded the Pre-Season Cheat Sheet and watched the Pre-Season Cheat Sheet Video. That was quick and painless.

The Cheat Sheet recommended I start with the Twitter lesson, which I did.  However, I already have a Twitter account so I opted to download the 3 page PDF and skim it rather than watch the 8 minute video. That took me about 30 seconds. If you are unfamiliar with Twitter, this will be a good introduction.

Next stop: the Twhirl lesson - a 42 minute video or 3 short PDFs. For something like installing, configuring, and learning software, I do better reading the instructions and doing it myself. I skimmed the PDFs and couldn’t imagine what might have taken 42 minutes to describe, so I watched a couple random minutes from the video to make sure I didn’t miss something critical. It seemed pretty straightforward, so I skipped the rest of the video.

My mind still wasn’t fried so I did the Google Reader pre-season lesson. This one has 4 downloads and a 49 minute video. Yikes. I don’t see myself watching that much video. I love the program so far - great content, fabulous layout. But my first comment to the folks at ThirtyDayChallenge is to break up the video into chapters. For instance, I already have a google account so I would like to skip that section entirely with a single mouse click. In any case, I configured Google Reader and tested some of the features. I haven’t used it before so this was new and interesting.

Finally, at 1:15 a.m., I ended with the Google Subscribe lesson.  The video is 39 minutes. The pdf is 2 pages. You do the math. No video for me. I truly hope I’m not missing the boat entirely. If anyone has gone through all of the ThirtyDayChallenge videos and compared them to the pdf downloads, I would be very interested in your comments - are the videos packed with useful tips that are missing from the downloads?

In any case, I have taken enough action today and now I must let my mind rest.

Have an action-packed day!

For everything you want to learn, Google will show you at least 4,326,187 sources that want to teach you. In starting this site, I have probably visited and bookmarked more sites than my previous 10 years of web surfing combined. There is a LOT of information out there on the subject of creating a website to make money, and much of the information appears to be (a) good and (b) free.

However, being able to sort through, digest and implement all of these lessons assumes a valuable commodity that I don’t have: time. I have a job, a family, and a life outside of this blog. How many hours a day can I devote to the infinite collection of information products created just for me? Not enough, clearly.

In the last week, I have spent countless hours on this project. Every night my husband sees me at my desk and (in a very supportive way) asks me what I’m working on. The answer is always a vague “I’m working on my site.” But what do I have to show for it?

• I got tired of the design and fiddled with some free themes. I decided on one and am working in the background to prepare it for release. Did I post about the process and the research? Nope.

• I have done a lot of research and a lot of writing, most of it still in draft format in tons of text files on my computer. Did I post about the research I was doing? Nope.

Where have I been? I fell into the “work = progress” trap.

Before anyone out there (my statistics are showing that someone in the Seychelles is visiting - thank you!) thinks I’m beating myself up, I’m not.  I’m pleased that I am working on this project every day. But research and first drafts don’t equal progress.  I have been taking lots of action, yet I haven’t moved forward. I need to do better. I must do two things to make progress:

1. Pick a single direction and move forward.
2. Build the habit of creating tangible output every day.

The direction I have chosen is the Thirty Day Challenge. If I like it, learn new things, and stick with it, I will write about it here. Every day.  If not, I will write about it here, and then I will find a new approach and write about that. Every day. Even if some of my posts seem inane and boring, which I obviously hope isn’t the case.

If you are doing the Thirty Day Challenge too, please let me know. If you like, you can follow me on Twitter and maybe we can team up.

Have an action-packed day!

Even though my site is only a few days old, I was thinking about site statistics this morning.  I wanted to see if I’ve had any visitors besides the few people I have told about the site.

To find out, I logged in to my hosting control panel. My host uses a product called cPanel. I don’t know anything about it, have never used it, and am trying to find my way around. I’m taking notes and at some point I’ll share whatever tips and tricks I learn.

When I found the statistics tools, something jumped out at me right away. I’ve had visitors!

InternetCaseStudy.com October Site Statistics

According to this chart, I’ve actually had some repeat visitors! I don’t know who they are or where they came from and right now I can’t take the time to find out.  I just want to give them a reason to come back. I can’t even tell you how intensely motivating it was to see that chart.

Now that I know someone is watching, I’m off to go create content. Stay tuned.

Have an action-packed day!

Yesterday I launched this project and today I’m writing my first post. My goal of taking daily action is forcing me to just write instead of planning, researching, tweaking, or doing any other task that isn’t clearly a step in the right direction.

My Objective

I started this site as a first step toward my goal of making money on the Internet. I want to supplement and ultimately replace my current income. I’m not an internet marketer (or a marketer of any kind). I have some technical background and want to jump on the “make money on the internet” bandwagon. So this site is the running dialog of how I get there. My goal is to try new things, track how well it works, and document everything. Ultimately I want to create a blueprint for others who have heard a lot of hype but don’t know where to start.

Once I get this site off the ground, and load all the content swirling around in my mind, I’ll use my own blueprint to start a site in an actual (non-internet-marketing) niche. And I’ll document the results on InternetCaseStudy. Wash, rinse, repeat.

With that being said, here is the summary of what I’ve done so far.

10/29 - Actions Completed:
- purchase domain on godaddy.com, point to hosting nameservers (created hosting account previously in anticipation of this step)
- log into hosting account: set up email and test it; get my ftp info
- Download a WordPress Guide and read it
- Install Wordpress
- Sit back and admire my clean, shiny new site

Basic Wordpress Installation

Total time spent doing these tasks was about 2 hours.

Completing these actions depended on doing some research, but I stayed very focused on doing a minimum amount of research so I could spend more time taking action.

Thoughts on Site Design

Content is King, right? I could spend several hours, days, or even months (and hundreds of dollars) working on a design, but it won’t count as action toward my goal (making money on the internet). So I’m sticking with the “out of the box” WordPress design for now and I’ll tweak it as I go.

That’s all for now. Tomorrow I will provide some context by writing a little bit about my background and influences. Questions and topic ideas are welcome.

Have an action-packed day!