“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” – Oscar Wilde

It is very likely that most of the visitors to this blog, particularly at present, know me from my association with the Thirty Day Challenge (30DC).  So I thought I had better talk early on about how I came to be involved in the 30DC and the nature of my association.  This post will end up being a brief history of the 30DC which may be of interest to those of you that have not been a part of the 30DC right from the beginning (and maybe even for some of you that have).

At the beginning, I had only just agreed to work with Ed Dale back in 2005 when Ed travelled to the United States and came back and called an immediate meeting.  In that meeting he was extremely excited about an idea he’d had after he had suddenly been exposed to the National Novel Writing Month. NaNoWriMo (as it is known) is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing on November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Ed’s idea was to replicate the training concept…by creating a course to introduce people to Internet Marketing and have them make $1 in 30 days.  The basic idea was to help people to get started online (learn the basic principles) but to give them a tangible result, hoping that if they could see that they could make $1 then they could go on to make as much money as they wanted depending on the effort they were prepared to make and the niches they choose to move into.

I could see that Ed was very excited by this idea…but at the time I did not share his enthusiasm. In fact, I thought he was crazy (although I diplomatically choose not to tell him to his face) as I couldn’t see how it was possible to make it happen in time.  You see, it was early-May when we were having this meeting and Ed wanted to start the challenge on the 1st July.  I came up with all these reasons why it wasn’t possible (no list, no website, no content) which I felt were all perfectly valid reasons for NOT doing it at the time.

Which, of course, Ed completely ignored!

You see the thing about idea focussed entrepreneurs is they don’t see the reasons to NOT do something, they only focus on the reasons to DO it.

The rest of course is history.  We did complete the challenge that year.  We had just over a 1,000 particpants and it was very successful, mainly I have to say because of Ed’s amazing ability to create the required content and videos just in time (often just a few hours before they went live).

During the first two Thirty Day Challenges (2005 & 2006), my role was very much in the back room.  I did record some of the videos but it was a very minor contribution mainly because I was still coming to terms with Internet Marketing and learning the ropes.  My strategy for learning, was to opt-in in to the lists of every marketer I could find and grab all their free content.  This is a very good strategy and one which still works well today if you have the time to read and absorb the material.  I didn’t see any difference between Pay Per Click Traffic (PPC) models and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) models so I learned about both even though I could see that Ed hated SEO (as a source of traffic) in favour of the cheap and easy PPC traffic available at that time. Suffice to say my interest in SEO was very much a private one at that time.

So the first two Thirty Day Challenges focussed more on finding a niche, and creating and selling your own product.  This was really only possible because back then, traffic just wasn’t an issue online.

During the latter half of 2006, however, Google changed everything by imposing a series of what we called ‘Google Slaps’.  In essence, it became no longer easy to get cheap, easy traffic and with every slap, it became even harder.

So during the Christmas break of 2006, I went back to square one and independently developed an SEO strategy based on Squidoo which at that time was ranking very well in the search engines for a range of keywords.  My motive for doing this was to reduce the reliance in the 30DC on PPC traffic on the assumption that we could teach people to drive traffic from the search engines within the 30 days and sell an affiliate product to test whatever niche they were targetting.  It took me a long time to persuade Ed that this would work…but to his credit he agreed to go foward despite his previously well publicised dislike for SEO.  Finally, I had an outlet for everything I had learned (and continue to learn) about SEO.  I was lucky too as by now, Ed had also formed a partnership with Dan Raine of the Immediate Edge, who was also very much in favour of teaching SEO as a strategy for acquiring traffic.

Never the less, this shift signalled a key change in the 30DC away from product creation towards traffic generation as we needed a traffic strategy that people could implement that didn’t cost too much money.  We were, of course, still motivated to teach people what we thought was the best way to get started online.

The 2007 30DC was again very successful (by now we had over 10,000 particpants).  And then Google decided it didn’t like Squidoo and began to seriously reduce the search engine rankings for Squidoo lenses, a situation which lasted for many months.

So for me…it was once again back to the drawing board.

For nearly 8 months in late 2007 to mid 2008 I tested nearly every content management and website design platform that was available.  I tested how easy it was to get pages ranked in the search engines and what strategies worked best to facilitate high rankings.  I knew we could no longer rely on Web 2.0 platforms for the main site (although they are still incredibly important for acquiring authority) and in the end I decided that WordPress gave the best SEO outcome while still being easy to publish and to implement features (through plugins).

I realised that we also need to give people assistance to apply and implement the concepts we were teaching and so Market Samurai and WordPressdirect came into being.  There is a lot to say about those platforms but I’ll leave that for future posts.

And so the 2008 and 2009 Thirty Day Challenges were focussed on testing niches/micro-niches using wordpress blogs.  We still teach the importance of researching the market before jumping in and creating a site but the current 30DC is focussed very much on creating a quality keyword focussed blog and then acquiring authority (backlinks) from other related websites to increase the probability that those blogs will rank in the search engines for the keywords being targeted. The goal is to try and sell something (initially an affiliate product) to the traffic coming to the blog as a test of the potential commercial value of the niche and the traffic associated with it.  If the traffic buys (something) at an acceptable conversion, then there is a motivation to expand the effort in that niche to get more traffic and sell more and possibly even develop new products over time.

The difference in 2009, is the scope, quality and maturity of the tools that are available now to implement the 30DC strategy (you just can’t believe what we can do today that we couldn’t do just a few short years ago).  These tools provide leverage (an important concept I’ll be blogging about soon) which makes it easier and faster to implement the strategy and also ensure that what should be done is being done.  My search for even greater leverage is never ending and continues to drive the evolution of the tools and the 30DC strategy today and into the future.

I am extremely proud of both my association and contribution to the Thirty Day Challenge (30DC) and am ever grateful to Ed Dale for both his vision and for the opportunity to be involved. To date over 100,000 people have benefited from their exposure to the 30DC training.  I hope there will be many more Thirty Day Challenges ahead…I still think it is easily the best free program for getting started with Internet Marketing online.

It is…as it is,

GuruBob

ps this post was never meant to be a serious discussion of the 30DC strategy as it is now (I will surely cover that in several posts in the future) more to give you, the reader, the context of my involvement and to set the scene for my future posting about the 30DC and the strategy and concepts we teach.

Technorati Tags: 30dc, challenge 30 day, dan raine, ed dale, google, GuruBob, Immediate Edge, Market Samurai, microniche, niche, search engine optimization, SEO, squidoo, thirty day challange, Thirty Day Challenge, Web 2.0, wordpress, WordPressDirect