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Okay, okay I know - I quit updating this blog daily after day 14. I just got so focused on the writing articles, 30 day challenge type niche specific blogs that I have totally neglected this

But, I’m back and will update this blog more often - maybe not daily, but periodically.

Since it doesn’t make sense to try to catch up day by day, I am going to do a post 30 Day Challenge look back.

Overall the 30 DC was an incredible piece of internet marketing training, especially for free - thank you Ed and Dan.

Even though I have been involved with internet marketing for a while, I did learn some valuable lessons and the 30 DC concepts were solid.

Even though I didn’t make my $10, it was a very worth while experience.

The most important two things I learned were.
1. How to identify niches - Learn how to find niches, learn how to determine if there will be enough demand (traffic) for that niche and how to determine if there will be buyers within that niche.

2. Content is indeed king - I’m sure you’ve heard that before, and it is true. I have to admit that I’m still not writing as much content as I need to. Writing is not one of my favorite things to do, so I really struggle with writing daily. I need to push myself to write content daily.

Even though I was satisfied overall with the training, I was disappointed with a couple of things.
1. The Tu***** fiasco - I’m not going to name tu**** by name because they don’t deserve any traffic from me. That blog service worked very well in getting 30 DC pages high rankings in Google - I had a page that ranked 17 in Google after only 2 hours and 15 minutes. However, apparently there were some idiots who created terrible content sites, spamming links and getting us all kicked out of Tu****.

The people, whether they were 30 DCers or not, are the type of people that take a good thing and instead of using it responsibly, ruin it for everyone.

I also have to comment of the owner of the system - Marco. I have to believe that this guy is certainly no genius. I can understand him wanting to protect the integrity of his blog system, and deleting blogs that were clearly spam. But, he did a mass delete, deleting what could have been hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of blogs, alienating what could have been hundreds to thousands of new customers.

I wonder how many blogs he deleted that weren’t 30 DCers, losing more customers because of how short sighted he was. He could have handled this so much better. He could have deleted all the suspected blogs, and then let us contact him, asking him to review our blog to see if it could be turned back on. Yes, this would have taken some of his time, but in the long run he could have had some faithful long term customers.

Wow, what I would give to have hundreds to thousands of people coming to my web services, this is every internet marketers dream. Marco had a chance to work with us and probably make a lot of money in the long run. Instead, he shot himself in the foot due to his short sighted-ness.

2. We never learned what the “secret sauce” was - I don’t blame Ed and Dan for not sharing the special sauce with us, after all look what happened after they told us about Tu****. The 30 DC became too popular causing problems I’m sure Ed and Dan never envisioned. Revealing the secret sauce would be risky. The responsible marketers would have used it with caution and the greedy, short term thinking idiots would have over-used it and ruined it for everyone.

My Favorite 30 DC Services
One great bonus to the 30 DC was learning about free Web 2.0 related services. Here are my favorites:

1. Facebook - A great social networking service. Even though Myspace is THE social network, I was never interested in joining Myspace. I see Facebook as a community that is much more professional. It has a ton of great Add-ons for just about anything you could think of.

2. Twitter - A cool little tool that allows you to share interesting sites that you find with your followers, live. There are Twitter plugins for Wordpress, Facebook, Joomla and a Twitter plugin that will work on any website.
Follow Me on Twitter!

3. Wordtracker GTrends Tool - Great for helping you find keywords, and determining if those keywords will generate enough traffic for your time.

4. Stumbleupon - A great Web 2.0 page/content ranking tool. Please use this service responsibly. Go ahead and use it to Stumble your own pages, with restraint, but be sure to Stumble other pages you like. Go ahead and add me as a Stumble friend.

In summary, I learned some new concepts, had some concepts re-enforced, and learned about some new tools that can be you be successful, when you use them responsibly.

Mike