88. 30DC put on hold

My hard disc seems to be corrupt, so I can't do a complete copy of it. For several days I have not been able to right click on my temp files to get rid of them, or delete them in any other way. What happens is, Windows Explorer either freezes, or just instantly shuts down.

Now it has got even worse. I cannot delete, copy, rename or do anything else with any other file or folder!

The only way I can copy a file is to left click on it, and click 'copy this file' on the left, then it gives me a box for the destination.

Also, whenver I go into any boxes like System box within Control Panel, the whole PC just freezes.

I've been on the phone to Microsoft for four hours on Wed and six hours on Thurs, and he's phoning me back again today. I've tried two offline complete scans, and four online scans.

He wants to make a new username, transfer everything across, then delete the old username (with corrupt files). I have transferred some files myself and tried to use Windows Explorer in the new user account, but it still won't work.

So I'm not confident that his plan will work. He's been a tech for years and has never come across this problem. My PC won't even let me do a System Restore - at all!

So I just want to get everything I need to put on a new computer, via my external hard drive, but I’m not sure that’s possible. I already looked at iTunes in my new user account, and three years worth of songs are gone. I don't know how to get to keep them. Most were paid for and downloaded, and I don't have them on CD.

I’ll just be spending the morning trying to salvage what files and folders I can before the MS tech rings me back.

To cap it all, I was still only on Day 23 of the 30DC before all this happened. I'm still able to watch some videos, but my system is so unreliable, I can't do much work at all.

Still earning all four stars, every day, as I've been doing ewverything I can. Non of this disaster has come about through laziness!

I guess I tempted fate by saying on Tuesday that I love my life - that'll teach me!

87. Thirty Day Challenge Day 28

Here’s something I only just found out. When looking down the list of StumbleUpon’s list of categories for websites, I noticed that one of them was ‘learning disorder’ – not ‘learning disability’, or ‘learning difficulty’ – so they obviously use a different term for it in the Sates. And I’ve never used ‘learning disorder’ as a tab for this blog. Learning, learning all the time. I love my life.

I was still behind on the 30DC, and manged to add Google Analytics to my main niche blog. It took a while finding the video, then finding a forum post that amended the instruction from a Tumblr blog to the blogger blogs, then I had to sign up with Google Analytics, and then put the code into the special box within my blog. so I had to have all these windows open at the same time, whilst I slowly but surely managed to do what turned out to be a one minute job. It just took slightly longer to learn it that’s all!

Had our weekly team Skype call, but Asbjorn couldn’t make it this week. Got Pauline set up with Google chat. My blog is now number 60 in Google, down form 45 yesterday. Hope it moves up or I’ll never get any traffic.

Spent way too long answering emails, and on the phone to Microsoft again, trying to sort out a malware alert.

86. Thirty Day Challenge Day 27

Did nothing but bookmarked my sites and my two team mates’ sites. I can’t believe how long it took, and I only stumbled them, put them all through Onlywire, and Netscaped a few of them, but it made a difference. Pauline reported that she had got indexed in only two hours! She’s number 17 in Google for her phrase.

So I checked my phrase, and my blogger blog is number 45 in Google for my phrase, so I sent an email asking for more love!

Wrote more short articles to blog about, but I’m so far behind. I didn’t even have time to look at today’s stuff. I plan to get up very early tomorrow.

85. Thirty Day Challenge Day 26

Feeling a bit foolish, as I went and asked about cloaking links on the forum, and if I wasn’t behind on the 30DC I’d know that using the tracking tool in the dasboard would do that exact job. I did watch the corresponding video, but as I hadn’t done the task myself, I forgot about it. Duh. I’m not safe to be let loose on the forums!

Spent all day getting wise about the various bookmarking sites listed in Social Poster. It’d be silly to just go and vote for your own sites on all these sites without undestanding what they specialise in. For example, Sk-rt.com is just for women’s topics, PlugIM is just for internet marketing topics, and Kick.ie is just about Irish sites, so it’d be pointless voting for my niche sites in the last two at least.

And another site was clearly owned by an internet marketer who had a very bad attitude, and sounds to me as though it was a male with a female name! So it paid off to spend some time doing this research.

Added more posts to both my blogs and social bookmarked them. Hopefully I can catch up tomorrow and sort those affiliate links out. I’m still not giving up on the possibility of winning the 30 day Challenge.

84. Thirty Day Challenge Days 23, 24 and 25

I’ve had terrible trouble the last few days. Firstly I have a migraine for two days, then yesterday I just had to do something about my PC running so painfully slow. It was literally taking over 2 minutes for links to open, and I was typing whole sentences before the first word even appeared on screen. So editing stuff was a nightmare.

It only happened online, not in a Word doc or anything. So I tried all sorts to speed it up. I can no longer watch videos in iTunes whilst I’ve got any browser open. They just keep stopping and starting. So this defeats the object of watching a video, and pausing it whilst I carry out the instruction.

I’ve already uninstalled lots of programs I no longer use, but I think I’m going to have to just add more RAM. I hope that will sort it out. Couldn’t do any work last night as I was doing a diskcleanup, and defrag all night.

Today I watched all last weeks videos again, and played the podcasts again. I went back and looked at last week’s video on Social Poster, as I’ve fallen badly behind. I’m pleased that I got through half the list of bookmarking sites to sign up with, but as I was curious to see what all the unfamiliar ones did that differed from the others, I got a bit sidetracked. A lot of sites are quite new and even the ‘most popular’ sites listed only have 1 vote – I noticed quite a few familiar names and phrases that looked like the work of fellow chellangers!

I also got hung up on trying to find out how to cloak affiliate links. I’m convinced a certain blog type site other than Tumblr is deleting pages with affiliate links in (judging from the sites I’ve viewed today) but one obvious 30DC page is surviving and has a cloaked link. I’ll have to contact them and find out how they got it.

I was going to buy Jim Edwards’ Affiliate Link Cloaker, but it says it only works for your own domain, not hosted blogs.

83. TDC Days 20 and 21

Watched yesterday’s 30DC videos and I’m so glad I didn’t bookmark any of my pages, apart from one stumble, because so many people didn’t realise, and they overdid it. That was what drew attention to the owner of Tumblr. He was notified by Digg and other sites that people were abusing the system.

I’ll just keep writing content! I’ve put pages up on various blog platforms. We’ll just have to see if they’re as sensitive as Tumblr.

The really cool thing is that Google indexed one of my pages before it was deleted, and I hadn’t social bookmarked it at all! So all the other things we are being told to do with the post optimization is really working. I wanted to set up Google analytics, but I was too busy setting up the blogs in the first place!

The other cool thing is that I’ve found other platforms that Ed didn’t mention, and I would never have thought of even looking for them, if this hadn’t happened with Tumblr. There are hundreds of other opportunities. I spent ages writing content for one, then found out that the title of the blog wasn’t in the url! Your username is in the url. That’s no good!

So I deleted it all, but I didn’t have to rewrite it all when I took the content elsewhere, so that was good. Every mistake is a lesson learned.

I’m off work for two weeks so I was up all night last night on the computer, til I realised I wss supposed to be somewhere at 11.30am.

Stupid to stay up all night, but I was on a roll!

Today I added more content to my Hubpages and had my Skype call with Asbjorn and Pauline. Asbjorn couldn’t talk, but us girls talked whilst Asbjorn just typed. It worked quite well!

82. 30 Day Challenge Day 19

Two of my Tumblr pages have been deleted simply because they had ‘How To’ in the title. I put up a short article and some of my own artwork on both pages, but the owner Marco has indiscriminately deleted sites involved with the Thirty Day Challenge. I’m not the slightest bit surprised, as there are so many thousands of people doing it.

But Ed says he’s hoping to talk to them. They have jumped to conclusions that we are all affiliate marketing spammers but we are selling quality information. They haven’t touched my main phrase page, but it doesn’t have a ‘How To’ in it. I have been back though and deleted all the affiliate links though, so they don’t delete it, but I’ll put them back when it’s all blown over.

Tumblr have shot themselves in the foot by deleting all the 30DC sites and directing traffic (who want all this niche info) to Tumblr’s home page.

Google won’t like that and could penalize Tumblr for sending honest searchers to a dud page with no info.

As I’ve put a lot of hard work into this, I bought a domain name and plan to host it myself. This may be a premature move – but even after the 30DC I could do with my own site on the subject. And at least I’ll have somewhere more permanent to direct readers of my Ezine article.

The point of the 30 Day Challenge though is to earn $10 in 30 days, by spending no money, but never mind.

Many people are setting up Blogger blogs instead. I’m sure Google who owns Blogger aren’t going to be that bothered as long as they contain good quality info. And with Adsense on there, they should be laughing.

81. 30 Day Challenge Day 18

Re-watched Thursday’s 30DCIII videos and watched yesterday’s videos about social bookmarking and ezine articles. Noticed Rob Somerville’s Tumblr blog has his link to the ‘money page’ in a separate link post, rather than in the posts. The separate links don’t look spammy at all. I’ll have to do that,

Spent the rest of the day finishing and perfecting my ezine article. I know I’ll never make any money if I spend most of the day writing an article, but it was quite long, and I wanted to make sure it was quality stuff, and that it gets verified for publication.

Maybe I won’t be so fastidious after writing a few hundred articles, but to be honest, I do hope mine are a lot better than some of the crap on these article sites. Even some that have perfect grammar make it clear that the person is not really an expert in the subject, and as a reader I wouldn’t want to believe anything that isn’t referenced properly.

Didn’t have time to sign up with Ezine and submit my article. I’m planning on having an early night tonight so I can get a record amount of work done tomorrow.

80. 30DCIII Day 17

I created a Clickbank hoplink and put the link into some of my posts on my tumblr page. I am only putting my affiliate link into every other post, as I think it will look too spammy if it is in every single post. I am also putting links to other sites too, offering free quality information, so I think visitors will be pleased.

Ed said we should ask ourselves will our visitors be happy or annoyed with our content, and as I’ve given them what they are looking for for free, I think they’ll be happy. I’m just hoping they will buy the product too, but no-one’s forcing them.

I watched Ed’s video this morning and he said lots of people on the forum are getting indexed in Google in only a few hours, so I checked my phrase, and I’m nowhere! But then, these other peole are probably a day ahead of me, and been social bookmarking like mad.

After work, I spent every minute writing more short articles and a larger one for Ezine Articles, but that’s not finished yet. Then I signed up with more social bookmarking sites, so I can ‘give love’ to my sites, and ask friends to do the same.

It’s possible that this method of getting ranked by search engines may not last long, especially if spammers are going to abuse it, but there’ll be some other method by then.

Sadly, I kept getting distracted on a lot of the social bookmarking sites, because I kept finding sites that were related to my niches, so I naturally wanted to check them out.

Still haven’t looked at today’s work, and may have to re-watch some videos from the last few days, to make sure I haven’t missed any part of the process. Still haven’t signed up as an Amazon affiliate, which I should have done years ago!

I’m hoping I can get lots of work done over the weekend, as I think it’s product creation next week, and that will involve technical stuff, so I must catch up for that.

I’ve found several other sites and tumblr blogs on different topics, whilst social bookmarking that are following the format of the Thirty Day Challenge, and one I found had an affiliate link that went to a sales page, but the affiliate name was not on the order page, so I found the owner on Facebook and let him know, or he won’t be getting his commissions.

79. Thirty Day Challenge Day 16

I’d finished all my short articles before I even left the house this morning! Jeez, why didn’t I listen to Ed when he told us about feeds last year? It took me about 30 minutes to write five articles from content that I’d got through a feed from Google news containing my keywords. And there are tons of news items I didn’t even touch, and I didn’t use any of the blog feeds, so there’s plenty of content to choose from in the future!

So after work, I had plenty of time to catch up with yesterday’s and today’s Thirty Day Challenge Day video tutorials.

Later I set up a Tumblr page on one of my niches, and added a brand new article I’d written from scratch. There’s also a picture of mine and a video of someone else’s. I’m pleased with how it looks.

Today Dan showed us how to make a Wordpress blog. I need to learn this, as I’ve only ever had Blogger blogs before, but Wordpress is supposed to be more flexible when it’s hosted on its own domain name.

So although I’ll still carry on blogging about The 30 Day Challenge here, I’ll have my Wordpress blog as well, that will be hosted on the 30DCIII site.

And as Dan showed us how to insert YouTube videos into our blogs, I plan to put one in, but I haven’t made any YouTube videos other the ones of Mike Blacktopp’s skydive. I’ll make more when I’ve made my $10.

I also downloaded a Firefox plugin that Caro recommended called Cooliris that lets you preview a site just by hovering your mouse over the link then moving slightly to the right to a Cooliris icon. I think it will prove a massive time saver, and already, I have been using it loads today. It’s at http://www.cooliris.com Thanks Caro!

Tried to finished 30DC work at 9.30pm, but actually it was 10.30 (now) so I have time to post to all my blogs, write my personal diary, walk and stretch and be in bed before midniight. That’s the only way I’ll be able to stop these headaches. I’ve been staying up way too late. And it affects my work the next day.

Only just realised I’ve misspelt Dyslexic in all my tabs since the 30DC started (I’ve been copying and pasting them form a Word doc). I’ll amend it when I get chance, but if anyone searching for it has managed to miss out the ‘s’ too (and I am aware of the irony), then they’ll find me no problem!

78. 30 Day Challenge Day 15

It dawned on me today that on Ed’s 30 Day Challenge videos, he can always get his RSS feeds at the click of a button (the little orange square in the url bar). And that’s why it only takes him seconds to find content for blog posts and articles.

I got really hung up on RSS feeds last year, and subsequently have been manually going round places to get content for my existing blogs.

Today the penny finally dropped as to just how important these feeds are as they save so much time. So I didn’t look at any of today’s training material. If I’m to write the rest of my short articles in record time to catch up, I need to do things properly.

So I tried to sort out getting all the relevant feeds into Bloglines, so that I too can find content quickly.

Unfortunately, the very first site I looked at had a problem with it’s RSS icon, but I didn’t know that. I thought it was me that was doing it wrong. So after a panic gmail text chat with Asbjorn (what would I do without him?) he told me where to find an alternative feed for that site.

I then spent ages trying to work out how to organise my feeds and folders in Bloglines, but then it clicked.

Once I worked out how to do it, I found that sometimes, it wouldn’t work first time, but it would work the second time. On one, it took five attempts, and I did exactly the same thing each time, but I stuck with it, as I knew it had worked before.

Once I was confident that I could do it properly, you couldn’t stop me building feeds to get content for my existing blogs. Now I’m dead chuffed I finally got it.

This afternoon, I was panicking that I was falling behind, and wouldn’t be able to finish my short articles on time, but I’m not worried now, as I now think it will be easy for me to catch up.

It’s slightly annoying that Bloglines keeps changing the order of my folders, seemingly for no reason, but it’s not a big problem.

Quickly had time just to check what work I’d missed on the 30DCIII Training page, and there’s only one video for today.

77. 30 Day Challenge Day 14

Watched today’s videos and found we had another 6 articles to write; three short pieces of content for each of our two niches. I actually had ten to write because I had only written two yesterday.

And I knew I had to get them all done, because once I get behind, I always have difficulty catching up.

It wasn’t a problem, when I went at my own pace and stayed focussed. Usually I’d panic if I’m even a little bit behind, but I can only concentrate at one thing at a time, so I did. I didn’t log into to the forum or my email account. I just wrote my pieces of content. Ed did his short article in 9 minutes. I did mine in 30 minutes, but I'm OCD about changing every single sentence, so there isn't duplicate content. Maybe my articles are too long. I didn't get them all finished.

I kept the pdf of Ed’s open to keep referring back to, as my memory’s like a sieve. This reminded me of which steps to take to get all the info together.

Also included in the videos were how to find affliate products, not to build a business out of affilaite marketing, but to test whether people in those markets are prepared to spend money.

Ed compared it to the TV idol series where you get paid to test what people want, rather than throw money away trying to find out. So he showed us Clickbank affiliate products, then showed us how to sign for Amazon and although they give measly rates of commission and we’re never gonna get rich selling Amazon products, they are a brilliant way of testing markets as they have so many products, and such a huge customer base.

I’m sure I signed up with them last year, and I know I have a Clickbank account, but stupidly, I never used them.

Had our weekly Skype call with Asbjorn and Pauline, and we lost Asbjorn after a while, but he was very helpful and guided me and Pauline through setting up Squidoo lenses. We won’t be covering thses in the 30DCIII.

76. The 30 Day Challenge Day 13

Spent all day collecting more information on my niches. I found loads of affiliate products that not only mean there’s money to be made from this niche, but I can be an affiliate for those products as well as create my own products.

Watched Ed’s latest video on the 30DCIII and he showed us how his new Mac can record the mac version of a powerpoint presentation, with his voice over it, so he can make videos without having to appear in them. That’s good news for people like me who have the perfect face for audio!

With my drawing niches I was going to do drawing tutorials with a webcam attached to a baseball hat, so no-one would see my face anyway. Hatcam! But this sounds cool as well. Asbjorn showed me how wordtracker just got a whole lot better with Google Trends.

75. The Thirty Day Challenge Day 12

It's 3.25am and I've been working for 16 hours collecting info, articles and checking out the competition on my niche.

74. 30DC Day 11

Saturday August 11th

Worked hard to find some more niches and I did find lots of different phrases for one large niche, which already has Web 2.0 strategies in place, but not for the subniches and phrases. I didn’t want to get into trouble so I checked on the forum to see if it was ok to go ahead. And two people including Lisa who is an Immediate Edge student (the system used in The 30 Day Challenge) gave me the go ahead.

Which I thought was great news and I got my calculator out to work out how rich I’m gonna be, when it dawned on me that this MAY be stuff that kids want to learn. And if that’s the case, then there won’t be any money in this niche.

There are tons of free info sites on the subject, but very few info products. There are lots of physical books, but again, they could be being bought as gifts for kids.

As the numbers are a lot less than my main niche, I decided to create hub pages for this, but not fill them with content just yet. Just have them there to deter other IMers from using the niche.

73. The 30 Day Challenge Day 10

Friday August 10th (ignore what it says up there!)

Had to make loads of phone calls, but listened to today’s podcast and watched all the videos on the 30 Day Challenge. I did understand the bit Ed thought some people would find difficult, because I’ve heard of Squidoo and Hubpages.

The SEO tool that we all have as a Firefox add-on has been demonstrated to full effect.

Checked out the forum, so I knew I wasn’t missing anything important. Caro posted giving us a list of Web 2.0 sites we need to be checking out niches for. Asbjorn chatted with me on gmail, and showed me how the SEO tool helped with his niche. He’s found a great one with no SEO at all!

Started researching my niche so I can write articles on it, and create hubpages. I also need to be thinking what sort of product I want. As Pauline my team mate has experience in my niche, I have asked her if she would provide her voice for an interview. She is also American, and my niche only applies in the US so it wouldn’t hold much weight if I provided the voice on an audio product! I’m very pleased that Pauline has agreed.

72. 30DC Day 9

Listened to the podcast this morning and Ed said there was an amazing time saving tool by someone called Garrett, and I spent a long time trying to find it, but couldn't. Tonight they tell us we'll get it soon.

Photographed cars all day.

Today got much better on the Thirty Day Challenge! Yesterday I was throwing out phrases I though weren’t working, but I wasn’t paying attention when I was told to not just look at the graph in google Trends, which only shows above 200 a day, but to also look at the bar underneath that represents all searches in English.

Even the ones that don’t register on the graph can still be on the bar, and I found three extra viable phrases.

And I’ve narrowed that down to two as Ed told us to in today’s podcast. And even though I want to pursue both of them, I think it will be foolish to do both during the 30DC. The reason is, the top one indicates that it brings in over 450 searches a day and the second one brings in 85.

As I’ve gone and looked at lots of sites on the subject of my top niche, I am buzzing with ideas of how I can make the best site I can.

I’ve made an excel sheet with all my findings, and I’ve put the good phrases in green for Go!

I’ve got other phrases for the same niche, and therefore product, but the searches per day are much lower, so I’ll have them as back-ups for later. It’ll still be worth adding those figures to the top ones, so I can increase visitors, and get more sales, without building more product websites.

It’s 2am again and I still haven’t been for my evening walk, or done my stretches.

71. Thirty Day Challenge Days 7 and 8

Ed promised us ground breaking stuff in terms of Market Research on the Thirty Day Challenge, and yesterday and today, he did deliver!

Yesterday there were videos on how to use the free Wordtracker tool effectively in collecting data about any niche. Then we were shown how to do proper searches in Google to determine how many other sites use the same phrase. The objective is to be number one in google for a particular phrase, which we will learn how to achieve over the next two weeks. And because we are being shown the correct way to do market research, we will know what we need to do, to create at least one sale per day. I think I’m right in saying that 100 visitors will bring one sale a day on average, providing you provide good content on your site.

Today we were shown how to confirm Wordtracker’s numbers using Google Trends.

Because Ed’s 30DCIII and ‘Immediate Edge’ partner Dan Raine has a site that he knows brings in approximately 500 visitors every day, they are able to use Google Trends to do a comparison between Dan’s phrase and any potential niche phrase. If the graph for your own niche phrase is higher than Dan’s phrase, then you know you will get more than 500 visitors a day. Or if it’s half as high, you can safely assume you’ll get around 250 visitors.

Up to now, internet marketers have used Overture and Wordtracker and other tools to guess how many visitors any key phrase will get, but they are only estimates. Never before has anyone been able to know for sure. Thousands of people have built entire websites, populated it with tons of content for a niche they are told gets traffic, but then found out to their cost that there is no traffic.

Now we know how to take the guesswork out of it. So there is no excuse for creating products for markets that don’t exist. There is a lot of other criteria too for obtaining the perfect niche and key phrase, far too detailed to go into here, but when I saw how easy it was, I was quite relieved. Now Ed says this is the hardest part. And it’s all downhill from now on. I hope so!

I’m pleased to have found a niche and phrase that meets the criteria. In fact the graph indicates that I too will get around 500 visitors a day if I’m in top position on Google. I want a back-up though, so I’m continuing the market research until I find more viable phrases.

Today has produced a flurry of activity on the forums, with people asking questions about their own findings, without divulging their niches of course, for obvious reasons.

Some people say they have found 20 phrases that meet the criteria. They must be doing something I don’t know about then, because I’ve been hard at it for two days, constantly checking hundreds of phrases, and only found one that has under 25,000 competing sites, and more than 200 searches a day.

Actually 100 searches a day could be profitable, but Google Trends doesn’t show up searches that are that few, so there’s no way of confirming the numbers.

70. 30 Day Challenge Day 6

Did a quick shoot today of a tile store – it was beautiful to shoot because the roof had lots of skylights in, so there was plenty of natural light. Also the flurescent tubes were daylight balanced, instead of green – brilliant! The owner says ‘How else can the customer tell what colour the tiles are?’ My kinda guy!

Ordered my food shopping online, but didn’t buy fruit and veg because they always send poor quality stuff, and I’ve got a great new greengrocer across the road. Had to tell a few Film Club friends that I can’t make it tomorrow. My social life is on hold until I’ve made my $10 on the Thirty Day Challenge! Browsed and posted on the 30DCIII forum.

Made some posts on my Team’s Facebook Group, as I’ve been keeping a note of interesting IM sites. Later I wanted to send my team mates presents, and in Facebook, presents are tiny cartoon graphics, and they want ONE DOLLAR for each of them! So I sent my team mates links to sites I thought they’d like instead, which was much more info for free! But what a brilliant marketing idea – get millions of buddies worldwide to send teeny pics to each other and charge them a dollar a time for them! Amazing.

Watched today’s videos. They’re on YouTube now. Wish I could get iTunes to work properly. It’s not downloading them all. I wonder if I’ve got the wrong RSS url. Followed along with each of my niches, and got some interesting results.

Looking forward to learning the ‘blow your socks off’ advice Ed is going to give us tomorrow and Wednesday.

69. More ADHD symptoms

Still taking an age to read ‘Is That My Child?’ by Dr Robin Pauc. I’m just reading it when I can’t sleep, because I get on better with audio books, as I’m such a slow reader.

I’m still near the beginning and I got to the part where it says that kids with dyslexia and dyspraxia are sensititve to light, and that they also have difficulty holding a pen to write. It’s uncanny, as I see myself on every page.

I always have to wear sunglasses even when it’s cloudy, and the more tired I am, the worse my sensitivity to light is. And it wasn’t until I was twelve that I started to hold a pen properly, when a teacher taught me how to. Before then, I used to hold it as in the photo. And pressing down hard when writing is also characteristic of dyspraxia. I still do that!

The more I learn about the condition(s), the more I am convinced that I am a text book case. When I was diagnosed, they only touched the surface. To read on some websites that there are people who believe dyslexia is a myth, is quite astonishing, when people like Dr Pauc, and Wynford Dore have put years of study into the condition, and proved time and time again the definitive patterns that these kids follow. The non believers are simply ignorant.

68. Thirty Day Challenge Day 5

Only one of yesterday's 30 Day Challenge videos went into iTunes, and I had to watch the other one on the Google videos site, and that hurt my eyes as Google videos always reduce the quality, so it was difficult to read the small text on Ed’s screen within the video. I still watched the whole thing. But whenever I come across little things like that, I remember my goal, and think “is this stopping me from completing the 30DCIII?” And if the answer’s no, then I don’t worry.

It was a glorious day, so I got great landscape photos for my photography site. I'm totally digital now, but previously, all the best landscape images I had were prints that needed to be scanned. And we're talking hundreds!

Later I did what Ed showed us by going to Wordtracker and copying and pasting all the results for my chosen niches, so we can use them later for further market and keyword research.

I can’t help thinking I should be doing more work than I am, like setting up an aweber account, as I reckon we’ll have so much to do in the next few weeks, it may all get on top of me. No, I’ll wait til Ed suggests it – I’ll just make sure I put the hours in. Those doubts creeping in again…

One thing I can do now though is upgrade my hosting account, as at the moment I can only host one domain, and hopefully I’ll want to host several soon. I’ll do that tomorrow.

Browsed other 30DCIII blogs by participants and some video blogs. Also made my Sunday phone calls to family and friends.

67. My Photography Site

I can’t believe I have failed to mention my Photography website on this blog. It only took TWO years to get off the ground! Well, I bought the domain three years ago, but have only got round to building it recently. Asbjorn helped me with the FTP – I had a major FTP phobia, which was just silly.

It’s quite outrageous that the only other sites I have are Blogger blogs, so I don’t buy hosting for them. But this is my first actual website that I pay hosting for. That’s shocking considering I’m supposed to have been learning internet marketing for three years.

Anyway it’s finally up - woohoo! - at www.AmpersandPhotography.co.uk I think (hope) my photography site demonstrates how clever I am (at photography, not web design), whereas this blog demonstrates how daft I am! Better not let my clients see this blog!

66. TDCIII Day 4

I’m still only getting Day 3’s material on the Thirty Day Challenge, but that’s ok. I listened to the podcast then watched the video, after I went back over Day 2’s videos following along, going to Google groups and Ebay hotlists. I couldn’t find any pet owner groups, and that surprised me. I made sure I did a thorough search. I’m just interested because I want someone to take over my dog blog, as I don’t have time. I figure paying an enthusiast will be better than paying someone on elance or rentacoder. But I don’t need a group on Google to find someone.

After watching Ed’s technorati video, and following along, I found a site written by a Stumble Upon expert who reckons your Adsense account will be banned if you stumble your own sites, and get too many people to stumble them in a short period of time. It seems this happens because Google just think you’re commiting click fraud, as your ads are clicked on a lot more than they previously were. I guess that’s not a problem for me at the moment, but something to consider.

Only went out to buy fruit from the new shop over the road. I was working away all day, and thinking of more and more ideas. Hope it doesn’t take me long to find a suitable killer niche. Loads of people are following me on Twitter – haven’t a clue who they are! And I keep forgetting to update it, and I shouldn’t, because you can use the url address bar – it’s so easy!

Forgot to ring people to tell them when my 40th do is. And it needs to be soon, or there’ll only be about four people turn up!

65. 30 Day Challenge Day 3

Checked my emails this morning, and Lisa confirmed on Facebook that it was her in the photo, and she added a comment, so she mustn't mind me using it. She reminded me that she won the trip to the Aston Martin racing day with Yanik Silver.

Had to meet a new client and check out his stock. This took most of the day, so I just watched two of yesterday’s videos again on the 30DC. I kept pausing them and did exactly what Ed did, just to satisfy myself that I could. Last year Caro told me that she watched the videos twice, then did the task herself, and went back to the videos as and when she needed to. That seems to work for me too.

And Ed has highlighted the cursor so it’s easy to follow along. I kept having to force myself to not go off and look at more niches, as more ideas came to me. I just wrote the ideas down and plan to check them out tomorrow.

Didn’t look at today’s stuff, as the UK only got them quite late anyway, as they were released lunchtime in the US. So I’ll go to town on them tomorrow. I think a lot of the month I’ll be a day behind, as I can usually get more work done in the mornings, but that won’t be a problem.

BTW, I’m changing the formats of the titles so they’re different versions of the phrase 30 Day Challenge on purpose, so that whatever people type in, they have a chance of finding me. I typed in ‘30DCIII blog’ the other day, and mine was the only one that showed up!

64. 30DC Day 2

Had lots of photos to edit. Found that I recognised one of the participants in the challenge, from one of my seminar photos. So I uploaded it to Facebook and asked her to confirm if it was her or not.

My 30 Day Challenge team mates responded to my discussion on my Facebook group post. Pauline’s not well, so we may get together next week, but it’ll be more beneficial by then as we will have started properly by then.

Ed asked us to think of seven markets, no more no less. So all I had to do was consult my book of ideas, where I have over 200 of them. But they were ideas for products, so I was able to edit them down to about 10 broad markets, and within those, 65 more targeted markets.

Slightly more than seven then. So I picked my seven favourite ones, that I think would be interesting to do. And then I can go back to my bigger list as and when I need to.

I spent all day at the computer, and missed my morning walk. (So I had an extra long walk tonight, then watched more of the videos whilst stretching.

63. Thirty Day Challenge Day 1

Took the day off and browsed the forum whilst waiting for the Thirty Day Challenge to begin. Followed a link on one post to info about Facebook. Spent a couple of hours looking at FAQs and Facebook tutorials. Was particularly interested to learn that you can advertise and sell directly from Facebook.

Watched more participants’ videos and video blogs about the 30DCIII. Some are really clever.

Still managed to fit in some photo editing before lunch. Then I found the Stumble Upon Getting Started Guide, so I read that even though I had set out to create a Facebook group for our Team on the 30DC.

The first thing I saw on the TDC blog for today was the TDC toolbar, which I downloaded for Firefox. Later I downloaded Day 1’s video, as it didn’t automatically download in iTunes for some reason, then I listened to the Podcast.

Was reassured when I heard Ed say he was going to go slowly! From what he was saying, it sounds like we will be making AV products and using video instead of a sales letter. Hope I can grasp all the technical stuff.

As I’m 40 in the first week in October, THAT’s what Plan B will be: To make $10 online whilst still in my 30s! But we’ll cross that bridge…

Later I watched Pauline’s YouTube videos about the model railway, and had to keep disciplined not to go watching lots of others by folks I don’t know.

This evening Facebook was driving me nuts, but I persevered and went back over Dan’s video about it, then was finally able to create a group, and send my team mates a message. Also uploaded some photos on there.