Too much judging – already!

Pish – no seismic videos in WordPress.com when posting direct from flock Never mind. Basically what was here was Ed doing his Kitchen Video thing saying “DON’T judge your ideas yet” Keep it simple!

I fell right into the first trap without even trying LOL!  Luckily I didn’t trash all the other ideas I had so they were still in VoodooPad and I could retrieve them.
Anyway I have my ideas, 5 shared with my team and 28 or so spare ones
Waiting for the awesomeness to continue with the release of Market Samurai…

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: 30Day Challenge 2008, ideas Day 2

Day One 2008 Thirty Day Challenge

So here I am back in the attic posting my Day 1 reflections.
I watched the videos and thought the Symphony of 4 parts was great. I loved the legal pad graphic, simple but perfect visualisation there. It spoke to me
Niches
I did as I was told, selected 5 or 6 of my niche ideas and subscribed to google alerts and feeds for them. I didn’t need to do that for my current stuff as it’s already done.
I’m a bit dubious about my niches but we’re not judging. We’re going to let the numbers do that for us.
I just chose the ones I was most interested in, which is such a relief after  ending up with boring ones last year! I simply wouldn’t do that again. 
My plan is to work with a couple of ideas related to my current niches and try to find a totally new one as well.
My current stuff is UK market focussed so I’m going to aim for a US market for the new one. Exciting eh?
Tools

browser
Not sure if I’ll stick with Flock, I might revert to Camino. Blogging from here is OK but I like Mars Edits too much.
twitter
Using tweetdeck to set up a 30 DC group seems the way to go for me so that’s done
Friendfeed
All done and dusted find me at lindiop
Also joined the  30 DC for the UK Room

Teams
I’ve joined one Uk ish one that’s using a bulletin board and one that seems to be dormant for now. We’ll see.
I’ve also found the Digital Natives  a team of home schoolers who are an interesting bunch.

Time for salad making, laters folks

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Tags: 30day challenge,

Escape from Spamalot

Yesterday I decided to move this blog away from all the nasty spam that has grown up in the un-cared for 30 Day Challenge Blog WordPress Multi-user site. If I were them I’d probably nuke the whole thing. They never tended it much anyway. I’m not sure they really ‘got’ the whole idea of a blogging learning community and forgot what the point of the blogs were. This strikes me as typical of the whole thing, to be honest. At least they never got round to having a wiki. 

Here on WordPress the blog will be safe, as I’ve no intentions of monetising it directly anyway. 

Avatars

I’m looking round for a cool, spidery avatar and other atticy (is that a word?) bits and bobs to personalise this space and identity before the Challenge gets going. 

Teams

I’ve not had any luck with teams yet. One rejected me for being female! I was so surprised I just accepted it. Neanderthals! Actually that’s an insult to what is obviously a superior species!

Still trying but I do wonder if it’s worth the effort. Last year’s were a dead loss mostly, with at least one member of my so called team refusing to socially post my stuff because my niche ‘wasn’t cool enough’ for her. Oh yes, and waiting till I’d done hers before revealing this.

Men?

Women?

Sheesh I think I’ll stick to arachnids – maybe I can find a team of spiders doing the Challenge

Yawn, stretch, it is nearly that time again

Pre-season 30 Day Challenge 2008 has started, ideas are floating round, and I’m looking for a team.

Last year – I made my $10 dollars from the Challenge in the first week of September and watched it dwindle away again but hey no probs

By the end of November I was making money from a couple of other sites  we used the 30 Day techniques to establish.  Now my partner and I are building up a good quality authority site for one  niche and I have another couple of niches I work on on my own.

Looking forward to this year’s challenge and learning lots more. The key for me is to take what I learn here and adapt it to my situation.

I’m not a newbie anymore and this sure isn’t Kansas!

More learning, tired now.

So rather than rush off and put everything I’ve got so far into a blog I decided to be a bit more experimental. I had a good look at ezine articles. Not as straight-forward as I had first imagined.

I did manage to find some quite detailed guidelines about how to write them, what makes a good one and what not to do. Most of this came via the ezine blog. This has to be essential reading. The guide tells you exactly what makes a good article in their terms, exactly what they think is good content. So that’s helpful.

I also found out from the ezine terms and conditions that you mustn’t link to your affiliate scheme anywhere in your article. Not even in the resource box. You can link to your web site, blog, squidoo or whatever there but not your affiliate. Niet. Nada. So I won’t do that then! I think Rob could have made that a bit clearer in the video.

Finally I signed up for and had a good look round Squidoo. I read lots of lenses on all sorts of topics to get a feel for what needs to go there.  So tomorrow is a big writing day. Blogger, Squidoo and Ezine. Three focussed and quite different articles.

Blogger gets 4 or 5 of the shorter more topical blog posts re-worked from tumblr, Squidoo gets some sort of longer article listing article probably with images and Ezine gets something more detailed. Phew!

Too tired to do any more now….what a day!

Content writing

Whilst all around rages chaos I’ve just spent a happy hour writing my 3 articles. Smug or what? Just goes to show if you read enough about any subject you can get interested! Powerful learning technique, immersion. How could I have forgotten that?

I’ve abandoned the whole Bloglines/ googlenotebook/docs idea. Just too clunky and too far from my practice. I gave up on Bloglines a few years ago becuase it drove me nuts. Why did I think that had changed? I returned to my old faithful NetNewsWire and set up a host of feeds for obscure topic related blogs. Trust me these blogs are so obscure google doesn’t even know they exist. Thank you wordpress.com tag surfer and Technorati search! Then I used the ‘post to VoodooPad’ short cut (shift/apple/;)when I hit stories that took my interest and wrote my 2- 300 words on each.  1000 words or so later I stopped because I’ve got cold toes. 

Pay it Back

Oh and then I used social poster to post some of them (the original stories not mine) to relevant sites (mostly reddit, newscape, indianpad and stumbleupon) thus building my own reputation for the subject on these sites. I didn’t use del.icio.us as I use that a lot professionally and I didn’t want to confuse my network

Just waiting now to see what’s in store for us today…

Good Content vs Spam?

What is Good Content vs Spam? – Thirty Day Challenge Forums

There’s a really good discussion on the forum about exactly what is the difference between Spam and content. Caro has been very clever and got the participants to start defining what they think is good content.  It’s well worth a read. Some of the people in the thread are professional writers and there are some quite detailed suggestions for making your articles better. Even if, like Karl, you don’t like forums

As of this morning my Tumblr is still up. If it had gone I don’t think I’d take it personally, it would probably been deleted because of guilt by association rather than anything else. I have a fairly successful edublog site that I know delivers great content. For its niche it ranks 1 on google. On it I have discreet google adsense and  Amazon Astore ads. It doesn’t earn that much. More than $10 dollars a month   The point is that what I am doing with it, republishing and commenting on other people’s cc licenced images would break Tumblr’s terms and conditions. Actually I know a couple of educationalist who were starting to use Tumblr for schools who are also at risk.

So back to writing my 3 a day – oh and finding another new niche. I had one crash and burn because of Web2.0 competition.

Tumbled

Well – there’s a turn up for the books! All those Tumblr blogs vanished even some that I looked at last night that had excellent content. Better than mine. As I said in my last post I took some time to tidy mine up and add a bit more value. I’d just finished when my love came galloping into the room.

“Back up your Tumblr blog!” he cried. “They are all vanishing!”

“Nah,” says I, “mine’s fine”.

And so it is. It’s still there tonight, with its 6 assorted posts and one clearly marked link to an Amazon Astore in the sidebar. It’s got a chatty, newsy tone and it’s all about a pretty obscure subject. I wonder how long it will last?

Two new blogger blogs and a back up later . Time for more wine – I might just survive this challenge but will my liver?

Here comes the sherriff!

IT”S NOT ABOUT TUMBLR SHEESH – Thirty Day Challenge

It’s not about TUMBLR and if your not putting quality, brilliant information that delivers supreme and real value to the reader thereA pox on your house.

I mean it – I hate spam, I hate get rich quick, this is not what the thirty day challenge is about. I hate arbitrage opportunities This is about creating a brilliant business one step at time – slowly and surely. Putting in effort as opposed to cash. So that people have a chance at doing something online without getting exploited by bastards who will take a couple of grand from you and teach you something that could never work.

Make your content EXCELLENT, Make it USEFUL – If it’s salesey you will get banned and I’ll be the first one clapping my hands with joy when it happens to you.

This is about creating a REAL, SUSTAINABLE, ECOLOGICAL and ETHICAL business.

Full Stop.

The man is 100% stone guarenteed right! Back to thinking about what my traffic wants to find rather than what I can scrape together.

Day 17 – The Challenge Hots Up

YouTube – Thirty Day Challenge – Day 17 – The Challenge Hots Up

Today’s show totally stolen by the gorgeous Annabelle, a true star What with her, and spotting album covers, er what was Ed on about? Anyone?