I’ve asked Sue Hodgson to write this guest post today. You might know her as Groobers in the 30 day challenge The topic is perfect for keeping you on track and guiding and supporting you while you build those 30dc blogs and move forward. And you’ll want to read it right now or you could turn into a pumpkin and you’ll soon find out why

While doing the 30DC last year I stumbled upon Isha a funny, intelligent, helpful lady who has now become a true friend (Isha: I paid her to say that :p)

She and I enjoy a weekly meeting over skype where we try to keep ourselves on task, and help each other out with problems that have arisen.

Anyhoo when Isha suggested a brainstorming group that she was a member of I decided to check it out.

I’d been receiving a weekly newsletter from Lynn Terry of ClickNewz.com for a while now but had never gotten around to checking out her Q & A webinar.

So that Tuesday along I went and boy I was blown away, people were linking to their sites and Lynn was brainstorming with them giving honest critiques and helpful tips on how to improve them.

Isha’s recommendation plus Lynn’s open, honest, helpful way of dealing with people made it an easy decision for me to join.

Here are a few reasons why:

I wanted/needed a place to ask my one hundred and one questions that arise on a daily basis, especially when it comes to affiliate marketing. I knew that Lynn with her vast experience as a super affiliate coupled with her brainstorming elite members would make the perfect place to learn.

Getting almost instantaneous answers to my questions from other Elite Members is a fantastic plus. I don’t think Lynn ever sleeps but she assures me she does “six hours a night and a two hour nap in the day”! If that’s what it does for you I think I’ll be trying the nap thing out myself.

One of my recent questions which was answered with resource links, suggestions and great tips was on having more than one affiliate on your site: I put up my site link and basically got a one on one critique by Lynn (fabulous).

Quality information and exclusive resources, I found it all here on the elite forum.

With a group of like minded individuals keeping each other accountable and on task, sounds like a no brainer that you want to be involved.

Heads up: it’s closing at midnight EST today for a while so make that quick, don’t turn into a pumpkin check out her post here

Collage Picture Frames

I just found out that I earnt £39.31 = US$56.91 between 22nd and 30th December – an even better Christmas prezzie than the 83 cents I that I found out about on Christmas day. Yippee!

Peeps who know that I’ve been in the 30dc for some time may be surprised at the slowness of my achievement.  What most readers (if I have any) won’t know is that I have what some peeps call “disabilities” (I like to think “differentability”) which kinda slow me down and I was only able to earn a negligible amount for years owing to pain.

Getting into the swing of being disciplined about the 30dc work has taken some time, and I also had a lot of software, hardware, and allthatjazzware issues that have driven me all but crazy.

In the past few days I was just at the point of throwing a few more ads and posts at this microniche before throwing up my arms at it and moving on to other keyword pastures – it hadn’t occurred to me that a link on just one post might have earnt me some dosh when all the visitors to my site seem to have been me, a couple of friends and a few peeps scattered between India, Turkey, Singapore and the US – I mean Google Insights told me that all the keyword searches were in the UK, so I went and purchased a .co.uk domain when I wasn’t able to get the .com domain. Well, the keyword is an item of clothing, and not a luxury item at that – so who in the UK in their right mind would want to purchase common clothing items from the US and also deal with the exchange rate – so the .co.uk thing seemed like the right thing at the time.

It turns out that one person who clicked through the link bookmarked the website that I affiliate with and visited it several times up to and including 30th December and bought £561- worth of goodies – who’dathortit?  I thought that with all my trials and tribs I’d missed the Christmas rush. Yes – it was one of those keywords that Market Samurai shows high in Autumn (Fall to some of you) through to December and then – ahem – a bit flat the rest of the year.  Well, that looked ok in September when I started cookin this microniche but it was beginning to look a bit past it and possibly yucky by about 23rd December.

You could say that I was a bit lucky that that one peep (that must be the singular of peeps – no?) bought so much.  Another way of looking at it is that I was a bit unlucky with the trials and tribs, and that I now know that this niche doesn’t just attract a few down-and-outs looking for a cheap bargain.

The Google Analytics weren’t telling me much more than the fact that I click on my site a lot when I’m correcting naughtie issues that the site has with its widgets and wodgets and the like (and why *do* the posts lose their line-spacing!!!?!), because – well how do you keep track of every time you look at your site as you’re correcting things?  The annoying thing is that even though I’m being careful to stay at my site for at least a few minutes at a time and clicking through to other pages, Google Analytics is telling me that the average time I’m spending at the site is just a couple of minutes, which is just not true.

Of the peeps other than me who visited my site on the click-through date (19th December), their networks are called “centrica staines middlesex uk”, “ip pools”, and “road runner holdco llc”.  Google Analytics tells me that each of the first two stayed at my site for zero seconds, and that they were bounces. The last visited for 4 seconds and looked at two pages.  My money is on the Staines Middlesex “bounce”, but who knows…

I won the zillion day challenge!

Isha

PS Yeh, yeh, yeh – I was already crazy, but you know what I mean…

Technorati Tags: 30dc, affiliate earnings

Over the Christmas period I discovered that this was not so!

If you’ve not already joined Technorati and “claimed” your blog, then you want to do it now.

Join Technorati here.

Isha

Technorati Tags: blog, join technorati, technorati, technorati tags

On one of my blogs I installed and activated a free plug-in called the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer which, amongst other things, gives you a ping log.

Since I hadn’t posted to the blog for a few days, I immediately clicked on “Ping now” and afterwards looked at the ping log. I was surprised to see that the overwhelming majority of the urls that are in the ping list were not in fact pinged. My log is available to peruse in two screenshots, here and here.

The MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer has a forum, which I duly perused.

On that forum I learnt that there is a ping list that suman, a forum moderator, recommends. In fact that list consists of just 6 urls:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://ping.myblog.jp

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://bblog.com/ping.php

I gather this is on the grounds that pingomatic itself pings a lot of urls and it aint really a good idea to have duplicate pings. There is in fact a longer list on that webpage that can be pinged if you don’t want to rely on pingomatic.

Isha

PS Looks like the mot du jour is “peruse”. Someone who uses a perruque.

Technorati Tags: maxblogpress, ping list, ping optimizer, pinging, wordpress direct, wpd

So far for one microniche I have well over 100 ‘words’ that I use for google alerts, twitter searches and the like. That’s a lot of twitter searches to create, click on the feed icon, and then bring the feed into the FF room.

But there’s no need to do all that.

Each twitter search feed for “your keyword” is of the form:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22your+keyword%22

where %22 represents the quote mark: ” .

I find Word a handy program for sorting the list into manageable alphabetical order and then arranging into the above format, but any text writer that has the ability to sort and has a decent ‘find and replace’ facility will do. The following notes refer to the use of Word, starting with a keyword list that has a paragraph (carriage return) between each item and no quote marks in the list. You might find it useful to keep a spare copy of the list at every stage of the following manipulation.

Paste your list into Word, highlight the list and click on the Table menu’s AZ Sort (or press Alt+a followed by s on your keyboard) to sort them into alphabetical order. Choose “Sort by Paragraphs”

Again highlight the list. Press Control+H to bring up the ‘Find and Replace’ dialogue window.

In the ‘Replace’ tab, in the box beside ‘Find what’, put:

^p

In the ‘Replace with’ box put:

%22^phttp://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22

Click on ‘Replace All’.

When asked ‘Do you want to search the remainder of the document?’ click ‘No’. Paste:

http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%22

in front of the first item in the list.

Again highlight the whole list and press Control+H.

In the ‘Replace’ tab, in the box beside ‘Find what’, this time simply press the space bar once.

In the ‘Replace with’ box put:

+

Now go to the FF room into which the twitter search feeds will be imported. Click on ‘Import site’. Click on the top left item, ‘Blog’.

Paste the first item of the list into the box and click on ‘Import Blog’, then the next item, then the next etc.

I haven’t found a way to automate this last part of the process, but the whole operation certainly beats the alternative method.

Isha

P.S. If you use WPD and ever change the title of a post, never ever go back into the post using the WPD interface…

Technorati Tags: friendfeed, FriendFeed room, import twitter search feed, twitter search, twitter search feed