Day 5 of the 30 Day Challenge – not very far into the program! Better get moving 🙂 …
Day 5 took a while to get to because of the extra time I spent over measuring the markets on the earlier days. I am so glad I did this. The amount of things learned from just checking the competition has been made it worthwhile. I will be spending a little time here and there constantly looking at all the competitive strategies that others are using as I go forward. I am sure I only touched the surface but it is so easy to get absorbed in the details so balance of time is needed.
Content is King – or Kong – or Key – well its pretty important
Day 5 is all about content and is probably the biggest headache for anybody who comes to Internet marketing. Fresh and unique content is so important to the process so you never get Google slapped for having too many duplicates.
How to write a unique article
Caro (and Rose the cat) covers the subject that will have most people running. I realised I hated writing some time ago and tried to force myself to do it more, hence my blogging – my blatant boring articles are not through any evil intention I assure you, I just wanted to get used to writing and more importantly writing quicker. I always maintained that I would work on the quality later – hence my interest in studying the Gary Halbert Newsletters, a great source.
For me, the choice of going headlong into Internet marketing was mainly driven by my need to learn how to do this properly – to communicate ideas to people. My passion driving this is at Beyond One World – something that I fully intend to go back to once I have met a few challenges. I tried really hard to make what I was talking about readable there, make it as interesting as the subject ‘I knew full well’ was – but I failed … Seemingly all the time. Writing is such an important skill. The keyboard is mightier than the bomb. Oh … That was just awful … See what I mean 🙂
My confession too is that with my hatred for writing I used to develop quite sophisticated sripting software to do it for me. I saw and used many of the other ‘content creation’ applications that were around at the time. Well this was so much better. It was (is) called QKSite and it used the ActiveX Scripting Engine to do the hard work and I kept adding and adding more integration and template functionality to it. It was fantastic…
However, that’s all I did with it, I never used it!!! Many months of work that I must go back to sometime and salvage, I am sure it’ll be good later for retrieving stuff from the various data warehouses around the Internet and producing readable output but I don’t have the time for it now???
I know … Boooooorrrrriiiiiinnng …
But I loved adding capability to it … OK … Enough of that.
Anyway, unique content. No cutting and pasting 🙂 Avoid that and you are more than half way there…
The most difficult thing I found was to just ‘write it’ – once I started it took a while to tidy up and I used to get ‘really’ tired after each paragraph even. I am glad to say it is getting easier. I don’t think anyone can do it wrong if they follow Caro’s advice and just do it. You can tidy it up or get better as you go along.
I guess the important bit for Day 5 going forward is that you need to 7 to 10 articles written that are about 300-400 (500?) words within the week.
Go for it…
How to work out your domain name
Gurubob gave some domain name setup advice and listed the following important suggestions:
- Have the theme keyword in the domain name – gives a Google SERPs advantage
- Get theme keyword in .com, .net or .org suffix in that order
- If all gone – add hyphens in the name
- If all gone – use suffix (preferable) or prefix to the keyword (e.g. Blog, site, website, my, your)
This is an area of debate in many places of the web – though suggestions 1 and 2 always stand.
He also recommends http://www.domainsbot.com – I always preferred http://www.domaintools.com but I would be interested if any else has found a better site.
Buying the Domain Name and Web Hosting
Well some money has to be spent. However it is an asset that can be sold on later. Nez (Andrew Nesbitt) recommended Hostgator for domain and ‘baby’ hosting (Huh! No money off coupon!) – again I am really happy with Dreamhost, but hey, let’s follow the program and try it out.
OK – Did it and got a bonus of $1.99 🙂
All went smoothly, email came back in about 3 minutes. Added an Outlook task to remind me to redeem a $50 Adword coupon 🙂 in the welcome mail.
I must remember to set up another to remind me not to ignore the first task!