Archive for January, 2009

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMmwCMmgmkQ[/youtube]

I decided to take a little tour of the Commodore stuff I currently have. Audio quality is a result of TheFlip’s compression (grrrrr)

I have written about the Thirty Day Challenge for about two years now, but one of the things I always promised myself I would do (but haven’t) is provide a day-to-day, totally transparent view of the niche I was tackling and the associated trials, research, pitfalls, and overall calamity that ensues.

One of the pitfalls of trying any kind of affiliate marketing on the Internet is there are thousands of “gurus” out there who claim to be making a lot of money selling other people’s (or their own) products, but nobody wants to “give up” their niche, strategy, or the web site(s) that is making them the money.   Many fear being copied, and so the cycle never ends of wannabe’s, semi-haves, and gurus.

But this time I will be absolutely transparent.  You can follow my progress (or lack of) the thirty day challenge by simple following along here on my blog at troyrutter.com.  I will show you the niches I am exploring, the research data, and eventually the adsense data (what I *can* show you anyway).

Nothing hidden.

So here we go!

Welcome to the Thirty Day Challenge!

The first few days of the Thirty Day Challenge are watching introductory videos and getting things started.   After filling out the form to get registered, you will be logged into your own personal Dashboard that sends you into different parts of the site.  Tonight I am going straight into Training.  BUT – I am skipping past the Daily Training and going to the 13 Pre-Season lessons below the daily training.

• Install Flock web browser
• Watch a bunch of flock videos

I have used Firefox religiously for many years, so switching to a new web browser, just for this seems a little odd.  And frightening.  But I will stay the course and hope there is a reason for it.  The first video is 40 minutes long and provides an overview of all of the preseason materials.

The rest of the tutorials on Flock go over several of the plugins that are recommended for doing the challenge.   They are too numerous to go over one by one here, but in the interest of following directions, I installed each of them before going on to the next pre-season tutorial.

One of the rgeatest Adsense teachers out there, Joel Comm, says that in order to reach the “next level” of working with Adsense, you need a mentor.  Somebody who has had success with the program, and can lead you through the ups and downs of building your niche web sites and content-based web sites up and optimizing them for Adsense.

So, I am officially looking for an adsense mentor.

I have read all the books, tried all the programs (for creating VRE, niche sites, etc) and have all the practical knowledge on building web sites, but am missing “something” – I am looking for a mentor to help talk me through making it to the next level of Adsense earnings.

Precisely, I am looking for:

a) a 1-on-1 daily coach available for email and IM communication
b) Someone currently making more than $1,000/mo. in Adsense earnings
c) Someone who preferably has already mentored others into achieving the $1,000/mo or more target
d) Someone who wants a great testimonial if they can help me meet that goal

In return, I will give a great testimonial to the person who helps me meet my goal of $1,000/mo.   I will also “pay it forward” and pass on the knowledge to another, thus carrying on the tradition of the mentor relationship.

In addition, I will promise to donate 15% of my Adsense earnings each month to charitable causes in my community.

I have already asked Joel Comm himself, but I think he is too busy, and that may have been too ambitious.  If you are interested, or know somebody, please direct them to this post and comment to contact me.   Comments are always moderated, so only I will see it.

Won’t you be mine, would you be mine, won’t you be…. my Adsense Mentor?

You might expect blog posts written with the wordpress app for the iPhone to be relatively short and sweet, however for me, my iPhone posts are oftentimes the most verbose of my postings.

Why is this?

For one, if I even consider blogging on the iPhone, I generally have a lot of time on my hands. It’s not that the app or process is difficult, it’s just that if I am out and about and have time to blog, it’s for a reason.   I must be stuck someplace like an airport or conference I’m not interested in for the idea to blog on the iPhone even to cross my mind.

But blogging from the iPhone does have a down side for me. I like to publish a post after writing, and many times I have written a fairly impressive post and then reviewed it on the iPhone screen, only to later find numerous spelling errors that I overlooked when tapping it out on the wordpress iPhone app.

If you have you wordpress blog automatically send out a tweet in Twitter , you can have hundreds if not thousands of people read your blog entry before you find all of your spelling errors. And a blog with a lot of errors is not only hard to read, it is also unprofessional.

So after a few months of occassional blogging on the iPhone, I am forced to think back to high school paper writing, and the teacher who said write it out, let it set, then edit and revise. The best process for me when using the iPhone for blogging is writing the post, saving it as a draft and then reviewing and publishing later.

In fact that is what I did with this post!

Any comments from other bloggers? Do you use remote posting for short posts or have you written a longer post on your iPhone or even via email?  Do you publish right away, or does it depend merely on the time-sensitive nature of the post?