The Challenge 2010

The Challenge 2010: Module 7/Day 2 – Consequences Of Your Decision

Gurubob is taking you through a crucial video today. As today is the day you begin to contemplate what you want to do moving forward. Gurubob is going to outlay what some of the alternatives are, and the consequences to you with each decision.

Now please do not be daunted by the word 'consequences'. It is more that we want you to have your eyes open, as this is about a decision that only you can make for yourself. And some of you are still not at that point of making a decision, and that's OK.

I know that this part brings up a lot of uncertainty, and begs the question: "What should I do?" from many of you. That's why it's important for you to listen to what Gurubob has to say today. He outlays options if you decide NOT to go forward, as there are still options that still can generate a reward. YAY!

And he touches on what you can do if you DO decide to go forward. And there are plenty of things you can do to build on what you already have. Double YAY!

And whatever decision you make, it will be the right one. If the traffic is not there right now, and/or it's not converting. If you have been working on it in the time frame we've taught everything. Then the result is what it is. It's black & white, not gray. So I encourage you to resist holding onto what is time to let go of.

And for those that have something solid to move forward with, we will be covering
options in greater details in coming days.

Basically, we want you to take an objective look at your site. Un-stick yourself from any attachment, and then begin to go through the process of what you may want to do next with it. As there are just so many great options available to you now.

We will be taking you through the first of these options tomorrow!

Consequences Of Your Decision Regarding Your Micro-Niche

Yesterday you found out how to evaluate the performance of your WPD micro-niche website with a view to making a decision on whether it is commercially viable or not. Today, you are going to look at potential options based on what your decision will be. Bear in mind though, that before making any judgements regarding your site you need to have a minimum of 200 views of your site or affiliate offer in order to see a defined result.

Today's lesson acts as an introduction to the options available to you, and what the consequences of your decision might be. In the simplest of terms you have one main decision to make, to decide to go forward with the micro-niche, or decide to not go forward. There are a number of options available to you regardless of the decision you make, which are outlined by GuruBob. Further into the module some of the options will be discussed and explored in greater detail.

If you decide not to go forward in your micro-niche, GuruBob outlines three of the main options to consider. One of the first options GuruBob introduces is to consider selling your micro-niche site using the service Flippa.com. GuruBob explains the advantages of this and also points out that this option will be covered in more detail later in the module.

Another option discussed is maintaining your site with a view to use it as a source of backlinks in future projects, or if the niche is of personal interest it may be something you want to continue with out of interest. The third option covered is to decide that you simply want to discontinue the site, cancel the webhosting and not renew the domain. These are all valid options based on what your needs and interests are.

If you decide that your micro-niche is commercially viable and you do want to go forward, again, you have a number of options at your disposal. Unlike the options for not going forward, in this scenario it will be more desirable to engage in more than one option.

The first and most obvious option is to increase your traffic through better rankings. You will do this by creating more backlinks and by posting on a wider range of relevant keywords as well as continuing to post on your core group of keywords that you started with.

Once you have increased your traffic, the next option to look at is to improve your sales conversion by building a list or adding additional monetization strategies to your site.

The last option to consider, after you have increased your traffic and improved your sales conversion, is increasing customer value. Here you would consider developing your own product, which means higher margins for you, in whatever medium you feel suits your market and that you are comfortable with.

All of the above options are things you need to consider when you make your decision regarding your micro-niche. Some of these options will be covered in further detail during the remainder of Module 7. Some of these are Flippa.com for selling your site, and finding additional keywords using Market Samurai and Google Analytics.

Action For The Day - Take some time to fully understand the likely consequences of your decision whether you choose to go forward or not in your chosen micro-niche.

Related Resources

You can find all of the related resources to today's content below.

Module 7 Discussion
Click here to visit the discussion forum for Module 7 of The Challenge.

Decision Assessment Criteria
Make sure you are ready to make a proper decision as outlined in the Day One content.

Handy Tip - If you have made your decision based on the results of the performance of your micro-niche, do not act yet. The remainder of Module 7 covers a few of the key options available to you in depth.

The Challenge 2010: Module 7/Day 1 – Why make A Decision About Your Niche

We're on the home stretch! Can you believe it? Today we have two videos for you. Ed starts the ball rolling, and then  welcomes back another guest presenter, Caro McCourtie  Ed's  video is a must see to start you off. As I want you to get the message, which Caro also reiterates. The results you see with your website is NOT an indictment on you. And it does not mean YOU have failed,  in fact you're passed with flying colors!

You've gotten this far, and truly tested a keyword phrase, spending time upfront to save you month's and years of time and money on something that may not be bringing you the returns.

That's a big deal you know!

Caro is going to go through the numbers you are to use to assess your blogs performance. They have criteria for both Adsense and your Affiliate program. And with this criteria, there's no gray area. It is what it is. And if the numbers do not look strong, that's OK, because as the weeks go on, we'll be introducing more options to you of what your next steps may be.

it's pretty easy to work out, once you know the key metric we use. They call it 'bad numbers' as it's a nice, achievable result, that if you do not get with your blog, means it's time to explore options…

Oh, how convenient, we'll be showing you EXACTLY what these are, as the week progresses.

 
Click here for Ed's video "Decision"

Click here for Assessment Criteria video

Making A Decision About Your Micro-Niche

Today's lesson is a very important one. Today you will be looking at the importance of making a decision about your micro-niche. You will evaluate the performance of your site over the past week and decide if the micro-niche looks profitable enough to continue on with. Regardless of what kind of data you have though, you have a number of options available to you.

When it comes down to making those decisions it's crucial to have the right mindset. Usually when people make decisions, they make decisions using gut feel or based on emotions, not facts. You have spent the past few modules working and creating something so that your decision can be based on one thing, numbers. Let the numbers judge, not you..

Regardless of what kind of numbers you have though, you have a number of options available to you. If the numbers favor you then you can continue on in that niche. If not, you could sell your site (which we'll show you how to do), you can restart the process (you'll be surprised how fast it is the second time around), or any of a number of possible ways to move forward.

The key thing to remember here is that regardless of the outcome, it is not a personal indictment on you. You have performed a test and received a result. That's it. It's natural to feel a level of disappointment, but never take it to heart. The reality is that the majority of tests you will run will not work. The flipside of that is that when the test does work, it works really well.

So, how do you prepare to make your decision? Caro outlines your criteria for assessment in order to make a decision. The guide to use for the criteria is that what you are looking is a Click Through Rate (CTR) of 0.5%, or 1 click for every 200 page impressions.

Firstly looking at Google Adsense, there are two key questions to ask regarding your site. 1: Are there any clicks at all? 2: What is the Click Through Rate (CTR)? A CTR of 0.5% is the minimum acceptable CTR for you to have in order to stay with the niche. You should look at the number of page impressions that your site had compared to how many clicks of the Google Adsense ads took place.

Looking at your affiliate product ad, again the minimum acceptable CTR is 0.5%. The data to look at is slightly different though. You need to look the number of views to the affiliate product page that has followed your link. This figure is the number of times people have clicked through to the affiliate page from your site, not views of a page on your site. For example, if 200 people have clicked the through to the affiliate product page from your ad and one person has bought that product from the affiliate website, that is a CTR of 0.5%. The appropriate data can be found by logging into your Google Adsense account as was demonstrated by Emily in Module 6.

To find the number of views of the affiliate product page that have come from your ad, you will need to login to the affiliate website itself, whether it's Amazon, Clickbank or one of the others. In your affiliate account it will show you the number of visits to the page from your ad.

Today is an observation day, not a taking action day. You will look at the performance of your site and collect your data, and you will obviously have a fair idea of the potential of your micro-niche. Having come to that conclusion, tomorrow's lesson will cover what your options are in detail, so do not take any action on the outcome of today's results until you have watched the lesson for Day 2.

Actions For The Day -

1. For Google Adsense: Find out how many page impressions your site had compared to the number of clicks from the ads on your site. Calculate the CTR.

2. For your affiliate product: Find out how many times the affiliate product website was visited compared to the number of sales those visits generated. Calculate the CTR.

3. Do not take any action based on your results until after tomorrow's lesson.

Related Resources

You can find all of the related resources to today's content below.

Google Adsense
Click here to sign up for a Google Adsense.

Google Adsense Support
Click here for support using Google Adsense.

Amazon Associates
Click here to visit Amazon Associates.

Amazon Associates Support
Click here for support with Amazon Associates.

Clickbank
Click here to visit Clickbank.

Clickbank Support
Click here for support with Clickbank.

Commission Junction
Click here to visit Commission Junction.

Commission Junction Support
Click here for support with Commission Junction.

PayDotCom
Click here to visit PayDotCom.

PayDotCom Support
Click here for support with PayDotCom.

Handy Tip - Remember that gut feeling and an emotional attachment to your micro-niche have no place in assessing the commerciality. If the performance of your micro-niche comes out at below a CTR of 0.5% (after 200 views), then that is a definitive result. The numbers never lie

The Challenge 2010: Module 6/Day 7 – Monetization Expectations

Monetization Expectations

Today is a short and sweet video (some of you may think, just like me ). I am reiterating a key point – this is just a test.

Not about building a business as yet.

And that regardless of the result (assessment comes in Module 7), everyone is truly a winner!  And congratulations to those that have already made their $1!  And again, you are ALL winners simply by being here still at this stage of the game. And not long to go now.

Enjoy your week off!

What To Expect In Monetizing Your WPD Micro-Niche Blog

The final day of Module 6 is about your expectations for monetization moving forward, deciding what is a good result for monetization and what is not a good result for monetization. The specifics of that will be covered in Module 7, but for now you have a week to let your WPD micro-niche blog sit and percolate.

Ed explains the importance of understanding that you are testing the commercial viability of your niche, not aiming to make a lot of money right off the bat. You need to remember this at all times. Whatever the results are that you achieve in the testing, you will be shown a variety of options in Module 7. None of your effort is wasted.

With that in mind, every opportunity you have to create another backlink, to do a free writing exercise, is time well spent. Take some time during the off week to hone those skills you've been learning since The Challenge started. Also, if there have been any lessons during The Challenge so far that have been unclear or presented a problem for you, the off week is the perfect time to revisit the lessons or seek support on The Challenge Forum.

Actions For The Day - Ensure that you have your Google Adsense and affiliate product ad showing correctly on your WPD micro-niche blog prior to the start of the off week to give you time to generate a sufficient amount of data.

Related Resources

You can find all of the related resources to today's content below.

The Challenge Forum
Click here to find support on The Challenge Forum.

The Challenge Training
Click here to revisit any Challenge lessons.

Handy Tip - Being mindful of the fact that The Challenge is teaching a methodology to test a micro-niche, it is important that the test is meaningful before any judgements are made.

It is suggested that at least 200 views of your monetization options be allowed to take place before any conclusions are drawn.

The Challenge 2010: Module 6/Day 6 – Publish An Ad

Today we have the final video in the Market Samurai series of how to choose an Affiliate to promote, how to create an ad, and then today, how to publish it, all within the MS Interface.

Ben Galt from Market Samurai is the guest presenter today. This is very straight forward process. And Ben shows you the options you have for publishing your ad.

Because this is going to be new for so many of you. I thoroughly recommend you watch this video more than once. A tip is to have the video running as you are working through the actions to take.

This is not because it is difficult, more that a new process can be daunting for the reason it is a new process

Please also remember, if you have any difficulties with publishing to your particular blog. Since this is using the Market Samurai interface, you are to go to Market Samurai Support with any issues. They are all trained to assist you in the way you need.

Publishing Ads To Your WPD Micro-Niche Blog

Over the last few lessons you've discovered how to find affiliate products related to your micro-niche, and create ads for those products with Market Samurai's Monetization Module. In today's lesson you find out the third step in the monetization process, how to take the ads you have created and publish them to your WPD micro-niche blog.

Ben from Market Samurai shows you an example of how to publish an ad to a blog using the ad created by Brent on Day 5 and an example blog setup for the demonstration. The actual publishing process is quite a simple one.

In Market Samurai Ben starts from the Monetization Module page showing the example ad. The first step to publishing the ad is to click the "Publish" button at the bottom right of the screen. After clicking, you get prompted with a variety of options for publishing. For the purposes of your WPD micro-niche blog, choose "New WordPress Direct account" and enter the details of your WPD account.

After Market Samurai connects to your WPD account, you click the "Retrieve Blogs" button to retrieve the blog details of sites that you have in WPD. You then need to choose the type of ad you want to publish, a sale offer, banner ad or blog post, and where you want the images for your ad to go, either on your blog, to a Flickr account, or linked from a remote location. After that, it's as simple as clicking the "Publish" button.

After clicking "Publish", Market Samurai will update you on the progress of the upload, and then provide a link directly to your blog so that you can check that the ad is showing. If the process worked correctly, you will see your affiliate product ad live on your WPD micro-niche blog. To check that your ad is setup correctly, click on the link in the ad. This should take you directly to the product webpage and here you can verify that your affiliate ID has carried through by checking the URL contents in the address bar of your browser.

This concludes the three step monetization process using the Monetization Module in Market Samurai, to find affiliate products, create an ad for an affiliate product, and then publish that ad to your WPD micro-niche blog.

Action For The Day - Publish your affiliate ad to your WPD micro-niche blog using the Monetization Module in Market Samurai.

Related Resources

You can find all of the related resources to today's content below.

Market Samurai
Click here to get your free trial copy of Market Samurai if you haven't already.

Market Samurai Support
Click here to get support for Market Samurai.

Handy Tip - When entering your WPD account information, be sure to choose 'New WordPress Direct account' and not 'New WordPress account'. They are two completely different things as one is for WordPress Direct (which we are using in The Challenge), and one for normal WordPress blogs.

The Challenge 2010: Module 6/Day 5 – Write An Ad

Those Market Samurai Pepsi Max touting lads, like to keep us guessing who's presenting which day. Today we welcome the dulcet tones of Brent Hodgson, taking you through writing an advert for an affiliate product using the monetization module of Market Samurai: Now some of you are fretting about not finding an Affiliate product for your theme keyword phrase.

First up, when you looked for commercial activity, we did ask you to check that there were affiliate programs. However if some overlooked that part there is good news. As I said yesterday, one or the other is fine. This is a TEST. So you need one monetization method to use in your test at least (if you have two out of two, then great!). So focus on Adsense if the affiliate side of things seems a dead end to you. Though of course with affiliate products, if it's not there for your theme keyword phrase, take a step up to the niche, and if nothing there, then a step up to the market.

Now back to today's video. Brent takes you through in great detail how to create your affiliate ad in the Market Samurai monetization module. This makes your life so much easier, I can not begin to tell you, Brent offers you some excellent guidance on how to approach creating the affiliate ad. Listen & take notes

And just to reiterate – you are NOT publishing yet. So remember patience is a virtue

Create Ads Using The Market Samurai Monetization Module

Today's lesson continues on from your introduction to the Market Samurai Monetization Module. In yesterday's lesson you found and shortlisted some affiliate products relevant to your micro-niche to advertise on your WPD micro-niche blog. In today's lesson, you will create an ad for one or more of those affiliate products, ready for insertion into your site.

Brent from Market Samurai takes you through the process of creating an ad using the copywriting tools in Market Samurai's Monetization Module. After using the copywriting tools a few times, you will find that the process of creating ads in the future takes just a few minutes.

The copywriting tool itself is accessed from your shortlist of affiliate products by clicking on the "Start New Campaign Button" at the bottom of your shortlist. The tool itself is incredibly easy to use and requires no sales, writing or technical skills.

An easy six button menu allows you to easily choose a template, add an image, put in a headline and subhead, add some copy for the ad, add some bullet points if you need them, and most importantly, add your affiliate link to the ad. The whole copywriting interface is drag and drop too. All you need to do is create the elements of your ad one step at a time and simply drag them across to your ad template.

Brent demonstrates creating an ad from scratch, going through every step in detail and offering suggestions on effective headlines and copy to get you started, as well as some general copywriting tips. Ways your headlines can get your visitors attention are asking questions, or sharing a surprise, secret or news, appealing to their deep desires, or offering quick solutions to a problem.

Brent points out that when it comes to writing your copy for your ad, you need to remember that products are designed to solve problems. You need to ask yourself what problem your affiliate product solves. Brent offers a few examples of this to give you idea of how to work what that problem might be.

The final step of the whole process is generating an affiliate link to go with your ad (you can also create a button to go with your ad as well). Here it is important to make sure that you have already signed up for the affiliate network that sells this product in order to create the link correctly. Without having the link generated correctly, you will not receive any commissions for sales of the product.

In tomorrow's lesson you will find out how to publish your newly created affiliate product ad to your WPD micro-niche blog.

Action For The Day - 1. Create your own ad using Market Samurai's Monetization Module.

Related Resources

You can find all of the related resources to today's content below.

Market Samurai
Click here to get your free trial copy of Market Samurai if you haven't already.

Market Samurai Support
Click here to get support for Market Samurai.

Amazon Associates
Click here to sign up with Amazon Associates.

Amazon Associates Support
Click here for support with Amazon Associates.

Clickbank
Click here to sign up with Clickbank.

Clickbank Support
Click here for support with Clickbank.

Commission Junction
Click here to sign up with Commission Junction.

Commission Junction Support
Click here for support with Commission Junction.

PayDotCom
Click here to sign up with PayDotCom.

PayDotCom Support
Click here for support with PayDotCom.

Handy Tip - Always remember that a product only has value if it solves a problem. Make sure your headline and copy focusses on the problem that product solves, not just the product itself.