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Show Notes:-

This show was originally recorded on Wednesday 14th May 2008.

6:05 I don’t know if you guys have got hairs on the back of your neck, but I have. Welcome to this, the launch for the 30dc 4.

6:20 Who would have thought that it would have grown this huge? What I find particularly emotional is if you back and look at that list of 32 names… I think I counted 4 millionaires in that list. I know a whole bunch of you are working full time on the internet and making a living out of the internet. It’s extraordinary and to me that is what it is all about. And for all of you starting from humble beginnings, that you have the chance to be part of that legacy, to be part of that history, to be part of the Thirty Day Challenge. And today is all about giving you a bit of the history; telling you about preseason, which is going to be awesome this year if I do say so myself; telling you something new about the competitions, because they’re always very important and also if we’ve got time, a few questions. But we’re going to keep this pretty tight. We’re going to keep this to about an hour.

Isn’t this amazing? I love this (Ed points to chat box)

7:58 I’m not going to see what is going in chat; we’ve got some moderators who are going to be watching. Gurubob will be noting down any questions and he’ll send them through to me on iChat.

8:31 First of all let me give you a bit of the history. The Thirty Day Challenge was created just after I sold all of my niche websites. I was sitting in New York, I had just done the deal and I was reading two books. I was reading iCon - the Steve Jobs’ biography; and also because I’m ADHD, I was reading about National Writers’ Month in a book about how to write a novel in 30 days.

The first or second season of The Apprentice had just finished filming and I was staying just down the road from Trump Tower. If you’ve ever been to the Trump Tower in New York, on the mezzanine level is a Starbucks. They’d just had the winner the previous night.

It really was just a mix of all of these things, [together] with one other thing.

When Frank Kern and I had been teaching the Underachiever Method, we had forgotten to teach one crucial element. It was something so important to people’s success online that I wanted to empirically prove it.

10:24 I thought what if we taught no holds barred, top-shelf, highest quality teaching for 30 days to try and people to make their first dollar online.

10:42 One of the biggest questions we get is, “Why just focus on a single dollar, Ed? I want to make hundreds of dollars. I want to make thousands of dollars. I want to make a million!” - like some of those from the original Thirty Day Challenge.

11:04 One of the biggest beefs I have in the whole internet space is…. People do make extraordinary amounts of money online; it’s a brilliant business - if there was a better business, I would be doing that, but for me this is the best business.

11:23 For me the key thing is that if you go to a conference and you see someone talking about how they made $75,000 last month, you’re brain records that whether you like it or not. You go away and you’re all exited - you’re enthusiasm bank account is at an all time high - and then you start working. All of a sudden, funnily enough you don’t make $75,000 in you’re first month.

12:06 Regardless of how positive you can think consciously, subconsciously your brain is just trying to look after you. It just wants the best for you, and it doesn’t want you in any way to exhibit any sort of pain. So, it will start going, “Hang on, this doesn’t work”, or it uses some justification to make it not work. This is why we focus on the dollar.

12:34 Everyone looks at the dollar and says, “Wiiih! Easy! We can make a dollar”. Well of the 900 people who thought, “Pah! Easy” 32 of them made the dollar inside the first month now many, many more went on after the 30 days to do so. In fact, of our most popular Thirty Day Challenge members - if there was a patron saint it would be this woman - Caro. Who could forget Caro’s incredible efforts in that first challenge? Boy, could she type. Despite her amazing efforts, no matter what she did, she didn’t quite make it. She missed the 30 days, but she worked so hard. Her win, and a lot of people’s win, is that if you stick at anything for 30 days that’s an impressive effort. I’m luck to get 2 days straight on my Wii Fit, and that’s with me icon looking like the Michelin Man.

13:40 Committing to anything for 30 days is an extraordinary effort and an extraordinary win. Thanks to the whole social networking and Web 2.0 phenom, we now have between 50 and 100 people joining the 30dc every day. These are new people; these are not people coming from the internet marketing world; they are looking for a plan B.

14:22 There have been extraordinary stories - every year has its legend. Who could forget “Tumblr Gate” last year? Who could forget the first ever “Google Slap” in the second challenge? Who knows what is going to happen this year? Could we see Dan Raine de-tog yet again? Who knows?

Whatever it is, it’s an adventure, and it’s a journey, and it’s one that if you step up to the plate and commit to it, you’ll remember for the rest of your life.

Currently on the Thirty Challenge Blog there’s a great audio, which I did for the second 30dc. I was literally dropping out of the blue and ringing people up on Skype to get their opinion. If you get the chance to listen to that it really has made a huge difference in people’s lives. That to me is what is most awesome.

You might have noticed the slight increase in professionalism last year - that is thanks to my main man, your main man, everybody’s main man, the pink thong wearing scoundrel from Manchester, North England, Dan “The Man” Raine.

15:44 Now, unfortunately Dan “The Man” Raine is about to get on a plane in the middle of the night in the 30dc and head off to his villa. But, hey, it’s a tough life for some; some of us are here doing a minor thing like launching the Thirty Day Challenge. J

16:04 But seriously, Dan has been an extraordinary… with what I’m about to release to you and what I’m about to launch today, you’ll already start to see some of the major differences between the Thirty Day Challenge this year. It really is going to be huge! Absolutely huge!

16:28 It’s grown and grown in leaps and bounds - it really has been an extraordinary journey. To the point where last year, I don’t know whether you’re aware of this, but in terms of internet marketing, in terms an online event, it became the biggest single education event in internet history. Something that I am dreadfully proud of.

16:58 If you have a community and you have a bunch of people that are all trying to look for an alternative, the sum of that group is so much more powerful than any one individual. That to me is extremely gratifying, extremely exciting, it gives me a hope in the future, bluntly.

17:20 I think in this year’s challenge a lot of us, let’s face it, are facing a lot of challenges. The last couple of years’ challenges have economically been pretty good. Things are getting tough out there. I know it, I experience it, I see it, and you guys see it. I think that makes this year’s Thirty Day Challenge even more important because having that plan B or having that plan C, is such a crucial thing, because we all know it…. and gosh you’ve heard me tell the story of when I was running a large global corporation and a board 16,000 miles away decides that 80 hard working fanatics in Leeds, North East England, needed to be retrenched because they’d found a different way to do it.

18:26 I had to walk in there one day and… If you’ve ever seen David Brent, or the US version of The Office… that was pretty much my management style. People look at that and see it as funny; I look at that and see and deep, dark psychological profile.

They walked in expecting bad jokes, but what they got instead was pink slips. Close to the worst day of my life - it was horrific. The reason it was so horrific, was that I knew that none of these guy… they didn’t lose their jobs because they were slackers. No, they worked their testicles off. It was unbelievable. It was such a great team.

The thing that made me so upset was that none of them had a plan B. They were living week to week off their wages. A lot of them had been on benefits for months, if not years, prior to being employed at IQ. That was just horrific, and that’s always been in the back of my mind.

So, yep, absolutely hands-down, for 11 months of the year… hey I’m about making money. Who can blame anybody for that? But during August, it’s about getting as many people to have their first experience of making that dollar online. I think that is really, really important.

19:58 So, here’s the thing. What are we going to be doing this year that is different? So, let’s talk about pre-season.

Now, pre-season was a feature that we introduced in last year’s Thirty Day Challenge. The reason I did that was [because] there were a lot of tools that we were using in the 30dc which while they were important to your internet marketing, it was about teaching you tools as opposed to teaching you how to market. Let’s face it; we need those 30 days to market, to create products, to research markets.

The response to pre-season last year was immense; people loved it. A lot of people were introduced to a feed-reader like Bloglines for the first time. They saw how to “pimp” their browser - how to make their browser work for them.

Now, if you thought last year’s pre-season was cool, you have not seen anything yet. Bluntly, we’ve been holding out. There are some amazing new tools, which going to be showing you starting June 1st.

21:24 Don’t freak out; we are not going for effectively 90 days of balls-to-the-wall working. The pre-season is deliberately spread out over the run up, June 1st to August 1st, to give people time. It’s going to be a very relaxed pace. We’re going to be releasing 1, 2, we might sneak in 3 lessons on different tools to show you how to use to get ready for the 30dc. Even if you didn’t do the 30dc, it’s going to change the way you use the internet. When you see how these tools work and the time it can save you…. It’s extraordinary because things are changing all the time, and people ask us, “Why do you refresh the content every 12 months?” The whole world changes online every 12 months.

I must say the 2007 strategy that we taught still works beautifully. Not only does it work beautifully, you can pay a lot of money to learn that in other places. Or of course you can have it for free here, but hey let’s not get bitchy.

22:44 This year, the tools and the methods and the strategies that we will be teaching in the 30dc are brand new. In fact, before you ask, we’ve got 2 strategies and we are absolutely debating both. The labs are testing both at the moment. Both work really, really well, but the question is which one is going to be better to implement for the 30dc? So, we don’t know for certain ourselves which one we’re going to use.

Before you ask, “Is it pay per click? Is it SEO based? …” The answer to that, hand on heart, is that we’re not 100% sure. What we are sure of is the tools…. because you’re still going to need to market research.

23:32 The great thing is that 12 months is a looong time on the internet. It great for you to be able to use these tools, even in just you’re daily use of the internet, it’s going to save you so much time, make you so much better informed, and not make you feel like you’re trying to drink from a fire hose.

With the internet, particularly when you’re staring out, and you’re looking to make first dollar, you really want to filter. On one hand you don’t wanting to be missing out on anything, but on the on the other hand it’s just so overwhelming. So, we want to show you some tools and strategies that will really help you with that, and I’m pretty excited by that. I think it’s going to be a really, really cool way of doing things.

24:28 So, how’s pre-season going to work? It’s going to start June 1st; we’re going to have a launch party which will be Sunday night in the United States, and Monday morning in the UK. We’ll start off with a bit of a fun party and then we’ll get cracking on June 2nd with our first new technology that we’re going to be teaching.

24:54 What I am super excited…Have I said “excited” enough in the last 20 minutes?… What we are absolutely enthused about… I’ll have to get a thesaurus soon (… is the way we’re going to be able to teach this year. Some of you may have already seen if you’ve seen some of the Twitter videos that I emailed you guys about…. You might have noticed the extraordinary quality of those particular screencast videos. That is because of an extraordinary piece of technology that has been release called ScreenFlow, which really, really changes the way I teach. It’s going to be so beneficial for you guys - you’ll no longer going to have to squint at the screen and hope to see what’s going on. Everything is going to be zoomed in… I can’t wait to get into the lessons because it’s just such a pleasure to use.

26:07 Something I want to say right off the bat with media, and indeed this (i.e. Ustream)… every single piece of content will be recorded going forward. The whole layout will change - the layout worked pretty well last year if you were actually in the mist of the challenge. You went to the blog, you saw there was a new piece of content, and you went to the training section, right? That was great for people who were doing the challenge, but it’s become a 12 month thing.

When you’ve got the equivalent of 3000-4000 people joining every month, all of a sudden what made sense during August, did not make sense in February. So, we are completely overhauling the design and you’ll see the first fruits of this with the preseason.

27:03 I’ve got give a tip of hat one of the original Thirty Day Challengers, Randy Prior, who showed me a process for doing this which I just think is magnificent. Randy, thank you - we’ve borrowed liberally.

What you will do is you will go to one spot and you’ll all the little training modules and you’ll just be able to pick one. Then, when you go to the training page…. and don’t worry, there’ll be videos on all this - that’s the Thirty Day deal, right?… I don’t care how basic an operation it is, we make no assumptions. Remember, we don’t want to make an ass out of you and me.

You’ll have this page and on it you’ll have streaming video as one option. You’ll also have a download file, but unlike last year where there was one download file, you’ll have different download files, because let’s face it the world has moved on. For example [the iPhone] has arrived and I don’t know if any of you have looked at a 30dc lesson on one, but it looks absolutely extraordinary. It’s just beautiful. Even if you just look at a YouTube video…

I caught that he’s whipping out his thing ( Why did I see that out of the corner of my eye?

28:48 Don’t tell anyone I told you, but June 9th …. (3G iPhone launch?)… Looking at the lessons on the iPhone is just extraordinary  - it looks brilliant.

29:25 There will be a download for iPod, one for Apple TV… there’ll be a bunch of downloads based on what you’re going to view it on.

Also on a voluntary basis, you’ll also have the show notes for the lesson on this individual page as well. They are not going to go up immediately and there’s a method to my madness. If we just put notes up, people will bobble along to the training page and go, “Right. Got it. Check”. They don’t watch what’s going on and this is a crucial thing - it’s a real mistake people actually make.

30:49 If I said, “Hi guys, we’re doing pay per click this year”, people will instantly go, “Oh right, I know all about pay per click. Got it. Check”.

I think that we’ve proven over the last 3 years that when we do a method we do things differently. Of course, social bookmarking is everywhere now - it’s boring. But you’ve got to think back to August last year; that wasn’t boring - that was revolutionary. Nobody had taught that stuff.

31:19 That’s why we very deliberately we want to make sure we release information in chunks to make sure people consume it. We’re not in this for a fun time. It’s show business, not show friends.

Even though this is an extraordinary community [and] it’s brilliant, we want to do this for an outcome. We want to make sure that you are making your first dollar. That is absolutely vital.

I must give a big shout out to all the people in the UK that have stayed up for this as well, because it is late up there. So, I really appreciate that.

32:15 What happens if you join the challenge a week before the start of the challenge like so many people do? All of the preseason material will be on this one page, so you just click on the things that you need. It will be available all the time, so it won’t make people feel like they’ve missed out. That’s a big change in the way we’ve delivered the material.

It also means that after the 30 days, it’ll be great.

(Ed plays YouTube on the iPhone)

33:15 Right, what else have we got to tell you about? Tell your friends.

I don’t know if you’ve logged into the 30dc challenge site, but if you go to www.thirtydaychallenge.com/members, you’ll notice there have been some huge changes this morning. First of all you’ll see that we talk about preseason, but what I want to talk about is this bit - “Promote the Challenge and Win”.

34:24 What’s happened in the past, particularly last year, is that the social elements of the challenge meant that the challenge grew, and grew, and grew. We want to come up with a way of thanking you for that. Dan The Man has been working like a crazy person to deliver “Promote the Challenge and Win”. Let me tell you, the prizes are sick.

34:55 So how does this work? If you refer somebody to the 30dc you’ll get a point, and if they refer somebody they also get a bit of a point too. These points go towards prizes.

One referral point doesn’t mean much, but if you get a certain amount of referral points each month… and it’s not going to be that many… we’ve done the calculations and we’ll get this information out to you… you get an Immediate Edge membership. As long as that keeps up then you’ll keep getting that Immediate Edge membership for free, which is pretty cool I think.

35:58 In terms of prizes, we tend to get a lot of stuff as affiliates prizes through the course of the year. So, things like MacBook Airs will be the prizes, we’ll have watches like Frank’s watch that we’re going to give away today to somebody who is still here at the end of the call.

The coolest prize is going to be a vehicle. Yep, you heard correct. [There's] lot’s of Apple prizes, because let’s face it, I want to encourage that.

You can see here in the red [text] the traffic link (referring to the members page). Everyone’s link is different, and you can see that mine is 49. You probably don’t want to promote mine because I can’t win anything.

We’re not going to release the vehicle [details] yet, we are going to have some fun with it. People have talked Ferraris, people have talked Lamborghinis, but nobody has given away something this special. No it’s not a joke - I’m not going to give away a Matchbox vehicle. This is a real, highly, highly sort after vehicle. I’ll let you speculate, because we are going to have some fun with it.

37:43 We’ve got a couple of things built in here; we’ve got an “Invite a Friend” link in there….

While I’m here I wanted to mention something else. You’ll notice there is an ad up here…

In previous challenges we’ve had a zero affiliate link policy. This year, bluntly, we’re downloading a terabyte of data today. The costs are getting pretty extraordinary, so there will be a couple of affiliate type links. They’ll be completely optional, and when we represent the affiliate link it will also have the main link.

If you want to donate is some way… and trust me the money doesn’t go to us. It goes to paying the Amazon S3 bill which is pretty substantial every month. It’s optional; it’s not like you have to click on it, and it’s only going to be a couple of certain places. You’re not going to be deluged with any of that crap, because we’re not into it. I wanted to be very upfront with you about that.

39:44 Check out the new video [on the home page], because that is pretty funky as well.

For me, the thing that I really like is the ability to earn enough to get an Immediate Edge membership for free. From our perspective, that’s what Dan’s and my day jobs are.

40:53 (Ed shows off one off a prize - the Omega Seamaster “James Bond” watch worth $2222)

42:50 Wow, 360 viewers. Awesome. Brilliant. Oh Lisa’s here, hello Lisa, queen of voiceovers.

42:59 People asked about the motto for this year. Last year it was “It what Willis was talking about“. I loved that. I really want to use, “Prepare for awesomeness”, but I’m pretty sure DreamWorks  would sue our butts as fast as we could say, “Father Christmas”. (because it’s the tagline from Kung Fu Panda)

Oh! Speaking of suing our butts… You’ll notice that last year and the year before there was a distinct absence of music which was sad. The first thing you heard [in the intro of today's show] was music from The Mission.

We haven’t used music in the first couple of years, because we’re concerned about copyright and rights issues. Well, thanks to some good friends, you know who you are, we actually have the rights to use music this year, which is brilliant.

43:58 We are also hoping that the wonderful, the magnificent, the extraordinarily talented Phil Mason will come up with a new theme for us this year. In fact, just to remind you of what that was like last year -  let me give you a walk down memory lane.

(Ed plays the video “That’s The Thirty Day Challenge” by Phil Mason.)

Can you ever get enough of that? Well done Phil. I’m still trying to learn it - you’ve got to give me the chords.

47:23 (Questions & Answers Section)

The first and most important [question] is for goodness sake people this is FREE! There are no hooks, no catches, it’s free. Get that through your head - there are no catches whatsoever. I know people find that hard to believe, because there are catches online - I completely understand that.

The only way I can that across to you guys is to ask veterans from past challenges - and there are not. It’s just something that we do.

48:30 Somebody else asked, “Why are teams important?” In my humble opinion, teams are vital. Of those 32 people who started that first challenge, ironically the person who won, Tom, he wasn’t in a team, but everybody else was. You’re percentage chances of completing the 30 days are through the roof. Bluntly, if you do it by yourself, you’ll let yourself slack off, you’ll let yourself go. If you’re in a team, you’re that much more likely to gut it out because you don’t want to let the team down.

Of course the cool thing about teams is it’s not only about the negative side - it’s also the positive side. 1+1=3 when it comes to a team.

If you get a good mix of skills… you might have someone who’s a techie, someone who’s a writer, you’ll get a whole bunch of skills and that is awesome.

49:40 I don’t know if you heard the recording before the show started - people used the words more than once, “Friends for life”. The friendships that have evolved out of the 30dc have been extraordinary and something I really, really, really love.

People ask, “How do you get on a team?” Well, there is a team section in the forum. In fact, let me just log in for a second and I can show you…

By the way thanks to Caroline Middlebrook for the heads up on that hosting too.

Here we are at the forum… While we’re here, I just want to point out something. Usually you would login in this top right-hand corner here with the same password you used to sign up.

You can see we’ve got our “General Chat” area, and, “Team Talk”…. look at this, we’re even on broadcast and there’s 13 viewing General, 8 viewing Team Talk, and 3 viewing tips.

If you go into the Team Talk section, that is where you can put ads like, “Looking for a team”.

Look at this - there’s 52 people online as we’re speaking, which really is just huge. I can’t tell you how big the Thirty Day Challenge has become.

52:38 Question: “Are people creating there own products for the Thirty Day Challenge this year?”

Again, we’re not going to preannounce what people are going to do, because we don’t want people to focus on something that they’re not ready to focus on, because it’s market first, right? If there’s anything you need to be thinking about now, it’s to get yourself out into the wide world and starting getting you’re little notebook and jotting down ideas for ideas. That’s what you need to be focusing on.

In terms of methods and everything like that, we’re not going to talk about that until it’s the appropriate time. It’s like when people ask me, “So what do you do for tax?” and they haven’t even earned a dollar yet. There’s a path here: Earn money - pay tax. It’s not do offshore tax planning before you’ve even earned a dollar.

We’re very real here at The Thirty Day Challenge; we can afford to be real, because you haven’t paid any money. Because of that I can tell you exactly what I think. We will do that, because I’m interested in you getting a result. I’m not interested in you having a great time. I’d love it if you have a great time - where’s the law that says you can’t have fun? But if you’re here, then you’re here to get a result. That is crucial.

53:38 Question: Do you have to sell your own product to qualify for income for the contest? Well, it depends what year. Last year, no. Again, we’ll be very clear about that when we get to that period of time.

53:55 Specifically, how do you register? You go to … http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com… The first thing that you do is to drop in your name and email and hit “register”. When you do that you’ll be taken to an invite a friend page. So, if there’s team mates that you want to make part of this then that’s the place to do so.

Then, you’re taken to the members page.

55:20 Someone just asked if that is George Clooney on the home page. Get their name, they have just won the watch J.

55:27 Can there be a section of the forum to ask questions of past veterans?

Well, I must do a huge shout out and thank you to the moderators who are all veterans of the 30dc - they do an awesome job. There’s really veterans everywhere.

There’s also the “Advanced Tactics” section that is not 30dc stuff. We did that so people could break away and do that as well.

55:58 Do I need to register again if I participated last year?

No you don’t. You should be able to log in, and you’re off to the races

56:35 This year is going to be…. If we did nothing else, it will be triple the size of last year and last year was huge.

We’ve scaled up an extraordinary amount. We’ve put a huge amount of resources into what we’re delivering for you for this year. The only thing we ask in return is for you to make a decision to say, “You know what, I’m going to commit to it. I’m going to take 30 days in the summer to commit to doing this, and I’m going to take advantage of the preseason to make sure that I know the tools of the trade.”

57:20 We’re going to look after you in terms of different formats, different videos, downloads, texts, the whole deal. We are going to look after you, but at the end of the day we can only make it as easy as we can. At the end of the day, it’s going to be up to you, but we’re going to give you every option.

57:46 People are asking, “Is the target $10?”

I’ve been listing back to previous podcasts, in preparation for today, and I think that we’ll do a dollar, because I just don’t want the money to…. It’s about the process.

Processes are not sexy, but every successful person in life is a person that’s worked out how to follow a process. I used to fight and rail against processes. I thought, “That inhibits my creativity - I’m a creative being. You know, I can’t follow a process, I need to be free and in the wind”. I was also very broke as it turned out.

I was free, but broke. I worked out that processes was actually what made the world go round. That is a crucial part of what’s going on.

Let’s face it, as Lisa Hartwell was trying to make the joke there, hey, a dollar’s not what it used to be. So, it’s an awesome opportunity for you to be absolutely proud. Make no mistake, it’s a lot of effort in making a dollar online.

Most importantly you’re setting yourself up. Because we can show you a trick to make a dollar. That’s easy - anyone can do that, but setting you up a business which makes it’s first dollar and then hopefully goes on to make hundreds of dollars if not thousands of dollars after the challenge…. that’s a different kettle of fish.

So there we have it. I hope that you guys will be part of it. I hope that the new technology enables us to deliver the content even more effectively to you guys. It’s going to be a huge, huge year.

I hope you can join us for the June 1st kick off preseason party. It’s just like NFL - we go into preseason, get those fundamentals right and then we launch into game days on August 1st.

With that we’ll work out who has won the watch and we’ll announce that up on the blog - so look on the blog later today.

We might have a little bit of an after party for half an hour or so, I’ll hang around. We’ll end this part of the presentation. A tradition here at the 30DCTV… we’ve been doing this for sometime now… is we hang around for a bit… as educational value, it’s useless, but it’s nice for me just to watch the chat window and have a talk to people.

Get ready for this year - let’s reminisce and remind ourselves why we’re here.

We’ll have the 30DCTV show next week, hope you can join us. We’ll have feedback, we’ll have reaction, to what’s happened today.

Wish you all the best, we’ll speak very soon.

Show Notes:-

This show was originally recorded on Wednesday 24th April 2008.

3:40 Today we’re Ed’s office which is around 500°C. Ed sound proofed the room and it’s uber hot in here.

Now the first thing we need to do is give a big thumbs up to the wonderful Phil Mason. The guy who launches the show every week and created the Thirty Day Challenge theme has got a new theme coming for this year, which is very, very cool. His musical opens on I think I said the East End last week, which just shows what a pencil head I am. That would of course be the West End in London, which is a huge deal. It’s his musical that he wrote. (MMM-MMM?)

5:01 We’ve got a whole bunch of people listening in the UK. I don’t know why all these people have stayed up especially for tonight.

If you get the chance, please go along and support a fellow 30 day challenger.

I think it’s running Friday, Saturday, and Sunday this weekend.

5:38 Another Thirty Day Challenger that I met up with in San Diego has an actual film launching coming up May 23rd. JD, I’m talking about you. It’s brilliant because she’s using a lot of the stuff that she’s learnt on the Thirty Day Challenge to use to market the film.

6:18 Guys, if you haven’t seen Ed’s new blog then you should probably head on over to TubbyNerd.com. Either Ed’s showing his teenage angst or he’s incredibly embarrassed by the state of it previously. He couldn’t stand the fact that DanRaine.com looked so incredibly sexy. Nez (aka Andrew Nesbit) has done a fantastic job.

It was actually a topic of conversation in San Diego – people kept coming up and saying how amazing it was. I am now officially Nez’s manager, and we’ll talk turkey if you want to engage his services J. He’s very, very expensive, but very, very good.

07:06 One of the things Nez has done, which you can’t see unless you’re looking at the site on an iPhone, is the iPhone friendly version.

07:20 He’s actually installed the iPhone management interface. To manage a Wordpress blog, you can do it but it’s a struggle.

It takes me half an hour to do a post from an iPhone, so this plugin that Nes has put in is superb. It’s particular helpful for those spam comments that we all have to deal with, or Caro’s (aka Carolyne McCourtie).

Yeah, they get flagged by Akismet now anyways (LOL).

Purely on length, it’s easy to tell J.

Sorry Caro, we don’t mean it, honest (LOL).

Yeah, see you at Beechworth.

08:10 Dan: I have to say just because I’m appearing on 30DCTV I’ve actually got a spot right in the middle of my head today.

Ed: You can’t see that. MAKE-UP!

Dan: MOLLY! (LOL)

Ed: Molly’s at kindergarten today and all the children are out, so I think child invasion is unlikely.

08:45 Let’s talk about Dan’s arrival into Australia because that does merit talking about. Let’s face it, the dude looks like a drug dealer. I’m starting to get a bit sensitive because anyone who comes to see me gets reamed by customs.

10:36 Last time I came back in I also got pulled in for the swabbing and I had the pleasure of being filmed for the highest rating TV show here in Australia, “Border Patrol”…..

12:30 For those of you who are flying in for the Beechworth conference, don’t be funny with customs.

And don’t put Ed Dale as your contact address. (LOL)

14:55 I had a delightful conversation with John Cusack. He’s very nice and he looks exactly the same funnily enough.

15:12 If anybody from the UK is travelling to Australia, then don’t forget you need a visitor’s visa now. Even though we’re part of the commonwealth….

Customs were a bit suspicious that I bought my visa on the day of travel.

15:43 You know what John Cusack said to me? Look, I think I know who you are but do you know Lisa Hartwell? (LOL) Can you somehow connect us up?

I said of course, I know the golden tonsils of the United Kingdom.

The best voice in the history of the universe.

I said back off pal. She’s ours!

Anyone who can do a promo for talkSport – double thumbs up in our books.

16:30 I just want to remind everybody that if you’ve got any questions, they need to go into http://thirtydaychallenge.tv/qa

17:02 Ed actually never comes back from a trip without buying tons of crap. I’m not sure if he told you about Canada, but he turned up with 9 suit cases, 5 guitars, amps, everything. So, I was quite surprised to see last night in his hall he only had one guitar and a couple of cases.

17:44 Check this out (Ed’s pen) That’s Richard Ink

Yes, as everyone says, that is pen porn.

19:30 See that there is a Swarovski (nice try, Ed J) crystal.

Too cheap, Richard. I would pay 4-5 times as much.

It is a copy writer thing. I’ve got to say, if you want a little pick me up to write, using a nice fountain pen to write… quite seriously it’s a psychological thing.

20:19 So you’ve slagged me off for losing my parking ticket. That’s not as bad as when I arrived in Atlanta and Frank was meant to drive me down to Maken. Instead we got talking and we ended up in Alabama (check out this map of their journey) We were actually podcasting at the time, and I won’t repeat what I said….

When something like that happens, you just have to milk it, milk it., and milk it. People don’t appreciate milking and milking something until it’s dead.

(Ed plays Dan Raine wearing Pink Thong video, AGAIN!)

I can’t see why they complain about that – it never gets old to me.

Dan: I hate you! (LOL) One day revenge will be mine.

22:33 Dan: One of the things that I want to talk about today is the Thirty Day Challenge Social Networking Service - social bookmarking service. A lot of people didn’t get exactly how this is all going to work, so I want to explain the process, and exactly what you guys are going to have to do, and what kind of benefits you can get out of the social bookmarking service.

I’m sure that most of you by now have seen the blog post about the peer to peer social bookmarking service. The reason it is called a peer to peer service is because effectively we are sharing our accounts.

Normally you would do a Squidoo page, or a hub page, or some other Web 2.0 content, and then you would have to go and social bookmark it. If you are using 30 services that takes up to an hour and a half.

Previously, you could use Social Marker and Social Poster which save a huge chunk of time, but even with those it’s an hour’s worth of work. So what we’ve done is that we’ve automated that process for 30dc users.

You need to go to the page that I’ve put up and go to each of the social bookmarking sites that I recommend on the page and register a new account. Now, this is the important thing here – it’s a new account. I don’t want you using your existing account, I want you to create a blank account for the process.

You put all your details in the Thirty Day Challenge social bookmarking service and then when we open it up on the Thursday/Friday after the next 30DC TV show (i.e. 8th or 9th May)… we’re going to be doing a live special for that…. once that’s been set up, you’ll be able to go to a single page on the 30DC site and fill in your details like the name of the site, the address, your description, the tags, and so on, and then hit “post”. Then in the background our system will then go and post your bookmark on 30 of the 30DC accounts.

So for every account you create in the system, then our system will go and post on those accounts.

25:30 Ed: Let’s see if I’ve got it…. Basically, I’ve created my 30 accounts, I’ve put them in the system…

Dan: I have to say it’s important that they have to be completely new accounts. If you’ve used them for bookmarking already then that’s not the ideal situation.

Ed: Then when we flick the service open for Thirty Day Challengers then you’ll be able to put in a page, and you’ll put in a URL, some tags, a title, and a description.

Dan: If it’s on Civet coffee and coffee beans, then you should put those in as your keywords. The form will tell you how to separate them, because there’s always a lot of confusion about how to separate your keywords, whether there should be a space or a comma. The form will explain that, and we will handle all of the differenced of different bookmarking services. You only have to put it in one way, and we handle all the rest.

27:04 Ed: Now, will those bookmarks be spread out over a number of days?

Dan: What basically happens is, and I have to really stress this, the 30 accounts that you create won’t necessarily host your content. So, if you post a bookmark, it won’t necessarily appear in all 30 of your bookmarking accounts. It will appear in other people’s as well – we’re doing that to maximise the whole breadth.

Say for instance, you’re creating content on just one subject… we’ve kind of looked at the Google algorithm and we’re saying that if all our bookmarks are necessarily on that one topic, then you could potentially get ‘flagged’. So what we’re doing is we’re spreading the bookmarks out.

27:47 So what happens is that after you hit the go button, over a period of say a week to 10 days, depending on how many other people are posting, content on those bookmarks get bookmarks get posted to the different engines.

So all 30 don’t get published straight at once. It will typically be 7-10 days. At least everyday we will post 2 or 3 bookmarks.

More importantly, for every account you create, that’s how many you’ll get. So if you’ve only created 5 (accounts) then you’ll only get 5 bookmarks back. So get as many of those in as you can.

28:20 The biggest mistake that people make when they are trying to get any sort of ranking and continuous ranking with the whole 30dc process is that you all notice that you’ll get ranking pretty much straight away, as you’ve all seen many, many times. But then it drops away,

What quite a lot of people didn’t get, and what we need explain better, is that very little bit of social bookmarking goes a long, long way. By spreading this out for you, you’ll do a lot better in your rankings.

If you think about how Google thinks about this, if you take it back to first principles, it makes a lot of sense. Let’s face it, when you look at your nightly news, most of the stuff that’s on that night is very interesting FOR THAT DAY. Probably 5% of the stories actually would have any run or any carry the next night right?

That’s a smart thing for Google to think. So Google looks at it and says, “Ah, there’s a bit of social bookmarking activity on this site, that must be relevant”. But like most news, it just assumes that it’s relevant for that particular period of time.

The only way it knows if it is going to be relevant over the long term is if it gets continuous bookmarking over a period of time.

Now the peer to peer element of this that basically, it’s not necessarily your username and password on that day. Why? Because then we can spread it out…

Dan: Initially, you’ll get 2,3,4, or 5 posts on the first day, more on the second day, more on the third day, and if you’ve done all 30, then they will trickle feed usually 6 or 7 after that.

What we’re going to do is also is in few weeks time after we’ve come out of beta…

Ed: Because it will stuff up guys!! (LOL)

Dan:…. And then we’ll be giving you the option to add a few more accounts on there. We’re actually in the process of setting up our own bookmarking service too, so we’ll be able to give you the option to create accounts on that too. Again, the more accounts you have the longer we can trickle feed into that site.

One of the things for this year’s challenge, is how to maximise… if you’ve got two content sites on the same topic and so on, and how to actually bookmark those effectively. This is something new for this year’s challenge, which I want to cover.

31:33 One thing I want to do though is quickly talk about is that with the Immediate Edge you get access to the social bookmarking service, but there’s some additional benefits for members.

I’m not sure if we should talk about them here, but…

Ed: Let’s just explain the difference between the 30dc side and the Immediate Edge side, because there’s a lot of Edgers on here as well.

32:11 One of the things is that in the Edge, we have a thing called the Edge Networker, and the actual bookmarking side of this is just a part of the Networker.

One of the things that we do is we have a central place for you to place in your address and your keywords - exactly the same as you’ll be doing in the 30DC. Then you post in the Edge Networker and we go out and we build back links from different content services. We use our own bookmarking sites, we have our own article directories, and various other places we pay to post content. So instead of you just social bookmarking, you get that as well as additional Edge Networker benefits. One of the most important things about it is if you put a link into the Edge Social Networker, you actually get back links up to a year later. We trickle feed every couple of days – that’s one of the most important aspects of it. Instead of you just getting a huge hit of links instantly, we feed that over a period of time. So Google always knows that the content coming in is relevant and up to date - people are still interested in it. That’s probably the main difference between the 30dc Social Bookmarking and the Edge services.

33:35 So the significant difference is that you’re effectively getting more social bookmarking from more accounts. For example, instead of 1 Digg, 1 Reddit, you’ll get 2 or 3 spread out of time very naturally, but automated. Then on top of this, you also get a whole bunch of links generated from other content sites in a network that we have been building up, which will give you PR links… PR3, PR4, PR5 type links as well. So it’s a very cool service. In fact, that right there pays for the entire….

Dan: Yeah. Realistically, we only charge $97 a month for the Edge, and if we were selling this as a stand alone service, I’d be charging $297 per month easily just for the service.

34:39 Ed: If you paid someone to outsource to link build with that quantity over that time, you’d pay more than $97.

Dan: Don’t get me wrong. The service for the 30dc is amazing and it’s going to save a huge chunk of time.

We talked to last year’s 30DC, especially the people who had problems getting indexed and ranked in Google. One of things was they did the full round of social bookmarking, but when they created the second content site they knew how much of a pain in the arse it was, so they only did 5 or 6 of the sites. Therefore there wasn’t as much link leverage – because it’s such a pain to do.

35:58 Rather than you having to worry about what’s the correct way to post, now it’s all optimised for you.

36:15 Now there’s a good question here actually that Richard has just put up: What if auto submitted links are spamish? Now the first point to make there is the submission is manually verified. I’m not going to give the full details of how we’re doing this or people will game the system, but every single link that goes into the 30DC social bookmarking service is verified by one of our support team; myself included, Ed’s going to do some, Rob’s definitely doing some… there’s Innes, and Nez, and Asbjorn, and we’re all going to be taking part and actually scanning the things. It’s so easy for us to spot the junk content because we see it all the time. So yes, there’s no spam bookmarking links getting into the system whatsoever – we’ll do our upmost. We’ll give people warnings, and if persistent then we’ll just ban their account from the service.

37:15 You remember when John Reese released Blog Rush, there was a real problem with quality. He just hired a bunch of people to do that. So some of you might be interested in being part of that. The only way to do it at the end of the day is a manual check and we’re prepared to do that. If that means it’s slower but maintains the quality then it’s better, because otherwise if one peanut ruins it for everyone else…. It’s extremely powerful.

37:55 The whole thing we want for this is it’s not to be a spam service. The last thing we want to be tarred with is the spam brush. A lot of people don’t understand the difference between a good social bookmarking post and a bad one. As part of the release, I’m going to do a video and give you a couple of good examples of how you write a post.

38:30 Ed: I’ve got to say, it’s funny how a piece of software can change your whole approach…. Having ScreenFlow…

Dan: I’m just going to interrupt. I used to hate doing videos and now for the last edge newsletter, I did 6 or 7 videos. I really enjoyed doing them though. It’s just because, A) the software makes them look nice… there’s always that fear of going on camera – I’m terrified sitting here, honest (LOL). A lot of people are worried doing videos, but if you use something like ScreenFlow, it’s fantastic because you can demonstrate things really, really well and you don’t have to be on it.

Ed: … and if people feel the need the to edit…. Never been a problem for myself J…

Dan: Yeah, we know. (LOL)

Ed: Actually, I do edit a little bit now because it’s so easy to do. The latest version came out while Dan and I were in the air. I haven’t actually had a chance to do it yet, but I’ve already seen some reports that it’s actually 40%-50% faster in the rendering, which is just awesome. Plus you’ll be able to render to Apple TV and I got to show Dan last night on the system downstairs how incredible all the content looks on Apple TV. If you really want a superlative Immediate Edge and Thirty Day Challenge experience… how much are the Apple TVs? $299? $399.

40:07 I’ll tell you what, watching it through the Apple TV is a pretty incredible experience.

Dan: Well that’s one of the things we want to do this year. We want to go pretty much multi-format, so we’re going to be doing Apple TV, and iPod, and iPhone, and HD, and normal video, and anything else we can think of… back of a napkin.

One of the reasons I’m over here this time is that we can do a huge big planning session for the Thirty Day Challenge and work out what people want. So you’ll probably be getting a load of surveys off me, because I’m pretty anal about it…

Ed: And we’re really going to get you guys’ feedback on this…

$229! Thank you Justin – by the way, great to meet you on the weekend, Justin. $229 – for what it does, it is crazy. And Eugene, who I’m not sure if is on today… for those of you how are international, there are many, many cool ways now that you can access iTunes Apple US – you don’t even need a credit card, you can do it through PayPal. So you can download all the latest movies and justify it… tax write off it… Randal.

41:47 Innes, I know your watching, we need to have a chat because we need to final the beta testing for the Edge guys. So we’ll be rolling it out to the Immediate Edge users sometime early next week.

Ed: I think we’ll turn it on during conference…

Dan: Yeah, hopefully…

43:05 Obviously, the whole Thirty Day Challenge thing is free. People have asked about affiliate programs, but nothing gets sold. I can’t tell you how many people came up to me in San Diego and said, “We always thought there was a catch”.

There is not, and it is very, very important that it stays that way.

We were thinking that we still want to encourage people – there are some studs out there… I’m thinking of Ed (aka NextInstinct)… how do we reward people who spread the gospel?

Dan: Well, there’s actually a couple of ways that we’re going to do this. Especially from a teams point of view, if you’re taking part in the 30DC for the first time this year, or you want a join a team this year, then I think it’s really important to do the challenge as a team of ideally 3. That seems to work the best.

Ed: I like 4s. 4s or 5s, but not 3.

Dan: Oh, I like 3 myself…

Ed: I have deep psychological scaring about 3s. (LOL) 3s never work for me, but what ever suits you guys.

44:30 Part of the challenge is to do it as teams again. Obviously, we’ve alleviated the whole social bookmarking reason, but it’s just that the whole group interaction of being able to ask your team mate, “What do you think about this idea?” or I think this keyword is ok, but your friends can actually tell you it’s a crock.

44:50 Dan: This year, what I want people to do is refer their friends. If you’ve got a friend or a buddy or a relative that wants their first foret into the old internet marketing world. Even if it’s just an education on blogging and all the other things that we teach… we want to reward you for introducing people into that as well.

What were doing is… there’s two things really. On the dashboard there’s going to be an option for referring 3 of your friends. It will send out a note from Ed and myself and invite them to come and watch a video about the 30DC.

If they sign up, we’re going to give you a credit. And what to points make?

Ed: Points make lots of cool things. The first thing is that if you reach a certain number of points in the month, you just get the Immediate Edge for free for that month. If you maintain that level then you’ll just keep having free Immediate Edge, which I think is a very cool deal.

It’s not going to be that many….

Dan: It’s fantastic for those of you who already have blogs. One of our goals is to just encourage you to invite your friends anyway, but people who have their own blogs and ways of contacting people, it’s effectively like an affiliate program.

47:13 Ed: Thanks to you guys, Dan and I tend to win a whole bunch of affiliate prizes and I don’t have much. I’ve a bit of a hermit-like existence. J

Dan: You have nothing.

Ed: I don’t have much in the way of gadgets. I won’t be like frequent flyers.

Dan: It’s amazing that Ed’s only got 2 guitars…

Ed: Recently, a very fancy pants Omega watch, a three screened 21 inch uber monitor thing was from Jeff Walker. Rather than us take all of this stuff, we’ll give it to you guys.

Dan: We’ve got things like iPods, iTouches, Apple software…

Ed: Let’s face it, we wouldn’t of got it if it wasn’t for you guys anyway. So it sort of makes sense. We’ll run it in a way so that everyone has a chance.

Dan: So there’ll be some prizes for referrals, some prizes for writing the most interesting article….

49:03 There’s a very special course that Ryan and I will be recommending to you. You and I have saying for a long time that pay per click is very, very important and that all the materials out there about pay per click are seriously outdated. Ryan Deiss is actually coming out with a new pay per click course. It’s really brilliant and will change the way you do pay per click.

He’s done it in a very clever way… and this is something for you guys to think about if you are going to do JV competitions… he’s made this cool list of stuff, and basically the person who comes top gets to pick. The coolest thing that’s there, which I’d hate to give away, but we will because that’s the deal, is the off-road Segway.

Dan: Oh! I was actually considering getting one of those, but my missus would have killed me. The 4X4 one’s fantastic, and what are they 4k or something?

Ed: So if we manage to snag that…..

Dan: You’re never getting that, guys. It’s mine (LOL).

Ed: No, that’s the deal. Otherwise we would argue over it.

50:31 We’re going to doing it just for referring people to the Thirty Day Challenge, we’re also going to be running some cool video competitions again.

50:40 The other day, I was looking for a charger for my TX1 to take to San Diego and I found two perfectly good [Canon IXUS cameras]. Ones the English version, ones the American version.

Dan: That’s shameful. While you were taking the kids to school this morning, me and Julie were slagging off your guitar buying habits.

Ed: Yes… um… Well, there may be a guitar or two in there as well.

51:24 Now, there’s something I want to say about the 30dc, which might give3 you guys a really good idea. I can’t tell you how many people came up to me in San Diego and talked about their small businesses. They applied [this] stuff to their real world businesses – you know, mechanic shop, tailor, these types of things – and the 30dc has had a massive impact.

Dan: I was speaking to a lad I actually used to go to school with believe it or not… a guy called Paul Turner who’s a member of the 30dc… he effectively turned his apartment rental business and he’s doing absolutely great guns now. Paul, if you’re watching, good on you mate.

52:34 The other thing that I was testing while I was actually flying in the air… Twitter has obviously been huge and getting huger – people are getting really amazing results all the time. I met up with Richard about his business and the way he does brilliant tweets for small business. One of the cool things was that I set up… and it’s an amazing service… and I know Shannon Cole you’re there… I used your tweet response service while I was actually in the plane. I could remotely set up insults as I’m flying across the pacific. I had so many people direct message me saying, "How do you Twitter from the plane?"

I did a little affiliate thing as part of the offer – it was a $9 book, and for $9 you couldn’t go wrong. I think we sold 38 copies of that thing while we were in the air out of something like 100 clicks or something. So, the response rate was enormous.

Now, please don’t go and put affiliate stuff in your Twitter feed all the time because it defeats the absolute purpose. I did a little AFF thing there to let people know that it actually an affiliate link, because I think that you’d just get unfollowed faster than you can say "Father Christmas" if you just did that all the time.

Remember, the key difference between Twitter and instant messaging or email is that psychologically speaking [the latter] are face to face contact. Wherever there’s a face to face contact, like Dan and I here, there’s a whole bunch of filters in place – even if you’re not aware of them. It means that you have to work extra hard to get a transaction.

54:54 What Twitter brings to the table, which none of the others do, is side to side. It’s like, "I’m checking out something cool like, CamTwist. This is a really cool application that we’re using to do all this cool studio stuff…" Bang, there we have it….

Dan: It’s a trust bond. That’s the most essential thing about Twitter. It’s not a sales mechanism it’s not something to hammer a message to people. It’s about building a trust. It’s about check move theory. You communicate people continuously and that’s the most important thing. You don’t have to be selling them something, even though you’re always building that relationship.

55:32 Ed: Yep, and why are reality programs so successful on television? I can’t believe how many people watched Dr Drew’s celebrity rehab. Seriously, you should play that to your kids. Forget “Just Say No”, just show them how poor old Jeffraham Taxi scrubbed up after a few years of cocaine and they’ll be off it.

Make sure that you follow Dan and I on Twitter. Another cool use of it was that we decided to have a catch up with some immediate edge members or anybody who was following Twitter really. We met some interesting people… (Ed tries to remember his name)… you’ll know because you were wearing the Oates t-shirt, of Hall & Oates. We all know Oates carried Hall. Hall was the pretty boy, Oates was the dude that was doing the hard yards. You can tell someone has immaculate taste when they’ve got the Oates t-shirt.

57:05 By the way, we’ve got questions and answers, but unfortunately no after show this evening, because we’ve a bit of work to do.

Dan: We’re just a bit out of time today, so no after show, no keywords, no nothing. I’m sorry, but we will be doing a couple more live sessions in the not too distant future, which brings us onto…. (LOL)

Ed: A brilliant segway…. is of course the reason Dan is here, apart from the sunshine and the brilliant coffee at my place, right?

Dan: Yeah, absolutely fantastic coffee mate. It’s even as good as mine.

Ed: You don’t think it’s better?

Dan: …. No. (LOL) No, nothings better than my coffee, mate. I’m sorry! He’s going to break down in an emotional wreck.

Ed: Get out! J

57:58 It’s obviously the Beechworth conference which happens this Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. We’ve got a full group and the who’s who of Australian top internet marketers.

Dan: It’s just going to be a cracking event.

Ed: It’s going to be really, really cool. Monday’s is going to be all about this stuff – the AV (audio visuals). One of the things I’m going to be demonstrating is how to do this (i.e. a live show). So, live from Beechworth…

Dan: Technology permitting…

Ed: I’m pretty sure the internet connection is pretty sweet. Worse case we’ll be doing it with the MacBook Air with the broadband modem…

We will literally be live from Beechworth (click here for the story about the “Well-hung Warlord” or here for some Qik broadcasts)

59:16 For Immediate Edge members, we’ll be using another platform which is Mogulus, which for me is the superior broadcasting platform with one massive weakness which is it doesn’t allow you to download shows and then put them into YouTube. However, what they have released is a sort of TiVo version of the thing. So, for the Immediate Edge, that is going to be perfect.

1:00:09 We’re going to be talking a lot about where we see things going in the rest of 2008 and into 2009.

Not to pat ourselves on the back, but both of us are 4 days off being 1 year on Twitter. It was Rob and Dan that invented GTrends. It was the boys that invented all this social bookmarking that is being talked about all around the joint. Not me. I made the coffee.

Dan: Yeah, you made the coffee.

Ed: I was there.

Dan: He does make very good coffee.

1:01:30 Ed: Actually, do you know what we should do….

Dan: Dan Raine gets drunk live on camera (LOL)….

Ed: We are going to do a special Euro version of the show. I think we’ll do it live from the Ned Kelly bar.

1:02:25 Donald’s coming in from the UK, Chris coming from South Africa, Kenny is coming from the UK….

1:02:53 I’m going to put on a little video and it’s probably going to have Frank playing the Ukulele. It’s probably going to loop – that’s why we can go wee-wee and make coffee so we can answer the Q & As. So pop us some questions on the page. We’ll be back…

 

Show Notes:-

This show was originally recorded on Tuesday 15th April 2008 at 8:00pm EST.

2:55 It’s been a huge week in internet marketing

3:07 That big thing that has happened is Twitter. I really want to strip Twitter back to understand the psychology of it.

(Ed shows Pink Thong Video)

7:24 The Alexa ranking of the thirtydaychallenge.com site has gone through the roof since the start of April. Although, Alexa ranking is fundamentally flawed, because we’re comparing apples to apples they’re all flawed together, so the data is interesting.

8:02 I think that’s down to a combination of three things, although Dan and I would argue about which one. I say it is down to the TV show and the Twitter phenomenon. Dan would say that it’s down to a bunch of scripts and search engine stuff related to the Thirty Day Challenge.

9:04 Twitter has all the characteristics of something that I suspect will turn out to be the marketing phenom of 2008. It is a classic example of a service that couldn’t have existed without the internet. The very first radio shows were just people reading out newspapers – the persuasive medium of the day before radio existed. Then they worked out that radio shows could be more immediate than radio shows.

9:54 The first television shows were dominated by the stars of radio shows; just someone talking into a microphone. It wasn’t until they understood the medium, e.g. the concept of the soap, that TV really took off.

10:23 With the internet, the first thing companies did were to put up brochures and made an online version. It didn’t really impact or take advantage of the internet at all. If you look at things that did take hold, eBay for example, could not have existed… you could not aggregate that kind of audience without the internet providing the interactivity.

10:52 By the way, what is it with eBay at the moment? Are they on cocaine down at eBay headquarters? Some of the moves they’re making are just total bone head moves. In Australia here, they are making PayPal the only way of payment. Apparently, having someone deposited money direct into your bank account these days is not good enough these days. That’s not as “secure” as using PayPal. That’s crazy.

11:30 For people with high ticket items, people have PayPal limits – there’s certain amounts that they can and can’t send through PayPal. It’s really bananarama – I don’t get it. I’m sure there will be a big outcry.

11:45 How did I find out that eBay had done that? Did eBay let me know? No. Ed, aka NextInstinct, did a Twitter on that… which brings me on to this story that Twitter could not have existed without the internet infrastructure. That’s part one of what makes it so exiting.

12:18 Part two, which really hit me about Twitter is following some news events, like the US presidential elections and the Olympic torch debacle at San Francisco. The hot news was not coming through blogs, but from traditional sources, which was extraordinary.

13:13 Let’s have a look at why Twitter is so cool. So the first thing you need to realise is that Twitter takes advantage of two things which I hold dearest to my marketing philosophy heart. The first thing is the Check Move theory that although I didn’t invent it, I am a big advocate of it. Check move theory is a very, very important element. 

14:55 It basically says that your success as a sales person in is direct proportion to the amount of times you have had a contact (aka “a touch”) with that person. The thing about Twitter is that it is the check move machine miracle, because you’re able to do really high touch activities, you’re able to provide real value, and you’re able to talk to so many people so directly. 

16:02 I’d encourage you to go back and look at the check moves video, because that’s really important to the whole thing.

16:48 I want to show you a video example of how one business is using Twitter just superbly. What’s ironic is that when I leaked this video out to people on Twitter of course, I believe Richard actually made quite a few sales. Check out this case study of how someone is taking all these technologies and applying them to a traditional business. Most people wouldn’t actually think would be appropriate, but he does it and does it brilliantly.

17:31 (Video – “How to Use Twitter for Business” runs from 17:31 – 33:00)

17:53 I was thrilled when this guy sent me a tweet about what he was doing. I don’t mind showing this example because what this guy does is so unique there’s no point in competing with this guy. What he does is actually a passion of mine, but not one I ever considered. There are so artisans nowadays that work in their garages and make these incredible hand build custom guitars. Nike are also doing this with shoes.

19:07 This week when we talked about Daniel Pink and his “A Whole New Mind” book, this whole concept of being able to design your own things or have custom, hand made things is such a huge part of society as we move forward. So it’s a real thrill to talk to you about Richard

19:39 Check out this site: RichardInk.com. The guys name is Richard Merritt, and apart from being a guitar super-enthusiast and a great player, he’s also a lover of coffee. So, we’ve a heck of a lot in common. He’s also a bit of a pipe man – that’s not my thing, as you can hear my lungs are completely conkers.

20:03 As you’ll see soon, I think that Richard has absolutely nailed how to use the blog and how to use Twitter and show off. Check out these most astounding fountain pens. That is just superb!

20:38 What I wanted to talk about is his taking the stuff he’s learnt from the Thirty Day Challenge and else where and apply it to his real world business. Something that I really want to emphasise this year is that the biggest successes we’ve had in these past 12 months has come from people applying the 30dc to their real world business.

21:14 This is actually a blog, and each pen that he makes actually has its own blog post. Check out this artisan pencil. Just look at the comments, “I just tweeted you”. Hello, when did that language come into the vernacular? Take it from me, it will become more and more and more. He’s conducting a business using a blog!

23:27 Now the thing about blogs of course is that they are so easy to update and automate. I just think that he has done this so tastefully. When you’re buying a pen, what do want to know? You want to know its construction – he describes it and gives it a story.

24:00 Look at this – fountain pen care tips. This is so cool. For all those people doing eBay products, this is so important. This is what we’re talking about when you start to care for your customers are really bring them in. Remember high concept, high touch – those are the messages from Daniel Pink’s “A whole new mind” This is both of those things.

24:48 We’ve got the workbench here. A brilliant way of doing this type of site. 

25:25 Gary Halbert used to have special pens and I have too. This is the Mount Blanc pen I used to sign the contract when I sold my websites. I feel silly now because Richard Ink are not only better price wise, but are just much better pens.

26:18 Let me show Richard’s Twitter – this is where it gets really cool.  I just love this (reading from Twitter posts) “Taking it easy today. Smoking a Maestro De Paja pipe which was a gift from artist @jasonclaydunn… Maybe head out to the studio…”

27:44 The way he talks to people, and this is crucial, when you reply to people, you need to make it readable to other people. For example, he writes  “No, not a new material. I do pens in several types of resins, acrylics, and celluloids as well as wood burls”.

28:33 You see it’s detail, and it’s engaging. He’s not trying to sell anything here; he’s not pitching. This is my greatest fear for people who have just jumped on to Twitter. If you pitch people, you’re gone because Twitter is the most democratic messaging service ever invented.

29:10 (Reading Richards twitter), you feel part of the creation process. You can do this quickly and easily without breaking your flow. So, if you’re doing any sort of creative endeavour, you can make people feel involved, and they’ll pay much more. When your reading Richard on Twitter, you don’t feel like you’re being sold to, it completely disengages all of the “I’m being sold to” defence mechanisms.

30:03 I don’t know whether Richard’s set out to do that deliberately or not, but he’s passionate about what he does and that comes through with every post. Look at  his response to comments – what has that told a prospective buyer?

30:43 You’ve got to understand the psychology of this and how important it is. It’s not the classic “person buying car vs. car salesman” interaction. It’s like two people discussing my snowball microphone and the third person comes and listens in on this conversation. This is why Twitter is so amazing in marketing.

31:28 Seth Godin did a brilliant post in the last couple of days. He says that if you do want to sell something then there’s nothing wrong with that, but if you follow someone one day and then sell to them the next it’s bad practice.

32:00 Why am I not worried about stuffing up Twitter? It’s because if you are noisy and offer no value, then they can stop following you.

 32:14 Buy some of Richard’s pens, because they are brilliant. More importantly, have a look at how this guy is conducting his artisan business. I’ve never met the guy, I’m just getting this from his website. I encourage you to go and have a look at it and think about how you can use twitter and blogs for your own real world business or your own e-store business.

33:05 The exercise that I want you to do and think about right here is, “How can I take what Richard has done and apply it to my own niche?”  It’s all about high-concept and high-touch (explained in a minute).

33:53 This week, I have been reading “A Whole New Mind – Why Right-Brainers will Rule the Future” by Daniel H Pink. This book is an absolute must read. It talks about the left brain, the more analytical brain; and the right brain, the more creative side. In truth you use all parts of your mind at all times, but there are definitely biases between the two.

35:05 One interesting fact from the book that I found fascinating is that in languages where they don’t use vowels, and only constantans (Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin, etc) they write from right to left. This is because to make the intuitive leap of putting the vowel sounds, in Arabic and Hebrew, engages the right side of the brain. Whereas in western languages we include the vowel so there’s no need to make a creative leap, so the left hand side of the brain is engaged.

35:51 I found that fascinating, but that’s almost a distraction from why this book is so good. He talks about “the conceptual age”… we’ve had the agricultural age, the industrial age, the information age, and his basic contention is that we are moving from the information age to the conceptual age.

36:33 I thought, “This sounds a bit airy-fairy”, but in chapter 2, “Abundance, Asia, and Automation” he’s talking about how these factors are really going to make a huge ground shift the way we value and pay for things.

37:01 For example, we’re familiar with the whole outsourcing debate and we’re big encouragers of outsourcing. The information marketing area is quite advanced when it comes to outsourcing, because any task that is repetitive or follows a set of rules can be effectively outsourced. You can debate the politics of this in the after show section if you like, but the facts are that people in India (do the outsourced work), where US$650 per month is 25 times the average wage.

37:59 I was surprised to learn that “the knowledge worker” is also in this automation category. It’s startling to learn that 90% of tax returns in the US are done in India

39:00 They did a study of how long it takes until a patient is interrupted by their doctor when they are explaining what is wrong with them. The average is about 20 seconds, because they have a diagnostic process, which they‘ve realised is all you need to cure a large percentage of ailments.

39:44 What makes this book so fascinating for us is that to protect yourself in the next 10-20 years, you need to look at things in the conceptual age (Ed starts to look up the 6 characteristics).

40:12 Dan Pink used to be a speech writer for Al Gore so it’s really, really a good read.

40:20 The 6 Characteristics are:

1.Design

2. Story

3. Symphony

4. Empathy

5. Play

6. Meaning

These are the things that in the conceptual age can’t be outsourced. Think about it. Why does Apple do so well? Yes, they get all their stuff made in Taiwan, but the design of something as beautiful as the iPhone is not something that can be outsourced. In the US, people who are in the creative arts are more increasingly becoming important to the economy. This really, really, is a big, big deal.

41:40 I won’t spoil the book, you’ve just got to read it.

42:15 If you look at those characteristics, empathy, symphony, play and story are the key constructs  of what good information marketing is all about. Then if we overlay Twitter onto all of this… Twitter is a tool for the conceptual age. Let me show you some examples:

43:10 (Ed mistakenly brings up a picture of an interesting looking tomato – whoops)

44:10 How did I find out about Richard (Merritt)? He Twittered me.

44:45 PollDaddy is a cool service that enables you to use Twitter people to do surveys. Twitter is great for utilising people’s brain power, I can’t believe how effective it at helping me when I get stuck.

Nez (Andrew Nesbit) has done a new design for my blog.

45:44 What is so cool about PollDaddy is that I saw that Dan and Lisa Hartwell have already run polls. NextInstinct, one of our favourite Thirty Day Challengers, has had a poll featured!

46:38 Twitter from a masterminding perspective is just huge. It is a torch created for it.

47:09 (PollDaddy) is my reason why Twitter is different to instant messaging such as Skype, iChat, etc. It is the absolute bomb and it enhances your Twitter experience 10 times.

47:51 (Video – “Why I Don’t Follow Many People On Twitter - I choose to follow EVERYONE!” 47:51-1:05:39)

48:15 I just want to show you a real, live, amazing example of why Twitter is so cool. I also want to point out again why I don’t follow many people. One reason is that there are just over 3,000 people following me. If I were to follow them back it would take 12.5 hours to read just one message from each of them. I only follow people that are part of my team or very close friends.

50:15 It’s not a snub. It’s not that I am being rude. Twitter is not an instant messaging where there is 2-way reciprocation. There is no obligation on the part of the person that you’re following than to do anything other than provide interesting information to you. If we fail in that endeavour, then we’re gone, and you lose a follower.

51:06 People think that because I don’t follow I’m being rude and I miss the conversation. I’m going to show you with this brilliant site (Quotably.com) that I can be across far more with a couple of amazing tools than I can could ever be. If followed 3,000 people, my Twirl would be like a Vegas slot machine, it would be continuously going off, making it unusable.

51:35 Let me show you this incredible Twitter tool – it’s going to change your Twitter life.

51:42 This is Quotably.com. We are going to at random pick a username… oh, I don’t know… “Ed_Dale”… and click Follow.

52:09 I did this video on why I don’t follow people much, and I used Seesmic which is this amazing video tool which integrates with Twitter. I can quickly whip off a video message that will encompass much more than a 140 character Twitter message. That’s amazing tool #1.

52:20 (Referring to Quotably conversations) Do I follow these people? No, all of these people used “@Ed_Dale”. Here’s the thing, if you use “@Ed_Dale” I will get that message and I’ll respond.

52:35 Now check this out. I follow John Reese. Why? Because he’s a good friend – not that he’s got anything to teach, I taught him everything he knows (joke).

53:55 The first thing that quotably does is that it brings you the entire conversation, which is so cool. I can laugh at John being stuck on a runway in Orlando, how cool is the world when you can do that?

54:29 Then I saw something: “Anyone know why @Ed_Dale doesn’t follow his followers back?”

55:25 You should be doing everything that you can to provide magnificent content so that people will be desperate to follow you. YaroStarak does that, he’s a really interesting blogger. Gideonshalwick is also someone who I’ve got some time for.

55:50 (Referring to Quotably conversation) I can see that Mari and Gideon are doing a bit of business. Would I have known that without (Quotably)? Would I know that Gideon was doing interviews with people? No. Am I inclined to do a video interview with Gideon now I know this? Yes, because it’s over the shoulder, it’s shoulder to shoulder marketing, not face to face marketing.

56:45 Now here we are. This is where we get into the meat. I wouldn’t have picked up that SethGodin and Jason without this Quotably tool.

57:05 I would use Twitter differently if it was just a group of friends instead of me as a character if you will… people follow me, I hope, because I’ve got some interesting insights in the use of technology, and marketing, and so on. It’s either that or rampant sex appeal.

37:38 (Referring to Quotably conversations) Jason said “But it certainly sends a message”. What’s going on here? I want everyone to like me, now of course that’s not going to happen in any world.

57:55 I wouldn’t have known that Jason has a negative view of me except for this use of this amazing tool. I’m way more over everything, and so can you be, by using this tool. It just shows you how powerful twitter is. I can literally put a hose on the bush fire before it gets out of control.

(Ed demonstrates how to reply to people directly using the @username trick.)

1:01:02 (Reading from Quotably) “ DonEttore: @marismith doesn’t practice what he preaches. Most of his inner circle just follow each other. One way marketing? Not very social.”

(Ed replies) “Ed_Dale: @DonEttore Mate - not true - this is I Dont Follow People much on Twitter - Redux http://seesmic.com/v/6C87sPJcYB”

1:01:31 The cool thing is that I know that Don is going to get that. How long has it taken me? 5 Seconds? For me I jus think that’s brilliant.

1:02:23 Now this has all been about me, but if I was a trout fisherman and I typed in trout fishing in the search all of a sudden it becomes fantastic.

1:02:47 This has turned into a much longer video than I hoped, but here’s the pièce de résistance. Look up here;    R – S – S  FEED. I can click on this… in this particular case I’m using Safari not Flock because I’m upgrading from Firefox to Flock which is another video I’m going to show you guys.

So anything to do with me – I’m across it.

1:03:29 I’m going to go through (Quotably) and respond to the rest of these people just to make sure they know I’m watching and that I do care. This is better than a two way conversation, because with instant message we feel obligated to reply all the time, instantly, and that’s why it becomes such a time suck. With Twitter, you answer on your own terms. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, it means you’ve got to balance it out. If you want to go live online, do World of Warcraft. I’m not saying that’s wrong.  I love World of Warcraft. I love all of these things, but you’ve just got to understand what you’re using them for. Please don’t mistake the fact that I don’t follow you personally as being a slight against you. It’s just not.

1:04:23 You can always contact me. This is why I love Twitter so much. If you just use the good old “@Ed_Dale” like Dustin has, I’ll get it. If Dustin sends me some interesting info, then I’m going to go, “Wow, I want to see what this guy’s doing”, and follow him. You’ll see in a new video I’m going to release very shortly, that’s how I found someone who’s doing amazing things with small business on Twitter.

1:04:53 For a whole philosophical discussion on Twitter, you want to tune in to this Tuesday night 8pm EST. We are going to dedicate the entire Thirty Day Challenge Show to a discussion about the ins and outs, the etiquettes, and the perspectives of utilising Twitter.  

1:05:45 (Ed singing “Don’t Ya Wish Ya Blog Was Hot Like Mine”)

1:07:20 What I love about Twitter is that it’s a completely permission based system. If someone sends you some links that you don’t like, or indeed if I start using Twitter in a way that is not comfortable with you, then one click and I’m gone. That’s the way I think it should be.

1:07:48 It’s about you having great information so that people are interested in following what you’ve got to say.

1:08:46 (Responding to Chat?) That Twitter launch stuff… Justin Brooke… It’s already happening. Don’t you worry about that.

1:08:53 (Ed demonstrates TweetScan feature in Twhirl) If I just type “Ed Dale”, every time anyone has mentioned “Ed Dale” I can see it which a very, very cool thing. The reason why I like to use it in Twhirl as opposed to the Tweetscan (site) is the ability to click on the photos.

Thank you guys and I will speak to you next week.

 

Show Notes:-

This show was originally recorded on Monday 7th April 2008 at 8:30pm EST.

00:06 This show is dedicated to the memory of Gary Halbert, who passed away one year ago tomorrow. Rest in peace, alpha shit weasel (as he affectionately referred to himself).

03:55 Welcome to our new home at thirtydaychallenge.tv. As you might have noticed we have moved from justin.tv to ustream.tv.

04:19 I’ve been doing a lot of live testing and later on in the show I will be talking about my findings. There are three major transmission environments, and each of them has some positives and some negatives.

4:42 Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of Gary Halbert passing, so I wanted to show you some of my favourite Gary Halbert lessons.

5:03 Twitter has become hot, hot, hot, and dare I say it, but I told you so. I want to talk about some testing on Twitter we have been doing in the lab.

6:02 The show is structured with content, lessons, news etc of the week in the first part, and then in the second part we turn off the recording and we go into questions and answers. Not only do you get to ask me questions, but you can see from the chat window we have a who’s who of internet marketing in the 30dc world – so there’s a lot of people here who can help. One of the awesome things (about ustream.tv) is that I can bring you on live. If you want to do that, you do need to have headphones, and you have to feel comfortable with your webcam. We can also use the chat window for questions and answers.

7:08 Finally, we will have the after show section which is completely without merit.

7:48 Some of you will have already noticed some of the benefits of Ustream. The quality of the picture and the sound will be much better. You also will have noticed that you get proper sound from (pre-recorded) videos as well.

9:28 One of the things that has been going on a lot this week, especially on April Fool’s day, were a lot of links that went to a YouTube video of Rick Asley singing “Never Gonna Give You Up”. If there’s one video from the 80s that should be dead and buried, it should be that. This is basically a prank that has gone around in the Web 2.0 world. (Referring to chat) That’s right “Rick Rolled”. A lot of people have been sending their video streams, their podcast streams, their tv shows, etc to this Rick Asley video and it may have happened to you. I have posted that Frank Ucayali video, and as internet marketers I suspect that we should try our own version of being “Rick Rolled” - called “Uc-Rolling”. I posted up a Twitter message saying “Check out this new video on the 30 dc”. When you click on the link you instead go to the Rick Asley video. I just wanted to explain this internet phenom.

11:41 This photo (of Gary Halbert) was actually taken from the very last public appearance that Gary ever made. It was, I’m very proud to say, from Frank and my Underachiever conference in 2006. Gary, as some of you may or may not know, was a huge, huge influence on me. I actually lived with the great man in Miami. What I got out of that wild experience was not only the “hows” of how the greatest copy writer the world has ever seen worked, but it also gave me an insight into the little things, the mechanics. That was what made a huge impression.

12:39 For those who don’t know Gary Halbert at all, Gary is in my opinion just the greatest copy writer of all time. Fortunately, the Gary Halbert newsletters are available on line and they are completely free. One of the best possible copywriting educations that you can get is to go right back to the start from newsletter one and just go through them. There are so many great pieces of information buried in there – it’s just totally brilliant. If there’s just one set of newsletters that I can point you to it’s the Boron newsletters. These were actually written when Gary was in prison for mail fraud. He told me that he didn’t deserve to go to jail for that, but there was plenty in the past that he did deserve to go to jail for, so it probably added up.

14:10 Gary wrote a series of letters to his son, Bond, from jail. These letters are the most extraordinary letters that I’ve ever seen. I want to show you one of my treasured possessions. This is not the original, but it is one of a few bound copies that Gary had made up which is the actual hand written version. It’s one of my most treasured possessions.  This to me is unbelievable.

16:11 This content is available to you online. It’s an extraordinary education. It was written for direct marketing, but it is also applicable online.

16:34 There’s one particular lesson that I want to bring you today which is one of my absolute favourites that I did last year – “Golden Nuggets”. Golden Nuggets is such an incredible strategy, because if there’s a mistake that people make when starting the 30dc or internet marketing, it’s that they only get into a topic to a certain degree. They don’t really understand it. This is something that Gary was brilliant at doing, and John Carlton today is brilliant at doing it, and I like to think that I’m pretty good at it too. This strategy some academics out there might recognise as study, but there’s a certain way to it… a physical element to it.

17:54 My book recommendation of the week is “The Back of the Napkin” by Dan Roam, which is absolutely brilliant. Seriously, this is one to get. What’s fascinating to me is that it’s a major element of what Gary did with the Golden Nugget method.

18:49 **The Golden Nugget Method – How To Become An Expert In 48 hours** (presentation made in iWork Keynote) I wanted to add a voice recording to the Golden Nugget pdf which I produced – it’s a great way of using one created piece of content and reformatting it for different distribution methods.

19:23 I wanted to teach you about The Golden Nugget Method, which Julie jokes, “Hey Ed, that’s just good studying”, but it’s always nice to give something a good title. You may not have the time right now, but you should try to read one newsletter a day.

20:37 Don’t let the fact that Gary did time put you off reading it. I think I’ve learnt from my mistakes than any successes, it’s just the fact of life. In fact for anyone that’s successful, I can guarantee one thing - they’ve made more mistakes than you. They’re not afraid to make mistakes.

21:02 Gary was a huge inspiration to me, he was very kind to me, and I went to live with him in Miami while he was teaching me the ropes. This newsletter really is absolutely brilliant. It’s completely free, and a big thank you to his sons, Kevin and Bond for continuing the site and continue it going.

21:30 As you’ll learn over the course of the rest of this month, content is everything. That’s going to be your job from now on – creating content or paying someone to do so. It’s the most important skill and I learnt all my chops right here.

21:59 Gary came up with this strategy to help write Direct Mail letters, but the technique applies to anytime you’re going to be creating content, whether you’re doing an interview or recording something like I am now, or writing a blog post. It’s just the degree to which you go.

22:17 People ask me, “How can you continuous talk about all of this stuff?” The truth is, it’s because of the study elements. I’ve already shown you my Bloglines secret and effectively what I’m doing every day is Golden Nugget theory. I’m looking round the net; everything makes me go, “Oh wow!” or “That’s interesting”, I make a note of it. It’s the act of physically recording that note and believe it or not I actually use a Moleskin notepad. You can also you Google Notebook, which you can cut and paste things. Which ever way you do it, the important thing is to do it.

23:19 When we started doing all this niche marketing, we grabbed those 3”x5” index cards and every single time we saw something we would write it down. Gary did it for headlines, “Wow-facts”, or anything makes you stop and go “Huh?” or “Interesting!”

19:49 As we go forward, you’ve got your phrases and you need to produce content for those. That can freak people out a bit, but I’m going to show you how to make it really fun. Some of you might be flashing back to school assignments and thinking about how horrendous they were. Folks, they were horrendous because of the way they were taught; it’s a crime that it’s still taught in that way. It’s a real shame, because it’s a joy to do. I used to hate it and now I love it. You should love it too, because it’s the thing that will set you apart down the track.

24:46 First of all, I want you to type your phrase into Google. Look at the top 10 sites (20 is better), and I want you to take heaps of notes. You should put one idea on each of the 3×5 cards so you are able to “fondle those facts” as Gary put it.

25:29 The reason people have so much problem with reports is that they just don’t have the information to hand. Writer’s block is caused by a lack of information. Another great book that I love is “Story” by Robert McKee which talks about screenwriting. Robert McKee is a very surly gentlemen as a general rule, but the book is still worth learning from. He talks about it in very frank language that writer’s block is caused by a lack of information, and nothing that a day spent doing golden nuggets won’t fix.

26:22 I want you to adopt a state of curiousness, because that is the state that will make you money. It is our natural state to sort, judge, and edit at the wrong times – something that is so badly taught in our schools.

27:17 The other thing I want you to do is join all the mailing list for the sites in the top 10 results. You may want to set up a Gmail account especially for doing this.

28:07 Bottom line is that as you take these notes your brain will start to sort it and work through it. A key thing is that if you take a break, then when you come back all of a sudden it just flows and you can just write. The best writers, Steven King, Amy Tan, Tolkien, Hemingway…. it’s very rare for them to have a specific idea of what’s going on. Steven King used to start of with nothing more than an idea, like what would happen if cars ate people? (Christine)… what happens if a dog goes bad? – (Cujo)… or what happens if you spill pig’s blood on a sophomore? (Carrie) – the rest of the story came out of that little idea.

29:19 The hook, the catch, everything that’s important about any piece of content that you write will magically appear.

29:52 Make sure you have your Bloglines setup. Your Firefox browser should default to Bloglines when you click the orange button in the address field. Subscribe to those blog feeds like I showed you and read them and take notes as I did with speed reading – it’s really, really important.

26:20 99% of people will just sit there passively reading Bloglines. There are two sorts of piles in your brain. One pile is like my desk at the moment, stuff is just thrown on it. You can find stuff, but it’s going to take a hell of a lot of time. The mere act of you taking active notes activates the part of the brain that acts like a filing cabinet. If you’re going to read it, why not take three extra seconds and make information 100 times more useful?

31:35 Make sure you do a search on FaceBook, Google Groups, MySpace, Yahoo, for the phrase. In most cases you might not find a group for your specific phrase so you’ll have to go to the core market. For example with “Free Speed Reading” you may have to look for “Speed Reading” groups. If it was “Sausage Making Tips”, the core market would be “Sausage Making”.

32:15 Reading is not enough – you must take notes.

32:30 There is a sort of part 2 to this which we’ll explain as we go through this next week of the challenge. At the moment I want you to be storing stuff in your filing cabinets, and then I’ll show you how to bring it out of the filing cabinets effortlessly and easily. If you always thought, “Oh, I can never create content”, I have had a 100% success rate with people who have followed these instructions. It just works, because its how your brain works.

33:01 If you market the way the internet works and use your brain the way it’s been designed to work, it’s funny how much easier things are.

34:48 I don’t know if you’ve been following Twitter, but if you have you might have seen that we had a big announcement. It is the peer to peer social bookmarking, and it’s been extraordinarily successful. We only put this out via Twitter for the first few days, but we’ve had 5917 people sign up.

35:59 In a nutshell, for the thirty day challenger, this site does one thing and it does it beautifully. Once you sign up with fresh accounts, over the next few days, you will be able to past in your URL, your tags, your phrase, and statement, press a button and all your social bookmarking will be done. It will save you an extraordinary amount of time or money. You might even find that Anil Feltcher in India might be out of business.

38:06 OnlyWire used to purport to do this, but it never actually did; this actually works. This has been 7 months of hardcore programming by Dan. Dan is an absolute genius.

36:11 There’s only one way to celebrate Dan’s genius (– the Pink Thong Video)

42:05 Now I wanted to talk about live tv. I’ve been doing a lot of research and a lot of testing. One of the cool things about being able to Twitter is when we wanted to test we would get anywhere from 15 to 25 people to help. This time last week was a disaster, Justin.tv just blew up on me. I don’t want to bag Justin.tv because it’s where we got the start. It has some really nice features, but I think the difference between Justin.tv and Ustream.tv is analogous to MySpace and FaceBook. Ustream has some very nice exporting options, I save as a movie, and it also has a submission engine to put it on YouTube. Most importantly, it allows really nice audio visual streaming of other (pre-recorded) videos.

45:04 It also allows you to have a co-host. It you have a webcam (or mic) and headphones you can come on the show. It’s vital to have headphones to avoid feedback.

47:36 The tools at Mogulus.com are just extraordinary, it’s like your producing CNN, you can have people jumping in backwards and forwards. You can have multiple producers, so you can have people doing the switching for me between videos. However there are a couple of things that it doesn’t do that I think are vital. It doesn’t allow you to export a video of your show and that is very important. The quality is superb, but can really tax your computer and can crash Firefox on old computers.

49:18 Mogulus are one to keep an eye on. You can half a dozen people that you switch between for segments, and you can have people queuing up everything for you. You can also have clickable links appear at the bottom of the video screen which for internet marketing is just superb. It’s going to be great for launches, because you can make your own infomercial show and have it running 24 hours a day.

50:35 What you should do is just like we’ve done is go and register yourself a .tv domain for your niches.

52:04 Twitter has got a bad wrap, but it has become huge and is becoming vital. It’s where things happen first and it’s a more reliable method than email if it’s used properly. The thing that makes people’s experience of Twitter not good is because they use it for the wrong things. There are three types of Twitter user, the first is groups of mates. I would love to do this, but I can’t really use it like this because of the position I’m in. When you hook it up to your mobile phone, or use it with Halo (if you know the link please leave it in comments below – thanks, Tim) it’s just brilliant. If you’re using it for marketing, you can’t use it for private conversations because it comes across as being rude – people feel as if they’re being left out of a conversation.

54:29 The whole micro blogging aspect can’t be underestimated – the leverage possibilities are extraordinary. To be able to type once for it appear on FaceBook, and loads of other social networks are going to make it indispensible in the marketer’s armoury.  We are going to make it a big part of the 30dc this year.

55:05 Can someone please Google for me “Frank Kern’s VW”? Look at this, Frank Kern’s VW page didn’t exist before Friday. That’s nuts.

56:21 We are going to be using Twitter enormously in the 30dc both as a communication tool amongst all the Thirty Day Challengers and as part of the methodology. I’ll be publishing some lessons going forward which will make Twitter much more useful.

56:50 Rob Summerville (head of the 30dc labs) was the biggest sceptic and critic of Twitter – he thought it was a load of toss. @Rob: Any sort of acknowledgment of genius in the chat window will be fine.

57:34 What I want to close out with is a presentation about Twitter and why it is so important.

58:30 **The Tao of Twitter** Here is an explanation of why I believe that twitter is such a cool thing for internet marketers. I’m using the Pecha Kucha style of a 20 second per slide, 20 slide presentation.

58:54 A lot of people wonder what’s the point of Twitter – why would anybody be interested in little snapshots of people’s lives? It doesn’t seem at first glance to make sense, but it does. It can be used for link building, selling without selling, and something that I think everybody has missed.

59:13 To make my first point about what makes Twitter so successful I need to show you an amazing book written by Paul Zane Pilzer called, “Unlimited Wealth”. When Paul was writing this he had one rule: a new technology will become accepted once it has become better and easier to use than the preceding technology.

59:36 If you have a look at Twitter it fulfils all those rules beautifully. Here’s a screen shot showing 4 different ways in which I can access Twitter.

1:00:00 Now the most important reason (except for the secret one coming up) is the bottom line formula: More Contact = More Sales. The person who makes the most contact will make the most sales – every internet marketer I know is in that position.

1:00:27 This is my Twitter screen and I use it to keep in touch – like micro-blogging. A lot of these conversations you can see were made via SMS when I was stuck on a plane.

1:00:45 One of the main benefits is that if I type in a post in Twitterific, the feed can go to up to 16 or 17 places.

1:01:07 Twitter and Google have a very good relationship. Twitter is indexed by Google, which makes it very useful, particularly with low competition phrases.

1:01:30 The most powerful lesson of all is one that people completely miss. Anytime we are communicating with a sales letter or an email, the reader has all their sales defences up.

1:02:13 The cool thing about Twitter is that it’s “fly on the wall” communication. You are side by side with your followers – here are some specific examples.

1:02:43 Here’s Twittervision on FaceBook – it shows that I’m located in London.

1:02:58 Hands down, the biggest mistake that people make with Twitter is using it for instant messaging. If you use it for IM, from an internet marketing perspective you’re dead in the water. There’s nothing more annoying for your followers than seeing conversations they are not part of.

1:03:21 Don’t sell! I saw a list of sales phrases you can use with Twitter – that’s just so stupid. If you sell to people then they are no longer a fly on the wall, you are going head to head with them.

1:03:44 If you’re ever wondering what to put up on Twitter, just answer the question, “What are you doing?”

1:04:05 I’ve run out of time this morning, but I’m going to do a video showing how to set up Twitter. If someone in the 30dc can beat me to it then send me a link and I will send it out to everybody. They have made it a lot easier to set up in the last few days.

1:04:27 When I’ve found someone who’s having a lot of success I just copy and follow along with what they are doing. So you might want to go to twitter.com/Ed_Dale and twitter.com/DanRaine to see how Dan and I are using Twitter.

1:05:35 The next lesson is about Check Moves, or How to Sell Without Selling created by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson.

1:06:49 Thanks for joining us. Don’t forget, the next show is at 8pm EST on Monday - I’d love to have you there. Make sure you blog about us, you are more than welcome to put the video on your pages, you have all the permissions required - Anil Feltcher will be having a heart attack. Now we are moving to questions and answers, so bye to all the folks watching the recording. Make sure to join us live because it’s so cool. Thanks very much for being with us and we’ll see you next week.

Show Notes:-

N.B. If you would like to make use of the time-codes below, this version on justin.tv has a time-code displayed with the video.

This show was originally recorded on March 18th 2008

1:02:08 Just to give you an idea of the technology I’m using, I’ve a Mac Pro tower with a Logitech USB camera. The picture is OK and the lighting is zero professional, but this hat is mediating the light on my face.

1:01:11 I’m not trying to look like Michael Moore as some said. Hello Alison.

1:00:59 I’m using a snowball condensing microphone. The snowball has a little more flexibility for moving around.

1:00:00 Now, I can do some pretty spiffy things that I can’t normally do - like showing a photo. I can use Skitch to grab a picture and throw that up.

59:24 I can also show you movies. The movie I am about to show you hasn’t been shot for this - to make a video for this, I would have to blow it up very, very large.

58:16 The program that allows me to do these (effects) is called Cam Twist. I can call in Flickr streams,  my twitter feed is down there scrolling, and I can do thought bubbles.

57:11 You can do this anywhere, any place, which I think has got huge ramifications in your niches. Where this is really powerful is in good old normal Joe and Jane Smith niches, because they’ve never seen anything remotely like this. With the sense of community, it just works really well.

55:45 One of the things about Justin.tv is that it’s public access, so anyone can come along which can cause some excitement. There are moderators so everyone plays nicely.

55:10 Imagine if your niche was trout fishing and you could show a movie of landing the latest trout.

54:52 The other thing I can do is make this all available for recording. Not only can we do this show live, but we can have the show recorded for later.

53:06 I want to now talk about The Thirty Day Challenge; we’ve already starting testing. In 2008, the challenge will be completely different to the one in 2007. Does it mean that the 2007 information is not any good? Absolutely not. It’s not only good – it works brilliantly.

52:06 For the newest people, here’s briefly a 30 second overview. The 30dc was created in 2005 when I had just sold a bunch of my little niche marketing businesses. My business partner at the time, Frank Kern, was busy being daddy for the second time and I was sort of twiddling my thumbs a bit. In all the stuff that we taught, there was one element that we had really forgotten to talk about during our training. And it was the concept of teams and team work.

51:23 Because when I first started doing niche publishing way back with Amy Roberts, Mel, Ugene Ware and Anthony Fernando, the thing that made that all work was the fact that we did that together as a team. And we met every Wednesday at the state library here in Melbourne.

We would work on each other’s project. And hopeful that we would get a product up for sale and make the first dollar (it took us 93 days). The team was really a critical part of that, because the team motivated. If someone got ahead the others would try and catch up, so there was a bit of friendly competition within the team.

50:40 There was an accountability – even if it wasn’t people saying, “You must finish this!” I’ve found that when you’re in a group and you’re all committed to an outcome, you don’t need to say anything a lot of the time. It’s very obvious who’s falling behind and who’s not falling behind.

50:18 Unfortunately, our brain in an effort to protect us usually causes people to drop out. They would rather drop out than subject themselves to having to front up - which is a bit of a shame.

50:00 Therefore, the Thirty Day Challenge was created to literally prove the concept that if you’re in a team, as a general rule you will do better than if you were doing it solo.

49:42 Now of course, Tom Tate, the first ever person who made a dollar with the Thirty Day Challenge, he did it as a lone ranger, didn’t he? He was the exception to the rule. But I’ve got to say that the vast majority of people who have been successful since were involved with teams.

49:17 Of course with social marketing, teams have now become even more important. I don’t think that in 2008 the internet is a solo sport anymore. The days of Frank, or I, or Dan Raine,  trying out little projects on who knows… growing tomatoes or whatever it happened to be… and making a real lot of money out of them… I wouldn’t say that they’re over, because I’m sure that right now there are people who are doing exactly that. I’m just saying that the balance of probabilities and likelihood of success would go towards people who are in teams.

48:34 They don’t have to be big teams either. I think that there’s an efficiency curve if you will – once you get past 4 or 5 people the efficiency goes down hill.

48:08 There are some video sites that are not designed for multiple broadcasts with hundred of people as we have now. 335 (viewers) – that’s fantastic. Your average teleconference call might have 100 listeners.

47:44 So that was the original idea behind The Thirty Day Challenge and who would have believed that it would grow as big as it has. It’s an insane time. For a month Dan Raine and myself … if someone could email a picture of Dan Raine in his pink thong that would be awesome, I think the broadcast needs that at some point.

47:08 Uh oh, Dan’s online. Hi Dan. Notice his username is pink which is lovely.

46:52 There’s one other thing about the Thirty Day Challenge which I really wanted to emphasise to people. I think a lot of people are excited by the sexy big numbers that people throw out, particularly in internet marketing. Frank for example has done some extraordinary things in terms of the success that he’s had, but sometimes those numbers distract people.

46:14 Here’s the problem – you go to a seminar and you see all these speakers who have done really well. Your enthusiasm bank account is overflowing and you go, “Right, I am going to make a difference. This internet stuff is going to be the thing that changes my life”. Great, you’re enthusiastic – and off you go.

45:41 You work hard at and all of a sudden you haven’t made $10,000 in your first month. Subconsciously, your brain’s going, “Oh, this is not very good. I think we might have to come up with a distraction because I don’t want poor Ed to feel like he’s a failure”. Your brain will do that, it’s very powerful - it doesn’t want you to feel like poo if it can possibly avoid it. So it will avoid rather than confront.

45:06 That’s why people often joke, “A dollar. Just a dollar. I’m going to make hundred’s of dollars”. A lot of those people aren’t here at the end of the thirty days. The reason why we focus on the $1, or $10 now, is because it’s achievable.

44:25 People forget that the first time I did something online it took 38 attempts. To make Wedding Planning Secrets profitable took 38 attempts. So I wanted to prove that people who start slow with small steps and set easily achievable goals and going to do a lot better. That’s a key part of the 30dc.

43:37 We are up to 344 viewers which is fantastic. 

43:13 The other piece of news is that we want all of you to help promote the 30dc. We want to do it in a really cool way by showing you the behind the scenes work. People don’t realise that in terms of traffic and participation the 30dc was bigger than anything that was done on the internet at that time. And the reason was that we were using social networks for marketing for the first time.

42:11 We thought that it would be really cool to show you guys how to do that to help us get the word out about the 30dc and have some really cool prizes. In fact we’ve had to create a whole new system to reward people for social networking activities. In showing you the process (behind the 30dc) you should be applying these to your own niche.

41:10 (referring to chat) Jason Moffat’s first year’s effort was that dread-lock site which was very cool.

40:53 One of the most frustrating things about internet marketing is looking at the list of the things that you should be doing and the list of what you are actually doing. And it’s the same for us.

40:20 Did you realise that there are over 15,000 unique visitors to the 30dc blog every day. Not during the challenge – that is now.

39:35 ScreenFlow is just absolutely amazing. I’m going to play you a little bit of video to show you the power of ScreenFlow.

38:07 I am system agnostic. All I am passionate about is great software. If I had to hand on heart coach someone who wants to make money online, what I give them to do it?

37:09 You have to account for the software as well. How much is CamTwist? It’s free. How much is VisualHub which hands down professionals across the board give the best produced .flv files? $29. Compared to Sorenson Squeeze which is around $400-$500.

36:32 If I look at my fellow internet marketing teachers, all bar Jeff Johnson have gone to Macs. Some have always used Macs like John Reese and Frank. It’s the best platform for producing internet marketing content. I am after the best possible tools for the job.

35:35 One of the biggest fallacies is the expense of a Mac compared to a PC. I’ve blogged about the alliced reports of a comparing a Dell PC to a Mac.

31:50 One of things that has happened that is really interesting is the eBay and Commission Junction situation. I don’t know if you’re aware but eBay had an affiliate program (ValueClick) that was run through Commission Junction. EBay have now taken that in-house (eBay Partner Network).

30:24 Another thing is Facebook. If you listen to Twitter and Blogs about Facebook they are getting punched left, right and centre.

29:50 A lot of posts say, “I will never click on a Facebook ad”, and this was funny to me because I recall in 96-97 when people said “I’ll never click on those!”. You might not have, but millions did. The challenge is to make it a seamless experience. The guys who get and understand it are making a killing

28:42 The other thing is the whole applications side of things. If you see my Facebook applications page you will see how many invitations I get. It is crazy.

27:58 (note to self) Use a separate browser window (during broadcasts). I’m also using Flock as well.

27:53 It’s very important online when your looking at so much data to sort the wheat from the chaff. Make no mistake, there are people doing super, super well using Facebook demographic marketing. For example, with wedding planning you can target users who are engaged. I am getting 1-2% click through.

26:40 People are trying to take the same techniques they are using in Google (Adwords) and apply them in Facebook, and I think that’s a mistake. Phrase marketing as opposed to demographic marketing are two different kettles of fish. The way people make decisions are identical, but the way to get them to make the decision you do have to think about.

25:55 One thing that I think is a huge opportunity is the iPhone software platform (aka iPhone SDK). Software programs is a really interesting area. Don’t turn off. People think that you have to be a coder – you don’t. You just have to be a user. Steve Jobs doesn’t code.

24:08 The way in which the world has opened up in  terms of out-sourcing and screen capture programs (e.g. Camtasia for PC or ScreenFlow for Mac) means that it is much better to show the programmers what you want instead of writing it down. I have had much better success since I have started shooting ScreenFlow screen capture of what I wanted rather than trying to write it down.

23:38 I have dealt with people from Lahore, Pakistan to Romania, to all over the place and if people can see what’s going on it makes a big, big difference.

Questions & Answers Section

22:36 So,what do you want to know about the Thirty Day Challenge in 2008?

22:28 (Someone types “I love John Crowther”) I love John Crowther too, but in a brotherly sort of way.

22:18 I think that there is so much in terms of the iPhone. If you’re in trout fishing, what kind of trout fishing what kind of iPhone application could you come up with? You could do a whole weather and trout fishing report. Then there’s the opportunity of selling of services and ads for that.

21:37 Of course the Thirty Challenge will be free. It wouldn’t be the Thirty Day Challenge if it wasn’t free. I must point out to people that the 30dc 2007 edition is by no means superseded. It is a brilliant course with strategies that work right now, today. If you into the forums you will see people virtually on a daily basis getting rankings and making their first $10.

20:57 (Viewer asks) “Ed I want to set up a membership site with video upload facility”. That’s way too complex to answer here today.But is it possible? Yes it is.

20:40  Thank you for the segway to the YouTube API opening up. Now, non-propeller heads are probably going, “You’re talking Latin to me again”. But it’s a big deal because Google/YouTube wants to host your video. You might have noticed that as of 10 days ago, you can upload files up to 1024MB in size.

19:55 With YouTube opening up this will allow you to build in video upload and hosting capacities into any site using the API. This might freak out a lot of you, but don’t. All you have to do is tell your programmer, “I want the facility to upload a video, I want people to be able to play and search”.

19:07 Question: Is successful internet marketing possible without mailing lists and squeeze pages? Answer: Yeah. Of course it is, but seriously, why? The mailing lists that your develop is a huge asset and if you look at all the big internet marketing launches, they’ve all been driven off email. This comes back to (that) it’s not about email. This is about a strategy I call “check moves” which I taught in the 30dc. So, if you want to refresh yourself, go and look at the whole video on check moves by a brilliant guy out of Melborne, Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson .

18:15 A lot of professionals highlight that lesson as the key lesson. It’s all about how often you contact people, which is why Justin.tv is absolutely brilliant.

17:34 (Referring to chat) Thanks for that really useful Wikipedia definition of “API”. It’s brilliant that people can chip in with some URLs.

16:49 Question: Can you give us a newbie guideline. Answer: The best advice if you’re just starting out is to go through the steps of the 30dc. By doing things is the way that you absorb and learn things.

15:50 There are a million other strategies such as Frank Kern’s Mass Control or Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula. The most important thing is that you just focus on one thing first – you need to walk before you can run.

15:05 I personally would go and have a look at 30dc 2007 because in 2005 you could pay 5 cents per click for pretty much any phrase in Google. You can’t do that anymore and in fact Google are penal if you don’t put things exactly they way they want. It’s harder get it for 5 cents, unless you have a little secret trick which you might have to stay tuned for.

14:08 With the older challenges the market research strategies still hold, but 2007’s Gtrends strategy is worth its weight in gold. That’s still the world class way of determining traffic; everybody I know who’s big in internet marketing is using that exact method.

12:50 Question: Will you post show notes? Answer: I’ll post the actual video, but if someone wants to post notes I will come up with an extraordinary way to compensate you.

12:15 Question: Is the Immediate Edge a natural progression to the 30dc? Answer: Yes, absolutely. We’re trying to make changes all the time to make it even better.

11:45 Do you think that YouTube has become a much more valuable traffic generating tool as opposed to other web 2.0 sites since the last 30dc? The answer to that is a big fat YES. YouTube is the biggest attractor to the 30dc by so far it’s not funny. Video is where it’s at.

11:20 For a lot of people (broadcasting themselves) is worse than public speaking, but the traffic on YouTube is astounding.

10:21 Apple TV, Tivo, Xbox & Micosoft Media Center are making YouTube an extraordinary platform. This is why they are releasing their API so you can custom build your own YouTube. You will be able to build the front end, in other words what people will see, and YouTube will provide the back end.

9:48 Question: Is Social Marker working for everyone? I presume so, but may I tell you that very soon you are going see a social marketing tool that will be released first to the 30dc people. It will change the way you socially bookmark forever

9:18 Dan’s been a bit quiet recently because he has been programming something fabulous. And it will be free of course to Thirty Day Challengers.

8:36 Question: How often do you put new posts on a new niche site that you’re testing? Answer: I tend to let the stats tell me, according to how well that post is bringing me in traffic. As a general rule you want to be updating it at least 5 times a week. I know in the old days of blogging it used to be the case of posting 3 times a day, but I don’t know that that is necessary with social bookmarking because it changes the whole dynamic.

7:56 What I do and what you should do as a Thirty Day Challenger is be stats driven. Using software such as Google Analytics you need to think about where is your traffic coming from, in terms of what phrases are coming up. Also, “Is the traffic continuing, or is the traffic dropping off?”

7:18 When the traffic drops off you need to investigate. It’s a bit like triage. You have to decide where to put your effort because you can’t do everything all the time

5:55 Question: Any chance for some interaction for those who are starting the 30dc from scratch? I see a lot of new people looking for direction. Answer: If this (the TV show) has worked, then I think this is perfect, and we’ll do this on a weekly basis. We can be driven by you guys (the viewers). This works for me, because this is great leverage of my time and I can maintain 300 people right the way through.

5:25 Thanks Dan for that URL (URL is missing, but if anyone has this web stats software link please add it in comments below – cheers, Tim)

5:02 Question: How do you market a paid PDF report without a website? Answer: Dan will tell you to sell them on Amazon. I know a lot of people go to eBay, but Amazon has so much more credibility, it has the whole engine and everything is ready to go. I know some guys, Fred Gleeck is one, that are doing very well selling on Amazon. Side note: all those buggers in Romania who are selling our stuff on eBay they do well, but we know were you are, and we’re comin’ to get ya, I .

4:14 Question: When you test a market on free content hosts, if find that it’s a good product do you abandon free site and start own site? Answer: No, you do both. It’s a great misconception of the 30dc that it was all you had to do, but really it’s just to get you started with their first $10. Once you’ve got a profitable site you really want to start looking at pay per click (PPC), product launches, and other strategies as shown in the Immediate Edge. It’s getting you going with the least amount of risk, and the least amount of money, since most people don’t have a lot of money to put together.

3:08  Question: Will you do another discounted offer for the Edge? Answer: I will have to ask Dan about that.

2:52 Question: Ed, is it better to have a dozen sites, or concentrate on one from the beginning? Answer: Again this has changed a lot from 2005 to 2008, because you really need to start focusing on one niche. Notice that I didn’t say one site, I’m saying one niche. It’s fair enough to spread markets until you’ve found a niche that you love and is profitable, but then you need to go deep.

2:25 Where as in the old days, Dan, Frank, and I would just go wide because it was easy. With social networking the danger is that if you don’t go deep and own your marketplace, someone can come in and “back-door” you. For example, they could use pay per click and come in through the back door that way, or they could use say search engine optimization. In other words where ever you’re not, they will be. (If you go wide you can’t cover these back-doors.)

1:38 Amazon has also video ad applications and Dan is actually in the process of testing that on the edge.

1:23 Question: What do you teach in the Immediate Edge that’s not in the 30dc? Answer: 30dc gets you started, gets you comfortable, and gets you your first $10. It gets you going with a strategy that if you really max out will make you do very well. To take that next step, in the Edge we try to show you all the other things that you can be doing in a theme based way. We just did a Facebook theme, a video theme, and a couple of project themes.

0:21 Question: Could you sell a PDF report through Squidoo? Answer: Not directly through Squidoo, but you could certainly set it up on Amazon and then use Squidoo to promote it.

Show Notes:-

N.B. Currently the time-code on the video is not counting down as it does on justin.tv. When Ed uploads to YouTube I will put that up instead and update the time-codes.

This show was originally recorded on March 25th 2008 20:30 EST

55:06 Welcome to the 2nd thirty day challenge TV show.

54:40 Thanks so much for the comments. I enjoyed the feedback from the last one.

54:09 For newcomers:-

You need to be logged in to use the chat screen
It would be great if you could add me as a favourite

52:38 You can subscribe to my Twitter feed at www.twtter.com/ed_dale

50:15 I call this a TV show very deliberately; it’s the psychology (that’s important). All of you should be looking multimedia of some description:-

* Audio
* Video
* PowerPoint with recorded audio

It has a dramatic effect on marketing. We have 40 people joining the 30dc every day from YouTube alone.

48:35 Our brains have been trained from a very early age to give a TV show your attention, and it’s a very big deal. What makes it a very big deal is the chat.

47:33 You’ve got all the best bits of TV and you can react.

47:00 If I were a trout fisherman I would be doing one of these every week. If you’re an avid trout fisherperson you would tune in to these. You could play videos shot outside and it would look a treat.

46:12 I love leverage online. One of the things that Rob Somerville always bangs into my head is the ability to take this and put it on YouTube, and if you’re signed up with justin.tv and you can take clips and put them on your site.

45:02 For some of you the thought of putting your head on this medium is a bit of an issue, but you can pre-shoot the whole thing.

44:24 I wanted to talk about some of the 30dc mythology. At its core it’s about your first steps making money online. If you buzz over to www.thritydaychallenge.com, it’s absolutely free and it’s high quality instruction. There are some who are selling this stuff for lots of money to teach the same thing.

43:47 Something that people find a bit confusing are all these references to pink thongs. Dan thought he would try his own 30dc a couple of years ago. Instead of trying to make $10 in 30 days he tried to make $15,000 in a month with a budget of just $125. Because he was drunk he agreed to parade publicly in a pink thong if he failed. He missed the mark by $400-$500. The problem with this failing is that he had to carry out this bet. This next video is parental guidance rated.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW0xOhH34oQ

That is the mythology of the Pink Thong. Trust me it was pink before it got wet. If you look in the YouTube video and you freeze it at the appropriate point you might want to look in the reflection in the window.

38:30 Welcome to Michelle McPherson, my favourite person who I haven’t met

38:10 This week it was my birthday, and I got some Xbox games, but it died. Someone sent me an old man’s personals website, because now I’m qualified.

37:30 You should check out the latest issue of Wired magazine. The cover story is by Cliff Andersen, the gentlemen who put together the book, “The long tale”.

36:20 In the 30dc we show how to exploit the phenomenon of the long by getting lots of small bits of traffic. Lots of little bits of traffic add up to a lot of traffic.

35:55 The most important thing that we can be doing in internet marketing is Market research; it’s where the battle is won and lost 97.5% of the time in my opinion. Online, there is no excuse to take any risks at all because you can know everything about a particular site/competitor/market.

34:41 You can start small and get big. I will throw up the challenge to name a successful company that has actually succeeded that has had bags of cash in the bank before it started. The truth is that nobody did. EBay came from selling Pez dispensers, Google was a PhD paper, (same with) General Motors and Ford.

33:12 Money can absolutely choke your business. The business conversations rotate around which chair we should use in the foyer as opposed to, “How do we make money to eat?” That’s why I love the 30dc; every company starts making its first $10.

31:43 Our first job is to get 200 people to our money page, because the 2nd part of the symphony is traffic. If the tree falls in the forest, but no one hears it, did it really fall?

30:50 So in wired, Chris Andersen talks about Free. As internet marketers we have known about the value of giving away free stuff for the longest time.

29:52 Someone said ask “There’s all this free stuff all over the internet, why would someone choose to pay for it?” John Reese said that what we are saving people is time – our most valuable commodity. We save people time.

28:50 This year’s 30 dc will be covering what happens when you apply these techniques to real businesses. In fact they have had the best results. So think about what you’re doing in your day job; where this really works is little craft markets. It’s very, very important that by starting small you’re setting yourself up to being actually very big.

26:55 I want to talk about Jeff Walker’s product launch Formula http://www.tubbynerd.com/plf/. Gary Halbert just gave his letters away in the end.

26:07 People think that by giving away stuff they’re just making sure that they won’t pay for something.

25:31 With product launches you see all the big things but you don’t see the small markets. What you don’t know is that a lot of Jeff’s case studies have been 30 day challengers.

24:59 Think about trout fishing forums/websites/blogs – they don’t know about internet marketing/JVs/launches.

24:30 A huge mistake people make is not being subtle about getting JV partners. As Neil Strauss in The Game would teach us it’s not your best opening line. The Game book is great if you can forget that it’s about dating and apply it to your niche. You want to say something interesting so they will be interested.

22:55 You need to build up the moment. This is a key thing that a lot of people think that we build our relationships overnight. John did his first 1million dollar day 3 years ago, like the 4 minute mile shifted people’s mindsets

21:55 2 years before the launch, he did anything he could to help others. That got him the JVs.

20:44 To be successful, you need to be involved in your product marketplace.

20:03 One of the things that I get emailed about is Bloglines. It’s brilliant to get all the information hand delivered to you.

19:17 I think trade shows are the number one missed opportunity. Out there has never been easier. You get so little mail these days.

18:04 People at the trade shows are there to do deals. You can kill three birds with one stone.

17:49 HIGHLIGHTED MATERIAL: If you have your podcasting gear (like a podcast with mic) and you organise to do interviews with these people, you get content, you develop relationships with these people and you line up JVs. It’s a killer technique

16:57 Question: Is a JV like an affiliate? Answer: JV has a little bit of a real world connotation, but I think they are interchangeable. They become your promotion partners.

16:00 It’s so powerful because it’s a third party recommendation which is the most powerful thing in internet marketing.

15:30 If you want to find more about product launching check out Jeff’s Product Launch Formula. Check it out, because you get some killer content. Also he is using the exact methodologies that he teaches in his product.

14:42 I’m fascinated by the music industry. The industry is dead but they don’t know it. In the 80s they had the top 40 and Thriller dominated the charts. It would build and build on momentum. The only way you would know about it was via radio. Now because of product launches online, everyone knows when something comes out. It is completely different to the past.

12:30 The great news is that some guys do product launches every 2 weeks.

11:59 One piece of info on the Beechworth Conference is a little template.

11:08 We are about to close it off, there will only be around 30 people there. Some of the smartest people are invited: Mark Lindsey and Daniel from the article distribution stuff, Pete Williams – PR god, obviously Dan and I will be there.

10:04 A lot of black hat will be taught, not because we want to teach them, but to know how to fight back.

9:25 We are going to teach market research like it has never been taught before. You can know what keywords your competitors are using. Dan is extraordinary when it comes to this stuff.

8:43 We think this video stuff is going to be really key in this upcoming year.

8:20 Andrew (Nes) Nesbitt will be in there too.

8:00 I want to give a peek behind the scenes in the lab.

6:50 One of things we have to do are look out for new web 2.0 sites. For example Weebly and Tumblr. We need to continually test those sites.

6:05 I’d love to pop up now and again and give a new site, but we get 15,000 people a day come to the 30dc blog.

5:33 We are starting to see some real success with Squidoo. You might want to brush off some of your old Squidoo lenses and start giving them some love.

4:58 A really cool technique that Dan developed is the ability to combine lots of RSS feeds and mix them in such a way that you don’t get penalized with duplicate content.

4:27 The tool he uses is Yahoo pipes. In the most recent Immediate Edge newsletter we show you what you need to do to provide a unique feed.

3:25 This would be great for example if you have a parked domain with high PR. This technique is killer for proving on topic content.

2:09 Another thing we have been playing with is PDF documents. They are handy because they can’t easily and the receiver sees thing the way you do.

0:59 Did you know you can take your RSS feeds and create a PDF feeds from it? You can bundle up your feeds as a book and give it away.

0:19 Google searches PDFs and may look at PDFs a little bit differently. Something in that one for all of us.