A new challenge is beginning, and this time you get to take part. Ed Dale and I have teamed up this year for the third Thirty Day Challenge and for a full 30 days we are going to be showing you exactly how to start your own Internet business and generate your first income online without spending a dime.

That’s right, this is going to cost zip, diddly, nothing, nada, ziltch. The entire training program is free, and you won’t have to spend a thing to get your business started and begin making money. No credit card required.

Join The Thirty Day Challenge Now

Well guys and gals, I finally did it… I honored the bet and aired the pink thong in public, and now the video is up on YouTube for all to see. Watch The Thong-A-Thon Video.

Well it’s nearly time for thong-a-thon, I will be posting the time, date, and location for the outing of the pink thong in a week or so’s time… boy am I looking forward to this… not.

Dan

Wow, I have to say a big thank you to all of you who have sent in emails over the last month or so. I have tried my best to answer them all and I really do appreciate your feedback. One person I really want to acknowledge here though is Shellie P. Shellie contacted me in November about a site she was setting up which was based on viral traffic and MySpace…

Well she launched in January and now has a pretty large list in her ********* niche and is making 3 sales a day @ $37 so that is pretty cool. This was really what the $15k was about, I might have lost but I hope that what I did helped spur people on a bit…

OK, ok, the post may have nothing to do with the pain…. just wait for the next one.

Ah the good old Internet. Andy put up a link on his blog yesterday to my new project and I was deluged with signups before it was even ready lol. I will be releasing more information this week, but to get on the beta list then head on over to:

http://www.ImmediateEdge.com/

I just saw another good Viral idea pop up today, which is a marketing forum with a viral aspect. Basically you get credits for every post you make which in turn allow you to show ads at the top of the page. There is also a one time offer that gives you a bulk number of credits for $197 and some bonuses… (you also get to use HTML in ads)

The viral aspect is if you refer people you also get credits, and you get credits for people that they refer etc. down 5 levels deep. You can check out the process here:

http://www.ConquerYourNiche.com/forum/DanRaine

Warning this is my affiliate link. (Don’t go and buy the $195 option) But I though it was a good example of how Viral can work. Yes it is in the IM world but the idea could also be applied to another niche.

I got finished up with some of my other stuff sooner than expected… so here is the Q&A answers…

What are your other ideas that you had for this contest and that you instead decided to go with this one?

I am going to be using a few of my other ideas for the next project so I don’t want to reveal them just yet for obvious reasons.

Have you ever found success with this type of site by using Adwords, Adbrite, etc? Or do you find more success with the techniques used throughout this blog?

Viral sites need people to talk for them to work. It’s all about building a list to get things kicked off. There are lots of other ways to accomplish this and AdWords etc. can help but can be quite costly per signup. The $15k Challenge really pushed the list building using Yahoo groups and forums but ultimately didn’t quite go viral. The product in the end didn’t captivate people enough to become a ‘business’, it was a bit of a one hit wonder.

what would you have done differently if you had $1000 start up capital?

If I could have bought more time then that would have been great ;), but with a larger budget I probably would have niched the market down a bit and created a few unique products not available anywhere else (probably a series of video tutorials). Free members would have received a lot of the craft material (as is on the site at the moment), and part one of the videos, Gold members would have got a few more parts, and Platinum the whole shebang!

What % signup, (not purchase, just email signup), can you hope from a MySpace, comment, bulletin and Private message.

It is very hard to accurately track MySpace percentages because a lot of people (not on your friends list) may also see the comments, group posts etc. But on the conservative side, I would be looking at 1-2%. One reader of this blog did a big MySpace powered launch last Friday and got an estimated 8.2% signup rate which is pretty amazing and a total sales percentage of 2.1%

If you were to revive your craft marketing, can you hope to make a regular income or is it really just a once off?

I think to turn it into a business, the model would need to change a little, I certainly could have got more sales by carrying on with the forums posts etc but long term I think I would change the structure of the site a little. Jen is planning to carry on marketing the site as is for another month or so but has a larger long term plan for it.

- And out of 7000 emails you got a /-3% return, in general is that a good or bad return on the net?

3% is very good. You should be looking at 1-1.5% conversion rate.

I don’t like spam, but I would like to hear from you, will you let us know from time to time what your next ventures will be? Like a ‘Dan’ newsletter.

Details on the next project will be posted very soon. I have received over 70 J.V. offers since the site began and have not posted any to the $15k list, that was not the intention of this project. I will only be using the list to send details of a report I am publishing (free) next week, and to let you all know about the new project.

What would you do differently if you had to start all over again?

To be honest there are only a couple of things that I would have done differently, firstly I would have started list building sooner, if I had then I am sure I would have reached the $15k goal before the end. The second thing (where I really screwed up) would have been to include ‘Crochet’ in the list of crafts… how I missed that out I have no idea.

Is lisa really you?

No idea, you will have to ask Lisa lol.

how much traffic did you get on average (per day) to your site? Secondly, did in decrease a lot after you stop the forum posts…how much is it nowadays?

Traffic is hard to estimate because so many people from this blog visited the site so it is impossible to split it up, and yes traffic dropped significantly once forum posting stopped. Currently the site still gets 15-20 new signups a day.

Here’s a question that I think will SURELY help many who are new to Internet Marketing, and are looking for ways to find products they can use for sites much like the crafty site. This is especially true for those starting on a very limited budget who would like to use your challenge as a model for their own venture.

When you began this challenge you knew you had a limited budget. You did your research and you settled on the craft market. You also chose EasyNicheProduct as the source of your membership products.

How much of your decision to join EasyNicheProduct was influenced by your familiarity with the site?

Did you already know that the site contained lots of product for the craft niche?

There are a load of PLR sites out there, the reason I chose EasyNicheProduct was solely based on the fact that I knew they had enough content on the site for the project.

How would you suggest someone find a source of product for their own site without having to sign up for every PLR site under the sun looking for enough content to offer?

That is actually quite difficult. Some sites publish a list of content but it is never a complete list. One thing I would suggest is either contact the owner and ask for a complete list or sign up for a few and take advantage of the guarantee for the ones which don’t have what you need. You also have to have a really good look at the contents as I got so many emails and there were so many comments saying that the products I had used were not on the ENP site, but they were, they were just buried with lots of other stuff.

Do you think YouTube or a short (2-3 minute) viral video posted at both YouTube AND MySpace of “Teri” making a craft might’ve boosted sales significantly?

This is hard to say until tried with the market. I have used YouTube to promote a few sites over the last six months and on one it had no real effect, but on another generated over 30% of the total signups over a 10 day period. You just don’t know to you give it a go… but as with any form of media, you still have to drive traffic to it to start the ball rolling.

In the answer I gave above about ‘what would I have done with $1000′ I said I would probably make videos, YouTube would have been a great place to post the free version.

What are your thoughts on viral videos in terms of being useful in marketing online in general?

Video is the way to go, and if you can release a viral video then all the better. It is always hard to find a good balance between obvious sales pitch and just good content. Getting people to share it is the hardest thing.

How will the “pink leather thong” video play into that (video viral marketing)?

I think that will be the only video I release which I hope will NOT go viral lol.

Will you please pop over to visit us at the new ViralTraffic101.com forum to say “Hi” every then and again? (We’d love to have you!…Without this challenge blog, it’s doubtful we all would’ve met anyway…You inspired us more than you know…)

Yes, I will be visiting regularly. People can join here: http://www.viraltraffic101.com/phpBB/

How did you add so many myspace friends w/ adder robot when myspace flags accounts that adds too many friends in the first couple weeks?

The key to adding friends is starting slowly, having a load of accounts, having a good profile, and then increasing the number of friend request after a short period of time. Starting off and sending 400 friend requests in the first day will almost definitely get you account suspended. But if you have 40 accounts all requesting 50 friends for a week then upping that to 150 then you can build a *huge* number of friends in only a few weeks. As with everything it is a lot of hard work to get the profiles created, but once you have done it, plug them all into BadderAdder and you are away.

(Remember: There is no point in just getting random friends. Make sure that your request are targeted at a niche)

Can we use this as a blueprint to actually recreate a goal blog like this?

Personally I wouldn’t enter the craft niche using the same strategy again, there have been several copycats since and I have seen quite a few posts on craft forums say ‘that looks like this site etc’. By all means give it a go, but I would look at changing the strategy a little, or hitting another niche entirely.

Was the challenge overall fun or stressful

It was stressful, but that was because of the time limitations, 90 days would have been a more realistic time scale without having to spend every waking hour in front of the computer. Posting to the blog also took a considerable amount of time out of the ‘work’ time.

Forum and group posting can eat up your time, it can be just as bad or worse than surfing aimlessly. So, I try to regulate my time for tasks like that. In order to create a presence that CAN do this, how many posts in how many different places?

The first thing you should probably do is the group posts (Yahoo, MSN, AOL etc). They get you much more bang for the work load involved. With the groups I would be looking at a couple of posts a day in each of the groups you join and about the same for each forum. When you find a thread that you can really join in with (know enough about), then make sure you get a lot of posts out then. It is much easier doing it that way.

Don’t forget, if people respond to a ‘question’ post, then either follow that up with another question, or a simple thanks etc. That way you get a lot more exposure.

I know it differs with each market and each campaign. And this isn’t about the butterfly effect either. I just want to know if you have to become a forum “mad man” and invest hours and hours to accomplish the response numbers you got in the time you had. Because forum posting has always been “trickle traffic” for me.

I am afraid so, getting traffic the way I did in the $15k Challenge is a lot of hard work, and it certainly isn’t something I could do every day, I would probably end up in a looney bin if I did. I only used this technique because of the time and the budget constraints. If this was a personal project then I would still have done some list building this way but I would have relied on a much stronger product to get people talking rather than ‘force-building’ a list.

You managed to get almost $15,000 in the first month of this project. Does the majority of your income come from the first month or can one expect to see a another $15,000 in the second and third months of running a website like this? Does traffic for a site like this cap and level off for a long period of time or do you normally see a sharp rise at the beginning then a drop after a couple months?

For this project, it was a one hit wonder. In a real viral project then you would peak a little slower then hopefully sustain the income for a few months and as it drops off then re-launch/promote etc. The second month’s figures haven’t been terrible ($4,100) but a lot of that can be attributed to one person mailing out to their list.

Would you ever consider being a mentor to someone wanting to do this?

One and one mentoring is very time consuming, I prefer teaching by doing. A lot of people seemed to have got a lot out of the $15k Challenge (and one reader is doing very well with his launch that happened last week), but what I am going to be doing for my next project will be quite different, it will certainly be a lot more detailed, live access to stats, and participation, to create Internet businesses that most people can easily set up. Don’t get me wrong, I have mentored people in the past, but I think there is a lot more value in what I am going to be doing soon.

Will this blog still be here if we want to refer to it and it’s content?

Yes, I am going to keep this up, I will probably lock comments in a few weeks so people don’t get annoyed if I don’t reply etc.

I pretty much have the same question as some of the other commenters. How many hours total do you think you spent on myspace, forum posting and yahoo groups postings? In my experience most forums don’t allow graphical sigs and text links in a signature doesn’t draw many clickthrus. So I’m guessing you would have to be posting like a madman to draw enough eyeballs.Unless I read wrong, in your blog it said you got about 3000 lead emails after the 1st day of marketing efforts, were you able track what % of that came from forums versus yahoo groups?

It is hard to accurately judge the amount of time I spent on each but realistically it was around 4-5 hours a day. (would have been less if I had used BadderAdder). I made a post previously about the % of signups, but that needs updating a little as MySpace signups went up quite a bit.

How do you respond to people that ever want to meet up with “Teri”, or whatever other face you put on the products you market?

On the whole, people don’t want to meet up, people just buy, consume, and leave. I have done a few newspaper/magazine interviews in the past under different pen names but they were fine as they were all male lol. I don’t think they would have liked seeing me in a skirt.

How did you address the address issue in emails, and what about people wanting to call in?

Most of the time I just responded as Teri in emails although I did answer a few as myself. As for calling in, no-one did.

How do you pick your niche to work in? If you were to describe this in a 5 or a 10 step process.

Documenting how I pick niches is probably out of the scope of this blog, I will be covering this in my personal blog soon so keep a look out for that.

If you were to estimate, what is your estimate of how much time total you spent on this project? and how many hours per day?

With posting to this blog, and all the other work involved I spend approx. 17 hours a day working on this. (this includes coding, site building, products etc).

I have created a site under a different topic that closely follows the outline you have laid out here. I’ve been at it for about a month now. A couple of day ago, someone who reads this blog came along with a very similar site and has started posting in some of the same places that I post. :@

He’s made himself almost impossible to reach. (Hidden email addresses, etc.) Short of confronting him openly on some forum or group, there seems to be no way to contact him directly. So, here my questions.

Have you ever had to deal with copy cats? If so, how did you do it?

Unfortunately I have to deal with this a lot. Over the years I have had products completely ripped of / copied etc. One eejit even had the cheek to sell a report of mine which I give away for free. The thing is most of the time you just have to suck it up, people enter new niches all the time. Unless they are directly copying your content etc then there is not a lot you can do about it. If however they are breaking copyright and you can’t get hold of them, then file a DMCA complaint against their host, this usually shuts the site down within 24 hours.

…can you make $1,500,000 in 30 days with a starting budget of $15′000? :-)

Probably not :) 30 days is way too short.

Since you can just add some zero’s, does that translate into final numbers too? Now that would be a fun numbers game!

I think we would all love it if we could. I have some really high income businesses which have certainly cost less than $1,500 to set up, but the key to all of them is time.

Did you have to dynamically change your IP to do any of the guerilla marketing on myspace?

No I didn’t. But as MySpace gets cleverer then you will probably have to. (or Just run from an AOL account as all their request come from a limited address range so they would find it difficult to ban the IP)

Thanks for all the emails… I am now back in action and will be posting the Q&A answers on Monday, as well as letting you know about the new project that is starting very soon… and finally to everyone in the US, have a great Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Just to let you know I am running a little behind schedule at the moment. The Q&A will be done before the weekend, but I also have some news…

I know quite a few of you got a lot out of the $15k challenge, so I have decided that I want to do something similar, but this time it will be some of you who are taking part and doing the work. The goals won’t be quite as lofty, but I do want to show just how possible it is to go from zero to several thousand dollars of profit in just a couple of months of work.

I will be posting more on this early next week.

Once this challenge is finally over I am going to be a lot more active on my personal blog. I have a few cool things to post there next week which I am sure a lot of you will get some benefit out of. So if you haven’t already checked it out, you can find my blog at:

http://www.DanRaine.com/

It needs a bit of a design revamp but I will get that sorted out soon ;)

I have been in bed with the flu for the last couple of days, but I am now back in action. I will be answering the Q&A on Saturday so if you have any questions you would like answering, get them posted before Friday evening.

One of the decisions I had to make when deciding on what kind of site to build was ‘am I going for $15k or am I looking to build a business’. In the end the answer was I was going for the $15k, a one hit wonder, if it became a business then great, but the goal was to go for the $15k.

In a way this is a bit of a shame because I kind of underestimated the number of people that would follow this blog on a daily basis, and even though its goal was never to teach people, I know that a lot of people (hopefully) got something out of the posts I wrote. But there’s the problem, I hope I am not helping you to create one hit wonders when you should be building businesses.

Now don’t get me wrong, earning $15k is great, and with any luck the site should still carry on earning at least a several hundred a week for the next couple of months (especially with some active marketing), but long term I think that Free Crafty Books will probably fizzle out unless a few radical changes are made.

Ultimately the site didn’t really go viral.

A real viral site usually has a high peak of sales at the beginning, but due to its offerings manages to create buzz. This buzz (and incentives) cause people to promote the site, and with a bit of luck you get growth, and finally long-term stability. Now every viral site goes through a decrease in numbers and a softening of the buzz and requires a bit of a re-launch at times to help stimulate the market again, but with Free Crafty Books I got sales, and only a little bit of buzz.

In a way Free Crafty Books was a lot like a traditional affiliate site, only a small percent of its total member base actively promoted the site, the rest just consumed, then left.

Now there was a post last week which had a lot of comments on about how to expand and stimulate the growth (competitions, promotions, active marketing etc.) and if you are going to be building a viral site then you really need to look at that again as there are some great nuggets in there. Remember though, I only had a limited time in which to market the site (a few weeks) and if I was doing this as a long term business then I would have certainly carried on the marketing.

But to get back on track… a lot of people who write guides to viral marketing only have experience in one field (Internet Marketing), in fact, if you ask practically any marketer for examples of viral marketing sites they will rattle of a list of sites, but all of them are in the IM or money making field.

And that is a distinction you have to understand… viral sites aimed at the IM crowd are about making money and building their businesses (think of all the list building sites out there with their downlines), but viral sites aimed at niche markets are slightly different. Yes money can be an incentive, but they also need that certain x-factor to get people talking (and you have to reward them for it).

Ok, sounds a little confusing, but what I am trying to say is that the product you are giving away (at the free membership level), should be of a significant value that people want to share it, and you need to reward them for doing so with something that is of a high enough value that they carry on doing so. The ultimate goal should be getting enough people to genuinely talk about your free offer.

Now I was speaking to a friend of mine who has set up quite a few viral(ish) sites over the years, three of them have gone on to become long-term businesses, so much so that he has a full-time member of staff working on each one. Only one of these sites has anything to do with making money, the other two are in different niches.

Looking at his sites from the outside you would find it hard to tell they were viral, and I think that is the problem a lot of people have, in the IM world we think of a viral site as one which has a free offer, then an immediate upsell. But the only reason we do this is because of the butterfly marketing course that was launched. Don’t get me wrong you can create very successful sites (and some businesses) with that approach, but I think the secret to a really long term business is approaching it on a more subtle level.

I am not going to tell you the niche here, but let me tell you a little about one of his sites.

His site is in a medium sized niche, its members have an average disposable income, and it is hobby related. He has two audio products and two eBooks as part of his free offering. The site also has a very active forum. When you first arrive at his site you can read various articles he has written, you can visit the forum, and it looks like you can directly download his books. When you go to download the books you are taken to a sales page, this page explains that these books are free, and all you have to do is register on the site to download them. The user then fills in the registration information. (this page is in a traditional sales page format so people get used to the change in style while being offered the free deal)

After registration they get the one time offer upgrade, this is to his Platinum Club. The Platinum Club offers exclusive access to some private forums, his monthly newsletter, and an exclusive DVD (produced himself). The fee for all this is only $17 a month (US, $27 for international) and they will get a new DVD every three months as well as his newsletter every month.

So now he is building a membership site, people are paying monthly, but to make sure he keeps getting paid, he gives a DVD away every three months (the drop out average), but it doesn’t stop there.

As a member of the Platinum Club (which has its own section of the site with quite a few unannounced goodies), they also get offered access to his ‘Inner Circle’. There are two ways to get inner circle membership, one it to refer 25 paid memberships, the other is to pay a flat out fee of $497. This does two things, it shows a value (and quite a few people buy at this price), but it also incentivises people to get the paid memberships.

So in reality there are four levels of membership…

1. Totally free, no registration
2. Registered member
3. Platinum club
4. Inner circle

This tactic works pretty well, because he still gets traffic without forcing anyone to join anything, this gets people feeling comfortable about him and his site (he is building a brand). The forums are popular with over 300 new topics a day being posted (and bring in a lot of traffic from natural search), his upsell to Platinum is on every page of his site (including the forums), and there is no obvious mention of the Inner Circle anywhere on his site (even the Inner Circle forum is not displayed), this gives it a feeling of exclusivity that it needs to justify the price tag etc. (people only ever find out after joining the Platinum Club apart from the occasional mention in the forums).

So before I ramble on too much, what I am trying to say here is there are many ways to implement viral. In this case it is a membership site with a viral aspect, and although his membership fee is really low, the pure volume of members more than makes up for it. So when thinking about building your own viral site, think about ways to integrate viral in to your business and not just having a viral business.

Now back to free crafty books.

Due to the limited budget and time I obviously couldn’t create a unique product. I managed to pull off the challenge (well almost) because I relied on marketing rather than viral marketing. I got people signed up because they didn’t have enough information to choose whether it was of value to them, I also got them to buy on this premise too. But without a doubt the ‘marketing trick’ that really made the money was to set a perceived value for an item then discount it. By making it an offer they couldn’t refuse I generated a substantial amount of the revenue. Again this challenge was about making $15k and not building a business, if It was about building a business then I would have definitely done it differently.

So that’s it for the challenge, I will be answering all the questions early next week so get them posted. Even though this has been a lot of work, and I lost, I really enjoyed doing it. It certainly got me writing again :) and on that point I wan’t to let you know that I will be posting a lot more to my personal blog so don’t forget to check that out. Also while I remember, I will be going over the business ideas next week.

Thanks to everybody who read and supported this blog.

Dan

… one final thing … (and I am not sure if I have posted this before but) only one person spotted this… If you look at the list of crafts that people could choose from then I missed out one of the most important ones… Crochet… That’s what you get for rushing… and I am sure it had an impact … even if only slightly

So I am sure you are all waiting to hear about thong-a-thon. (shame on you) So here is what’s happening. On New Year’s Eve, either in Times Square or Leicester Square I will be running around in the thong in a painful attempt to get on TV. This spectacle will be filmed by my good friends and will be posted up here (via YouTube) for you all to have a laugh at.

Once it has been decided which venue it will be at, I will put up a post here to let you know, and if you are in the area then please come along, and once clothed I will let you buy me a bourbon to help with the hypothermia.

Well the time has finally come to dish out the prizes… so without further ado…

The First prize winner i.e. the person getting the Free Crafty Book site and the $15k (well almost) is Jen Gooding from Vancouver. I phoned Jen up a few hours ago and to say she is pleased is the understatement of the year. Jen has agreed to do a telephone interview with me next week (once she has had time to have a think) about what her plans are for the site. I will be recording this and putting it up here for everyone to listen to.

The Second Prize, which is a copy of Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula goes to Michelle and Simon Frost from Australia.

The Third Prize is… there is no third prize, but there are some other ‘notable’ prizes…

Each of the people below are going to get a full years membership to a site which I am launching very soon, details of which will be posted on my blog.

Dan - For generating the most traffic to this site from his forum posts.

Lisa - For being the most prolific poster / most active member.

Caro - For being level headed, seeing more than one side, and generally being just a nice person.

? - I want to give a prize to the funniest comment and to the person who you want to get a free membership (you can’t vote for yourself). If you found something funny, or you want to nominate someone then please post a comment and I will sort out a voting thingy

(wow we have a Dan, and people think Lisa is me… I am sure there are going to be comments about that)

There have been a lot of questions asked in comments over the last week that I have either skipped, ignored, or just plain old missed, so I want to do a final Q&A session before this blog / challenge is finally over.

The final post-mortem is coming tomorrow so some of your questions may be answered there, but if not please post them here and I will answer them early next week.