Feature Highlights

• Automatically cloak links in any part of your site. This means you can also cloak links in the sidebar, footer, etc.
• Comes with multiple cloaking techniques, like the ability to display the cloaked link in a frame or hide the HTTP referer info.
• Improved click statistics + optional Google Analytics integration.
• Gives you more control over which links get cloaked – e.g. you can cloak a bunch of links based on their domain name.
• Backwards compatible with the free version – the settings will be imported automatically and any links you’ve cloaked using the <!–cloak–> tag or the “Cloak All” mode will continue to be cloaked with no additional effort on your part. The old “static” cloaked links can be imported with a few clicks.
• A new cool name – Eclipse Link Cloaker

You can find a more complete list of features (along with screenshots and tutorials) on the plugins website.

Wait, “Premium”?

Yes, that curious adjective means the plugin also comes with a price-tag. Not to worry though – during the initial release period you can grab the new plugin for a meagre sum of $25 and apply it’s awesome cloaking power to any number of sites. There’s even a 100% money-back guarantee, so you wouldn’t really be risking anything.

Miscellaneous Notes

Phew. I hope that didn’t sound too much like sales talk. Anyway, there are a few more minor points I’d like to mention :

• There will be an affiliate program with 50%-70% commissions. It’s already functional now (so if you have any special ideas, let me know), I just haven’t set up the public-facing affiliate how-to and such.
• The plugin will have free, automatic updates and can be updated using the same interface that is used to update plugins hosted on wordpress.org.
• Obviously, there’s a little bit of DRM involved.
• mod_rewrite/pretty permalinks are no longer required. The plugin automatically detects what kind permalink structure the user has and alters it’s cloaked URLs appropriately.

If you have any questions or doubts, feel free to leave a comment.

Well, this post is actually my attempt to answer a burning question : “How can we download stuff for free and ensure that musicians, actors, programmers and other people who create stuff still get paid?”. It’s a longish, wistful rant on intellectual property and conflicts between scarcity-based economy and post-scarcity society (The Web), with a few constructive suggestions tacked on in the end. Comments are welcome.

The Problem

What do the following examples have in common :

• Lawsuits against filesharers and sites that enable filesharing. Case in point : The Pirate Bay trial.
• Fledging attempts to make the Internet fully monitored, supposedly to stop copyright infringement.
• People who write great OSS/freeware tools still need to have a “day job” to pay the bills.
• Ridiculously cumbersome DRM.
• Buying something through an online content delivery service can cost more than buying the same thing in a physical store. Case in point : Steam.
• The fact that the owner of 4chan is in debt.

Any ideas? Well, here’s mine : all of these problems are caused by a conflict between scarcity and post-scarcity.

We’re currently at an unique point in time, a time when there still exists a scarcity of many resources but a few resources are becoming effectively free (disk space, computing power, bandwidth… well, almost). This leads to a conflict of intuitions. On the one hand, people realize that copying a file or loading a website costs practically nothing (uses non-scarce resources), so they don’t want to pay for downloaded movies/music/software or pay for using a site like 4chan or Wikipedia.

On the other hand, the producers of value – actors, musicians, programmers, webmasters – have to expend scarce resources to create stuff, even if the end-result is stored in a non-scarce medium. People still need equipment like computers, music instruments, brushes, filming sets, video cameras and other tools of their craft. They also need food, shelter, clothes, transportation, time and perhaps web hosting. You can download [The.Dark.Knight[2008]DvDrip-aXXo.avi] for free, but it cost millions to produce.

In other words, creators need a way to obtain scarce resources in exchange for non-scarce resources. They’ve spent time and money to make something people like and they feel they should get something tangible in return (also, they want resources to make more stuff in the future). Of course, this is intuitively unacceptable to consumers who wonder “Why should I pay for stuff I can get for free?”.

And so it goes.

Bad Solutions

So far, all the attempts to deal with this conflict have only lead to partial solutions at best and crazy abolish-human-rights projects at worst.

• Artificial scarcity. Yeah, I’m looking at you, DRM. Trying to turn a non-scarce resource into a scarce one seems downright criminal when you consider that this thing we call “progress” normally leads to less scarcity, not more. Also, I’m sure you’re aware of the fact that DRM has so far proven ineffective at deterring piracy and might even push more people towards using torrents as it’s more convenient than dealing with idiotic file protection schemes.
• Selling merchandise and tickets for live performances. This is a fine practice in it self, but it only works for certain niches and levels of popularity. A band like Sonata Arctica can probably make a decent amount of cash on t-shirts and tickets, but I doubt anyone would pay to see the author of the WordPress plugin WP Super Cache programming “live” (no offense Donncha ).
• Get a job. Of course, the programmers, writers, musicians and everyone else could just get a “normal” job and use that income to support their art, right? That works in theory, but this solution creates more problems than it solves. First, you have to find a job that doesn’t suck, which is no easy feat. Second, you’d have less time to spend on the thing you actually want to do. And finally, there’s one drawback that most people fail to consider – if your day job is in the same field as your “art” (e.g. a programmer working on commercial software to support his open-source projects), chances are it will be subject to the same scarcity vs. non-scarcity problem. Getting a job only shifts the problem to the employer, not eliminate it.
• Advertising. This is another partial solution that only works for certain niches. How would product placement work in music, and would you really want it to? The truth is people hate ads and can go to great lengths to get rid of them. A website with AdSense on it might get away with it for a while (though a lot of geeks seem to think in an ideal world everybody would be using Adblock), but adware is usually mercilessly eradicated and commercial breaks in streamed videos are seen as a deadly sin. In summary : advertising works, but it’s not the best solution.

A Better Solution?

Any proposed solution needs to answer two basic questions :

• Where does the money come from? As much as we’d like that, we can’t really get everything for free. So even if we invent a perfect system for dealing with postscarcity in a world that still depends largely on a scarcity-based economy, somebody will have to pay = provide the required scarce resources to the people producing non-scarce stuff. This could be either the consumers, or advertising income.
• Who gets the money, and how much? This is a problem of resource allocation. You’ve probably heard various rumors that record companies bag most of the income and hand only pennies to the artists. Another example would be mediocre videogames that cost as much as good ones, and the fact that you have to pay up front for movie tickets. Ideally, what you pay should be commensurate with how valuable the product is to you.

My proposal : Whuffie + real money

Imagine a membership service called “PostRep” (from post-scarcity and reputation). This service takes a small subscription fee, say, $20-$30/month. This is where the money comes from (advertising might also be used – more on that later). In return, every member of the system gets the ability to hand out and receive reputation points. You could also call it Whuffie, karma, upvotes, tokens or whatever else you think is cool and marketable. Team accounts can also be created. Each team has to decide on their own how to redistribute points received by a team account as the system doesn’t impose any particular algorithm there.

You can hand out as many points as you like – there is no limit – and you can do it manually and/or automatically. For example, you could give 100 points to the programmer who wrote an open-source program you use, and your music player could automatically give 1 point to the author(s) of each track you listen to. Downloading stuff via the PostRep system would also automatically assign a (configurable) amount of reputation to the creator of the file. This should be fairly easy to integrate with existing rating systems, so that when you rate a movie on IMDB, you also automatically send a proportional amount of points to the team who made it.

What (else) is in it for me?

As a member of this imaginary system, you get free and easy access to the non-scarce values created by any member of the PostRep online system. Music, movies, software, books, whatever else that can be expressed and transmitted digitally. No DRM and other bullshit. Creating a system that actually works would be a huge engineering challenge, but it’s definitely feasible (see also : Steam and similar services).

As a side-effect of the reputation system you can also get a very flexible rating scheme for digital content and even other people. Hell, you could even implement the “right-handed vs. left-handed Whuffie” idea and see how much reputation points where assigned by people you like vs. the people you dislike. Of course, the amounts would need to be normalized based on the total number of points handed out by each individual, but that would be pretty easy from the engineering perspective.

Where’s the money?

So what happens to your subscription fee? Simple – each month, PostRep redistributes the funds to other members proportionally to the amount of rep. points/Whuffie/whatever you gave them. This also means that you get a smaller or larger sum as well, depending on how much rep you got for your work. Popular artists, OSS programmers and the owners of popular websites could even make a decent income.

Advertising

A more controversial approach would be to make the system partially or wholly ad-supported. Marketers would jump on the possibility to access data on per-user ratings and point transactions, as it would give them the ability to create finely targeted advertising. However, as I mentioned before, advertising isn’t generally well-regarded by users. Making it opt-in might help.

And where’s the catch?…

Of course, there are several disadvantages to this idea, like political feasibility and how the PostRep earnings of popular artists would compare to their current income. I’ve also been (intentionally) vague on how exactly the reputation points would be calculated and normalized. However, I won’t go into details on that today – this post is already long enough as it is Feel free to post any criticisms and suggestions in the comment section.

Hmm, I really need to find some illustrative pictures next time.

But enough about that. If we lay aside the morality debate, do you know how big is the real impact of Adblock users on your site’s financial success? Perhaps you’re only “losing” 0.1% of your potential ad impressions. Or it might be over 50%. In any case, it wouldn’t hurt to have some actual numbers, right? I’ll show you how to get them.

Nuts And Bolts

We’ll need two things – a way to detect the Adblock extension, and a way to track the number of visitors that use it. For the first part, there’s a simple JavaScript solution posted in a StackOverflow thread that we can adapt for our needs. With a few minor changes, this script seems to work nicely with the latest version of FF and correctly detects Adblock Plus 1.0.1.

Tracking the Adblock users is a bit trickier. There are two choices here – either write a specialized web stats tool (a marvelous waste of time), or try to integrate the detection script with your existing analytics software (requires grokking the API). I decided to go the second route and use Google Analytics custom segments for this task. If you’re already using GA on your site, creating a custom segment is relatively painless (more on this later) and you get all the advanced reporting with no additional hassle.

Bringing It All Together – The Tracker

Place the below piece of code on every page where you want to track Adblock users. It doesn’t matter where exactly you put it, as long as there’s the GA tracker code on the same page, too.

Sidenote for WordPress users : The easiest way to install this script on your site is to put it in your theme’s footer. Go to Appearance -> Editor, click on Footer and paste the code just before the </body> tag.

<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */
 
function checkAdblock() {
	if ( detectAdblock() ){
		trackAdblock('Adblock Detected');
	} else {
		trackAdblock('No Adblock');
	}
}
 
//Run checkAdblock when page is loaded
if(document.addEventListener)
	document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", checkAdblock, false);
 
//adapted from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2472/how-can-i-tell-if-a-web-client-is-blocking-ads
function detectAdblock(){
	//Create an invisible test image 
	var AbpImage = document.createElement("IMG");
	AbpImage.id = 'abp_detector';
	AbpImage.src = '/images/ad/banner.gif';
	AbpImage.style.width = '0px';
	AbpImage.style.height = '0px';
	AbpImage.style.top = '-1000px';
	AbpImage.style.left = '-1000px';
	document.body.appendChild(AbpImage);
	//Check if Adblock has tried to hide the image
	var AbpDetected = (ws_getComputedStyle(document.getElementById('abp_detector'),'display') == 'none');
	//Be nice - remove the image 
	document.body.removeChild(AbpImage);
	return AbpDetected;
}
 
//http://www.robertnyman.com/2006/04/24/get-the-rendered-style-of-an-element/
function ws_getComputedStyle(oElm, strCssRule){
	var strValue = "";
	if(document.defaultView && document.defaultView.getComputedStyle){
		strValue = document.defaultView.getComputedStyle(oElm, "").getPropertyValue(strCssRule);
	}
	else if(oElm.currentStyle){
		strCssRule = strCssRule.replace(/\-(\w)/g, function (strMatch, p1){
			return p1.toUpperCase();
		});
		strValue = oElm.currentStyle[strCssRule];
	}
	return strValue;
}
 
//Record Adblock state  
function trackAdblock(state){
 
	function readCookie(name) {
		var nameEQ = name + "=";
		var ca = document.cookie.split(';');
		for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) {
			var c = ca[i];
			while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length);
			if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length);
		}
		return null;
	}
 
	var current_cookie = readCookie('__utmv');
	if ( (current_cookie==null) || (current_cookie.indexOf(encodeURIComponent(state)) == -1) ){
		//Set the user-defined segmentation variable with the Google Analytics tracker
		if (typeof pageTracker != 'undefined'){
  			pageTracker._setVar(state);
	  	}
	}
}
 
/* ]]> */
</script>

Sorry for the lack of indentation – it looks like my syntax highlighter plugin has a few glitches.

Viewing The Results

Now that you’ve installed the tracker, you’ll probably want to verify that it’s working and see the promised statistics. To do this, you need to create a custom segment in your Google Analytics report. Okay, that’s an easy one.

1. Go to “Advanced Segments” and click on “Create a new customised segment”.

2. Expand the “Visitors” list and drag the “User-Defined Value” block to the empty box on the right. Select “Matches exactly” from the Condition dropdown, and enter “Adblock Detected” in the Value field. Finally, enter a suitable name in the Name segment : field and click on Create Segment. You can also click the Test Segment button to check the segment before saving, but this will only work if the tracker has already been running for a while and has recorded some hits.

3. Now, go back to the Dashboard and select the newly created segment from the “Advanced Segments” box.

The result :

Note that you’ll probably need to wait for a few hours – or even a full day – before the new stats show up in Google Analytics.

Final Mini-Rant

On a more personal note, it appears that only 5% of my visitors use Adblock. I believe this hardly merits more than a “meh” reaction

And in case anyone cares about my stance on the ethics of ABP : at this point in time, there is no proper solution. Everybody wants free stuff. Everybody wants money. Consider the digital piracy debate – Adblock vs. Anti-Adblock is a more subtle manifestation of the same issues. And it doesn’t look like there’s a way out, not until we hit some kind of Utopia.

Here are some tips that I figured out from my experimentation.

Use section targeting

Section targeting allows you to emphasize or downplay certain parts of you page for the purpose of AdSense ad selection. This can improve your ad relevance and result in a higher CTR. To emphasize some content wrap it in these tags :

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
...content here...
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

To make the AdSense bot ignore some part of your content, use something like this :

<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
...ignored content here...
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

For this blog I’ve edited the theme to add the “ignore” tags around my sidebar, page footer and most of the header. I also added inclusive tags to some individual posts. The Google AdSense Targeting plugin does some of this automatically, but I prefer to do it manually as it gives me greater control. Note that section targeting can take a while to come into effect.

Break up untargeted words

If you see that AdSense is picking up certain words in your posts and assigning them too much importance (like getting blog-related ads when the post is about widgets and only mentions blogging once), there’s another trick to try.

In addition to section targeting, you can also break up the untargeted words on your page by using the <span> tag. Example : “bl<span>og</span>”

The tags have no effect on how the page looks to a human visitor. On the other hand, the AdSense mediapartners bot will think “bl” and “og” are two separate words (so you might get ads about Ogs ).
Note that this might be considered a slightly “grayhat” technique by some.

Get advanced AdSense tracking

The statistics available in the AdSense account are very general and not that useful for advanced optimization. For one, per-URL and per-keyword CTR stats would help a lot in seeing which pages are performing well and which need to be improved.

Currently I’m using the AdSense Click Tracker plugin to track AdSense clicks with Google Analytics. This approach works, but it only catches around 40% of the clicks and I can’t seem to get certain data from GA reports (like the aforementioned per-URL CTR). So I’m still looking for a better tracking script.

Do what professionals do (not what they say)!

There are lots of AdSense e-books and video courses out there (some of them are pretty good), but what I’ve found really useful is examining how successful webmasters optimize their pages for AdSense. You can see real examples of how ads are integrated into the content, analyze AdSense block placement and so on, and, best of all, it’s free

Keep in mind that you need to pick the site to analyze carefully. Some highly successful websites are deliberately under-monetized, at least in terms of contextual ads, as they can afford it easily. I’d also suggest you look for websites with target audience similar to yours for better results.

Now, these aren’t any old keywords – each of them fulfills two important requirements :

1. No more than 30 000 results in Google for a phrase match search (”keyword phrase in quotes”).
2. At least 100 expected visitors per day if you manage to get your page in the #1 spot in for the keyword.

This means that there’s a good chance you could make some money from one of these niches if you apply the free techniques taught in the Thirty Day Challenge.

By the way, I have to appologise for making the title of this post a bit misleading – there are actually 212 keywords listed below. Some of them are quite similar, so I didn’t feel like claiming I have 200 unique ideas here.

You’re free to use any of the keywords for any purpose. If you do, a link to this site would be appreciated, but isn’t required.

• Don’t “get” Twitter, Facebook and the like?
• Consider “normal” an insult?
• Typically only lurk in forums and rarely or never post anything?
• Are generally out of touch with popular trends?
• Feel article writing or this “blogging” thing are unnatural for you?
• Have no idea what the mystical “other people” want?
• Don’t really care much about what they want?
• Have above average intelligence?
• Are not rich yet?

If you answered “yes” to 6 or more of the above, congratulations! You might find something of interest in this post. On the other hand, the list above strongly implies asocial tendencies and lack of social skills, and since I’d say “yes” to all of the items there, the ideas expressed below may not be easy to grasp. We’ll see.

The problem

Everybody needs money. Making money online seems like an attractive idea – it promises freedom and the coveted dream of “residual income”, meaning you could just sit back and watch your favorite currency units roll in.

Unfortunately it turns out that most attractive methods for generating online income require a non-zero understanding of human psychology and lots (and I mean lots) of communication skills. After all, marketing is communication (and vice versa). So what if you don’t particularly enjoy talking with strangers? You’re screwed (like me). If it’s not talking, it’s writing. Same thing. You can learn to do it better, but you won’t necessarily feel good about it.

I’ve read lots of articles telling to choose something you like doing and see if you can make some money from that. I’ve addressed this issue in an earlier post, but here’s a short summary – nobody cares about obscure personal hobbies and the communication/marketing part is still implied no matter what you do. Unique content is worthless if no-one knows about it.

Possible solutions

Okay, enough with the whining, let’s see some ideas! Here are some thoughts about how you could make some money online even if you can fully relate to the grim view I presented above. Certain familiarity with IT, marketing and SEO is assumed.

Throw away the hat
Black, white? Bleh, what matters is who’s got the #1 position in Google! Right? Maybe. While I don’t find things like spamming and made-for-adsense sites consisting of nothing more than scraped content terribly appealing, there are some techniques worth knowing. The color is irrelevant; do what works and feels right and don’t limit yourself to only learning one side of “the Force”. Subscribe to Blue Hat SEO and read through the archives – it’s a goldmine. For a true sociopath the fully-blackhat approach might work better, because it’s largely a numbers game. Personally, I prefer whitehat & grayhat strategies, though I’ve had some limited success with highly questionable tactics in the past.

Write about trivial things
Use a keyword research tool to find low-competition phrases people search for. Select those queries that seem trivial and obvious for you. This will allow you to write about them easily, because you already know everything there is to know about them. Start up a blog and post about the topics. Optimize the blog for search engines, get links, get on the first page of Google and make money from AdSense or affiliate offers.

If you blog about things you really are interested in, you’re unlikely to get a lot of visitors (if you do, you’re either very lucky or a true genius, or not a renegade after all). I realize this is not what you’re “supposed to” believe, but I speak from experience (self-selection bias is a possibility). On this blog, there are three posts that are optimized for search engines and cover topics I find trivial. See if you can find them… These 3 posts get around 30% of the traffic. Note that there are around 60 posts in total.

Don’t buy it
Whatever e-book, course or piece of software “it” is, you can often get it (or something else that’s just as good) for free online. Failing that, you can make it yourself. Yes, I’m a programmer.

Listen to people slightly above your level
Don’t read John Chow. Be careful with Steve Pavlina. If you want advice and information, look to those who have had more success than you, but are still within reach. Trying to apply guru-level techniques while being almost broke is likely to discourage. Often it’s just too hard to relate to what successful people say if you’re not so successful yourself.

Don’t believe a word I say
Ah-ha, you didn’t expect this one! Everything above is just food for thought. I don’t have all the answers in the business/financial niche. I’m not “there” yet and I don’t know if and how I will get there. Hell, the future is grim and uncertain! So what? Maybe I’m not the only one (though being the only one blogger to ever write something like this would be cool, I highly doubt it’s possible).

Outro

Expect a more meaningful and emotionless post soon. I don’t know why I bother. Oh wait, it’s called “hope”. Whatever.

On the other hand, mixing RSS feeds and using content spinners is much easier. One can also employ free article directories, scrape Wikipedia and so on. Blackhat marketers can create algorithmically unique content with little real value fast.

A possible solution is to find a profitable niche that you personally like. This is damn hard because, if you’re looking for a niche that’s at least remotely popular, it’s probably going to be quite saturated. If you disagree, I have two words for you – self-selection bias (or is that three words?)

Things You Believe In May Seem Unprofitable
Why would someone care about my “computer processors made into magical artifacts” hobby? Niches that are really personal and unique often are just that – nobody else cares about them.

Even if you find a niche topic that has both supply (something to sell) and demand (someone who would buy a product), and you have the skills to grab a piece of the traffic pie, it may still feel wrong. Maybe the product sucks, or you simply don’t know enough about it to wholeheartedly recommend it. An affiliate marketer can’t be expected to buy and test each product before promoting it, right? A partial solution would be not to sell anything and rely on ads for income instead.

Another example – I would typically feel uneasy promoting commercial software, because I know 99% of the time you can find a free alternative that is just as good.

If being “good” doesn’t bother you, this is a non-issue. Instead of picking niches you like choose yhose that are profitable. You won’t need to create quality content for it anyway.

Exploits: Hard To Discover, Easy To Use
Finding a way to “game the system” requires creativity and luck, but using an exploit is easier, faster and more profitable (short-term) than many whitehat strategies. Here’s an example –

1. Sign up as an affiliate for adultfriendfinder.com.
2. Get your affiliate URL, targeted to the signup page. PPC mode.
3. Set up a throwaway e-mail account, set up a vacation autoresponder (see below).
4. Post “girl looking for a guy” ads on free ad sites, use the email address.
5. When someone replies to your ad they get an automated response with your aff. link and some compelling reasons to sing up (to see your pictures, etc).
6. Profit!

This is a simplified description of a scamming strategy I read in one of those PDF reports. With a few hours of work every day you could easily make $50-$100/day from this strategy. I speak from personal experience – this was the technique I was testing before I broke my arm. That kind of made me reconsider using blackhat stuff.

“The Dark Side” offers instant gratification, and that’s a tempting offer for sure. Obviously blackhat tricks become ineffective eventually, but there are always new techniques being discovered. Also, you can get most of the new IM products for free if you know where to look.

Learning IM Makes One Focus On The IM Niche
When somebody wants o learn “how to make money online”, they will automatically focus on the “make money” niche. A beginner internet marketer will often try to sell internet marketing products because that’s the topic he’s focused on at that time. I, too, am guilty of doing this. This is just how our brains work.

What most of the “gurus” don’t tell you is that IM is the worst niche for a beginner to start in. The market is saturated and most of the products are crap. For the beginner, this may create the (incorrect) impression that the “make money online” thing (no matter what the niche) is an inherently shady business. Even more – looking at the strategies some successful marketers (*cough*Ewen Chia*cough*) use it may seem that unethical methods work best and you must cast aside your morals to get rich fast.

Conclusions Lacking
I wonder what’s the proportion of whitehats vs. blackhats that are really successful making money online? “Successful” being at least $1000 profit per month.

Ah well, this took me bloody ages to write with one hand (left), but I feel it was worth it. I even managed to avoid ranting about my shady past. Err, well, at least partially avoid

How It Works/Worked

It’s all free. Anyone can register and no, you don’t get spammed. I even didn’t see a single affiliate link anywhere. The people running the challenge (Ed Dale, Dan and whoever else ) created a lot of learning material – podcasts, videos, PDF’s and even a Firefox toolbar – with new resources appearing almost every day, available either through the blog or the members area. There’s lots and lots of info and step-by-step guides about

• How to get ideas (and associated keyword phrases).
• How to analyze niches.
• How to find out exactly how many people are searching for the phrase on Google (a neat idea for using Google Trends, there’s even an automated tool now).
• How to see if there’s money to be made in the niche.
• Places where you can host a site for free.
• Social bookmarking and all the Web 2.0 stuff (TDC was very focused on this topic).
• Getting traffic, getting ranked in Google and maintaining good rankings.
• And more, way more.

And there’s a forum, too. And teams, and blogs, and custom software, and god knows what else. There’s a huge amount of valuable (and free) info in TDC.

How Hard Is It?

So-so. Most of the techniques and tactics are fairly easy and completely actionable – you can “just do it”. All technical stuff is explained in sufficient detail, so you will be able to follow along even if all you can do on the Internet is browse sites and check e-mail.

Personally I think the most complex part was finding a suitable niche and creating good content for it. To find a niche you need to somehow discover a topic that lots of people are interested in and with an acceptable amount of competition. This quickly rules out most trivial or overly general niches like health care, anti-spyware, credit cards… in short – if you’re getting spam e-mails on a particular topic, it’s a bad idea to try and move into that niche

TDC provides lots of resources to help finding niches (and still more are discussed in the forums) but it’s largely a “hit and miss” process anyway. The approach I found most effective for me was to go to Wordtracker GTrends and type in “partial” keywords. For example – “how to”, “learn”, “fix”, “help” and so on. A niche keyword phrase might be “how to [do something]“. The [do something] part can be very hard to figure out because you only know about a limited amount of “things to do”, plus most of them will likely be some popular high-competition topics. So it can be better to use “how to” and see what “somethings” people are actually searching for.

The content creation part was hard for me because, for many niches, I knew nothing about the topic, or, more accurately – didn’t care about the topic. Don’t get me wrong – TDC has enough information about how to do research, find topics for niche articles and become an expert (of sorts) quickly on any topic, but that is of little consolation if I find a promising niche like “how to make a widget” and realize I could care less about widgets. I think that while it definitely is possible to make money from a topic you find uninteresting, it’s not the best way. Thankfully I managed to find some computer-related niches that I’m interested in.

Does It Really Work?

See for yourself (and this, too). Of the two sites that I created during the TDC, one is already getting around 45 visits/day, after being online for less than a week. It’s not on the first page of Google, but it may get there eventually. I’m also going to use the strategies I learned to promote this site (which might be slightly harder because it’s not focused on a single topic). I haven’t made any money from this affair yet, but it doesn’t cost me anything either apart from the time invested, so that’s fine. BTW, on the topic of time – it’s going to pass anyway, so it’s better spent on something worthwhile, not joyful procrastination.

What Happens Now

The “thirty day” and “challenge” parts of the Thirty Day Challenge are over, but somehow the TDC lives on. While there is no more time limit for making $10 and no more “winners” will be announced, the site is still there, the forums are active and Ed, Dan and the rest are going to put even more resources on the site with time. I’ve heard they’ll talk about creating your own products in September… If you want more info, listen to this podcast about the future of TDC.

Hey, you have made it this far, all the way through my endless writing! Here’s something nice for you – The Summary Of Summaries about the Thirty Day Challenge, full of links, tips, articles and more. Good luck