Thirty Day Goal
Set And Accomplish Your Goals In Thirty Days

Wow! those last 11 days went by fast and let me tell you I was a complete failure…not only in my Thirty Day Goal, but also in my Eleven Day Goal.  If you want to see my goals take a look at last months two posts:

Goals For 2010
Article Creation Goal Update #1

Should I even recount my results over the past month?  Why not…The goal was to output 72 total articles between my blogs (way, way too lofty a goal).  After the first twenty days we revised the goal to only output 15 articles in the last 11 days.  Here were my results:

First 20 days: 10 articles
Last 11 days:  5 articles

Eeeek!!! Not even close.

image by Anders V

Focus Your Blogging Goals

Last months exercise helped me realize that I need to focus my blogging goals.  In particular only concentrate on one thing at a time (one blog in this case).  I gave myself such a lofty task that the mere thought of starting was enough to make me procrastinate.  Another possible solution could be to break down these large items into smaller chunks.  Maybe 72 total articles is achievable for me, but I need to think of it more as writing 2.5 articles a day (that’s a high expectation considering I have a full time job to worry about).  Finally, I didn’t create any due dates, besides the final date.  It kind of reminds of the procrastination in college…do nothing all semester then write a 20 page paper from 5pm till 8am the next day…not the smartest way to accomplish a goal.  What I need are intermediate goals, not just the big final…more like high school where most teachers break your work out into homework assignments, pop quizzes, regular exams, midterms, and finals.

Here are a few things I noticed.  The day I set my goals I was very productive probably outputting two or three articles in one sitting.  As time moved forward my productivity declined.  I was having motivation or procrastination problems.

This months goal is to just focus on one blog.  Concentrate all my efforts to get everything done on that one blog.

Focusing on PuppyInTraining.com

This months goal is to focus all of my efforts on the PuppyInTraining.com blog.  The Puppy In Training blog is basically about my journey as a Guide Dog puppy raiser.  I like to give out tips and hints on dog training (stuff I learn during my puppy training classes), information about upcoming dog events, dog product reviews, and a bunch of other dog and puppy related rants and writings.

I guess the million dollar question is what do I want to do to the Puppy In Training website?  So lets get started…

1. Write a minimum of two posts a week released once on Tuesday and once on Thursday.
2. Read through and update all the pages.
3. Write a My Story post that covers my entire life with dogs.
4. Update the design on the Puppy In Training site.
5. Create a newsletter sequence to run once a month for 6 months.

That’s the list I want to accomplish in the month of February 2010.  Lets break it down even further into smaller more bite sized chunks.

Write a minimum of two posts a week released once on Tuesday and once on Thursday (due date February 14th)
I released my first article of the month Tuesday, Feb 2nd called Top 5 Reasons Why A Dog Sticks His Head Out The Car Window.  That’s one down only 7 more to go.  In order to accomplish this goal I’m going to work on writing my Tuesday and Thursday posts the weekend before.  In fact I might try writing six articles on Saturday that I can schedule for the rest of the month.  On a side note, I would really like to get 3-5 total articles out in any given week and will work towards that goal if time permits.

Read through and update all pages (due date February 7th)
This shouldn’t be to difficult a task and can probably be done in one or two sittings.  As I look at the current Puppy In Training site I need to update the information on the About Page, make the Contact Page a little neater, add information to the Advertise Page (this could lead to another source of revenue), and maybe do some brainstorming on what I could add to the Resources Page.  One final thought…should I add another page to include a store front?

Write a My Story post that covers my entire life with dogs (due date February 7th)
This should be an easy one.  Sit down and write my life with dogs.  Break the article up into 4 separate 500+ page articles.  Release in a series and link to from my about page.  This micro-goal dovetails with the first two micro-goals.

Update the design on the Puppy In Training site (due date February 28th)
This is probably the biggest micro-goal.  I probably won’t opt for a custom designed template for my website, but may choose a premium template.  I’ll probably outline a post here at the Thirty Day Goal website and do my best to identify exactly what I’m looking for in a template and see what I can find.

Create a newsletter sequence to run once a month for 6 months (due date February 28th)
This is another daunting task.  I have approximately 2000 subscribers to my Puppy In Training newsletter and don’t have a proper sequence of newsletters in place.  My first step in this process is to send a quick newsletter to all my subscribers and update them on my upcoming goals, any puppy news etc.   Then create the newsletter sequence and try to follow the format Darren Rowse is using at Digital Photography School.  Check out his newsletter sequence article.

In order to document this months journey here’s a look at the current state (as of 2/1/2010) of the PuppyInTraining.com website:

Puppy In Training Home Page

Puppy In Training Post Page

Okay, so I think I got it for this month.  I focused my goals.  I broke them down into smaller chunks.  I assigned due dates.  Now lets get rocking!

Do you have a Thirty Day Goal this month?  Do you have trouble focusing or accomplishing goals?  Please tell us your story in the comment section below.

At the beginning of this month I decided to focus my efforts on one project: my blog about raising a Guide Dog Puppy In Training.  The plan is to report income numbers and the website statistics using Google Analytics.

Here are the statistics on my Puppy In Training blog as of January 31st 2010.

• Web Address: http://puppyintraining.com
• First Blog Post: August 2007
• Number of Blog Posts: 333
• Number of Comments: 1,469
• Number of RSS Subscribers: 1,959
• Twitter Followers: 35
• Facebook Fanpage Fans: 8

Google Analytics Report January 2010

Traffic has increased since December 2009, but as you can see from the graph day to day it is very flat.  When I am active in creating traffic channels to my blog you would normally see spikes whether from a guest post, stumbleupon spike, or Digg front page.  I’d like to see at least one such spike a month.  Unfortunately, as you can tell I haven’t been to active outside of creating content for my Puppy In Training blog.

Income Report – January 2010

Google AdSense: $251.62
Amazon Associates: $26.91
TOTAL: $278.53

Compared to last month AdSense has increased only slightly (approximately $2) and Amazon Associates has decreased approximately $8.

It’s difficult to determine when Google AdSense will increase and decrease.  It usually goes up and down with traffic, but not always.  This past month I did make a few changes by removing several Ad blocks from the website and could be the cause of the slight decrease in relationship to the increase in traffic.

I usually include Amazon Associates links in posts when appropriate in an article.  On occasion I produce dog product reviews and include amazon associate links.  Thus far my most successful posts have been a series on dog bowls.

Conclusions

As you can tell there’s really not much going on with my Puppy In Trainin blog.  That needs to change.  If you haven’t already read my Thirty Day Goal for February then check out How To Focus Your Blogging Goals.  My Thirty Day Goal for February will hopefully help increase traffic and bring new visitors and subscribers to the site.  However, I have not implemented any way to produce the traffic spikes I mentioned in Google Analytics section of this report.

I’ll tack on one more goal for the month…join a social traffic group to help gain the traffic spikes mentioned earlier.

That’s it for the month.  I plan to get a Statistics and Income Report together every month to track and review my progress.  It will give me a chance to analyze my blog, make decisions on how to increase traffic and income, find out what’s working and what is not, and aid in determining my Thirty Day Goal for the month.

Houston we have a problem!  The January 2010 Thirty Day Goal was slightly over aggressive.  Actually I was so overwhelmed thinking about getting as many articles together as possible guess how many I actually produced up to this point?  I think maybe 5 total…   Yep, this month has been almost a complete failure.  However, today a light bulb went on in my head.  I’m trying to do too much in too little time.

Problem #1 – The first weekend of the month was a holiday.  January 1st is a big time to celebrate in my family and so what did I get done that weekend…a big fat 0.

Problem #2 – Fast forward to weekend number 2…I had a snowboarding trip planned that ate up four days and to top things off the two days before vacation I was scrambling around buying new stuff for my trip and packing my bags.  That’s a total of 6 days no-work.

Problems 1 and 2 (kind of reminds me of thing 1 and thing 2 from Cat in the Hat) put me way behind.  So, what happened next?  I was so overwhelmed I was like a chicken with his head cut off.  I started several articles, but didn’t finish because my mind got side tracked and started thinking about 7 things at once…not good.

So, now that we only have eleven days left in the month I’m calming myself down and revising my goals.

Eleven Day Goal

I want to work on three of my blogs and therefore would like to put at least an article every other day for these three blogs and here is the plan of attack.

• Between today (Wednesday) and Friday write two articles per blog = 6 articles.  That’s totally doable.
• Saturday and Sunday are non-publishing days, but heavy writing days.  Write 2 pillar articles per blog (to be released on Tuesday and Thursday) – total 6 articles this weekend.
• During the week write a minimum of 1 short article per blog (300 – 500 word).  3 articles.

That there my friends will be the new writing schedule.  Write 2 pillar articles per blog on the weekend and a minimum of 1 short article during the week.  Also, I did mention using alternative methods to produce more content and while I haven’t received any guest articles I did join a site that supplies content as long as you include a link back to their sponsors.  We’ll see how that goes over with my audience.

So, to recap:

• By January 31st I will have a total of 15 articles written for my three sites.
• I will not lose my head anymore.
• All will be well at the end of the month.

Since this month revolved around content creation.  What shall we do for next months “Thirty Day Goal?”  I’m thinking time to promote!

This blog has layed dormant for quite some time now.  However, now that new year is upon (and many of us are writing down our goals for the year) I decided to revive the Thirty Day Goal.

What do I have in store for this blog?  Well, it’s been almost a year and a half since my last entry and at that time I was updating my progress on the Thirty Day Challenge 2008.  Unfortunately, I did not complete that years challenge.  However, in 2009 I finished all of the lessons, but did not make my first $1.  However, the blog I created in 2009 is still averaging about 20 visitors a day and approximately 40 page views.  I guess I just did not choose a profitable niche.

Back to the question…what do I have in store for this blog?  First off I did notice that I have 12 subscribers to the blog…Thanks guys and please give me a shout in the comments section if you’re still following.  If any of you would like me to talk about a specific topic then please let me know.  Second, I plan on using this blog for monthly and yearly goal setting, tracking my progress, and hopefully giving you insight on what works for me and my internet business.

image by Dan4th

I’m not talking about hockey goals.  However, I love playing hockey and one of my personal goals would be to become a better hockey player…

What I’ve Accomplished Through 2009

A quick update on my progress at the beginning of 2010.

• Including this blog I have 6 active blogs.
• Collectively these 6 blogs pull in about 30K visitors and 50K pageviews.
• I make about $300 a month from these blogs mostly from Google AdSense and Amazon Affiliates

Goals For 2010

I’m going to try and keep this list short which hopefully makes it easier to accomplish.

1. 10 websites each receiving 100+ visitors a day.  In 2009 I only had 1 that produced at that traffic level.
2. 1 million page views in 2010. This is related to goal #1.  In 2009 we had 486,060 page views.
3. Average $150 a day in revenue from these 10 websites directly or indirectly.  In 2009 my highest month grossed $10 a day.
4. Launch my first membership website. In 2009 I began the process…establishing preeminence, starting an email list, partially building the site.

Okay…so that’s a short tidy list.  As we move throughout the year I will establish ONE Thirty Day Goal on the first of each month that will help me accomplish one of these 3 major goals for 2010.

January’s Thirty Day Goal

That brings me to this months Thirty Day Goal.  Drum roll please…

• I mentioned that I have established 6 blogs in total.  I’d like to start this month off right and produce a minimum of 3 articles a week between all six blogs.  A steep request I know, but content is king and before we start drawing traffic to our sites and getting loyal subscribers it’s a good idea to get a base of pillar articles.  So…6 blogs x 3 articles x 4 weeks = 72 total articles!  By the way, this months goal helps by not only generating content and hopefully traffic, but also creates good writing habits.

I better start thinking about ways to produce articles and fast.  Hmmm…Guest Posts, Paid Posts, Hire a Blogger, Ask Friends To Write To My Blogs…Who knows…Are any of you interested in contributing guest posts let me know in the comment section below.

1 article down for the month of January 71 more to go.

If anyone is still following this blog I apologize for not getting posts done last week.  As you all know I’m very behind on my thirty day challenge.   This past week has been tough with several fires at work and trying to finish off a contract project that I’ve been working on for the past month.

I’ll do my best to try and get back on track, but next week I’ll be on vacation in Alaska for the next 8 days.  I’m going to try and get some work done, but I’m not too sure if our cabin will have internet.

If you don’t hear from me for the next week then you’ll know I don’t have internet.  I’ll do my best to catch some halibut and salmon and avoid the grizzlies.  I’ll speak to everyone real soon!

Today we’re going to setup a hub page to get more backlinks ad off-page authority to our blog.

Anytime you create new content piece of content you should let the world know by using social bookmarking.

Day 12 is approximately ~23 minutes

How To Create A Hubpages Site

(video length ~21 minutes)

Hubpages is another web 2.0 platform that we can use to link to our WordPress Direct blog. You need to be careful with Hubpages and err on the side of conservative. Caro recommends you only use one backlink in your first Hubpage.

A hubpage is a web page about a particular topic. They recommend 3 links at the most in your hubpage.

Go to HubPages and create a new hubpages account if you don’t already have one.

1. At the Edit Hub page the first thing we did was add an RSS feed to the page by clicking the button in the right column. The page does not refresh, but you will see that the RSS feed appears on the bottom your editable capsules.
2. Caro creates several capsules on her hubpages including, a photo, RSS feed, and plain text.

Caro finds that her Hubpages gets more comment/feedback then her Squidoo Lens. We’re using both mainly to produce authority links to our blog. Be very careful not to upset the HubPage people with too many links. This is reiterated several times throughout this video.

In th second part of the video Caro creates the profile for her account.

When you add a photo hubpages asks you to crop the image. You can resize the image by clicking shift+ctrl and then use your mouse cursor to resize. Caro does not show you how to resized the crop box in the video.

Don’t worry about your HubPage score.

You can add another tag in the bottom of the right column.

After you publish your hubpage use Social Marker to bookmark and let the world know about your content.

Squidoo, Ezine, and Hubpages all have different rules. Make sure you follow the rules.

One Final Thing

I don’t remember Caro adding a backlink to her wordpress direct blog. It may have been included in the text she copy pasted or maybe I just missed it in the video. In any case don’t forget to add a link in your HubPage that point back to you blog. Caro recommends only 1 on your first HubPage, but also mentions as many as 3 might be safe.

Steps To Take Today

• Create A HubPage just like Caro did in today’s video.

Today I built my first Squidoo Lens.  I must say it does help to have a little html background for this one.  In Caro’s video she mentions that it’s not that big a deal, but some of the things she just copied and pasted kind of blew by me and I had to watch the video in slow motion to catch exactly what was going on.

How To Build A Squidoo Lens?

It says build a Squidoo Lens in three steps, but that’s not really the case.  Make sure you get signed up and have a Squidoo account.  Creating the account is very straight forward.  Go to create a Squidoo Lens and fill out the first (I believe) 3 steps (very straigt forward).   When you get to the module area it might get a little confusing.  Here are my pointers:

• The default view has a bunch of modules.  You can delete and add modules any way you’d like.  After watching the video I noticed that Caro (as she mentioned) only used 4 modules and deleted the rest.
• HTML – adding html is simple if you know the tags, however, not all the tags worked.  I wanted to add header tags h1, h2, h3, etc., but it wouldn’t register.  I did a little research and found the following: Your Lens title is an h1 tag, module titles are h2 tags, and module sub-titles are h3 tags.  Apparently you can’t use header tags in the text area (although I didn’t try an h4).
• I’m not too sure how Caro added her affiliate image, but here’s what I did.  I added the image by pulling it from my dogadoptionsrescue.com server by using the following tag <a href=”http://locatereviews.com/1324519995″><img src=”http://www.dogadoptionsrescue.com/wp-content/uploads/585adeb70258014.jpg” /></a>.  The <a tag creates the anchor to my affiliate site and the <img tag links to the affiliate image on my server.
• One final pointer is I created a different affiliate link by going to the Thirty Day Challenge website and creating a trackable link using the TDC Stat Tracker.  This way I will know how many referrals come from Squidoo and how many come from my Dog Adoptions website.  The unfortunate part is I won’t know which site a conversion is coming from.

Overall, I just need to play around a little more with Squidoo to get comfortable.

Market Samurai Finding Content

The updated version of Market Samurai is pretty much a no brainer.  It’s pretty straight forward and an easy way to find more information and I can now use it to create some RSS feeds for my Squidoo Lenses.

After all this if you’d like to take a look at my Squidoo Lens head on over to  Dog Adoptions and let me know what you think.  Leave me a comment in my guest book, click through to my Dog Adoptions blog or be a pal an purchase my dog adoptions affiliate so I can grab my first sale.

That’s it for today.  I’m heading over to SocialMarker to let everyone know about my new lens!

Today we get to learn how to build a Squidoo Lens. We’ll learn how to sign up for an account, build a lens, and the importance of keyword optimization in the content. Guru Bob is also going to show us improvements on the “Find Content” feature in Market Samurai.

Squidoo is one of the best platforms for hosting content and getting indexed in Google. I like Ed’s analogy of a spiderweb we’re using the different content platforms to build a spiderweb to try and catch our traffic.

Day 11 is approximately ~24 minutes

How To Create A Squidoo Lens

(video length ~17 minutes)

Week 2 is very much about creating quality links to promote your blog. We’re going to use powerful web 2.0 content platforms starting with Squidoo.

Signing up for a Squidoo account is just like every other form on the internet. Just fill the form and sign up!

• After you sign up you come to a page that asks you about building a lens. If you already have an account you can get to the same place by going to the upper left of your dashboard and clicking the “Make A Lens” link.
• Step 1: In the My Lens is about field use your keyword phrase
• Step 2: What’s Your Goal for your page? Caro says to choose whatever we want here. She usually goes with the default option here. I want to get the word out about Dog Adoptions (easiest option)
• Step 3:Try to use your main keywords in the URL…if it’s not available try using dashes.  When you’ve completed this section click next.
• Step 4: “And 3 More Good Ones” – use 3 from your secondary keywords or categories on your blog.

Funny it said there were only 3 steps to creating a Squidoo Lens.

• When setting up your lens – I’m assuming this is a first time thing you can setup your bio by putting a short blurb along with a photo.
• Once your bio is setup you need to set up a minimum of 3 modules to get up and running.
• Click the Edit button next to “Introduction, Content, and Discovery Tool”  Use your keyword for the title and add copy you’ve created to the description area. – use material that’s you created – original copy.
• You can check to see if your content is original by going to http://www.copyscape.com to check and see if your material is indeed original.  You may want to do this if your using some content from other articles.
• Caro also uploads a relevant photo.
• Caro recommends less links.  Take a few keywords and link to your main ranking vehicle (your wordpress blog).  You can also link with some of the category keywords as well.
• You can add your RSS feed to the lens as well

The actual purpose of the Squidoo Lens is to build quality links to your blog. Although Caro does add a link back to our affiliate product on here Lens and uses the Vintage Electric Guitar Price Guide image for her link.

Remember you only need 3 modules.  You can remove the modules or add different modules you’d like to include.

***Caro’s main recommendation:  Make sure you don’t include to many links in your lens.

The final step is to make sure you use Socialmarker to let the social bookmark sites know your new lens is available.

Caro submits to 10 Social Bookmark sites.  Make sure you don’t bombard the Social Bookmark sites.  Do your best to make sure you offer quality content.

When you submit to Social sites you always want to make sure you’re submitting quality content.

Find More Content Using Market Samurai

(video length ~5 minutes)

There are now some new features in Market Samurai.  First new content sources and second your can create your own RSS feed for your specific keyword.

New content platforms are now available on Market Samurai.

• Wikipedia
• Youtube
• News/Miscellaneous
• Yahoo News
• Yahoo Answers

After you do your content search Market Samurai generates an RSS feed that you can use in areas such as the RSS module in your Squidoo Lens.

Steps To Take Today

• Create Your Squidoo Lens
• Submit to SocialMarker
• Check out the RSS Feed and new content areas on Market Samurai

I’m sure RSS directories is a great way to increase the number of people reading your feed. Unfortunatley, we have not setup a feedburner account to track the number of feeds to our blog. Maybe that’s in an upcoming lesson.

TDC RSS Submitter

The guys at the Thirty Day Challenge have setup an easy to use RSS Submitter to get our feeds into the RSS Directorie. I submitted my feed using my secondary keyword phrases and a short text summary during the submission process.

Here’s the information I used:

Blog URL: http://www.dogadoptionsrescue.com

Feed URL: http://www.dogadoptionsrescue.com/feed/

Your Main Keyword Phrase: Dog Adoptions

Additional Tags: Dog Adoptions, Rescue A Dog, Small Dog Rescue, Puppy Adoptions, Dog Centers

A Brief Description: A dog adoptions blog about…can’t remember exactly what I put here.

Because we are not using feedburner I went ahead and submitted my own Puppy In Training blog to the feed to see if how much my feed count increases in the coming days.