The challenge is in the home stretch. I’ve come up with a theory that Guru Bob is the brains of the 30 DC crew. I find his videos the most helpful and full of content. Great stuff. The teaching today centered around researching competitors and backlinks. Using Google and Yahoo, you want to research and find relevant niche sites that you might also target for linking. Getting links at sites that your competitors have is a good place to start. It was also shown that Google doesn’t list many links so it is best to use Yahoo when performing the search.

If you take the time and do the process outlined in the 30 DC, you will definitely be ahead of most other sites in your niches. This is Internet Marketing 101.

The only issue I’m finding is that it all takes lots of time and effort. If you’re going to jump into setting up sites, you need to be realistic with your time commitment. Researching, writing, setting up sites/blogs, social bookmarking, affiliate linking, researching competitors, etc., will take you many hours (especially if you are going to target multiple niches). You will also need to be patient and realize you might be doing this for a niche that ends up with either no traffic or no interest in purchasing products.

For me, I’m thinking you can write this process up and hire a personal assistant to do it for you.

Today was bittersweet. The 30 DC team released some great content and then Ed Dale dropped the bomb: no “secret sauce”. When the challenge was in the early days, Ed promised to help the 30 DC with some secret technique(s) that would absolutely help your site get into the top spot on Google. It was supposed to be the secret tool to bring you to the next level. Today we learned that the information will not be shared and basically our sites are on their own. If your site is stuck in the Google rankings, tough beans.

The reason given for the change of mind had to do with spammers and other nefarious characters. Too many people on the 30 DC and too much potential for “abuse”. Ed and the crew seem like straight-up guys so I’m disinclined to follow the path that this is all a marketing ploy for their paid coaching program. I think it’s short-sighted and a bad decision, but it’s their hard work that developed or discovered the method. The only part that sucks is that it was supposed to be a lifesaver for a poorly ranking site. It kinda feels like having a tool box with all tools except the hammer. Good luck if you need to drive a bunch of nails.

That being said, it appears the 30 DC will not disband after 30 days. There’s going to be a new section for teams to continue and more instruction on how to create products. Sounds good.

Today’s teaching centered around link building and using Google Alerts. To sum it up, you need lots of quality links to your site to rank well and build authority. The best way to do it: outstanding content.

Some other good news today. Two of my blogger blogs are within the Top 10 results for the target keyword phrase. One of them got ranked in less than 2 hours and is in the Top 10 for a broad phrase match! I’m stunned. What’s even more stunning is that I didn’t promote it. I just wrote some targeted content and “published” onto the blog. I started getting organic traffic immediately. Update: It’s now been six hours and the site is ranked 7th out of 2,050,000 for the broad phrase.

Have I made any money yet? Nope.

Not much new movement for the 30 DC blogs. One of the blogs is in Google and I’m ranking high for an irrelevant keyword phrase. I love when that happens. The phrase relates to the genre but nothing on my site deals with it. How did this happen? The Blogger default listing for categories is named “Label”. When people search for “xyz label” they getting my site. What’s even funnier is that I have no idea why they are searching for that phrase and didn’t find any answers when I did my own Google search. If I find out what it’s about, I’ll write a post on it so at least they find something helpful.

Moving forward, I will be working on an effective web 2.0 strategy for my future sites. I want the most impact with the least risk. The risk is getting labeled a spammer or getting my web 2.0 accounts deleted. It’s a fine line.

No sales this weekend so I’m definitely not in the raffle for a trip to see Ed in Australia. My feelings now are more like when you’re losing by 49 points in a football game and there’s five minutes left in the 4th quarter. Sure, you’re gonna play out the last minutes, but there’s not much hope in winning.

Check out Income Hero’s post on 263 Article Directories. If you write a bunch of different articles and point them back to your site, you’d definitely get some help ranking with Google.