The upgrade said it worked and when I viewed the site, it was porked. I got a few upgrade.php errors and finally realized I needed to start from scratch to rescue the site.

How did I fix it? Easy.

1. Download WP 2.8.5
2. Extract to my hard drive
3. Start my FTP program
4. Upload the WP-Admin, WP-Content, and WP-Includes folders from my hard drive to my hosting folders
5. Try to log-in (wp-admin.php)
6. When prompted to upgrade the database, do it.
7. Upgrade completes, site back online

Easy enough eh?

Murphy’s Law of Upgrading — any automatic upgrade won’t

I slapped up a new theme. Kinda cool. The biggest laugh is that the site is NOT #1 for the term nextebizguy.com or nextebizguy.

Love it.

One day I sat and wrote a 295 word article for one of my sites. The article will not win a Pulitzer Prize, but it wasn’t trash either. I think it took me a total of 20 minutes. The majority of the time was spent signing up as an author.

I submitted the article and had it reviewed by their editors within two days. The article went live on 30 Aug 2007 and I was named an “expert author”. To date the article was viewed 319 times and I’ve received 25 site visits. These visits spend 4.22 minutes on the site and view 2.25 pages.

This is just one article. What if I wrote nine more? You get the picture. From my brief experience, I would definitely recommend you write a few articles to support whatever site you’re working on.

As for me, I think I made 20 cents from Adsense clicks. I didn’t win the challenge by making ten dollars in 30 days. Lots of others didn’t do it either. My hunch says a small minority of those participating actually won the challenge. There were a few huge winners (like 7,000 dollars) but those were the exceptions.

Ed and crew will keep the forum going and say they’ll be adding more content about making products in a week. I would recommend you check out the site and the materials if you have any desire to try and make a few bucks online.

For me, the best part was making new friends on Facebook. Building a team of people to talk with is really helpful in staying on target and motivated.

The techniques work for traffic. Taking what I’ve learned I’ve been able to get a site ranked in Google in two hours and now that site gets good traffic in only three days. If you apply the web 2.0 techniques to a site with content people want, you’ll be successful.

1. Don’t pick a niche with little traffic
2. Don’t pick a niche with no products to market
3. Don’t pick a niche that is a temporary situation in someone’s life
4. Do make sure your URL, blog title, headline, and first sentence include your targeted keyword(s)
5. Do make sure that competitors aren’t already using web 2.0 strategies

Simple enough.

GuruBob was back on his game for the final lessons. One lesson covered using Yahoo Answers for an additional way to get backlinks to your site. I have tried this already and it did nothing for me, but I’m glad he has seen success with it. The majority of my answers were voted best answer and still nothing. Go figure.

He also spoke about directory submissions and I heeded the advice. Using the sites he showed, I picked the PR 5 and 6 directories and submitted one of my sites to them. The bad news is that if you don’t pay for review, it will take ~6 months to get your link reviewed and in the directory.

All of this pushes you toward the goal of creating the best link platform pointing to your website. Just use the strategies and get the links. You’ll get the traffic.

It takes the same amount of effort to promote a $1 dollar product as it does to promote a $100,000 dollar product.

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.

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.