Ed came through with a ton of good stuff today. It was a rare experience as he stayed on topic and just gave solid information. For the people having problems getting their sites to rank well in Google, Ed offered the following suggestions:

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.

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.