Hi everyone,

Just wanted to drop in a quick update about my $200 per day online challenge!

So far things are going well. As I mentioned previously, I’ve been going through PiePieGirl’s “One Week Marketing” to see if I can make $200 per day online with Squidoo.

I’m still on day 1 but already super excited about where this is going! PotPieGirl definitely seems to know her stuff when it comes to Squidoo as there’s tons of tips and tricks already I’m excited to use to make $200 per day online this month.

So, I was getting ready to start making some Squidoo lenses for some affiliate products and then realized… wait a minute… what am I actually gonna sell… and what keywords am I going to use??

It’s one thing to be all fired up about a product… but if everyone and their mom is competing for the ‘selling’ keywords for it, you’re going to have a real hard time trying to get ranked in Google search!

So at this point, I’m evaluating a few options (recommended as part of “One Week Marketing“) for doing market/niche/keyword research for my $200 per day online challenge.

One of them is the Micro Niche Finder. Two things stand out to me about Micro Niche Finder:

1. You can use it to find which keywords should be avoided due to high competition and which you should go after since they’re lower competition
2. Their commercial intent tools look helpful to figure out if people are even buying things related to this keyword. This has been a big problem for me in the past! I’ve gotten all excited about a low competition keyword – only to find it was low competition because no one’s buying anything!

I’ve definitely got a little more research to do before I commit to anything – but once I do, things will definitely pick up as I get rolling cranking out some Squidoo lenses! I’m super excited to actually get some lenses out there & ranked in Google search results!

As today’s question for part of my $200 per day online challenge, how do you do your niche keyword research? Do you use a special tool or just your brain? Tell me what you think below!

Hey guys (and girls too)!

Like I said in my last post, my action plan is to see if I can use PotPieGirl’s “5 steps to make $200 per day online” to actually make just $20 this month.

I know, it’s not a big “shoot for the stars” type of goal/plan, but what I’m looking for at the moment isn’t an instant online day job replacer, it’s just a simple few dollars to get back into the online world with and feel successful .

The 5 Step Plan to making $200 per day online – My progress:

So, I do have a bit of a confession to make – I actually completed have already step #1 – “Get the Basics” back in 2006 when I got into this making money online stuff in the very beginning and have definitely enjoyed all the resources at The Wealthy Affiliate and am still active in the forums there. In fact, there’s more than enough helpful stuff there to take you from $0 to $200 per day just within that forum! But for this test, I wanted to follow Pot Pie Girl’s 5 step action plan since I follow her blog and want to see some more of the actual methods she uses.

So, I’m on to step #2 – “Get a plan of Action“. Since I’m going to do this “by the book” (or maybe by the e-book?) I decided to actually take action, put down some money, and purchase Pot Pie Girl’s own One Week Marketing method. I decided to go for the $47 version but I’m sure there’s probably some great stuff in the $77 version also.

I just downloaded & unpacked it, so I’m pretty excited to see what it’s all about. Given the title, “One Week Marketing“, I’m thinking that if all goes well, I’ll be able to report some sort of success with this method here by a week from today – woohoo! I’ll make sure to update here again soon with my first steps of action!

In the meanwhile, if you have comments or questions about the “One Week Marketing” course, feel free to post them here!

So I was over browsing one of my favorite marketing friends Jennifer (PotPieGirl)’s site tonight, looking for some good tips to help me get back into the online marketing game and found this page:

5 Steps to make $200 a day online

Naturally, the whole post is a great read, but the thing that stood out to me was her step #2 – where she believes that 95% of online marketers fail at trying to make money. What is it?

Get a plan!

If you don’t have a plan, you have no direction. Like the saying goes – “Failure to plan is planning to fail”. Without a plan, there’s no reason to believe you’ll see any rewards of hard work, no matter how hard you work or how passionate you are.

Even if you do manage to achieve some level of results, they will be nothing compared to what you might have had if you just made a plan.

I’ve seen this come true in my own life – maybe you have as well?

Let’s say you’re going to throw a big birthday party for a friend – and you really want it to turn out well. Are you going to just wait until the last minute to throw ideas together  and hope everything all works out? Probably not!

If you’re like me, you’ll want to take some time, sit down, plan out when it’s going to be, where it’ll happen, who will be coming – and of course, what kind of food everyone will be enjoying.

None of these steps is really that difficult – but a plan requires at least 2 key steps to work:

1. It has to be well-defined.What exactly are you going to do? When will it happen? Who’s in charge of it? How will results be evaluated? Well-defined plans are easier to follow because they require less thinking, thus less time spent grinding your gears trying to figure out how to work the plan. Pay a little bit more effort up front to define your plan, and you’ll thank yourself on down the road as your momentum powers you to success!
2. You have to be committed. You may have the best plan ever but if you don’t commit to working the plan, you’ve only wasted your efforts. Instead, make sure that the plan is realistic. Making a plan to lose 50 pounds in a month is well-defined, but it sure ain’t realistic! If you keep your plans to stuff you know you can commit to, you’ll never have to worry about losing interest in the plan and walking away.

So where’s my plan?

My plan is simple. I want to see if I can use Jennifer’s 5 Steps to make $200 a day online post to make money online.

What will I be selling? Don’t know yet! I’ll probably go with Clickbank, Amazon, or Commission Junction. What I do know is that I won’t be selling anything that seems shady or that I wouldn’t feel comfortable telling (or selling to) my friends in real life. So probably no “Make Money Online” products, Lotto/betting systems, or full movie download sites/products.

How will I be selling it? Well, Jennifer’s guide recommends Squidoo, and maybe some articles or niche sites, so I’ll start with Squidoo and see how it goes from there.

How much do I want to make? Just 20$ this month. That’s it! Not even a hundred bucks, just a simple $20 bill. Since today’s June 1st, that gives me a full month to see if I can make just $20 using a plan that’s designed to make 10x that in a day! If I end up beating my goal, so much the better!

Most Importantly, what do I want to learn? I want to learn the process. How to go from not even having a squidoo account to finding a hungry market, finding the keyword they’re using for searching for products to buy, setting up a Squidoo lense for it, optimizing the lense – and then getting enough traffic to start making sales.

So! That’s it for now. I’m going to get started bright and early tomorrow morning and start in on the plan. I’ll keep you all updated on how it goes and what I’m learning along the way so you can hurl encouragement or jeers my way!