The Thirty Day Challenge and Google Groups

Today kicked off the start of the Thirty Day Challenge. I’m sure you are wondering what challenge would take thirty days and why I would be interested in joining it. Basically, the goal of the 30DC is to earn $10.00 online within thirty days without investing any money in the process. At first, I had the same reaction - $10? Are you kidding me? However, the goal is not to become rich in thirty days but rather to realize that it is possible to make money online even if you know little to nothing about the internet. Well, hopefully I am a bit above the little to nothing category, but I thought this would be a great way to hear of some additional traffic building techniques as well as potential monetization tactics that could help improve my own online ventures. It is also important to note that $10 is a very reasonable amount someone could expect to earn after thirty days. If they picked something like $500, then people would assume they were kidding and never even attempt to follow the challenge process. The 30DC is all about motivating those who have tried and failed or never tried out of fear of failure.

Another cool component to the 30DC is the focus on teams and team collaboration. The idea is still to work independently by working on your own product that will earn you $10 in the thirty days. However, they encourage you to form a team that you can collaborate and communicate with regarding your questions, concerns, successes, resources, etc.

For those interested in joining the challenge, entry is still open (although today, August 1st, was officially kickoff). Sign up for the forums and you can start participating as a member right away. After you setup your account, be sure to check out their pre-season recap post to get up-to-date on all their 30DC tips.

A few friends of mine and I have all formed a 30DC team and will be using Google Groups to organize our communications. This was actually and surprisingly the first time I have every used Google Groups and must say that I am impressed. The idea is to create a public or private web space where you can do the following:

• Create forum-like discussion topics
• Create individual pages
• Communicate via private messages and email with your group
• Share up to 100mb of files between your group

I set up our group in 20 minutes and had no problems getting used to the navigation of the site. My only criticism is the way forum topics are organized. As soon as you create a new title for your thread, it creates an entirely separate topic, which gets messy. I was hoping to create 5-7 general topics (SEO, monetization, etc) that we could all post questions/comments in. Looks like I will just have to get used to it, but at least all posts are search-friendly via the Google search engine - so finding past threads shouldn’t be difficult.

Hope to see you in the challenge!!

Netvibes: RSS and Goal Management

For the past few months I have been using www.netvibes.com as my homepage. It is a simple way to manage your RSS feeds in addition to having numerous modules that allow you to create task lists, notes, weather trackers, etc. With the internet being the information overload that it is, neglecting to use RSS feeds to filter your favorite blogs/media sites, is like using excite.com as your search engine.

Really Simple Syndication offers instant updates of the newest posts and articles from your favorite sites. RSS really cuts down on the time I normally spend surfing around. Netvibes also features a summary of each post - this really helps in choosing which posts to actually read.

When managing my goals, I use a task list with the specific goal as the title and the action items as each ‘to-do’. I find it makes things easier since the layout allows you to see all of your goals and action items, rather than having them all spread out.