The Thirty Day Challenge is a (get ready for it…) 30 day email course designed to walk beginners step-by-step through the process of researching a niche, then setting up, SEO optimizing, promoting, and monetizing a website.
The actual challenge is to find a suitable keyword and go through all the steps to generate $1.00 in ad revenue. Let me be clear, this is the best free resource for beginner internet marketers IF you can tolerate sitting through 10 hours of video, and are ok with not having a good source of reference material to fall back on afterwards.
Pros:
Now, I consider my search engine placement skills to be pretty damned advanced at this point, and I learned a TON of new things from this email series (most notably, the importance of social bookmarking sites, and using Squidoo and Hub Pages to generate high page-rank inbound links). If you have no idea what I’m talking about in the last sentence, no worries, Ed and the gang will walk you through everything you need to know.
The best part is that once you get your first email, you can view all of the video lessons immediately by going to the site.
Make notes on the Squidoo and Hub Pages videos and include them in the Off-Page SEO tab of your binder. (huh?)
Cons:
I’m not a huge fan of video, and I find it a pain to sit through a half-hour clip when I can scan a document in 10 minutes and get the highlights. Ed and the gang are entertaining to watch, but video is still a drawback in my book. Each video page includes a transcript, but it is not a suitable replacement for the videos. Another drawback is that it is hard to create reference material from videos. If you want to revisit the material, you have to re-watch the video. Bummer. If these guys were to write a book, I’d be all over it even at $200. Unfortunately, the videos are the best we can do for now.
Naomi Dunford decided to re-release her popular SEO School ebook this week, and if you’re new to SEO, or are confused by all of the more technical SEO books on the market, then this is your lucky day. Naomi distills a confusing topic into an easy-to-read 53-pages that will get you off to a solid start if you are looking to learn SEO. A must-read, in my opinion.
Pros:
Naomi’s writing style is entertaining to say the least (she curses like a drunken sailor even in her writing), but she knows her stuff. I know, because I’ve paid her over 4-figures just to call her and bounce ideas off of her. I bought the book when I was about 4 months into learning SEO, and I still didn’t have a good grasp of the big picture. This book set me squarely on the path to learning SEO.
I like to think of Naomi’s book as the “course syllabus” for the rest of your SEO education - which is why I’ve chosen to review this book first. You will not learn everything here, but you will learn the basics in a structured way, so that you can be intelligent about going out to find more granular information on a particular topic.
Without this book, my approach SEO would be a lot less organized and structured than it is today. In particular, 3 chapters are must-reads:
What to Rank For: Naomi does a great job explaining the process of finding a profitable niche. More importantly, the book tells you which keywords you absolutely do NOT want to go after for a particular niche. The competition section is great as well, and goes into detail about how to evaluate your chances of ranking for a your keyword phrase.
Include pages 15-24 in the Keyword Research tab of your binder. (huh?)
On-Page Optimization: this chapter walks you through the process of optimizing your site for a particular keyword step-by-step. I have since found more detailed explanations of each step, but this is what got me started, and it is still an excellent resource to have.
Include pages 25-33 in the On-Page SEO tab of your binder. (huh?)
Off-Page SEO: I like this chapter because it is the best overview of off-page SEO that I’ve found. You will not learn everything you need to know here, but this will provide a solid foundation from which to build.
Include pages 35-40 in the Off-Page SEO tab of your binder. (huh?)
Cons:
If you already know a lot about picking the right optimization keywords, and on- and off-page SEO, this is not an essential book for you. You’ll learn some new things for sure, but nothing is earth-shattering here. Having said that, I still read the keywords section from time-to-time because it is the best book on the topic that I’ve seen.
