90 Day Internet Marketing Challenge: Week 1 by Oscar Del Ben

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Note from Joseph Archibald: Oscar approached me almost a week or so ago regards pursuing an internet marketing challenge, and although he first considered posting results on his own blog, he decided not to proceed with this. It was clear from a few of his current blog regulars that it was not entirely in-keeping with previous posts. Hence his decision to offer progress and results elsewhere.

Thus when he approached me about posting on the SEO Tips Blog, of course I jumped at this chance without any hesitation. I’m no fool after all and I can see a “fire-starter” a mile off!

Without further ado, I’ll pass this over to Oliver and let him tell us all about his Challenge…

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I’ve been thinking about starting an internet marketing challenge for a while now, but I never really got into it. This changed when I saw Joseph Archibald’s 40 Day Challenge on the Warrior Forum though, and that’s when I decided it was time to take action.

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A bit of background about me. My name is Oscar Del Ben and I’m from Italy.

I spend my days mostly programming and blogging, or creating websites that help people in some way. I was introduced to internet marketing by my friend Glen Allsopp (from ViperChill) and I think I know how the process should work.

{Note from Joseph: I read one of Glen’s articles about 2 weeks ago (before I knew Oscar, hence before I knew Glen and Oscar were friends) re on-page SEO techniques. If you want to understand more about on-page SEO and how to go about it, I suggest you check Glen’s site – he’s hot on the subject!}.

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The problem is, one thing is knowing the theory, another is to put it into practice, that’s why I finally decided to start an internet marketing challenge on my personal development blog.

My goal is to build up to six websites in 90 days and rank them in the top five for their main keyword phrases. I also want to make some money from them, that’s what we all wish at the end, right?

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Anyway, while I am providing some update s on my blog, I decided to post a more detailed update each week here on the SEO tips and tricks blog, where I can share real numbers and discuss my results with other marketers. Joseph was kind enough to allow me to write these posts for his fantastic blog, which is a honor for me. Let’s get started.

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Internet Marketing Challenge Week #1

My intention is to post weekly updates, but since I started this experiment 8 days ago, I’m going to include one extra day this week.

This week I worked on ranking a website which I created a few weeks ago, howtogetbettergrades.net, as well as trying to rank my Market Samurai page. The second one isn’t really a website per se but I don’t think that’s a big deal, as everyone know that it’s better to rank on an existing domain, right?

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Anyway, this is what I did this week:

Saturday – day 3. Saturday I spent one hour creating two 100 word snippets with their spun version. It was the first time I was using The Best Spinner, so I needed some extra time to get comfortable with it.

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Sunday – day 4. Sunday I created 500 snippet articles by using my two spun articles I wrote the previous day. This process took me just 10 minutes using The Best Spinner, which is fantastic. I honestly never thought that using an article spinner could be so productive.

After that I spent another 10 minutes submitting 10 snippets to Blog Blueprint (3 snippets pointing to the homepage with correct anchor text, 3 pointing to the homepage with random anchor text, 2 pointing to other pages with correct anchor text, and 2 pointing to other pages with random anchor text).

I was feeling productive that day, so I spent another 50 minutes creating a spun version of a 650 word article that I later submitted to the main directories (ArticleDashboard, Amazines, etc). {note from Joseph: were these all do-follow directories, Oscar?}

I also worked on ranking my Market Samurai web page. In 25 minutes I generated 250 snippets of text (however they were not really unique enough, so the software skipped some of them), and submitted 6 snippets to Blog Blueprint (4 with the keyword “Market Samurai” and 2 with the keyword “market samurai review”). I also submitted an article to UniqueArticleWizard pointing to my market samurai page. I think my domain is strong enough to support it with 50 submissions per day.

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Monday – day 5. Today I spent 1 hour and 20 minutes submitting to social networks. I don’t think this was very productive and indeed I could have used Bookmarking Demon to automate it (might try next week). Anyway I submitted all my pages where I’m trying to rank for both websites to mister-wong, furl.net, connotea.org, mylinkvault, bibsonomy.

After that I spent 15 minutes submitting snippets to Blog Blueprint. 10 for my first website and 5 to my review page. As usual I varied my anchor text.

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Tuesday – day 6. Today I did nothing, ouch

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Wednesday – day 7. Today I worked on ranking howtogetbettergrades.net. My Articleblast account was approved so I submitted an article which was immediately published. My Amazines and Ezinearticles were also approved so I submitted each of them to the pinger – pingomatic, as well as promoting them with Unique Article Wizard (using the articles I previously created). I also published 10 snippets to Blog Blueprint. All of this took me 50 minutes. Not bad, I would say!

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Thursday 8. Again, I did nothing.

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Friday 9. Today I submitted 10 snippets of text pointing to my howtogetbettergrades.net website, as usual by varying my anchor text and pages.

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Overall Ranking

I know that talking about ranking already is naive, but let’s see how I was doing.

Regarding my grades website, it seems like I entered the Google sandbox. Also traffic from search engines was virtually zero. Quite annoying but I can’t expect anything from one week of work, I guess.

With my Market Samurai page though, that’s another story. On July 2 my website was ranking on the 4th page according to Market Samurai, but today it’s showing in the 13th position! That’s quite something if you ask me. I received a total number of 37 visitors from Google for Market Samurai – related keywords, with average time spent on the page of more than 10 minutes.

I also made some sales, but I can’t say for sure yet if they were the result of Google traffic (but I think yes). Again, it seems like quality work pays off better!

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I’m very happy with the results so far, but I know I have to do more. I have no problem working for 6 hours on a website if it provides real value to visitors, so I’m going to concentrate more on that.

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Please feel at ease to leave any comments and share what’s on your mind, thank you!

Tagged as: Joseph Archibald and Oscar del Ben, Market Samurai Challenge, Oscar del Ben, Oscar del Ben 90 day challenge