Two weeks ago, I started on what I would consider my first real Internet marketing project.  I figured that by the end of the holidays, I’d have it up and running. Naturally, I was way to optimistic. Here it is, the last weekend before having to go back to J.O.B. and I’m still plugging away at it.

It’s not the process that’s at fault, and I can’t claim that this project is really any more difficult than any of the little one’s I’ve done, but I’ve suffered a terrible case of analysis paralysis at just about every turn.  I assume that as I force myself to complete and maintain this project that it will all become easier. 

Or, at least I hope so. 

Through the Thirty Day Challenge, I was able to download a 40 day trial of Market Samurai. Market Samurai is a tool for researching possible markets and niches. This can all be done without the tool, but it would take much, much longer.

Since mSamurai runs in the Adobe Air environment, it’s supposed to be OS agnostic and should run on Linux. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly the case. Adobe doesn’t officially support Linux with Air. They have a beta version that works well enough to get twhirl running.  Unfortunately, Air 1.0beta is apparently insufficient for mSamurai.

I installed mSamurai and launched it and it initially appeared to work … at least the window came up.  But when I clicked on anything in the window, including the “X” to close the application, it would simply toggle the window-frame on and off:

This is obviously a bug, but whether it’s in Air 1.0beta or Market Samurai is the question.  I went ahead and opened a support ticket at noblesamurai.com, but they claim the problem is with the beta Air.  Considering that I have other Air based products running, I have my doubts.

My work-around was to make use of the XP virtual machine I already have installed.  This is a minimal installation with a 5gb “hard drive” and with only 256mb of “ram” allocated to it.  Previously, this only reason I’ve used this VM was for iTunes (thus far, Apple refuses to support Linux and, in fact, seems to go out of their way to make non-apple/non-windows machines not work with their products — something I didn’t know when I purchased my ipod.  Note to Apple: This ipod is the last apple product I purchase until these practices stop.)

I re-installed mSamurai on the XP VM and, although it appears to be just a tad slow, it seems to work just fine:

Yesterday was “Day 01″ of the Thirty Day Challenge. I’ve watched the videos, but so far, they’re the usual fair: how not to put the cart (product) before the horse (market research), and go out and find a number of niche markets.

I knew this was coming, but drug my feet anyway. Family and the evil J.O.B. took priority during the preseason. But now the ‘challenge is upon me, so I’ve got to put my nose to the grindstone — hopefully, long enough to be mildly successful, at least enough that I’ll stick with it after the #30dc is over.

Anyway, I’ve finally put 10 niche market ideas on paper, so I think I’m finally ready to move on to Day 2 training — which has been sitting on disk, unwatched, since downloading it this morning.

So here I am, downloading the HD #30DC Day 2 videos (last one is at 95%) while going through my Google reading list, surfing various #30DC forums, and jamming to random tunes on my mp3 player.

Suddenly, I hear Ed’s voice say “Welcome to Day 2, Thirty Day Challenge, 2007 …”

How much of a coincidence is that?!?

I had forgotten that last year’s #30DC podcasts were on the player.

It must be a sign!!

Earlier this year, I completely switched over from Windows to using Ubuntu Linux. So the Thirty Day Challenge will provide me with a few extra challenges, in addition to the internet marketing.

For example, the base-line browser that Ed Dale has selected for this years #30DC is Flock, version 1.2.1. I believe he selected Flock over Firefox because Flock is designed as a Social browser — it integrates well with most, if not all, of the major social networks without having to add additional plugins or extentions (addons). That’s not to say that it doesn’t need any extentions, just fewer, and access to various social networks is only one click away. I completely understand why he chose it.

However, Flock is very, very, v e r y slow on Ubuntu. I found that the longer I used it, the slower it got. Even after applying the performance enhancements recommended by mountainguy, I found that using it was still … painful.

So I switched back to using Firefox 3.

The next hurdle, so far, was getting twitter to work. I could use it from the website, and via the Firefox twitterbar extention, or via gTwitter, a very simple Linux Twitter client. But after seeing Ed demonstrate Twhirl … well the other options weren’t enough.

Unfortunately, Twhirl requires Adobe AIR, which doesn’t have an official download for Linux. Or so I thought. A quick search via Google produced an entry at Seth Yates’ blog that explains where to get the Alpha version of Adobe AIR for Linux, allowing Twhirl to be installed. So, although Twhirl doesn’t integrate (yet) with the Ubuntu desktop, it seems to be fully functional — I’m now participating in twittinuum with the rest of the #30DC crowd.

Lastly, the #30DC is recommending Google Reader as the RSS feed reader of choice. Naturally, being browser based, it works flawlessly with FF3 on Ubuntu. Further, after toying with it for about 10 minutes, I decided that it is a far superior reader than what I was previously using. Not only have I moved all my news feeds to Google Reader, but I’ve reduced my email inbox clutter as well by utilizing the RSS feed option for each of my Google Alerts. Now, the hour or more that was spent browsing through my news feeds and alerts emails has been reduced to about 20 minutes! A big round of applause for Mr. Ed Dale!

The auction has ended, and the results, while not fantastic, are interesting.  We sold the gaming system for about $100 more than we had originally paid for it.  Although good, this was about what I had figured it would have sold for regardless how it was written up — I have been watching the closing prices of these items on many, many auctions and this seems to be the current going rate.

The interesting part was the number of page views our auction received.  As I mentioned previously, auctions for these game consoles were getting between 80-200 page views from start to finish.  On day one, we received over 600 views and, without taking any further actions, received a total of 1122 views by the time the auction closed!

Of course, we don’t really know how may views were the result of TDC methods and how many were the result of the story.  It might have been helpful to have put some form of analytics in place to further analyze the hits — I didn’t think about that until after all the action started.

In the end, we made some money and got phenomenal results, at least if you’re counting eye-balls that saw the auction.

Christmas has come and gone, and now that the dust has settled we find ourselves with an extra gaming console of a rather popular variety.  Rather than take it back to the store for a refund, I thought I’d use this opportunity to play with “story” marketing on eBay.  There’s no risk involved here, I’m quite sure I’ll get our money back out of it … but I’m curious how well it will do and how much more it might earn.

Story marketing on ebay is just what it sounds like.  You don’t really do any marketing, you just tell a good story.  In this case, I’m simply telling why we’re putting it up for sale and providing a little bit of back-story on how we acquired it.  It’s all been punched up a little to make it more interesting, but is basically the truth.  In the story, I explained that we just wanted to get our money back and set the initial price at what we paid for it — without the Buy-it-Now option.

I then used TDC methods to spread the word about the auction to a variety of social sites.

So far, the results have been interesting.  In the last 24 hours, the auction has received well over 600 page views, and we still have 6 days left.  Checking other auctions for this popular console — those about to end — they only have between 80-200 page views.  So it’s obvious that the word has gotten out.

Of course, the real proof is in the pudding.  The auction has only received 1 bid, and is being watched by 5 people.  So, we’ve at least gotten our money back.  But it is still very early in the auction process and, judging by their history, our single bidder is rather inexperienced with eBay.  I expect all the action to occur in the last 24 hours of the auction.

So we’ll continue to watch and I’ll present the final results when it’s over.

It looks like I made a sale in late October, while I was out of commission.  Very cool.  Although it was far too late to be considered a success from the TDC, I still count it as a personal success.  It lets me know this whole project is not a complete waste of time.

Due to a variety of personal issues, I’ve been forced to take a general hiatus from e-marketing, blogging, family, and life in general.  Although I’m still experiencing rough patches, I’m on the mend and am getting back to life and those things I’ve been otherwise missing.

I’m still working on the content for my second niche market, but I’m finding some of the statistics I’m getting on the first one rather curious.  First, although I’ve spent far too much time attempting to get Google Analytics to work on this hosting service, it’s definitely a no-go for it.  Fortunately they at least have the slimstat wp plugin, so I have something to look at regarding hits and visits. 

However, I’m having trouble actually believing the results slimstat is showing me.  Last night, with the site having slipped to #47 in the listings — It appears a couple of other TDC members have chosen the same niche and have ranked above me (congratulations, guys!) — according to slimstat, my site was still pulling in about 800 visitors a day!  Only one visit via Google, from some rather obscure search phrase, and the rest from the social sites.  Pretty darned interesting.  Of course, my click-through rates are very low and there have been no sales yet.  But considering none of the visitors were actually searching for the niche, but just dropped in via a social network, this is understandable.  Once the ranking is in the top 10, I may start getting search traffic that will be more interested in the sale product.  Time will tell.

One of the things that should help in the rankings is if I add another posting to the site that was never on the first, tumbled, site.  With some original content, it should be more likely to raise in the listings than with “duplicate” content.  Once that’s been written and posted, I’ll get back to setting up the test site for the other niche.

UPDATE: I just checked the rankings and it appears the site is now at #25.  Page two is much better than page four.  Hopefully, once the new article is published, it will move to page one.