In their own words:
In a nutshell… The Thirty Day Challenge is about making your first $10 online. For a full 30 days we are going to be showing you exactly how to start your own Internet business and generate your first income online without spending a dime.
In mine:
The good part: if you’re looking for new gray hat techniques to rank and make some money then their videos do provide good nuggets of information, that I personally didn’t see anywhere else. The market research part especially is pretty good. It will teach you how to research keywords and find a niche for affiliate marketing. If you’re a beginner then these videos will teach you how to do it in an easy way.
The bad part: if you’re not a beginner and you already have some experience with setting up blogs and other similar stuff, it will drive you mad trying to follow all the metaphors and the nonsense that the presenter spits out. It’s really beginner stuff, but the bad part is that you have to follow it because it does have some nuggets of wisdom here and there, that you don’t want to miss. So, yesterday I’ve spent an excruciating period of time watching all the videos released so far and listening to podcasts. The worse part is that I can’t stand the voice together with the way he talks.
The spam part: the whole thing has a nasty “I’m going to sell you an e-book at the end” feel to it. The thing that really put me over the edge was the fact that they claim in the videos that they will be using “white hat” techniques only. Having seen all the videos, that makes me think that either they don’t have a clue or that they’re lying through their noses.
No mater what their explanations might be, there is no way in hell that submitting one page Tumblr blogs with affiliate links on them to 20+ social media sites can be considered white hat. Screenshot on the right shows you how one of those sites looks after the 30DC Brigade marched through. If you look closely, you’ll probably notice a number of Tumblr blogs submitted.
And those are not all of them. There are probably thousands of these nitwits by now, happily spamming social media sites, getting banned from Digg, Reddit or Netscape and still thinking that they’re making money online using white hat techniques.
And to top it off, the snake oil salesman presenting the videos talks about how he feels good that he helps people find what they want (while linking in his spam blogs to 10 page classic sales letters) and that white hat is the way to go to feel good about yourself and make money in the long run (don’t remember the exact words and you couldn’t pay me to watch those videos again to find out).
Conclusion: watch the videos, don’t believe a word he’s saying about all that stuff being ethical. It’s not. The reason I recommend the videos is because if you want to make money online and be good at SEO, you need to know everything, white and black. And it does show you a nice way to rank fast for uncompetitive keywords. Take the lessons, use different methods.
I’m all for gaming Google, that’s what SEO is all about. I’m just not the kind that would spam sites that other people use, to rank for a keyword that brings 100 visitors per day.
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Dewald responded on 22 Aug 2007 at 12:08 am #
It’s an interesting take that you have on the Thirty Day Challenge. We agree in principal about the ethics of some of the methods. You just use much stronger language to express your opinion.
Alexandru responded on 22 Aug 2007 at 12:24 am #
Hi Dewald. I use a stronger language because I think they’re giving the wrong image to people that have no idea how you can make money online. Labeling their methods as white hat really makes me wonder on their end goal.