Jason Murphy

The 20 Day Challenge

Aug 10, 2007 Business & Marketing

A few weeks ago John Hawkins approached me and asked if I wanted to join a challenge with him. That challenge seemed simple enough. It was called “The 30 Day Challenge” and it was geared towards marketers. The object was to earn $10 from online marketing, with zero start-up costs. Since I’m always up for learning in this arena, I bit and joined the challenge.

We then pulled in 4 other friends, and may have a few more join us as well.

The challenge was supposed to start on August 1st. I say supposed to because, well, there really hasn’t been any challenge yet. Ok, I know that you can’t just dive into something without a little education first. But this is what gets me. During the last half of July, Ed Dale and Dan Raines provided us with what they called “Pre-season” content. These were posts and videos that would prime us for Day 1 of the 30 Day Challenge. It’s understood that some users may have very little experience with Firefox, StumbleUpon, Facebook or Digg. And to be honest I did learn a couple of tricks for a few of the platforms they suggested. They gave us the tools, showed us some examples of how they’d work for us and on the last day of July they hyped up big time and told us to get ready for challenge to start tomorrow!

People were so excited for this challenge. They blogged about it, told their friends about it, built websites about it, and even wrote songs about the challenge! Wow, that’s a pretty dedicated fan base.

So it was the morning of Day 1 and the challengers were treating it like Christmas morning. They woke up, realized it was a special day and logged onto the website waiting for their goodies. They had just received two weeks of instruction and were ready to go! This was the day they started “doing” the challenge.

And Ed, or the Wizard of Ed as I call him, told everyone to wait. To sit back and relax. To not do anything today but to watch videos.

Huh?

Didn’t we just spend two weeks of sitting back and watching videos?

But I gave it a chance. The information in the videos was very basic but still useful information. Anyone new to internet marketing probably found it very insightful, but I know there were some of us that were thinking “Is this it?”.

It was like lining up all horses at the Kentucky Derby, the blinders on, and the horses chomping at the bits. The official calls out “Ready…”, the crowd quiets down, the horses press up against the gates. “Set…”, the jockeys raise their buggy whips back, the crowd watches intensely. Then the announcer says “Oh wait, I need to tell you a little more about horse racing…”

I’m a little disappointed because we’ve now spent 10 days pretty much doing nothing active. We’ve researched niches and keywords, but really this could have been a one day task.

The big problem is that in the pre-season there was a lot of huffing an puffing about a guy they tested this approach on who was able to meet his goal of $10 within 3 days. And here we sit at Day 10 and not a cent, nor an attempt to make a cent, has happened.

I’m also a little disgruntled because I used to do business coaching, specifically Internet Business Coaching, for a living. This 10 days of content has been stretched out and watered down. We should only be on day 3 or 4 at this point, especially since there was such a huge “pre-season” build-up.

But alas, I’ll keep pressing on. I’m not dropping out of the challenge yet. Each coach has his own style, and while this isn’t how I would have done things, I won’t deny that Ed and his crew have become successful using their strategies.

We’ll just see if what happens Monday.

UPDATE: After posting this rant I was wondering if anyone else was choking on the TDC like I was. I love the idea, but I’m struggling with the execution. It appears that I’m not the only one who thinks so.

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• Today is Day 2 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.
• This post is also part of the 30 Day Challenge Series.