• Autumn is the warmest part of the year in SF.
• Balance is the most important thing in life.
• Everything is connected - what you do in one part of your life can have drastic effects on the others.
• Yes, it is possible to style anime-hair.
• Multitasking is a necessary evil, you need to set a time limit for it.
• The world does not explode if I don’t check my email for 2 days.
• Short term results and long term results are very different and often completely opposite.
• Journals and blogs are amongst mankind’s greatest inventions.
• People in SF can’t drive. Or park.
• What you do in the first 3 hours of your day determines how the rest of your day will go.
• It takes 30 days to form a habit… or kick one.
• There is no such thing as time management, as time is constant and always moving. There is only self management.
• Goals are back in fashion. My current chain is: perfect average day –> goals with timelines attached (Tim Ferriss’ dreamlines) –> one away motivation, one towards motivation –> inevitability thinking structures.

What I wrote down really surprised me. It didn’t include:

• Partying in Ibiza.
• Climbing K2.
• Salsa dancing in Havana.
• Or any other of the things I have on my list of things to do.

Instead, it turned out to be a surprisingly chilled and laid-back day.

Which brings me to the title of this post: what we actually want.

The exercise triggered a bunch of random thought chains in my mind. All those things that I “want” to do, I actually don’t want to do - or at least not every day. In fact, most of the things that I thought I wanted to do were derived from hearing other people talk about them, or reading about them somewhere, or seeing them on random commercials on the less-than-4 hours of TV that I watch a month.

Most people delude themselves into thinking that they want things, when what they really want is experience. Kern gave the example of guys wanting Ferraris not because they want the cars themselves… but because they want to feel like James Bond. Or Justin Hemmes.

I’m going to take this one step further. You don’t even have to have the car to feel like James Bond - you can step outside your front door and feel that now. After all… emotional states and frames of mind are things we can change and alter within ourselves once we know how.

And what of the meaning of life? Well, after my suggestion that motivation is useless, some people pointed out the basic human urges of wanting to survive and reproduce. I was, of course, talking about the common complaint of many-a-office-worker of not being motivated enough to complete a task or project. But experience addresses the other side of the discussion, the question of “why am I doing this?”

Which is why I would add experience in as the third basic human urge. Wanting to experience is what causes people to dream, to fantasise, to want to go out and DO things in the world. It explains why everyone who has realised that happiness comes purely from within doesn’t automatically box themselves up in a monastery and enjoy existence until the end of their days (though that could be quite an experience in and of itself).

Is “experience” simply a fanciful smokescreen that hides motivation? Maybe. I still truly believe that needing to find the motivation to do things is a pointless exercise, and a waste of perfectly-good brain activity. If we simply know what we want to experience, and then go ahead and do things to get there… wouldn’t life be THAT much simpler?

A quick recap of what’s happened so far:

• Found a niche through exhaustive market and keyword analysis.
• Built a blog around it that provides quality content.
• Built backlinks by developing sites on web 2.0 properties.
• Written articles and submitted them to directories to build further backlinks.
• Socially bookmarked everything.

And here are my stats for this project:

• Blog indexed, but not ranked (no PR yet).
• For my main keyword, I am 85 on broad and 51 on phrase.
• For my secondary keywords, I am respectively broad/phrase: 111/71, -/-, 7/2, 162/90, 78/50, 68/67, 184/-.
• According to wordpress stats, my blog gets on average 45 visitors a day.
• I have sent 250 clicks to the affiliate program I am promoting, and received 0 sales.

Other observations:

• I have begun streamlining my blog. Adding in a twitter account, facebook page and so on and so forth. I have also added some fancy-pants keyword-level tracking.
• I’m going to wait for another 250 clicks and if there is no sale made then I’m switching out the affiliate program.
• I will continue to post articles to both the blog and offsite properties.
• Market Samurai is working again - sort of. Their proxy system seems to be suffering under the increased load and having to use my own IP to query google results in fast banning. Hmmm…

The basic wrap-up so far has been:

• Get your tools ready.
• Load up Market Samurai.
• Find 2-3 niches and run them through keyword analysis (<50k competing pages, >80 searches per day).
• Analyse your competition.

So after doing all this… I’ve settled on my niche for this year. Note that the definition of “niche” here is simply the keyword you want to optimise for. I have 3-4 that fall into this range, and plan to to be hitting all of them.

As an aside, I think it’s also useful to discuss scope and workload in terms of the challenge. I know most people will probably be more concerned with “is my niche any good?”, but for me… I took a look at my current workload of having 4 projects running already… so instead of starting yet another one (which would mean less sleep, less productivity and decreased results), I converted the one in its infant stages over to the 30DC framework.

That being said… my main hold up right now is technical, namely that Market Samurai seems to be stuck in bug-land for some reason, so I can’t finish my keyword or competition research. I’m sure things will pick up again once they guys over at Noble Samurai have worked out all the kinks…

Warning: If you are prude, under the age of 18, don’t want to read about sex and relationships or easily offended, don’t read on any further. You’ve been warned.

——————————-

I’ve decided that motivation, and needing motivation to do anything… is all a load of bullocks.

To understand why I’ve come to this conclusion, you need to know how it came about.

A little while back, I heard on a marketing interview somewhere (can’t remember if it was Eben Pagan, John Reese or Frank Kern… maybe it was all three of them) about the three BIGGEST markets in existence. Which are:

1. Sex and relationships.
2. Making money.
3. Health and beauty.

So far so good. Fast forward about 2 weeks and I’m on my weekly marketing mastermind call. We are discussing the big three (markets). Something very interesting was said: that there is really only one “big market” out there, and that is sex and relationships. And that number two and number three are really only means of getting more of number one.

This hit me like the metaphorical ton of bricks. My head was buzzing from the realisation for a good hour.

The realisation was this: for the majority of people in the world today, that statement holds true.

Namely, that men and women all over the world, earn money, and maintain their health and beauty in order to gain sex or a relationship (or two ).

My life experience has taught me otherwise: sex and relationships have nothing to do with money, looks, health (beyond a basic level necessary for survival) and beauty.

If your head is spinning at the moment, or you are fuming up inside… it’s because your construct of reality has just been messed with. I suggest you stop reading now and spare yourself the mental bedazzlement that is to come.

If we extend this idea FURTHER, we reach the title of this post: which is that motivation is BUNK. It does not exist. Everything that you THOUGHT motivated you to do all the things in your life… is really just all in your head, and founded on a set of false assumptions.

Why? Think about it. Let’s start with men. Men work. They work HARD. They try to earn lots of money. They try to achieve positions of status and power. They work out for hours at the gym. They learn nifty skills like breakdancing and motorbike riding. Or maybe French cooking and oenology if they live in San Francisco. But no-one ever really stops to ask them WHY. Why, why, why!?!

Even though 99.99% of them will never admit it, it is for one thing and one thing only: women. AKA big market number one - sex and relationships. It is not because they “want to” do all those things, but it is because they feel that it will increase their chances of landing that one special girl (or girls).

Women have a slightly different set of drives. They spend hours at the dressing table getting ready to go out - why? To dazzle 1) the guys, 2) the other girls. It’s all about social standing and status. And where does social status or standing land you? In the relationship that you want. Think about the story of Cinderella: she has to undergo a metamorphosis from the poor and humdrum peasant girl into the fairytale “princess to be” in order to win the heart of the prince.

So most people’s entire set of motivations is founded on a false belief, which is that you need either #2) money, or #3) looks (health and beauty) to get #1) sex and relationships. This is why all the motivations that you thought you had… are not really motivations at all. Not in the true sense of doing things for yourself and your own life.

I’ve written in the past about using a massive list of motivational reasons to propel you to get things done. I no longer agree with this. I went through my own list, and crossed out all the motivational reasons where I was doing anything in order to get something from the world around me. Or where I was doing something to live up to some standard that society had dictated. Or where I was doing anything that simply wasn’t *just*for*me*.

At the end, I was left with a page of crossed out lines and no motivational reasons. This is why motivation does not exist.

Anything that you do, be it making money, travelling, working out or even just having fun… is for you and for you only. You should never do it for anyone else. Because if you do… your motivations are externally driven and enforced, and you are left in that precarious position that most of the world’s population is in - performing a highwire act in front of a temperamental crowd armed with sticks and stones… and with no safety net below you.

So the next logical question is: what replaces motivation then? If I have no motivations in life, what now? How am I ever going to get things done now?

(Don’t even bother asking “So exactly what have I been doing for the last 20-30-40-50 years of my life?” - it’s just going to make your head hurt.)

The answer is actually buried in the above paragraphs: do things because YOU want to do them. That’s all the “motivation” you need.

I want to build a multi-million dollar business. Cool, I’ll just go ahead and do it.

I want to get into peak physical shape so I can travel the world. Cool, I’ll just go ahead and do it.

Taking action becomes a matter of just DOING without needing a reason for doing so.

A wonderful side-effect of this is that you also become immune to that modern-day office epidemic: procrastination. Because after all… procrastination is simply our minds saying “I don’t feel like doing this right now. I don’t feel motivated.”

Well, if you have NO motivations, then you can never “feel” like doing anything at anytime. You are simply left with one choice: I’m either going to do it, or not.

After dealing with crashes, freezes while checking data and so on and so forth… I found a solution to make this ABSOLUTELY KICK-ASS research tool workable for the time being.

It’s so simple as well: use it alongside Excel.

So if you watched the chunky tutorial video, you’ll see Brent (I think?) talking about using the negative keyword marker within Market Samurai. I wouldn’t. I did that, then when I started analysing keywords… it froze. Not fun after 30 minutes of keyword culling.

So here’s what I did. Put in your seed keyword(s), and generate via SEODigger, Synonym and Sites. Then click on the Export tab and use the “Export Keyword List With Data”. And save it as a CSV.

Now taking this CSV, cull through all your negative keywords and put them on a separate list. As an added bonus, you can also immediately sort by searches and remove those below your search threshold.

Now take your new and refined keyword list, and import it back into Market Samurai for analysis. Use the “Add Your Own Keywords” function. And then once you’ve done your analysis, export it back out into Excel.

As a super-double-bonus, this will also help you overcome the dreaded “banned by the Google Synonym Tool” error. Export your list out, close Market Samurai, clear your IE cache, and then import it back in. Voila, it works again.

- Aaron

A very craftily worded scam piece from a bunch of guys called the “Domain Renewal Group”. I wonder how many people they suckered into thinking that they were actually legit?

Notice how they never exactly state that they are asking you to CHANGE REGISTRAR. They just keep on mentioning that “your domain is about to expire” and “you must renew now to keep it”.

I think I’ll stick with my $9.99 a year with Goddady thanks.

I am starting a team - suitably named Team “I don’t want a real job”. You can sign up for the team here: http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/forums/team-talk/5875-team-i-dont-want-real-job.html

As I mentioned before, I’ll be blogging about the entire experience and what I’ll be doing day-to-day right here.

The only thing I hate more than unsolicited email is unsolicited snail mail.

I’ll be following along again this year, and using it to launch a new Internet business. And this year I plan to actually stick with it and go beyond making just that first $10 with the site

I’ll be detailing most of what I do (market research, traffic generation, conversion testing etc) here on this blog. I am yet undecided whether or not I’ll be writing specifically what niche I’ll be working with, as we’ll have to see what the niche is first.

I WILL be starting a team for the 30DC, so if you are doing it too… shoot me an email and we can talk

Links for the 30DC here:

http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/

and

http://www.thirtydaychallenge.tv/