| How David Hurley Won The PipsPowerGroup.com $500 "Summer" Giveaway Competition |
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| Written by Alan Thomas | ||||
| Thursday, 14 August 2008 11:57 | ||||
The Pips Power Group: Helping Internet Marketers To Succeed!Six Internet Marketing Experts Set Up A Summer Competition To Find The Best Improver Among Their Proteges!Back in February 2008 six Internet marketing experts teamed up to form a mentoring group for struggling Internet marketers.The result was the Plug-In Profit Site Power Group, or PPG. The only qualification for membership is that you subscribe to the Plug-In Profit Site (PIPS) available here and then sign up to the PPG, here. If you are starting out online and you want to find a reliable way to succeed within a modest budget, then the combination of PlPS and PPG is the best way to go. As someone who had who was determined to build a business working from home on the Internet, and an affiliate of PIPS, I was very interested to hear about the PPG, although... ...I must admit that I was also a bit sceptical at the outset..! Anyway, the prelaunch lifetime membership offer was so good that I jumped at it and was one of the first people through the doors when they opened! In the six months since I joined the PPG I have made constant progress because I have had both expert guidance in what to do and what NOT to do, and have been motivated to put in the work needed to succeed. I'll talk more about what the PPG offers in another article... In this article I want to talk about the "PPG 'Summer' $500 Giveaway Competition which the PPG mentors ran for six weeks from June 1st until July 15th. The aim of the contest was to see which PIPS/PPG member could make most progress with their business in that time. We had to provide our Alexa.com ranking at the start and finish of the competiton. Other factors that were measured included:
The other thing we had to do was to report our activity each day on the competition thread of the PPG forum. Forty PPG members entered the competition, so the thread quickly grew as people filed their reports each day. Halfway through the competition the "Current Top 10" names were announced and I was pleased to see my name on the list. None of us knew our exact position in the top 10 rankings. They were listed in this order: When the competition closed on 15th July we had to wait a few days while the mentors sorted through the mass of information and boiled it all down to produce the final results, which we received by email. I was quite sure that my campaign had gone off the boil and that Matt Belock (not in the first Top 10, you notice) had come up through the field to take first place. I expected to see Tanny in second place... But when the results arrived in my inbox and I opened the email I was amazed to see the following:
So how did I succeed in winning the PPG competition? One answer might be "by the skin of my teeth"! It was certainly a close competition as all the competitors mentioned above made a big effort and a lot of progress.
My Strategy...My strategy was fairly straightforward and based on focus, effort, and support. I prioritized the building of backlinks, posting of articles and blogs, and after that, improving my website. FOCUS: - I was determined to do something every day, even on the days when I was busy with other stuff. I therefore divided jobs between "high input" and "low input": HIGH INPUT: article writing and submitting; writing blog posts; improving website LOW INPUT: forum posts, blog comments, stumbling and social bookmarking, Squidoo comments, TrafficSwarm clicking. SUPPORT: I helped keep myself focused by reading books such as Seth Godin's Permission Marketing and by watching DVDs and listening to CDs that Success University send me every month, and by going over my long term aims. I had two days per week which I could dedicate more time to the competition, and on those days I did high input stuff, such as writing articles and blog posts. I used Submit Your Article to rewrite and distribute articles. Submit Your Article proved to be the jewel in the crown of my campaign. Once an article was published or a blog post posted I got into the habit of bookmarking it and pinging Blogger.com blog posts. During the days when I was busy teaching, editing articles for the local newspaper, consulting, and dealing with Japanese-Games-Shop.com orders, I would lower my sights and concentrate on the low input tasks unless I was feeling exceptionally energetic! With this new-found focus a couple of nice little bonuses came along It was interesting to see what the other competitors were doing as well. Some people were concentrating a lot on directory submissions. I wanted to answer that attack so I downloaded directorysubmitter.com, but never found the opportunity to use it! I also wanted to start using another article submission service because SubmitYourArticle limits you to just 8 articles per month, so I signed up to ArticleMarketer.com and posted a couple of articles... however, because I took out a free subscription everything took a lot longer to process and the articles were not distributed until after the competition had closed! With less than two weeks remaining, I began to shift the emphasis of my activities towards improving my website. By now, I was also getting tired, and I noticed that Matt Belock was really starting to produce some good results and that he and some other competitors were making impressive progress up the Alexa rankings. In response, I drew up a list of nine targets to keep me focused, and then drew a line graph to chart my progress and spur me on. The nine objectives were:
As you can see, I fell far short of the optimistic targets, BUT just because I had written down my aims and made a graph meant that some nights I would stay up an extra hour just to get one or other of the lines on my graph moving up towards some of the targets!! However, by the end I felt that Matt, Tanny and some of the others would be ahead. In fact, I was not even sure that I would still be in the top 10! So, when I saw the result, with my name in the no. 1 spot, I was both delighted and, just for a while, speechless! The competition has been a great experience for everybody who stayed involved. It gave us a good idea of what is needed to succeed on the Internet, and it also improved our ability to go out and do it. Without the PPG, I for one would not have made half as much progress in 2008 as I have. But I am also aware that there is still a lot of work to be done and progress to be made. Happily, though, because I am a lifetime member of the PPG I have six top-class mentors and a great bunch of dedicated fellow marketers to guide me through to success. Thank you, Ken Troyer for setting up the PPG, and Jeff Casmer, Mal Keenan, Cynthia Minaar, Suzanne Morrison, Jeff Schuman, for making up a great team of mentors at PipsPowerGroup.com David Hurley |
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 14 August 2008 13:01 ) | ||||
