This is day 11 of my 30 day marketing challenge where I’m demonstrating how blogging can be a profitable business to start.

My three tasks for the day were:

1. I wrote an article for Darren’s ProBlogger.net website about the various RSS-to-Email services that are available today. I used this same technique to get a contributing author position at Lifehack.org and it has been a huge traffic generator. So I emailed Darren with a quick note (he gets tons of email) asking him if I could contribute this article to his blog (notice I focused on what was in it for him). Now that its written I’m going to give it a once over later today, and send it to him. Hopefully it will appear in a few days (it’s over 6 pages single space in MS word, so he may break it up into multiple posts). And of course it includes my by line at the bottom which is how I get traffic to this website.

2. I funded my StumbleUpon advertisers account so that I can try driving some traffic from them. I started with $50, and at $.05 per click that will be 1000 visitors. I will track how many of them turn into subscribers and report back.

3. I made an effort today to extend the length of domain registration. Apparently Google gives preference to domains which have been registered for a long time. However, my web host provider was less than helpful in accomplishing this. I wasn’t sure what their tech support address was, so I sent a request and included a couple CC’s. It just so happens I got back 3 replies from 3 different people to the same question. Two of them clearly didn’t understand what I was asking at all, and the third understood but couldn’t make the request.

Here was my request:

> Hi,
>
> I’ve heard that Google gives preference to websites that have
> registered their domains for longer periods of time.
>
> I’d like to register mine for longer if possible. How can I do this?
>
> Thank you!
> Brian Armstrong

And here were the three replies:

Thank you for contacting us.

Try to visit Google AdWords. It’s an outside system under Google that
allows you to stay on their SEO for a longer time./

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

–
Sincerely,
Rowena Obeso
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

This isn’t true, it’s not what I was asking, and “stay on their SEO” makes no sense.

Second response:

Thank you for contacting us.

If you want to register your domain into google search engine, all you
need to do
is submit your domain through 1and1 application which is simple
submission. On
how to do a simple submission you can refer on the link below:

http://faq.1and1.com/applications/simple_submission__simple_seo/2.html

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

–
Sincerely,
Ariel Contreras
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

Not what I was asking at all, and I’m already in Google. Third response…

Thank you for contacting us.

We only have 1 year domain registration. We automatically renew it every
year. We don’t have that kind of offer.

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

–
Sincerely,
Elmer Salupan
Technical Support
1&1 Internet

Not helpful but at least Elmer understood the question!

I’ve been relatively happy with 1and1 hosting in the past, but recent events (slow server, failure to support the latest PHP and MySQL, and this event) have made me not want to recommend them to anyone.

Anyway, since that didn’t go very well, and I wanted to complete my third task for the day. I typed “marketing” into technorati and found an interesting blog where the guy is making some amazing amounts of money off of Adsense. You can see a picture of him holding a check from Google for over $100 grand. I sent him a link to this article series in hopes of a backlink.

I can’t wait for the next Google update (they seem to do it about once per month). I’m going to have a ton more links and I’m hoping to get a bump in page rank and search listings.