Some might have thought about it, but to my knowledge, Ed Dale is the first person to do it. And what he’s doing may change the face of niche marketing for good…

Ed Dale is well-known in Internet marketing circles for starting the Underachiever’s program with Frank Kern a few years ago and then, more recently, Dominiche and the 30 Day Challenge.

The Underachiever’s program essentially taught people very simple niche marketing: find a promising niche, ask people want they want to know, create a product to deliver on those wants, buy traffic… rinse and repeat a few hundred times.

There were – and are – flaws with that model. Ironically, what Ed Dale is doing now is one of the things that fully exploits those flaws. More on that in a moment.

Dominiche was Ed’s program to train people on how to buy and sell websites for a profit. The 30 Day Challenge is a free, 30 day multimedia program that teaches people to how to start making money in their own Internet business. Although I haven’t personally gone through the program myself, I’ve heard nothing but good things about it.

Based, it seems, on Ed Dale’s success buying and selling websites (i.e. web businesses), Ed is now taking an unprecedented step within the Internet marketing community: he’s taking his company, Thirty Day Challenge, Inc., public.

By means of an initial public offering (IPO) on the NASDAQ stock exchange, Ed will seek to raise capital in order to buy and sell Internet businesses on a MUCH larger scale.

So what’s the big deal?

Well, for one thing, those Underachiever websites that Ed Dale and Frank Kern used to teach people to create will have a tough time competing against a cashed-up Thirty Day Challenge, Inc.

They were already vulnerable, largely because of what Rich Schefren discussed in his Internet Business Manifesto but if Ed Dale’s idea catches on, any niches with a certain level of scale may be in trouble.

Then again, part of the plan is for Thirty Day Challenge, Inc. to buy them! The good ones anyway…

Put it this way… Imagine you decide to go into the stock trading niche and put up a site selling an ebook on stock trading.

After you’ve implemented your pay-per-click advertising campaign and search engine optimization strategy, etc to bring in traffic and are converting a certain percentage of visitors into customers, you move on to creating other niche websites.

In fact, you end up with hundreds of websites all earning a few thousand dollars a week.

The problem with this model is that each website, on its own, is highly vulnerable to a competitor with capital, expertise and better products or services.

Your puny ghost-written, 30 page ebook is just no-match for the multimedia program created by acclaimed stock trading guru, Ima Stockstar, who has written 10 books, speaks at seminars, and has her own television show.

Now, disclaimer here: you will only get stomped on by competitors if there’s a certain level of money to be made in your niche. The opportunity cost is otherwise just too high for them to bother deploying resources against you.

Okay, so the bigger niche players were always going to put the underachievers out of business. Where does Ed Dale’s new public company, Thirty Day Challenge, Inc., fit into the equation?

Well, it starts buying up all the major niche players and adding value (e.g. Internet marketing expertise) so they become even more successful and powerful.

With a public company Ed Dale will be able to pay not just cash (or cash at all) for each acquisition, but stock. This stock will, in turn, give the businesses that Thirty Day Challenge, Inc. acquires a strong incentive to keep on enhancing their businesses.

That is, as I understand it, the theory anyway…

Ed Dale says he wants Thirty Day Challenge, Inc. to become the ‘Berkshire Hathaway’ of his space. (Berkshire Hathaway is the company used by the world’s second richest individual, Warren Buffett, to acquire and monetize companies.)

Hence, Ed Dale’s plan to take over niche marketing. And, based on a pretty good track record – buying, enhancing and monetizing (including selling) Internet businesses – as well as Ed’s ‘research lab’ in the form of the Thirty Day Challenge program – he may just pull it off.

Personally, I wonder whether raising venture capital and staying private for a few years would have been a better approach. But Ed Dale seems convinced that buying companies in return for equity in Thirty Day Challenge, Inc. will better facilitate his goal of becoming Berkshire Hathaway-like.

In any case, Ed’s move is bold and audacious and it certainly makes him one of the more interesting people in the Internet marketing niche right now…

Source: Ed Dale, “Thirty Day Challenge Inc – What’s happening with our going public plans,” Tubby Nerd.com, March 20, 2009

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 6:22 am and is filed under Ecommerce, Feature, Internet Marketing Niche, Website Flipping. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.