What is the Secret Special Sauce?
Ed Dales Secret SauceAnyone who has been following Ed Dale and his Thirty Day Challenge will instantly recognise the phrase “Secret Sauce” or “Special Sauce”. It has been mentioned by Ed on a number of occassions and a great deal of atticipation surrounds it. It is supposedly a way to increase your position in Google for a particular phrase.

If you’ve followed all of Ed’s advice and got your blog indexed in Google in record time and you’ve used social bookmarking responsibly you should be getting Google traffic by now right? Well, maybe….

The Problem with the 30 Day Challenge…
The problem is that most of the traffic from Google searches goes to the first four sites returned from the Google search results…

Therefore, if your site isn’t listed in the top four then you’re going to see limited or no traffic. Obviously this is a big problem for anyone trying to make their first $10 and win the challenge.

Enter the Secret Sauce…
The Secret Sauce has been mentioned as a way to address this problem. Ed has built up the suspense as to exactly what the Secret Sauce is. On Friday it finally looked as though the Secret of the Secret Sauce would be revealed on “Monster Monday”.

Well Monster Monday is here and guess what?

There will be no Secret Sauce…
Ed has decided pull the Secret of the Sauce because of a small minority of spammers who have been following and abusing the challenge. This may be a good reason but ultimately it’s going to dissapoint a lot of legitimate followers of the challenge (myself included).

Ed Dale’s Secret Sauce - The Secret is there’s no secret, but shhhh it’s a secret

What may also start alarm bells ringing for some people is that anyone who subscribes to The Immediate Edge, which costs around $150 a month, will get access to the Secret Sauce. To some it may appear as though The Thirty Day Challenge was just about recruiting for The Immediate Edge.

Personally, I have to believe that the motives behind the Thirty Day Challenge have been good. Ed and his team have provided a lot of quality training which has been both informative and useful. Indeed I only started this blog because of Ed and the Thirty Day Challenge.

No doubt there will be an increase in the level of interest in Ed’s paid services as well as subscribers to the Immediate Edge. I don’t think that this is the primary reason for providing the 30 Day Challenge, although i’m sure nobody will be complaining about the increase.

The Challenge Continues…
The good news is that the 30 Day Challenge will continue past the 30 days. This is good news right? Well it will enable more people to do the challenge. For those of us who have almost completed the first 30 days, we’d much rather have the secret of the sauce!

“Tumblelogs are the refreshingly simple new way to share anything you find, love, hate, or create.”

At least that’s what the Tumblr website would have us believe.

So, why then has Tumblr chosen to delete tens of thousands of it’s customers blogs over the past 3 days? The answer, we’re told is to intercept ‘spammers’ taking advantage of their free service.

Most sites would welcome the creation of over 20,000 new user accounts practically overnight, but not Tumblr. It seems Tumblr isn’t interested in a massive influx of new users or huge interest in their services.

The problems began when members of The Thirty Day Challenge began to create accounts as part of the challenge. The Thirty Day Challenge is a free service run each year by Ed Dale and members of The Immediate Edge. The aim of the challenge this year was to make $10 online by using many of the free resources available on the web.

Ed Dale has been very clear on his stance on spamming throughout the challenge. There has been an emphasis on providing good quality content. Ed often tells participants to ask themselves if the user going to be happy or annoyed with the content provided?

Tumblr’s reaction has been a mass cull of new and old users alike. They pulled the trigger and deleted around 20,000 accounts. There has also been blocking of new and existing accounts where they perceive their services are being used for financial gain.

It appears that in Tumblr’s trigger-happy rampage, they may have shot themselves in the foot. Many users are annoyed with Tumblr for the way in which they deleted content without so much as an e-mail. Many people have lost hours of hard work and feel very bitter towards Tumblr. If Tumblr’s aim is to compete with existing blogging sites like Blogger.com they have certainly thrown away a huge opportunity.

Participants of the Thirty Day Challenge are learning more than just how to sell on the Internet. They are learning the ethics of Internet Marketing. Ed Dale supports doing this in a positive way and providing the user with good quality content.

The Thirty Day Challenge gave a huge thumbs up to Tumblr. It’s a shame then, that Tumblr chose to act in this way. Choosing to nuke everyone instead of carrying out a surgical strike may be a blunder that Tumblr will regret for a long time.