A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.
Sly Blanco, the famous dude who sold his blog for $9500 has been having his new blog beaten, swallowed, shove in the ass, destroyed, bludgeoned, attacked by spambots. Look:
And John has been his loyal reader commentator. 🙂
I am pretty much sure Sly’s really taking his time with the huge chunk of almost $10,000 that he got from his previous blog. So as the spams, taking their sweet time turning his blog to a splog.
A lot of people in the blogging community usually want to learn either how to make money with affiliate marketing or how to start earning through flipping websites/blogs. Although its not your usual mano-a mano type of matchup, it still makes sense to tackle both. So today I thought its interesting to tackle both and get your opinion about it.
Everyone in the building knows how much I love affiliate marketing. Not because I make hundreds to thousands (most of the times, I’m even losing more than profiting 🙂 ), but because I just enjoy the whole process. I love the landing page thing, the PPC manipulation marketing stuff and the affiliate promotion overall. Although I haven’t been active with affiliate marketing this year (because of college), its still something I see myself doing in the future.
I’m not going to detail how aff.marketing works but basically its like promoting an offer and getting paid for driving leads/sales. Most affiliate marketing asshoes in the industry can be found on the bloody wickedfire forum and some of them are making five figures from affiliate marketing. If done properly, I can say affiliate marketing is the one and only business model that can go on autopilot (yes, money while sleeping!)
Site flipping is something I haven’t done. Although through the years we’ve sold some really good websites, we really never considered it as site flipping. Flipping Blog and websites is easier than affiliate marketing in my opinion but the niche is as saturated as the latter. Some people really do good in it, and some people are happy to do it as a hobby.
What is site flipping? It’s simple as making a website or blog and then selling it. The idea here is creating a unique something and convincing the marketplace that, that “something” has a high potential and could yield income if marketed properly. Although, its not as automated as affiliate marketing, flipping people websites is a lot easier to do than the former. Another fact is that there is low risk and low cost in it. If the site doesn’t sell, you still have a lot of options with it.
For the first time in this blog I will hold a poll. And its a poll about the two stuffs discussed above. What do you think is better overall? Affiliate Marketing Or Buying (or creating) And Selling Websites? Or maybe you can share your thoughts and add something to what has been discussed.
This is a paid review sponsored by Michael Dunlop
Income Diary is a blog owned by a fellow young entrepreneur Michael Dunlop. Michael is famous more specifically because of his interviews So what is Income Diary? As what the name suggests, it’s actually a blog about making income on the internet. The blog boasts interviews from prominent persons in the industry such as Aaron Wall, John Chow and Chris Garret. Interviews are something that Michael has done a lot in the past and even in Retire @ 21 he has done a lot of it.
Income Diary uses a premium Wootheme and obviously it is customized. I liked the way images are used especially with interviews, the big pictures fit very well in the content of his blog. The sidebar of his blog, unlike most blogs in this niche, isn’t cluttered with paid advertising or whatsoever. Instead, it contains pictures on how one can set up a blog step by step. Another noticeable thing in his blog is the Top Earning Blogs Part. I’m not sure if anyone has done it before but I think it’s another great part of the blog and I can actually see it becoming famous in the future just like other lists.
Although most content in the blog are interviews, Michael also runs a newsletter. He gives away a 7 day course for free about making money by blogging for subscribing to him.
To sum it all up IncomeDiary is a blog worth-following. With myriads of blogs related to blogging and internet marketing springing each day, creating another one doesn’t seem to be a good move. But with the way I see how IncomeDiary.com is starting to grow, I know Michael knows what he is doing. As I’ve said it’s a great site and by saying great, I mean it adds value. Maybe a little more content and walkthrough articles outside the interviews wouldn’t harm.
What do you think?
A lot of bloggers in the industry mostly talk about getting traffic flowing into blogs by doing the traditional things. Blog commenting, forum and article marketing, social media, even offline interaction. These free ways, while it has been used a lot and is certainly a great way to target visitors to your site, it’s not the only ones!
Most people don’t bother to talk about paid promotions because not a lot of people are interested spending dimes with it. But the truth is it’s actually a powerful way to drive traffic to your blog. I have used some of them here and some of them in other blogs and so far it’s really doing good. Without further ado, here they are:
There are tons of paid options but basically these are what I think the most effective. If you have some $100 to spend or a credit card, then why not try to invest in it. Quality of Traffic and targeting is what the paid advertising gives that most free promotion tactics don’t. What do you think?
As you may notice, most medium cap bloggers within our niche seemed to be lackadaisical on posting nowadays. I was looking from this blog’s archive and was surprised it’s actually the same thing with this blog. 🙂
It’s not surprising though because most bloggers are either college students, or someone having a full time job so it’s easy to figure out they are busy with more important stuffs. Anyway here are some few news I’ve heard/read this past week.
Shoemoney and SEO Expert Disa Johnson’s conflict seemed to be reaching new heights. What appeared to be a done deal when Shoe actually followed what Disa requested, isn’t done after all. Disa feels pissed with the fact that Shoemoney’s blog post appears on Google for her name. Apparently Disa cared so much about her reputation and has now been doing a massive twitter campaign against Shoe. They feel pissed off against each other, didn’t they? 🙂
Desmond from Desmond Blog had just flipped his blogflippingformula site for close to $2000. It’s good to hear it considering a lot of people (I think) are doubting on Desmond’s ability to flip blogs and whether he’s genuine or not.
Pure Digital Technologies, makers of the ever so popular Flip Video Camera were selling their company and Cisco is said to be the most appealed buyer and that the price is “north of $500 million.” Founder and CEO Jonathan Kaplan is said to be taking around $80 million off the table personally. This hasn’t been confirmed. My prediction is Cisco could have it before June.
News from this blog
So I know a lot of people are eagerly waiting for the prizes they have won from my previous contest. I couldn’t contact some of the sponsors and some have said they are going to give their prize in 5 days. The list of sponsors (and their reputation) is of a good quality and I believe I would never have a problem with them. So just give me another week for releasing your prize.
Advertising on Melvin Blog
The price rates on advertising on this blog have never increased for a while. So know I’m planning to increase it. The traffic of the blog has drastically increased as well as its readership for this year so starting wednesday night the new price rates would be in effect and here they are:
125X125 – From $10 – $15 – 2 spots available
468X60 – From $15 – $25 – 0 available
Text links – From $5 to $10 – 7 available
Paid Reviews – From $40 – $55
A lot of people are telling to increase my rates even early this year but I just decided I would do it this wednesday. So if you’re promoting something and feel my blog’s niche suits it, then advertise now, before it increases…
A lot of blogs start out well. They post superb content, have nice interactions between visitors and simply they just provide good value. Results? They get the initial boost, the traction, the followers/subscribers.
Then fast-foward, the blog has now posting “not so-good” content, articles that obviously are just rehashed articles seen on forums. Don’t be surprised, its actually the trend of most blogs.
Most blogs really has a “life-cycle” like that and unfortunately if you look at your own blog, that may even be the case. Providing great content is really the key to traffic, fame and possibly income for your blog. What makes it difficult is the fact that we cannot produce superb content all the time. I remember one time I was subscribed (using my feedreader) to almost 150 sites/blogs that interest me. Sooner I found out 30% of them are no longer providing what I used to enjoy with them before.
That’s really the case. Even if you look at most blogs nowadays you’ll see the same trend. Zacjohnson used to be one of my daily reads with his nice post with PPC Marketing. Now most of his posts are just about an affiliate network, some tools and something not as useful as before. Carl Ocab used to have some nice tutorial tips on some basic stuffs as well as some advanced tips but if you look at his blog now, you’ll see a ton of guest post(that promotes their own blogs), some offtopic posts, and none that are really related to making money online (a brand his blog is promoting).
You can look no further by just looking at my blog. Do you think I have run out of good reads for you? Or my blog has never had a great content even before? LOL… Anyway, I think picking the niche of your blog and its goal plays a strong role on how you must distribute great content to your readers. Lots of people starting out say “ah, I would make a blog teaching people about fishing”, and in the end they just ran out of nice content for their niche. Stating clear your purpose and niche helps a lot in defining what your blog is really all about. It helps to the extent that you would understand how much effort, time you need to exert to fulfill that goal. If you are in the helpful niche of blogs, then I’m afraid to say you have to do 100% more work than normal bloggers.
Back to blogs that I mentioned earlier. So, they don’t produce the same great content they used to produce before, but do you see people leaving them? Do you see a decline of traffic in their part? Partly yes! But the truth is they still managed to gain that same attention from the blogosphere despite the fact they are posting less value. At the end it speaks about “not the greatness of content” after all. Content is great, but that doesn’t mean its anything. 🙂
Edit: Didn’t really like to repeat it but again if you read the original contest page, you’ll see that anyone can win more than one. Another thing is that the list is in order, which means the no.1 guy would pick first his prize before other could, then no.2, then 3 and so on. So let me restate, don’t contact me I will contact you instead so that I can remind you the prizes that are still available.
The contest winners that should’ve been released last Feb.26 or March 3, but because of “uncertainty” of things, it has been released just by now. 🙁 yea, I know I sucked owe you an apology. I know most people waiting for the results would just read the title of the post and scroll directly down to the winners so what’s the point of making a long paragraph like this? 😉
Overall there are 40+ contestants and I believe 40 for 18 prizes isn’t bad! I mean even if another 20 still entered the contest by now, the chances are still very high. Anyway these are the lucky winners (in order) courtesy of the Randomizer:
That’s it. I actually planned to post a video on randomizing each winners so that the result would really look more transparent to everyone. But since my connection is a complete crap, I wasn’t able to do it. Congratulations to all the winners. I shall be contacting you (or if you can, contact me!) to ask you for the prize you want. Or you may also leave a comment here of your desired prize. Then I’ll hook you up w/the sponsor. Again I would like to say thank you to all of those who participated. I can conclude this is a successful contest and look more for it in the near future… 🙂
And again to the sponsors. If not for them, there would be no contest like this one and I am really thankful to them. Another mention on them wouldn’t do no harm eh? 🙂
I would like to post more on how I learn through these contest, how it increased my traffic/readers/SERP and etc, but I guess my professor in Project Management is now waiting for me in school so I’ll do it someday. Again thank you and God Bless to everyone. 🙂