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A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

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Archives for September 2010

Driving Consistent Traffic is the Key

Driving Consistent Traffic is the Key

by Melvin · Sep 29, 2010

You wonder how those bloggers can actually just spend very little time in a week yet they still get the same amount of traffic to their sites? You wonder how they participate so little in the blogosphere, almost never make comments on other blogs nor do they lurk on forums? There are two simple answers, 1). They’re already an established blogger and 2). The traffic that they get is pretty consistent.

Now the first answer is understandable, they are an established blogger. We all know it takes time to be an established authority blogger. Some of the top bloggers in the space were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.

But for us who’s definitely not considered as a top blogger in this space or any other space, what we could work on is getting consistent and recurring traffic to our blog. Yes, this is the same traffic that could repeat again and again with little to no maintenance at all. By driving consistent traffic, there’s a better chance of getting more loyal readers to your blog as oppose to just a one time visit.

Here’s a short quote on my guest post on BlogEngage about driving consistent traffic:

“One thing that sets apart good bloggers from just the average ones is the ability of the former to drive traffic on a consistent basis. Driving traffic these days is easy but what counts the most is on whether the traffic that you’re going to drive is going to convert or not.

Conversion can vary depending on the goals that you set as a blogger but the bottom line here is that every serious blogger must aim for consistent and returning traffic, not just a one time spike.

In this post, I would like to talk about different things that you can do in order to get that consistent stream of traffic. But before that, let me just cover first the facts about traffic and why you need to aim for consistency.”

I also happened to share some personal stuff on this post on how I thought I was already getting consistent traffic but still I don’t so you may want to check the article out.

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Top Posts, Traffic Tagged With: blog traffic, consistent traffic

Blog Engage Crazy Guest Blogging Contest

by Melvin · Sep 24, 2010

Cash contests and guest blogging seem to be the perfect combination these days. Just after one and one and another one have been done, it seems that new guest blogging cash contests keep on springing all over. So for this edition, it’s Blog Engage turn to host its own contest. You can read more about the contest here.

So basically it’s just pretty much the same (as far as rules) as with the other guest blogging contests. In order to win, you have to put in a superb guest article and you have to promote it.

Contest Prizes and Awards

2 year free hosting (3 GB space/15 GB bandwith) + 1 free domain

Houston SEO

Best Travel Websites

Denver Web Design

Denver Web Design

James Brown

Leading Travel Directory for Travel Websites

My Guest Blog Media Sponsor

Golf School

Golf School

Chicago Web Design

Chicago Web Design

Content Marketing

Content Marketing

Virtual Assistant

Newark Airport Parking

Newark Airport Parking

Other prizes: Non-Cash Sponsors

Platinum Package ” $125 value + stationery design “Business Cards, Letterhead and Envelopes” 100$ value

One year membership at Elegant Themes From Nick

Simply Fresh WordPress theme

Free Blog Review at Bloggeries Blog Forum

One Year Free of HostGator’s Business Web Hosting Plan (a $179.40 value)

So that’s it, make sure you don’t miss it out and please do support me in the contest. As always I just don’t join contests, I try to win them too. 🙂  And it doesn’t end there, I actually hand out superb value by writing a really good article so make sure to check out my post entry there and let me know what you think

Filed Under: Contest, Ramblings Tagged With: blog engage contest, blogengage

Bloggers Come and Go, You One of them?

by Melvin · Sep 23, 2010

In my 5 years experience of blogging and 2+ here with this blog, I have met so many people, made friends,  and probably had done some joint ventures with them as well. But one thing that’s clear is that being a blogger is not permanent.

I know I have bragged many times before on how I’m going to last forever as a blogger and how this blog is going to remain stable despite any challenges but I realized that you can’t really control things. There are some events that are just inevitable and would cause us to refrain from doing something and I know this is mostly the case for some of my blogger friends.

At some point its sad because bloggers are friendly in nature and I really had met a lot of bloggers that I really liked a lot. For them to leave the blogosphere is like cutting that only communication channel they have for their readers and specifically me. Of course in some cases I’m happy and it specifically pertains to bloggers who have sold their blogs successfully. I’m sure they’re satisfied with whatever pay they got from it and it only helped them move towards the direction that they like to move into.

As of this writing, I’ve been really really busy as evident with my lack of activity in the blogosphere and with this blog. My day job really demands my full eight hours that its impossible to sneak anything into that work sched. And when that 8 hours is over, all I could ever do is take my rest. In conjunction with that I also need to fulfill my responsibilities as the interim head of the family.

But as I always boast, this blog will still be a blog owned by me, Melvin. I don’t have any plans of selling it or abandoning it. Heck, that’s why I chose to have my name in it!

That last line is honestly what I really feel but I know there would be inevitable circumstances that could force me to do things differently. 🙁 How about you, what do you feel about this subject matter?

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Preachings, Ramblings Tagged With: bloggers, bloggers go, bloggers leave

Revisiting Online Profits Membership and My Experience

by Melvin · Sep 19, 2010

Online Profits Training ProgramYou could remember last June that I reviewed OnlineProfits.com, an internet marketing course maintained by the ever popular Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips. In that post, I provided a comprehensive analysis of what the program is really all about and how you can benefit from it. Now in this post, I’d like to get back on the program and see how it’s been doing so far.

The main reason why I took the course is to add up my knowledge on the subject of internet marketing. While I’d always like to call and believe myself as an internet marketer, I somehow feel I lack that basic foundation. As many of you know, I didn’t have any formal education of marketing and with that I realized I need to know at least the abc’s that I may not be aware with in the first place.

So in the first seven days, I was really ecstatic. I’m all over the members area almost like a mad man scrambling for information (even though I don’t need to). My thinking was the course used to cost $50 a month and it sold out on less than 10 days so for me to get it for free, it’s insane! Well after that initial excitement, I started focusing more while reading less. I started using more the resources tool and the tools area.

The resources area is just amazing. There are a lot of stuff there that the membership site gives away for free. You don’t see a lot of Woothemes theme being given away nor do some premium wordpress plugins that usually sell in for 30 bucks. But it’s all for FREE.  The tools are is for more the geeky ones or the ones who’d like to do research more on niche. In that page you’ll see 20+ useful tools that you can use to research or optimize what you’re doing.

The social club is also a nice bonus as it contains mini clubs that agree on a common goal. For instance, there’s this retweet club wherein all members do is retweet each other’s articles and there’s also the WeVote club which is more for social bookmarking.

There’s a little forum but as of the moment it isnt really as high-traffic as some of the other forums. But if you’re a newbie, Daniel lurks there a lot so expect your concerns to be answered immediately.

Do I like it? Guess what?

While I haven’t read the main lessons that much, I’m happy with what I’m getting so far. The Live case studies portion is awesome and that’s probably the proof that what’s inside the program really works.

What I like about it the most is that its not full of hype. When you’re inside the membership area, you wouldn’t see those animated flashy designs saying “you’re now ready for financial freedom” or variations like that. Instead, you’d feel that your inside a real internet marketing training sessions. The lessons are well organized, not cluttered and Daniel is quick in helping everyone.

As I’ve said the program used to cost $392 in total, and Daniel decided to make it open to public for FREE because he believes more interaction inside is much better than cash. Go now and become a member of OnlineProfits Membership site.

Here’s the Catch

Here’s something that would further more sweeten this deal. As some of you know, the membership program is FREE but you have to avail hosting from its partner Hosting Nine. So basically, you need to sign up for a hosting deal under OnlineProfits to be able to get the program for free.

I know some people have problem with it due to the fact that they already have their own hosting. So here’s my sweet deal. Sign up to OnlineProfits.com under me by clicking any link in this post, follow all the steps, pay the hosting and I’ll reimburse everything that you paid. That’s right, I’ll initially cover your hosting by doing so.

So doing the math, you will basically get the OnlineProfits membership program for free and also you get free hosting courtesy of MelvinBlog.com. How nice is that? 😀 All you have to do upon paying for the hosting is email me your receipt ID from Hosting Nine and I’ll refund your money asap. Let me know!

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Internet Marketing, Paid Post Tagged With: free membership, online profits, onlineprofits

Making Money Isn’t Really Hard, It’s Just a Lot of Hard Work

Making Money Isn’t Really Hard, It’s Just a Lot of Hard Work

by Melvin · Sep 14, 2010

The hype with making tons of cash from blogging has considerably gone down for the past few years as probably a lot of people have realized that the hype surrounding blogging is all but hype. In fact I’ve seen a lot of people quit blogging to focus on doing  more “secure” stuffs like a day job or a real offline business.

I remember when the make money blogging hype is on its peak, people have the mentality of like “I need to put this ad to make some serious cash”. Of course I was one of those people. I had my little basketball blog back then plastered with all sort kinds of banners, CPM, CPC, CPA, you name it. Of course it all backfired for me. The only positive thing then was that I am enjoying running a basketball site. It’s my passion, my hobby.

Eventually and fortunately I said to myself, “bug this! I’m not gonna do any money-related strategy, Im just gonna do what I enjoy, I’d write posts after posts and just do my thing. A kid like me should be enjoying life anyway!” And it was a crucial turning point for me.

After almost a year, the blog started gaining traffic and then money afterwards. The blog was doing good in page impressions that the CPM banners that I used to hate before started giving me respectable daily earnings. Then I started getting private ads from big sports-related companies and it really blew off for me. For some people the money I made back then may not probably be that big, but for an enthusiastic kid like me, it’s an unforgettable experience.

I always reflect back to it and I love telling this story to my friends over and over again. And I’m always amaze when my friends respond to me and say “wow that’s a ton of work. I can’t imagine myself putting that much hard work!”

Looking back, I didn’t really realize that what I did was “a ton” of hard work. All i knew was I was putting up some posts on how this New York Knicks suck, on how LeBron James is the best player ever and stuffs. Heck, I enjoy it so it must not be really hard work.

And oh, what you read above is the elongated version of my about page. 😉

Disparity between Hard and hard work

I used to do lots of programming back in college and so if you know everything about it, you’ll know it’s really hard to be one. As a programmer/coder you need to know a lot of things, you need to have a broad perspective, you need to have  superb logic to make things work and you need an immense patience testing and trying different lines of codes. In short, its hard.

Blogging (or making money from blogging) isn’t. Hell, just as long as you know how to read, write, type, copy, paste, act as human, interact, you’re qualified. Everyone does qualify for it but why is it that very few succeed? Yes, lack of hard work. Blogging isn’t hard, its just a lot of hard work. It’s so true. It’s easy to write an article but you need to work hard to come up with 50 high quality ones. It’s nuts to interact but its a challenge to do it with over a hundred of people. It’s tough.

I don’t consider myself a guru and no one of my readers do but I can share here some insights that I feel can be helpful to you:

1. Just do it, stop strategizing!

I usually get a lot of flak when I tell people about this but just from experience (and from observing how big bloggers like Jeremy did), I can tell that this is one key aspect why I’m somehow more successful than some people.

I just do it, if it doesn’t work then I gotta move on! The problem with strategizing too much is that people keep on speculating, lurking, observing that nobody does anything! The biggest problem has and always been getting off your ass. I don’t know about you but I certainly wouldn’t refrain from doing things unless experience tells me that ‘hey this isn’t working’.

The statement “Experience is your best teacher” is corny but its still powerful and proven. You just don’t let people dictate you things, do it yourself. After all you really don’t have anything to lose. Every of our failure racks up to our own education and this is one good thing you will always have.

2. If you enjoy it, just go on! (Passion)

That’s why passion is a key element in blogging. I mean why write about something you don’t enjoy in the first place? That’s probably the biggest reason why most bloggers fail, its because they really don’t feel passionate about what they’re blogging. How can you enjoy talking about making money online if you don’t know it?

It’s always been the same parallels over and over again with all of these successful bloggers. They enjoy just blogging on something that they don’t really expect anything. Why don’t you go on Darren Rowse blog’s archive and look for some of his oldest posts. Its amazing how this guy churned out almost over a hundred of blog articles with over 1000+ words each that never even got any comment/traction? Of course these days Darren can write an article w/any length and still get a heap of comments but the lesson here is that you’re not going to get noticed overnight and if you don’t have passion, I doubt you can last too long in the blogosphere.

3. Stop chasing for shiny golden “secrets” because there’s none.

Ok again I used to be like this one when I was on my early stage of blogging. The scenario is usually like this: A blogger reads a post on some blog that making money is hard. You have to do this, do that, implement this, test, blah blah.  So what happens is that this blogger says to himself “No, there must be something better than this, I need to keep looking for one”. And of course the cycle never ends. That blogger would never ever get to work because all he does is chase for secrets.

There’s a big misconception about “premium info stuffs” and secrets. Most people think that these are just the same. The truth is its not. Most info products whether its $9.95 or $999.5 is all about educating people. I’ve consumed a lot of them and I hate eBooks actually all I can say is that the main goal of most of them, if not all is just to organize infos around the web, compile them and present them well. You’re paying them not really because of the “premium stuffs” but only because they’re saving you from getting overloaded. In short, they are giving you blueprints so you never have to find them yourself.

Why not take time to look Technorati’s top 100 blogs? Do you think these guys have secrets? All you can notice is that these bloggers provide massive value to their readers and that alone sums up why they’re popular.

Wrapping it up

As I end this I’ll repeat. Blogging and making money isn’t hard,  it’s just a lot of hard work. “Hardwork” is an overly used term but surprisingly not a lot of people value it. From my experience, and from other people’s experience, there’s really no need to reinvent the wheel and chase for something more. Besides if you’re exerting hard work on your passion, then it’s really not hard after all.

I haven’t written a long post like this for a while and I got carried a bit while writing this, lols. But as always, I’d like to hear back from you.

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing, Top Posts Tagged With: blogging, hard work, make money online, making money blogging

The Challenge of Reading and Responding to Emails

by Melvin · Sep 9, 2010

When I was just getting started, I always thought that those big bloggers are simply absurd for not responding to all emails they receive. I mean there’s this guy right here sending a genuine email waiting and hoping for a response, only for him to be ignored because the blogger that he wrote to was simply just too “busy”.

Yes I always thought this is just part of the gimmick of those bloggers, pretending they’re doing a lot but in reality, they’re just never in the mood to answer emails unless it came from and advertiser or a friend of theirs.

That was before until I experienced it myself.

Since late last year, I have been having difficulties maintaining my email inbox to an organized one, much more definitely to replying to each and every genuine email that I receive. Its funny because there are times where I can reply to emails that just arrived within less than a second yet I fail to reply on the ones that have been on my inbox for a long time.

From the sender’s perspective, they would really get pissed off at it. As I stated above, its painful to send an email, patiently wait for a response not knowing whether the receiver will ever respond or not. At times, they even had to resend the email or reconfirm just to make sure they’re really waiting for something and not nothing.

I don’t know but over the past 5-8 months, I think doing these micro tasks like reading emails, responding to tweets, checking stuffs have become a daunting task for me. And this is where I realized that ‘hey, maybe these big guys are really genuinely having difficulties really’. If I myself who is not a big figure at all is getting bombarded, maybe they, themselves get 3 times more than I do.

Because of this I had to put systems in place. I usually set a time where I can read emails (usually at night) and I make sure I respond to them. I had this bad habit of checking my emails, then waiting for an hour or two before responding to it. Why read an email twice or thrice in the first place before responding to it?

Now I can say I’m really getting more and more organized with it but still I find it challenging. I’m sure there would still be many bugs with what I do but I guess I just have to adjust to it and eventually learn from my mistakes. What say you?

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Offtopic, Ramblings, Top Posts Tagged With: challenge of reading emails, reading emails

Can you Really Depend on SEO for Your Site?

Can you Really Depend on SEO for Your Site?

by Melvin · Sep 2, 2010

Search engine optimization is one overrated thing. And I know its not just me who thinks it this way. But even with that fact, I still have a lot of respect for the top SEO guys like Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan and some other ones. They’re the guys whom I think have the most extensive and updated knowledge about the topic that’s why I keep on following them.

Anyway back to the topic. I know a lot of newcomers in the business or even the experienced ones rely too much on search engines. I mean, the time that they allot in planning and strategizing for SEO is just too much. Now this leads us to the question, “Can you really depend on your SEO tactics for the profitability of your site?”. I’m sure we will all have mixed takes about it.

As most of you know, I guest post a lot these days and I wrote an article over the cool folks at Sem-group which is all about SEO, SEM and Social media. In that post I discussed a lot about how they’re connected and how SEM and social media play vital role in giving the site the initial boost. Here’s an excerpt:

When building a website or any online-based project, you want to build SEO in it from the get-go. You want to optimize it for those key terms that you’re looking into from the start. I know you’re saying, “how can you do that, you don’t even have content yet?” Yes, you’re right but what I mean is that with every websites you can already set up things from the start that would give you a dramatic effect later on. Let me explain.For example, if I’m building a site based on a WordPress platform, I can start fine-tuning the site’s search goals by doing the necessary things like adding an All in One SEO pack, canonicalizing the domain, setting up the meta descriptions properly and creating a robots.txt (and many more of course). You see, these are the things that you can already do from the start yet it doesn’t take that much to do those. On the flip side, it may not yield that much results for the first few months but its future benefits would be enormous for sure.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t a short-term goal in the first place right? Organic rankings is something that can be achieved over time and if you’re getting lots of traffic from search engines then you know what I’m talking about.

Read more: http://sem-group.net/search-engine-optimization-blog/sem-seo-social-media-and-their-connection-to-each-other/#ixzz0yL5bkfe4
Again you can visit my post about SEO, SEM and Social media and feel free to add your insights about it too. I know people have various opinions about this topic and Im willing to take criticisms for it.

It’s a Contest, Help me Win it!

Yes, the article I’ve written above is a contest entry. Sem-Group.net was lucky enough to gather over $2000 of prizes at stake and as all of you know, I love joining contests.  Here are the cold-blooded prizes and their sponsors:

$200 Prize Sponsors

  • Link Building from  Daniel McGonagle
  • Best Travel Sites from BestTravelWebsites.com
  • Vacation Rentals from ArrangeYourVacation.com

$150 Prize Sponsors

  • The Best Candy Store

$100 Prize Sponsors

  • Marriage Advice from  Alisa Bowman
  • Internet Marketing Services provided by  Vertical Measures
  • SEO Software from  Sheer SEO
  • SEO Ottawa – SEO consultants, writers, and translators in Canada
  • Virtual Assistants from Offshore Ally
  • Thesis Skins by  Hesham Zebida
  • Houston SEO services provided by  Gerald Weber
  • Network Marketing Training from  Toni J Young
  • Distinctive Ecards by Quillcards
  • Ghostwriting services provided by  Ghostwriter Dad

$50 Prize Sponsors

  • Whitney Segura’s Internet Marketing Blog
  • James Brown
  • Houston web design by  Raxa Design
  • Freelance Copywriter Eric Brantner
  • Houston Business Development by  The Servant Media
  • Increasing Targeted Website Traffic by  Ana Hoffman, Traffic Generation Cafe
  • Kennewick Homes from The Lane Real Estate Team

Other prizes: Non-Cash Sponsors

  • Hostgator.com is offering a 1 year Business Web Hosting plan. Includes toll free phone number and SSL, a $179.40 value.
  • David Harry is offering a full years membership at SEO Training Dojo, a value of $250.
  • Link-Assistant.Com is offering SEO tools – SEO PowerSuite Enterprise (max. functionality license) $599 worth with a life-time LIVE! plan subscription.
  • Special thanks to the contest media partner My Blog Guest, the free guest post exchange community by  Ann Smarty where users meet to exchange guest posts and network.

What’s needed for me to win

To help me win the contest, simply visit the post above, share your opinion by commenting and retweet it. The more comments and retweets the more chances of me winning. As you can see right now, I’m in the last place as far as both are concern but that would change if you help me out. 😀

Again here’s the post: http://sem-group.net/search-engine-optimization-blog/sem-seo-social-media-and-their-connection-to-each-other/ feel free to check it out!

Filed Under: Contest, Internet Marketing, SEO, Traffic Tagged With: sem, SEO, Social Media

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