Offtopic

No One Reads Blogs During Holidays. ;-)

by Melvin · Dec 25, 2010

lol. Anyhow, this is the third Christmas of MelvinBlog.com and I just like to greet everyone a very very merry, fruitful & safe Christmas. For the most part this holiday season is about spending time with family & friends, eating good food and drinking beer reflecting on things that happened for the past months. But let us not forget that Christmas mainly exists because its the birthday of Jesus Christ. Ok I don’t want to sound too “Christian” here.

Don’t read blogs, go out & enjoy this holiday! 😀

Melvin = Dead?

by Melvin · Oct 30, 2010

With just 3 posts for this month, with this one being 4th you’re probably wondering on where Melvin has been? Is he dead? Has a serious illness hampered him that he can no longer type using fingers? Is he on the court now battling some lawsuit cases against him? or what?

One of those may be correct but the real reason why Melvin hasn’t been active lately is because he’s busy…

Lols, of course it’s me talking here and I just thought it would be nice to talk in the third person at least for the introduction. So yep the reason is that I’ve been busy with a lot of things lately. Here are those:

Personal Stuff

There’s been some personal issues that I have been battling lately. Some family issues as well as some illness to a family member that I cannot really disclose for a reason. Also I’ve been quite struggling with keeping my sane as far as being the interim head of the family is concern.

But I’m expecting that go away after October ends. 😉

Work

I don’t want to stress it that much anymore as I’ve mentioned it already myriads of times. Since August my responsibility has increased and I was assigned to become a software tester while keeping my designation as an online marketing guy.

I don’t really consider it tough but if you combine everything, traveling, going home late, partying every fridays or saturdays, then its gotta take a toll on your body I guess.

Consulting & Client Work

Ok, a lot of you probably aren’t aware of this but sometime last year I did some consulting in SEO and online marketing in general. I got a couple of good clients who are willing to work with me to increase their search visibility and stuff like that.

It wasn’t really a core of my online business but I decided to open it up last month (even though I was hyper busy). Eventually I got this client who has nabbed my services for at least more than 2 months I’m estimating, and that has been considered as my other work aside from my job.

What’s next for MelvinBlog?

Am I selling it? Heck no, at least for the moment. Its funny because the traffic has still been consistent even though I haven’t posted here nor have done anything in the blogosphere. The advertising income is still somewhat somehow consistent thanks to the loyal sponsors.

As for the content, I have some really really good stuff that’s currently in draft so stay tuned for that. Also expect me to throw a bunch of guest posts out there. I’m looking on returning on the normal posting frequency here for the next month so stay tuned.

Lastly, if you want to keep in touch with me closer by following me on Twitter and/or on my Facebook Fan page. Till then folks!

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?

How I Got the Job that I Really Want

by Melvin · Aug 27, 2010

By now you are probably feeling that the owner of this blog has a real world job as evident with the lack of posting here as well as lack of interaction in the blogosphere as a whole. It’s true. It’s quite hard to manage two worlds in same amount of time while balancing your life altogether. However, I can tell you its really super rewarding, especially if you like what youre doing in your job.

I’m pleasured that one of the most popular blogs in the world Jobmobs have allowed me to share my experience with job hunting via a guest post. In that blog I created a post entitled “How to Define Your Ideal Job and Why You Have To”. Part of the interesting points I tackled there are as follows (quoted):

Admit it, it’s hard to go outside wearing that funky eccentric dress while splashing that confidence if you’re not really sure you want what you’re going to do. Or in the case of a job search, most people just ignore so many job listings because they feel they aren’t ready yet, which is obviously related to not having enough confidence in yourself.

If you really think a job is ideal for you, why would you lack confidence? Why would you feel scared?

So here it is!

My belief with the whole job hunting thing is that people get employed more quickly depending on how much they like the job.

How is that so?

Read more at: http://jobmob.co.il/blog/define-your-ideal-job/#ixzz0xjMhb1uw

I’m getting some interesting feedbacks about it so far and I’m looking forward on hearing your piece as well. I’m sure there are so many people that can relate to that post so let me know! 🙂

Can We Connect More in Facebook?

by Melvin · Aug 15, 2010

Since having a job late last June, I took it as a challenge to maintain everything that I’ve been doing. I always think I’m a good darn multitasker and with that, every plan that I had prior to taking my job has still been the plan.

Obviously its getting tougher and tougher each week as I realized things are not as easy as I thought they would be. I’m sure you notice it that there were times that I couldn’t even publish a single blog post here or maybe respond to an email in a timely manner. Yes, having a day job is a huge time sink.

So it left me thinking what could I do to still maintain my connection with you, as my readers like I did before. Since it’s nearly impossible to pop out as much blog posts as I used to in the old days, I had an idea of being more into the social media scene.

Obviously I thought of Twitter. I mean, I tweet a lot of time, I have a thousand followers so maybe I can just tap into it and communicate with you more. Good idea but I realized something else.

Twitter is good but still it doesn’t really possess the “real-timeness” of Facebook. I mean how many times can you reply to someone, only to get a reply after a day or two? and then getting confused with the reply because you already forgot you asked a question.

Since I brought up Facebook, then it’s a good idea to use it right? Facebook probably is the largest social network outside Twitter and people there spend more time than with the latter one. I have a Facebook account with a couple hundred followers but the problem is it’s used more to connect to friends and people here in my country. If you’re my friend there, I’m sure you see me say a lot of “Tagalog” words that you just don’t care at all because you don’t understand it in the first place. Most of my things there are just catered to my friends and relatives, not in a wider user base as for instance, my blog’s readers.

With that I realized, the fan page. Yes, the MelvinBlog Facebook Fan Page. The fan page started late last year and I even held a contest to populate my fans, lols. It started off good and nice, I was active there, some of the fans are replying on a daily basis and I’m also using it to gain more traffic back to the blog and vice versa.

I started automating things, connecting it with Twitter and my feed and eventually what happened is that it became stagnant. I mean who cares replying to an automated wall status message right? As days passed by, it started becoming more and more dull. The usual 3-4 replies I get in my wall messages turned to zero, zilch! My bad eh!

The Resurrection of my Fan Page

Yes, you guessed it right. I’m going to switch it back to its old setup and start being more active there. I know the fan page has been “dead” for the past 5 months but its time to resurrect it.

As I’ve said my plan with it is to use it more to communicate with you when times are hard (means busy days). Just to give you an idea, here’s what you can do with my fan page:

Greet me hi or hello
Say I look good
Ask questions
Complain about something
Collaborate with your ideas
Spam your links 🙂
Beg for money
Shoot me with your funny pics
Tag me with your food for the moment
Use it as an email alternative
and super many more

As you can see, you can literally do anything by being hooked up in my fan page. And I can assure you that I’ll never let you down. Fortunately, surfing Facebook is 110% legal in our office so rest assure that we can then be closer with each other.

You may want to closely follow it since I’m having some brilliant contest ideas that I may throw just in that fan page. Its going to be really nice and fun out there as we can learn more about each other on a more personal scale. Be a fan of my blog now and let’s start connecting. =p

iBlog 6 Blogging Summit Recap and Some Photos

by Melvin · Apr 19, 2010

Long time no post here, at least for my preference. 🙂 Anyways, last Friday and Saturday I attended the biggest blogging event here in Philippines which is the iBlog Philippine Blogging Summit. The conference was held for the 6th time already and I actually can’t believe that I missed the previous 5 ones considering that I’ve been blogging for 3 years already.

I also mentioned in my post on attending Wordcamp 09 that since late last year, I’ve shifted my focus on trying to network more with my fellow citizens here and connect with more local bloggers. Since I’ve started I was more always on the international side of things. Most of my blogging colleagues are from the other side of the world. I have few Filipino blogging friends but I realized I have to have more.

So I attended iBlog 6 Summit. It’s a 2 day event, the first day was more targeted on businesses on tapping blogs while the second day is more on blogging as a whole. Unlike most of the iBlog posts, this is going to be a comprehensive one. 🙂

Disclaimer: I’m a nice guy but I’m honest so i would put out my personal opinion on every talk. If you’re name is misspelled, hit me up. 🙂 Im also a horrible photographer so I had to steal borrow other photos from other people

Day 1

Since its just my second event, its understandable that I am holding myself back a bit because Im shy. Ok, I arrived just on time by myself and with no friends on sight.

Janette Toral spoke about Blogging for business which is a pretty general talk on how blogs make money and how they are intended for business. It was a pretty broad talk wherein she covered making money from various things like paid review, corporate blogging and selling products.

Janette is a reputable figure here in Philippine and while its my first time hearing her speak, I was not disappointed. I think she laid out all the necessary info especially for noobs on how the money works on blogging.

It was followed by Abe Olandres speech about Advertising in Blogs which is a more in-depth topic than the first one. Abe is one of the pioneers of blogging here and is one who probably have generated the most revenue. Its a pretty great talk and he was not too shabby to share his figures. 🙂

The next one was the sponsor talk and its really something I dont want to talk about. The next speaker is Mr. Gary Viray who preaches about SEO and SEM. Its pretty fundamental for me but I know it really opened the eyes of most new bloggers in the world of SEO. It also debunks the myth of old SEO practices wherein it used to be based on quantity of inbound links.

Next is the lunch and networking part. The food is “” but thats considerable considering its a free and open for all event. Again I was not able to network that much because I was really really shy. But at the time, I met four people by then namely: Mariel, May Ann, Paul David and Jilcae w/c are the people that I pretty much talked with for the whole day.

Carlo Ople then presented something about measuring blog buzz in w/c he tackled on how traditional businesses are so much hurting themselves not putting up proper online campaigns and lacking specific goals. It was one of my fave talk for that day since it presented me to the offline business side of things. Im always like the guy who knows things online but its refreshing to see the “foreign” side of things. Carlo reiterated that we must “show respect to social media” which pretty much sums it all up.

Emerson Banez who is a lawyer tackled legal concerns in blogging w/c I initially thought was boring but he made a way to make it enticing to listeners. It was basically about copyrights, and disclaimers which was beneficial as well. Law is really not my forte but its good to learn something from that side too.

The next one is about the win-win situation for bloggers and advertisers which was presented by Didi Paterno. It was a bit sound and fundamental to me since most of the money made in this blog is through advertising.

Lastly that day, Manuel Viloria which i thought was dressed a bit overformal, discussed about attraction marketing which was a really fruitful topic. This topic was about building a list, capturing them, then using social media to leverage them is something that was an eye-opener especially for most bloggers here. Up to now, it still amazes me how a lot of bloggers dont go into the “relationship-building” business model and instead just stay on the old blogging bandwagon techniques.

Day 2

Day 2 is mostly for bloggers. I anticipated that this day is for newbies, people who haven’t had much experience yet with blogging. With that in mind, I still attended.

The very beautiful, mesmerizing and eye-capturing and lovable Ms. Hannah Villasis started the day by discussing about Blogging 101 which is basically just about blogging and how it has become it is today. I’m hitting my head so hard because I actually missed this talk and wasnt able to take a pic of her while on stage. I woke up late that day and it sucks!

Then the equally handsome Vince Gollangco discussed about Video Blogging which was enticing to me since I’ve been planning to go into that route but never actually have done it. Vince made a great emphasis that we should never really care about those negative feedbacks because there would be always. He also handed out some great tips on how to do videoblogging and how its easier than what most people really think.

PhotoBlogging101 is another interesting talk since I am fascinated with photography lately. Im not a photo blogger but I love taking random pics. Juned discussed it more on a photography aspect rather than the blogging side and it was really a nice session.

Then it was the sponsor talk, and then the talk about launching successful blog contests which is something that I already have an idea about. But again Im sure this talk has become useful to a lot of other people on the said event.

It was followed by the very interesting topic of Impact of Blogging to the community wherein Joseph Gonzales (by far the most lively speaker, also humorous), cited the intangibles of blogging and how he leveraged it in helping his community. It was so inspiring to hear that blogging can do more than what we all think it could and in his case, its really for a bigger cause. And then it was lastly followed by Marghil Macuha’ of Macuha.com talked on how SEO is a must for making money online. It was pretty a fundamental talk but I picked up some nice techniques of his as well. 🙂

Conclusion & Things Learned

The biggest blogging conference and event was really living to its bill. I was so happy that I was able to attend and meet all other bloggers and prominent figures here personally. Of course I still wished to have done better especially with the networking part. In conferences like this, I should be introducing myself, shaking other people’s hand, taking pics with other people, and just building relationship with them, almost none of those were done. (shy alert!)

All in all I would like to thank to all who have stumbled upon in the event. My new buddies, May Ann, Jilcae, Paul and two other persons I didn’t recognize that much. The speakers who I know really prepared so hard not just to present something, but to make sure they give out the best ones.

And of course the organizers, Ms.Janette Toral, the emcees, the photographers (hey how can I find the pics that may possibly include me?), the hyper-active Mike Abundo, and all those people who worked to make this happen. Usually organizers are the ones who don’t get much credit but here I’d like to put an emphasis to them for doing such a wonderful job. Having an event for 6th straight years is just plain awesome.

iBlog 6 Group Pic — Photo is from Carlo Ople

If you have your own coverage of your iBlog 6 Summit, please comment here so I can post your link here as well. 🙂 Do share your opinion as well about this Summit and let me know what talks did you enjoy the most.

Other iBlog 6 Press/Blog Coverages:

More Photos are located on the photos page

April Fools Pranks, Are you one of those fools?

by Melvin · Apr 2, 2010

First and foremost, Happy april fools day to everyone! Here in my country its already the second of April and I know in most countries its just the 1st so today I would be tackling something about April fools and the pranks from some websites/blogs.

Anyways its funny how a lot of people are just sooo gullible that you could really laugh out loud when you see them just get persuaded that easy. Whether they were really acting foolishly or just getting with the flow is up to them.

So for today I collected some of my fave april fools prank for the year 2010 and let me know what you think about them.

1. Google Changes Its Name to Topeka

It has been announced in Google’s blog and by reading the post alone, I could obviously tell that it’s an april fools prank. Nice try google though! I just couldn’t fathom why people would say “I did a topeka search for blah blah”.

2. TextP from Youtube

Lols, this new feature from youtube allows you to watch videos in text only mode. According to them, it would save them $1 per second of bandwidth. You can view any video in TextP format by appending &textp=fool to the end of any URL on YouTube. Lols..

3. An App for Android that will translate Animal Speech

Google UK is said to be offering an app that would easily translate Animal Speech. Funny concept but it’s an obvious prank I must say.

4. Shoemoney Modeling Agency

From the time I’ve seen the title of the post, I instantly knew it was shoe’s present for this year’s april fools. And watching the video would really make you laugh. It’s basically about shoemoney doing modeling for a hefty amount of price. And since shoe is baldy-wise, he again held comments that would spoil the post on moderation. I tried gaming the commenting system but to no avail.

5. DailyBlogTips Television Deal

Daniel Scocco tried to be unique this time but I still won’t bite his prank. 🙂 Interestingly a lot of people are FOOL enough to believe his claims. LOL. If blogging could land people TV shows then im sure this would only become more saturated than ever.

6. College Humor Banned by the Government

Going to the site, you would get redirected to this april fool page in which it would tell you that they logged your IP and may subpoena your address from your ISP for further investigation. Im sure it scared the hell out of those fools eh? 🙂

Techcrunch has a bigger list and you can go there if you’d like to see other april fools pranks.

April Fools Day Never Die

I don’t know but April fools never die even though it seems that most people are prepared for it. Even though, its still surprising how a lot people are foolish enough to bite the claim w/c made it more fun and enticing.

Post note: Me saying the word fool is not intended to offend people, its just going through the tradition. 😉

Surprising Announcement!

And there is my surprise announcement! 🙂 I’m completely removing my self from operations in this blog and other several website of mine. No not really, I will still own EVERYTHING but would appoint several key players to staff my network of sites especially this blog, MelvinBlog.com.

I’ve worked with myriads of talented within my 5 years and so it gave me the opportunity to really get them for the long haul. Does that mean i’m not gonna post in this blog anymore? probably yes (heck don’t be sad). Maybe I still would (3 times a year or whatever). But rest assured the people I’ve hired to continue run this blog is as competent as I am and I know they have better grammars than me, lols.

Don’t really want to dive a lot on the reason but its basically because I was hired as a soon-to-be IT Project Manager for a prestige company called IBM. It’s amazing because I am just going to graduate this May and to have that job is just life-changing for me. I mean I’m not even 20 and i’m getting this opportunity already. I know it would be a hard transition for me but I guess im just willing to take and I promise that I would do everything to get the money they would pay me worth it! Here’s the press that IBM issued regarding this.

Again no reason to be sad, I hope you as my readers would be happy for me and still continue to support this blog.