Reviewing Year 2010 – Just Another Year End Post

by Melvin · Jan 2, 2011

Time flies really fast, isn’t it? Just few more hours and Its already year 2011. So for that, I’d like to make a recap post about things that happened for this year. I’ve never done this before so I thought its exciting to do one now.

Year 2010 overall has been good to me. At the start of the year, I went back to my college university after two painful stints of OJT on some companies the past year. It was exciting because that happened to be my last term in college which means goodbye school. Here’s the summary of my 2010.

Early 2010

Everything started with the Advance English kind of like training for us. I live in Philippines and although people here speak better English than some other Asian countries, our school felt the need for this so that we’re more prepared when we go out and find/get jobs.

College-wise, its kind of like one of the most challenging trimesters for us because of the pressure of being a graduating student. There were some tough software development projects but overall it was just fine.

As far as my online stuff is concern, I decided to focus on growing this blog more and it did. I tried engaging to more bloggers and putting up better content. Luckily, this blog grew and obviously the income increased mainly because of increased number of ads.

Summer of 2010

I also held the best blog marketing contest and it had about over $2000 of real prizes from real people at stake. I was so glad that sponsors helped me out in this. The contest got good popularity around, a lot of people have joined but the best thing was it benefitted bloggers themselves.

In return I joined some contests as well and won some. It was always good and challenging for me to go out and try to win these contests.

Aside from that, I attended two blogging conference for this year. The first one was iBlog which is THE biggest blogging summit in the Philippines and it was a good as I met a lot of new friends and got to see people that I admire in the industry. The other conference was Wordcamp 2010 in which Matt Mullenwegg flew down to grace the event. It was equally a nice event and I was able to see Matt in person.

Getting Employed, & Starting New Stuff

Then June onwards became a really busy month. I got employed in a software development company as their online marketing guy and later I was also assigned as a software tester. From there on, I started spending lesser and lesser time in this blog and other of my web properties. I found that a day job really sucks time.

It didn’t prevent me though from pursuing other of my online businesses. I founded Killerlogodesigns late July (although we’re kind of like in beta) and got some good clients. I also started some sites in the sports niche just to increase my visibility in that space. Lastly I opened doing client work and consulting for clients. I used to do a lot of that couple of years back before I got bored with it. Late this year, I opened it up again.

Because of those things and my job, I was able to make tons of money in a very short period of time. Consulting and client work rakes in the most, then I still have passive income from ads from my blogs and then the day job. But then a good portion of it was spent to hospital when one of my family members got confined.. I also helped out my parents in paying some stuff.

Year 2010 in General

All in all, 2010 is a good year for me. I feel blessed to be given with these opportunities and feel equally elated that I was able to deliver and satisfy people that I’m working with. There were some challenges along the way, most are minor ones and some are tough ones but what’s important is that I was always given this opportunity to prove myself as a interim father of the family and the eldest son.

So to conclude in a long sentence, in 2010 I was able to grow this blog and monetize it well, was able to finish college and land a job, was able to make good amount of money in my first 6 months outside college and on the other side I was able to surpass most of the problems for me and my family.

Looking forward to 2011

So to be straightforward, I know 2011 is going to be a much more exciting year for me obviously equally full with challenges and obstacles. I’m not fazed with it and I want to continue improving myself and maximizing my potentials. How about you?

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! 😀

Making Money Blogging by Not Trying at All

by Melvin · Dec 5, 2010

I know the title of this post raises the eyebrows of some of you here but let me just get my point here. So basically here in this blog, what I have been preaching is that you can never make money blogging unless you put in enough effort. you do it wisely and execute things strategically. Heck, most successful bloggers even take like one year before they even get to where they are now. And that comes with the fact that they are consistently putting effort from day one.

In this blog, I wrote some few tips related to making money blogging although this blog is NOT about that topic. I wrote posts like how this blog makes money, how I doubled my advertising income, monetizing local traffic and stuff like that. Another popular blog posts is this post which is entitled making money isn’t hard, it just involves a lot of hardwork which has completely nothing to do with making money blogging.

If you read those posts, you can see that most of the things that I do or attain are possible because I’m workaholic. I do exert a lot of effort in this blog (although not these days though) and most bloggers that I know do the same so there’s a commonality between bloggers who are making money.

Work hard, Don’t Expect at All

Ok I know I’ve been taking both sides of the fence here which definitely will confuse you but let me explain. Some of you here know that blogging isn’t really the main way I make money ever since. Before it was affiliate marketing. I did a lot of CPA stuff, promoting offers through PayPerClick, making a lot of money back then and some of you are aware with it.

I don’t do it that much today because of all regulations and affiliate marketing is a fly-by-night thing. I can be making $100 in one day or losing more than that. There’s that much risk that convinced me to stop doing it.

I also spent some little time with freelance writing early back in my college days and was associated with some companies. This was just a part-time gig for me as I was studying so I could have some allowance on my part.

I enjoyed blogging ever since and probably had spent the most amount of time in it without really making nearly the amount that I make with other things.

Having a Day Job

So late last June, I took a job at a certain software development company as their online marketing guy and with that I applied all the knowledge that I have to that company.

Obviously its nice for me because it was my first ever job and it allowed me to kind of like have an income source outside the internet which I also considered consistent (at least for the first 6 months) because you’re getting paid monthly.

Consulting & Client Work

The demands of having a day job is tough but that didn’t prevent me from pursuing this consulting & client work business. Very few know that I manage a startup company at Round Table Networks and that I did some consulting way back last year. It was good and the money was enough but back then I didn’t find it that fulfilling so I stopped doing it and instead focused on my sites.

Late September I started doing it again to just try to see what would happen. Luckily I got some clients that I have been working until now and that has brought both good things and bad things to me. The good is obviously the compensation and the bad is that I have lesser and lesser time to spend for my web properties which includes this blog and some other stuff.

Making Money Blogging & Not Expecting at All

I don’t know. I, myself is confused on what the topic of this blog post really is but I guess its just about accepting the fact that living off with the sole money that you make from blogging is almost not possible these days. I mean I still make a decent (not phenomenal) monthly passive income from this blog and some of my other sites but they just take a backseat with what I do primarily.

The main point here is that if you’re trying to make money from your blog but you have a job that you make consistent amount of money with, then just don’t expect too much from your blog. Sometimes its better to just work without expecting something because in that way, you don’t get depressed or frustrated when you don’t make that much money.

Looking back now, I realized that blogging was NEVER the main thing for me. Sure, this blog is one of main prized assets that I have online but it just acts as a second fiddle to the things that I really do. It was affiliate marketing before, having a day job and consulting work for now.

I think it’s equally important to have this mindset that sometimes enjoying something is enough and may alone justify the effort that you put into it. I know that statement is debatable.

I try to make money blogging, but I don’t expect that much. And that helped me a lot in focusing on more important things that I need to prioritize without getting frustrated. How about you?

MelvinBlog.com is now PR3 (Lol)

by Melvin · Dec 1, 2010

I’m not really sure on when exactly the pagerank update has occurred but last Friday I opened the home page of this site to see if its still functioning properly (lol) and then I easily noticed that the pagerank toolbar suggested MelvinBlog has now a pagerank of 3. Yay!

Actually I don’t really know how to react primarily because I never cared about pagerank anyway. In fact as I was writing this post, I was thinking if its even necessary to post this blog article. But because I see that most people post articles when pagerank update occurs, I was convinced. 😉

Back about not caring about pagerank. The truth is I never really cared. Most of the sites that I own do have pagerank yet my main business model does not really rely on getting huge search traffic or building tons of backlinks. But for MelvinBlog its quite a bit interesting. Here’s a brief story why.

MelvinBlog Pagerank Story

So everything started last August of 08 I think. I got PR2 and that was considering that my blog was just started just June of 08. So for 2 months only, I was able to manage getting my blog into that pagerank without doing anything at all literally.

Then 2 weeks after that, Google slapped me back to PR0 for no reasons at all. You see I don’t sell links, or if I ever do, it usually is redirected from OpenAds back then which means no PR juice is passed to a site. I do sell reviews but even that, I nofollow all the links. So even though I didn’t care that much with PR, I was quite baffled.

After two years, I still had PR0. And that came with the fact that I have over 10,000 backlinks, that I guest blogged for majority of big and reputable blogs like JohnChow.com & DailyBlogTips.com, and have never done anything that would piss off the search engines (Google in particular).

At the time, I was thinking that maybe the linking structure of my site is super flawed that Google cannot just read my entire site properly. That’s because my blog isn’t set up normally, I do usually try to nofollow page that I dont think add value, noindex tags and categories page and even do my robots.txt page extensively.

So with that I really lost hope that my blog would ever get passed PR0 and like I said, I have come to the point where I don’t care about it anymore since the bulk of the income that I make is through advertising, something that pagerank has nothing to do about.

So that’s it. I think it’s important to note too that we as bloggers shouldn’t be caring too much about these metrics because after all, it has nothing to do with our success or the money that we could potentially make.

Personally, I could say that its nice to see this blog get a PR3. How about you? I like to hear your say about this topic and I’d like to know too if your blog/s received an increase or decrease in pagerank as well.

Why Productivity is Vital in Blogging Success

by Melvin · Nov 27, 2010

One of the the reasons why most bloggers can’t get pass the startup/newbie stage is because they lack a lot of things. From things like passion and determination to a more measurable metrics like traffic, lack of focus, incompetence or whatever it is, I can say that it can be all attributed to one thing, being unproductive.

I, myself is a big advocate of being able to produce consistently and riding on that to move up the ladder. I’m sure a lot of people would say they are exerting so much effort in it but still it doesn’t provide them a good outcome. Do take note that hardwork does not have a linear relationship with being productive. I mean I can work hard on reading a lot of materials in all my 24 hours but does that mean I’m productive? Naah!

The truth about being productive is that it still depends on whether you’re doing the right things. But how the heck do I know what is right from what’s not? Simple. If you’re focusing on exerting effort on things that you need to be doing, then you’re achieving to be productive. In other terms, if you’re working hard on some of the things that can have a dramatic effect on your own blogging and you’re working on it with such good focus then you are being productive.

What are the things that can have dramatic effect? Now this is where it gets a bit tricky. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot that doing small things can lead to big things which is true. Now the thing that I want to emphasize here is that if you have a plan and execute that plan in such a way that you’re doing it in a strategic step by step manner, thats going towards the productive way.

You see, there’s so many people wanting to do things all at the same time and want to exert an equal amount of efforts doing all those things successively. We all know that’s impossible and as a result, they get burnt out pretty quickly and they never really do any of those things properly. That being said, it’s really hard to be on a momentum when you don’t know what you need to do first, when you don’t have an idea what needs to be prioritized the most.

Final Words

I’ve read a lot of productivity tips and quite to be frank, some of them are really good and I use them coupled with my own implementations to maximize my productivity. But the main point here is that it all starts with you, yes you the blogger. What do you really want to achieve first and foremost? Most bloggers have this lucrative long term plan but most of them, if not all, lack the missing pieces in between to be able to move forward.

If my long term goal is to make money, how do I achieve that? Get traffic? Yes, but how do I get traffic? And the question and answer goes on. Until we can answer those things, then we can start working things on a more concise way, hence we can maximize our productivity on each of the tasks that we’re going to do. Again always take note that working hard doesn’t mean your being productive and being productive doesn’t even guarantee success!

Now you may probably say now that I’m pushing the thought that blogging is super hard. It depends on the way you’d like to think of it but at least you’re now getting the bigger picture in a clearer manner.

5 Different Things that I have to Accomplish Everyday

by Melvin · Nov 22, 2010

If you’ve been reading the blog, you’ll easily see that I’ve been whining quite a lot about how I’m super busy and how hectic my schedule is. I mean if you go to each of my previous posts for the past few days and weeks you could easily notice that I always open the articles with the “I’m so busy lately” kind of line, lols.

Anyways sometime last year I wrote a post called “I wish there’s more than 24 hours in one day” and I got some interesting feedback about it. Now in this post I’d like to go a bit offtopic again by tackling the 5 different things that I always strive for before each day ends. The list starts now (in no particular order).

My work tasks – Obviously I need to accomplish all my tasks for my day job for the particular day. I usually set out goals in every working day to make sure I’m being efficient and helpful to the company. For instance if my task is to find review sites, I usually set out a goal for myself (i.e. 100 review sites a day).
Read all emails – I have a whole bunch of email accounts for different properties and to be honest I have been receiving a lot per day. In just my recent post I talked about my difficulties with responding to emails. But even with that I make sure that I read each and every emails on all my accounts before the day ends.
Do all blog-related micro tasks – This includes moderating comments, spam comments, seeing if theres a new advertiser, retweet articles, manage my facebook blog fan page and so on. This usually happens at the latter part of the day.
Post blog entries – If you know me, I usually write my posts for one week in one sitting, usually every mondays or saturdays. With that, I usually just set them as drafts and then the task becomes publishing those posts as the days go by. And making sure it’s error-free (although all of my posts have errors!)
Do my responsibilities at home – I pretty much arrive late at night so my task upon arriving is to ensure everything in home/house is fine. Just the simple things like making sure everyone took their dinner, my little brother has made his homework, my mom is well-rested and the doors are locked and secure for the day.

Those are the 5 different things that I aim to accomplish and complete everyday. It’s a bit daunting but it has become a part of my daily routine that it’s normal now for me. How about you?

5 Clever Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog…

by Melvin · Nov 14, 2010

In this blog, I probably have given a lot of tips already on driving more traffic to your blog and you could see all of them simply by checking out my traffic and blog marketing sections.

So in this blog post I would like to share to you some *clever tips on driving more and more traffic to your blog. These are tips that are uncommon and on whether they are blackhat/shady or not, its up to you. 🙂

1. Setting referral traffic source as your site.

I’m not sure if this is something that a lot of bloggers and webmasters know but basically you can set your site as a referrer for all sites that you visit.

The way you do that is through your browser. In Firefox you can simply just download this plugin called RefControl. What this does is simply just allow you to set the referring URL either for all sites that you visit or for a specific site.

The good thing about this is that the traffic that you will get can potentially be a repeat traffic(recurring) since you’re letting real people (not bots) see your site/blog. And the best part is that there’s literally no work involved. If you’re like me who loves to read stuffs online, then thats it.

2. Link baiting in forums

Couple of months back I wrote this really definitive guide on how you can drive traffic to your blog using forums. It was well-received by a lot of people and you may want to check that out.

So with link baiting in forums, I’m not really referring to you creating a new thread with some controversial topic and then linking back to your own blog. That’s actually an idea forum members usually frown into. Link baiting in forums is simply just posting a thread that you know a lot of people can relate into.

So as you can see in the image above, I just simply created a thread that I know a lot of people would be interested to engage in. I didn’t even put a link explicitly to my blog and as you could realize, this forum thread reached more than 5 pages and a lot of replies from the forum members. Obviously it drove a lot of traffic back to my blog through the signature links and the header itself.

The interesting thing is that the thread was created May last year and people are still replying up to today which brings up the thread above.

3. Talking about making money online

I don’t know what’s the reason behind it but obviously if you make a certain post targeted to making money online or maybe a tip about it, people generally respond positively to it.

Not so long ago, I wrote this post about how MelvinBlog makes its money and up to know its one of the highest viewed page/post in this blog. It’s even viewed more than the recent post on “making money isn’t hard, its just a lot of hard work” which I thought was the best post I have ever produced.

Of course you may not want to talk about making money if you don’t have an experience with it yourself or lack the knowledge about it.

4. By Joining Guest Blogging contests

Its kind of like odd to include it here right? I have joined a lot of guest blogging contests this year and have talked alot about it too but the truth I think is that it simply just drives you traffic without you really realizing it.

Most people join these contest not to find new readers, nor drive traffic but to win a cash prize and I think that cash serves as an incentive for us bloggers to work harder in driving more and more exposure to our articles. So little do we realize that in trying to win it, we’re unexpectedly driving more and more new readers to our site.

Note: On a little side note, I am participating in Blog Engage contest. Please read, comment and tweet my article on how to drive consistent traffic to your blog. 😉

5. Taking advantage of your newsletter/email list

Most people now know that having a list is essential in blogging yet STILL believe it or not, most bloggers still don’t have one. What do we do now? Simple, take advantage of the fact that we have a list! Having your own email list has several advantages. You could a).connect with people who are interested in the niche that your are into b). drive them to your blog, get them to read your content c). cultivate that relationship that could eventually enable you to sell and push some products to them.

I know some people would find it quite an investment to pay $20 a month for an email marketing tool like Aweber but I think its really really a major investment. I think Aweber still has this $1 for 1st month promo. If you’re interested, take advantage of it now and see if its for you or not.

So, those are my 5 clever tips that could help you drive more traffic to your blog and more importantly, this is a traffic that converts (as a reader, as a customer). If you have some questions or would like to share some other tips, please comment on the comment form below.