MelvinBlog

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

Blog

Why Video Posts Can Generate More Traffic For Your Blog

by ·

This is a guest post by Amanda Green

Many bloggers have recently experimented with video use on their site. While there are many different challenges and considerations that one should keep in mind when making the transition to video, one benefit of the medium is abundantly clear: video, when incorporated correctly and on the right type of site, can almost guarantee a boost in traffic as a result of its use.

Why is this? Let’s take a look at some of the main reasons:

-Higher search result ranking. Several studies have shown that Google’s search results, in an effort to provide a broad range of search-friendly content, has a policy of strongly favoring video results over written ones. In fact, a piece in video form is almost fifty times more likely to organically make the front page than a similar piece composed of text. Video, then, can be an instrumental tool in bringing first-time visitors to your site.

-Differentiated content. Video naturally adds a diversity of content to a website. This can keep things interesting for both the blogger and for the loyal reader, but it can also have the effect of making the blog more appealing to more people in the first place. Some people are visually-inclined by nature and are likely to find a site with a good video mix to be highly appealing. Such diversification helps turn a greater percentage of first-time visitors into loyal returners.

-SEO benefits. Video further offers numerous SEO benefits that can translate into larger traffic volumes. For example, a blogger who effectively uses video tags, establishes video libraries, properly embeds streaming features into a site, and integrates with social media can boost his search result ranking and inbound traffic while lowering bounce rates. You may want to consult an SEO advisor for further link-building and integration assistance.

-More money. Finally, video posts can bring in more money for a website, which in turn can be used towards marketing approaches that generate exposure and traffic. The reason they procure more money is because advertisers have been flocking towards embedded video advertising in the past 1-2 years – and they are willing to pay high rates for the privilege. Bloggers who incorporate the medium correctly can consequently expect more money in their bank accounts and greater spending flexibility for their business credit card or credit card low APR.

These are the main ways that video blogging can help you boost traffic towards your site. While video is not appropriate for every topic or area of content, those bloggers that find a use for it can certainly reap substantial rewards as a result.

LeadsMarket Payday Loan Affiliate Program Review

LeadsMarket Payday Loan Affiliate Program Review

by ·

This review is sponsored by LeadsMarket.

I usually shy away from reviewing or associating myself to any ‘payday loan’ related topics but when Leads Market approached me and showed me some press links and resources to their site, I decided that it wouldn’t be really bad to do a review for them considering they are an affiliate program and that I have been ‘sort of’ blogging into that space with this blog for quite some time.

Introducing LeadsMarket.com

Leads Market is a ‘new’ affiliate network that seems to be focusing more on payday loan offers. Their website, on first glimpse, suggests that they are a fully fledged affiliate network. They state in their homepage that they have other offers as well such as dating, mortgages, flowers, etc., however, some quick browsing would reveal that they seem to be more functioning as a payday loan affiliate program and nothing else at the moment.

Also if you go to their website, the title of their main page is ‘The Best Affiliate Internet Marketing Program’ which sounds like a bit vague to me since it seems to be there just to target a very broad keyword. The design of their entire website, while its clean and simple, looks somewhat generic to me. On the good side, it does present some good materials on their homepage and they also have an FAQ where you can read stuff to know more about them. Here’s a good look on their site:

Overall, the site looks somehow not complete yet, as they seem to be still working out on some other stuff at the moment. And that’s why they are primarily a payday loan affiliate program for now as I understand.

Benefits & Exclusivity

Just like every other affiliate network, they’re presenting some benefits and exclusivity in their affiliate network. One of those is getting direct exclusive offers from them. Leads Market runs offers that are ONLY available to them and nowhere else. As an affiliate, this is a good benefit since there would be less competition considering the specific offer you’re promoting is not that saturated yet.

Another benefit that they are promoting is the commissions. Leads Market claims that their affiliates get a ‘lion’s share of commission’. This is due to the fact that they are an advertiser themselves,  not middle-man which most of the affiliate networks are. They also do what most networks do which is providing their top affiliates with payout bonuses per month.

Speaking of payouts, Leads Market has the standard NET 30 payout which means you’ll have to wait 30 more days from the end of the Calendar month. This is a bit long if you ask me however, you can structure a more flexible payout terms with them if you are one of their top affiliates. Payments are made via check, Direct deposit, PayPal, Payoneer and PayQuicker.

Lastly, just like other networks, they do provide top-notch support and good technology (e.g. tracking, creatives, etc.). Communication with your affiliate manager is very very important as every affiliate knows. The success of the affiliate somehow depends on the quality of the affiliate manager that he has. And with that, support plays a really really vital role for this. Hopefully LeadsMarket has experienced affiliate managers and dedicated support team to help you out on this.

Conclusion

I don’t have any first hand experience with Leads Market myself since I just recently signed up, and therefore I cannot really make any personal recommendations myself on whether they’re worth it or not. As I mentioned, they are relatively new in the space and do not seem to be that popular yet. A quick search for Leads Market will not even yield that much results yet for them.

While I may not be recommending them yet, I would highly highly suggest you to at least check them out, and perhaps signup and see if the offers are enticing enough for you to stay. Payday loans are usually high paying offers which are not that hard to promote considering that its mostly cost per lead and that the consumer just need to input some stuff and meet some minimal requirements in order for them to qualify as a lead. However, payday loans are also a bit regulated and there used to be and still there are lots of shady offers existing in the vertical. That would be a pretty good challenge for Leads Market to take in this regard since they are primarily a payday loan affiliate program.

So that’s it, feel free to check LeadsMarket.com and if you already have experience with them, feel free to comment below.

 

 

Maximizing Search Traffic For Old Blog Posts

Maximizing Search Traffic For Old Blog Posts

by ·

If there’s a type of blog entry that is potentially getting traffic from search right now, its undoubtedly your old blog entries. As we all know, search engine traffic takes time. No one really writes or puts out something, and then expects search engines to start sending traffic to that content as soon as its published. That’s why its really more long term and that I always tell people to just do the basic search stuff, but not get too obsessed with it. In short, do other online marketing stuff as well and don’t really on Google.

In this blog entry I would just like to share some rambling stuff regarding search engine traffic here in this blog. As you all know, I haven’t been blogging actively for quite a while now and in fact I’m not that much into the game anymore. So understandably, the traffic that this site is getting is considerably lower than ever. And because of that, its easier for me to spot the increased search traffic that I started getting.

While the traffic increase for the past 18 months is not massive, its very evident that I started getting more traffic from search and that comes with me not posting that much during the period of increase. And the traffic is still consistent as of this writing. More search traffic when not posting too much, amazing? No.

The truth is even if I am posting consistently, I would still get the same (or more) amount of search traffic because the content that are getting the hits from search are old blog entries.

Now I’m not really a search guy. I wrote before about writing for search engines but I don’t mostly work with doing SEO stuff. I love putting out content and engaging but I’m not a search guy. However, the reason I started getting more search traffic is quite a bit surprising.

About 3 years ago I wrote a cheesy post about the best birthday gift for the girl that I love (or more accurately I have a crush with). That was college days so please understand that I was dealing with puppy loves and whatnot. :p. Now, I noticed that I started getting like 10-20 hits a day regarding keywords related to that blog entry. I was obviously surprised because the article was not written in a way that one would expect it would get traffic.

So when I got convinced that I had to do something to get better traffic, I studied the Analytics and Webmaster Central data even more. And then I edited the said blog entry to try to ‘massage’ it more and eventually get better rankings. I’m not really able to follow it closely because of work but for the past 2 months, I realized that I’m now getting 30-50 hits from search from keywords that are related to that blog entry. It was fascinating because I never really expected it to get traffic from search at all. Also, its on the first page of Google right now when you search for ‘best birthday gifts for girls’ which I thought was amazing.

And now there are some other keywords that I never intended to rank for that are ranking well and are getting me some traffic.

Moral Lesson

So what’s the moral lesson of this blog post? The lesson is to never underestimate traffic from search engines. But another is that when you feel like you are starting to get some, don’t be afraid to make modifications to that specific blog post. You have all the data to look at from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central and it reveals almost everything to help you. Do some tweaks and those little tweaks can definitely help.

My stance on not getting too caught up with doing SEO is still the same and I don’t still consider myself as a guy doing search engine optimization primarily but it definitely gives me some things to experiment for now.  And getting search traffic and maximizing it is something that I know will be useful in the long run.

How about you? What’s your no.1 tip in maximizing search traffic?

Getting Back to ‘Basketball Blogging’

by ·

I mentioned many times in the past how I got started with blogging, and it was through blogging about basketball, particularly the NBA. Ideally it was my plan to blog about other areas of basketball like local basketball, European leagues, collegiate basketball, etc. however it was pretty obvious that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it due to my lack of knowledge on other areas and time constraints as well (was a student at the time).

Anyway back to ‘getting back’ to basketball blogging, I used to own a personal basketball blog called Basketball Nonsense that I started 2007. It was nothing really eye-catching as its just a ramblings blog about basketball (NBA) where I just rant about players that I don’t like and write about my own analysis on things. Long story short, it started getting popular and started making money although it was never massive. I sold the blog for 300  some dollars which at the time was amazing for me. I was so thrilled with the amount that I accepted the bid right away.

Even with the sale, I still wrote for the blog as a paid writer for the next 4-5 months. And even after that period, I would still normally write or comment about an article there just because I needed a place to write something regarding my thoughts about basketball.  Offline, I usually have friends who I talk to about basketball almost every single day. I guess anyone who follows basketball know that it isn’t really out of the ordinary to talk about basketball 24-7.

Back to Blogging about NBA Basketball

It was a long story and even now I don’t still have the complete ownership of the blog. But since I’ve hosted the site for perhaps over a year now for free, I decided to take on a more active role regarding writing content on the blog.

Basketball Nonsense is not an amazing blog at all and in fact, it gets less than 50 hits a day for the past 1.5 years. My goal is to write more content again on that blog however I’m not really too keen on monetizing it or making it like Slam Online or something. If it gets traffic and comments, fine but right now, I just want to write my thoughts about basketball on some web property. And since there’s a property that I used to own, why not write on that existing one?

All in all, this is ‘blogging for passion’ in action. I’m just so glad I can write once more about basketball and offer my ‘scholarly’ thoughts about what’s happening and engage to the community once again.  And to start with, I made some minor revamps on design and will still continue to enhance its look and then later focus on writing more.

But that’s it for now. Visit the blog and let me know what you think!

The Death of Complex Blog Designs (& My Own Redesign)

by ·

When I started being aware of blogs, most of the blogs at the time were pretty much sporting a generic design. The simple blog layout was usually just a 2 column layout, a simple header, simple footer and dull colors. Of course I just followed the herd and had those design on my blogs.

Now as time passed by, more and more blog design companies introduced more flexible yet complex themes.  All of a sudden all normal blogs started sporting the ‘magazine’ look and I was one of them of course. 😉 The simple 2 column layout became obsolete quickly and multiple sidebars, multi subheaders and footers started becoming the ‘in thing’. And based on the past designs of this blog, you can see that I was very much following the trend.

MelvinBlog 4.0

Even though I’ve been mostly using magazine style themes, I’m a big fan of simple blog designs such as DailyBlogTips and DoshDosh (which is dead nowadays). I always thought like their blog loads in no time and that its very very pleasing in the eyes. And thus, it encouraged me to find a simpler design and finally move away from the magazine style template.

Now you can argue that my current design may still not be the ‘simplest’ of all however you can easily see that this design moves far away from the previous designs where I had fancy sliders, colorful images, thumbnails and etc. Instead, this design just focuses on content and nothing else. The readability, spacing is definitely much better and the elements can breathe easier based on how the theme is designed. And while I still have 2 sidebars, the widgets that I have utilized is much lesser than the past designs. And lastly I cut down on redundancy by eliminating stuff that are pretty much just wasting the space.

Now using StudioPress Framework

And if you’re wondering what theme it is, then the answer is its StudioPress. In the past designs I mostly pick themes that are not so mainstream. The past theme was from someone in ThemeForest and while I like it, its clear that its pretty hard to expand from the theme itself due to that there’s really not much people behind it.

With StudioPress, you’re talking about the flexible framework but you’re also after the interactive support from the community. I’m sure its still going to take me some time to understand features such as hooks but they’re definitely not lacking on resources on how to help users like me understand it. So all in all I’m happy so far with my transition to the StudioPress Framework and thus I would highly recommend you to at least take a look at them.

Death of Complex Designs.

Now getting back to the death of complex flashy blog designs, I would say that most bloggers in this space have moved into a more simple approach as well. Shoemoney’s blog has been much cleaner now and loads a ton quicker as well. John Chow who has been notorious for plastering his blog with as much stuff as possible has also decided to cut down more. I have a lot on the list but you should find out yourself that blogs these days seem to be getting back more on basic designs with basic layout and stuff.  Or perhaps is it just in this industry?

Perhaps this has also something to do with the decline of the ‘meta-blogging’ (blogging about blogging, blogging about making money blogging) trend. The strength of meta-blogging mostly hinges through advertising money, affiliate referral, and product sales in general and when you’re talking about those things, you’re talking about putting more and more ‘clutter’ to your blog one way or another. Its like the ‘more banners the better chance I can make money’ kind of thinking. And now that its dead, bloggers are quickly moving away from all the clutter by either changing their approach or just simply forgetting about blogging for money.

And therefore, what used to be “dull” seems to be the cool thing again these days. What say you?

Resurrection of my Blogging Life + Drastic Changes Ahead…

by ·

So what’s up? It’s been almost 3 months since I last posted here in this blog and the last two posts didn’t even seem like “real” posts from me. 🙂 Overall, I just posted less than 40 posts for the past year and just 4 in the past 4 months. Oh yea!

I’m sure you’ve heard me before coming up with a lot of alibis and excuses for the lack of posts and today, I would still do the same by saying that I’ve been busy the past year with my work primarily and other client tasks.  But the difference is that I will not come up with a list this time of what to expect from this blog. But rather I would discuss some drastic changes going forward.

Reverting back to casual posting

One of the things that I’ve done in the past 2 years (more evidently the past year) is that I moved slowly from being a casual blogger that has passion for internet marketing and blogging to a blogger who wants to build expertise and strictly cater to that expertise. I started to “act” like a guru on something and thus wanted to connect to my audience as someone who knows A LOT about something rather than just simply being myself. Obviously this has burned me out to the point that I hated writing here anymore.

When I was just getting started about 4 years ago, I idolized Shoemoney because he’s just so ‘plain’. He writes something useful about our industry but he also writes a lot about ‘personal crap’ or things that he’s interested but most of is audience are not. And I used to post like that. I had a lot ‘childish’ posts about having a bunch of mouse for my PC, receiving gadgets from companies, and even love life posts. It’s not really “so professional” but its enjoying.

Going back to what I was doing the past year, it became clear that its “unfulfilling”. I started to work on things like capturing more newsletter subscribers, strategizing on funneling prospects to buyers, writing bait posts that will eventually get readers to get my incentives and all of those ‘Frank Kern’ type of ninja things.   Of course, no offense to Frank, but I was not built that way.

And last but certainly not the least, Robb Sutton’s post about ‘Blogging needing to get back to its roots‘ made me realize a bunch of things as well. So props to you Rob!

What will change & what will not

Does this mean I’m not going to monetize this blog anymore? No of course! Ads are still there and will always be there forever. I haven’t really made that much money from ads recently (probably less than $1500 for the past year) however I still see a lot of value in the “spaces” of this blog. I’m not going to push this too much but ads will remain. 🙂

How about the usual ‘marketing’ shit like capturing email leads, funneling them, selling info products to them, upselling etc.? I will probably still however this will never ever be a priority. In fact, I don’t even think I’m going to do anything aside from getting some newsletters out. I don’t see myself putting out any product today, and in the future. 😉

How about the posts? As mentioned above, I will do more casual posts. More of “I feel good about writing this today” kind of thing. Maybe not so much as say posting cat pictures, or ranting about neighbors and colleagues and stuff. But it depends on how I feel. I’m sure I’m going to lose out some readers along the way but hey this is my blog.

I will probably be doing some massive changes to some pages to reflect the shift of focus for this blog. Sure, pages like Freebies, Why Subscribe to my Blog will remain unchanged but as mentioned, the blog will not revolve around showcasing those things anymore. I’d be happy if I get more and more readers however, as long as I’m feeling good about what I’m doing, then I will just continue it. 🙂

So whats next?

I don’t know! I’ll probably write next about the version 4.0 design of this blog and then some ramblings here and there. The one thing to keep in mind is that MelvinBlog will still continue to be an internet marketing /blogging blog however I wouldn’t be pressuring myself too much about coming up with guides and rich-content type of posts. I may put out some posts about a marketing strategy that worked well for me but that would be few and far between.

As I’m writing this, I’m actually getting more and more excited about this ‘rebirth’  in blogging. I haven’t really written anything on ANY other blogs of mine but that FOR SURE will change in the coming months. Either for the good or the bad, not much that I cared anyway. 😉