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Learn What Writing About Practical Matters Has in Store for You

by Melvin · Jun 11, 2011

This is a guest post written by Laurence Mitchel

Let’s face it; we’re all either trying to be the next Perez Hilton or the founders of a tech-focused version of The Huffington Post. Even if our pursuits aren’t exactly to relay the latest rumors or break the most recent news story, when we blog we tend to focus on subjects that we know to be exciting and culturally relevant. The only problem with that is it produces an echo chamber blistered from the amount of repetitious information that trickles its away down through Internet popularity. You might have a wholly unique perspective on the Arab Spring but that won’t do much but add on to the millions of emitted opinions on the issue that make their way online, many of which come from people directly involved. It’s hard to compete with that no matter what you have to say.

Sometimes all it takes is re-looking at the relevancy of certain things in our own lives to realize there’s actually a lot more we could be talking about that we actually can provide some authority on. Successful blogs derive their success from the writer’s authority on a particular issue. Even if you’re just a Californian gossip queen, if you can talk about celebrities in a way most others can’t, that’s how you net a massive following. Since the seemingly exciting topics have already been taken, new bloggers should consider less dynamic and more practical topics to write about.

Topics like how to choose the right sealing wax for your car might seem boring, but not when you consider the fact that there are surely a few thousand people at least who would read what you had to say on the subject if you knew what you were talking about. You might even be the only person online who projects any level of expertise on the subject and collect all the potential readership. A storage blog, as completely uninteresting as that may sound, is above al practical. People commit personal property to long term storage all the time and are probably dying to get some layperson’s opinion on the best way going about it. You’d really be surprised how some of these off-center topics catch on with the right readers.

Everybody is an expert at something. I happen to be pretty good at doing everything I can to work the least amount. That’s a blog topic that could last me months right there. Maybe you’re a former dry cleaner or medical coder, and being laid off has actually given you the opportunity to turn that talent around and use it as a means to sound off free worthwhile advice. Who knows you could be initiating a movement. Just think: “how to store dry cleaning long term – part one”.

Sounds really practical isn’t it? What do you think?

May 21 Aftermath, Is Your Blog Still Alive? (lol)

by Melvin · May 22, 2011

We were long told by Mr.Camping that the world would end by May 21st and not surprisingly, it didn’t happen. Out of curiosity, during that day I kind of like acted like its going to really happen. I was very quiet and vigilant. I tried not to go online that much and just reflected on my own life. Well, just a weird act on my end. 😉

Anyway, May 21 has ended and one thing I realized is how I haven’t posted in this blog in a while. Its funny because I’ve just written a post on how I could focus on this blog again. Long story short, shortly after writing that post I went to the province and when I came back it seemed like I have forgotten everything about what I’m doing online.

May 21’s Doomsday

Obviously, that’s another failed ~~scholarly~~ guess by Harold Camping and every person who believed in that prediction is downright stupid. But even still, let’s not mention that. We could pick a few takeaways on that day though that we could use on our very own advantage.

In my case, I haven’t worked in this blog for like the entire 2011. All I have are plans, specifically elaborated by strategies. Yeah, I’m good at creating long-ass plans but whether I could take action and implement those things consistently remains unseen. So there, I could pick that up and use that deficiencies to my own wonder.

May 21 2011 is a date to remember in one that it brought a lot of humorous things online and offline. The hashtags related to that were so popular in Twitter and reading all those things could take forever. But maybe the important thing here for us bloggers is to evaluate if we’re still blogging at our very own pace. If not, then maybe we can use that day, reevaluate things and start working again like its a new beginning. I know it sounds corny.

Making Money Blogging What You Love

by Melvin · Apr 17, 2011

In a recent local blogging conference that I attended, I noticed that most bloggers here blog about things that they genuinely love and like. What I mean there is that they don’t blog about making money or blog about something that they would get easily bored. And of course that is always a good sign.

Just like majority of bloggers attending blogging conferences, these people want to make money with their blogs. In fact, maybe that’s a big reason why they attend conferences, to learn how to make money while blogging about something that they love.

But the question is, can you really make money blogging about what you love?

Two Part Answer

Yes

The first answer is yes, its possible. Look at a lot of famous bloggers out there. Darren Rowse for instance, loves photography so he has a blog with and he makes money. So that’s writing and blogging on a topic that he really feels good about. Look at the tech bloggers out there, they get a lot of free stuff because they write about technology. And writing for them isn’t hard at all since this is what they live and breath.

Another good example is myself. I blog about internet marketing and blogging and I make some money out of this blog too yet I really love to do internet marketing. I used to blog about basketball because I have passion for it and I made some money on that blog too. So the first of the two part answer is yes, it’s possible.

No

Obviously the second answer to the question is no (lol, its either yes or no so it shouldn’t be hard you to guess it ). One component that enables bloggers to make money from their blogs is the size of the market that they’re into. Imagine, most money is made because of things like advertising and selling products and stuff. And that only becomes possible when there’s enough people interested in that area/niche.

Take a look at the niches that we mentioned above. Internet marketing, technology, photography, making money online. Obviously what’s common with them is that a lot of people are looking for information about them. They’re scouring like mad people trying to find stuff to read regarding those things. For the most part, people are willing to spend for what they’re looking for! And when that’s the case, the thing that we love becomes profitable.

Now unfortunately it’s not a general rule which means it doesn’t apply to everything. Some people have interest in blogging about their own personal ramblings and they love to write about it. Problem is that’s not something that a lot of people are interested to so the size of the market is very slim and money is hard to make. Some others like to talk about let’s say naruto or some japanese anime. Maybe a good number of people are into the same thing but the monetization model that they can use is very limited thus very little can be made as well. Among all that, the size of the market is just one of the factors (but a very big factor to consider) that we must consider.

So that’s it. As what most people teach, the money can be made in blogging by finding the intercept between things that you care and things that enough people are interested too so that you’re not left out alone when you started blogging yourself. Not the most pleasing thing to hear but that’s how bloggers make good money out of doing something that they like.

I wanna know your opinion about. What do you think?

Reviving This Blog & Some Updates

by Melvin · Apr 14, 2011

For the past 2-3 months or so I have been not that active in the blogosphere and that’s very evident with the lack of posts here in this blog. I have just 12 posts so far for the entire year and this is very different from the previous years that I had with this blog.

What I’ve been up to lately?

I’ve been up to so many things for the year and obviously you can never do so many things at a time. I have my normal day job taking still most of my time (8 hours). Then I have consulting and client work w/c is something that I have been doing since late September last year. That amounts to something like 12-14 hours a day of work. The remaining time is usually spent on some of my properties online that I try to maintain once in a while. Now do take note that’s just for work time and we all know living a life is not all about working if you know what I mean.

And that leaves to very little to no time at all for blogging. This kind of like sucks for me because I recently just published a post about maintaining your blog when you’re busy, yet its me who can’t maintain the blog while I’m busy. 😀

The original plan was for me to do blog-related stuff every weekend but that is often sabotage since I have to fill up some time during weekends for some of my clients in exchange for an added compensation. Sometimes, I do not work on some days during weekdays so I have to compensate during either Saturday or Sunday.

I gotta tell you that doing client work and consulting is so lucrative (especially for me who’s living here in Philippines). You can pretty much just do it for a couple of hours yet make more money than what you usually make in a day or 2 for your day job. But the drawback is its not as fulfilling as blogging and doing your own stuff. You could be enjoying it for first two months until you realize that your passion isn’t really there.

What’s Next For Me?

Believe it or not, I dropped consulting and client work. 🙂 I have a couple of reason for doing it. The first one is to revert back to me living a normal life (not a workaholic life) and the second one is for me to focus on doing what I really want which is blogging and doing my own stuff. That’s why I realized that maybe this is the right time to start doing what I have been doing for most of my life.

This means that I will be posting occasionally again to this blog, while interacting and being active on the blogosphere once more. I sure missed out a lot of the things that I’m doing like commenting, going to social sites and interacting, doing guest posts, lurking in forums and so on. Hopefully the free time that I will get will enable me to do these things again.

So that’s it. For some of my readers who were pissed off with my lack of activity, I would like to ask for an apology. Make sure you follow me up, and you’re hooked up with my newsletter so you don’t miss out things that I announce. 🙂 See ya!

iBlog 7 Experience and New Learnings

by Melvin · Apr 6, 2011

As mentioned in my previous local events posts, its just been since last two years (2009) since I started attending (or more so becoming more aware) local events here. I have been a blogger since 2006 but I haven’t been that much involved in the local scenes primarily because the demographics that I am catering to is more of foreign for most of my blogs / past projects.

Anyway iBlog7 is the second iBlog event that I attended. Funny how I missed iBlog 1-5 though. 🙂 Just in case you don’t know, iBlog is THE largest blogging summit here in Philippines in w/c lots of bloggers, PR practitioners, business persons alike grace the event. I met some people here last year that have become my friends since then while I also have finally seen some of the respected figures in the local scenes like Janette Toral, Carlo Ople and so on.

I’m not anymore going to discuss each and every talk made in the event since most people have already done that. Or you can just make a reference to the iBlog’s official site to see the topics that have been tackled all throughout the event.

Me Speaking

Yay! I haven’t really been posting a lot in this blog lately so you’re probably unaware that I was one of the speakers in the event.

So obviously I was feeling some nerves during my talk mainly because I haven’t spoken in front of that amount of audience. You can consider that as my first stint to a big blogging event so my mouth was kind of like drying as I was speaking.

The topic that I tackled is entitled “Blog Traffic 102” in w/c I talked about some ‘modern’ ways that I always use to drive traffic to my blogs. The way I planned it was for me to tackle that topic in-depth and obviously that didn’t turn out very well since I just had about 20 minutes to talk about it. But in the end, I thought I did pretty well but of course there are still lots of room for improvement.

If you’re looking for the PowerPoint presentation, kindly grab it here. Hint: The amount of helpful resource links inside is enormous and is something that a lot of people requested me to share in this blog post but you may want to look at the last slide as well since there’s a free gift link in that slide. =p

Learnings

The reason I attend these events aside from the networking part is because it always amazes me how I learn lots of things during the event. It’s not just about the tips or sleek tricks but its also about the intangible things that we, as bloggers usually forget. Like for me, I’ve been making money from blogging since a long time but I never really realized that much before how the money part is just 10% of the ‘industry’.

Sometimes its the other things that make blogging much more fulfilling. Things like helping out other people unknowingly, like fighting for something that we believe in, having our own advocacies, reaching out to people. Its about having that community that I admittingly, sometimes think I don’t have nor I cared about. And of course its the variety of people that you will meet that will help you grow more as a blogger.

I mean iBlog itself is a free event since it started. No one pays for anything, organizers work hard to do this and do that, and as a result of their hard work, bloggers benefit a lot. So that I think is my biggest reflection in attending this event. Hopefully I can comeback next year not as a speaker, but more of just like a normal blogger. Who knows, I might be able to do some sponsoring and organizing as well in the future. But for now, I’ll just cross my finger. 😉

I’d like to give special credit to the organizers, to Ms.Janette for organizing such a wonderful event. I haven’t done that much networking since a).I was too shy and b).I was too shy. But those who said ‘hi’ to me and asked some questions, I appreciate that.

P.S. If you have a picture of me while on the stage, then please let me know. 😉

Studying How Internet Marketers Roll with Launches

by Melvin · Mar 12, 2011

If you’ve been following our industry lately, you probably have noticed the buzz around this thing called the Software System. I didn’t buy it nor am I against it. And in fact, I’m not here to review it or give my take on it. The reason why I opened that up is to study how internet marketers act or roll with these big-time launches by their industry friends and business partners.

It’s All About Affiliate Marketing

A long time ago, I wrote a post called Affiliate Marketing in blogs where I discussed that unlike in PPC-CPA space, affiliate marketing in blogs is all about building relationships and recommending products that are really really congruent not just with the market, but with their specific needs.

So for example, you can’t just promote a product about making money online in a making money online market. You have to dig deeper into that and find their inner needs. Is it making money through memberships? or about blogging? product launches? This just doesn’t apply to blogs, it applies to people with lists as well.

As you can see, you will get nowhere when you don’t identify the inner needs and desire of your market. With this, you really really have to be specific with your offer.

The Software System Launch

First and foremost, I would like to give this disclaimer that I’m not a product launch guru. I really am not that’s why I constantly watch and study different things. What I’m going to outline here is just all my 2 cents.

Obviously the software system isn’t your typical “make money on the internet” kind of hype. It focuses on creating softwares and selling them to a bunch of people and making tons of money. During that launch guys like John Chow, Jeremy Schoemoney, Jeff Walker, Frank Kern and a bunch of smaller marketers and bloggers jumped on the bandwagon and promoted it. For this post, I would be using the big 4 mentioned above.

During the period, these guys were emailing people like crazy and for almost everyday (twice a day for Kern for instance). Now let’s (briefly) take a look at some of their emails during the launch day:

John Chow’s Offer:

Jeff Walker’s offer:

Shoe’s offer:

Kern’s offer:

Noticed the same patterns in their emails on that launch day? Hmm, interesting…

Incentivization – the art of bribing

As funny as it may sound, all of them (and some more others) have this kind of a bribe to further more try to convince their readers to purchase UNDER their link. And all of them are claiming that by spending $2700 on that product, they would get over that price value in return. How unreal could that possibly be? Can I buy a Kia and get an Audi in return?

I know it sounds crazy but incentivization is a big part in launches and also a big reason why marketers (both the owner and the affiliate) make so much money. The incent value that they’re giving away is just the “perceived value”, not the real price tag but since a lot of smart marketers have built good communities around them, most people trust them and believe that they’re really getting a good value for the amount they’re spending (w/c maybe is true or maybe not).

So I think that’s the important thing to learn here. People’s averseness (means resisting) to buy something online these days makes it much harder for us, marketers to go out and sell our own stuff w/o giving away a lot in return. It also speaks on how crucial relationship building is in this type of business since people obviously won’t buy from you and anything you recommend, unless they trust you and see you as a prominent person in your market.

This trend started a long time ago and I believe it would only continue for a very long period of time. As an internet marketer and/or blogger, are you in this game too?

Minimizing Blog Elements and Why Should

by Melvin · Mar 5, 2011

One of the more noticeable changes in my recent blog redesign is that there are way fewer elements than ever. The 2.0 version of the blog before was probably the most cluttered design I ever had and even though I really, really like it, I realized that there really isn’t that much use for most of the elements in there. Heck that design even had 2 sidebars in it and a bunch of free space to play with.

I’m not sure if bloggers are aware but minimizing some of the elements is really the way to go. I would use this blog as an example. Before, I used to have so many elements and widgets on the sidebar, footer, header and etc. For instance, I had those recent readers widget, that mini navigator plugin, a bunch of list of links and a whole lot of redundancies (duplicate elements etc.). Then I evaluated, am I really using these elements? Do I benefit from putting some of it here and there? Or am I just wasting some space?

Obviously the easy answer is yes, I’m just wasting space. A recent reader widget is nothing but a widget to show some flair, a mini navigator plugin is a redundancy since users can navigate themselves using the menu bar, excessive number of ad zones also harm since no one’s really buying them. Aside from that I looked at my stats using a bunch of my tracking tools and I saw that users don’t really use most of the elements that I put in the blog. The behavior of most of my readers is that they check out a post or two and then comment and then leave. No one’s looking at this, no one’s clicking there and etc.

To add to that, I looked into my Google Webmaster Central and saw that my blog’s loading time is really slow (as slow as John Chow’s blog, lol). Those things have strongly convinced me that a change is needed.

Cut Out Some Elements!

So that’s my advice to you. Look, as an average web surfer/reader/lurker, we can only do so much on one’s site. I occasionally go to NBA.com but do I really use all of their features there? No, but NBA is an exception since its a large website and is widely visited by a lot of people all over the globe. But us bloggers? I know we all want to keep people browsing and staying for awhile but trust me, that’s not the way to go.

Another factor is loading time which I mentioned above. I live here in Asia and I know our internet here is just sub par comparing to countries like say US or Europe. If you have all those elements and 50% of your traffic is coming from a country that has a mediocre internet connection then that would give a bad user experience.

If those factors still don’t convince you then just remember the things I mentioned above. You have this, this and this in your sidebar and this in your footer. Ask yourself a question. What is this for? Do I benefit from it or does my readers benefit from this? Does it fit in well with my branding and stuff like that? Why not run some advance tracking tools on your blog to see if your readers are really noticing and using those things?

Believe it or not, I still feel that I need to remove some more elements here in this blog. I need to fill in some spots (dang I have four subfooters!) but I have to balance that with what I want and what I don’t want.

Lastly, look at some of the cluttered popular blogs around. Most of them made some redesigns recently and one thing to notice is that they have undergone a major revamp by removing things that they no longer need and by putting up a cleaner design. How about you? Are you ready to cut down the clutter and excess?