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Social Media Users Finding Better Jobs After College? Probably.

by Melvin · Mar 1, 2011

This is a guest post written by Jayson Jones

It’s a virtual age. Life is shaped by technology, the days are defined by online explorations, and all college graduates have been exposed to the world of networks and exchanges.

It is only wise therefore to expect those exchanges to yield results beyond the common greetings. They are instead to offer potential careers.

Industry is changing. What was once a limitation of resources, a force of on-site conversations, has instead sprawled out. Virtuality now connects all companies; and graduates seeking to inject themselves into the fray must understand how to use this to their advantage. Social media dominates all things — and, while there can be no guarantee of succeeding through this venue, the statistics are shaded favorably. The benefits can’t be denied.

Career Decisions

The future is a vast thing — frightening with all of its possibilities. There is no certainty of victory, only the desire for it; and recent graduates may find themselves overwhelmed, unsure of what career path to take. Social media helps to lessen the burden, however. Individuals who don’t know how to properly tailor their degrees can use sites like LinkedIn to discover all of the many opportunities.

LinkedIn (established in 2003) is a business-oriented network that encourages those of similar fields to become aware of each other. As of 2011, however, it also offers a unique tool for guests: the Career Explorer.

Graduates can provide information like their experiences, degrees and interests; and the Explorer will then calculate potential positions. Paths can be discovered, rewritten and possibly even began all from the computer. This helps to ensure no decision is ignored.

Network Aid

The world of business is shaped to communication. No company is formed of silent managers, the dull employees. Instead there’s a demand for words and ideas. Networking helps to make those ideas a little easier to trade, though.

Popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit allow individuals to recognize all relevant posts and conversations. Instant access is offered, and this ensures that no graduate will be without the necessary updates. All can instead track corporations, note any career openings and follow developments. Knowledge provides a better chance for success.

Brand Building

No resume is enough. No first impression can be won with just a smile. This is a modern era and the traditional notions of earning careers are now considered antiquated. Individuals must instead understand who they are and what they wish to offer. They must build a brand. Social media provides graduates with the ability to present themselves to the world — through videos, blogs, RSS feeds and more.

All information can be charted out and posted. A brand can then be formed, with readers gained and a presence developed. This makes it far easier to contact companies, offering credence to all inquiries (rather than simply sending in a dull page and praying it isn’t overlooked).

Conclusion

Business is no longer confined to the standards of the past. It’s instead reaching toward the convenience of the present — and graduates are urged to do the same. There can be no promise of an online marketing career, but there can be a promise of potential. And that’s all many need.

Jayson Jones is an art student with a focus in Fashion Design. He’s an amateur blogger, and you can find his work at http://www.catwalkcatfight.com/, or follow him on Twitter @jaysonjonez.

The “Writing for Search” Experiment

by Melvin · Feb 19, 2011

As most of you know, I was never really the type of guy who writes for search engines. If you look at my archives, you could literally see that most of my posts are titled by choice and personal preference, and not really to attract search traffic. Aside from that, I don’t really try to do keyword research and see trends and then make a blog post about it just to get some search visitors. I can say that I do probably set up the basic things on this blog search-wise but I don’t really pay that much attention to it nor do I spend a lot of efforts in it.

Obviously that worked for me ever since. I’m more about building relationships and branding myself so most of the traffic coming from this blog are either referral or direct. On my other online businesses (affiliate marketing and niche sites), I probably do more SEO but again I know that’s very little as compared to what some other marketers do.

Early last year, I got curious about writing for search. I was thinking why do people desperately do that. Are they just THAT stupid? or maybe I’m being too harsh. So one day I wrote a test post on a topic that’s trending (I wouldn’t say the topic) and after about 4 days I have seen some traffic with that certain test post. It isn’t ever massive, just about 30 a day but its fascinating because it gets that amount super consistently day by day. Just in case you’re wondering, I did that experiment using my personal blog.

Anyway back to the traffic, the blog gets very little to no traffic since its just a normal personal site but when I did do that test post I started getting 20-40 uniques a day for like up to now (2+ months) which I thought was amazing since I never really did anything after posting that.

I didn’t try generating traffic for that, all I did was wrote a rubbish article on a trending topic and then published it. There’s no maintenance whatsoever too.

Writing for search is something that I loathe and feel that I don’t need to do and obviously I have proven that with this blog and some of my other sites. But that certain test has given me some pretty good ideas on my next upcoming experiments. Am I going to write for search now? Definitely no! An increased focus on search? Maybe.

I know a lot of you here search-optimize your blogs more than I do so what do you think?

Maintaining Your Blog When You’re Busy

by Melvin · Feb 10, 2011

Hard times, they always come don’t they? Imagine, you worked your butts off pretty hard for 6+ months to get steady traffic. You really dedicated your effort to make sure there’s growth in your blog and all of a sudden you learned that you’re going to be busy for the next few months, thus you can only spend so little time for your blog.

Think about this, things online move rapidly. Spending 2 months to promote a blog and get traffic would only take 1 week of full absence to have that traffic diminish. With that in mind, we’re in big trouble. But of course like anything else, there are smart fixes and solutions for that and in this blog post I aim to talk about those things.

Write in one sitting

If you’re really busy, there’s a good chance that you can still have a day or two where you can write some blog posts. Believe its more than enough.

The way I do it most of the times is write my blog posts in one sitting. So basically you could pick your most productive day, in most cases, its every Monday, and then sit down and don’t do anything other than write blog entries. You would be surprised how many high quality articles you can pump out in that day.

For me I usually do it every morning mostly in my home office (anyone can call their room their office 😉 ) and spend almost 6 hours in writing articles. I can then come up with 5-8 blog articles that I can now set on queue. The important thing here is that you have the continuity of content which will definitely help with consistent traffic and awareness around the blogosphere.

Utilize Social Media accounts

In the event that you cannot really go out and market your blog through commenting or other things, you can simply just utilize your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook and etc.

Most people can access this through their mobile phones so just a simple tweet maybe every three hours can do wonders. Social media is still a hot commodity when it comes to traffic generation and if you have good following on social sites then there’s a good chance you can benefit from it a lot by doing it consistently.

Make things Structured and Automated

One thing that I learned a lot ever since having a job is making things automated and structured. Of course before, I thought I was very structured but I know I improved a lot.

Here are some of the things that you can automate so you no longer need to do it manually.

Automate your tweets – This can be done in various ways. You can signup to a service known as twitterfeed. What it does is simply just automatically tweet your latest post published so there’s no need to do it manually. Another is by utilizing this plugin called as Tweet Your Old Post. This brilliant plugin simply just tweets any random posts of yours in a certain time interval and the beauty about this is that you can have control on types of posts that you want to publish. Let’s say you just want to continually publish your top posts. What you can do is filter it using your categories so that you can eliminate your personal posts from being tweeted.
Structure your newsletter series – Just like in posting blog posts, you can actually do your newsletter of one week or 2 in one sitting. In my experience, the best way to do it is every Sunday since you are much more relaxed to write a series of newsletters.
Manage your Ad Inventory with Ease – There are times that you wouldn’t notice there are advertisers looking to advertise on your site. The best way to manage your ad with ease is to use a third-party advertising platform and in my case, I highly recommend using OIO Publisher. OIO automates everything, from setting up banner spaces to accepting payments and even sending out stats. Those things can be done easily with OIO.

Note: OIO Publisher usually costs $47 but if you sign up under my link, you can get a $10 off and instead get it for $37

Seek for outside help

In an event where you feel you really need outside help, you can simply just hire freelancers out there to do things for you. My buddy Carl Ocab, noticeably has done this extensively as he has almost moved away from posting articles on his blog.

Contrary to what most people think, its actually not that expensive. You can simply do a contract that would pay a freelancer on a per article basis so you don’t need to shed a lot of money for something that is not done daily.

You can also hire virtual assistants that can oversee minor operations on your blog such as publishing blog posts, deleting spam comments, answering emails and maintaining small things. Hiring someone can be really really helpful especially if you want to maintain consistency in your blog.

There ya go! Those are the 4 things that you can do to be able to maintain your blog even when you don’t have time to do it on a daily basis. Strategic blogging involves being wise enough in facing certain problems mentioned above. If you can make yourself involved lesser than ever while still reaping the same benefits, then you’re doing it right.

Making Money from Ads, Overrated or Underrated?

by Melvin · Feb 5, 2011

Over the past good years, myriads of posts have been centered with the topic of making money through banner advertising or simply just any type of advertising. Way back from the dot com boom where startup companies were spending lucratively on banner advertisements, from the emergence of blogs and Google Adsense to the last years recession and now today, it seems like so many people just like to talk about banner advertising and their obnoxious take on it.

Initially it was the BEST way to make money online. I mean all you need to have is a web property, a topic and surely you can find some sort kind of sponsors to pay off your living. From there on, you’ll wait for them to get bankrupt and after that you chase for another sponsor. That’s the way it used to be before until big and small companies realized its all overhyped. And from there on some pundits started writing how making money through advertising is overrated and not for everyone. And until the day I write this post. 😉

Why it’s Overrated?

So to tackle it equally in both sides I decided to discuss it separately. Overrated is define as something that’s highly “perceived” as effective yet in reality its not (or maybe thats just the way I define it). Profiting from advertising is overrated because:

It’s very hit and miss – In my blog post about how I doubled my blog advertising income, I concluded everything by saying that advertising income is still very hit and miss. What I mean there is that you can never expect to duplicate the same amount of money or more that you made last month to the current or succeeding months to come. It’s hard to rely on sponsors every month and expect they could pay all your bills.
It’s hard and impossible for an average guy to make a living from it – Advertising is good however, if you’re just like most of us who don’t get millions of hits then its hard to squeeze a lot of money from it. As David Risley stated, if you compare a blog with 1000 visitors trying to make money solely from ads from a blog with 500 readers that is selling something, it’s obvious that the latter one is more profitable. Again, unless you are a site like YouTube, its nearly impossible to live off that advertising income.
Couldn’t be even considered as a business model – This is true. I mean where’s the business in there? All you have to do is set up ad inventories and or use third-party advertising networks. You’re really not doing anything aside from copying and pasting codes and setting up ads so I don’t consider it a business model.

Why it’s Underrated?

Now let’s tackle it from the other side of the fence. Many people nowadays seemed to be so prolific in bashing making money from ads. If you read a lot, then you know what I’m talking about. Profiting from advertising is underrated because:

It’s the pioneer of making money while sleeping (passive income) – Although nowadays there are many ways to make money passively, banner advertising probably is the pioneer of that. From the dot com boom days up to now, if you have a good web property then you can literally set it and forget it. Big sites like Cheezburger can literally not work for one month and I could assure you they would still be making the same amount of revenue from banner advertising. How’s that as an autopilot thing?
Duh! It’s easy – Totally easy that even a man that came from some random cave could literally do it. We heard a lot about selling your own product or having a membership but those things are not for everyone. While on the other hand, trying to profit from Google ads or some other forms of advertising are definitely doable by any average Joe.
You just need traffic and nothing else – In modern blogging, we all know that it’s all about building relationships. After building it, you can funnel it and then later on sell your stuff to them or promote affiliate offers. So with that, it means more than just getting traffic. When you’re profiting though from advertising, all you need is traffic (albeit massive traffic). You don’t need to respond to the comments, you don’t need to watch things closely or whatever. Just the traffic, and you’re living off that traffic.

To end this post, I hope i was able to give each argument a fair explanation on why they’re the best thing ever or not. If you ask me about my personal opinion, I would say banner advertising is still something thats worth looking at not just now but for 10-20 years to come.

Yes I can sell a product or a membership site but I can do that with ads on my sidebar right? Since I have the traffic, why not leverage it more? How about you, what do you think?

Key Ingredients of a Likeable Blog

by Melvin · Jan 30, 2011

Not so many people can create a blog and be a blogger that gets a lot of people to read his blog. That being said its much harder for someone to create a blog and be a blogger that people would like and would love to read to for a long time.

I know that of course, I’m a lurker. In my free times, I do a lot of blog hopping and try to see what the blogosphere is talking about. Some blogs are good and I like them a lot while some are good, yet I don’t feel like I ever want to get associated with them. And that’s the truth, needless to say.

There seems to be some key substance or ingredients that make a blog or the blogger that’s behind it likeable for people and for this post I’d like to share them to you based on my own experience. If you find that I’m missing something in the list, feel free to let me know it through the contact form. Anyhow here’s the list:

1. The blog loads smoothly and quickly

Let’s face it, blogs these days are plastered with ads. Look at you’re blog, look at my blog, look at this blog. But the truth is that it does not mean that your blog has to look cluttered, the truth is that there’s a lot of ways still to make a blog presentable and look uncluttered. And that is by making sure your blog loads smoothly and quickly.

There’s nothing worse than craving to find information only to wait for days and days before that info loads (of course “days” is a hyperbole description). I experienced that too and it took me a while to realize that my blog was loading slow enough for people to actually just move away and bounce from my site.

2. The author cares to reply to comments

These days, it can quite be hard to drive and attract traffic to your site especially if you’re just starting out. There’s just so much to read and there’s a chance that someone is always better than you, writes better content and knows more. So how do we counter that as a smaller blogger? Well the simple answer is to interact better to our audience.

As obvious these days, blogs that get loyal audience are the blogs that care about their readers. For my own perspective, I always feel appreciated everytime someone takes some time to reply to my comments and thats the reality about it. You may not be able to reply to all comments or may not be able to do it in a timely manner. But what’s important is to at least show you interact with them.

3. It’s easy to connect to them

Blogging is often associated to social media simply because they’re really connected to each other. You see, I have a blog but because I have a blog, I also use Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon or whatever. What makes a blogger approachable and easy to connect to is when he/she shares his/her information publicly to his readers. When connecting to him/her is easy.

4. When the blogger is nice and transparent

By saying nice, I don’t mean angelic or religious in some way or another. What I mean is that the blogger is nice and a true person. Here’s the thing, I myself is a big advocate of criticizing someone and in my blog I always voice out if some things or tools suck and that’s because its who I am.

I wrote a post not so long ago entitled, “its not about making controversy, it’s about being me” and in that I emphasized the importance of being yourself and not faking it. Although I also covered the consequences that one could face by being so transparent. Blogging is a human to human connection and I haven’t seen anyone succeeded who’s pretending to be someone else.

5. They reward their readers once in a while

This is a big reason for most readers and audience why they have to stay. Not all bloggers do this and I’m not talking about rewarding someone by giving him cash or gadgets. What I’m talking about is the simple things like commenting back on the blog, or giving a mention or link love. How about a simple retweet or a stumble? Those things are really small yet they mean a lot especially for your readers.

Those are the 5 things that I think makes a blog and its blogger likeable . They are definitely simple things but the effects can be dramatic especially for the growth of the community of your blog.

Did you notice I haven’t even included writing good content? Yes, writing superb articles will always be a factor for one’s success but good writers and informational blogs aren’t really always likeable, you know what I mean? People read for two things, first is to find information and second is to connect and if you’re just going to write good blog entries then I’m not sure that’s enough for you to be successful.

I just named 5 here because I know you have other things in your mind too. So what are the other key ingredients of a likeable blog that you think I missed out?

MelvinBlog 3.0 – A Fresh New Design

by Melvin · Jan 26, 2011

So for most people, having a new blog design to start the year is uncommon. I don’t wanna say it’s something that I am looking forward on doing every year but for the third time in three years, I have always introduced a new design to refresh the blog and cater to my *new needs.

Now welcome to MelvinBlog 3.0! If you’re reading from your RSS, its time to come out of your shells to visit my actual site or you can look at this screenshot(click for a larger look):

As you can see, this blog still sports that magazine look although much more cleaner and less cluttered than the previous one.

Why Change?

First and foremost is to refresh the look of the blog. The Colormatic UBD theme has been in this blog for over a year now and we all know people get bored with same design over and over again.

The second reason is to clean things up. If you look at the mainstream blog redesign these days, you can see that most of them have started cleaning up the clutter. For instance, ProBlogger’s new design emphasizes a better spacing and lesser elements. Shoemoney’s blog is also just sporting a clean theme now.

When I decided to go to version 2.0, I had a lot of things in mind including some elements that I want to add that I haven’t added before. With that, I settled for ColorMatic, in which I can pretty much put a lot of things in one place without having users to scroll down.

A year has passed and I realized that some things aren’t really worth putting into the blog. With that I had to find a template that I can work with that still is a magazine theme, yet sports lesser clutter. Another factor that I always consider is that I don’t want to look like a mainstream blog (one which looks like another). So that’s why I settled for this design.

Websource Theme

The theme that you are looking now is called WebSource theme. It comes from ThemeForest.net and specifically a guy named DDStudios. You’re wondering why I didn’t go with top notch themes like StudioPress, Thesis, WooThemes, and etc. The reason as I mentioned above is that I hate being mainstream. Most bloggers would just want to jump into something just because a lot of people are into it.

Also as always, I did some minor customizations in the codes so to make sure that the blog will extremely look unique.

For me as long as the theme works, doesn’t have that much bugs and is greatly structured, then I’m in to consider it. And to add, Websource looks extremely unique while also fitting my needs and requirements.

The redesign isn’t fully complete yet. As you can see, there are some elements that still look weird or you may visit a certain page that looks odd. In fact, I don’t even have a logo yet as I’m planning to implement a new one for this new design so my designer is currently working on it right now. Let’s say the site is just 50% done and I’m just excited to launch it right away. 😉

The Old Look

So for the last time, let’s savor the old look for MelvinBlog which is also known as Version 2.0. This theme from ThemeWars has done a lot of good things, made me good money and helped me engage my content more to my readers.

So that’s it. I will just let you find for yourself some new features and elements that I added and/or that comes with this new design. Please also expect that there might be some bugs or minor flaws (as mentioned) that I haven’t found out yet or I’m currently fixing so please bare with it for the moment. 😉

As always you’re opinion matters a lot to me. 🙂

10 Signs that a Blog is Getting Bigger than Ever

by Melvin · Jan 15, 2011

Everyone starts out as small bloggers and over time eventually some of us reach the greener pasture and become a bigger blog. By saying big blog, what I mean is that the blog gets more readers than ever and obviously starts making more money. Not a lot of bloggers get into this stage and to be honest, I still think that this blog far from that.

Anyways in this post I just like to enumerate different things and signs that obviously make a blog bigger than ever.

1. Humongous number of comments

It all starts with this. I was reading shoemoney’s blog ever since not a lot of people are reading it yet. And when he started becoming popular, the number of comments per posts has started rising crazily. And long story short, Shoemoney’s blog is now one of the most popular blog in the weight loss internet marketing niche.

Of course this does not apply to all. Long time ago, I made a post about whether comments justify the success of a blog and in that writeup I revealed that anyone can really get 50ish comments per post, but that doesn’t make them established at all.

2. Increased number of ads

This is very logical. When a blog starts out with so many white space in its layout and all of a sudden looks like a Nascar, you know its just trying to make the most of its traffic. Again this does not mean any blog that looks like Nascar is a big blog, but its at least an indication that the blogger who owns it is trying to make the most out of the opportunity. 😉

3. The blog starts out churning out multiple articles per day

Heheh. This is so true. Look at problogger, look at JohnChow, these guys are posting 3-4 posts per day and the reason is sound, it is to maximize their exposure for their writing. Another more recent example is Hesham of FamousBloggers.com

If you get over thousand hits per day and 80% of them expect that you will post a couple more post before the day ends, how many repeat traffic could that possibly bring? 😉

4. When one can already confidently sell their own product or membership program

Most bloggers/marketers fail in selling info products and membership sites fora simple reason, they do it even before they establish a presence.

Now when a blogger can confidently sell something to its readerbase, then most of the time it means that he is getting enough traffic and enough publicity to be able to see his/her stuff to other people. That’s another sign.

5. When one tweets for 20+ times a day

Another thing related to getting bigger as a blogger is an increased popularity in social sites like Twitter, Facebook, or whatever it is. So naturally when you have already 10,000 (real) followers, you don’t want to waste that. Instead you want to make the most of it by either pointing them to your blog frequently or pushing affiliate products.

6. When a blog gets featured occasionally

This is pretty obvious. When someone makes mention of your blog even if its just a small mention, then it means you’re not just an ordinary blogger (lols).

A lot of mid to big bloggers occasionally do roundups of blogs that provide value to readers and when your blog gets mentioned in there, it means a lot.

7. Getting Interviewed

This is related to no.6. If you started getting those interview requests, then it means you’re slowly carving out your name in the blogosphere. Although like other reasons mentioned in this post, getting interviewed doesn’t directly mean you’re famous. There are a lot of bloggers who interview random people on a daily basis which I obviously find lame.

8. Making redesigns

Not really spoiling Problogger’s new design eh. 😉 Ok so its noticeable that once a blog gets big enough and come to the point that the theme can no longer handle whatever it has, bloggers will make that redesigns.

It’s always part of the reason. Most bloggers who start getting traffic decide to do other things like starting a newsletter or publishing more posts and in that case, making redesigns is almost always part of the equation.

9. Starts getting negative publicity

This is of course the bad side of becoming more popular. When your blog eventually gets bigger, you will start receiving troll/hate comments and messages from people who are wasting their time. You will also start getting into these controversies obviously created by other people who are looking to ride into your momentum upwards.

Its important to understand its normal. People love hating other people and they can never be contented with everything that they do. Negative publicity is still publicity after all.

10. Lesser activity in the blogopshere

This is sad yet true. When bloggers like Yaro Starak, Darren Rowse, David Risley and etc. are just small bloggers who own small blogs back then, you can almost always see them participating in forums, commenting on other blogs, replying to their readers frequently and just being active overall in the entire blogging scene.

Unfortunately as they started getting bigger, they realized its more worthy to start putting efforts on other things than interaction. Is it a bad thing? Definitively no because that is really how the process works. Hence, its a sign the blogger is getting bigger.

So you have any other ideas in mind? 😉