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The Big Challenge After a Blog Contest – The Dropoff

by Melvin · Aug 22, 2010

By now I can relax a bit after all the contest related tasks have been completed. With this I realized that no matter how small or big, how short or long a contest will be, it will always take a lot of work. As I’ve said, I worked for this contest in as early as late April so I’ve been really doing most of the planning myself since this is a one-man blog.

But still, I don’t have any regrets whatsoever. I know by now, you know how grateful I am with how the contest turned out to be and how this has been so beneficial to the blogosphere. Traffic wise it’s been great as well. I got the most traffic ever during those months although I didn’t ramp up my posting. But now that the contest is over, here comes the big challenge.

Traffic Dropoff

Traffic dropoff usually happens after the end of each contest. Its nothing revolutionary, it’s just normal.

Let’s say a blog just gets 50 visitors prior to running a contest. As soon as the blogger runs the contest, he instantly notices that he doubles his traffic immediately.But after the contest, he soon realizes that his traffic starts to go down and back to the normal 50 visits per day.

As I’ve said, this really happens to any bloggers who run contests. The main reason for this is sound and simple, people only get to your site/blog because they’re incentivized to do so.

One thing you can easily notice is that throughout your contest, some other bloggers who haven’t been into your blog were the most active ones. They comment a lot, interact and almost have been always there.

Don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong about that. It’s human nature that in a contest you want to be as nice as possible because its part of your strategy in winning the contest. However when the contest ends, the participants interest on continuing on following you and your blog highly depends on whether they won something or they didn’t. With that in mind, the incentivization factor that had them to follow you in the first place starts to diminish.

The challenge then is to make them stay even after the contest.

Hook them through the contest, Make them stay for the content

So what I usually try to do is test if they’re really in for a long haul by producing good content. How? Well a contest usually runs for a month, in my case its for 1 and a half months. So that period is your period to convince them that you’re blog is more than just a blog holding a contest, that you’re content is far more important than the prizes of the contest.

This is hard to do and it’s really challenging to make them stay mainly because they may not be the right people in your blog in the first place. Most people who join contests are those who live with contests. Not that I have any problem with that but proliferation is really important. If I have 100 new audiences that aren’t willing to spend money forever, then isn’t it worth it more to have just 15 potential customers who are loyal enough to stay for the long haul because of the good stuff I’m providing?

The takeaway here is still the content. People read stuffs because they like reading it isn’t it? And with contests, it’s not really good content, is it?

As you can see we as bloggers, as contest organizers have an ample time to prove ourselves to them. Write good content, make sure you make them feel they belong, always keep that conversation even after the contest is over. Those and other small things may be enough to make them stay for a while, maybe for a little bit longer. What say you?

How to be Great at Your Affiliate Business with Content

by Melvin · Aug 19, 2010

In this guest post, Corry Cummings discussed the role of high quality content in succeeding with affiliate marketing.

If you are familiar with running an affiliate business, you know how important promotion is. You must promote your business partner’s product in order to be successful. The factor that determines whether or not your business generates profit is whether you can get the visitors to your website interested in the product. One of the best ways to do this is with high quality content. You must make sure that your content is professional, clean and attention-grabbing. If you can manage this, your website will garner attention, gain credibility and most importantly, be interesting to your visitors. Here are some suggestions for how to become great at your affiliate business with content.

Choose the Right Type of Content

Different business plans will necessitate various kinds of content. Think about the direction that you want to take your business in and the type of content you think will appeal to your readers. Every business will have different needs, but the kind of content that tends to work best for affiliate businesses include the following:

Blog Posts
Reports
Articles
E-Books

It may be helpful to mix and match in order to appeal to a variety of people. Consider your product when deciding what kind of content to use. Is it a relatively uniform demographic or are you writing to people of multiple ages or different countries of residence? Think about the needs and desires of your readers. If you can satisfy those needs and desires, your readers will be more willing to explore the product further.

Choose Your Topics Carefully

Just like choosing the form your content will take, it is important to carefully plan your topics. You will want to feature content that is varied but can all relate to your topic. Do not just ceaselessly promote your product. In general, customers will be put off by obvious advertisement. Instead, you will want to get them legitimately interested in the product. Provide content that discusses the history or simple facts about the product. Keep in mind that you are still trying to sell a product, but approaching that goal from multiple angles might increase your chance of success. Again, consider your audience and choose topics based on what you think they will want.

Provide High Quality Content

Having a variety of content with multiple forms and topics can help draw interest to your business, but only if the content is high quality. This is perhaps the most important step. If your content is poorly written or simply uninteresting, it will not matter what the topic is. The visitors to your website will associate shoddy writing with an unreliable seller and a substandard product. One recommendation is that you consider hiring a content writing service. This way, you will be guaranteed high quality content from professional content writers. You will still have control over exactly what you want from each article, and you can be confident that the end result will be clean, professional and interesting to your visitors.

Corry Cummings is the owner of Content Customs, a content creation company that specializes in high quality web content writing services. He also runs a blog over at Content Customs, which is managed and written by one of the head writers of the company.

Can We Connect More in Facebook?

by Melvin · Aug 15, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Resurrection of my Fan Page

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

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

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

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

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

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

by Melvin · Aug 10, 2010

Everyday a lot of people in the internet scramble for traffic. Internet marketers, PPC affiliate guys, bloggers, or even just the ordinary upcoming newbie. The internet is just so diverse that people are sold into an idea that there’s always an unknown place with millions of people that other marketers haven’t found yet. That’s why I love to experiment about these traffic sources. It’s because at the end of the day, I know it’s all worth it.

I mentioned bloggers above as one of those who scramble for traffic but one thing I noticed is that bloggers don’t that much look for new traffic sources, instead they just focus on what they have and try to leverage that into something more. I have no problem with that and in fact that’s what I try to do on an everyday basis. What I’d like to state is that we, in conjunction with that, should also not be that shabby in terms of finding new sources of traffic to our sites.

As I’ve said, the internet has been so huge and that is the reason too why things get saturated and diluted so easily. I mean when was the last time you run something profitable that lasted for more than a month? When was the last time you found a social network that consistently gives you over a 100 hits for a week? The thing with the internet is that things change so rapidly that if you’re not ready, you’re gonna be left out so quickly.

Why Should I be Looking for New Traffic Sources?

First and foremost is to enhance what you already have in your hand. For example, my blog has been getting traffic from forums ever since. So naturally what I would do is leverage that more and try to see if I can get more from that. Now with that, the way to enhance is to look on other other forums which may be catered to my blog as well. I mean it’s not rocket science. If this forum about blogging is constantly giving me good amount of traffic maybe this forum about blogging and internet marketing can do it too. You know what I mean?

Now back to answering the question. It’s proven that there’s always a place untapped to get traffic and from time to time, there will be always be new high-trafficked places just springing over and over. We should continuously be on the look because these untapped sources are so worth it. I mean wouldn’t you want to get 50 new readers on a daily or weekly basis just by engaging in some place you haven’t engaged before?

It just works for everything. Forum marketing, guest blogging, social networking or just anything else. For instance, you guys have probably seen me guest post on popular blogs like JohnChow or DailyBlogTips and etc. But to take that further, I’m constantly on the search of blogs that may not get the same traffic but are worth guest posting to.

For instance, ShoutmeLoud.com is a high-traffic blog yet I was not aware of this site prior to this year. Another is SiteSketch101, which probably has a ton of audience that has never heard of me or my blog. There are many more out there but what I basically do and I hope for you to do as well is to try to give value and engage in their audience as well. By doing that, you’re giving yourself a chance to open the door for more readers, more traffic, more potential customers

For social network, many people use the standard sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or whatever but for me what I do is use the smaller ones and try to be active there which will eventually build up over time. Not a lot of people know Blogengage or MMOSocialNetwork but the truth is these sites can give you much more traffic than what you can get with Digg or any other big sites out there.

Conclusion

I could go on more but the takeaway here is being creative and constantly on search for new sources. I’m not saying you have to do this everyday, what Im saying is that we should always give some time on this task.

For example, my friday schedule is usually set out on that and by setting a certain date, you’re enabling yourself to be productive with whatever task you have. It doesn’t just apply to finding new traffic source but it applies to everything, writing blog posts, networking, and many more. So do you have your own way of chasing for new traffic sources?

MelvinBlog’s Marketing Tip Contest Winners

by Melvin · Aug 7, 2010

The time has finally come. As I’ve promised, today the winners for the MelvinBlog’s Marketing Tip Contest will be announced. And as I’ve said, I will not be late this time in announcing the winners I will try not to be late but still I did (lols, its Aug.7 in Philippines).

As I’ve mentioned thousand of times, the entries were really great and I’m sure the judges had a hard time rating each article. I myself had a hard time too! Anyways for the last time I’d like to thank the sponsors for gracing this event as if not for them all these things will not happen. I’d like to thank my media partner Fergal of Business Advice Forum who has done an exceptional job in spreading the news. Now for the last time let’s give these people a round of a plause for being sponsors:

Now the Winners

So all in all we had 16 entries and as I’ve said the winners will be judged by two factors; quality and popularity. Quality is 70% and is largely based on the ratings given by the five judges. The second one is popularity which accounts for 30%. This is basically the amount of comments and retweets the posts have received. For the sake of getting you more excited here’s the screenshot of the scoreboard (Click for a larger view)

As agreed upon, I’m not going to disclose the name of the judges for now. If you saw the image above and still you were not able to figure it out. Read below to see the complete list of the winners.

1st Prize – Lee Ka Hoong

Lee’s entry was entitled 3 Effective Blog Marketing Strategies That I Use and it got the highest score overall. He scored a total of 8.1 points and got the nod of most judges. Aside from that it also got a lot of traffic that his blog was one of the main traffic drivers for my blog on that month. Congratulations Lee! You win the following:

6 months free for the standard package of CrazyEgg valued at $19 a month – $114 value
1 character design courtesy of LogoNerds – $97 value
1 multi-use package of Themewars premium theme – $70 value
WordPress SEO service courtesy of ShoutMeLoud.com – $250 value
1 First Class Package of Ultimate Blogging Theme 3.0 – $147 value
1 license of OIO Publisher – $47 value
$20 cash from FamousBloggers.com – $20
6 months free Web hosting courtesy of MelvinBlog.com – $45 value
1 copy of Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco – $17 value
Premium Interview featured here in MelvinBlog.com – $70 value

2nd Prize – Murray Lunn

Murray which is more known by the name Murlu wrote a post entitled Write 10 Articles A Day, Market Yourself And Avoid Burn Out. In that article Murray made a really interesting point and approach in terms of not burning out yourself so you still have time to do a lot of things. Personally this my favorite post as I find this really really unique and innovative. Congrats Murlu! You win the following:

$50 cash and one year PRO membership for MyBlogGuest – $170 value
1 copy of Blogussion Thesis theme package – $46 value
1 character design courtesy of LogoNerds – $97 value
1 license of OIO Publisher – $47 value
1 copy of Crowbar Content courtesy of Buzz Marketing guru Dean Hunt – $97
1 copy of Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco – $17 value
$15 cash from BlogTactic
1 copy of 70 Posting Ideas courtesy of Liane – $15

3rd Prize – Devesh (no surname)

Dev wrote a well-received posts entitled 10 Best Marketing Tips that Will Blow Your Mind | Make Money Online. I can say that’s a good post to start with and its nice that his readers really benefitted from that article. Actually he’s tied for second place with Murlu but for the tie-breaker I asked all the judges on who deserves the 2nd and 3rd place more. Congrats Dev, you win the following:

1 copy of Gab Fire Theme – $59 value
1 year membership for ElegantThemes -$19
$15 cash, one advertising space and one copy of Facebook ad coupon eBook valued at $15 courtesy of Smartbloggerz.com – $54 total value
1 copy of Easy Blog Traffic worth $59, Insider SEO Revealed at $39 and Twitter Marketing Power worth $57 courtesy of WebTrafficROI.com
1 copy of Thirtyday blog eBook by Jimvesting – $15 value
1 copy of 70 Posting Ideas courtesy of Liane – $15

And to everyone else.

To all others who have joined the contest namely, Agent Deepak (man! you’re the favorite one on this contest), D3s0, Felix Albutura, Elie Palima, Cynthia Boris, Febap Liew, Sourav, I’d like to thank you for participating in the contest. You know what? I feel really really bad that I only got this number of sponsor prizes to give away. I mean I should’ve begged for more.

All entries are just exceptional and as you can see in the scoreboard, the difference between the winner points and a non-winner points do not even have a disparity of 1 point! It only means that this contest is really well fought so everyone should really deserve more than just a mention.

Again I hope I could’ve grabbed 10 – 20 more prizes so maybe I can include 2 or more winners but I didn’t really expect it to be this tight.

I wish I could give away $50 to each one too but that would be too much for me. Still for those who didn’t win, again just because I appreciate your entries, it’s closely fought, almost had same scores with the winners, I am going to contact you (using your blog’s contact form) for a surprise prize. Yes that’s how I appreciate you and your entry. Just wait and I’m sure you’re gonna be happy about it. 🙂

Twitter Retweet Contest

I nearly forgot this! I was about to publish this post yesterday midnight until I realized this contest. If you would remember, there was a side-in contest which was more to twitter users. As mentioned I’m giving away 10 prizes for that as well. Here are the awesome winners drawn randomly via random.org and in chronological order:

The 10 highlighted names are the winners and they are arranged chronologically. Its kind of funny because John Chow who retweeted my article won too although Im sure he wouldn’t mind giving that thing away to others anyway. Here’s your winnings btw:

Deanna_J – GabFire Theme
AgentDeepak – Blogussion Thesis Theme
whatswithjeff – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
easy4com – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
John Chow – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
AhsanHussein – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
MyBlog2day – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
d3so – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
Elie Palima- 1 copy of Social Media Marketing Book
Funbu – Youtube Made Simple Video Series Book

To all winners both in retweet contest and the main contest, don’t contact me. I will be contacting you to give you directions on how you can claim your prizes. It goes the same to non-winners on the main contest as I would be surprising you by giving you something. 😉

Again, don’t contact me. I will be the one who will contact you.

Successful Contest, What’s Next?

Well this contest ran for almost 2 months and I prepared this for almost 4 months. With that, I wanted to weep that it ended up being successful and I was really happy with the turnout. Congratulations again to all contestants, you’re all winners as I learned a lot from you. Also to sponsors, which are mostly my peers and friends, I appreciate you helping me out. This isn’t anywhere possible if not for you guys!

Obviously I’m don’t have the time I used to for this blog as I’ve started working a normal job but rest assure that this blog will still be as alive as ever. And if you’re looking to maximize and take advantage of my traffic, then why not submit a guest post entry so that your article would be featured for a long time since I don’t really have that much time to write a post? clever idea eh? 🙂

Blog Posts Retweets, Do they really make sense?

by Melvin · Aug 3, 2010

When retweets was first introduced, I was really really so much into it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever especially with the fact that if someone retweets your article, then there’s a good chance more than a thousand people can actually see it and have the opportunity to retweet it as well. It’s mainly because the potential of Twitter is really there.

Of course at first, I really didn’t figure out how I can get that much retweets that would enable me to reap those benefits. I started to install that little Tweetmeme plugin so that my readers can start retweeting my article for me. Obviously I started to realize that each of the 100 visitors will not really retweet it.

So what I did then was start using Twitter genuinely. I started following people that is related to what I’m blogging and started really giving tweeting some time. Eventually my follower count started growing and interaction has been more lively now. And not surprisingly with that, I started getting retweets.

The highest retweet count that I got is 133 and not surprisingly it came from a contest post. But then I got a little contented with the fact that at least I was getting more than 10 retweets almost every time. And now I started wondering. Is this retweets really worth it? or is it just a number that you could flaunt and brag to other people?

Ok ok. Unlike in the previous posts, I’m not gonna flash out some geeky numbers on your screen or some screenshot from Google Analytics and then explain it one by one. Studying the behavior from Twitter is a quite a it tricky that just showing stats doesn’t mean anything that much.

So for this year, Twitter has sent me over a 1000 uniques and more than 2500 pageviews. Of course the bounce rate and stickiness weren’t as effective as let’s say guest post campaigns and stuffs. Twitter has so many bot accounts and in fact I have a couple for myself and the reason for that is mainly for testing. If someone is being followed by 1000 bots, that will not make any sense right so I guess that’s why it’s not converting that well.

Of course the main benefit of it is that it’s free and if utilized well, it can be a source of free yet targeted high quality traffic for any site. But how can one utilize it and maximize its benefits? That’s literally the question of every blogger in this space. I know big guru bloggers utilize it so well that for instance, Shoemoney even called as “the best marketing medium” right now.

For me what I do is basically just host all my shortlinks via bit.ly. Bit.ly has some free basic tracking which is pretty darn good. You can find the no.of unique clicks, no.of referrers/retweets, the location they were retweeted and even the day to day activities of your posts. In fact, I already considered it’s PRO program just because of how slick it is.

If you’re using other shorteners, I’m pretty sure they have their built-in trackers as well so make sure you’re making the most by using that to analyze things.

So all in all, retweets really matter. As I said above, I got some pretty good (yet not really massive) traffic from it and from a hindsight I can say that it’s one good way to get new readers to your blog. The number of RT’s alone can quite a bit be misleading but the traffic stats will always speak for themselves. From that on, its just a matter of tweaking it more and more.

What do you think? Maybe you have some secrets to share as well?

The Best Blog Marketing Tips Around the Internet

by Melvin · Jul 31, 2010

The contest has finally ended and it’s really really such a great one. It ran for almost 2 months and we’ve had successful feedbacks all over. On top of that, the quality of the entries that we’ve received is just superb. So if I am about conclude now if the contest was successful or not, there’s no question it is.

Anyways first I’d like to apologize for not having this post earlier nor reminding people that the contest has already ended. Actually, it is just this month that I started feeling the sting of having a day job. Although it’s enjoyable and exciting, it disables me to do a lot of things that I used to do when I was still in college.

Anyhow, the winners for the contest will be announced in August 5 as the current entries are already in the hands of the judges. But with that I’d like to honor those entries and give them some link love not because they participated in the contest but because they are really good reads. So if you’re looking for the best marketing tips around, then you may want to read these articles:

I’ve personally read all of them and I’m so happy with the quality. As I’ve said before, the goal of this contest is really to give back to the community and with the participants adhering to that, I think this is the most awesome contest I have ever run so far. With that I’d like to congratulate everybody already for really doing a good job. 🙂

Now if you’re contest entry was not there, feel free to hit me up via comment form asap. I tried to find all the articles, tried to moderate all the trackbacks and even went as far as the spam comments page just to make sure all entries are received. Yes, I know how it feels when an entry is ignored. Anyway, again feel free to hit me up in case your article isn’t here.

So what’s next? Well there’s a lot of things to watch out for in this blog but as for the moment, why not try to support your favorite blogger by reading, commenting and retweeting his article above? What do you think?