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The Only Thing You Need When Starting an MMO Blog

by Melvin · May 4, 2010

make money online blog It doesn’t take a lot to figure out that most of the bloggers who are trying to make money online is blogging in the dirty polluted make money online niche. Simon from Teenius.com has written a superb guest post here in this blog on whether you can still make money from the mmo niche or not. I’d recommend you to read that post as he has pointed out valid points about that topic.

Only a small fraction of bloggers in the MMO industry is actually making money (not a secret) from talking some craps about making money and the rest simply do not make anything. Listen, if you are a noob reading this and you’re planning to start a make money online blog then please don’t. Don’t and you’d thank me later, I swear. 😉

Credibility

In any niche, before people could even notice you on something you must establish credibility first and foremost. A good reason why a huge chunk of bloggers aren’t getting read is because they are not credible enough to pay attention to. Who would like to read an “expert” tip written by some Average Joe? “Heck, how would I even know this guy is for real?”

In MMO Niche, the only thing you need is…

…The actual experience of making money online. Yep, that’s right. In this business, today, you’ll never ever succeed talking about making money online if in the first place, you have no idea on how to do it!

I know what you are talking. How about the “follow me as I make money online” or “track the journey of a 12-yr old student on making money” kind of concept? The answer is those concepts are already obsolete. It doesn’t work anymore. A good number of people have probably had some success with that but right now, it’s already outdated and lame!

People are critical. If you speak on something that you really don’t know, even if you’re claiming it’s just your personal opinion, you’re gonna get busted. And the news that “your blog is just a crap” spreads faster than good mentions. You don’t want to ruin your ENTIRE name just because of this mistake.

Dig Deeper in what you really know

“How about you Melvin? You are blogging in the dirty niche; do you have an experience with the crap you’re talking about?” The answer is yes. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you probably already know everything about me. How I started within a sports niche, got into the beginners mistake of using Adsense ONLY, getting into internet marketing, making a ton of money (ton w/c is equal to my standards. 😉 ) with affiliate marketing, engaging into some blackhat, doing freelance work (for startup cash), doing SEO-related stuffs, and a whole lot more.

I probably am qualified (or not) to talk into this niche, but I beg not to. Why? Because mmo is already a niche that has a lot of qualified people to speak into. In fact, these are people who know MORE than what I know.

So instead I just dug deeper and went into the marketing part of blogging. I am an internet marketer, have bought tons of stupid eBooks, got enrolled in a lot of quality coaching programs and have about 3 years of experience. And that’s why I try to incorporate all of this into blogging where I know I’ve done well because of the fact that I have the knowledge on how to market my sites.

Ok enough self promo. We all want to make money online and become (or look like) expert in our own areas. But don’t do the mistake of getting into something, just because you feel it’s ideal. You cannot claim yourself as a blogging expert if you just write crappy articles, you can’t fool people you are a loss weight expert if you yourself aren’t fit.

Hmmm.. Is there something fishy that we need to know about you? 😀

Image Credit to: Paradigm Business Consultancy

Why Personal Posts Get LOTS of Traffic

by Melvin · Apr 29, 2010

I was playing with the logs and stats from my Google Analytics account and it really didn’t surprise me that some of the posts that gets the most traffic were the ones that really didn’t have anything to do with internet marketing, blogging or make money online (w/c is the topic of this blog). Here’s a short screenshot from G.A:

Contest posts are naturally high traffic ones due to its intrinsic nature, while some of the other posts here go within the theme of this blog w/c is internet marketing and blogging. The hits from other couple of posts and pages may seem unnatural though. The post about the best birthday gift for the girl I love have the most no. of unique counts and pageviews in terms of posts and the about and photo pages are the most popular in pages.

That is voyeurism at work. It continues to amaze me how offtopic writeups, mostly are personal posts, get so much traction. When I wrote that “teenage-love” affair post I really wasn’t so keen that I would get responses but I was surprised when so many people I do not know commented and gave me their tips. It also went hot on social sites and eventually just got so many traction.

Why it rakes in traffic

People love personal posts, there’s no doubt about it. Most of my readers read my blog because of my expertise in this topic so that being said, any other post outside my niche can either spark a good interest or no interest at all and luckily for me its working on a good side.

Voyeurism is a superb traffic technique just because of the fact that it enhances your relationship your audience. It brings you closer on a more personal basis and in marketing, that’s an added trust and credibility.

Top 3 ways on how to take advantage of Voyeurism

Build your expertise first and foremost – Ok, you cannot just start a blog and write random personal posts and then expect a heap of traffic. It is not gonna happen. What you can do though, is work on building a presence first, overdeliver good content in your niche and focus on growth. As I’ve said people become more interested on your personal stuffs when they trust you for what you provide.
Share your personal craps BUT STILL add value – One thing you would notice with all the personal posts is that they all add value. No one wants to read something they wouldn’t enjoy so whether that value accounts for enjoyment, or learnings, its all up to your readers. Just make sure they are going to pick up something useful.
Don’t hold back anything – People love honest stories and it’s always one thing that people admire. You cannot call that post personal when you’re lying so make sure you don’t hold anything back.
Limit yourself in doing it – Ok now we know that personal posts are the ones that get good traffic. We also understood that people like it for intrinsic reasons so what now? Make all your posts personal posts? Naah! Like anything there’s a limit. When it comes to superb content, you can’t feed your readers with these each and everytime as they will get overwhelmed. That goes the same with personal posts. Once you abuse the use of it, it would start boring the heck of your readers.

So what now? Here in my blog, I’m proud to say that people like my personality (debatable). I get both good and bad feedbacks but overall I think I’m doing things fine. Voyeurism is an effect of good personal branding and if youre not leveraging it, you’re missing a lot.

Blogging Without Borders, Why Location Is Not a Limitation

by Melvin · Apr 26, 2010

Do take note of this, Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse are from Australia, John Chow is from Vancouver Canada, Daniel Scocco is from Brazil, Chris Garrett is from UK, Murray Newlands is also from UK I believe and my friend Carl “KidBlogger” Ocab is from Philippines and etc.

Ok now from outside this niche. Alborz Fallah of CarAdvice.com.au is from Australia (arrgh, again), the ever famous Danny Choo is from Japan, Lhong Zheng was from China (although he resides in Mulgrave), and again fellow Filipino tech blogger Jehzeel Laurente lives here in Philippines. And yea you’re right, I probably have missed a ton of other people still either because I did my research poorly or didn’t do research at all. Anyway, lols. 🙂

Whew, that was quite a long list! I was watching NBA (w/c is one show I always watch no matter what) and they have this segment called Basketball without borders where they usually go to places outside US to have campaigns on basketball. They even play official ball games there sometimes. It’s refreshing to think that you can play basketball no matter where you are.

Thinking of that, I kinda relate it to blogging. You can easily notice that all bloggers I mentioned above live outside the United States. Most people who are just planning to get started blogging worry a lot on whether they can even get attention, relating it to the fact that they live outside big and profitable countries like America and Europe.

To make it worse, most bloggers even do recommend bloggers to target bigger countries mentioned above if they are considering making money from blogging. As a result, bloggers are discouraged even before they get to have a chance.

I would tell you this one straight to your face, successful blogging has no borders, geographical location is NEVER a limitation! Whether you are blogging just as a hobby or using blogging as a business tool, you should never ever get discouraged just because of where you live. Remember that in any country there is always a (profitable) market for something. There are always things where people want to spend some money to learn and educate themselves.

If you’re just going to get wet or in the middle of that (very slow) learning curve and you’re feeling discouraged, I feel for you. I was once like that. When I started my past blogs and websites I basically plastered them with Google Adsense. My neighbor is reading it, my classmates are reading it, and they are clicking the ad. And it sucks to realize that those clicks even with a good quantity totals to just a very small amount (since most clicks is from my country).

And then as I was signing up with other different ad networks I was a bit disappointed to learn that some networks rejected me just because of the fact that I live outside the US. It can really be depressing but having the proper mindset, here I am today.

It’s important to always look at the big picture, not get discouraged by all those cons and instead work on things you could care more. I myself live in a third world country, Philippines. As I was looking at my Analytics and logs, I was seeing the most of my traffic comes here in Asia, and I can say those readers are big factors why I make money from this blog, why I’m somehow read by people.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter where you live from or where your target market is. The only thing that matters is your dedication. Sure, you can count the disadvantages of living in your place at your fingertips or you can elaborate the advantages of living a big country but that’s not a legitimate reason, in fact it’s not even a reason.

As I end this, I do hope you can look at those bloggers I mentioned above and use them as an inspiration. Inspiration not just as big and successful bloggers, but also as bloggers who live in different parts of the world. Yep, blogging doesn’t have any borders, just like basketball.

You Need a Pitch for Your Blog, Here’s Why

by Melvin · Apr 21, 2010

Most bloggers are blogging in a certain niche and if you’re reading this blog for quite some time you probably have heard me say that having a clear niche is very important to be successful in blogging. Gone are the days where you could just blog about anything and expect a heap of traffic in return. When I was just getting started, I pretty much did things that way. I felt, “oh, those are for just those sleazy marketers or just for get-rich quick scammers”. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that hey maybe I really need one.

Darren Rowse 31 Days to be a better blogger eBook calls this an elevator pitch, wherein you have a very short space and time to pitch what is your blog really all about to visitors, especially new visitors. This also helps you as blogger to have a nice idea of what to post and what to not. If you’re blogging about car insurance, then pitch it in the way where the visitors can find it unique. You also need to find an enticing angle to present it. Just pitching it as a “great [niche name] blog” is not enough.

Ok I know what you are thinking. I know you’re saying “Im not a salesman and I never want to sound that way!”. I don’t want either! In fact, I really haven’t sold almost any stuff here in my blog. I don’t sell info products (I did for 1 month last year), I don’t do consulting, I don’t psyche you that what I provide costs $XXXX amount).

The truth is a blog pitch doesn’t really need to become like a traditional pitch. If you look at the most successful blogs in this niche, you really wouldn’t think they’re hardselling or pitching something that sounds like they’re selling. The ever famous Shoemoney’s tagline is “Skills to pay the bills”. Not that he says he’s a make money online blogger, but still people come to him as an authority.

By bringing in your blog’s pitch, you’re making a clear and concise detail on what your readers should expect in your blog. You’re telling them ‘hey I’m in this industry, Im an expert in this field’. But of course, your pitch must stand out from the rest so you should not just make use of old generic ones.

Another good reason why you need to have one is to target your audience very well. All of us want a huge number of audience. Unfortunately, it’s all useless when some of them are not really aligned to what we offer and present. Isolating the right people as our audience is crucial for having a tight and well-targeted blog readership.

Final Words

So by now, you should’ve already understood the value of a pitch or elevator pitch for your blog. If you still feel you don’t have a pitch for your blog or you are unsure whether its the proper one, then take some time to think one. If you, yourself is not clear about it, then how would you expect your readers to get it too?

What do you think about elevator pitch for blogging? What is your own pitch for your blog? My blog pitch is “Internet Marketing for Bloggers” or some variations of it. I would be pretty interested to know yours as well.

iBlog 6 Blogging Summit Recap and Some Photos

by Melvin · Apr 19, 2010

Long time no post here, at least for my preference. 🙂 Anyways, last Friday and Saturday I attended the biggest blogging event here in Philippines which is the iBlog Philippine Blogging Summit. The conference was held for the 6th time already and I actually can’t believe that I missed the previous 5 ones considering that I’ve been blogging for 3 years already.

I also mentioned in my post on attending Wordcamp 09 that since late last year, I’ve shifted my focus on trying to network more with my fellow citizens here and connect with more local bloggers. Since I’ve started I was more always on the international side of things. Most of my blogging colleagues are from the other side of the world. I have few Filipino blogging friends but I realized I have to have more.

So I attended iBlog 6 Summit. It’s a 2 day event, the first day was more targeted on businesses on tapping blogs while the second day is more on blogging as a whole. Unlike most of the iBlog posts, this is going to be a comprehensive one. 🙂

Disclaimer: I’m a nice guy but I’m honest so i would put out my personal opinion on every talk. If you’re name is misspelled, hit me up. 🙂 Im also a horrible photographer so I had to steal borrow other photos from other people

Day 1

Since its just my second event, its understandable that I am holding myself back a bit because Im shy. Ok, I arrived just on time by myself and with no friends on sight.

Janette Toral spoke about Blogging for business which is a pretty general talk on how blogs make money and how they are intended for business. It was a pretty broad talk wherein she covered making money from various things like paid review, corporate blogging and selling products.

Janette is a reputable figure here in Philippine and while its my first time hearing her speak, I was not disappointed. I think she laid out all the necessary info especially for noobs on how the money works on blogging.

It was followed by Abe Olandres speech about Advertising in Blogs which is a more in-depth topic than the first one. Abe is one of the pioneers of blogging here and is one who probably have generated the most revenue. Its a pretty great talk and he was not too shabby to share his figures. 🙂

The next one was the sponsor talk and its really something I dont want to talk about. The next speaker is Mr. Gary Viray who preaches about SEO and SEM. Its pretty fundamental for me but I know it really opened the eyes of most new bloggers in the world of SEO. It also debunks the myth of old SEO practices wherein it used to be based on quantity of inbound links.

Next is the lunch and networking part. The food is “” but thats considerable considering its a free and open for all event. Again I was not able to network that much because I was really really shy. But at the time, I met four people by then namely: Mariel, May Ann, Paul David and Jilcae w/c are the people that I pretty much talked with for the whole day.

Carlo Ople then presented something about measuring blog buzz in w/c he tackled on how traditional businesses are so much hurting themselves not putting up proper online campaigns and lacking specific goals. It was one of my fave talk for that day since it presented me to the offline business side of things. Im always like the guy who knows things online but its refreshing to see the “foreign” side of things. Carlo reiterated that we must “show respect to social media” which pretty much sums it all up.

Emerson Banez who is a lawyer tackled legal concerns in blogging w/c I initially thought was boring but he made a way to make it enticing to listeners. It was basically about copyrights, and disclaimers which was beneficial as well. Law is really not my forte but its good to learn something from that side too.

The next one is about the win-win situation for bloggers and advertisers which was presented by Didi Paterno. It was a bit sound and fundamental to me since most of the money made in this blog is through advertising.

Lastly that day, Manuel Viloria which i thought was dressed a bit overformal, discussed about attraction marketing which was a really fruitful topic. This topic was about building a list, capturing them, then using social media to leverage them is something that was an eye-opener especially for most bloggers here. Up to now, it still amazes me how a lot of bloggers dont go into the “relationship-building” business model and instead just stay on the old blogging bandwagon techniques.

Day 2

Day 2 is mostly for bloggers. I anticipated that this day is for newbies, people who haven’t had much experience yet with blogging. With that in mind, I still attended.

The very beautiful, mesmerizing and eye-capturing and lovable Ms. Hannah Villasis started the day by discussing about Blogging 101 which is basically just about blogging and how it has become it is today. I’m hitting my head so hard because I actually missed this talk and wasnt able to take a pic of her while on stage. I woke up late that day and it sucks!

Then the equally handsome Vince Gollangco discussed about Video Blogging which was enticing to me since I’ve been planning to go into that route but never actually have done it. Vince made a great emphasis that we should never really care about those negative feedbacks because there would be always. He also handed out some great tips on how to do videoblogging and how its easier than what most people really think.

PhotoBlogging101 is another interesting talk since I am fascinated with photography lately. Im not a photo blogger but I love taking random pics. Juned discussed it more on a photography aspect rather than the blogging side and it was really a nice session.

Then it was the sponsor talk, and then the talk about launching successful blog contests which is something that I already have an idea about. But again Im sure this talk has become useful to a lot of other people on the said event.

It was followed by the very interesting topic of Impact of Blogging to the community wherein Joseph Gonzales (by far the most lively speaker, also humorous), cited the intangibles of blogging and how he leveraged it in helping his community. It was so inspiring to hear that blogging can do more than what we all think it could and in his case, its really for a bigger cause. And then it was lastly followed by Marghil Macuha’ of Macuha.com talked on how SEO is a must for making money online. It was pretty a fundamental talk but I picked up some nice techniques of his as well. 🙂

Conclusion & Things Learned

The biggest blogging conference and event was really living to its bill. I was so happy that I was able to attend and meet all other bloggers and prominent figures here personally. Of course I still wished to have done better especially with the networking part. In conferences like this, I should be introducing myself, shaking other people’s hand, taking pics with other people, and just building relationship with them, almost none of those were done. (shy alert!)

All in all I would like to thank to all who have stumbled upon in the event. My new buddies, May Ann, Jilcae, Paul and two other persons I didn’t recognize that much. The speakers who I know really prepared so hard not just to present something, but to make sure they give out the best ones.

And of course the organizers, Ms.Janette Toral, the emcees, the photographers (hey how can I find the pics that may possibly include me?), the hyper-active Mike Abundo, and all those people who worked to make this happen. Usually organizers are the ones who don’t get much credit but here I’d like to put an emphasis to them for doing such a wonderful job. Having an event for 6th straight years is just plain awesome.

iBlog 6 Group Pic — Photo is from Carlo Ople

If you have your own coverage of your iBlog 6 Summit, please comment here so I can post your link here as well. 🙂 Do share your opinion as well about this Summit and let me know what talks did you enjoy the most.

Other iBlog 6 Press/Blog Coverages:

More Photos are located on the photos page

Widget Logic Plugin, Strategize Your Sidebar Widgets

by Melvin · Apr 10, 2010

All bloggers make good use of the sidebar in their template. Whether it is 2-column, 3 column-sidebar or just multiple sidebars, our aim as a blogger is to make good use of them all. Thankfully for us, WordPress has made it so much easy with the use of widgets wherein all we have to do is drag and drop things.

Of course just like anything, people sometimes abuse the use of widgets and sidebar elements. How many bloggers have you seen cluttering their sidebar too much? Or how many useless widgets usually do appear on most sidebars? The ease of using widgets have enabled bloggers to become a bit trigger-happy with putting so much at the same time.

Widget Logic WordPress Plugin

The topic above leads us to the widget logic plugin. What widget-logic does is basically lets user use conditional tags to control the pages where a certain widget will appear on. It sounds a bit basic but trust me this one is a helpful plugin.

Looking at my blog you would see that some widgets that appear on home don’t necessarily appear on the other pages and vice versa. If you’re more technically literate, you could actually play more with the conditional tags to achieve your desired result.con

For example here in my blog, I don’t display the top commentator widget anywhere outside the home page basically because the home page is the strongest page in my blog. Another is my “Blog Marketing for Fame” eBook widget wherein I don’t display it in the index page primarily because I already have it in the middle sidebar part. But when you go to the posts and pages, you could see it at the top most part of the sidebar. You can do your own variations depending on how you prefer it.

Its all about maximizing each and every part of your blog

When I went with the blog’s redesign, my aim is to maximize every space without annoying/cluttering my readers’ mind. So with widget logic plugin, I was able to really implement things that I want. It gave me the flexibility of mixing and matching different elements in the sidebar.

How about you, have you used this widget already? If yes, maybe you can tell me some of your implementation techniques and tips. If not, I would highly recommend using it. Check out the widget logic plugin page.

Don’t Wait to be Perfect in Blogging

by Melvin · Apr 6, 2010

We all want to be perfect. We want to look perfect while going to any party, we want to be perfect while playing video games, and we want to be perfect if we are cooking something. We just want to be perfect in whatever we do, so that we can prove how much superior and efficient we are than our peers. And, the same rule applies to the blogging. Time and time again, I see bloggers who got struck in the vicious cycle of creating a perfect blog and eventually lose focus from their real objectives. So, in this article I’ll try to convince you that you shouldn’t wait to be perfect in blogging.

1. Improvement is more important

Don’t expect too much, too quickly because it will just increase your frustration. I’ve seen many bloggers who wants to be perfect from the first day. And due to this, they put so much pressure on themselves that they completely ignore the improvement that occurred in them over the period of time. Perfection is a never ending process, so don’t think a lot about it and focus on improving your skills.

2. Success depends on efforts

You can’t control the perfection but you can control your efforts. The more efforts you are ready to put into your blog, the more successful you’ll be. It is a myth, that to be successful you need to be perfect. How many successful guys are completely perfect in their jobs? How many successful guys know everything about their niche? I don’t think even one of them knows everything about his field. What makes them successful is the huge amount of efforts they put in to their job.

3. Criticism is good

Criticism or rejection helps you to identify your weak points which you were not aware of and provide you with an opportunity to make yourself much better. So if you just want to be perfect before you are afraid of criticism then think again. Don’t wait for your content to be perfect, go out with what you’ve and learn to take all kind of criticism.

4. Just Do It

It’s a Nike slogan, but really a great advice. Don’t hesitate to execute your plans even if they are not perfect. I’ve seen many persons having great ideas about product, website but they never execute it because they feel their plan/product still needs some more tweaks. As the result, most of those plans never get executed. Execution is more important than perfection. Don’t wait for your plan to be perfect because you don’t know how people are going to react in reality. The greatest example of this is Microsoft; they never waited for a perfect operating system. They came out with the basic version of windows in 1985 and are still trying to improving their product without sacrificing their sales.

5. Sometimes it’s better not to be perfect

When you are perfect (popular) in your niche, then you start attracting lot of unwanted attention towards yourself. People start having huge expectations from you, your failures get more criticized, you’ve more enemies etc. So, in a way your decisions start getting influenced by the opinions of others. But when you are not perfect, you are free to do whatever you want to do and how you want to do.

So these are the five points due to which I think that why you shouldn’t wait to be perfect. As I know that I’m not a perfect and there is lot that I’ve to learn. So, please share your opinions in the comments below.

Gagandeep Singh is a Freelance writer working for conversion rate optimization company Invesp.