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

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5 Tips to Effectively Start a Brand New Blog

by Melvin · Dec 21, 2009

In this post,  Brandon Walker talks about some good tips on getting how a brand new blog can easily get recognized.

I often get asked “what is the best method to use to effectively start a new blog to give it the best possible chance of being successful?”

It’s always a difficult question to answer particularly because starting a brand new blog can be challenging and difficult for webmasters as they usually have no audience, no traffic and have not been recognized as an authority within their niche. It is therefore extremely important to have credibility and that can be difficult to achieve, particularly if you have only been active in internet marketing circles for a short length of time.

But don’t become too discouraged because you will find many successful bloggers will say the most difficult time they faced during the beginning stages of blogging was when no one knew who they were within their niches.

  1. Write Good Content – Writing good content in your blogs is essential if you’re looking to get noticed within your niche. This is the most effective means you can utilize to connect with your readers because through your content you can project your own style and personality.Readers appreciate good quality content and if they like it may even consider linking to it because they like it so much. From my own experience I have sites that tend to do well and attract traffic simply because I had put a great deal of time and effort into writing good quality content.

    This is generally because readers bookmark the content, refer to it in their own posts, resulting in natural links and traffic.

    The golden rule for writing good content is that one stunningly well written post can receive much more traffic and attention than many very ordinary posts combined.

  2. Guest Posting – Often when you begin a new site you don’t have an audience of people reading your content while other sites in your niche may have.To generate interest my advice is to search for credible blogs in your niche and look to see whether or not they accept guest posts. If they do accept guest posts write a top quality article using your very best material and then send your article to the blog site by email. If the blog author happens to like your material, they will post it on their site resulting in you gaining credibility, recognition and generating traffic to your own site.To help you get started, one method you can use to find guest posts is through Google. This can be done by entering the search string (niche keyword) + “guest post. This search will bring up pages of results on blogs that are willing to accept guest authors.

    Find appropriate blogs in your niche and get writing!

  3. Gain Trust With Google – Thousands of brand new blogs are started everyday, many of them spam sites. It is important for you to convince Google that your site is not another one of these low quality sites by building quality links from reputable sources.For example Ezinearticles, Hubpages and Squidoo are all sites looked favorably upon by Google. Further, they all allow you to create a page on their site with a link pointing to your own site.

    In simple terms, by getting a single link from each of these sites you are effectively letting Google know that you are not just another spam site and you should therefore be trusted. This can be very powerful because gaining trust from Google is very important because ‘traffic is king’ and can over time lead to search traffic flowing to your new site.

  4. Become a Credible Source of Information Within Your Niche – It is very important that you build credibility within your niche when you begin a brand new site. It is necessary to show people you should be trusted and are knowledgeable with regard to your niche.As already mentioned guest posting is one way to gain this credibility along with forum marketing and commenting on high profile blogs being another excellent method.

    The key is to post relevant and exceptional comments so people will take notice.

  5. Build a List – Generally when you start a new blog, visitors to your site are very limited – that’s why it is important you try to retain these visitors who do come calling.One method you can use is to produce a free report with valuable information about your niche and offer it to your readers in exchange for their name and email address. This can require effort on your part in putting together the report but there are several advantages to be made by following this approach. For example, apart from collecting their details so they can be contacted later, you are also importantly building trust and credibility with your readers through the free report you are providing.

Conclusion

Clearly the success of your blog or any website for that matter is dependent on how much effort you’re a prepared to put into your site.

If you work hard and apply the 5 methods I have mentioned above, then before you know it your brand new site will have visitors clicking onto it and generating ongoing income for you.

Brandon Walker is an accomplished internet marketer who provides tips, techniques and advice to other bloggers on how to generate income from working online at Foxmarketer.com

Filed Under: Blogging Tips, Guest Post, Traffic Tagged With: brand new blog, getting traffic

Shoemoney System, Manila Blog Workshop & Some Announcements

by Melvin · Dec 17, 2009

So it’s been quite a long time since I’ve done a recap post about the blogosphere and some news. And I thought today is the best day to post for something like this.

And anyways, we’re all feeling the spirit of holidays, aren’t we? 😉

Blog Recap

The blog has been quite doing well both in terms of revenue and growing the community. The traffic for October up to December has grown up to like 125%. And thanks to the guest posting galore and some advertising campaigns. In few days I am going to publish a really great post about how guest posting has really increased not just my traffic but my overall branding overall, so stay tuned!

Shoemoney System and Manila Blogging Workshop

Jeremy Schoemaker, the ever famous Shoemoney has released the Shoemoney System. Seriously it looks like its a paid system (soon) but as for now you really got to check it out as Jeremy is handing out free videos with seriously superb qualities. Whether you’re new into this game or a seasoned one you might want to follow the system as there’s really so much to learn from it.

Meanwhile if you’re here locally (w/c means you’re a Filipino), then you must take a look at the Manila Blogging Workshop. It’s organized by KidBlogger Carl Ocab, who happens to be a good friend of mine too. Carl has been in this business of blogging for what, 4 years? So his experience definitely is something that you could gain a lot. Be sure to check out the video because Carl explained what the workshop is all about (seriously its not the seminar and workshop you’re used to).

Getting Sold and What Not

This past few week has also been surprising with the acquisition of some pretty big companies/dot com businesses online. If you’re a reader of TechCrunch then you probably have heard already that the popular Imeem music has been already sold to Myspace Music for $1 million in cash. There’s a ton of criticism with this acquisition since MySpace seemed to have shut down the API and yea Im a regular Imeem user so it sucks.

Old social network known as Friendster w/c is a very popular network here in Asia has been sold to a Malaysian Payment Company MOL Global. It’s really the last gasp of Friendster, a network which used to be real famous until MySpace and Facebook joined the scene. Friendster was acquired for just a mere value of $26 million (their valuation is like $100 million).

And yea, Im not selling mine and I hope you don’t sell yours as well even though if its just a small asset. I have a huge portfolio of websites and blogs that are just never utilized (because Im soooper busy) well but I swear to God I will KEEP them. Anything I forgot here?

Filed Under: Ramblings, Social Media Tagged With: blogging workshop, holidays, shoemoney system, techcrunch news

Premium Themes OR Custom Themes?

by Melvin · Dec 12, 2009

Bloggers at certain point in time usually decide eventually that they would start using a paid theme. The problem that bothers them the most is whether they should use a premium theme or a completely customized theme. In this brief post I would discuss to you the two briefly including their advantage and disadvantage.

PREMIUM THEMES

Premium themes are themes you usually pay for. Obviously the quality of these themes are way ahead of free themes and the benefits that you’d receive from using it is just too much.

The cost of a single use license is very cheap either, ranging from $20 to couple hundreds of dollars. If you ask me its a great deal because for some couple of dollars you get yourself a good theme, and you set yourself apart from other millions of bloggers who use “cookie-cutter” free themes. Also with premium themes, you can pretty much expect the coding to be clean enough to maximize every possible potential for the blog.

Another thing to add is the support forums. Most, if not all, premium themes services come with lifetime support which includes access to tutorials and the forum. For me this is really crucial since working with your newly purchased premium design could be tough especially if you’re not techy enough to handle all the mind-boggling stuffs. One reason why the Thesis theme is soooo popular and well-loved is because of its excellent support enabling users to really make the most of what they paid.

Obviously the main disadvantage of Premium themes is that you really don’t get to look that much different from the rest of the users of the same theme. Yes, you can change the headers, colors, fonts designs or whatever but at the end of the day, you’re still using the same theme with 100 others. But heck that should not be that big of a factor when considering this type of theme! Here’s a short list of the popular Premium themes services:

  • Thesis Theme
  • WooThemes
  • Ultimate Blogging Theme
  • StudioPress
  • Themewars (my theme! 😉 )

CUSTOM THEMES

Customized themes are themes that are unique, meaning no one can have that same look, layout or whatever. The quality of these themes is never in question (debatable) and it’s certainly the type of theme you could use if you have big money to spend.

That being said, to get a custom theme you need to have $1000 upwards. Obviously what you’re going to get is more than just the “premium” and you’d feel super special knowing not any single blogger sports the same theme. 🙂

There are several disadvantages that in my opinion the custom themes have. First is limited support. Most custom theme companies just have a limited number of revisions (mostly 3 revs). So in case you communicated poorly with them then its a big problem for your part when you couldnt seem to get what you want from them. And since different companies have different coding conventions, it can really be tough to do the dirty work yourself.

And another is the tough decision on choosing what company to hire. Most people find themselves trapped on choosing a cheap untested company to design their own only to find out that the work completely sucked. It usually is a big problem because most people want to have custom looks for their blogs YET don’t have that budget so they end up paying for a cheap (crap) company. Anyhow no worries, I already did the research for you for the top ones in this category

  • Unique Blog Designs
  • Cre8d Designs
  • Soap Design
  • BeersDesign
  • Guerilla

Conclusion

It’s a cliche statement, but it all depends on what you really need and what your goals are (and how much you can spend). Most people use (custom) designs to springboard themselves to fame while others let content speak for it.

I’m biased but obviously I would pick Premium over custom simply because you can do so much things that can match what a custom theme does for a very reasonable price. Support also does it because you don’t need to guess, most of what you want is laid out in there and that’s something  a custom theme NEVER does have.

Coding is another big factor. As I’ve said when you hire a custom designer, most of what you would see is in the front-end. But how about the back-end? How about how codes are optimal? How its integration maximizes the search engine traffic? Or is it even w3c compliant?

So I’m laying out the floor on you to speak. What do you think about the custom themes and the premium themes? Which one do you prefer the most?

Filed Under: Blogging Tips, Designs, SEO Tagged With: blog design, custom themes, premium themes

Let Me See Your Workspace

by Melvin · Dec 8, 2009

Much to my surprise there were just actually few people who have done this thing before (doing a google search would tell you). So in this very short post I am going to just to announce that I am looking for YOUR blogging workspace to feature here in my blog.

Note: You don’t need to have a majestic workspace to get qualified. Whether your workspace is in the farm, or in the yacht or wherever. The goal of this is to simply showcase the workspace of small business entrepreneurs/bloggers like us. In exchange is, of course a lovely link from this PR0 blog and some traction. 😀

How the heck are you gonna let me know about your workspace? There are various ways:

  • By using my contact form (recommended)
  • By giving a link of it in the comment form (not recommended, you’d spoil the excitement by letting your workspace shown “prematurely”)
  • By tweeting it to @melvinblog
  • Writing in Mail.

So fire away your workspaces!

Filed Under: Offtopic, Ramblings Tagged With: blog workspace, workspace

5 Ways to Make Readers Visit Your Blog Again

by Melvin · Dec 4, 2009

In this post, Mikkel talks about 5 ways on how to make your readers visit your blog again for more.

Does your visitor count go from 5 to 51 in a day, and then on 7 the next day? That’s a quite clear sign that you don’t have loyal readers, those readers can be hard to get. I have compiled a list of methods on how to get readers to come back

  1. Contest – Everybody loves contests, if a reader is competing in a contest of yours he will get back, if he win he might want to read the blog, because you are cool – and then your blog is (of course) delivering good content.When you are running a contest be sure to make the contest as relevant as possible, don’t go offer an Internet Marketing product if your blog is about dog training. If you don’t have a niche or can come up with anything you’d like to offer, then just offer a cash prize everybody loves cold cash.
  2. Maybe you should held a contest every once in a month – which will make people come back = repeated traffic.

  3. Offer White Papers – White papers are really good for attracting readers – especially repeated traffic, if you for an example release a new white paper every month people will get back to your blog to download the white paper.Be sure to use the white paper to link back to your blog – just try to make it as relevant as possible. Add links in the text. In that way you will make people come back to your blog and then they make that a habit, so they will return more often.
  4. Update Your Blog – The probably easiest way (but yet the one that takes time) to make people come back and read your blog is to write new content. Readers don’t want to keep checking your blog for 3-4 days in a row to find a non-updated blog – at least write 5 articles in a week – the more the better. One article per day is okay, if the article is above 500 words. If it’s 250 word per post, try to publish 2 articles each day.
  5. Be a Part of Another Community – If you are member of a forum and write more than one post each day, people will remember your name and blog – so they check it out, maybe they are going to be loyal readers sometime. It will make readers come back because they see your post and look at the signature. Which reminds them of the fantastic content you provide.Maybe leave some comments on another blog (in your niche) – write a thoughtful comment, which will lead them to click the link to the well written content on your blog. That would make a loyal reader, because he finds your blog through a comment on his blog (a good comment), which also shows that you care about other people than yourself.
  6. Write Content That is Unique – Write content that makes people think: “This is a unique blog, I haven’t seen a post about this topic anywhere else. I want to subscribe.” Lots of blogs about blogging talks about the same. You have to stand out from the crowd to get people to even think about coming back.

This is guest blogged by Mikkel from DaneBlogger.com. Mikkel is a 14 year old kid from Denmark who’s been blogging since 2007.Feel free to subscribe to his feed.

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Guest Post Tagged With: blog traffic, loyal readers

Really Want To Make Money? – Find Your Strengths!

by Melvin · Nov 30, 2009

I remember when I was just getting started with my making money ventures I was like “I want to try this, want to try that and whatever”. My mentality was like I want to try everything so that when something fails, there’s still a good chance some of the methods I tried would work. Imagine if I would try 20 different money-making tactics, maybe at least 1 or 2 would succeed. Did I do the right thing? NO!

The Problem Noobs Encounter

When some new guy is entering the industry, you could easily expect that guy to be full of energy and enthusiasm. Or maybe inspiration for some people. Like my case, they jump into everything head first and has that aggressive mentality and “hail Mary please work” mindset. But it isn’t wrong right? The answer is YES and NO.

I’ve written a lot here in the blog about how people should TAKE ACTION and I know other million dozen bloggers say the same. It’s true, you won’t succeed reading for 10 years before acting. But the same can be also said to being too aggressive. I had this cousin who really wanted to jump into affiliate marketing and because she’s really wealthy, she dived into it without having any basic startup knowledge. The result was she lost a ton of money.

You know me, I really love to test, love to take advantage of “unheard” stuffs and just always think outside the box. But do bare in mind that I can already afford to fail given my experience with internet marketing. If you’re a noob, has no money and has that unnerving mindset then LISTEN. I know it’s cool to look real brave, its good for the ego for people to see you as a courageous newbie business person. But don’t be an idiot. Work your way up first before acting like you’ve done it already.

Finding Your Strengths

Just because you heard arbitrage is cool, doesn’t mean you have to go into it. I hear a lot of people saying “I heard this thing makes big money, I heard I could become a millionaire with this and that”. That’s exactly the no.1 recipe for failure.

If you really want to start making money, then start analyzing your strengths. Start planning the directions you’re going to take. Narrow down your huge options and think. I understand everyone wants to be that “entrepreneur”, a CEO-like business person who is at the top, foreseeing whats happening, getting the biggest money but you have to understand it’s not gonna happen. Successful freelancers remain as freelancers, graphic artists could never become programmers and bloggers as CEO is far-fetched.

What do you think? Do you think you’re playing the game using your strengths or playing it with others strength? Let me know by using the contact form below..

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing, Preachings, Ramblings Tagged With: finding strengths, make money, noobs

MelvinBlog 2.0 – The Scenes Behind It

MelvinBlog 2.0 – The Scenes Behind It

by Melvin · Nov 24, 2009

By now you probably have realized that this blog has been sporting a new design and a completely different layout. And as always any change deserves an explanation. 😉 So in this post I would try to do an in-depth explanation about this new design and how it came out to look like this.

MelvinBlog’s New Design

I lied when I stated that the new design would probably be implemented next year. Anyways, obviously the new design uses a magazine template which enables easier navigation and making good use of spaces. At first I totally really oppose the use of magazine themes for this blog for some reasons but after seeking for professional advices, I just got myself convinced!

The theme I am specifically using is Colormatic Theme, a theme created by ThemeWars which is owned by the super popular Unique Blog Designs. As of course, there are many magazine-styled themes by other companies but I guess UBD has sold the concept of this theme well to me and so I did purchase the developer’s license.

Anyways, the one prop I always get from the former theme is that it looks really peaceful and tranquil. I guess people like the light colors of it and I, myself think that the blending of color on that theme was good. So basically what I did was to try to carry out as much color schemes/combination as possible and import it in the new theme.

Better Navigation

As you can see the homepage of the blog showcases not just the latest post but also the best posts from the blog. It has the featured content at the top most part and the recent blog posts at the left. I also have four sub footers in there in which I have difficulties filling up with.

The unique part of this theme is the built-in blog navigator widget, the social network in the sidebar and the recent tweets. Do take note that those are not plugins but built-in widgets that comes within the theme.

Newsletter

newsletterThis is the first time I have had a list in the IM niche and although I am with Aweber for long, I never really intended to have one until I realized the need of it last month. And that was one reason the change of theme has become imminent.

So this current layout has basically met my plans with the newsletter placement and as you may notice it’s very very visible. Feel free to sign up in it (it’s free) and I am promising to over-deliver to you, giving out the best stuffs that I’ve never yet put up here. You might not want to miss that.

Better Ad Placements

The new theme benefits advertisers as well. All the ads are shown on EVERY page/post and it just means maximum exposure for them. It’s also taking lesser space now as opposed to before yet is more organized.

I don’t have any plans on increasing the number of ads/ad spots in this blog (yet) as this blog is not created solely for getting monetized. But I am planning to increase the price of the ad spots since the current price is the price for about 5-6 months and obviously the blog has grown a ton after that period.

The Sidebar, Testimonials and Facebook Fan My Blog

Well this theme is preloaded with 4-5 different layouts and this one I’m using has two sidebars in homepage and one in every page/post. Using the sidebars is so easy because it’s widgetized unlike my former team. And as you may notice different widgets show in different pages of the blog (I would talk that in my future posts).

There’s also that testimonial part in the latter part of the sidebar. These are testimonials from some of the loyal readers of this blog and if you feel you can add one, then please hit me up in the contact form.

The facebook fan my blog widget is one that’s been recently used by a lot of bloggers and have left me wondering “why not?” So currently all the fans are my friends and classmates and so if you’re a frequent reader and a subscriber here then why not give the author some kudos by hitting up the “become a fan” button? 🙂

Overall Feel and Your Suggestions

It actually took me close to one week to test different color schemes and layout before deciding to fully implement this one. My designers and I still had about 4-5 custom implementations to make this theme more enticing. We’re still waiting for something to finally put together all those piece. In the end I really feel it’s all worth it and I feel more excited than ever! It makes me want to go to every page of the blog and feel the new look of it.

I also think it’s time to say goodbye to the old theme. I really like it and I’ve told you that lots of times here. That greenish organic theme from PremiumThemes.Net made me good money, helped the blog grow and had its own ups and downs. I’m a guy who appreciates everything and here’s the final look the MelvinBlog V1 powered by Organic theme. Click for a larger look…

So now it’s your turn. I’ve asked some of my friends about the new design and now it’s time for you, my audience to speak out your mind and throw your suggestions and critique for this blog. I could very well appreciate each and every suggestion that I can get from you and let’s hope it’s a win-win situation for everyone here.

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Featured Articles, Offtopic, Preachings, Ramblings Tagged With: colormatic, melvinblog new theme, new design, new layout

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