MelvinBlog

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

Blog

Experimenting With Search Funds

by ·

I know you guys are very familiar with get paid to search program known as Search Funds or now known as homepages friends. Basically it’s just a network that pays you for every search you do. Sounds scam right? Well I don’t really do get paid to, but I think this one will be an exception. As a student, and affiliate marketer and blogger, I do probably about 30 searches a day. And joining this type of network makes sense besides it’s free and it’s cost is next to nothing. I’ve been using it for close to a month now and I have £2 on my account. The minimum payout is £20 and obviously I’m very far from it.

So going back to the plan, well I have something not so evil going in my mind. I am the upcoming treasurer of our university’s information technology and computer science organization department and more probably my friends and/or our group would dominate each positions (because we are intelligent nice people). So what am I gonna do is just simply change the default Google search engine and search box on browsers of computers in the laboratory to my search engine with Search Funds. Then that’s it, students in the laboratory are students so oftentimes they do research. 😉 I will be tracking everything there by myself. And in a month I will put here the results. 🙂

Btw, if you haven’t heard search funds and somehow is interested here’s their Search Funds homepage

To Monetize Or To Not

by ·

monetize or not?So today I am going to set my views about monetizing blogs and when should you start it. I have read several blog posts about this but I think I’m going to have my share of what my thoughts are about monetizing blogs too early. Doing my own research, I have found out that 80% of blogs that are created have goals of putting advertisements on it and make the most out of it. And if I’m gonna base it with what I have seen most, I can say that out of 80% only 10-15% make decent money from their blog.

Monetizing a blog too early is an issue for a long time. I remember a great friend Carl Ocab writing a post that one should monetize early. Obviously I commented explaining my side and he had his reply to my comment. So back to monetizing I think it’s not really bad to monetize the blog very early. In fact you can sell your space cheap if your blog is new. But what I think most people are forgetting is that you don’t really need to expect a lot from it. Oftentimes, one would put a chitika banner and upon seeing that the blog hasn’t even made a dollar on a week, he would put the banner out and say that chitika isn’t effective. Net Business Blog owner Matt Coddlington said that monetizing your blog early will help you understand that it doesn’t go that easy.

Why not monetize? Well I think the single reason I can say people must need to understand is that they have to work their traffic first. In my experience when you’re traffic starts increasing then money wouldn’t be that hard. The problem when people start monetizing is that their focus shifts from acquiring a lot of traffic first to working so hard on monetizing. They keep on signing on different programs, work hard on ad placements, tweak their layouts to accommodate ads so they already forgot the need for traffic. I know you guys heard it already that you can’t focus on two things. You must always set your priorities and then do what should have been done.

I hope I made a point here. I’m not against monetizing new blogs. In fact you may see me work for monetizing this blog in few weeks or so. The key is always the traffic. In every income report of the famous John Chow you always see him stress in the last paragraph to drive truckloads of traffic first, before starting to explore monetization options. If you intend to monetize you’re blog early then just don’t expect too much. I know it’s hard to be patient but if you really want to reap the fruits of you’re blog then you must work well for it.

I think it’s like having sex. You don’t enjoy your partner if she’s just around 10-16 years old (tell me if you do). And you would certainly enjoy her when you do her on her peak which 18 years old onwards. Am I missing something?

If you like this post you may want to sphinn it or digg or reddit or just subscribe to my feeds.

Flawed Template, New Logo, Great Plans

by ·

Update: Rajaie has fixed my template and I really thank him for that. You can visit him here

So our class just took 4 hours and already went home and there’s pretty a whole lot of time to blog. Right now I’m gonna share you the things that took place for the week as well as plans

my logoNew Logo –> Yeah I think it’s great. Someone at bp told me to make a logo and so I did. I head to digital point forums and have someone for me to carve out one. Actually I purchased three so just in case this logo flunks, I still have a backup.

Threaded Plugin Comments –> is not supported in this template I guess. I really really love Brian’s threaded comment because it makes your blog more alive but I guess I’m not that blessed to use it…

Link colors, wtf! –> So this is my biggest embarrassment thus far. Everytime I ask how to change the color of the links to blue, people tend to look at me and say i’m a fool. Well the truth is, I really can’t. I have asked help from every forums, sitepoint, dp, blog premiere everywhere but none seemed to solve my case. I know you are gonna say I should edit the style.css and look for the a part or maybe a:link and replace the hex code. But to tell you guys, it really isn’t working. I’m close on hiring someone to do that simple thing for me. But of course it’s better to get away with it free. So who’s willing to help me? I’m gonna give my theme to you and resolve my case… For now links can be determined when you hover you’re mouse and the color changes to red.

Head to Head –> So yesterday I shot Daniel of Daily Blog Tips an email regarding whether I can use his concept of blogger face off but with a little variation. He said yes and boom! I can do it now also. I’me very excited about this new feature because it gives smaller blogs a chance to get featured.

Great Girls Friday –> So another great plan for the blog. Shoemoney is running a free shirt friday right and me with GSF. The main goal here is to feature girls I like on my blog every friday and giving a link back at them. It varies. I can interview lady bloggers out there (I’m targeting the beautiful Lisa Bettany) or have a picture with a beautiful girl here in Philippines (you know there are a lot of great girls here 😉 )

Go Boston Celtics –> So with the series up 2-0 I think Lakers will bounce back strong but I’m sure Boston will prevail. By the way I have a basketball blog entitled Triviality of Basketball. All the expenses for this blog are taken to that blog’s earnings… Are you in the Celtics bandwagon?

Affiliate Marketing Is A Very Green Pasture

by ·

Sorry for the title, I don’t really create great titles and I don’t know how to. 😉 So tomorrow, I’ll be back in class so more probably the next post will be a little sooner. Today I am going to say something about affiliate marketing. No, I won’t define nor discuss the basics of it or maybe even tell you something useful about it. I just am going to tell you guys that affiliate marketing can make you filthy rich. Yes I know you guys already know it but for some people out there who haven’t tried affiliate marketing yet then maybe you shouldn’t.

When I have first entered this I though it works on a CPC basis but it does not (I know I’m a fool). Well I am just surprised that many people do not actually know that affiliate marketing is a very lucrative business. Maybe you feel guys like Shoemoney and Chow and some others make big bucks blogging but the truth is they make even more and more being affiliates. I myself is an affiliate. I use many types of affiliate program and I suggest you too. In this field you really have to learn a lot and being creative helps you more. But to be specific I so much like Commission Junction and PepperJam. They have made great conversions for me. If you are wondering what product am I promoting, I embark a lot in a very easy way of dating. Ringtones are great but the market was very competitive now and dating wasn’t that much.

my account...

So how do you make money w/affiliate marketing? Two things come to my mind when asked about this question, outsourcing and leveraging (go and see wikipedia). I can say that I learned those things along the way. I’m not saying I’m earning a lot from affiliate marketing but what I say is aff.marketing has been my biggest money maker… Basically I start by promoting products, then buying about 30 domains and then hire someone to make me a salespage. That’s it, then some adwords (I highly recommend Aaron Wall SEO Book, the best by far!) Last words, if you are gonna go and try affiliate marketing then patience is the key. Learning is your main weapon and failure will be your guardian angel(i know it’s corny).

Btw, tune in for the next few days because I would be giving an ebook about how a newbie can make $500 per month on affiliate marketing. It costs i forgot and I’m not really sure if I want to share it for free. 😉

My Check Is Close To Expiring

by ·

more niche check

Like what I have said before, aside from blogging I really do lots of affiliate marketing. I spend my blog’s earnings to it and at the end of the day I just hoped that my investment makes sense. So I recall last April something I got a check from MoreNiche affiliate program. The check isn’t really big, it only amounted to $129 and I worked for it in 15 day, yeah 15 days only. Actually the product that I have promoted there was something about poker and gambling which really converts well.

So back to the check, I think a check expires in 3 months right? So initially to be able to withdraw checks in Philippines, you have to open a dollar account in a bank. The minimum deposit is $300. For some it’s not a problem, for me it’s a huge problem. Why? Because first, $300 is not a small amount, at least for me. Then all the payments that I’ve got go directly to my paypal account and some by wire transfers. Paypal amounts were converted to peso upon withdrawing while wire transfer also works the same way. So the first solution I have got is selling peso to dollars. That time I was thinking that maybe I shouldn’t because if I do, I can’t spend my money to buy things that I need/want.

Months passed by and the check is now close to getting expired. I’m in the tough situation right now because I don’t have money at this point. Everything was re-invested back and some were spent. I think it’s really my fault; I didn’t see this coming and haven’t realized that I have a check in hand. But wait I still have one solution. Maybe I can ask my mom for a $300 (13,000 in pesos) and just pay her afterwards. After all, I learned another lesson.

People Will Not Read Your Blog

by ·

…much more to comment on your post. Well with over 20 billions of blogs in the blogosphere, it’s really hard for new blogs or even old blogs to obtain some trust and get some disciples followers. I know some will easily say that if you promote it well, then most likely things are gonna go well. Maybe not! Writing great content is hoisted all over the World Wide Web. By far it is still the most effective way of convincing people that you really worth the attention. But how is good content good? How do you make people like you? Your blog? Here are some simple tips that to my surprise I see many do not do.

• Spontaneity. Well my blog is very new. I have created it just last May 27. And the sad part is after creating and making the first post, mosquitoes don’t want me to have a great start so they gave me the dengue and I was confined for 4 days. So what about it? Well looking to my blog I got about over 20 comments already and I can say it’s a great number because I see most blogs that do not have a comment for most posts and it’s a big pain. When writing a post in blog, I suggest being natural with what you feel. I mean some bloggers tend to put so much pressure on perfecting their post and it really hurt their blog. Just go with what you feel, after all it’s a blog, it’s YOUR blog. And how many times do you see shoemoney writing about lost episodes, johnchow about his fine dining and look, they get tons of comments for that!

• Affiliate links. I really despise reading blogs with affiliate links on almost every post. That’s why I don’t read chow’s blog that much. =p Btw, putting an affiliate links are not really bad but should be held moderately. Remember that you’re providing readers informations and helping them, not the other way around.

• Super duper Self promotion. Oftentimes, I really see blogs that have some promotions about themselves on the first page and I think it’s not really a great way. Most of this blogs are about SEO and it’s obvious that they are indeed selling their services and boasting. In my humble opinion, I feel that can be put instead at the about page where it really does not mess the content.

• Flawed template. Ok, I admit the first time I bought my theme I edit it heavily not knowing that it made my sidebar pushed down. I didn’t see it because I’m using firefox (though some did) and I really thank people for letting me know it (they are from blog premiere and some from digital point). Right now the template has still some flaws and I’m really doing everything to clean the mess.

• You don’t read their blog. So if you don’t read other peoples blog then chances are they don’t read your blog. Most blogs out there are really informative and I can say that it has really helped me a lot in some aspects. To reward them why not link to them?

These are just few things that popped into my mind when thinking about people who say “why don’t you visit my blog anymore”. You can always add something there and everyone has his own views. I’m glad to hear some from you…

The RSS FEED

by ·

Ok everyone knows what an rss feed is right? And I’m sure most people have different ways on how they would increase their subscribers from feed. Actually I have really invested some thoughts about feeds. Why? Because if you work hard on getting rss subscribers and end up getting more from it than from your site itself, then I guess monetizing your blog would be somehow difficult or maybe earnings maybe lesser than what you should get.

So looking at techcrunch’s rss subscribers a year ago, I was amazed how they are getting so many readers to their site especially most coming from their feed. And I am even more amazed when I learned that an ad spot on techcrunch costs $10,000 per month.
So getting back to rss, to be honest I was not really trying to focus much on promoting my rss for some reasons:

  • Because there are tons of feed scrapers out there
  • I would rather have people visit my blog’s page rather than an RSS.

I don’t really know why but my basketball site before only an rss button because it’s pretty much included in the theme. Though I have never ever promoted its feed I was surprised to see that I got at least 30 subscribers for about 6 months for not even asking them to subscribe. Then through my analytics I have realized that most people who comment and visit there came from feeds So that’s the time that I have really seen the importance of getting people into your rss feed. Right now, my plan for this month is to increase my rss subscribers and hopefully get into a hundred before this year ends. That’s a pretty realistic goal I must say…