Blogging Experience

Getting Back to ‘Basketball Blogging’

by Melvin · Apr 7, 2012

I mentioned many times in the past how I got started with blogging, and it was through blogging about basketball, particularly the NBA. Ideally it was my plan to blog about other areas of basketball like local basketball, European leagues, collegiate basketball, etc. however it was pretty obvious that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it due to my lack of knowledge on other areas and time constraints as well (was a student at the time).

Anyway back to ‘getting back’ to basketball blogging, I used to own a personal basketball blog called Basketball Nonsense that I started 2007. It was nothing really eye-catching as its just a ramblings blog about basketball (NBA) where I just rant about players that I don’t like and write about my own analysis on things. Long story short, it started getting popular and started making money although it was never massive. I sold the blog for 300 some dollars which at the time was amazing for me. I was so thrilled with the amount that I accepted the bid right away.

Even with the sale, I still wrote for the blog as a paid writer for the next 4-5 months. And even after that period, I would still normally write or comment about an article there just because I needed a place to write something regarding my thoughts about basketball. Offline, I usually have friends who I talk to about basketball almost every single day. I guess anyone who follows basketball know that it isn’t really out of the ordinary to talk about basketball 24-7.

Back to Blogging about NBA Basketball

It was a long story and even now I don’t still have the complete ownership of the blog. But since I’ve hosted the site for perhaps over a year now for free, I decided to take on a more active role regarding writing content on the blog.

Basketball Nonsense is not an amazing blog at all and in fact, it gets less than 50 hits a day for the past 1.5 years. My goal is to write more content again on that blog however I’m not really too keen on monetizing it or making it like Slam Online or something. If it gets traffic and comments, fine but right now, I just want to write my thoughts about basketball on some web property. And since there’s a property that I used to own, why not write on that existing one?

All in all, this is ‘blogging for passion’ in action. I’m just so glad I can write once more about basketball and offer my ‘scholarly’ thoughts about what’s happening and engage to the community once again. And to start with, I made some minor revamps on design and will still continue to enhance its look and then later focus on writing more.

But that’s it for now. Visit the blog and let me know what you think!

The Death of Complex Blog Designs (& My Own Redesign)

by Melvin · Mar 4, 2012

When I started being aware of blogs, most of the blogs at the time were pretty much sporting a generic design. The simple blog layout was usually just a 2 column layout, a simple header, simple footer and dull colors. Of course I just followed the herd and had those design on my blogs.

Now as time passed by, more and more blog design companies introduced more flexible yet complex themes. All of a sudden all normal blogs started sporting the ‘magazine’ look and I was one of them of course. 😉 The simple 2 column layout became obsolete quickly and multiple sidebars, multi subheaders and footers started becoming the ‘in thing’. And based on the past designs of this blog, you can see that I was very much following the trend.

MelvinBlog 4.0

Even though I’ve been mostly using magazine style themes, I’m a big fan of simple blog designs such as DailyBlogTips and DoshDosh (which is dead nowadays). I always thought like their blog loads in no time and that its very very pleasing in the eyes. And thus, it encouraged me to find a simpler design and finally move away from the magazine style template.

Now you can argue that my current design may still not be the ‘simplest’ of all however you can easily see that this design moves far away from the previous designs where I had fancy sliders, colorful images, thumbnails and etc. Instead, this design just focuses on content and nothing else. The readability, spacing is definitely much better and the elements can breathe easier based on how the theme is designed. And while I still have 2 sidebars, the widgets that I have utilized is much lesser than the past designs. And lastly I cut down on redundancy by eliminating stuff that are pretty much just wasting the space.

Now using StudioPress Framework

And if you’re wondering what theme it is, then the answer is its StudioPress. In the past designs I mostly pick themes that are not so mainstream. The past theme was from someone in ThemeForest and while I like it, its clear that its pretty hard to expand from the theme itself due to that there’s really not much people behind it.

With StudioPress, you’re talking about the flexible framework but you’re also after the interactive support from the community. I’m sure its still going to take me some time to understand features such as hooks but they’re definitely not lacking on resources on how to help users like me understand it. So all in all I’m happy so far with my transition to the StudioPress Framework and thus I would highly recommend you to at least take a look at them.

Death of Complex Designs.

Now getting back to the death of complex flashy blog designs, I would say that most bloggers in this space have moved into a more simple approach as well. Shoemoney’s blog has been much cleaner now and loads a ton quicker as well. John Chow who has been notorious for plastering his blog with as much stuff as possible has also decided to cut down more. I have a lot on the list but you should find out yourself that blogs these days seem to be getting back more on basic designs with basic layout and stuff. Or perhaps is it just in this industry?

Perhaps this has also something to do with the decline of the ‘meta-blogging’ (blogging about blogging, blogging about making money blogging) trend. The strength of meta-blogging mostly hinges through advertising money, affiliate referral, and product sales in general and when you’re talking about those things, you’re talking about putting more and more ‘clutter’ to your blog one way or another. Its like the ‘more banners the better chance I can make money’ kind of thinking. And now that its dead, bloggers are quickly moving away from all the clutter by either changing their approach or just simply forgetting about blogging for money.

And therefore, what used to be “dull” seems to be the cool thing again these days. What say you?

Resurrection of my Blogging Life + Drastic Changes Ahead…

by Melvin · Feb 29, 2012

So what’s up? It’s been almost 3 months since I last posted here in this blog and the last two posts didn’t even seem like “real” posts from me. 🙂 Overall, I just posted less than 40 posts for the past year and just 4 in the past 4 months. Oh yea!

I’m sure you’ve heard me before coming up with a lot of alibis and excuses for the lack of posts and today, I would still do the same by saying that I’ve been busy the past year with my work primarily and other client tasks. But the difference is that I will not come up with a list this time of what to expect from this blog. But rather I would discuss some drastic changes going forward.

Reverting back to casual posting

One of the things that I’ve done in the past 2 years (more evidently the past year) is that I moved slowly from being a casual blogger that has passion for internet marketing and blogging to a blogger who wants to build expertise and strictly cater to that expertise. I started to “act” like a guru on something and thus wanted to connect to my audience as someone who knows A LOT about something rather than just simply being myself. Obviously this has burned me out to the point that I hated writing here anymore.

When I was just getting started about 4 years ago, I idolized Shoemoney because he’s just so ‘plain’. He writes something useful about our industry but he also writes a lot about ‘personal crap’ or things that he’s interested but most of is audience are not. And I used to post like that. I had a lot ‘childish’ posts about having a bunch of mouse for my PC, receiving gadgets from companies, and even love life posts. It’s not really “so professional” but its enjoying.

Going back to what I was doing the past year, it became clear that its “unfulfilling”. I started to work on things like capturing more newsletter subscribers, strategizing on funneling prospects to buyers, writing bait posts that will eventually get readers to get my incentives and all of those ‘Frank Kern’ type of ninja things. Of course, no offense to Frank, but I was not built that way.

And last but certainly not the least, Robb Sutton’s post about ‘Blogging needing to get back to its roots‘ made me realize a bunch of things as well. So props to you Rob!

What will change & what will not

Does this mean I’m not going to monetize this blog anymore? No of course! Ads are still there and will always be there forever. I haven’t really made that much money from ads recently (probably less than $1500 for the past year) however I still see a lot of value in the “spaces” of this blog. I’m not going to push this too much but ads will remain. 🙂

How about the usual ‘marketing’ shit like capturing email leads, funneling them, selling info products to them, upselling etc.? I will probably still however this will never ever be a priority. In fact, I don’t even think I’m going to do anything aside from getting some newsletters out. I don’t see myself putting out any product today, and in the future. 😉

How about the posts? As mentioned above, I will do more casual posts. More of “I feel good about writing this today” kind of thing. Maybe not so much as say posting cat pictures, or ranting about neighbors and colleagues and stuff. But it depends on how I feel. I’m sure I’m going to lose out some readers along the way but hey this is my blog.

I will probably be doing some massive changes to some pages to reflect the shift of focus for this blog. Sure, pages like Freebies, Why Subscribe to my Blog will remain unchanged but as mentioned, the blog will not revolve around showcasing those things anymore. I’d be happy if I get more and more readers however, as long as I’m feeling good about what I’m doing, then I will just continue it. 🙂

So whats next?

I don’t know! I’ll probably write next about the version 4.0 design of this blog and then some ramblings here and there. The one thing to keep in mind is that MelvinBlog will still continue to be an internet marketing /blogging blog however I wouldn’t be pressuring myself too much about coming up with guides and rich-content type of posts. I may put out some posts about a marketing strategy that worked well for me but that would be few and far between.

As I’m writing this, I’m actually getting more and more excited about this ‘rebirth’ in blogging. I haven’t really written anything on ANY other blogs of mine but that FOR SURE will change in the coming months. Either for the good or the bad, not much that I cared anyway. 😉

Does Directory Submission Still Work? Get Links Pro Review

by Melvin · Dec 10, 2011

Directory submission used to be one of the more popular link building techniques that people used to boost their search rankings. Back then, doing submissions was a must. However these days, many SEO experts seem to conclude that doing submissions isn’t worth it anymore. But is it really the case?

Well to help us answer that, let’s review Get Links Pro first, a company that does manual directory submissions and also other link building methods.

Get Links Pro Review

As mentioned above, Get Links Pro provides manual directory submissions and other link building services like blog comments, do-follow profile links, article submissions, local citations and etc.

Get Links Pro’s services start at $8 for 50 Social Bookmarks package and go up to $200 for 2000 Directory Submission package. They also provide a monthly type of directory package which costs a walking $25 for 250 monthly directory submissions. The owner told me that this monthly package was more popular than the other ones.

Overall, most of the categories are pretty flexible in which it allows you to choose from a small package up to a big package.

Aside from this, they also provide a combination of all of their services and this falls into their link building services. For this, they combined 5 different types of methods which help ensure diversity in link building profile. For example their ‘fantastic package’ provides 100 directory submissions, 50 article submissions, 15 profile links and 5 dofollow comments at an affordable price of $39. The higher end of these combinations is called the ‘Incredible Package’ which costs $1,455.

If you decide to go this route, I would suggest picking what’s suitable for you for the immediate moment. They have 9 different combinations for the link building service that you can choose from so if you’re just a small startup then obviously the cheaper one could work well for you. This is also ideal since links are coming from multiple sources which mean it’s much more diversified and less spammy.

Here is a screenshot of some of their link building packages:

Get Links Pro Website

If you arrive at Get Links Pro website, you can see that it’s a pretty simple and neat site. The navigation is good although it could be a bit confusing at the start. For example, you would initially think that they only do manual directory submissions since it’s the primary description on their site. Also, I think some packages could be named better like a ‘fantastic package’ for instance could be named as a ‘beginner package’ or anything that describes it better.

Another thing worth-noting is that most of their category-specific packages are not done efficiently (in my opinion). You will have to scan through a long generic pack of text before you can see the pricing and the content of the package. I definitely think that the pricing and packages should be the first thing seen when someone goes in there. The text can then come below that (like their link building services page. 😉 ). Lastly, I don’t think people would want to read a long text so it probably wouldn’t harm if they decrease the text, and get straight to the point.

Support and Other Miscelllaneous Stuff

As far as support, I think they’re just doing it fine as they have 5 “I’m online” live chats. Yes 5 different live chats. Seriously I’ve never seen any service or website that lists 5 different live chats that you could talk to so as long as these chats are for real, then I think it’s a big plus on their part.

Aside from that, I think everything is fine on their end. They have lots of pages (FAQ’s, About, Affiliates, etc.) so if you really want to know them more and the services that they provide, you can definitely spend some time reading about them first. Lastly, I think the URL structure on some of the pages is quite funny as it seems to be ‘rerouting’ some pages to a temporary link or something. A good example would be clicking on their logo (i.e. has some index.php?’parameters’ instead of just the main index url).

Conclusion

So is it still worth spending money on manual submissions? Specifically companies like Get Links Pro? My personal opinion is that directory submissions are still useful and if done correctly, it can still create a diversified link profile that can rank you well for certain key terms. In fact, I know some people that rely on this alone in getting their niche sites up in the search engines. But again, submissions must be done correctly and I don’t think there’s anything better than manual submissions like what Get Links Pro does.

So if you want to get ranked and you don’t have time to do it yourself, check out Get Links Pro. I’m sure there would be a package there that would suit your needs.

Why a Blog is your Best Marketing Asset

by Melvin · Oct 10, 2011

I have been blogging for about 4 years now and it still never ceases to amaze me how a blog can be utilized as a powerful marketing asset for whatever you’re doing. For example, this blog alone has helped me do a ton of things just because I write here. It has that leverage that gives you a pretty good advantage over your other competitors in your market. Aside from that it allows you to do direct response marketing better than ever since you’re hardly pitching them anything but rather just giving out good content.

Anyway there’s a huge contest over at SEM-GROUP in w/c I am currently participating right now. My writing entry to that contest is entitled Your Best Internet Marketing Asset – Your Blog. It’s a detailed blog post about what I said above. It also tackles how blogging alone covers all of the other components that you probably already need in order to succeed in marketing your business online. Again you can help me win the contest by reading my contest entry.

It’s not a traffic-getting contest actually but rather just a writing contest. However, its one of those rarely lengthy blog entries that I usually do and I think you can benefit greatly from that.

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

Contest Media Partner

$500 Sponsors

RankPop.com Affordable SEO

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Daniel McGonagle Link Building

SEO-Peace.com Professional link building SEO Company

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Hesham Zebida Thesis Skins

$100 Sponsors

Scott Bradley Simple Weight Loss Tips For Entrepreneurs

Milan Matchev Health Directory

Jacob Share JobMob Job Search Tips

Ileane Smith Blogging Tips

Search Engine Marketing Group

John Britsios www.SEOWorkers.com

Magento Developer

Doc Sheldon’s Clinic Critical Thinking for the Discerning SEO

$50 Sponsors

Vertical Measures Internet Marketing Services

Whitney Michael Segura Greenhouses for Sale

Butch Segura Wholesale Greenhouses by EarthCare

Whitney “WeedyP” Segura Internet Marketing Blog by Whitney Segura

Ernest Segura Greenhouse Supplies @ OurCrazyDeals.com

Raxa Design Houston Internet marketing

Ana Hoffman – Traffic Generation Cafe Web Traffic

James Brown James Brown

Anwar Barake Wholesale Herbal Incense

Understand Technology with TechFume

The Tech Blog TechnoZeast

Wilderness Aware Rafting Colorado White Water Rafting

Sales Nexus online CRM

SEO Prize Sponsors

David Harry A full years membership at SEO Dojo, a value of $250.SEO Training Dojo

Lifetime membership to: My Blog Guest. MyBlogGuest.com is the free guest post exchange community where users meet to exchange guest posts and network.

Link-Assistant.Com SEO PowerSuite Enterprise (max. functionality license) SEO tools

SEMrush.com – the best tool to spy on your competitors ($210 value) www.semrush.com

3 month Pro subscription to Raven Internet Marketing Tools ($297 value) Raven Internet Marketing Tools

A Guide on Doing Blog Marketing

by Melvin · Sep 19, 2011

It’s been a while since I created a guide on blog marketing/driving traffic to a blog and obviously the need to update the material has occurred to me. Especially with the fact that I got lots of feedback based on the old one that I created and those feedback that I received were really good.

Now if you haven’t been reading my blog since last year, then the book that I’m referring to is the one entitled ‘Blog Marketing for Fame’. This free guide generally received positive feedback from most of my readers and I was happy with how it turned out. There were a couple of good suggestions that I put into work with regards to the new one.

So there I upgraded the guide and it has been rebranded as …

‘Blog Marketing Guide’

Aside from the old one having a long flimsy name, another reason for the renaming of the book is the fact that there’s really no guide on blog marketing in general available. And perhaps, ‘Blog Marketing Guide‘ as a name is pretty good and something easy to remember. It may not really be the perfect name for now but its something that’s good to start with.

The book just like most of my guides are free if you subscribe to my newsletter which is totally a no-brainer if you ask me. :p. The book has 5 general sections on how and where you can get traffic plus a detailed explanation/elaboration of the different things that I do that has worked extremely well for myself and hopefully can also work for you.

But the book isn’t really just the cool stuff here as the newsletter is the one that I would say I’m pretty proud of. Over the past few years I haven’t really had gotten a huge amount of people on my list. I have a couple of hundreds to be honest but I’m very proud to say that the community in my newsletter is a tightly-knit interactive group. Lastly, I usually put out lots of great advice and tips that I normally don’t publish here. And hey there were a couple of times that I even gave free goodies there. 🙂

Why Blog Marketing?

Pretty simple. Just like in my old post about most bloggers failing at marketing, the reason I created this thing is to be able to help out lots of bloggers on how they can market their blogs competitively.

Not much has really changed. Most bloggers aren’t still good at marketing their stuff and its pretty understandable. When I was getting started I looked at blogging as just writing and I believe this is how most bloggers trying to carve their niche look at blogging as well. Obviously its the wrong way to look at it.

We, bloggers have to be somehow in the middle of ‘writers’ and internet marketers (salesmen). We need to write out our usual selves while being good enough to promote it and get enough people in our community. But we don’t need to sound like those marketers right? Nor do we need to push out one product after the other just to get affiliate sales. In short, we don’t want any part of being salesy yet we want to know how to market.

Hopefully that’s what the Blog Marketing Guide brings to the table.

So that’s my reason. Again, your feedback is highly appreciated and feel free to get this guide across the blogosphere.

Confirm You Are Not a Spammer – Seriously?

by Melvin · Sep 13, 2011

I’m seeing this plugin in LOTS of blogs that I’m reading and commenting to and I wasn’t really that much concerned about it, initially. However when I started commenting again on lots of blogs as part of my back to blogging tasks, I started getting annoyed with this plugin. Why is that so?

Confirm you are not a spammer

What I’m talking about is this plugin called Anti-Spambot created by GrowMap and Andy w/c are people that I know and respect a lot. The way this plugin works is that there’s a checkbox in a comment form and before you can submit your comment, you will need to tick the checkbox to indeed confirm that you are not a spammer. How much sense does that make?

Well its not really that much of a big deal for me actually. I just find that its a workflow killer. I mean, you’re typing comments and doing this and that and when you click submit, you will get this notice that you have to confirm. Not that its annoying but it just gives me the ‘wtf’ look on my face. It doesn’t reload the page either so your comment will still be there but I guess its just human nature to get the ‘what’ look when you submit something and it doesn’t get submitted immediately. lols.

The other side

I haven’t tried the plugin yet so I haven’t had a chance to see what’s behind it yet. However from a bloggers perspective, I can’t really see much the value of it. I mean, what makes it different from a captcha? It requires you to do a thing before submitting your comment. Is it not making it hard for your reader to do commenting? Or maybe its just being lazy to moderate comments all in all?

If you’re reading this blog for a while you know that I value comments a lot and that I make it easy for people to interact (I always ask for their take, whatnot). With that I’m thinking having this ‘confirm you’re not a spammer’ box will only give your readers a step more before they can do what they want to do. And that maybe there’s a conversion part there that gets unconverted instead.

But again that’s just my opinion. Or maybe is there something that I misunderstood with regards to the plugin? Is Akismet not enough?