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

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Blogging Tips

Using Social Media to Boost your SEO strategy

by Melvin · Feb 28, 2013

This is a guest post by Charles Hammerman

In this rapidly changing online environment, social media plays a very important part in gaining exposure. News spreads like wildfire throughout the main outlets, and there’s no better way of getting a message across to a large number of new people. It wasn’t long ago that SEO and social media were two pretty different things, but recently they seem to have blended in to one online marketing strategy.

For this reason, utilizing social media is essential for any aspiring business. Nowadays, half of the world’s population is on websites such as Twitter and Facebook, and it hasn’t taken long for the world’s biggest brands to reach out across the globe and gain a whole new customer base. There are countless stories of social media posts from companies going viral.

This is an example of why social media is so important, and why it should not be discounted from a company’s SEO strategy. In fact, more and more companies have now begun to make use of social media in order to bring about an increase in the number of followers, and visibility that their pages get. If you browse Twitter, you’ll find famous companies have their own accounts which provide live updates of what’s happening with the business, and what’s new. This is the kind of thing you should incorporate.

Getting it Right

If you are looking to use social media to your own advantage and boost your SEO strategy, it is important for you to make sure that you follow this few steps.

  • Firstly, it is important for you to create a plan of what you are going to do during your social media campaign. Gaining popularity on a social media website is not necessarily difficult, but making sure that you maintain the level is what’s really important. This is where some companies may fail.
  • It is important for you to make sure that you create accounts on all of the major social media websites such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, and create an identity for you and your brand. Whatever you share on one of your pages should also be done so on the other pages, which helps in creating a unified identity for your business.
  • The most important thing that you must keep in mind during your social media campaigns is to always treat your visitors well. The real point of social media is to interact with the people, to talk to them and gauge their reactions and opinion. It would be a poor decision to ignore what your users are saying. Try to interact with your readers and viewers as much as possible.
  • The final thing to make sure you get right is the content itself. It’s all very well posting regular updates, but if you don’t have anything good to say, then nothing is going to get shared, which means that you won’t boost your online presence at all. Be as interesting as possible, and capitalize on breaking news that’s relevant you your industry or niche.

Charles Hammerman is an international SEO and social media marketing specialist based in the UK.

Filed Under: Blogging Tips, Guest Post, SEO, Social Media, Traffic Tagged With: seo and social media, seo tips, social media tips

You Still Trying to Make Money Blogging? That’s Old School!

by Melvin · May 19, 2012

Well, its really not! 🙂 But blogging has changed a lot over the past 10 years that a lot of bloggers were left (in the dust) because they’re still doing blogging the same way they’re doing it 5-10 years ago. I gotta admit that I sort of consider myself one of those who have not been doing what I’m supposed to be doing different than what I was doing before.

A couple of days ago, I read a post from one of my favorite blogs entitled ‘The Future of Blogging‘. Now I know you’re probably thinking that this is one of those cheesy posts where the author just puts something together about how blogging will still change the world, whatever, but trust me its not. The post is the longest post I’ve read in a while, and more importantly it tackles the reality of blogging and where its really heading in the future. Here’s a pretty long excerpt:

This is an important blog post, because it makes a prediction. A prediction about the future of blogging; a platform actively used by over 181 million people (Nielsen data for October 2011). Not only will you learn why I think most blogging advice is dated and ineffective, but I’ll also reveal where I believe this entire industry is heading, so you can stay ahead of the competition.

This is not only an important post, but also the longest I have ever written. It’s more like a mini-eBook, without the price tag. Don’t let its lack of cost make you doubt the value here though. I will at least sell you on what you’re about to learn:

  • A weird tip I personally received from Google’s Matt Cutts which increased my ViperChill search rankings
  • What Gawker does once per week to double their traffic figures. That’s going from two million to four million uniques per day
  • Why the Daily Mail recently surpassed the New York Times as the number #1 newspaper website in the world
  • How Mashable crushed TechCrunch on traffic numbers (even though they used to be the underdog)
  • Why the successful ‘make money online’ blogs of the past have now faded into obscurity
  • The number one reason Leo Babauta dominated the personal development industry in two months
  • What Steve Kamb did to build a six-figure blog in the overly saturated health niche
  • Why feed counts mean absolutely nothing (and never really have)
  • Which Huffington Post articles attract 3X more clicks than any other
  • Why the Verge was one of the fastest growing blog launches in history

…and most importantly, how this all helps me to make a prediction about what it now takes to build highly profitable blogs.

What I love about the post aside from that it covers a lot of different interesting subtopics is the fact that Glen backed up everything with numbers and proofs. I know research is overrated but the amount of effort that was done here is just phenomenal. I rarely print blog posts (not sure I ever did before) but when I read the first 60% of it, I was convinced that I should.

Again, give it a real read and I can guarantee that this post will benefit you.

Filed Under: Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing, Link love Tagged With: blogging in the future, future of blogging, making money blogging is old school

Maximizing Search Traffic For Old Blog Posts

Maximizing Search Traffic For Old Blog Posts

by Melvin · Apr 15, 2012

If there’s a type of blog entry that is potentially getting traffic from search right now, its undoubtedly your old blog entries. As we all know, search engine traffic takes time. No one really writes or puts out something, and then expects search engines to start sending traffic to that content as soon as its published. That’s why its really more long term and that I always tell people to just do the basic search stuff, but not get too obsessed with it. In short, do other online marketing stuff as well and don’t really on Google.

In this blog entry I would just like to share some rambling stuff regarding search engine traffic here in this blog. As you all know, I haven’t been blogging actively for quite a while now and in fact I’m not that much into the game anymore. So understandably, the traffic that this site is getting is considerably lower than ever. And because of that, its easier for me to spot the increased search traffic that I started getting.

While the traffic increase for the past 18 months is not massive, its very evident that I started getting more traffic from search and that comes with me not posting that much during the period of increase. And the traffic is still consistent as of this writing. More search traffic when not posting too much, amazing? No.

The truth is even if I am posting consistently, I would still get the same (or more) amount of search traffic because the content that are getting the hits from search are old blog entries.

Now I’m not really a search guy. I wrote before about writing for search engines but I don’t mostly work with doing SEO stuff. I love putting out content and engaging but I’m not a search guy. However, the reason I started getting more search traffic is quite a bit surprising.

About 3 years ago I wrote a cheesy post about the best birthday gift for the girl that I love (or more accurately I have a crush with). That was college days so please understand that I was dealing with puppy loves and whatnot. :p. Now, I noticed that I started getting like 10-20 hits a day regarding keywords related to that blog entry. I was obviously surprised because the article was not written in a way that one would expect it would get traffic.

So when I got convinced that I had to do something to get better traffic, I studied the Analytics and Webmaster Central data even more. And then I edited the said blog entry to try to ‘massage’ it more and eventually get better rankings. I’m not really able to follow it closely because of work but for the past 2 months, I realized that I’m now getting 30-50 hits from search from keywords that are related to that blog entry. It was fascinating because I never really expected it to get traffic from search at all. Also, its on the first page of Google right now when you search for ‘best birthday gifts for girls’ which I thought was amazing.

And now there are some other keywords that I never intended to rank for that are ranking well and are getting me some traffic.

Moral Lesson

So what’s the moral lesson of this blog post? The lesson is to never underestimate traffic from search engines. But another is that when you feel like you are starting to get some, don’t be afraid to make modifications to that specific blog post. You have all the data to look at from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central and it reveals almost everything to help you. Do some tweaks and those little tweaks can definitely help.

My stance on not getting too caught up with doing SEO is still the same and I don’t still consider myself as a guy doing search engine optimization primarily but it definitely gives me some things to experiment for now.  And getting search traffic and maximizing it is something that I know will be useful in the long run.

How about you? What’s your no.1 tip in maximizing search traffic?

Filed Under: Blogging Tips, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing, SEO, Top Posts, Traffic Tagged With: maximize search traffic, maximizing search engine traffic, search traffic for blog

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?

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Designs, Ramblings Tagged With: complex blog designs, melvinblog 4.0, simple designs

Why a Blog is your Best Marketing Asset

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

Contest Media Partner Blogengage

$500 Sponsors

RankPop.com Affordable SEO

$300 Sponsors

linkvana contest banner

Daniel McGonagle Link Building

SEO-Peace.com Professional link building SEO Company

$150 Sponsors

Thesis Skins

Hesham Zebida Thesis Skins

$100 Sponsors

Simple Weight Loss Tips

Scott Bradley Simple Weight Loss Tips For Entrepreneurs

Milan Matchev Health Directory

JobMob Job Search Tips

Jacob Share JobMob Job Search Tips

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Ileane Smith Blogging Tips

Search Engine Marketing Group Logo

Search Engine Marketing Group

SEO Workers Logo

John Britsios www.SEOWorkers.com

Magento Developer

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

The SEO Training Dojo

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

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Contest, Internet Marketing, SEO, Top Posts Tagged With: blog as marketing asset, internet marketing blog

A Guide on Doing Blog Marketing

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.

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing, Top Posts, Traffic Tagged With: blog marketing guide, getting traffic, marketing your blog

Most Bloggers are Limiting Themselves & Here’s Why

Most Bloggers are Limiting Themselves & Here’s Why

by Melvin · Sep 5, 2011

As  bloggers, we are constantly taught not to put our eggs in one basket. What this mean is that we should never limit ourselves to just one thing. For traffic generation for instance, we should not rely on search traffic and we should try to diversify different sources of traffic. For monetization, it could be tapping into different source of income. If you’re monetizing solely through Google Adsense, then have you given a thought that you’d be broke when Google bans you?

To be honest, I highly think the same of blogging itself as a whole. Most people I think are limiting themselves too much and sometimes I am one of those people who do it unfortunately. I used to limit myself too much in blogging and that I didn’t realize there’s a lot of money outside of the actual writing in a blog. Of course a blog is a very valuable asset but sometimes we can use that blog to get into many other different areas that can prove to be profitable for us. Example? Freelancing, affiliate marketing, consulting, etc.

For more of this, you can check out my guest post entry entitled why most bloggers don’t make much money. It’s also an entry to a contest so I would appreciate if you could comment there and retweet the post for me. Or you can do other more stuff if you want. 😉

—————————————————————————————————————————————-

I’m obligated to post the sponsors of the contest so here they are:


SMARTBLOGGERZ – Main Sponsor ($750)

SmartBloggerz helps bloggers and affiliate marketers learn what it REALLY takes to make money online and be successful online just by implementing the tips that are shared regularly on the blog and to those who subscribed to the private newsletter.


ESTAVA MORIOKA – Gold Sponsor ($150)

Estava Morioka is the premier resource for the American Party Girl. Their online boutique offers Stylish, Inexpensive, and High Quality party dresses, cocktail dresses, sexy party dress and sexy club dresses.


THE BAD BLOGGER – Gold Sponsor ($150)

“The Bad Blogger” is a blogger who blogs about Internet Marketing, Copywriting and Blogging related Topics.

Again I would appreciate if you can support me in this contest. 🙂

Filed Under: Blogging Tips, Contest, Monetization Tactics Tagged With: bloggers limiting themselves, more money for bloggers

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