Blogging Experience

Did You SEO Your Site?

by Melvin · Jun 17, 2008

Well going back when this blog was born, one of the things I have planned is to experiment on different stuffs. So the first thing that I did was not to optimize my site for search engines and see if the traffic can still have its way. Basically, at first I don’t really feel optimizing this site much for SE because it’s a personal one and besides I know people will somehow get here. I even remember someone saying “SEO your site dude”. Of course I understand that I must make the most of search engines.

Looking to my Analytics, I saw that the blog had over 800 page views and a very high bounce rate and NO traffic from Search Engines. So what I did last week was tweak my site for search engines. I didn’t really do it fullblast, as I’ve said i’m in the testing mode. This week I was surprised to see that there was a small spike on traffic from search engines. The 0% before turned to 6%. It only means that optimizing really works and it works for the good of your site.

I have seen several blogs with great contents not optimizing their site and I don’t really have anything against them. Who knows they might just be testing the waters too! For those people who do not know it, it’s not really hard actually. You just need to read and usually it’s easier than what most people think. Google loves WordPress blogs a lot and having a wordpress site is a great booster whatever projects you may have. Joost De Valk has written a very very very great guide on WordPress SEO.

How about you? Have you completely optimized your site already? Did you SEO it?

Experimenting With Search Funds

by Melvin · Jun 16, 2008

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 Melvin · Jun 13, 2008

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.

The RSS FEED

by Melvin · Jun 5, 2008

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…