Blogging Experience

Revisiting Online Profits Membership and My Experience

by Melvin · Sep 19, 2010

You could remember last June that I reviewed OnlineProfits.com, an internet marketing course maintained by the ever popular Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips. In that post, I provided a comprehensive analysis of what the program is really all about and how you can benefit from it. Now in this post, I’d like to get back on the program and see how it’s been doing so far.

The main reason why I took the course is to add up my knowledge on the subject of internet marketing. While I’d always like to call and believe myself as an internet marketer, I somehow feel I lack that basic foundation. As many of you know, I didn’t have any formal education of marketing and with that I realized I need to know at least the abc’s that I may not be aware with in the first place.

So in the first seven days, I was really ecstatic. I’m all over the members area almost like a mad man scrambling for information (even though I don’t need to). My thinking was the course used to cost $50 a month and it sold out on less than 10 days so for me to get it for free, it’s insane! Well after that initial excitement, I started focusing more while reading less. I started using more the resources tool and the tools area.

The resources area is just amazing. There are a lot of stuff there that the membership site gives away for free. You don’t see a lot of Woothemes theme being given away nor do some premium wordpress plugins that usually sell in for 30 bucks. But it’s all for FREE. The tools are is for more the geeky ones or the ones who’d like to do research more on niche. In that page you’ll see 20+ useful tools that you can use to research or optimize what you’re doing.

The social club is also a nice bonus as it contains mini clubs that agree on a common goal. For instance, there’s this retweet club wherein all members do is retweet each other’s articles and there’s also the WeVote club which is more for social bookmarking.

There’s a little forum but as of the moment it isnt really as high-traffic as some of the other forums. But if you’re a newbie, Daniel lurks there a lot so expect your concerns to be answered immediately.

Do I like it? Guess what?

While I haven’t read the main lessons that much, I’m happy with what I’m getting so far. The Live case studies portion is awesome and that’s probably the proof that what’s inside the program really works.

What I like about it the most is that its not full of hype. When you’re inside the membership area, you wouldn’t see those animated flashy designs saying “you’re now ready for financial freedom” or variations like that. Instead, you’d feel that your inside a real internet marketing training sessions. The lessons are well organized, not cluttered and Daniel is quick in helping everyone.

As I’ve said the program used to cost $392 in total, and Daniel decided to make it open to public for FREE because he believes more interaction inside is much better than cash. Go now and become a member of OnlineProfits Membership site.

Here’s the Catch

Here’s something that would further more sweeten this deal. As some of you know, the membership program is FREE but you have to avail hosting from its partner Hosting Nine. So basically, you need to sign up for a hosting deal under OnlineProfits to be able to get the program for free.

I know some people have problem with it due to the fact that they already have their own hosting. So here’s my sweet deal. Sign up to OnlineProfits.com under me by clicking any link in this post, follow all the steps, pay the hosting and I’ll reimburse everything that you paid. That’s right, I’ll initially cover your hosting by doing so.

So doing the math, you will basically get the OnlineProfits membership program for free and also you get free hosting courtesy of MelvinBlog.com. How nice is that? 😀 All you have to do upon paying for the hosting is email me your receipt ID from Hosting Nine and I’ll refund your money asap. Let me know!

Making Money Isn’t Really Hard, It’s Just a Lot of Hard Work

by Melvin · Sep 14, 2010

The hype with making tons of cash from blogging has considerably gone down for the past few years as probably a lot of people have realized that the hype surrounding blogging is all but hype. In fact I’ve seen a lot of people quit blogging to focus on doing more “secure” stuffs like a day job or a real offline business.

I remember when the make money blogging hype is on its peak, people have the mentality of like “I need to put this ad to make some serious cash”. Of course I was one of those people. I had my little basketball blog back then plastered with all sort kinds of banners, CPM, CPC, CPA, you name it. Of course it all backfired for me. The only positive thing then was that I am enjoying running a basketball site. It’s my passion, my hobby.

Eventually and fortunately I said to myself, “bug this! I’m not gonna do any money-related strategy, Im just gonna do what I enjoy, I’d write posts after posts and just do my thing. A kid like me should be enjoying life anyway!” And it was a crucial turning point for me.

After almost a year, the blog started gaining traffic and then money afterwards. The blog was doing good in page impressions that the CPM banners that I used to hate before started giving me respectable daily earnings. Then I started getting private ads from big sports-related companies and it really blew off for me. For some people the money I made back then may not probably be that big, but for an enthusiastic kid like me, it’s an unforgettable experience.

I always reflect back to it and I love telling this story to my friends over and over again. And I’m always amaze when my friends respond to me and say “wow that’s a ton of work. I can’t imagine myself putting that much hard work!”

Looking back, I didn’t really realize that what I did was “a ton” of hard work. All i knew was I was putting up some posts on how this New York Knicks suck, on how LeBron James is the best player ever and stuffs. Heck, I enjoy it so it must not be really hard work.

And oh, what you read above is the elongated version of my about page. 😉

Disparity between Hard and hard work

I used to do lots of programming back in college and so if you know everything about it, you’ll know it’s really hard to be one. As a programmer/coder you need to know a lot of things, you need to have a broad perspective, you need to have superb logic to make things work and you need an immense patience testing and trying different lines of codes. In short, its hard.

Blogging (or making money from blogging) isn’t. Hell, just as long as you know how to read, write, type, copy, paste, act as human, interact, you’re qualified. Everyone does qualify for it but why is it that very few succeed? Yes, lack of hard work. Blogging isn’t hard, its just a lot of hard work. It’s so true. It’s easy to write an article but you need to work hard to come up with 50 high quality ones. It’s nuts to interact but its a challenge to do it with over a hundred of people. It’s tough.

I don’t consider myself a guru and no one of my readers do but I can share here some insights that I feel can be helpful to you:

1. Just do it, stop strategizing!

I usually get a lot of flak when I tell people about this but just from experience (and from observing how big bloggers like Jeremy did), I can tell that this is one key aspect why I’m somehow more successful than some people.

I just do it, if it doesn’t work then I gotta move on! The problem with strategizing too much is that people keep on speculating, lurking, observing that nobody does anything! The biggest problem has and always been getting off your ass. I don’t know about you but I certainly wouldn’t refrain from doing things unless experience tells me that ‘hey this isn’t working’.

The statement “Experience is your best teacher” is corny but its still powerful and proven. You just don’t let people dictate you things, do it yourself. After all you really don’t have anything to lose. Every of our failure racks up to our own education and this is one good thing you will always have.

2. If you enjoy it, just go on! (Passion)

That’s why passion is a key element in blogging. I mean why write about something you don’t enjoy in the first place? That’s probably the biggest reason why most bloggers fail, its because they really don’t feel passionate about what they’re blogging. How can you enjoy talking about making money online if you don’t know it?

It’s always been the same parallels over and over again with all of these successful bloggers. They enjoy just blogging on something that they don’t really expect anything. Why don’t you go on Darren Rowse blog’s archive and look for some of his oldest posts. Its amazing how this guy churned out almost over a hundred of blog articles with over 1000+ words each that never even got any comment/traction? Of course these days Darren can write an article w/any length and still get a heap of comments but the lesson here is that you’re not going to get noticed overnight and if you don’t have passion, I doubt you can last too long in the blogosphere.

3. Stop chasing for shiny golden “secrets” because there’s none.

Ok again I used to be like this one when I was on my early stage of blogging. The scenario is usually like this: A blogger reads a post on some blog that making money is hard. You have to do this, do that, implement this, test, blah blah. So what happens is that this blogger says to himself “No, there must be something better than this, I need to keep looking for one”. And of course the cycle never ends. That blogger would never ever get to work because all he does is chase for secrets.

There’s a big misconception about “premium info stuffs” and secrets. Most people think that these are just the same. The truth is its not. Most info products whether its $9.95 or $999.5 is all about educating people. I’ve consumed a lot of them and I hate eBooks actually all I can say is that the main goal of most of them, if not all is just to organize infos around the web, compile them and present them well. You’re paying them not really because of the “premium stuffs” but only because they’re saving you from getting overloaded. In short, they are giving you blueprints so you never have to find them yourself.

Why not take time to look Technorati’s top 100 blogs? Do you think these guys have secrets? All you can notice is that these bloggers provide massive value to their readers and that alone sums up why they’re popular.

Wrapping it up

As I end this I’ll repeat. Blogging and making money isn’t hard, it’s just a lot of hard work. “Hardwork” is an overly used term but surprisingly not a lot of people value it. From my experience, and from other people’s experience, there’s really no need to reinvent the wheel and chase for something more. Besides if you’re exerting hard work on your passion, then it’s really not hard after all.

I haven’t written a long post like this for a while and I got carried a bit while writing this, lols. But as always, I’d like to hear back from you.

The Challenge of Reading and Responding to Emails

by Melvin · Sep 9, 2010

When I was just getting started, I always thought that those big bloggers are simply absurd for not responding to all emails they receive. I mean there’s this guy right here sending a genuine email waiting and hoping for a response, only for him to be ignored because the blogger that he wrote to was simply just too “busy”.

Yes I always thought this is just part of the gimmick of those bloggers, pretending they’re doing a lot but in reality, they’re just never in the mood to answer emails unless it came from and advertiser or a friend of theirs.

That was before until I experienced it myself.

Since late last year, I have been having difficulties maintaining my email inbox to an organized one, much more definitely to replying to each and every genuine email that I receive. Its funny because there are times where I can reply to emails that just arrived within less than a second yet I fail to reply on the ones that have been on my inbox for a long time.

From the sender’s perspective, they would really get pissed off at it. As I stated above, its painful to send an email, patiently wait for a response not knowing whether the receiver will ever respond or not. At times, they even had to resend the email or reconfirm just to make sure they’re really waiting for something and not nothing.

I don’t know but over the past 5-8 months, I think doing these micro tasks like reading emails, responding to tweets, checking stuffs have become a daunting task for me. And this is where I realized that ‘hey, maybe these big guys are really genuinely having difficulties really’. If I myself who is not a big figure at all is getting bombarded, maybe they, themselves get 3 times more than I do.

Because of this I had to put systems in place. I usually set a time where I can read emails (usually at night) and I make sure I respond to them. I had this bad habit of checking my emails, then waiting for an hour or two before responding to it. Why read an email twice or thrice in the first place before responding to it?

Now I can say I’m really getting more and more organized with it but still I find it challenging. I’m sure there would still be many bugs with what I do but I guess I just have to adjust to it and eventually learn from my mistakes. What say you?

The Big Challenge After a Blog Contest – The Dropoff

by Melvin · Aug 22, 2010

By now I can relax a bit after all the contest related tasks have been completed. With this I realized that no matter how small or big, how short or long a contest will be, it will always take a lot of work. As I’ve said, I worked for this contest in as early as late April so I’ve been really doing most of the planning myself since this is a one-man blog.

But still, I don’t have any regrets whatsoever. I know by now, you know how grateful I am with how the contest turned out to be and how this has been so beneficial to the blogosphere. Traffic wise it’s been great as well. I got the most traffic ever during those months although I didn’t ramp up my posting. But now that the contest is over, here comes the big challenge.

Traffic Dropoff

Traffic dropoff usually happens after the end of each contest. Its nothing revolutionary, it’s just normal.

Let’s say a blog just gets 50 visitors prior to running a contest. As soon as the blogger runs the contest, he instantly notices that he doubles his traffic immediately.But after the contest, he soon realizes that his traffic starts to go down and back to the normal 50 visits per day.

As I’ve said, this really happens to any bloggers who run contests. The main reason for this is sound and simple, people only get to your site/blog because they’re incentivized to do so.

One thing you can easily notice is that throughout your contest, some other bloggers who haven’t been into your blog were the most active ones. They comment a lot, interact and almost have been always there.

Don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong about that. It’s human nature that in a contest you want to be as nice as possible because its part of your strategy in winning the contest. However when the contest ends, the participants interest on continuing on following you and your blog highly depends on whether they won something or they didn’t. With that in mind, the incentivization factor that had them to follow you in the first place starts to diminish.

The challenge then is to make them stay even after the contest.

Hook them through the contest, Make them stay for the content

So what I usually try to do is test if they’re really in for a long haul by producing good content. How? Well a contest usually runs for a month, in my case its for 1 and a half months. So that period is your period to convince them that you’re blog is more than just a blog holding a contest, that you’re content is far more important than the prizes of the contest.

This is hard to do and it’s really challenging to make them stay mainly because they may not be the right people in your blog in the first place. Most people who join contests are those who live with contests. Not that I have any problem with that but proliferation is really important. If I have 100 new audiences that aren’t willing to spend money forever, then isn’t it worth it more to have just 15 potential customers who are loyal enough to stay for the long haul because of the good stuff I’m providing?

The takeaway here is still the content. People read stuffs because they like reading it isn’t it? And with contests, it’s not really good content, is it?

As you can see we as bloggers, as contest organizers have an ample time to prove ourselves to them. Write good content, make sure you make them feel they belong, always keep that conversation even after the contest is over. Those and other small things may be enough to make them stay for a while, maybe for a little bit longer. What say you?

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

by Melvin · Aug 10, 2010

Everyday a lot of people in the internet scramble for traffic. Internet marketers, PPC affiliate guys, bloggers, or even just the ordinary upcoming newbie. The internet is just so diverse that people are sold into an idea that there’s always an unknown place with millions of people that other marketers haven’t found yet. That’s why I love to experiment about these traffic sources. It’s because at the end of the day, I know it’s all worth it.

I mentioned bloggers above as one of those who scramble for traffic but one thing I noticed is that bloggers don’t that much look for new traffic sources, instead they just focus on what they have and try to leverage that into something more. I have no problem with that and in fact that’s what I try to do on an everyday basis. What I’d like to state is that we, in conjunction with that, should also not be that shabby in terms of finding new sources of traffic to our sites.

As I’ve said, the internet has been so huge and that is the reason too why things get saturated and diluted so easily. I mean when was the last time you run something profitable that lasted for more than a month? When was the last time you found a social network that consistently gives you over a 100 hits for a week? The thing with the internet is that things change so rapidly that if you’re not ready, you’re gonna be left out so quickly.

Why Should I be Looking for New Traffic Sources?

First and foremost is to enhance what you already have in your hand. For example, my blog has been getting traffic from forums ever since. So naturally what I would do is leverage that more and try to see if I can get more from that. Now with that, the way to enhance is to look on other other forums which may be catered to my blog as well. I mean it’s not rocket science. If this forum about blogging is constantly giving me good amount of traffic maybe this forum about blogging and internet marketing can do it too. You know what I mean?

Now back to answering the question. It’s proven that there’s always a place untapped to get traffic and from time to time, there will be always be new high-trafficked places just springing over and over. We should continuously be on the look because these untapped sources are so worth it. I mean wouldn’t you want to get 50 new readers on a daily or weekly basis just by engaging in some place you haven’t engaged before?

It just works for everything. Forum marketing, guest blogging, social networking or just anything else. For instance, you guys have probably seen me guest post on popular blogs like JohnChow or DailyBlogTips and etc. But to take that further, I’m constantly on the search of blogs that may not get the same traffic but are worth guest posting to.

For instance, ShoutmeLoud.com is a high-traffic blog yet I was not aware of this site prior to this year. Another is SiteSketch101, which probably has a ton of audience that has never heard of me or my blog. There are many more out there but what I basically do and I hope for you to do as well is to try to give value and engage in their audience as well. By doing that, you’re giving yourself a chance to open the door for more readers, more traffic, more potential customers

For social network, many people use the standard sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or whatever but for me what I do is use the smaller ones and try to be active there which will eventually build up over time. Not a lot of people know Blogengage or MMOSocialNetwork but the truth is these sites can give you much more traffic than what you can get with Digg or any other big sites out there.

Conclusion

I could go on more but the takeaway here is being creative and constantly on search for new sources. I’m not saying you have to do this everyday, what Im saying is that we should always give some time on this task.

For example, my friday schedule is usually set out on that and by setting a certain date, you’re enabling yourself to be productive with whatever task you have. It doesn’t just apply to finding new traffic source but it applies to everything, writing blog posts, networking, and many more. So do you have your own way of chasing for new traffic sources?

Blog Posts Retweets, Do they really make sense?

by Melvin · Aug 3, 2010

When retweets was first introduced, I was really really so much into it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever especially with the fact that if someone retweets your article, then there’s a good chance more than a thousand people can actually see it and have the opportunity to retweet it as well. It’s mainly because the potential of Twitter is really there.

Of course at first, I really didn’t figure out how I can get that much retweets that would enable me to reap those benefits. I started to install that little Tweetmeme plugin so that my readers can start retweeting my article for me. Obviously I started to realize that each of the 100 visitors will not really retweet it.

So what I did then was start using Twitter genuinely. I started following people that is related to what I’m blogging and started really giving tweeting some time. Eventually my follower count started growing and interaction has been more lively now. And not surprisingly with that, I started getting retweets.

The highest retweet count that I got is 133 and not surprisingly it came from a contest post. But then I got a little contented with the fact that at least I was getting more than 10 retweets almost every time. And now I started wondering. Is this retweets really worth it? or is it just a number that you could flaunt and brag to other people?

Ok ok. Unlike in the previous posts, I’m not gonna flash out some geeky numbers on your screen or some screenshot from Google Analytics and then explain it one by one. Studying the behavior from Twitter is a quite a it tricky that just showing stats doesn’t mean anything that much.

So for this year, Twitter has sent me over a 1000 uniques and more than 2500 pageviews. Of course the bounce rate and stickiness weren’t as effective as let’s say guest post campaigns and stuffs. Twitter has so many bot accounts and in fact I have a couple for myself and the reason for that is mainly for testing. If someone is being followed by 1000 bots, that will not make any sense right so I guess that’s why it’s not converting that well.

Of course the main benefit of it is that it’s free and if utilized well, it can be a source of free yet targeted high quality traffic for any site. But how can one utilize it and maximize its benefits? That’s literally the question of every blogger in this space. I know big guru bloggers utilize it so well that for instance, Shoemoney even called as “the best marketing medium” right now.

For me what I do is basically just host all my shortlinks via bit.ly. Bit.ly has some free basic tracking which is pretty darn good. You can find the no.of unique clicks, no.of referrers/retweets, the location they were retweeted and even the day to day activities of your posts. In fact, I already considered it’s PRO program just because of how slick it is.

If you’re using other shorteners, I’m pretty sure they have their built-in trackers as well so make sure you’re making the most by using that to analyze things.

So all in all, retweets really matter. As I said above, I got some pretty good (yet not really massive) traffic from it and from a hindsight I can say that it’s one good way to get new readers to your blog. The number of RT’s alone can quite a bit be misleading but the traffic stats will always speak for themselves. From that on, its just a matter of tweaking it more and more.

What do you think? Maybe you have some secrets to share as well?

I Don’t Have Anything to Blog for Today, Help!

by Melvin · Jul 27, 2010

Most people get into this thing called as “writer’s block” wherein they cannot get a topic they can write about. Literally nothing comes out of their mind, zero, zilch! I had experienced it too and in fact I did more than 10 times already.

There has been really some good and lengthy guides out there discussing how to cope up with writer’s block and if you came across some of those and you find them helpful then I suggest you to bookmark them so you have a copy of it which you can reference back continuously.

Anyways in this post, I want to share my unique take on how I deal with it and what I usually do when I literally have nothing in my mind to blog about.

1. If you don’t feel writing, then don’t!

Well this is the basic thing to do. I mean why force yourself to write if you don’t like or feel writing?

This was really my motto since the day I created this blog and many other blogs. If I’m not in the mood then I wouldn’t. After all it’s nice to show a great post which is quite of not the latest rather than show a latest yet crappy low quality ones that will harm your blog more than benefit it.

2. Go outside, Relax

With the first one, obviously you can’t just refrain from writing forever and expect to get same readership after a month or two. That being considered, I’d usually go outside, maybe in the mall and relax. This small thing can help you get back on track and hopefully get some ideas for your posts.

A good rest also helps since no one of us wants to get burned out writing that we end up not enjoying it at all.

3. Read other Stuffs

If you’re still not back in writing mode, you can simply just browse the blogosphere, go to your favorite blogs in your niche and just read and observe what’s going on. Eventually by still being connected and updated to the blogosphere, it can help you think of the topics or just get you involved to maybe write on the current trends or simply just have an opinion on whats currently in.

Those are my 3-step process. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? I feel fortunate that I can crank out blog articles one after another and with that I really don’t struggle that much with producing content for my blog/s.

But then I know a lot of people who struggle with this. And I hope the 3 step process I outlined above can somehow help you break the writers block. How about you? Do you have any other strategies that you may want to share with me?