MelvinBlog

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

Blogging Experience

Being *Just* a Marketer & Not an Internet Guy

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In the internet marketing world, I see three different kinds of people. The first kind is a techie person who knows a lot about the internet but does not have any knowledge in marketing. Basically this is where most people are coming from. Second is the type of person who has offline marketing experience but hasn’t really have much idea on how the internet works and third, is a someone who does not know either, meaning a newbie or newcomer.

I’ve been into this space now for quite a while and I’ve noticed a lot of things. Most of which is directly related to internet marketers who aren’t that geeky enough to understand the internet.

Remember my post on how to easily steal an eBook? That’s just one of them. I mean that post was even outdated by now yet a lot of people still seem to fail to comply to that. Just take the simple way of hiding their eBook from public access is something that most of them, if not us, could not do.

Why this is a Big issue?

I know most marketers would say that “who cares? my customers aren’t geeky so Im just contented” This is a big issue just because of the fact that there’s so much ripping and fraud going around. I mean if an eBook you badly want becomes available for free on some blackhat type of forum, are you still gonna pay for it?

How about a membership site where you can literally access it even without you being a member? These days there are so many tools that are available (not for free of course) that can really help you with this thing. Being a marketer and not an internet guy, you can always seek help from people who know more about these technical details.

How about free reports to build your list? It’s funny because I’m seeing quite a lot of people offering freebie in exchange for an email but the thing is that freebie is freely available even without giving up your email. Yes, most people fail at this.

The Solution

Well this is a very broad topic and the solution would have easily been very lengthy if I state it all here. The best way to see if people can rip your files off is to simply just become that *other people. I mean why not do a thorough search on your own stuff and see if you can get it for free. If it’s the case, then it’s a major problem for you.

It also does pay to ask for help in related forums where people do the same thing. For instance, if you’re an eBook whore seller, then maybe hang out quite a bit in Warriors Forum and see if people can provide you some help.  These people are just in the same situation as you and as I’ve people in forums are always ready to help.

Lastly there’s a lot of tools out there to help you. If you’re doing a business online, having all of those needed tools is a worthy investment after all (even if they’re expensive). Would you rather not spend money and lose a lot of money with your product getting freely shared or the other way around? Again, it may be hard for you if you’re not a “tech” person to make those third party tools to work but that’s why you outsource right?

I’d like to of course get your take with this subject matter. I’m sure most you do the same thing as I do and  have you found any tools and techniques that you can recommend to the community?

And lastly, are you just being a marketer and not an “internet guy” as a whole?

Joining Blog Contests, What’s Your Motivational Factor?

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Contests or specifically blog contests are a great way to attract a huge number of people from a wide variety of demographics. Not only because its full of hype, but more likely because almost everyone joins it.

I’m sure you’re aware that I join as much contest as I can and bragging aside, I usually win a lot. From the simple, “subscribe to feed, comment here” type of contest to the harder affiliate marketing competitions, I probably had participated in all of those. Joining contest is really fun in the sense that if you lose, then you lose. I mean people don’t grudge when they lose in contests, instead they ponder on how it’s super fun and how they learned a lot. Another benefit is that it really brings you closer to other bloggers.

I know like me, you also like joining contests probably for the same reason and amazingly for me I don’t just join contests giving iPads or whatever gadgets, I literally join each and every as much as I could. Even if the prize is a Flip Mino or a simple quality eBook or even just a template, I am usually urged to participate.

I love Competing

This pretty much sums it up. I’m a gamer and I’m ready to compete all the time and every time I look back I always see this as a determining factor. I joined a lot of affiliate marketing contests by Market Leverage and I won I think 3 of them. For me it’s just nice to compete with all these people around the world doing the same thing with me and proving them something (I’m sure they’re proving something too!).

When I join contests, I don’t just carry my name and my blog but also my country. Philippines is a third-world country but what a lot of people don’t know about us is that we’re good. I mean again bragging aside, we’re good. There are a lot of marketers here who literally kill it with whatever business model and I know a lot of bloggers here who are really well-known internationally.

They say competition is always good because it just means there’s money in it. The same goes with contests. When you see you’re up against someone, you have that determination inside you to win it all. And the best thing is that you don’t treat others as a competitor, instead you treat him as a peer.

Feeds our ego well

If you’re winning, it satisfies us ego-wise. Who doesn’t want to get recognized as someone who emerged victorious in a contest? It helps you build your online portfolio, your image and you get more chance for people to visit you because you won the contest.

A good example is Lyndon Reid who won the shoemoney’s gambler contest. He won the contest so he got the prize of attending the summit for free and an additional cash but on a side note, he received so much traction because big blogger like John Chow blogged for him as well.

Prizes are good, too good to be true

In one of my old posts about how to make money outside internet marketing, I mentioned that joining blog contests is a good nice way to go. I mean seriously, how hard is it to actually tweet something or blog about it? Is it hard to write an entry to a contest? Seriously, oftentimes its just so worth it.

John Chow has had a post about this entitled “Are you scared of success” in which he pointed out how people are scared of joining contests. That is so true and I think there’s another factor that hinges with that and its a word called “laziness”. That’s a good point too since most people want to succeed but almost none can move, no one can really do anything.

What do you think? What’s your main driving point on why you join contests?

What Type Of Blog Post Can Get You the Most Traffic?

What Type Of Blog Post Can Get You the Most Traffic?

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This is the question that I got from a good friend couple of weeks back. I was about to post it last Monday but I got super busy. Anyways back to the topic. So you’re feeling good to write something you think would crush the blogosphere right? You sit down and wrote it, published it and boom, not much traffic. Where do I get wrong, maybe you’re asking.

Anyways first I’d like to answer the question first on what is the best day to post a good article? The answer (I know you’ll be disappointed) is it depends. Mostly and from my experience the best day is either Monday or Tuesday. This is when I mostly post my “pillar articles” as what Yaro Starak calls it. I was also inferred that Friday and Saturday are good days as well but as I’ve said it depends on the behavior of your readers.

So what type of blog post can get the most traffic? Here’s a list based on my own experience as well as some research. No particular order:

Personal posts

I talked about this in my post about personal posts and voyeurism. Again the reason why this type of post gets so much traffic is because people are always interested to know private things about the author and also add the fact that literally everyone can participate in this type of conversation. Once in a while, it’s nice to let our readers know that ‘hey Im human too and I screw up sometimes’ Here are some examples:

“How To” Type of Posts

Arguably and obviously the best way to get it done during high traffic days. “How to” posts are basically like definitive guides wherein you write an article with a minimum or longer than 1000 words. The reason it works well is obvious, it gets people to read more. And if you do this write, you will not only get a lot of traffic, you will also get a lot of links from other blogs in the blogosphere.

I have done a couple of this post in the past few years but this year I’m trying to do it more and more to provide the best value for my readers. Here’s my portfolio of my own how to posts:

Resource Guide

This is another type of post that seems to rake in instant traffic to a blog. Here in this blog, you really will not find that much but I know for most blogs this is usually there main driver of traffic for their sites. The reason this works so well is because people see it as handy, meaning something that they can bookmark or use for future use. And besides people love lists so no wonder why it does well. Ex:

Interviews With Other Bloggers

Actually this goes well specifically for interviewing high profile bloggers in your niche but for this I would like to use bloggers as a general example. This type of post can attract so much traffic mainly because most bloggers, if not all, love talking about themselves on where they’re up to lately! Instead of just you spreading the word, they help you spread the word and if they’re big enough, let alone their massive number of readers do the job for you. Examples:

Contest Posts

Contest posts are the type of posts that can get it done pretty quick. For obvious reasons, contest posts can very much get massive traffic, comments and attention in just a span of an hour. The cons though is that the long term effect and benefit of it is non-existing since people don’t need to read if it’s already done. In short, it’s time-sensitive. Examples:

Controversial Posts

Controversial posts can get an equally massive traction around if done properly. However, never ever do it for the sake of being controversial. Know what I mean? When you expose something or rant on someone, make sure you back up it up with facts, not just speculations. There’s a good chance that the traffic you will get can only do harm for you if you don’t do it correctly.

My favorite guy in doing is a dude named NickyCakes. Nick has been exposing and calling out on people especially if he thinks they suck. The good thing is he always backs it up with facts. But the one thing that you have to keep in mind when doing controversial posts is that you have to be ready for everything, regardless of you’re doing it right or you’re doing it wrong.

Linkbait Posts

Linkbait type of posts kind of like included in each and every type I mentioned above but the reason I had it seperately is because there are some bloggers out there who use compelling headlines alone to get massive traction.

I’m sure you’ve read intriguing titled posts wherein the content doesn’t really fall into the other type of posts I mentioned above. A good example of this are the April fools posts wherein it’s intriguing and that alone get so many people to read their stuffs.

There’s not much return in it because people are gonna either find it nice or they would get pissed off and it could result to a high percentage of visitors just bouncing off.

Conclusion

Those are the different types of posts that can potentially get the most traffic. So far I think I’ve done most of them and this blog post is more from my experience in blogging.

Also when considering on publishing on any of these posts make sure to spend an ample amount of time and work on them carefully. As I’ve said a lot of times already, it could completely go the other way and more likely just harm your blog if not done correctly.

That’s it for now, how about you do you have any types of guest post that works the most for you? or maybe you would want to share your own reason why some of them work so well?

Image credit to: http://hermawanputra.files.wordpress.com

I’m Decreasing My Posting Frequency, What’s your Take?

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My last post last week is a very clear indication that some necessary changes are imminent in this blog. So now in this post I would particularly talk about the decrease on the blog posting frequency here in MelvinBlog.

Over the past few months I have been consistently churning out 8-10 blog posts per month or a post per three days. During my school days, it was I think 6-8 posts a month. That being said, for a very long time you as my reader is trained for that frequency. You’re not expecting me to post twice a day because you get used to the current frequency that I have

Now that I obviously don’t have the same time to be dedicated in blogging, I’d like to make a short announcement that I would be decreasing my posts more. I don’t have an exact figure in mind but I think 5-6 a month is where its currently heading.

I’m sure a lot of people really don’t think it’s something that important and I really don’t think it is too but because I care for my readers so I’d like to let everyone know. Couple of years back, there was an awesome post at Problogger on that subject and it has been concluded that blog post frequency doesn’t really matter that much in as much as people would like to think to. And I agree.

Right now, I look at bloggers like Glen of Viperchill, Marko of HowToMakeMyBlog and even Neil Patel of QuickSprout as good examples. They really don’t need to commit into writing everyday, what they commit to is writing high quality content each and every time they write and it’s really something that I’d like to implement here.

I’m sure you would notice it with my recent “how to” posts that I really have started to shift into that writing way. That being said, Im not really worrying on a sudden drop of traffic (maybe that would be evident on the first few weeks) because my aim since this year was to make this blog more as a reference guide where people could actually look into this as a reference, not just a blog.

Another reason I’m doing it is because I want to set aside time some time to some of my bigger projects in conjunction with my real-world work/job. I’ve announced a couple of weeks back that I’m working on my relaunch of my info product called MMO Blog Monetizer 2.0. I’m also working on some side projects that may need to take some of my time as well.

How about you guys? Whats your take on posting frequency? Do you think it’s overrated too or what? I’d like to hear you out on this matter.

Finding a Job, err.. Career. Do I Really Need to?

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Been a long time since I’ve done a post here in my blog w/c does have some sort kind of a personal touch. Lately I made a commitment to really take the blog to the higher level by actually posting definitive types of articles and guides. As you may recently notice here, there were really some very wordy posts here that provides very good quality for my audience.

I want to take a break on that and want to focus on this post about… my life. Yes, my life. Not very many of you know that last May, I graduated with a degree of Computer Science. Even before graduation I was really looking for jobs. I actually applied on a very popular bank here for a computer programmer’s position but eventually failed the 5th step of the process. I also applied on some several other IT firms but haven’t yet gotten any confirmation. Ironically some of the companies like Accenture and etc. surprised me because of their very low entry level pay w/c had me backing out. Oh well.

Anyways back to the topic. I usually get asked with the question “do I really need it? why not just ramped up my effort in what Im doing online?” I don’t know but I think people don’t really understand the reality and the situation.

We, people who make money online usually are fascinated with the fact that the internet has enormous opportunity and it’s totally true. We also see a lot of those success stories wherein “John decided to make his internet efforts full time and eventually he succeeded”. In fact, guys like Darren Rowse, David Risley and many others took that path and were huge figures right now in the blogosphere. But the thing is when people fail doing this, they are usually left unnoticed.

The reality is that almost all people who decide not to take a real world job usually fail doing things online. That’s the truth. We can talk about mindset problems here, or lack of strategies or many other more geeky stuffs but the bottom line is, it’s hard. There’s a very thin line between people living off the internet dream and having a real world job.

How about me?

Aside from the question above, my friends usually ask me “aren’t you making enough?” This question really is a funny question for me. My answer is yes and no. Yes, because I’m a bachelor right now. I don’t have a wife (heck Im 20 yrs old!), I don’t need to pay anything besides my internet (yes I pay for it) and my food. On the other side, the answer is no because I’m the eldest of the family.

I know you will say, “whats the relation with that?” I don’t know about you but basically here in my country, if you’re the eldest then you have tons of responsibilities in your shoulders. As I’ve stated many times before, we’re not a rich family. My dad is a seaman and my mom has a small store business here in Philippines. I know they’re not getting any younger so it’s time for me to help out and maybe 5-10 years from now, I may have to earn what they are earning from now.

For me I think I’m doing good in the internet but still not enough to call it a living from the internet. This blog is doing good financially, some other sites do well too. I also am a paid writer on some of the popular sports websites. I used to also make a lot of money with affiliate marketing before I decided to take an hiatus in it because I want a more steady business model.

The problem that comes with that is I invest a lot of money. I have 3-4 designers right now for my bigger projects. I also have a guy working for me full time to write blog articles and I also pay for stuffs like hosting and whatever. It didn’t also help that I inherited that Western Culture in terms of spending money on foods and other royalty stuffs. Eventually it leaves me just enough to enjoy my month off the money I make. That’s going to change though as my responsibilities gets bigger.

Financial Security

The reason why most people work is because of financial security and that’s the path I’m looking at right now. My parents aren’t too high on what Im doing (although they somehow support me all throughout) and even up to now they still don’t get it. They were always on this speculation that I’m doing something scrupulous online and it’s not really something reliable.

I don’t know but I think thats really it. As of this writing I am about to sign a contract with a company for my first job and it’s a mixed feeling. As like many people, I’m looking for financial security and of course coupled with my responsibilities as a the eldest child of my family. I don’t know but I’m a bit worried on how my first job would impact my life, impact my business overall.

Now to you! I know most of the readers here have a real world job. I know you’re doing it and also alloting some part-time effort on blogging or whatever business you may have. Finding a career (the more elegant term for job) is the path I’ve gone into. It’s the better decision or maybe its not but one thing is for sure, it’s the realistic demand of life. Any insightful tips that you can give to me or any words of wisdom?

Things I don’t Like with Guest Blogging Contests

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Every summer it’s noticeable that contests spring up like mushroom as you can almost find them anywhere. In fact, here in this blog there is a current contest running that started this June. That being said, we can conclude that summer is contests season.

Anyways, the days where the contest is all about subscribing to feed, blogging about it, digging, stumbling it are probably gone. What you’d notice today is that a lot of bloggers have become more creative in creating their own contests. What’s in today is guest blogging contests which at the same I’d like to talk about.

The latest is the one that Smartbloggerz is currently running while the other same type of contest can be found here and there. That being said, guest blogging contests is something that will happen more in the future as its becoming the newest trend for contests.

Guest blogging has really exploded for the past 2 years now as evident with the whole scene. In fact some bloggers like Carl Ocab and even Problogger have already let the guest posters post majority of their content. Back to the contests, I can say I’m not really a big fan of those although I participate a lot into it. For me it’s kind of like ruining the whole guest posting strategy and here are my thoughts.

The Goal Becomes Different

People would argue about it since in order to win these contests you have to write good content right? The problem with this is that your focus shifts from reaping the benefits of a guest post featured to winning the contest all out. I mean normally with guest posts what I usually do is make sure the readers of that post will be catered as much as possible to my blog, get replies for their comments and me tracking numbers, optimizing whats working out and what’s not.

With contests, it becomes really different. Instead of doing things I listed above, I would then focus more on writing more and more guest posts for that contest, observe where am I currently standing, do I have a good chance of winning or not and things like that. Nothing really bad about but its like the true essence of doing guest posts diminishes.

Readers’ interaction Differs Considerably

Another thing I don’t like with it is that its really hard to reap the same benefits from it as oppose to writing a guest article for the sole purpose of making a guest post. I was tracking my stats (again my fave hobby, lols) and what I found out is that not a lot of people really read the article and go to your blog. For instance I wrote a guest post before and it gave me like 35% bounce rate to my site which is an exceptional rate. After quite some time I did another guest post with the same blog but this time just got a 69% rate. Of course things could vary depending on other factors but I’m sure the “contest” factor is one of the bigger factors.

When guest blogging becomes a contest, most of the consumers of the post becomes the contestant and oftentimes they are just lurking there to see and track how other contestants are doing.

Lesser Traffic

This is the obvious disadvantage of this. We, as guest posters will receive lesser traffic and obviously lesser bang for our efforts when we guest post more for the contest than for the intrinsic purpose of it. I mean if you see an awesome guest posts and then you saw a note saying “this is an entry to blah blah, join now and get a chance to win $XXXX”. I mean what would you do? Naturally we will participate. There’s really nothing to blame. You can’t blame the owner who hold the contest nor you can blame the sponsors that made that pot got that high. There’s no one  to blame because its human nature, you see a contest related to you, odds are high that you’ll join it.

Overall, if guest blogging contests keep on growing more and more, it will definitely have a big impact on how traditional guest blogging works. With things I mentioned, it can be hard to really see the essence of doing guest posts aside from targeting those contest prizes.

But then I don’t have any problem with that  (or just a small problem), in fact I’m even one of those who are competing to dominate win it. But still at the end of the day, you’re still gonna wonder where all of these things head into. What say you?

How I (Literally) Doubled My Blog Advertising Income

How I (Literally) Doubled My Blog Advertising Income

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AdvertisingIn one of my featured posts, I discussed about how this blog currently makes money including all the tools and the reasoning behind the monetization tactics I use and how I do it. The post was received so well that I got some questions asked privately asking for some more additional clarifications. I love helping people out so I did walk them through as much as possible but of course time is so limited that I can’t do that to everyone.

In the last post, I did make mention that direct advertising sales is highest source of income for this blog. I know a lot of bloggers have this as their  primary monetization model as well but also I realized that a lot of other bloggers are having so much trouble with it.

In this another lengthy post, I’d  like to discuss how I literally doubled my advertising income through the past few  years. And here we go:

Pre note: This is not, at all, a walk-through on how to do blog advertising. Its mainly a post where I share how I doubled my advertising income. That being said, consider this post as a post targeted to intermediate to advance users who may probably be already making money with blog advertising. Also there’s no traffic tip in this post.

Getting the right tools & technology

When I started, I installed OpenX on this blog primarily because I have been using it on my other blogs created before this one. And OpenX is really an awesome free tool because they have all sorts of features that are available on so many other paid tools.

Not too long, I realized that I have to jump on the OIO Publisher bandwagon. Again in case you don’t know, OIO is an advertising manager platform that handles the advertising for you. This means that you no longer need to manually accept payments, add banners, track expiring date and stuffs because OIO does that all for you.

It costs $47 with an unlimited use so you can pretty much use it on every of your site. It’s beneficial first because, you can manage ads literally with your hands tied back (heheh, a marketer’s usual hype) and second because it pretty much works alongside any other networks and integrates well with almost all payment processor. It does also have tons of features like geo-targeting and stat-tracking.

Note: If you still does not have OIO Publisher on your blog, you are very fortunate because OIO gave me a coupon code that entitles everyone to a $10 discount. By signing up with OIO Publisher under me, you get the unlimited usage license for just $37 which is definitely a huge steal. Click this link now and make sure you enter BLOOM-MELVS to claim your discount.

Alternatively there are other third party networks that you could look as well like BuySellAds and AdvertiseSpace.com, both of which sell your space for you in exchange for a revenue  cut (50%). Some people do well with those networks and while other prefer using OIO to keep profit 100%.

Setting Up the right Advertise Now Page

It’s funny but one of the most viewed pages in this blog is the advertise now page which goes to show that potential advertisers really care about the stats. The mistake that I mostly see with other bloggers advertising page is that the statistics are not as comprehensive as it should. Usually they just put paragraphs with no proofs at all or worse they don’t even use  any screenshot from Google Analytics and other logs.

You have to understand that advertisers spend soooo much money in their campaigns and as a wise person, what they want is to get a good bang for their buck. Oftentimes they buy space from as much blogs as possible and then track what’s doing well and what’s not. By having  a “proper” advertise now page you’re giving them a clear and concise information of what to expect in your blog.

Don’t Direct Link to the Payment Page

Most people who use OIO Publisher or other third party tool does the mistake of linking their Advertise now box directly to the payment. Why is that a problem? It’s a problem because there’s really no value from the advertiser’s side. I mean if you put yourself in their shoes, you don’t want to buy an ad space without knowing the stats first right?

I conducted an test last year and found an interesting result to where a lot of advertisers will buy an ad space when you direct link it to the payment page while a good number of advertisers will buy but then subscribe for future payments when you send them to the advertise page. You see, a good advertising page builds trust and I have some advertisers here who are advertising ever since last year which I thought was pretty cool.

Giving them reasonable pricing

I understand that all bloggers value their traffic as much as they could but sometimes you have to bent a bit to make things work. It’s not really that you’re selling yourself cheap but its more of determining how the marketplaces prices it. Jeremy Schoemaker even told us before that he is selling initially his ad spots for like 2/10 the price.

Another reason is that you want to build relationship with these advertisers. A lot of times when an advertiser talks with me, he usually asks for an initial month discount and most of the times I accept it. I understand that banner ads have very poor clickthroughs and as a blogger, you want to establish that relationship where you can let people know what they can get from you and how they can benefit.

Stalk, look around

The one thing that’s so good (or so bad depending on where your siding) about online business is that it’s very transparent. You can easily stalk on what others are doing, how they are doing it and stuffs.

Just the same with direct ad sales. One of the tricks is to always look on blogs within your niche and observe who are the advertisers advertising. Then contact them up and tell them you’re offering advertising as well. There’s a good chance that they will respond since most of them are just small business owners and chances are they’d negotiate with you to push their campaign through. That’s because they understand it’s all about market penetration and branding. Once a brand gets through these markets, it’s amazing how it spreads like fire without that much effort at all.

Outsource

I have pretty come to a point now where I have already appointed someone to do things for me. For instance, every two week or so a person I hired would go to all webmaster forums, find advertisers looking for related advertising and offer them the space. He also does a listing on big boards highlighting advertising on my blog and the benefits of it.

If you’re going to chase advertisers (there’s no need to when you have a nice blog like me. 😉 ), it’s almost essential to have someone working for you, contacting advertisers, flaunting the benefits and such. That makes the process very automated at the end.

Blog Advertising is STILL hit & miss.

In this post I didn’t hold back anything, I completely shared to you how I grew my blog advertising income. But still at the end of the day, it’s still a hit and miss income opportunity. A lot of people still claim it as an unstable way to make money from blog and that’s true. If you’re into making more, you would want to definitely work more on a more “in-house” and consistent money maker w/c can bring you more money without having the need for tons of traffic.

But of course if you’re like me and you have those wide sidebars and nice spacings, you might as well just leverage your traffic too and benefit from selling these spaces. After all, probably 80% of blogs still make money from blog advertising. And do take note that they are doing it, without really sacrificing their more profitable monetization ways.