Blogging Experience

Bloggers, Its Time To Forget those Metrics

by Melvin · Jun 3, 2010

Each and every blogger who is just getting started is usually being taught about the different metrics and how each of those play a certain role on their blog. The metrics I’m pertaining to are: the Google Pagerank, the Alexa rank, the Technorati authority, the feed subscriber count, and even being included in those top 100 lists. From a hindsight, isn’t it exciting to witness each metric of your blog improve and attribute it to your blog’s growth?

Well, we cannot dismiss the fact that these metrics change as our blog’s popularity change but we should always not be too concerned with that or else we are going to harm our blog. I remember when my blog was just getting started. In 2 months I received a pr2 ranking and was like jumping up and down with excitement. I was really really ecstatic back then and thought I was hardcore.

Not too long after that, the blog was slapped back to pr0. I remember I even did a rant post claiming that Google was making a mistake of slapping my rankings. Funny enough the reasoning behind that was simple. I was selling links, doing black hat type of stuffs and just being bad. In short, I was not complying with Google”s guidelines.

Today I no longer care with Metrics

I bet that even people tell they don’t care that much with those ranking stuffs, they are still baffled. That was what I was like back then. I mean I was puzzled why these blogs have good Alexa rank yet they receive very few to no comments at all. Why is mine just in the 200k?

The main reason I actually stopped caring about those things is that its not helping me and my blog at all! I mean instead of focusing on producing good content to my readers, I would instead search ways on how to game Alexa or instead of marketing my blog more, I would research on why my blog is pr0.

Eventually I said “buggy this, I would stop being concerned with all these stuffs, instead I would just do what I would need to do”. And that was like the turning point for me from being an overly-conscious metric guy to being a real blogger.

If you’re still unaware, it’s about building relationships.

I always like to tell newcomers in blogging that its about connecting to your readers, building that relationship. It doesn’t happen overnight but instead on focusing on useless things, we as bloggers have to focus more on making that bond with other bloggers.

The thing about blogging is that it is such a friendly atmosphere. In fact we treat other bloggers as peers when in fact they are our competitors. That doesn’t happen in real world businesses.

So that’s the main point of this post. the metrics are good, sure it can feed our ego well, we can boast it in forums claiming ‘hey I have a better pr than you” or whatever. But at the end of the day, blogging is a person-to person relationship, not technology and script driven activity.

Can you sell your own product just because you have a high Alexa and pagerank? Does it mean you’re credible just because you’re in the top 500 list of some random guy? Naah! But when you build those relationships with your readers w/c are your potential customers, you don’t even need a thousand of people a day. All you need is a fraction of that. Believe me.

Entrepreneurial Tip: Take Everything With a Grain of Salt

by Melvin · May 22, 2010

In this information-overload era its just so easy to find answers to our questions. I mean when was the last time you searched for something and didn’t find anything? That pretty much sums it. Add the fact that search engines are constantly tweaked to cater to the majority of users so all in all we are in this ‘so useful’ internet era.

But we might as well be cautious a bit though as the information could basically own us. How many times have you heard someone saying they’re suffering from information overload? The information we’re talking here are good and brilliant informations and its so easy to just consume things as much as you could.

Let alone in blogging and making money online that so many people can’t get pass the first stage because they keep on consuming new information after new information. Everyone suffers from this and unfortunately most people mishandle it. I used to think that info overload is just a person’s inability to filter but I was wrong.

Take everything with a grain of salt

According to phrases.org.uk, the statement means we should accept infos but maintain it in a degree of skepticism about its truth. In a more normal description, it’s all about taking each and every information but not completely believe it.

I know most of us, if not all, rely on information to do all the things we need to get done. However, we should always remember that there are certain factors that can affect whether that information can be useful or not. Here are some reasons:

Most information are not timeless – The first thing I do whenever I read a good piece of article related to my business is to check out the date. I think not a lot of people understand that informations or advice that they usually read aren’t gonna last forever. For instance, I could search on something about “wordpress tweaks and stuffs” and could find great lengthy articles on that subject. But the problem is if it the info is too old or outdated, it’s not going to benefit me.
The effect is usually NOT the same for others – Recently I wrote a post about how my blog makes money and I’m sure thousands of people who have read it would exactly copy the ways I mentioned. But does that mean they can reap the same results? probably, probably not! A good friend always likes to tell me that not all MBA students who graduate get a good life even though it is highly perceived that if you take that course, you’re gold.
Things can go wrong with unusual outside factors – Another question, when was the last time that what you planned goes off exactly as its planned? Just the same with informations we consume. One good observation is that when one writes a good walkthrough on how he makes money for example with affiliate marketing, almost no readers get to duplicate that effort. Why is that? Because in every thing we do there are always outside factors that greatly affect things. Demographics, time, and etc., they all play a good role in all of this.
False claims/infos – It’s funny but a lot of people aren’t too keen on spotting wrong and fake informations. A lot just completely gloss into it and completely treat it as it is. That’s why its important to understand that almost all websites have disclaimers and it’s there for a reason.

Do it and see for yourself

The only way to find out is to do it and see for yourself. You can never really conclude something as working unless you get to experience it yourself. It’s also good to test since doing so can make you avoid being a crybaby, taking info and then calling it out a bum if it didn’t work. 😉

A good example is what I do with affiliate marketing. In forums, you oftentimes see bums people who post “hey this offer from this, I tested it in this, and its killing it for me!”. But the truth is doing exactly the same thing wouldn’t certify a success! There might be some factors that hinge on demographics, the PPC slaps, landing page issues and so many things. And in that particular example, the best thing to do is do the offer yourself, test and see if it’s really worth converting (or is just all hype).

I know you guys trust a lot of brands related within your businesses. There’s nothing wrong with that. Besides, these people are experts and credible for a reason. But in the end don’t forget to do your own testing and take all those infos with a grain of salt. After all, they say marketers are liars. 🙂

How MelvinBlog Dot Com Really Makes Money

by Melvin · May 10, 2010

I got this request from two people and although they are only two people (lols), I thought I would share here with you right now how MelvinBlog Dot Com makes money.

First and foremost, I would first like to clarify that this blog makes very little to no money at all. Initially when I started this blog, I had in mind bloggers like Shoemoney and Carl Ocab and basically told myself that I’m really going to monetize this blog as hard as I could. Eventually it did especially the past few years where it makes a steady three-figure income every month which I thought was amazing considering I’m not really selling anything except ad space and also the fact that the blog isn’t a high traffic one.

Anyways enough schmoozing, today I am going to break down to you how this blog makes money in the past recent years. I may not totally give you the exact figures or the precise time period but I’d try to detail it as possible.

This blog is nowhere close to a high-traffic site but it’s enough for me to make some money out of it and take good care of all the bills. I also think it’s interesting to let people see how this blog makes money considering a lot of blogs who have much bigger traffic than this blog has been having difficulties with monetization. Without further ado, here we go.

Direct Advertising

It’s no secret and by simple observation you can easily see that majority of the money from this blog comes from selling ad spaces directly to advertisers. I sell several advertising which includes the well-known square banners at the sidebar, I also have text links and the premium spot which is the 468X60 banner space. Initially I wasn’t too keen on selling paid reviews but after realizing it’s totally just fine, I decided to give it a go.

I don’t know but I think I really do well with selling my ad spaces in this blog. I usually get sold out and if not, maybe 1-2 ad spaces were left. One reason is that my ad space is really cheap. I know some bloggers who have the same traffic than me yet they’re selling their spaces for like double of my amount. I’ve talked about it in my how to get that blog advertisers post and it’s all about really letting the marketplace decide for the price tag. Getting 4 $10 placement is always better than one $25 placement.

I’m also keen on giving out discounts especially if it’s on a commitment basis or if it’s a bulk package. Not only I get to be able to get sponsors but also it builds that publisher-advertiser relationship over time which is something that most bloggers don’t do.

And lastly yes I use a very awesome plugin called OIO Publisher. For those who do not know, what it basically does is make selling ad space automated. The advertiser purchases an ad, and then the plugin does everything. You don’t need to upload the banner manually, you don’t need to undergo to those long processes that you usually go into when doing it by yourself.

It also does have some other unique features like geo-targeting and stat-tracking in which it emails the advertisers about all the stats, the clicks, ecpm, and all those geeky number stuffs.

If you don’t have it yet, get your copy now. I know I was like having some pride into myself before and said “I’m not gonna jump into this OIO thing.” I was making good money then but upon purchasing, I almost doubled my advertising income alone because of this plugin. $47 is so cheap since you can use it in as many of your sites as possible.

Direct Ad Sales alone pays for my virtual private network hosting bills and some other couple of outsourcing works so maybe it’s not that dead after all.

Affiliate Marketing

Most of you here know that I’m an affiliate marketer primarily running CPA campaigns through Pay-per click and then Facebook so being an affiliate is usually my bread and butter in terms of making money. But then it’s not really something that is related to this blog so I really don’t count it as part of the revenue.

However, I made some money though with some affiliate products I recommend in this blog. On my earlier days I was promoting affiliate networks like Pepperjam Network and Clickbooth which back then was paying $5 and $10 respectively for every referral. I made a lot of money in that since I leveraged the blog’s traffic and my reputation in forums. Do take note that I was making money as well by promoting affiliate offers within the network so I was not just trying to refer people for the sake of making money.

Most commissions nowadays are from the products that I’ve used and recommend here in this blog. Some of them include the 31 day workbook by Darren Rowse, Elegant Themes, Theme Wars, and of course OIO affiliate program which is one of the lucrative programs out there. Again, I promote products that I use and recommend. I would say stay away from promoting stuffs that you haven’t used yourself.

Affiliate program isn’t really the main driving force of this blog but I know some blogs who do really quite well with this business model. One of them is Michael Dunlop of IncomeDiary.com who doesn’t sell ad space. Instead he leverages his traffic by providing tons of free good stuffs and then recommending products to them afterwards. It’s a great business model as well for the blog so you might as well look at that.

Selling my product

If you can remember I sold a product last year which was called “Make Money Online Blog Monetizer” in which it was my first info product ever. The product was launched for 2 and a half months before pulling it out in the market. I’m not gonna say it’s the best product ever since sliced bread but it did almost raked in a thousand dollars in that period. I know I could’ve done much better had the internship not started killing me back then.

Since then I closed the product down as my goal was really to test the market back then as well as analyze its scalability. Whether I had made $20, $200 or $2000, I would still close the launch for that thing for the same duration of time. Whether it is still going to get launched again or not remains to be seen though.

In the latter part of this year I am looking to release another product so stay tuned for that.

Unorthodox Monetization Ways

I always take blog monetization as a big challenge so I did some unorthodox ways to squeeze money from this blog as well. One of them is through the “put the banner and make money program”. During the past couple of years it was really kicking. I mean you don’t need traffic, don’t need page rank, all you need is to sign up, and then put those ugly looking banners that are made of frames and tables and then receive your 10 Euros (they were usually paying Euros). Some are on a recurring basis and most are on a one time basis.

I really didn’t get the other side of it, all I knew was it’s another way to make money. I even wrote a post about it on how you can money without any sweat at all.

I also did some paid text links in posts thing where I basically was approached by advertisers saying they want this keyword in this specific post to link on their site or whatnot. Probably it’s an evil tactic but is definitely another good way to make money. The buy sell text links forum in digital point was where I was getting most of my clients.

Finally I also tried my luck with CPM-based advertising where I get paid a dollar or more for a thousand impressions. I was a smart ass so all I did was to leverage social media traffic, setup some rotating IP addresses to view my blog and buy cheap traffic. It was a little profitable thing but then I stopped doing it when I switched with this magazine template.

I still have a couple at the back of my mind but I don’t think it’s good to share those things as well as it may probably harm your blog if you implement it. Anyways do take note too that this is what I’d like to call as “desperate monetization measures”. Like I’ve said, it’s always a challenge for me to make money and so even when people see me as trying too hard to make money, I really don’t mind.

Future Plan

As I’ve said I’m going to release a couple of products down the road this year and test the market for it. Since I started list-building last year, I would try to get something from it as well, try to build relationships and then leverage it by recommending some stuffs to them.

The direct advertising model is going to be here in my blog for at least this year since its making me some really good money although I would try to shy away from it probably starting next year once I start getting a more consistent stream of income from other sources

An interesting note to take as well is on how I myself have turned the focus of this blog from making as much money as possible to actually starting to work more on its personal brand and focusing with relationships instead. Although the blog still makes decent money, most of the goals that I’ve set this year aren’t really on the financial side, rather more on building a larger community towards it and bigger readability all throughout the blogosphere. Money is good, but I’d take growing credibility and expertise any time of the day.

Long post huh? What say you?

Why Personal Posts Get LOTS of Traffic

by Melvin · Apr 29, 2010

I was playing with the logs and stats from my Google Analytics account and it really didn’t surprise me that some of the posts that gets the most traffic were the ones that really didn’t have anything to do with internet marketing, blogging or make money online (w/c is the topic of this blog). Here’s a short screenshot from G.A:

Contest posts are naturally high traffic ones due to its intrinsic nature, while some of the other posts here go within the theme of this blog w/c is internet marketing and blogging. The hits from other couple of posts and pages may seem unnatural though. The post about the best birthday gift for the girl I love have the most no. of unique counts and pageviews in terms of posts and the about and photo pages are the most popular in pages.

That is voyeurism at work. It continues to amaze me how offtopic writeups, mostly are personal posts, get so much traction. When I wrote that “teenage-love” affair post I really wasn’t so keen that I would get responses but I was surprised when so many people I do not know commented and gave me their tips. It also went hot on social sites and eventually just got so many traction.

Why it rakes in traffic

People love personal posts, there’s no doubt about it. Most of my readers read my blog because of my expertise in this topic so that being said, any other post outside my niche can either spark a good interest or no interest at all and luckily for me its working on a good side.

Voyeurism is a superb traffic technique just because of the fact that it enhances your relationship your audience. It brings you closer on a more personal basis and in marketing, that’s an added trust and credibility.

Top 3 ways on how to take advantage of Voyeurism

Build your expertise first and foremost – Ok, you cannot just start a blog and write random personal posts and then expect a heap of traffic. It is not gonna happen. What you can do though, is work on building a presence first, overdeliver good content in your niche and focus on growth. As I’ve said people become more interested on your personal stuffs when they trust you for what you provide.
Share your personal craps BUT STILL add value – One thing you would notice with all the personal posts is that they all add value. No one wants to read something they wouldn’t enjoy so whether that value accounts for enjoyment, or learnings, its all up to your readers. Just make sure they are going to pick up something useful.
Don’t hold back anything – People love honest stories and it’s always one thing that people admire. You cannot call that post personal when you’re lying so make sure you don’t hold anything back.
Limit yourself in doing it – Ok now we know that personal posts are the ones that get good traffic. We also understood that people like it for intrinsic reasons so what now? Make all your posts personal posts? Naah! Like anything there’s a limit. When it comes to superb content, you can’t feed your readers with these each and everytime as they will get overwhelmed. That goes the same with personal posts. Once you abuse the use of it, it would start boring the heck of your readers.

So what now? Here in my blog, I’m proud to say that people like my personality (debatable). I get both good and bad feedbacks but overall I think I’m doing things fine. Voyeurism is an effect of good personal branding and if youre not leveraging it, you’re missing a lot.

Blogging Without Borders, Why Location Is Not a Limitation

by Melvin · Apr 26, 2010

Do take note of this, Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse are from Australia, John Chow is from Vancouver Canada, Daniel Scocco is from Brazil, Chris Garrett is from UK, Murray Newlands is also from UK I believe and my friend Carl “KidBlogger” Ocab is from Philippines and etc.

Ok now from outside this niche. Alborz Fallah of CarAdvice.com.au is from Australia (arrgh, again), the ever famous Danny Choo is from Japan, Lhong Zheng was from China (although he resides in Mulgrave), and again fellow Filipino tech blogger Jehzeel Laurente lives here in Philippines. And yea you’re right, I probably have missed a ton of other people still either because I did my research poorly or didn’t do research at all. Anyway, lols. 🙂

Whew, that was quite a long list! I was watching NBA (w/c is one show I always watch no matter what) and they have this segment called Basketball without borders where they usually go to places outside US to have campaigns on basketball. They even play official ball games there sometimes. It’s refreshing to think that you can play basketball no matter where you are.

Thinking of that, I kinda relate it to blogging. You can easily notice that all bloggers I mentioned above live outside the United States. Most people who are just planning to get started blogging worry a lot on whether they can even get attention, relating it to the fact that they live outside big and profitable countries like America and Europe.

To make it worse, most bloggers even do recommend bloggers to target bigger countries mentioned above if they are considering making money from blogging. As a result, bloggers are discouraged even before they get to have a chance.

I would tell you this one straight to your face, successful blogging has no borders, geographical location is NEVER a limitation! Whether you are blogging just as a hobby or using blogging as a business tool, you should never ever get discouraged just because of where you live. Remember that in any country there is always a (profitable) market for something. There are always things where people want to spend some money to learn and educate themselves.

If you’re just going to get wet or in the middle of that (very slow) learning curve and you’re feeling discouraged, I feel for you. I was once like that. When I started my past blogs and websites I basically plastered them with Google Adsense. My neighbor is reading it, my classmates are reading it, and they are clicking the ad. And it sucks to realize that those clicks even with a good quantity totals to just a very small amount (since most clicks is from my country).

And then as I was signing up with other different ad networks I was a bit disappointed to learn that some networks rejected me just because of the fact that I live outside the US. It can really be depressing but having the proper mindset, here I am today.

It’s important to always look at the big picture, not get discouraged by all those cons and instead work on things you could care more. I myself live in a third world country, Philippines. As I was looking at my Analytics and logs, I was seeing the most of my traffic comes here in Asia, and I can say those readers are big factors why I make money from this blog, why I’m somehow read by people.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter where you live from or where your target market is. The only thing that matters is your dedication. Sure, you can count the disadvantages of living in your place at your fingertips or you can elaborate the advantages of living a big country but that’s not a legitimate reason, in fact it’s not even a reason.

As I end this, I do hope you can look at those bloggers I mentioned above and use them as an inspiration. Inspiration not just as big and successful bloggers, but also as bloggers who live in different parts of the world. Yep, blogging doesn’t have any borders, just like basketball.

Widget Logic Plugin, Strategize Your Sidebar Widgets

by Melvin · Apr 10, 2010

All bloggers make good use of the sidebar in their template. Whether it is 2-column, 3 column-sidebar or just multiple sidebars, our aim as a blogger is to make good use of them all. Thankfully for us, WordPress has made it so much easy with the use of widgets wherein all we have to do is drag and drop things.

Of course just like anything, people sometimes abuse the use of widgets and sidebar elements. How many bloggers have you seen cluttering their sidebar too much? Or how many useless widgets usually do appear on most sidebars? The ease of using widgets have enabled bloggers to become a bit trigger-happy with putting so much at the same time.

Widget Logic WordPress Plugin

The topic above leads us to the widget logic plugin. What widget-logic does is basically lets user use conditional tags to control the pages where a certain widget will appear on. It sounds a bit basic but trust me this one is a helpful plugin.

Looking at my blog you would see that some widgets that appear on home don’t necessarily appear on the other pages and vice versa. If you’re more technically literate, you could actually play more with the conditional tags to achieve your desired result.con

For example here in my blog, I don’t display the top commentator widget anywhere outside the home page basically because the home page is the strongest page in my blog. Another is my “Blog Marketing for Fame” eBook widget wherein I don’t display it in the index page primarily because I already have it in the middle sidebar part. But when you go to the posts and pages, you could see it at the top most part of the sidebar. You can do your own variations depending on how you prefer it.

Its all about maximizing each and every part of your blog

When I went with the blog’s redesign, my aim is to maximize every space without annoying/cluttering my readers’ mind. So with widget logic plugin, I was able to really implement things that I want. It gave me the flexibility of mixing and matching different elements in the sidebar.

How about you, have you used this widget already? If yes, maybe you can tell me some of your implementation techniques and tips. If not, I would highly recommend using it. Check out the widget logic plugin page.

Making Money Online & then Quitting School

by Melvin · Mar 27, 2010

There’s usually a trend not just in online space but in the business as a whole. And this is usually when a kid, or basically just a young person starts becoming successful (making tons of money is included in that of course). What happens most of the times, is that that young kid quits school and goes his own way. Does it sound surprising? No!

For the last couple of month, last couple of weeks specifically, I’ve been into probably the busiest, most exhausting days of my college life. I am a graduating student and I’ve never really like gave everything in school. Even if its exam or just any subject, I never had any day where I was not able to do what I really want. Of course until now.

Just a wrap up of what craziness happened the last few weeks, it includes the agonizing process of developing a software, then the super duper lengthy amount of paperworks that comes with it, then all the meeting and then the revision and then the defense. Do take note, that is just one subject. How about the others where we have a project, exams, stuffs, just craziness.

And it surprised me that I can’t even afford to login to the dashboard page of this blog. I can’t do a lot of the usual things I do in a day. Seems like all I can do is the school work (and tweeting of course)

Quitting School

Let’s go back to the main topic of this post. If you are into this niche, you could easily realize that most successful marketers/bloggers never really finished college. Instead they quit and stuffs.

To tell you honestly quitting school when you are making good money (or even just some money) is not a hard decision to make. I mean who cares about school anyway? I’m always like “hell Im going to school this month and I would then make lesser money as oppose to I’m not gonna go to school and I would triple my monthly income when I go to school”.

The only thing worth considering are the outside factors. The factors that doesn’t do anything with all the benefits that you get to enjoy when you quit school. Like for example is your parents. I don’t know about you but if I’m quitting school today (or even before) and say to them Im making enough money, then they’d still be upset. Why? Because of the degree that you’re going to miss out.

I know having a degree is probably one of the many overrated things here on earth but a lot of people just value that. Not having one is just like not having a future life.

Another good factor is your friends, your enjoyment and attachment with them. I would be the first one to say that I go to school mostly because I want to see my friends, have a talk with them and do our craps all together. And if I quit school right now, then I don’t think I would see them anymore for maybe the next few months (seriously!).

There are endless factors when it comes to this and it includes, financial stability, security, freedom, values and cultures that you are used to and etc. And its important to weigh them all down equally before making a decision. It wouldn’t also harm to seek out advice from people you trust.

Lastly, quitting school is ALMOST synonymous to having your own business, doing your own thing in future. Because of not having a degree, the chances of you, getting employed becomes smaller. Of course anyone out there could disagree and give me twenty-five reasons why its not the case but I’m pretty sure that it applies to majority, if not all. In short, you’re taking the risk and you’re less secure.

Am I Quitting School

Heck, no is the answer! As I’ve said, Im going to graduate one month from now and If I am about to quit then its the most stupid decisions I am going to make.Maybe if I have stumbled upon that thought 2 years ago, but now? Definitely not! 😉

School has taught a ton of nice values to me, enabled me to become who I am right now, helped me be with equally talented people, brought me experience I could never forget, hooked me up with pretty girls, got me with cool persons, party casinos, sports, drinking sprees and etc. Even if I was making $1 million 2 years ago, I probably would’ve still not quit, or maybe I would. 🙂