Blogging Tips

5 Ways to Make Readers Visit Your Blog Again

by Melvin · Dec 4, 2009

In this post, Mikkel talks about 5 ways on how to make your readers visit your blog again for more.

Does your visitor count go from 5 to 51 in a day, and then on 7 the next day? That’s a quite clear sign that you don’t have loyal readers, those readers can be hard to get. I have compiled a list of methods on how to get readers to come back

Contest – Everybody loves contests, if a reader is competing in a contest of yours he will get back, if he win he might want to read the blog, because you are cool – and then your blog is (of course) delivering good content.When you are running a contest be sure to make the contest as relevant as possible, don’t go offer an Internet Marketing product if your blog is about dog training. If you don’t have a niche or can come up with anything you’d like to offer, then just offer a cash prize everybody loves cold cash.

Maybe you should held a contest every once in a month – which will make people come back = repeated traffic.

Offer White Papers – White papers are really good for attracting readers – especially repeated traffic, if you for an example release a new white paper every month people will get back to your blog to download the white paper.Be sure to use the white paper to link back to your blog – just try to make it as relevant as possible. Add links in the text. In that way you will make people come back to your blog and then they make that a habit, so they will return more often.
Update Your Blog – The probably easiest way (but yet the one that takes time) to make people come back and read your blog is to write new content. Readers don’t want to keep checking your blog for 3-4 days in a row to find a non-updated blog – at least write 5 articles in a week – the more the better. One article per day is okay, if the article is above 500 words. If it’s 250 word per post, try to publish 2 articles each day.
Be a Part of Another Community – If you are member of a forum and write more than one post each day, people will remember your name and blog – so they check it out, maybe they are going to be loyal readers sometime. It will make readers come back because they see your post and look at the signature. Which reminds them of the fantastic content you provide.Maybe leave some comments on another blog (in your niche) – write a thoughtful comment, which will lead them to click the link to the well written content on your blog. That would make a loyal reader, because he finds your blog through a comment on his blog (a good comment), which also shows that you care about other people than yourself.
Write Content That is Unique – Write content that makes people think: “This is a unique blog, I haven’t seen a post about this topic anywhere else. I want to subscribe.” Lots of blogs about blogging talks about the same. You have to stand out from the crowd to get people to even think about coming back.

This is guest blogged by Mikkel from DaneBlogger.com. Mikkel is a 14 year old kid from Denmark who’s been blogging since 2007.Feel free to subscribe to his feed.

Really Want To Make Money? – Find Your Strengths!

by Melvin · Nov 30, 2009

I remember when I was just getting started with my making money ventures I was like “I want to try this, want to try that and whatever”. My mentality was like I want to try everything so that when something fails, there’s still a good chance some of the methods I tried would work. Imagine if I would try 20 different money-making tactics, maybe at least 1 or 2 would succeed. Did I do the right thing? NO!

The Problem Noobs Encounter

When some new guy is entering the industry, you could easily expect that guy to be full of energy and enthusiasm. Or maybe inspiration for some people. Like my case, they jump into everything head first and has that aggressive mentality and “hail Mary please work” mindset. But it isn’t wrong right? The answer is YES and NO.

I’ve written a lot here in the blog about how people should TAKE ACTION and I know other million dozen bloggers say the same. It’s true, you won’t succeed reading for 10 years before acting. But the same can be also said to being too aggressive. I had this cousin who really wanted to jump into affiliate marketing and because she’s really wealthy, she dived into it without having any basic startup knowledge. The result was she lost a ton of money.

You know me, I really love to test, love to take advantage of “unheard” stuffs and just always think outside the box. But do bare in mind that I can already afford to fail given my experience with internet marketing. If you’re a noob, has no money and has that unnerving mindset then LISTEN. I know it’s cool to look real brave, its good for the ego for people to see you as a courageous newbie business person. But don’t be an idiot. Work your way up first before acting like you’ve done it already.

Finding Your Strengths

Just because you heard arbitrage is cool, doesn’t mean you have to go into it. I hear a lot of people saying “I heard this thing makes big money, I heard I could become a millionaire with this and that”. That’s exactly the no.1 recipe for failure.

If you really want to start making money, then start analyzing your strengths. Start planning the directions you’re going to take. Narrow down your huge options and think. I understand everyone wants to be that “entrepreneur”, a CEO-like business person who is at the top, foreseeing whats happening, getting the biggest money but you have to understand it’s not gonna happen. Successful freelancers remain as freelancers, graphic artists could never become programmers and bloggers as CEO is far-fetched.

What do you think? Do you think you’re playing the game using your strengths or playing it with others strength? Let me know by using the contact form below..

Can You Still Make Money Online in MMO Niche?

by Melvin · Nov 8, 2009

In this guest post, Simon shows to us why making money in a make money online niche isn’t yet a history.

I was recently reading an article that was asking whether it’s still possible to earn money from the ‘make money online’ (MMO) niche. As we all know, the MMO niche is getting more and more packed, thus increasing competition and making us work even harder to get traffic to out site. And, as we also know, without traffic you can’t make money.

So, can you still make a decent amount of money by blogging in the MMO niche?

Simple answer: YES.

There are lots of make money online blogs around, but at the same time lets be honest in saying that well over 50% are rubbish.

OK, sorry for sounding harsh, but it’s true. Most the MMO blogs I visit have no real potential for earning: the bloggers don’t have a clue how to monetise their blog and are only in the make money online niche because that’s how the big names (Darren Rowse, John Chow etc) have made their name, so they try it out for themselves.

If you’re interested in making “proper” money on your MMO blog, you shouldn’t associate yourself with these blogs. You should really be taking a step to make your blog better than the average, and this way you already have an advantage over tons of other blogs.

There’s lots of ways to gain that extra something that will take your blog above the rest. It could be something as simple as the design (for example, small, ‘not so good’ blogs will often have a free theme, but by getting a custom theme made you can set yourself apart), or something as complex as creating a whole new branch to your website that has never been seen before.

Either way, the thing that is most important is the content. Quality content is what sets the cool blogs apart from those that are quite frankly rubbish. By posting articles that are going to grab the readers attention and then be enjoyable to read, you’re bound to get loads more traffic as people will link to you, and, as we all know, more links means more traffic.

So, how do you make your blog worth visiting? I’d love to hear some of your suggestions, so feel free to leave a comment below!

Simon Rogers is a teenager who blogs at Teenius.com. Also, there is an awesome contest he’s running at the moment which you can find here. It’s easy to enter and has some great prizes!

Personal Branding with Your Name and Photo

by Melvin · Nov 3, 2009

In this post, Antti Kokkonen talks about the benefits of using your personal name and photo in boosting your own personal brand)

Personal branding is about building up trust and establishing yourself as an authority, a source of valuable information. By being honest, being yourself and branding yourself as an expert in your niche, you’ll have something that cannot be taken away from you, a personal brand you can be proud of.

And the first step is to put your name out, so make sure your name is visible on your blog, your social media profiles, etc. I know, it might be scary to use your real name online, but think of it this way — would you trust and buy something from someone whose name you don’t know? I certainly wouldn’t.

The next step is to get an image that your name can be connected to. Logos are important for branding. Having a logo means you can utilize that logo everywhere. So if you like, you can get a logo designed (or design it yourself) for your blog.

But more importantly, for yourself, you really don’t have to design a logo, as there’s a good chance you already have one. Your photo! Choose one great photo of yourself and use the same photo as your avatar and profile picture in all the social network sites, like Twitter and Facebook, and also your blog! Not having your own photo in your blog is something that’s ridiculous. Of course it’s debatable since guys like Maki of DoshDosh.com don’t use one yet is considered an authority.

When you use your real name and photo on your blog and social media, you’ll start building an audience and a following for yourself, not just your blog, business or service. Your personal brand stays with you, even if you sell your business, your blog or start providing a new kind of service.

Using Real Name and Photo Builds Trust

When I see a blog or website with someones face on it, it’s immediately more interesting than a blog without one. I’m much more likely to subscribe to a blog which has a “face on it”. I don’t know, maybe it makes it all feel more honest. If I can’t find who is keeping the blog, I immediately become suspicious. And even more so, if I’m in the process of buying something from that person, or something he/she recommends.

I don’t know about you, but I think seven times before I buy anything from someone who I haven’t met or seen. That’s seven opportunities to convince myself not to buy from this stranger. And that’s seven opportunities for you to lose that sale. If you’re planning on selling anything online, keep that in mind.

Also, if I find a blog filled with great posts, I want to know more about the author, I want to know who he or she is. If I can’t find anything about the blogger, I’m gone. And I’m not alone on this, as your readers want to know you and get connected. Don’t disappoint them and make sure the links to your primary social media profiles are clearly visible.

By seeing your name and photo, people on your blog or social networks will know who they’re interacting with. They will know that this certain guy right here is not just a “fly- by night person”. Of course, there’s more to personal branding than just putting your name out there and using a real photo, but this is the first step you have to take.

Now it’s your turn! Are you in the process of building a personal brand? Do you use your real name and photo in your blog and in the social networks?

Antti Kokkonen has been hiding under an Internet alias “Zemalf” for many years, and you can find his not-always-so-focused blog about blogging, social media and Internet business at http://zemalf.com. To stay connected, go ahead follow Antti on Twitter.

I Am Going To Steal Your Ebook!

by Melvin · Oct 24, 2009

Disclaimer: This is not a post teaching you to do this evil thing. I, myself HAVE NEVER EVER stolen any eBook. I don’t need to, I make enough money to live. Just look at this post as a guide to have a basic understanding on how this process works and how you can protect yourself when you do selling eBooks.

Internet Marketing in whatever niche you are, involves a lot of selling. And 90% of the products is what we known as info products or eBooks. But do you know that most of the eBooks that these people are selling are usually just ripped off for free? Or do you know that a lot of people have a ton of good quality eBooks they don’t even pay for? Well I’m sure you, as a reader of this blog are selling ebooks, or have plans of doing it, so this post can be a good read for you.

So most people do sell ebook via Clickbank. In selling, you are required to do two pages. First is the salespage itself, where you would pitch your offer and the second is the thank you page, a page where a paying customer would be redirected once they have made the payment. The problem that I see most of the time is that any user can easily access the thank you page!

One good example is the sales page Problogging BluePrint. So the main page is the index page while the download page is just located in /thanks.html part. Fortunately the link is broken (and its unfortunate for paying customers!). The surprising thing is that most salespage function that way! They have their download page accessible almost by anyone! I mean the usual locations are the ff:

/thanks.html
/thanks.php
/download
/download.html
several variations

That’s why Im not surprised that a lot of info products just leak like crazy. Another bone head mistake most marketers do is make use of robots.txt. Oh my god! I mean yes you can tell the search engine to hide your download page but have you forgotten humans can read it? So if you guys want to steal someone’s ebook all you have to do is try to go /robots.txt and see the page that they disallow, LOLS… Another problem is the noticeable increase of PDF search engines. It’s surprising that a lot of popular eBook shows up on sites like pdfsearchengine. So altogether, it’s an uphill battle to combat eBook fraud and many people so far fail to do it!

How Do I Protect My Ebook?

Well this post is not really a guide on info product protection but since we’re here Im going to give you some brief explanation of what I know. If you’re a clickbank merchant, make sure to have a third party plugin to protect your download page. One that I came across through is DlGuard. Since I have never done any clickbank thing I would suggest you to do your own research as to what the reliable third party plugins are.

If you’re just selling a product yourself, using e-junkie is the smartest thing. E-Junkie is one of the leaders in terms of handling info product automation, payment and delivering the product itself. So far I haven’t heard any issues about using it and even the top marketers like Darren Rowse is using it. $10 per month is a reasonable price for the protection that it gives.

Lastly, always do a simple Google check for your eBook to see if some asshole is sharing it. Use the query “title of your ebook” filetype:PDF, and then scan the search results THOROUGHLY. It’s because sometimes you protect your download page a lot that you forget the file itself. Again some morons do buy it only to share it to other people while other people accidentally (or not) stores it on their server only to leak when someone does a search. Just consider doing this like a maintenance thing.

It can also be a good option to use the PDF search engines we mentioned earlier to your advantage. Search for your eBook, then if you find it, contact the site owner and tell him to remove it (or send him a DMCA notice). Obviously when someone shares it, he knows it’s illegal so he’d just more likely laugh at you when you contact him. The best thing to do is send the notice to their hosting provider by doing a quick whois on the site that distributes your copy illegally.

Conclusion:

Selling eBooks is a big and still growing industry and unfortunately not a lot of people are techy enough to protect the hardwork they exerted. Protecting your own info product can be really hard but there are ways. Im not saying people are evil but put yourself in their situation. You are craving for some expensive info product and you see a flaw that would make it free for you, are you not going to download it? The obvious answer is the answer for 98% of us!

I don’t know about you but if you’re just letting your product leak like waterpipes, then I think your product and you deserves to be ripped off for free. After all security is part of any business model both online and offline that should never be neglected. I would really love to have your opinion about it. Or maybe you can share your own tips that you implement yourself!

Hey, Is Your Blog’s Layout Just Fine?

by Melvin · Oct 17, 2009

This post isn’t really about the blog’s theme or the how beautiful the design is. We all know people who can spend can have the “best” theme while people who don’t have the money can settle for the average. The post that I am going to tackle is about blog design resolution of your website/blog. Why resolution? Well the layout of your blog, might it be the best or the worst, highly depends on the monitor’s resolution of your readers. In short, good design is useless if your readers still have to scroll horizontally just to view every part of your content.

So to kick things, this is how MelvinBlog looks in my laptop (1280X800) (click for larger view):

While on most computers w/c have the 1024X768 screen resolution, it does show like this:

What you would notice is the fact that in my laptop, there is still a space both in the left and right side part while in most screen resolutions, there’s no margin anymore and the content is like stretched. And still it doesn’t look annoying at all!

The main point here is that don’t try to base the design of your blog in your wide screen computer’s resolution. In a certain survey about screen resolutions, it’s been proven that a lot of people are still using the old fashioned 800X600 and 1024X768 screen resolution. In the end it just means that don’t decide based on your personal preference. Remember that our readers’ user experience is still the one that counts the most. We, liking the look of our blog is no match against them, not finding it good enough.

So, what does my blog look like in your computer? Scannable enough or completely crappy? How about you, have you already asked other people on what they think about the design of your blog based on their own screen’s resolution? Or maybe you haven’t even considered resolutions on carving out your design? Hmm..

Do You Appreciate Your Readers?

by Melvin · Sep 28, 2009

It’s kinda sad that most bloggers (even popular ones) don’t seem to show they appreciate they readers/audience. There is a big imbalance between bloggers wanting to get too much traffic and bloggers showing their appreciation to their readers. One crucial factor I think why blogs get loyal readers is the fact that readers feel appreciated and therefore they keep returning because they know the author “care” for them.

Many people misunderstood my posts about not caring for PM’s on contact form and not replying on blog comments as a proof that I really don’t give much value to my readers. It’s understandable but it’s totally untrue. The value that I place to the blog readers is the highest (higher than advertisers). Because no readers literally means no money made at all and no fun.

Well today I am going to list ways on how you can show appreciation to your readers and I hope you guys like it.

Read and reply to their comments – It sure did take long for me to realize this one. Contrary to what I believed before, its not true that readers comment on blogs and don’t come back anymore. It surprises me a lot of times when I replied to a comment that the readers comes back and say thanks for replying. Replying to every comment may look silly but it builds readership and loyalty.
Link out to them – Although its impossible to link out to all your commenters, giving a link love to some of their best posts can be helpful. Believe me, bloggers feel appreciated when someone links out to them, may it be a big blog or a small blog. Most people are afraid to give links because they don’t want to dilute their pagerank w/c is a lame reason. Readers > Pagerank/Metrics.
Ask for their opinion – If you’re a long time reader of this blog, there is a customary question and answer thing here wherein a reader can ask a question and me hopefully me being able to answer it. The mistake that most blogs do is they stuff their readers so much that they are an expert in their niche that their readers won’t anymore do anything which is completely wrong. Ask out your readers for something, post a poll or just simply encourage them to do interactions with you.
Give out incentives – Ok, so here I have never had given an ipod or a flip (and I think it’s far-fetched). The blogosphere is a tight community that every incentive received is a big thing. I can’t stress this more. It doesn’t have to be a physical product or a cash prize but anything that can be useful to them is a nice thing.
Show Social Media Love – I always feel good when someone retweets my post or stumbles something here and stuffs. Another good way to show your appreciation is to actually do the same for them. If you’re into social media (who’s not?), a simple digg, or some buzz on their article can mean a lot to them. Remember it’s ALWAYS giving first then receiving second.
Network With Them! – The reason I put the little social bookmark/network icon on the sidebar is to network more with my readers. Everything we are doing online is marketing. Marketing is not business, but it’s a function of the business. It helps big when you connect to your readers via other social means like Facebook, Friendfeed or maybe Youtube and etc. The good thing with blogging is that it enables us to maximize networking with other people w/c at the end leads to bigger business relationships, joint ventures or just simple friendships. If you’re not doing this, then you’re missing out a lot!

Showing your audience that you appreciate them is a big factor on having a successful blog, successful business. Sad state is that most people don’t even pay attention to it. What do you think? I would love to have your own take about it and you can do so in the comment form.

Note: Interestingly, all people who are in my top commentators list (@ sidebar) would be able to get a free advertising for one month. Just comment here and I would hook you up on something. Thanks. 😉