Blogging Tips

Monetizing Your Local Traffic

by Melvin · Jul 5, 2009

Just a quick post today, I need more rest. 🙁

It’s so easy to monetize a local traffic from a website or blog if your country is in US or Canada. But if you’re like me who’s country resides on an unpopular Asian country, squeezing out something from your local traffic can be hard. If you’re trying to use Adsense and you have a ton of say, Asian traffic then I would say that is not a good idea. There are really few Adwords advertisers who target traffic outside US. why? Because the money is really inside the US (and countries close to it), sounds unfair? No.

Well the short answer is by selling your own product. The thing about local traffic is that they are usually more loyal than international traffic. It can be an info product, consultation or whatever, just make sure you are well-reputed in your country first before implementing it. Luckily for me, US is my largest referrer of traffic, followed by Australia, some Asian countries and then Philippines. At the start of this year, I really worked hard on getting more loyal followers that are Filipinos and so far I am seeing the benefits of it. Back on monetization, the second next option is direct ad sales, although it can be real hard since most local advertisers are also advertising international products targeted at bigger countries.

Any other ways you can suggest?

How ‘Not’ to Have a Successful a Guest Post

by Melvin · May 22, 2009

I have already seen many guides on making an effective guest posts so I thought I would create one that is quite completely the opposite. 🙂

Anyways you might have seen me do guest articles on some blogs related to this niche. And to tell you honestly, guest post is really a great way to reach out to newer audience and types of people, interactive with them and hopefully have them following your blog. As I have been doing guest posts since last year I have learned a lot of stuffs about it and today I want to share you what are the things that you should do if you want to have your guest post suck big time:

Crappy grammar – Well I have had some problems before with this because usually I just type what’s on my mind spontaneously so grammars had become one of my problems before. If you are no-english native, that doesn’t mean you should write posts with grammatical errors. But still if you like ‘Not” to have a successful guest post, then do your crappy article!
Don’t comment/interact – While I don’t really respond to all comments, I try to interact as much as I can especially with guest posts. There is no worse thing than when a reader asks something on that certain post w/o getting a response from the guest blogger. Responding and interacting with them is like giving them another reason to subscribe and follow your blog. But anyway don’t respond back especially if you don’t want your author bio link to be clicked.
Be boring – Every blogger has his one tone and by trying to pretend you are somebody is a big ‘YES’ if you want to have an unsuccessful guest post. If you speak like ‘chow’ then so be it! If not, readers would surely get bored with your ‘professional-like, pretending’ tone.
Self-Promo Bio box – It’s not wrong to say that you are a ’10 year old blogger who has some experience in blogging’. But saying stuffs in bio box like ‘a guy who is making six figures a month and by purchasing my book you can learn how to’ is a big no no! The bio box plays a crucial role because it gives a short overview of who you really are and what value they can get from you in case they want to visit your blog. The box is not for bragging and self-promo but still if you think it can help you go ahead. Congrats, because you are destined to have no clickers for your link. 😀
Full of fluffs – I have to confess that during my early days of guest posting, I get a rate of 10% success in guest posting! 90% won’t even get passed the owners approval because of fluffs and some nonsense in the article. Remember blog owners expect articles that are even better than what they are writing, so they expect you to write ‘scholarly’. Put fluffs and prepare to be criticized!
Direct them to your front page – Ok here’s an example. On normal days this blog gets 150-250 uniques a day. On days where my posts on some blogs are published, I get 250-350 uniques. A 100 increase isn’t that high eh? Yes it isn’t (or it is depending on who you are), but on normal days my blog gets 700-900 pageviews and on ‘guest posting’ days it gets over 1500-2000! Why? Simply because of the use of landing page. LP is simply a page where the visitors land. Here’s my landing page for instance. The page simply contains an explanation w/what your blog gives and what your best/helpful posts are. To be honest when reading a new blog for the first time using their LP, I usually subscribe after getting to read their best posts! It can increase conversions up to 50% depending on how you carve out your own.

Over the past years I think I have improved a lot in terms of making a guest post. Guest posts are really beneficial in such a way that it can simply bring you a lot. I know some of you have also your own ups and downs with guest posts so feel free to share your thoughts (or critique!).

Don’t Let Me Steal Your WordPress Files!

by Melvin · May 11, 2009

I was bloghopping for the past 30 minutes with some blogs within my niche and noticed something in common.

So today I’m going to make a really quick article about protecting your wordpress folders and directory. A lot of bloggers I’ve noticed, have their blog’s folders browsable which is NEVER a good idea. I’d pick a cool kid name Desmond from DesmondBlog as an example. If you type the url desmondblog.com/wp-content/uploads you could pretty much see everything in the folder:

Seeing the whole content of the uploads folder is no bad (who cares about it?). But because his blog’s subfolders are browseable, we could pretty much view his themes @ /wp-content/themes (and get his premium themes),as well as its subdirectories and how about the plugins folder located at wp-content/plugins? Hackers could just go in it very simple and discover that you actually run an out-of-date wordpress plugin and exploit in it.

What should you need do then? Simply go to .htaccess file and put “Options – Indexes” on any line and save. The little code prevents your wordpress folders from being accessed by anyone. The second option if you only want to restrict access to some selected folders is just by creating an index.html file and uploading it to your desired folder. Say you just want your plugins folder to be the one unaccessible, then go to it and upload the html file. That simple! 😀

Like what i’ve said for every 10 blogs that I visit, 7 of them are usually unprotected. You could let them know it by sharing this post (or just simply telling them. 😉

Driving Traffic With BlogCatalog

by Melvin · May 9, 2009

Blogcatalog is one heck of a social community website with hundreds of thousands of users everyday. The best thing about the users there is they’re so active. In case you don’t know, blogcatalog is one of biggest traffic referrals on this blog when it was on its earlier stages. Traffic from there is really massive and its just the matter of how you are going to convert them into loyal subscribers.

Well everything started really well with me using blogcatalog until I abused them and I got banned eventually. Anyway right now I am going to share some really good tips to you on how you can get a share of the massive traffic on BG:

Carve out your profile well – It’s funny that a lot of people after signing up don’t even look to edit their profile page. They immediately jump into discussions w/c is wrong. By having a nice written profile, you’re giving yourself a chance to really introduce who you are, what niche you are into and what are your blogs.
Add Friends & Interact – Like any social community, blogcatalog allows you to add friends and grow your own community. The more friends you have the more traffic and readership you would get from it. So take some time to scan profiles there and hopefully interact with them the right way. Add me as your friend. 😉
Discussions – The discussions page probably is the most trafficked part of it. This is a part where there is a free-flowing discussions of literally about everything. Make sure you blend well w/it. If utilized properly it can bring you hundred uniques a day. Don’t be spammy as people there easily remember who adds value and who adds crap! A bad rep is not good!
Join Communities – By joining communities you are putting yourself in a larger scheme of people w/common goals. Examples of the communities there are the “stumble” community, the “make-money-online”, the technorati, the twitter community and a whole lot more.
Paid Sponsorship – There are two options in this one, first is the premium sponsorship w/c costs $60 and the category position ad w/c costs $8 per month. I find the rates really cheap since what you’re getting by having your site there is just too much. I’ve tried the $8 per month on my other blogs and I would say it really converted well. If you have some budget to promote, then I would really recommend this option.

All in all blogcatalog is really a nice social community. You want traffic, you get the traffic! But getting traffic is not the end right? We, as bloggers or marketers have to find our own ways on how we can convert their curiosity to loyalty. How we can convert those first time visits, into returning readers. It’s not about the quantity of traffic, it’s about the quality of it. What do you think?

Make Sure You Upgrade Your Feed Link

by Melvin · May 4, 2009

It has not been new to everyone that Feedburner has been acquired by Google. Because of it we have to upgrade basically everything and migrate and lose some subscribers in the process.

Anyway this is just a very short reminder to everyone to please update your feedburner url. That is because the current url of the feed is not redirecting to the new feed address which gives you a ‘page cannot be found’. If you’re using Feedburner FeedSmith plugin (which you should be using anyway), just change the previous url (‘feeds.feedburner.com/blogsname) to the new one (feeds2.feedburner.com/blogsname). I do also suggest to update your feedcount chicklet’s url and image url so that your feedcount can be shown. It can be done by simply appending ‘2’ after the word ‘feeds’. Most of us have our feed address set at http://blogname.com/feed, if you try to click it, it would just give you an error page. Not sure though how long it would last.

What I have noticed is that a lot bloggers, even big bloggers haven’t changed it yet. So what to do now? Change it! Believe me folks, you’re letting a lot of potential subscribers go away by having an erratic feed link, even if its just for one day.

Replying To Every Comments Is Silly!

by Melvin · Apr 24, 2009

Interacting with your readers is one thing that makes a blog a tight community. As what has been said a thousand times, blogging is a two way process, providing something, and getting feedback. So in short, you cannot just provide good content and then take a nap. Your readers sure have their say, maybe they couldn’t understand something or want more clarifications. Either way, this is where replying to them takes place.

While I do reply to 15-35% of comments in this blog, I think replying to each and every comment is silly! Why? Simply it’s because you really don’t have to most of the times. I find it ridiculous when a blogger responds to all comments (including trivial comments). I read Neil Patel’s blog and to be frank I enjoy reading it. But I just don’t get why he needs to reply to all comments he receives. I also have done a guest post on Yan’s blog about reputation management. I was asked by him as well to reply to every comments, so I did (not all comments though). Anyway I know 60% wouldn’t agree on me but I just think I have these 4 reasons why I think it’s silly and here they are:

Not all comments add value – Comments like “been here, nice blog” or “thanks for this informative post” are no way can be considered as useless comments. In fact, it always feels good when someone finds your article great. But, it doesn’t add value! I feel I could always go by not saying “you’re welcome”. Depends on my mood, though. 🙂
85% don’t even get back to your post – The truth about bloggers is that, they bounce so fast. I mean because they want to comment on as many blogs as they can, they don’t really pay much attention to the post and would just rather agree on it immediately or say thank you. So because of it, they wouldn’t even be able to read your reply. In this case, I always look whether someone is subscribed to the comments via email (always make sure it’s unchecked). In that way, I would know if the guy is really waiting for a reply or not.
It inflates your no.of comments per post – In my previous post about whether comments could justify the success of the blog, I tackled that because some of the bloggers reply to every comments, it makes their blog’s community so huge. I’m not really against it but I think it can have a negative impact on a blog because the blogger may have been wasting his time replying to all comments instead of promoting his blog more.
Face it, not all your posts can be liked! – Well in my blog’s case, I have a ton of personal posts rather than helpful posts. I understand that by posting something about my crush, or my school life, it would tune out some of the readers. You see, people always expect something from your blog. If they are into blogging and they think you could help them but suddenly they’ve read an affiliate marketing article, it’s very likely that they wouldn’t get it and won’t respond. Same with contest posts. They rack a hundred comments but that doesn’t justify the popularity of a blog.

Overall the number of comments is really a nice way to dress your blog up and have a nice community. It attracts readers, advertisers and so on. But I think it goes more than just that. If you could possibly work more on other important things that would benefit your blog then that would be nicer than just wasting your time replying to each and every comment, even though you know its just a spam. What do you think? Or maybe am I missing something?

Paid Promotion Is The Key

by Melvin · Mar 17, 2009

A lot of bloggers in the industry mostly talk about getting traffic flowing into blogs by doing the traditional things. Blog commenting, forum and article marketing, social media, even offline interaction. These free ways, while it has been used a lot and is certainly a great way to target visitors to your site, it’s not the only ones!

Most people don’t bother to talk about paid promotions because not a lot of people are interested spending dimes with it. But the truth is it’s actually a powerful way to drive traffic to your blog. I have used some of them here and some of them in other blogs and so far it’s really doing good. Without further ado, here they are:

PPC Marketing – Who said PPC is just for affiliate offers? After about 1 1/2 month my blog has started, I spent some $50 each in Google Adwords and Yahoo Search Marketing. I am getting dead cheap clicks for every long tail keyword and I can say it really did well. The tip is that you need to make the users understand that the ad directs them to a blog of that certain topic. Use a landing page as well! Here I have a welcome page as a landing page so that new users can explore the content of my blog more and figure out how it can benefit them. Believe me folks, it converts the curious dudes into readers/subscribers.
Paid Review – While there are tons of ways on doing advertising on a blog, paid review obviously is the best. Why? Paid review targets the audience well, gives permanent backlinks, and guess what, adds kudos to your blog easily. Let’s face it, bloggers are paid to review. And I have never seen a negative review, believe me! Most of the times the blogger just recommends the site and that alone can sum it all up against other paid advertising options on blogs.
Paid Social Media – The social media days are getting more saturated. Before it’s like you can put a humor content and get tons of great responses. Now it’s different! Ok, so the idea here is to post some really nice content. Then buy 100 diggs/stumbles/reddit/propells or whatsoever. These diggs wouldn’t get you in the front page but at least they can get you traction. You are getting noticed now. If you’re submitted content is liked, then prepare your server for truckloads of traffic.
Press Release – PR (not to be confused with page rank) is something that I haven’t really utilized for my blogs. Some people however do have some success with it. A release usually costs $100 and up and it’s a high risk, high reward form of promotion. It is gonna either flop so bad or do good. Problem is that most people are tired reading a release stating “this guy started a blog about making money online”. If you’re into the IM niche, Im not sure you should use this as an option.
Sponsor a Contest – Seriously a contest can give you a lot. The quality of traffic that can come back to you depends on what you sponsor. Most users are curious on why this dude gave this prize away so if you sponsored something really nice then more likely people will pay you a visit or even a comment. Look who looks better, one who sponsored an Ipod or one who sponsored an Internet Marketing Book? 😉

There are tons of paid options but basically these are what I think the most effective. If you have some $100 to spend or a credit card, then why not try to invest in it. Quality of Traffic and targeting is what the paid advertising gives that most free promotion tactics don’t. What do you think?