Blogging Tips

Maintaining Your Blog When You’re Busy

by Melvin · Feb 10, 2011

Hard times, they always come don’t they? Imagine, you worked your butts off pretty hard for 6+ months to get steady traffic. You really dedicated your effort to make sure there’s growth in your blog and all of a sudden you learned that you’re going to be busy for the next few months, thus you can only spend so little time for your blog.

Think about this, things online move rapidly. Spending 2 months to promote a blog and get traffic would only take 1 week of full absence to have that traffic diminish. With that in mind, we’re in big trouble. But of course like anything else, there are smart fixes and solutions for that and in this blog post I aim to talk about those things.

Write in one sitting

If you’re really busy, there’s a good chance that you can still have a day or two where you can write some blog posts. Believe its more than enough.

The way I do it most of the times is write my blog posts in one sitting. So basically you could pick your most productive day, in most cases, its every Monday, and then sit down and don’t do anything other than write blog entries. You would be surprised how many high quality articles you can pump out in that day.

For me I usually do it every morning mostly in my home office (anyone can call their room their office 😉 ) and spend almost 6 hours in writing articles. I can then come up with 5-8 blog articles that I can now set on queue. The important thing here is that you have the continuity of content which will definitely help with consistent traffic and awareness around the blogosphere.

Utilize Social Media accounts

In the event that you cannot really go out and market your blog through commenting or other things, you can simply just utilize your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook and etc.

Most people can access this through their mobile phones so just a simple tweet maybe every three hours can do wonders. Social media is still a hot commodity when it comes to traffic generation and if you have good following on social sites then there’s a good chance you can benefit from it a lot by doing it consistently.

Make things Structured and Automated

One thing that I learned a lot ever since having a job is making things automated and structured. Of course before, I thought I was very structured but I know I improved a lot.

Here are some of the things that you can automate so you no longer need to do it manually.

Automate your tweets – This can be done in various ways. You can signup to a service known as twitterfeed. What it does is simply just automatically tweet your latest post published so there’s no need to do it manually. Another is by utilizing this plugin called as Tweet Your Old Post. This brilliant plugin simply just tweets any random posts of yours in a certain time interval and the beauty about this is that you can have control on types of posts that you want to publish. Let’s say you just want to continually publish your top posts. What you can do is filter it using your categories so that you can eliminate your personal posts from being tweeted.
Structure your newsletter series – Just like in posting blog posts, you can actually do your newsletter of one week or 2 in one sitting. In my experience, the best way to do it is every Sunday since you are much more relaxed to write a series of newsletters.
Manage your Ad Inventory with Ease – There are times that you wouldn’t notice there are advertisers looking to advertise on your site. The best way to manage your ad with ease is to use a third-party advertising platform and in my case, I highly recommend using OIO Publisher. OIO automates everything, from setting up banner spaces to accepting payments and even sending out stats. Those things can be done easily with OIO.

Note: OIO Publisher usually costs $47 but if you sign up under my link, you can get a $10 off and instead get it for $37

Seek for outside help

In an event where you feel you really need outside help, you can simply just hire freelancers out there to do things for you. My buddy Carl Ocab, noticeably has done this extensively as he has almost moved away from posting articles on his blog.

Contrary to what most people think, its actually not that expensive. You can simply do a contract that would pay a freelancer on a per article basis so you don’t need to shed a lot of money for something that is not done daily.

You can also hire virtual assistants that can oversee minor operations on your blog such as publishing blog posts, deleting spam comments, answering emails and maintaining small things. Hiring someone can be really really helpful especially if you want to maintain consistency in your blog.

There ya go! Those are the 4 things that you can do to be able to maintain your blog even when you don’t have time to do it on a daily basis. Strategic blogging involves being wise enough in facing certain problems mentioned above. If you can make yourself involved lesser than ever while still reaping the same benefits, then you’re doing it right.

Making Money from Ads, Overrated or Underrated?

by Melvin · Feb 5, 2011

Over the past good years, myriads of posts have been centered with the topic of making money through banner advertising or simply just any type of advertising. Way back from the dot com boom where startup companies were spending lucratively on banner advertisements, from the emergence of blogs and Google Adsense to the last years recession and now today, it seems like so many people just like to talk about banner advertising and their obnoxious take on it.

Initially it was the BEST way to make money online. I mean all you need to have is a web property, a topic and surely you can find some sort kind of sponsors to pay off your living. From there on, you’ll wait for them to get bankrupt and after that you chase for another sponsor. That’s the way it used to be before until big and small companies realized its all overhyped. And from there on some pundits started writing how making money through advertising is overrated and not for everyone. And until the day I write this post. 😉

Why it’s Overrated?

So to tackle it equally in both sides I decided to discuss it separately. Overrated is define as something that’s highly “perceived” as effective yet in reality its not (or maybe thats just the way I define it). Profiting from advertising is overrated because:

It’s very hit and miss – In my blog post about how I doubled my blog advertising income, I concluded everything by saying that advertising income is still very hit and miss. What I mean there is that you can never expect to duplicate the same amount of money or more that you made last month to the current or succeeding months to come. It’s hard to rely on sponsors every month and expect they could pay all your bills.
It’s hard and impossible for an average guy to make a living from it – Advertising is good however, if you’re just like most of us who don’t get millions of hits then its hard to squeeze a lot of money from it. As David Risley stated, if you compare a blog with 1000 visitors trying to make money solely from ads from a blog with 500 readers that is selling something, it’s obvious that the latter one is more profitable. Again, unless you are a site like YouTube, its nearly impossible to live off that advertising income.
Couldn’t be even considered as a business model – This is true. I mean where’s the business in there? All you have to do is set up ad inventories and or use third-party advertising networks. You’re really not doing anything aside from copying and pasting codes and setting up ads so I don’t consider it a business model.

Why it’s Underrated?

Now let’s tackle it from the other side of the fence. Many people nowadays seemed to be so prolific in bashing making money from ads. If you read a lot, then you know what I’m talking about. Profiting from advertising is underrated because:

It’s the pioneer of making money while sleeping (passive income) – Although nowadays there are many ways to make money passively, banner advertising probably is the pioneer of that. From the dot com boom days up to now, if you have a good web property then you can literally set it and forget it. Big sites like Cheezburger can literally not work for one month and I could assure you they would still be making the same amount of revenue from banner advertising. How’s that as an autopilot thing?
Duh! It’s easy – Totally easy that even a man that came from some random cave could literally do it. We heard a lot about selling your own product or having a membership but those things are not for everyone. While on the other hand, trying to profit from Google ads or some other forms of advertising are definitely doable by any average Joe.
You just need traffic and nothing else – In modern blogging, we all know that it’s all about building relationships. After building it, you can funnel it and then later on sell your stuff to them or promote affiliate offers. So with that, it means more than just getting traffic. When you’re profiting though from advertising, all you need is traffic (albeit massive traffic). You don’t need to respond to the comments, you don’t need to watch things closely or whatever. Just the traffic, and you’re living off that traffic.

To end this post, I hope i was able to give each argument a fair explanation on why they’re the best thing ever or not. If you ask me about my personal opinion, I would say banner advertising is still something thats worth looking at not just now but for 10-20 years to come.

Yes I can sell a product or a membership site but I can do that with ads on my sidebar right? Since I have the traffic, why not leverage it more? How about you, what do you think?

Key Ingredients of a Likeable Blog

by Melvin · Jan 30, 2011

Not so many people can create a blog and be a blogger that gets a lot of people to read his blog. That being said its much harder for someone to create a blog and be a blogger that people would like and would love to read to for a long time.

I know that of course, I’m a lurker. In my free times, I do a lot of blog hopping and try to see what the blogosphere is talking about. Some blogs are good and I like them a lot while some are good, yet I don’t feel like I ever want to get associated with them. And that’s the truth, needless to say.

There seems to be some key substance or ingredients that make a blog or the blogger that’s behind it likeable for people and for this post I’d like to share them to you based on my own experience. If you find that I’m missing something in the list, feel free to let me know it through the contact form. Anyhow here’s the list:

1. The blog loads smoothly and quickly

Let’s face it, blogs these days are plastered with ads. Look at you’re blog, look at my blog, look at this blog. But the truth is that it does not mean that your blog has to look cluttered, the truth is that there’s a lot of ways still to make a blog presentable and look uncluttered. And that is by making sure your blog loads smoothly and quickly.

There’s nothing worse than craving to find information only to wait for days and days before that info loads (of course “days” is a hyperbole description). I experienced that too and it took me a while to realize that my blog was loading slow enough for people to actually just move away and bounce from my site.

2. The author cares to reply to comments

These days, it can quite be hard to drive and attract traffic to your site especially if you’re just starting out. There’s just so much to read and there’s a chance that someone is always better than you, writes better content and knows more. So how do we counter that as a smaller blogger? Well the simple answer is to interact better to our audience.

As obvious these days, blogs that get loyal audience are the blogs that care about their readers. For my own perspective, I always feel appreciated everytime someone takes some time to reply to my comments and thats the reality about it. You may not be able to reply to all comments or may not be able to do it in a timely manner. But what’s important is to at least show you interact with them.

3. It’s easy to connect to them

Blogging is often associated to social media simply because they’re really connected to each other. You see, I have a blog but because I have a blog, I also use Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon or whatever. What makes a blogger approachable and easy to connect to is when he/she shares his/her information publicly to his readers. When connecting to him/her is easy.

4. When the blogger is nice and transparent

By saying nice, I don’t mean angelic or religious in some way or another. What I mean is that the blogger is nice and a true person. Here’s the thing, I myself is a big advocate of criticizing someone and in my blog I always voice out if some things or tools suck and that’s because its who I am.

I wrote a post not so long ago entitled, “its not about making controversy, it’s about being me” and in that I emphasized the importance of being yourself and not faking it. Although I also covered the consequences that one could face by being so transparent. Blogging is a human to human connection and I haven’t seen anyone succeeded who’s pretending to be someone else.

5. They reward their readers once in a while

This is a big reason for most readers and audience why they have to stay. Not all bloggers do this and I’m not talking about rewarding someone by giving him cash or gadgets. What I’m talking about is the simple things like commenting back on the blog, or giving a mention or link love. How about a simple retweet or a stumble? Those things are really small yet they mean a lot especially for your readers.

Those are the 5 things that I think makes a blog and its blogger likeable . They are definitely simple things but the effects can be dramatic especially for the growth of the community of your blog.

Did you notice I haven’t even included writing good content? Yes, writing superb articles will always be a factor for one’s success but good writers and informational blogs aren’t really always likeable, you know what I mean? People read for two things, first is to find information and second is to connect and if you’re just going to write good blog entries then I’m not sure that’s enough for you to be successful.

I just named 5 here because I know you have other things in your mind too. So what are the other key ingredients of a likeable blog that you think I missed out?

10 Signs that a Blog is Getting Bigger than Ever

by Melvin · Jan 15, 2011

Everyone starts out as small bloggers and over time eventually some of us reach the greener pasture and become a bigger blog. By saying big blog, what I mean is that the blog gets more readers than ever and obviously starts making more money. Not a lot of bloggers get into this stage and to be honest, I still think that this blog far from that.

Anyways in this post I just like to enumerate different things and signs that obviously make a blog bigger than ever.

1. Humongous number of comments

It all starts with this. I was reading shoemoney’s blog ever since not a lot of people are reading it yet. And when he started becoming popular, the number of comments per posts has started rising crazily. And long story short, Shoemoney’s blog is now one of the most popular blog in the weight loss internet marketing niche.

Of course this does not apply to all. Long time ago, I made a post about whether comments justify the success of a blog and in that writeup I revealed that anyone can really get 50ish comments per post, but that doesn’t make them established at all.

2. Increased number of ads

This is very logical. When a blog starts out with so many white space in its layout and all of a sudden looks like a Nascar, you know its just trying to make the most of its traffic. Again this does not mean any blog that looks like Nascar is a big blog, but its at least an indication that the blogger who owns it is trying to make the most out of the opportunity. 😉

3. The blog starts out churning out multiple articles per day

Heheh. This is so true. Look at problogger, look at JohnChow, these guys are posting 3-4 posts per day and the reason is sound, it is to maximize their exposure for their writing. Another more recent example is Hesham of FamousBloggers.com

If you get over thousand hits per day and 80% of them expect that you will post a couple more post before the day ends, how many repeat traffic could that possibly bring? 😉

4. When one can already confidently sell their own product or membership program

Most bloggers/marketers fail in selling info products and membership sites fora simple reason, they do it even before they establish a presence.

Now when a blogger can confidently sell something to its readerbase, then most of the time it means that he is getting enough traffic and enough publicity to be able to see his/her stuff to other people. That’s another sign.

5. When one tweets for 20+ times a day

Another thing related to getting bigger as a blogger is an increased popularity in social sites like Twitter, Facebook, or whatever it is. So naturally when you have already 10,000 (real) followers, you don’t want to waste that. Instead you want to make the most of it by either pointing them to your blog frequently or pushing affiliate products.

6. When a blog gets featured occasionally

This is pretty obvious. When someone makes mention of your blog even if its just a small mention, then it means you’re not just an ordinary blogger (lols).

A lot of mid to big bloggers occasionally do roundups of blogs that provide value to readers and when your blog gets mentioned in there, it means a lot.

7. Getting Interviewed

This is related to no.6. If you started getting those interview requests, then it means you’re slowly carving out your name in the blogosphere. Although like other reasons mentioned in this post, getting interviewed doesn’t directly mean you’re famous. There are a lot of bloggers who interview random people on a daily basis which I obviously find lame.

8. Making redesigns

Not really spoiling Problogger’s new design eh. 😉 Ok so its noticeable that once a blog gets big enough and come to the point that the theme can no longer handle whatever it has, bloggers will make that redesigns.

It’s always part of the reason. Most bloggers who start getting traffic decide to do other things like starting a newsletter or publishing more posts and in that case, making redesigns is almost always part of the equation.

9. Starts getting negative publicity

This is of course the bad side of becoming more popular. When your blog eventually gets bigger, you will start receiving troll/hate comments and messages from people who are wasting their time. You will also start getting into these controversies obviously created by other people who are looking to ride into your momentum upwards.

Its important to understand its normal. People love hating other people and they can never be contented with everything that they do. Negative publicity is still publicity after all.

10. Lesser activity in the blogopshere

This is sad yet true. When bloggers like Yaro Starak, Darren Rowse, David Risley and etc. are just small bloggers who own small blogs back then, you can almost always see them participating in forums, commenting on other blogs, replying to their readers frequently and just being active overall in the entire blogging scene.

Unfortunately as they started getting bigger, they realized its more worthy to start putting efforts on other things than interaction. Is it a bad thing? Definitively no because that is really how the process works. Hence, its a sign the blogger is getting bigger.

So you have any other ideas in mind? 😉

Making Money Blogging by Not Trying at All

by Melvin · Dec 5, 2010

I know the title of this post raises the eyebrows of some of you here but let me just get my point here. So basically here in this blog, what I have been preaching is that you can never make money blogging unless you put in enough effort. you do it wisely and execute things strategically. Heck, most successful bloggers even take like one year before they even get to where they are now. And that comes with the fact that they are consistently putting effort from day one.

In this blog, I wrote some few tips related to making money blogging although this blog is NOT about that topic. I wrote posts like how this blog makes money, how I doubled my advertising income, monetizing local traffic and stuff like that. Another popular blog posts is this post which is entitled making money isn’t hard, it just involves a lot of hardwork which has completely nothing to do with making money blogging.

If you read those posts, you can see that most of the things that I do or attain are possible because I’m workaholic. I do exert a lot of effort in this blog (although not these days though) and most bloggers that I know do the same so there’s a commonality between bloggers who are making money.

Work hard, Don’t Expect at All

Ok I know I’ve been taking both sides of the fence here which definitely will confuse you but let me explain. Some of you here know that blogging isn’t really the main way I make money ever since. Before it was affiliate marketing. I did a lot of CPA stuff, promoting offers through PayPerClick, making a lot of money back then and some of you are aware with it.

I don’t do it that much today because of all regulations and affiliate marketing is a fly-by-night thing. I can be making $100 in one day or losing more than that. There’s that much risk that convinced me to stop doing it.

I also spent some little time with freelance writing early back in my college days and was associated with some companies. This was just a part-time gig for me as I was studying so I could have some allowance on my part.

I enjoyed blogging ever since and probably had spent the most amount of time in it without really making nearly the amount that I make with other things.

Having a Day Job

So late last June, I took a job at a certain software development company as their online marketing guy and with that I applied all the knowledge that I have to that company.

Obviously its nice for me because it was my first ever job and it allowed me to kind of like have an income source outside the internet which I also considered consistent (at least for the first 6 months) because you’re getting paid monthly.

Consulting & Client Work

The demands of having a day job is tough but that didn’t prevent me from pursuing this consulting & client work business. Very few know that I manage a startup company at Round Table Networks and that I did some consulting way back last year. It was good and the money was enough but back then I didn’t find it that fulfilling so I stopped doing it and instead focused on my sites.

Late September I started doing it again to just try to see what would happen. Luckily I got some clients that I have been working until now and that has brought both good things and bad things to me. The good is obviously the compensation and the bad is that I have lesser and lesser time to spend for my web properties which includes this blog and some other stuff.

Making Money Blogging & Not Expecting at All

I don’t know. I, myself is confused on what the topic of this blog post really is but I guess its just about accepting the fact that living off with the sole money that you make from blogging is almost not possible these days. I mean I still make a decent (not phenomenal) monthly passive income from this blog and some of my other sites but they just take a backseat with what I do primarily.

The main point here is that if you’re trying to make money from your blog but you have a job that you make consistent amount of money with, then just don’t expect too much from your blog. Sometimes its better to just work without expecting something because in that way, you don’t get depressed or frustrated when you don’t make that much money.

Looking back now, I realized that blogging was NEVER the main thing for me. Sure, this blog is one of main prized assets that I have online but it just acts as a second fiddle to the things that I really do. It was affiliate marketing before, having a day job and consulting work for now.

I think it’s equally important to have this mindset that sometimes enjoying something is enough and may alone justify the effort that you put into it. I know that statement is debatable.

I try to make money blogging, but I don’t expect that much. And that helped me a lot in focusing on more important things that I need to prioritize without getting frustrated. How about you?

Why Productivity is Vital in Blogging Success

by Melvin · Nov 27, 2010

One of the the reasons why most bloggers can’t get pass the startup/newbie stage is because they lack a lot of things. From things like passion and determination to a more measurable metrics like traffic, lack of focus, incompetence or whatever it is, I can say that it can be all attributed to one thing, being unproductive.

I, myself is a big advocate of being able to produce consistently and riding on that to move up the ladder. I’m sure a lot of people would say they are exerting so much effort in it but still it doesn’t provide them a good outcome. Do take note that hardwork does not have a linear relationship with being productive. I mean I can work hard on reading a lot of materials in all my 24 hours but does that mean I’m productive? Naah!

The truth about being productive is that it still depends on whether you’re doing the right things. But how the heck do I know what is right from what’s not? Simple. If you’re focusing on exerting effort on things that you need to be doing, then you’re achieving to be productive. In other terms, if you’re working hard on some of the things that can have a dramatic effect on your own blogging and you’re working on it with such good focus then you are being productive.

What are the things that can have dramatic effect? Now this is where it gets a bit tricky. I’m sure you’ve heard a lot that doing small things can lead to big things which is true. Now the thing that I want to emphasize here is that if you have a plan and execute that plan in such a way that you’re doing it in a strategic step by step manner, thats going towards the productive way.

You see, there’s so many people wanting to do things all at the same time and want to exert an equal amount of efforts doing all those things successively. We all know that’s impossible and as a result, they get burnt out pretty quickly and they never really do any of those things properly. That being said, it’s really hard to be on a momentum when you don’t know what you need to do first, when you don’t have an idea what needs to be prioritized the most.

Final Words

I’ve read a lot of productivity tips and quite to be frank, some of them are really good and I use them coupled with my own implementations to maximize my productivity. But the main point here is that it all starts with you, yes you the blogger. What do you really want to achieve first and foremost? Most bloggers have this lucrative long term plan but most of them, if not all, lack the missing pieces in between to be able to move forward.

If my long term goal is to make money, how do I achieve that? Get traffic? Yes, but how do I get traffic? And the question and answer goes on. Until we can answer those things, then we can start working things on a more concise way, hence we can maximize our productivity on each of the tasks that we’re going to do. Again always take note that working hard doesn’t mean your being productive and being productive doesn’t even guarantee success!

Now you may probably say now that I’m pushing the thought that blogging is super hard. It depends on the way you’d like to think of it but at least you’re now getting the bigger picture in a clearer manner.

5 Clever Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog…

by Melvin · Nov 14, 2010

In this blog, I probably have given a lot of tips already on driving more traffic to your blog and you could see all of them simply by checking out my traffic and blog marketing sections.

So in this blog post I would like to share to you some *clever tips on driving more and more traffic to your blog. These are tips that are uncommon and on whether they are blackhat/shady or not, its up to you. 🙂

1. Setting referral traffic source as your site.

I’m not sure if this is something that a lot of bloggers and webmasters know but basically you can set your site as a referrer for all sites that you visit.

The way you do that is through your browser. In Firefox you can simply just download this plugin called RefControl. What this does is simply just allow you to set the referring URL either for all sites that you visit or for a specific site.

The good thing about this is that the traffic that you will get can potentially be a repeat traffic(recurring) since you’re letting real people (not bots) see your site/blog. And the best part is that there’s literally no work involved. If you’re like me who loves to read stuffs online, then thats it.

2. Link baiting in forums

Couple of months back I wrote this really definitive guide on how you can drive traffic to your blog using forums. It was well-received by a lot of people and you may want to check that out.

So with link baiting in forums, I’m not really referring to you creating a new thread with some controversial topic and then linking back to your own blog. That’s actually an idea forum members usually frown into. Link baiting in forums is simply just posting a thread that you know a lot of people can relate into.

So as you can see in the image above, I just simply created a thread that I know a lot of people would be interested to engage in. I didn’t even put a link explicitly to my blog and as you could realize, this forum thread reached more than 5 pages and a lot of replies from the forum members. Obviously it drove a lot of traffic back to my blog through the signature links and the header itself.

The interesting thing is that the thread was created May last year and people are still replying up to today which brings up the thread above.

3. Talking about making money online

I don’t know what’s the reason behind it but obviously if you make a certain post targeted to making money online or maybe a tip about it, people generally respond positively to it.

Not so long ago, I wrote this post about how MelvinBlog makes its money and up to know its one of the highest viewed page/post in this blog. It’s even viewed more than the recent post on “making money isn’t hard, its just a lot of hard work” which I thought was the best post I have ever produced.

Of course you may not want to talk about making money if you don’t have an experience with it yourself or lack the knowledge about it.

4. By Joining Guest Blogging contests

Its kind of like odd to include it here right? I have joined a lot of guest blogging contests this year and have talked alot about it too but the truth I think is that it simply just drives you traffic without you really realizing it.

Most people join these contest not to find new readers, nor drive traffic but to win a cash prize and I think that cash serves as an incentive for us bloggers to work harder in driving more and more exposure to our articles. So little do we realize that in trying to win it, we’re unexpectedly driving more and more new readers to our site.

Note: On a little side note, I am participating in Blog Engage contest. Please read, comment and tweet my article on how to drive consistent traffic to your blog. 😉

5. Taking advantage of your newsletter/email list

Most people now know that having a list is essential in blogging yet STILL believe it or not, most bloggers still don’t have one. What do we do now? Simple, take advantage of the fact that we have a list! Having your own email list has several advantages. You could a).connect with people who are interested in the niche that your are into b). drive them to your blog, get them to read your content c). cultivate that relationship that could eventually enable you to sell and push some products to them.

I know some people would find it quite an investment to pay $20 a month for an email marketing tool like Aweber but I think its really really a major investment. I think Aweber still has this $1 for 1st month promo. If you’re interested, take advantage of it now and see if its for you or not.

So, those are my 5 clever tips that could help you drive more traffic to your blog and more importantly, this is a traffic that converts (as a reader, as a customer). If you have some questions or would like to share some other tips, please comment on the comment form below.