• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content

MelvinBlog

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

  • Author
  • Photos
  • Contact

Blogging Tips

Have You Ever Thought of Revamping Your Marketing Plan?

Have You Ever Thought of Revamping Your Marketing Plan?

by Melvin · Oct 10, 2010

Revamping something is one thing that is always feared by people for two reasons, a) is because they’re afraid that everything or mostly that they exerted would put into waste and b). because of skepticism. It’s really hard and there’s no doubt that it would take much thinking and suggestion to actually decide on whether its time to change or not.

I myself had been into these situations. With affiliate marketing for instance where I mostly do my campaigns via PPC and Facebook ads, there were times that I had to change my strategies to adapt to some changes in guidelines that these networks usually impose (especially Facebook). The hardest part of this is that sometimes strategies that have worked a lot of times for you are the ones that you need to revamp.

This can also apply both to internet marketing product launches and just the typical blogging. Over the past few years we’ve seen so many guys changing their strategies/marketing tactics on their business. For instance Shoemoney which came from the pay-per-click/ringtone affiliate marketing has been into list building and product launches as you can easily notice if you’re subscribed to his email list.

Traditional marketers like Jeff Walker, Frank Kern and other ones are getting more into content-based stuff. You can see them tapping blogs or even incentivizing something for their joint ventures.

Another great example is our blog marketing plan and strategies. Before, its more on the more active you are, the more traffic you can pull. If you can be a top commenter on 20-50 popular blogs then it may alone be enough. These days it still works but we have to be more creative in order to justify a good return for our efforts. As you can see guest blogging seems to be the “in” thing since at the start of the year (although it existed a long time ago). Who knows, maybe next year it will not be as effective as it is right now.

Bottom line here is that marketing is a continuous refining process. There may be something that works superbly for now but is obsolete tomorrow. There are also some factors to consider like FTC intervention, saturation, legal type of stuffs and so on which just makes things more complicated. What do you think?

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing Tagged With: blog marketing, Internet Marketing, marketing, revamp plan

Driving Consistent Traffic is the Key

Driving Consistent Traffic is the Key

by Melvin · Sep 29, 2010

You wonder how those bloggers can actually just spend very little time in a week yet they still get the same amount of traffic to their sites? You wonder how they participate so little in the blogosphere, almost never make comments on other blogs nor do they lurk on forums? There are two simple answers, 1). They’re already an established blogger and 2). The traffic that they get is pretty consistent.

Now the first answer is understandable, they are an established blogger. We all know it takes time to be an established authority blogger. Some of the top bloggers in the space were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.

But for us who’s definitely not considered as a top blogger in this space or any other space, what we could work on is getting consistent and recurring traffic to our blog. Yes, this is the same traffic that could repeat again and again with little to no maintenance at all. By driving consistent traffic, there’s a better chance of getting more loyal readers to your blog as oppose to just a one time visit.

Here’s a short quote on my guest post on BlogEngage about driving consistent traffic:

“One thing that sets apart good bloggers from just the average ones is the ability of the former to drive traffic on a consistent basis. Driving traffic these days is easy but what counts the most is on whether the traffic that you’re going to drive is going to convert or not.

Conversion can vary depending on the goals that you set as a blogger but the bottom line here is that every serious blogger must aim for consistent and returning traffic, not just a one time spike.

In this post, I would like to talk about different things that you can do in order to get that consistent stream of traffic. But before that, let me just cover first the facts about traffic and why you need to aim for consistency.”

I also happened to share some personal stuff on this post on how I thought I was already getting consistent traffic but still I don’t so you may want to check the article out.

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Top Posts, Traffic Tagged With: blog traffic, consistent traffic

Making Money Isn’t Really Hard, It’s Just a Lot of Hard Work

Making Money Isn’t Really Hard, It’s Just a Lot of Hard Work

by Melvin · Sep 14, 2010

The hype with making tons of cash from blogging has considerably gone down for the past few years as probably a lot of people have realized that the hype surrounding blogging is all but hype. In fact I’ve seen a lot of people quit blogging to focus on doing  more “secure” stuffs like a day job or a real offline business.

I remember when the make money blogging hype is on its peak, people have the mentality of like “I need to put this ad to make some serious cash”. Of course I was one of those people. I had my little basketball blog back then plastered with all sort kinds of banners, CPM, CPC, CPA, you name it. Of course it all backfired for me. The only positive thing then was that I am enjoying running a basketball site. It’s my passion, my hobby.

Eventually and fortunately I said to myself, “bug this! I’m not gonna do any money-related strategy, Im just gonna do what I enjoy, I’d write posts after posts and just do my thing. A kid like me should be enjoying life anyway!” And it was a crucial turning point for me.

After almost a year, the blog started gaining traffic and then money afterwards. The blog was doing good in page impressions that the CPM banners that I used to hate before started giving me respectable daily earnings. Then I started getting private ads from big sports-related companies and it really blew off for me. For some people the money I made back then may not probably be that big, but for an enthusiastic kid like me, it’s an unforgettable experience.

I always reflect back to it and I love telling this story to my friends over and over again. And I’m always amaze when my friends respond to me and say “wow that’s a ton of work. I can’t imagine myself putting that much hard work!”

Looking back, I didn’t really realize that what I did was “a ton” of hard work. All i knew was I was putting up some posts on how this New York Knicks suck, on how LeBron James is the best player ever and stuffs. Heck, I enjoy it so it must not be really hard work.

And oh, what you read above is the elongated version of my about page. 😉

Disparity between Hard and hard work

I used to do lots of programming back in college and so if you know everything about it, you’ll know it’s really hard to be one. As a programmer/coder you need to know a lot of things, you need to have a broad perspective, you need to have  superb logic to make things work and you need an immense patience testing and trying different lines of codes. In short, its hard.

Blogging (or making money from blogging) isn’t. Hell, just as long as you know how to read, write, type, copy, paste, act as human, interact, you’re qualified. Everyone does qualify for it but why is it that very few succeed? Yes, lack of hard work. Blogging isn’t hard, its just a lot of hard work. It’s so true. It’s easy to write an article but you need to work hard to come up with 50 high quality ones. It’s nuts to interact but its a challenge to do it with over a hundred of people. It’s tough.

I don’t consider myself a guru and no one of my readers do but I can share here some insights that I feel can be helpful to you:

1. Just do it, stop strategizing!

I usually get a lot of flak when I tell people about this but just from experience (and from observing how big bloggers like Jeremy did), I can tell that this is one key aspect why I’m somehow more successful than some people.

I just do it, if it doesn’t work then I gotta move on! The problem with strategizing too much is that people keep on speculating, lurking, observing that nobody does anything! The biggest problem has and always been getting off your ass. I don’t know about you but I certainly wouldn’t refrain from doing things unless experience tells me that ‘hey this isn’t working’.

The statement “Experience is your best teacher” is corny but its still powerful and proven. You just don’t let people dictate you things, do it yourself. After all you really don’t have anything to lose. Every of our failure racks up to our own education and this is one good thing you will always have.

2. If you enjoy it, just go on! (Passion)

That’s why passion is a key element in blogging. I mean why write about something you don’t enjoy in the first place? That’s probably the biggest reason why most bloggers fail, its because they really don’t feel passionate about what they’re blogging. How can you enjoy talking about making money online if you don’t know it?

It’s always been the same parallels over and over again with all of these successful bloggers. They enjoy just blogging on something that they don’t really expect anything. Why don’t you go on Darren Rowse blog’s archive and look for some of his oldest posts. Its amazing how this guy churned out almost over a hundred of blog articles with over 1000+ words each that never even got any comment/traction? Of course these days Darren can write an article w/any length and still get a heap of comments but the lesson here is that you’re not going to get noticed overnight and if you don’t have passion, I doubt you can last too long in the blogosphere.

3. Stop chasing for shiny golden “secrets” because there’s none.

Ok again I used to be like this one when I was on my early stage of blogging. The scenario is usually like this: A blogger reads a post on some blog that making money is hard. You have to do this, do that, implement this, test, blah blah.  So what happens is that this blogger says to himself “No, there must be something better than this, I need to keep looking for one”. And of course the cycle never ends. That blogger would never ever get to work because all he does is chase for secrets.

There’s a big misconception about “premium info stuffs” and secrets. Most people think that these are just the same. The truth is its not. Most info products whether its $9.95 or $999.5 is all about educating people. I’ve consumed a lot of them and I hate eBooks actually all I can say is that the main goal of most of them, if not all is just to organize infos around the web, compile them and present them well. You’re paying them not really because of the “premium stuffs” but only because they’re saving you from getting overloaded. In short, they are giving you blueprints so you never have to find them yourself.

Why not take time to look Technorati’s top 100 blogs? Do you think these guys have secrets? All you can notice is that these bloggers provide massive value to their readers and that alone sums up why they’re popular.

Wrapping it up

As I end this I’ll repeat. Blogging and making money isn’t hard,  it’s just a lot of hard work. “Hardwork” is an overly used term but surprisingly not a lot of people value it. From my experience, and from other people’s experience, there’s really no need to reinvent the wheel and chase for something more. Besides if you’re exerting hard work on your passion, then it’s really not hard after all.

I haven’t written a long post like this for a while and I got carried a bit while writing this, lols. But as always, I’d like to hear back from you.

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing, Top Posts Tagged With: blogging, hard work, make money online, making money blogging

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

by Melvin · Aug 30, 2010

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’m trying to be active in Facebook once more, not with my personal account but with the blog’s fan page. So far it’s been good, slowly but surely I’m getting people to communicate with me through that medium.

Anyways, I set the fan page last year and even up to now, I am constantly getting asked on how I do it. I’d love to point to amazing and definitive guides like the one from Pat Flynn and some others. Pat has absolutely helped me set up mine by writing a Facebook Guide for Bloggers which is an extremely popular article.

Now the reason I’m doing this post is that I want my readers to have a place too, or just a reference just in case they want to set up a Facebook Fan Page for their blogs. Another is that Facebook has made some changes with the custom box and I believe most of the articles haven’t updated their guides yet so it’s good to have the latest one right? 😉

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page

First things first

I’ll go straight into the topic. To start creating a page, head on to the Create a Page page. You have three options there, you could create a fan page, a community page, or a Facebook group. In this what we’d like to do is create a fan page so click on the Fan Page section. Don’t worry creating a page is FREE to anyone.

Make sure you name your page carefully because it’s something that you can never change later on. So take your time in naming your page (usually it’s just the name of the blog as well), and double check if you typed it correctly.

You may also want to put in some status messages first. People don’t subscribe to a fan page that has empty interaction. I know its odd to put a status message when there’s no one following you yet but trust me this is what is needed. Plus, everyone does that initially.

Personalization

Now make sure you don’t become one of those millions of fan pages that create just a generic page for their brand. Facebook fan pages almost look the same but you can customize it by personalizing the way it looks. And you can do that by simply uploading images.

Upload your photo, make sure it’s something that would represent the brand of your blog. You could either place a custom logo image of your blog or simply just a pic of you. Do not also forget to write details like the tagline (the one that appears under the logo) and the info tab which would contain all the basic information about your fan page.  Again take time to write those information.

Lastly, create a custom box! A custom box is just basically a box that is outside the default “Wall” and “Info” boxes. The main use of this is you can create a custom landing page for your fan page. Here’s how mine looks:

MelvinBlog Fan Page

You could easily do that clicking on the + sign on tabs and adding a custom box. You can then name it and put content inside the box. The “in thing” however is the use of images. As you can see above, my landing page just consists of an image and a simple html text. Make sure to get your message clearly across your target audience. Do not also forget to ask them to LIKE your fan page.

To create an HTML, simply add the application Facebook Markup Language and you’re ready to go. Using it is as easy as using an HTML editor.

Little update that I’d like to emphasize is that Facebook has updated their terms when it comes to custom boxes. Before the maximum width for an image is 760px but Facebook has reduced it now to 520px. Make sure you comply with the settings or else the custom box would look ugly.

Finishing Touch

Now maybe you’re wondering, where is the custom box for? As I’ve written a lot in the past few months, I’ve always emphasized the importance of landing pages. With landing page, you can actually “convince” your potential readers more to do something that you want.

Now head on to the settings of your fan page and change the “Default Landing Tab” to your specific custom box. Now every visitor that goes into your fan page will land to that custom page where they will be more enticed to “like” your page as opposed to just landing to the default wall tab.

facebook default tab

As you can also notice, your url is pretty not personalized. That’s normal. As soon as you hit 25 fans, Facebook will give you the ability to change the vanity url of your page. Again, make sure you are sure with what you input as this is pretty much unchangeable.

Conclusion

Now you have a Facebook Fan Page for your blog. Utilizing a Fan page is like using Twitter except that there’s almost no limit. And since anyone uses Facebook more than Twitter, you could literally build a powerful community behind that communication medium which in turn can translate as traffic to your blog or vice versa.

But how do I get people to like my page? There are thousands of ways but the most clever way first and foremost is to initially contact your friends in Facebook and tell them politely to fan your fan page. It’s easy, if you have 50 friends, Im sure almost all of them wouldn’t mind “liking” your page.

Did I miss anything here? If you would like to add something or ask anything, feel free to write in the comment form.

Filed Under: Blog Tools, Blogging Tips, Featured Articles, Internet Marketing, Preachings, Social Media, Top Posts, Traffic Tagged With: facebook, facebook fan page, melvinblog fan, set up fan page

The Big Challenge After a Blog Contest – The Dropoff

The Big Challenge After a Blog Contest – The Dropoff

by Melvin · Aug 22, 2010

By now I can relax a bit after all the contest related tasks have been completed. With this I realized that no matter how small or big, how short or long a contest will be, it will always take a lot of work. As I’ve said, I worked for this contest in as early as late April so I’ve been really doing most of the planning myself since this is a one-man blog.

But still, I don’t have any regrets whatsoever. I know by now, you know how grateful I am with how the contest turned out to be and how this has been so beneficial to the blogosphere. Traffic wise it’s been great as well. I got the most traffic ever during those months although I didn’t ramp up my posting. But now that the contest is over, here comes the big challenge.

Traffic Dropoff

Traffic dropoff usually happens after the end of each contest. Its nothing revolutionary, it’s just normal.

Let’s say a blog just gets 50 visitors prior to running a contest. As soon as the blogger runs the contest, he instantly notices that he doubles his traffic immediately.But after the contest, he soon realizes that his traffic starts to go down and back to the normal 50 visits per day.

As I’ve said, this really happens to any bloggers who run contests. The main reason for this is sound and simple,  people only get to your site/blog because they’re incentivized to do so.

One thing you can easily notice is that throughout your contest, some other bloggers who haven’t been into your blog were the most active ones. They comment a lot, interact and almost have been always there.

Don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong about that. It’s human nature that in a contest you want to be as nice as possible because its part of your strategy in winning the contest. However when the contest ends, the participants interest on continuing on following you and your blog highly depends on whether they won something or they didn’t. With that in mind, the incentivization factor that had them to follow you in the first place starts to diminish.

The challenge then is to make them stay even after the contest.

Hook them through the contest, Make them stay for the content

So what I usually try to do is test if they’re really in for a long haul by producing good content. How? Well a contest usually runs for a month, in my case its for 1 and a half months. So that period is your  period to convince them that you’re blog is more than just a blog holding a contest, that you’re content is far more important than the prizes of the contest.

This is hard to do and it’s really challenging to make them stay mainly because they may not be the right people in your blog in the first place. Most people who join contests are those who live with contests. Not that I have any problem with that but proliferation is really important. If I have 100 new audiences that aren’t willing to spend money forever, then isn’t it worth it more to have just 15 potential customers who are loyal enough to stay for the long haul because of the good stuff I’m providing?

The takeaway here is still the content. People read stuffs because they like reading it isn’t it? And with contests, it’s not really good content, is it?

As you can see we as bloggers, as contest organizers have an ample time to prove ourselves to them. Write good content, make sure you make them feel they belong, always keep that conversation even after the contest is over. Those and other small things may be enough to make them stay for a while, maybe for a little bit longer.  What say you?

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing, Preachings, Ramblings, Top Posts Tagged With: blog contest tips, contest aftermath, traffic dropoff

Can We Connect More in Facebook?

by Melvin · Aug 15, 2010

Since having a job late last June, I took it as a challenge to maintain everything that I’ve been doing. I always think I’m a good darn multitasker and with that, every plan that I had prior to taking my job has still been the plan.

Obviously its getting tougher and tougher each week as I realized things are not as easy as I thought they would be. I’m sure you notice it that there were times that I couldn’t even publish a single blog post here or maybe respond to an email in a timely manner. Yes, having a day job is a huge time sink.

So it left me thinking what could I do to still maintain my connection with you, as my readers like I did before. Since it’s nearly impossible to pop out as much blog posts as I used to in the old days, I had an idea of being more into the social media scene.

Obviously I thought of Twitter. I mean, I tweet a lot of time, I have a thousand followers so maybe I can just tap into it and communicate with you more. Good idea but I realized something else.

Twitter is good but still it doesn’t really possess the “real-timeness” of Facebook. I mean how many times can you reply to someone, only to get a reply after a day or two? and then getting confused with the reply because  you already forgot you asked a question.

Since I brought up Facebook, then it’s a good idea to use it right? Facebook probably is the largest social network outside Twitter and people there spend more time than with the latter one. I have a Facebook account with a couple hundred followers but the problem is it’s used more to connect to friends and people here in my country. If you’re my friend there, I’m sure you see me say a lot of “Tagalog” words that you just don’t care at all because you don’t understand it in the first place. Most of my things there are just catered to my friends and relatives, not in a wider user base as for instance, my blog’s readers.

With that I realized, the fan page. Yes, the MelvinBlog Facebook Fan Page. The fan page started late last year and I even held a contest to populate my fans, lols. It started off good and nice, I was active there, some of the fans are replying on a daily basis and I’m also using it to gain more traffic back to the blog and vice versa.

I started automating things, connecting it with Twitter and my feed and eventually what happened is that it became stagnant. I mean who cares replying to an automated wall status message right? As days passed by, it started becoming more and more dull. The usual 3-4 replies I get in my wall messages turned to zero, zilch! My bad eh!

The Resurrection of my Fan Page

Yes, you guessed it right. I’m going to switch it back to its old setup and start being more active there. I know the fan page has been “dead” for the past 5 months but its time to resurrect it.

As I’ve said my plan with it is to use it more to communicate with you when times are hard (means busy days).  Just to give you an idea, here’s what you can do with my fan page:

  • Greet me hi or hello
  • Say I look good
  • Ask questions
  • Complain about something
  • Collaborate with your ideas
  • Spam your links 🙂
  • Beg for money
  • Shoot me with your funny pics
  • Tag me with your food for the moment
  • Use it as an email alternative
  • and super many more

As you can see, you can literally do anything by being hooked up in my fan page. And I can assure you that I’ll never let you down. Fortunately, surfing Facebook is 110% legal in our office so rest assure that we can then be closer with each other.

You may want to closely follow it since I’m having some brilliant contest ideas that I may throw just in that fan page. Its going to be really nice and fun out there as we can learn more about each other on a more personal scale. Be a fan of my blog now and let’s start connecting. =p

Filed Under: Announcements, Blogging Tips, Offtopic, Preachings, Ramblings, Social Media Tagged With: facebook, facebook fan page, melvinblog fan

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

by Melvin · Aug 10, 2010

Everyday a lot of people in the internet scramble for traffic. Internet marketers, PPC affiliate guys, bloggers, or even just the ordinary upcoming newbie. The internet is just so diverse that people are sold into an idea that there’s always an unknown place with millions of people that other marketers haven’t found yet. That’s why I love to experiment about these traffic sources. It’s because at the end of the day, I know it’s all worth it.

I mentioned bloggers above as one of those who scramble for traffic but one thing I noticed is that bloggers don’t that much look for new traffic sources, instead they just focus on what they have and try to leverage that into something more. I have no problem with that and in fact that’s what I try to do on an everyday basis. What I’d like to state is that we, in conjunction with that, should also not be that shabby in terms of finding new sources of traffic to our sites.

As I’ve said, the internet has been so huge and that is the reason too why things get saturated and diluted so easily. I mean when was the last time you run something profitable that lasted for more than a month? When was the last time you found a social network that consistently gives you over a 100 hits for a week? The thing with the internet is that things change so rapidly that if you’re not ready, you’re gonna be left out so quickly.

Why Should I be Looking for New Traffic Sources?

First and foremost is to enhance what you already have in your hand. For example, my blog has been getting traffic from forums ever since. So naturally what I would do is leverage that more and try to see if I can get more from that. Now with that, the way to enhance is to look on other other forums which may be catered to my blog as well. I mean it’s not rocket science. If this forum about blogging is constantly giving me good amount of traffic maybe this forum about blogging and internet marketing can do it too. You know what I mean?

Now back to answering the question. It’s proven that there’s always a place untapped to get traffic and from time to time, there will be always be new high-trafficked places just springing over and over. We should continuously be on the look because these untapped sources are so worth it. I mean wouldn’t you want to get 50 new readers on a daily or weekly basis just by engaging in some place you haven’t engaged before?

It just works for everything. Forum marketing, guest blogging, social networking or just anything else. For instance, you guys have probably seen me guest post on popular blogs like JohnChow or DailyBlogTips and etc. But to take that further, I’m constantly on the search of blogs that may not get the same traffic but are worth guest posting to.

For instance, ShoutmeLoud.com is a high-traffic blog yet I was not aware of this site prior to this year. Another is SiteSketch101, which probably has a ton of audience that has never heard of me or my blog. There are many more out there but what I basically do and I hope for  you to do as well is to try to give value and engage in their audience as well. By doing that, you’re giving yourself a chance to open the door for more readers, more traffic, more potential customers

For social network, many people use the standard sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or whatever but for me what I do is use the smaller ones and try to be active there which will eventually build up over time. Not a lot of people know Blogengage or MMOSocialNetwork but the truth is these sites can give you much more traffic than what you can get with Digg or any other big sites out there.

Conclusion

I could go on more but the takeaway here is being creative and constantly on search for new sources. I’m not saying you have to do this everyday, what Im saying is that we should always give some time on this task.

For example, my friday schedule is usually set out on that and by setting a certain date, you’re enabling yourself to be productive with whatever task you have. It doesn’t just apply to finding new traffic source but it applies to everything, writing blog posts, networking, and many more. So do you have your own way of chasing for new traffic sources?

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing, Social Media, Top Posts, Traffic Tagged With: blog traffic, new traffic sources

  • « Go to Previous Page
  • Page 1
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 3
  • Page 4
  • Page 5
  • Page 6
  • Page 7
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 13
  • Go to Next Page »

Copyright © 2026 · No Sidebar Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in