Guest Post

Don’t Wait to be Perfect in Blogging

by Melvin · Apr 6, 2010

We all want to be perfect. We want to look perfect while going to any party, we want to be perfect while playing video games, and we want to be perfect if we are cooking something. We just want to be perfect in whatever we do, so that we can prove how much superior and efficient we are than our peers. And, the same rule applies to the blogging. Time and time again, I see bloggers who got struck in the vicious cycle of creating a perfect blog and eventually lose focus from their real objectives. So, in this article I’ll try to convince you that you shouldn’t wait to be perfect in blogging.

1. Improvement is more important

Don’t expect too much, too quickly because it will just increase your frustration. I’ve seen many bloggers who wants to be perfect from the first day. And due to this, they put so much pressure on themselves that they completely ignore the improvement that occurred in them over the period of time. Perfection is a never ending process, so don’t think a lot about it and focus on improving your skills.

2. Success depends on efforts

You can’t control the perfection but you can control your efforts. The more efforts you are ready to put into your blog, the more successful you’ll be. It is a myth, that to be successful you need to be perfect. How many successful guys are completely perfect in their jobs? How many successful guys know everything about their niche? I don’t think even one of them knows everything about his field. What makes them successful is the huge amount of efforts they put in to their job.

3. Criticism is good

Criticism or rejection helps you to identify your weak points which you were not aware of and provide you with an opportunity to make yourself much better. So if you just want to be perfect before you are afraid of criticism then think again. Don’t wait for your content to be perfect, go out with what you’ve and learn to take all kind of criticism.

4. Just Do It

It’s a Nike slogan, but really a great advice. Don’t hesitate to execute your plans even if they are not perfect. I’ve seen many persons having great ideas about product, website but they never execute it because they feel their plan/product still needs some more tweaks. As the result, most of those plans never get executed. Execution is more important than perfection. Don’t wait for your plan to be perfect because you don’t know how people are going to react in reality. The greatest example of this is Microsoft; they never waited for a perfect operating system. They came out with the basic version of windows in 1985 and are still trying to improving their product without sacrificing their sales.

5. Sometimes it’s better not to be perfect

When you are perfect (popular) in your niche, then you start attracting lot of unwanted attention towards yourself. People start having huge expectations from you, your failures get more criticized, you’ve more enemies etc. So, in a way your decisions start getting influenced by the opinions of others. But when you are not perfect, you are free to do whatever you want to do and how you want to do.

So these are the five points due to which I think that why you shouldn’t wait to be perfect. As I know that I’m not a perfect and there is lot that I’ve to learn. So, please share your opinions in the comments below.

Gagandeep Singh is a Freelance writer working for conversion rate optimization company Invesp.

MyBlogGuest Review: Promote Your Brand by Guest Posting

by Melvin · Feb 14, 2010

This is a paid review sponsored by Ann Smarty of MyBlogGuest.com

Just in case you‘re living inside a hollow cave, you probably aren‘t aware yet that guest posting is the most powerful FREE way to get a blog known. By far, it’s a very powerful tactic that can get your blog brand across a wide range of audience. In my free eBook called Blog Marketing for Fame (get your copy now!) I stressed so much how it made my blog grew that quick.

For today, Ann Smarty pinged me last week to do this review of her site called as MyBlogGuest. I‘ll drive straight into the site and will now discuss what it is all about and its functionalities. So basically MyBlogGuest is a forum where you can find guest posters and fellow bloggers. The idea behind it is to build a community of guest posters that will collaborate with each other. In the end, it should be a win-win situation for everyone.

Site‘s Design & Aesthetics

At first look, you actually wouldn‘t think it‘s a forum and for me the only time I realized it was a forum was when I already completed filling out my profile. The site‘s layout is very simple yet it doesn‘t look like an ancient website. The forum itself is small yet is very targeted to guest bloggers. I personally like it because being targeted, you get to squeeze every benefit from it and will no longer need to avoid forum lurkers who just annoy members.

Another unique part is the categories and tags page. While you can browse each thread to find out your interest, you can also benefit a lot by sorting the blogs by categories. For example, MelvinBlog Dot Com is inside the internet marketing category so all you have to do is to pick your niche/category and you would immediately see blogs which are talking on the same stuffs. It also works the same with tags where you can specify the tags that your blog uses.

Functionality and Benefits

As I’ve said I’m a fan of small yet tight communities. MyBlogGuest isn’t like other forums which are mostly cluttered. As I was browsing different topics (there are just mainly 5 topics), I noticed that the members are supportive of each other. Ann was also out there responding and collaborating with the members. There was even a “Help Needed” topic there where you can go out and request for social media votes.

Another thing Ann mentioned is that they would try to keep the quality as high as possible. The forum has made it easy to report people who violate the rules, or those who don’t follow the guidelines of guest posting. So if you go out there and try to game the system, then more likely you are gonna get banned.

Lastly there’s also another part w/c is called Blog Round Ups where Ann would feature the best guest posts arranged through the forum in her blog. Although I don’t think it’s a huge feature, it can still help you get traffic especially if your blog is just getting started.

The Bad & Ugly, Some Suggestions

Well not really bad and ugly, I just can’t figure out a good title, lols. The one thing I don’t like is the quality of blogs in there. In fact I’ve seen people requesting for guest posts on a blog with an Alexa 1 million rank but it’s understandable and it’s the inevitable part of this feature. But I would definitely love to have a sort kind of a filtering system where you can filter good blogs from average ones.

Actually there is, the Blog Power. By specifying your blog and some of your social media accounts, you are getting a certain rating for your blog. The higher, the better obviously. But I find it glitchy since Google PR and other stuffs don’t really determine the audience behind the blog. Another is the part where you link your social media account to the forum. Actually it’s not linking, it’s just inputting (w/c is obviously a flaw).

Since I’m not a social junkie, all of my social accounts power just combined for a mere 7 points. So what I basically did was just borrow the user name of the top users in those social networks. Look:

Obviously the built-in Blog Power isn’t really a reliable metric and even if they fix it, it is still not (metrics aren’t that precise in determining)

It’s also the anti-thesis for direct communication types of guest posting for bloggers. Since most bloggers do have a contact form, then why go through a third party in a forum? Besides, bloggers check their email more often than forums right? Anyways I don’t really see it changing the current procedures in guest posting. People will still contact other bloggers directly and stuffs like that.

Final Words

MyBlogGuest is a decent site and the fact that it’s not a make money program is one thing that I liked so much about it. Ann Smarty is a pretty reputable person in this industry and I know her intention is honest. As the forum grows bigger and bigger and more tweaks are implemented, I think the site can become a key player in the rapidly-growing guest blogging community. Of course it still depends on a lot of factors, mostly the users (both quantity and quality). If she can get large bloggers to thumbs it up then it’s going to get huge in no time.

Demand & Supply – Understanding Blogging Economy

by Melvin · Jan 23, 2010

Currently Blogging is one of the greatest Internet Marketing Model. While many people use blogging for personal purposes, some use it as an Internet Marketing tool. The few people who use blogging as Internet Marketing tool are the ones who want to earn money, reputation and fame. But only a very few percentage of them succeed.

One of the reason of success of these successful bloggers (whom we call pro bloggers) is the understanding of Blogging Economy. The understand how to utilize their resources, where to invest and how to balance Demand and Supply. Demand and Supply is core of any kind of Economy. The relationship between demand and Supply underlines the forces behind the allocation of your blogging resources in the most efficient ways. It also decides the price (may not be a monetary value) of your content in the Blogging Community.

Before we proceed any further let us define Demand and Supply.

Demand refers to how much (quantity) of a product or service is desired by consumer. The quantity demanded is the amount of a product people are willing to buy at a certain price.

Supply represents how much the market/producer can offer. The quantity supplied refers to the amount of a certain good producers are willing to supply when receiving a certain price.

How does Demand and Supply work for Blogging?

In blogging, a blogger is not always selling. So two cases arises, one when a blogger is selling his content (posting article/post) for free and other when a blogger is selling a product or service for a price.

CASE I: Blogger provides free information through an article/blog post

Here the commodity (information) is free to everyone, so money is not a factor. When something is free, it means the supply is theoretically infinite. The demand of the content decrease and so does its value. Now to increase the value of your content, we need to increase the demand. And since our commodity is free, its not that simple. There are two different ways to increase the demand.

First is decreasing the supply. But practically it is not possible to just decrease the supply. In case of a blog post once posted is available to everyone. One way to decrease the supply will be to password protect the whole/part of post. You may also consider having a free members area where selected few have access to the content. This way you virtually decrease the supply. This will only work if your content had high demand before.
Second is allocation of resources. Allocation of resources in blogging means investing more time (if required money) to research the topic you are about to write. Write the post in a unique way or better with a whole new perspective.

CASE II: Blogger is selling some product or service

Here the commodity is not free and those who want it or need it have to pay some price. When you are selling something, the price is decided by the demand and supply in the market (here blogging community).

When money is involved, it becomes easier to understand the market. Price decreases with higher supply and increases with increase in demand. So if the product/service you are selling is available elsewhere in plenty (may be lower price) you will have to decrease your price too. But if the demand is high and supply is low (only a few more sellers are there), you can increase the price as well.

There are some more factors which decide the price as well. One of these factor is customer awareness. Think of the condition when a certain product eg. Blogging Guide is available in plenty but the customer is aware of only your guide. The customer will buy yours. You can set higher price. This is a case of Virtual Demand (a imaginary high demand and low supply condition).

Whatever I have mentioned above are only few of the theories of Demand and Supply in Blogging. To succeed you need to understand them and apply these theory practically. For example, I told you about how demand and supply control the price. You can use it to decide the at what price you should sell your product/service, so that people buy it. How to make them buy your product and service at a ceratin price.

If you have any questions, just leave a comment and I will answer them.

PS: The most important thing to note about Demand and Supply is that how impractical (it is mostly theory) it may seem, it governs the market. You can think of cases where the theory may not apply, but in most cases Demand and Supply theory works with a high efficiency.

Editor of Agent Deepak – A student at IIT, Kharagpur. He has 3 years of experience in Blogging and also have 1 year experience in SEO, Graphics design and Web design. He is tweeting @AgentDeepak. If you are on Facebook you can also befriend him @AgentDeepak

Photo Credit from Chief Ingredient

Your Guest Post was Rejected, What’s Next?

by Melvin · Jan 20, 2010

By now you probably already have learned that guest posting is a powerful way to drive crazy high quality traffic to your site. I’m not just talking about the hits here, I’m talking about traffic that could easily become one of your subscribers, more importantly your customers. Guest Posting really is going to do the job for your blog in terms of getting more publicity.

So because a lot of people already knew it and learned it’s benefits, it seems that every blogger in every corner is sitting, focusing and writing a guest post for the big blogs in their niche. But the question is, are they getting success by actually getting their post/s qualified? Or is it the owner of the other blog think their guest post suck?

Ok I will talk from experience here. Probably you have seen me and my blog on some other blogs having a guest post so it’s pretty obvious guest posting is my blog project since late last year. But I am going to confess that for every 5 guest posts I write, less than 50% gets accepted. For every 10, it’s just 4 and yeah it’s painful especially thinking about the time I spent writing and writing only for the author to say it has not met the qualifications. *sucks*

So that was my experience early this year when I was just totally new to guest posting. Obviously I have improved a lot but the question is what to do next when you get rejected? (ok, no list in this post guys!)

The answer is just keep on going. I know other people would say try to analyze, learn and improve but I think it’s just all about keeping on writing. I’d tell you’d be surprised on how just writing alone could unknowingly improve your way of writing. I love reading my old posts and it always amazes me how many stupid mistakes I have done before even though I (think) have a good english grammar (for someone who lives outside the US).

It’s ok to feel bad but that should never keep you from trying. Bloggers have different styles, so they also have different requirements, different take on whether the article is good or crap. If you’re guest posts got rejected then go ahead and submit it others. If its still discarded then don’t delete it from your hard drive. Even if it piles up there it’s still going to do you wonder by letting you become a better writer.

What do you think guys? I would really love to get your opinion about this topic.

5 Tips to Effectively Start a Brand New Blog

by Melvin · Dec 21, 2009

In this post, Brandon Walker talks about some good tips on getting how a brand new blog can easily get recognized.

I often get asked “what is the best method to use to effectively start a new blog to give it the best possible chance of being successful?”

It’s always a difficult question to answer particularly because starting a brand new blog can be challenging and difficult for webmasters as they usually have no audience, no traffic and have not been recognized as an authority within their niche. It is therefore extremely important to have credibility and that can be difficult to achieve, particularly if you have only been active in internet marketing circles for a short length of time.

But don’t become too discouraged because you will find many successful bloggers will say the most difficult time they faced during the beginning stages of blogging was when no one knew who they were within their niches.

Write Good Content – Writing good content in your blogs is essential if you’re looking to get noticed within your niche. This is the most effective means you can utilize to connect with your readers because through your content you can project your own style and personality.Readers appreciate good quality content and if they like it may even consider linking to it because they like it so much. From my own experience I have sites that tend to do well and attract traffic simply because I had put a great deal of time and effort into writing good quality content.
This is generally because readers bookmark the content, refer to it in their own posts, resulting in natural links and traffic.

The golden rule for writing good content is that one stunningly well written post can receive much more traffic and attention than many very ordinary posts combined.
Guest Posting – Often when you begin a new site you don’t have an audience of people reading your content while other sites in your niche may have.To generate interest my advice is to search for credible blogs in your niche and look to see whether or not they accept guest posts. If they do accept guest posts write a top quality article using your very best material and then send your article to the blog site by email. If the blog author happens to like your material, they will post it on their site resulting in you gaining credibility, recognition and generating traffic to your own site.To help you get started, one method you can use to find guest posts is through Google. This can be done by entering the search string (niche keyword) + “guest post. This search will bring up pages of results on blogs that are willing to accept guest authors.
Find appropriate blogs in your niche and get writing!
Gain Trust With Google – Thousands of brand new blogs are started everyday, many of them spam sites. It is important for you to convince Google that your site is not another one of these low quality sites by building quality links from reputable sources.For example Ezinearticles, Hubpages and Squidoo are all sites looked favorably upon by Google. Further, they all allow you to create a page on their site with a link pointing to your own site.
In simple terms, by getting a single link from each of these sites you are effectively letting Google know that you are not just another spam site and you should therefore be trusted. This can be very powerful because gaining trust from Google is very important because ‘traffic is king’ and can over time lead to search traffic flowing to your new site.
Become a Credible Source of Information Within Your Niche – It is very important that you build credibility within your niche when you begin a brand new site. It is necessary to show people you should be trusted and are knowledgeable with regard to your niche.As already mentioned guest posting is one way to gain this credibility along with forum marketing and commenting on high profile blogs being another excellent method.
The key is to post relevant and exceptional comments so people will take notice.
Build a List – Generally when you start a new blog, visitors to your site are very limited – that’s why it is important you try to retain these visitors who do come calling.One method you can use is to produce a free report with valuable information about your niche and offer it to your readers in exchange for their name and email address. This can require effort on your part in putting together the report but there are several advantages to be made by following this approach. For example, apart from collecting their details so they can be contacted later, you are also importantly building trust and credibility with your readers through the free report you are providing.

Conclusion

Clearly the success of your blog or any website for that matter is dependent on how much effort you’re a prepared to put into your site.

If you work hard and apply the 5 methods I have mentioned above, then before you know it your brand new site will have visitors clicking onto it and generating ongoing income for you.

Brandon Walker is an accomplished internet marketer who provides tips, techniques and advice to other bloggers on how to generate income from working online at Foxmarketer.com

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.

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!