Monetization Tactics

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.

Niche Research & The Internet Time Machine

by Melvin · Jul 3, 2010

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of TheInternetTimeMachine. All opinions are 100% mine.

If you’ve been reading this for a while, you probably have noticed me tell you a lot that in order to be profitable, you need to have a niche. To be more specific, you need to be in a good niche.

I’ve been into this internet marketing niche for 3 years already and even though it isn’t as long as some people have been into, I could easily say that I’ve learned a lot. My first crack of niche selection was when I started a basketball blog. It was a failure for half a year before I was able to turn it around and make it profitable but still it’s not a niche that I could really make a ton of money with and I realized that immediately.

I then moved on to affiliate marketing where I made a ton of money. Now what I’m talking about here is the PPC- cpa affiliate marketing where I would push lets say a quiz type of offer to Adwords or MSN and then either make or lose money. This is where I learned the true value of niche research. In as much as most of us would like to just follow our passion and make money, unfortunately it’s not possible. Doing an extensive research first to find a profitable place to start with is always crucial and overall, niche marketing is a must-step for any kind of business model

Meet NowRelevant & Internet Time Machine

NowRelevant is some sort kind of a search engine that allows you to do extensive searches for your niche. Now this company just launched a software and service called The Internet Time Machine. What is this all about? Short answer is for tactical niche research. What TITM does is collect the hottest keywords for the past 24 hours. These are either for SEO-types of guys where they more rely on organic rankings or for PPC guys like me who want to get the latest trend. Look:

You can run three different types of searches. One is for SEO-targeted, two is the latest trends which mostly focuses on PPC and third is something that I find unique, the core trend analysis. This type of analysis is mostly targeted to what people are looking to buy right now. Whether it is accurate or not, I would leave it up to you when you try it I guess.

Affiliate Marketing Contest with $20,000 at stake

So to spice things up for their launch, these folks decided to run a massive Internet Marketing Contest wherein you can take home, at minimum, $10,000 all yours! Actually there will just be two winners so each of them will take home 10 grands. How sweet is that?

The contest is open to all I believe and the contest is basically all about creativity and planning skills. The winner of the contest will receive $10,000 and the one who referred the winner will equally receive the same amount. Now what’s easier?

Now there’s a video that’s dedicated to it and I don’t want to spoil that. Here’s the video:

Why I Pulled Out the MMO Blog Monetizer off the Market

by Melvin · Jun 17, 2010

MMO Blog Monetizer, what a horrible name, isn’t it? Anyways for those of you who just started reading this blog since this year, that is actually my first and only product that I released last year and took off the market after a couple of months. The product is all about monetizing make money online blogs (and other blogs closely related to mmo).

So basically when people ask me why I took it off, I usually respond that its because Im going to use it for larger project and of course to avoid saturation. Do you actually believe it? Heck, that is a marketer’s reason always! I mean you see products that are taken off the market and there’s always a reason/s why it happens. And it’s always related to business.

Anyways those two reasons I mentioned are true and I didn’t lie (or perhaps I did) when I said that. However that’s just 5% of the whole story. And in this somewhat controversial post, im going to detail to you the other reasons why I took it off the market.

My First Info Product

That MMO Blog Monetizer thing is my first info product. As i’ve always expressed here in my blog, I’m quite allergic with info products. In my post entitled “Does reading eBooks really help you make money“, I ripped off most eBooks and basically claimed that when you purchase one, don’t expect anything.

I followed that post with a how to steal an eBook post in which I outlined several ways on how most marketers are retarded for just exposing their products without them knowing it. So it’s kind of ironic for me to start my own product especially if its an info product right?

Anyways, the first reason is that my eBook sucks. Nope, not that its of crap value and not that I received gazillions of refunds. I re-read the book after 6 months and it’s really bad in formatting, kind of disorganized, text are not spaced-out well. I didn’t use that much image and I have some crappy grammatical errors, name them!

So what I eventually had in mind was that I’m going to close it out because I don’t want people to make fun of my eBooks crappiness, formatting-wise. Although no one has really complained with the crappiness of the product, I’d like to make sure that I need to work harder on that aspect more and so I decided to take it off and seek professional advice more on that side.

Not the Easiest product to Comprehend

Most first-time info marketers really make this mistake. They tend to create their products for themselves, considering themselves as their audience. Again the takeaway on marketing something is that “we are not our customer” and it applies to creating info products as well.

Actually I re-read the eBook a couple of times as well as have some of my friends read it for me. We did some editing and thought it was all fine already. Eventually it was not. I used a lot of jargons that were hard for some readers to understand.

This is really one of the hardest things for me. I’m never good at walking people through on basic stuffs that I oftentimes just butcher it completely. The downside for me was that I got a lot of support questions from people since the product was really hard to understand especially for noobs.

It’s expensive

Yes it is. It was priced at $14 for a 17 page eBook and some bonuses. Now I don’t want to tell the product doesn’t have good quality. It has, and that is one of the things Im proud with. But with that, I realized I need to throw in some other couple of valuable stuffs to make it the perfect product.

These days, most product claim that their product is more than what its worth. That was where I failed before. I should’ve added more than just the core product.

Timelessness

And of course just like anything, things get outdated. The main reason why MassControl and Traffic Secrets have 2.0 versions is because they were updated and most of the content inside were catered for the time it was released.

That’s my same goal with that product. Its funny because I threw in a ton of coupon codes inside only to realize that they were already not working anymore. Some of the screenshots were also old-ish so that was I was trying to achieve with that.

MMO 2.0 – Watch out!

And if you got a sense from the beginning of reading this article that I am about to expose something in the end, then you’re right. 😉 I’m currently working out super hard on producing the 2.0 version of the product. I’m eliminating and improving all of the flaws I mentioned above and I’m sure you will like it better than LA Lakers capturing the NBA Title.

I may give this product away for FREE or may not. I may sell this for lower pricing or higher pricing. There’s a lot of uncertainties right now but two things are sure. One is that it’s going to be of perfect quality and second is that people who are gonna opt-in to the early bird waiting list will get massive discounts and tons of good value bonuses and throw-ins. Get inside now!

Post Note: MMO 2.0’s early list is different from the blog’s mailing list so make sure you get in. 😉

How I (Literally) Doubled My Blog Advertising Income

by Melvin · Jun 7, 2010

In one of my featured posts, I discussed about how this blog currently makes money including all the tools and the reasoning behind the monetization tactics I use and how I do it. The post was received so well that I got some questions asked privately asking for some more additional clarifications. I love helping people out so I did walk them through as much as possible but of course time is so limited that I can’t do that to everyone.

In the last post, I did make mention that direct advertising sales is highest source of income for this blog. I know a lot of bloggers have this as their primary monetization model as well but also I realized that a lot of other bloggers are having so much trouble with it.

In this another lengthy post, I’d like to discuss how I literally doubled my advertising income through the past few years. And here we go:

Pre note: This is not, at all, a walk-through on how to do blog advertising. Its mainly a post where I share how I doubled my advertising income. That being said, consider this post as a post targeted to intermediate to advance users who may probably be already making money with blog advertising. Also there’s no traffic tip in this post.

Getting the right tools & technology

When I started, I installed OpenX on this blog primarily because I have been using it on my other blogs created before this one. And OpenX is really an awesome free tool because they have all sorts of features that are available on so many other paid tools.

Not too long, I realized that I have to jump on the OIO Publisher bandwagon. Again in case you don’t know, OIO is an advertising manager platform that handles the advertising for you. This means that you no longer need to manually accept payments, add banners, track expiring date and stuffs because OIO does that all for you.

It costs $47 with an unlimited use so you can pretty much use it on every of your site. It’s beneficial first because, you can manage ads literally with your hands tied back (heheh, a marketer’s usual hype) and second because it pretty much works alongside any other networks and integrates well with almost all payment processor. It does also have tons of features like geo-targeting and stat-tracking.

Note: If you still does not have OIO Publisher on your blog, you are very fortunate because OIO gave me a coupon code that entitles everyone to a $10 discount. By signing up with OIO Publisher under me, you get the unlimited usage license for just $37 which is definitely a huge steal. Click this link now and make sure you enter BLOOM-MELVS to claim your discount.

Alternatively there are other third party networks that you could look as well like BuySellAds and AdvertiseSpace.com, both of which sell your space for you in exchange for a revenue cut (50%). Some people do well with those networks and while other prefer using OIO to keep profit 100%.

Setting Up the right Advertise Now Page

It’s funny but one of the most viewed pages in this blog is the advertise now page which goes to show that potential advertisers really care about the stats. The mistake that I mostly see with other bloggers advertising page is that the statistics are not as comprehensive as it should. Usually they just put paragraphs with no proofs at all or worse they don’t even use any screenshot from Google Analytics and other logs.

You have to understand that advertisers spend soooo much money in their campaigns and as a wise person, what they want is to get a good bang for their buck. Oftentimes they buy space from as much blogs as possible and then track what’s doing well and what’s not. By having a “proper” advertise now page you’re giving them a clear and concise information of what to expect in your blog.

Don’t Direct Link to the Payment Page

Most people who use OIO Publisher or other third party tool does the mistake of linking their Advertise now box directly to the payment. Why is that a problem? It’s a problem because there’s really no value from the advertiser’s side. I mean if you put yourself in their shoes, you don’t want to buy an ad space without knowing the stats first right?

I conducted an test last year and found an interesting result to where a lot of advertisers will buy an ad space when you direct link it to the payment page while a good number of advertisers will buy but then subscribe for future payments when you send them to the advertise page. You see, a good advertising page builds trust and I have some advertisers here who are advertising ever since last year which I thought was pretty cool.

Giving them reasonable pricing

I understand that all bloggers value their traffic as much as they could but sometimes you have to bent a bit to make things work. It’s not really that you’re selling yourself cheap but its more of determining how the marketplaces prices it. Jeremy Schoemaker even told us before that he is selling initially his ad spots for like 2/10 the price.

Another reason is that you want to build relationship with these advertisers. A lot of times when an advertiser talks with me, he usually asks for an initial month discount and most of the times I accept it. I understand that banner ads have very poor clickthroughs and as a blogger, you want to establish that relationship where you can let people know what they can get from you and how they can benefit.

Stalk, look around

The one thing that’s so good (or so bad depending on where your siding) about online business is that it’s very transparent. You can easily stalk on what others are doing, how they are doing it and stuffs.

Just the same with direct ad sales. One of the tricks is to always look on blogs within your niche and observe who are the advertisers advertising. Then contact them up and tell them you’re offering advertising as well. There’s a good chance that they will respond since most of them are just small business owners and chances are they’d negotiate with you to push their campaign through. That’s because they understand it’s all about market penetration and branding. Once a brand gets through these markets, it’s amazing how it spreads like fire without that much effort at all.

Outsource

I have pretty come to a point now where I have already appointed someone to do things for me. For instance, every two week or so a person I hired would go to all webmaster forums, find advertisers looking for related advertising and offer them the space. He also does a listing on big boards highlighting advertising on my blog and the benefits of it.

If you’re going to chase advertisers (there’s no need to when you have a nice blog like me. 😉 ), it’s almost essential to have someone working for you, contacting advertisers, flaunting the benefits and such. That makes the process very automated at the end.

Blog Advertising is STILL hit & miss.

In this post I didn’t hold back anything, I completely shared to you how I grew my blog advertising income. But still at the end of the day, it’s still a hit and miss income opportunity. A lot of people still claim it as an unstable way to make money from blog and that’s true. If you’re into making more, you would want to definitely work more on a more “in-house” and consistent money maker w/c can bring you more money without having the need for tons of traffic.

But of course if you’re like me and you have those wide sidebars and nice spacings, you might as well just leverage your traffic too and benefit from selling these spaces. After all, probably 80% of blogs still make money from blog advertising. And do take note that they are doing it, without really sacrificing their more profitable monetization ways.

Your Blog Is Terrible At Converting…

by Melvin · May 30, 2010

In this guest post, Welly Mulia talks about conversion using the blog as a powerful medium

Even if you have a blog with an opt-in form to collect visitors’ email, you still need to create a separate squeeze page that resides on its own if you’re really serious about building your list.

Before I get into the why, let me just very briefly explain what a squeeze page is (for the sake of those who don’t know what that means).

A squeeze page is basically a simple web page that is purposely created and set up to build a list (group of people with similar interests). People who land on your site are called visitors. The ONE and ONLY purpose of a squeeze page is to convert these visitors into leads, and the way to do that is to convince them to enter their email on the opt-in form on your squeeze page.

The Why

Now let’s see why you should create a dedicated squeeze page instead of relying on your blog’s opt-in form. There is only ONE reason, and that is because the conversion on your squeeze page is going to be much higher than your blog. This means for the same number of visitors, you are going to acquire more leads from a squeeze page.

Why is this so?

Because your blog has A LOT of distractions:

– Links (both internal and external) within posts that take the visitor away to other places

– Comments left by commentators also have links that are clickable to their websites

– Ads and links on your sidebar

Bottom line: Your visitors have a lot of options when they are on your blog. They can click an ad; click an outgoing link left by a commentator, etc. The more options (other than just subscribing to your list) you give to people, the less focus they become. The less focus they become, the less likely they are going to join your list.

Having a squeeze page, though, is useless if you don’t monetize your list. You’ve worked hard to build that list, make sure you reward yourself by monetizing it. Of course, I’m not advocating you to simply sell all the time to your list. Doing this will definitely wear out your list in no time and your subscribers will unsubscribe faster than you can find new ones. You want to mix in education and entertainment with your sales pitches.

I’ve come across marketers who are on both extreme ends – one group sells too much, and the other sells too little. You want to maintain a balance between education and selling, as well as add in entertainment (your personal stories and how they relate to what you offer) to your messages.

List Monetization

Let me give you some tips on how to monetize your list:

– The freebie that you give away to get people into your list must be VERY RELATED to the product (your own or affiliate) you want to sell

– Don’t give everything away in your freebie. Yes of course your freebie must be high quality that delivers value. But don’t give everything away. Give away
USEFUL but INCOMPLETE information. If you give away the whole pie, why should they buy your product?

– Your freebie must NATURALLY LEAD to your product. For example, if your freebie is about how to build an email list, a good sales offer would be to sell an autoresponder service (either your own or affiliate service). Or you could also teach them the GENERAL concept of email list building, but never really reveal the step-by-step action they need to take to successfully build a list. If they want the complete, step-by-step guide, they have to buy your product.

Squeeze Page Tips (to help increase conversion)

Before I end this article, I’d like to give you some additional tips when it comes to creating your squeeze page:

– It’s a good idea to have your squeeze page professionally designed (but not too fancy) so that you portray a professional image to your visitors that you are serious in whatever you’re doing. Contrary to what you’ve heard, people DO judge a book by its cover, especially when you are a stranger to them.

– Make sure your opt-in form is above the fold. This means visitors landing on your squeeze page can immediately see it without having to scroll down the screen.

– Use a BIG opt-in form and a BIG subscribe button so that they are eye-catching and easily noticeable.

– Use the word “FREE” and “INSTANT” on your subscribe button, opt-in form, in your headline, as well as a few times throughout the copy on your squeeze page. Do not overdo it though. People like free stuff because of their greedy human nature, and they also love when they can get it instantly without having to wait. After all, this is an instant society.

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Entrepreneurial Tip: Take Everything With a Grain of Salt

by Melvin · May 22, 2010

In this information-overload era its just so easy to find answers to our questions. I mean when was the last time you searched for something and didn’t find anything? That pretty much sums it. Add the fact that search engines are constantly tweaked to cater to the majority of users so all in all we are in this ‘so useful’ internet era.

But we might as well be cautious a bit though as the information could basically own us. How many times have you heard someone saying they’re suffering from information overload? The information we’re talking here are good and brilliant informations and its so easy to just consume things as much as you could.

Let alone in blogging and making money online that so many people can’t get pass the first stage because they keep on consuming new information after new information. Everyone suffers from this and unfortunately most people mishandle it. I used to think that info overload is just a person’s inability to filter but I was wrong.

Take everything with a grain of salt

According to phrases.org.uk, the statement means we should accept infos but maintain it in a degree of skepticism about its truth. In a more normal description, it’s all about taking each and every information but not completely believe it.

I know most of us, if not all, rely on information to do all the things we need to get done. However, we should always remember that there are certain factors that can affect whether that information can be useful or not. Here are some reasons:

Most information are not timeless – The first thing I do whenever I read a good piece of article related to my business is to check out the date. I think not a lot of people understand that informations or advice that they usually read aren’t gonna last forever. For instance, I could search on something about “wordpress tweaks and stuffs” and could find great lengthy articles on that subject. But the problem is if it the info is too old or outdated, it’s not going to benefit me.
The effect is usually NOT the same for others – Recently I wrote a post about how my blog makes money and I’m sure thousands of people who have read it would exactly copy the ways I mentioned. But does that mean they can reap the same results? probably, probably not! A good friend always likes to tell me that not all MBA students who graduate get a good life even though it is highly perceived that if you take that course, you’re gold.
Things can go wrong with unusual outside factors – Another question, when was the last time that what you planned goes off exactly as its planned? Just the same with informations we consume. One good observation is that when one writes a good walkthrough on how he makes money for example with affiliate marketing, almost no readers get to duplicate that effort. Why is that? Because in every thing we do there are always outside factors that greatly affect things. Demographics, time, and etc., they all play a good role in all of this.
False claims/infos – It’s funny but a lot of people aren’t too keen on spotting wrong and fake informations. A lot just completely gloss into it and completely treat it as it is. That’s why its important to understand that almost all websites have disclaimers and it’s there for a reason.

Do it and see for yourself

The only way to find out is to do it and see for yourself. You can never really conclude something as working unless you get to experience it yourself. It’s also good to test since doing so can make you avoid being a crybaby, taking info and then calling it out a bum if it didn’t work. 😉

A good example is what I do with affiliate marketing. In forums, you oftentimes see bums people who post “hey this offer from this, I tested it in this, and its killing it for me!”. But the truth is doing exactly the same thing wouldn’t certify a success! There might be some factors that hinge on demographics, the PPC slaps, landing page issues and so many things. And in that particular example, the best thing to do is do the offer yourself, test and see if it’s really worth converting (or is just all hype).

I know you guys trust a lot of brands related within your businesses. There’s nothing wrong with that. Besides, these people are experts and credible for a reason. But in the end don’t forget to do your own testing and take all those infos with a grain of salt. After all, they say marketers are liars. 🙂