Social Media

Social Media Users Finding Better Jobs After College? Probably.

by Melvin · Mar 1, 2011

This is a guest post written by Jayson Jones

It’s a virtual age. Life is shaped by technology, the days are defined by online explorations, and all college graduates have been exposed to the world of networks and exchanges.

It is only wise therefore to expect those exchanges to yield results beyond the common greetings. They are instead to offer potential careers.

Industry is changing. What was once a limitation of resources, a force of on-site conversations, has instead sprawled out. Virtuality now connects all companies; and graduates seeking to inject themselves into the fray must understand how to use this to their advantage. Social media dominates all things — and, while there can be no guarantee of succeeding through this venue, the statistics are shaded favorably. The benefits can’t be denied.

Career Decisions

The future is a vast thing — frightening with all of its possibilities. There is no certainty of victory, only the desire for it; and recent graduates may find themselves overwhelmed, unsure of what career path to take. Social media helps to lessen the burden, however. Individuals who don’t know how to properly tailor their degrees can use sites like LinkedIn to discover all of the many opportunities.

LinkedIn (established in 2003) is a business-oriented network that encourages those of similar fields to become aware of each other. As of 2011, however, it also offers a unique tool for guests: the Career Explorer.

Graduates can provide information like their experiences, degrees and interests; and the Explorer will then calculate potential positions. Paths can be discovered, rewritten and possibly even began all from the computer. This helps to ensure no decision is ignored.

Network Aid

The world of business is shaped to communication. No company is formed of silent managers, the dull employees. Instead there’s a demand for words and ideas. Networking helps to make those ideas a little easier to trade, though.

Popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit allow individuals to recognize all relevant posts and conversations. Instant access is offered, and this ensures that no graduate will be without the necessary updates. All can instead track corporations, note any career openings and follow developments. Knowledge provides a better chance for success.

Brand Building

No resume is enough. No first impression can be won with just a smile. This is a modern era and the traditional notions of earning careers are now considered antiquated. Individuals must instead understand who they are and what they wish to offer. They must build a brand. Social media provides graduates with the ability to present themselves to the world — through videos, blogs, RSS feeds and more.

All information can be charted out and posted. A brand can then be formed, with readers gained and a presence developed. This makes it far easier to contact companies, offering credence to all inquiries (rather than simply sending in a dull page and praying it isn’t overlooked).

Conclusion

Business is no longer confined to the standards of the past. It’s instead reaching toward the convenience of the present — and graduates are urged to do the same. There can be no promise of an online marketing career, but there can be a promise of potential. And that’s all many need.

Jayson Jones is an art student with a focus in Fashion Design. He’s an amateur blogger, and you can find his work at http://www.catwalkcatfight.com/, or follow him on Twitter @jaysonjonez.

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?

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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

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?