Social Media

Blog Posts Retweets, Do they really make sense?

by Melvin · Aug 3, 2010

When retweets was first introduced, I was really really so much into it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever especially with the fact that if someone retweets your article, then there’s a good chance more than a thousand people can actually see it and have the opportunity to retweet it as well. It’s mainly because the potential of Twitter is really there.

Of course at first, I really didn’t figure out how I can get that much retweets that would enable me to reap those benefits. I started to install that little Tweetmeme plugin so that my readers can start retweeting my article for me. Obviously I started to realize that each of the 100 visitors will not really retweet it.

So what I did then was start using Twitter genuinely. I started following people that is related to what I’m blogging and started really giving tweeting some time. Eventually my follower count started growing and interaction has been more lively now. And not surprisingly with that, I started getting retweets.

The highest retweet count that I got is 133 and not surprisingly it came from a contest post. But then I got a little contented with the fact that at least I was getting more than 10 retweets almost every time. And now I started wondering. Is this retweets really worth it? or is it just a number that you could flaunt and brag to other people?

Ok ok. Unlike in the previous posts, I’m not gonna flash out some geeky numbers on your screen or some screenshot from Google Analytics and then explain it one by one. Studying the behavior from Twitter is a quite a it tricky that just showing stats doesn’t mean anything that much.

So for this year, Twitter has sent me over a 1000 uniques and more than 2500 pageviews. Of course the bounce rate and stickiness weren’t as effective as let’s say guest post campaigns and stuffs. Twitter has so many bot accounts and in fact I have a couple for myself and the reason for that is mainly for testing. If someone is being followed by 1000 bots, that will not make any sense right so I guess that’s why it’s not converting that well.

Of course the main benefit of it is that it’s free and if utilized well, it can be a source of free yet targeted high quality traffic for any site. But how can one utilize it and maximize its benefits? That’s literally the question of every blogger in this space. I know big guru bloggers utilize it so well that for instance, Shoemoney even called as “the best marketing medium” right now.

For me what I do is basically just host all my shortlinks via bit.ly. Bit.ly has some free basic tracking which is pretty darn good. You can find the no.of unique clicks, no.of referrers/retweets, the location they were retweeted and even the day to day activities of your posts. In fact, I already considered it’s PRO program just because of how slick it is.

If you’re using other shorteners, I’m pretty sure they have their built-in trackers as well so make sure you’re making the most by using that to analyze things.

So all in all, retweets really matter. As I said above, I got some pretty good (yet not really massive) traffic from it and from a hindsight I can say that it’s one good way to get new readers to your blog. The number of RT’s alone can quite a bit be misleading but the traffic stats will always speak for themselves. From that on, its just a matter of tweaking it more and more.

What do you think? Maybe you have some secrets to share as well?

An Interesting Guest Post Analysis on FamousBloggers

by Melvin · Jul 14, 2010

We all know that guest posting brings in real traffic if done correctly. As a member of my community, you’re probably also aware on how I’ve been guest posting on a lot of blogs for the past few months for now. I have done a lot of guest post but I realized I haven’t really done any analysis on the effects of this guest posts for my blog. And while it’s impossible to do one posts for all guest posts I’ve done, I think it would make more sense to at least try to pick one and feature it every week. What do you think?

Anyways, I’ve been trying to do 5 guest posts per month and its a level I’m trying to maintain for now. If you can remember I made a commitment to take this blog to the next level but increasing my efforts. However, that took a hit after my current employment. Nevertheless here’s an interesting analysis of my guest post in FamousBloggers.com

What is FamousBloggers?

FamousBloggers is multi-author blog which is blogging in topics related to online business. It’s a relatively *new blog. I said new because it has just been in the blogosphere for less than one year yet it has already made so much strides and it has a good overall community behind it. Hesham and his community is one of the very few teams in the blogosphere who are serious in taking their whole thing to new heights.

If you know me I love testing out different traffic sources and experimenting. You may probably have seen me do couple of guest posts for high traffic blogs like John Chow and also you’ve seen me in smaller blogs as well. Guest posting for FamousBloggers is really intriguing to me for a couple of reasons. First is that its a new source of traffic as I’m sure most of the readers their haven’t heard my blog and second, I want to build a good relationship not just with the blog but with their community.

Guest Post Analysis

I’ve done about three guest posts on FamousBloggers.com for the past few months and there’s really some interesting number I am seeing. Before that, let’s just first analyze how’s the return on a normal John Chow guest post considering that Chow’s blog is one of the most high traffic blogs around in this niche.

The reason I showed you the statistics from Chow’s guest post is because we are going to use his blog as the barometer. John’s blog is always an interesting cover for me in the subject of guest posting first is because he gets so many traffic yet these traffic are mostly trigger-lucky readers who read myriads of content everyday. Usually they end up bouncing up too quickly on most blogs just because of where they’re coming from.

Another thing is that John’s posting frequency is always weird. Sometimes you can get your post in there for more than 24 hours but most of the times, it can be there for less than 6 hours. That’s why stats always fluctuate and with that, you always need to have some sort of perfect timing to maximize your traffic with his blog.

Now as for FamousBloggers, I did start guest posting for that site last May and initially I don’t think there’s that many people in that community that were aware of my blog. Here are the initial stats:

As you can see with the numbers, back then nearly all of his readers don’t know my blog so its a whopping 94% new visits. I got a fairly good amount of traffic with 50 unique hits for that one guest posts and some followup comments throughout the entire month. Another nice return here is the page/visit stat. This is one of my determiner on whether the guest post is worth it or not. As you can see, each user nearly has visited 4 pages of my blog so it’s nearly 200 pageviews for that guest post and for me it’s an always nice indication.

After that one guest post I tried doing some other more to have a bigger picture on what I can really get on that blog in terms of exposure.

Now there’s a weird stuff here as far as this specific stat is concern. I was getting over 5 views per visit yet my bounce rate is 51.61%. Again the discussion between the difference between bounce rate and exit rate has been there for years. Anyways I’m still happy with the turnout of it thus far since I’m not getting a massive traffic yet, it’s targeted. Another thing that you can notice is that the % of new visits has gone down which means the goal of my guest posting campaigns there is already met.

But of course, it still doesn’t stop there. Just late last month up to this month, Hesham launched a $3500 cash contest and obviously I joined that considering the fact I’m obsessed with contest.

However, I was quite curious since if it’s a contest then maybe it could prove my theory that guest blogging contests really differs from normal guest posting campaigns in which not a lot of people really convert mainly because all they care about is the contest and not the intrinsic reasoning behind a guest post. Either way, I booked my spot and wrote a definitive guest post on blog commenting. Here’s how it turned out:

And it turns out I was right. 🙂 I got the most comment and retweet in that post but that’s simply because it’s a community contest and so the whole community was trying to help me out as well. But as far as converting them to click my author bio and go to my blog, not that much.

However, one thing I was happy about is that most of the readers of that blog are not anymore new to MelvinBlog. I started out with a new visits percentage of 94% and now its amazingly down to 13% which is really nice thing to have. Again the traffic wasn’t ever massive but conversion is everything and I can get 10 people to subscribe to my blog then its certainly better than 1000 bouncing readers.

How I do and prepare for that

Well most bloggers just do their guest post and leave it up in the air but I always prefer to welcome those new audience in the most polite way I can.

As I have been preaching for a long time, a landing page is a must. It’s because new visitors may not always like your current posts and if you direct them to your best posts instead, then you’re giving them an option to explore more which should be your goal anyways. Here’s a nice screenshot (again) of the my traffic when I direct people to my landing page:

So there ya go. You can see that by getting them to that page, they get to explore more and there’s a high chance that they will subscribe to your blog or follow you for quite a while. Heck even those who came from Google didn’t bounce that quick.

FamousBloggers Guest Post Conclusion

Actually there’s no conclusion yet, since I’m still going to do occassional guest posts on that blog. But for the moment it’s all good. One thing that blog has is an interactive community wherein you’ll expect almost 30+ comments on each and every of your guest posts. So with that, I know that I’m posting articles to real people, not just bots.

Drawbacks is that Hesham and his folks publish articles on an everyday basis so like John Chow’s blog, you get to have a small time in the featured area which is at the top. But even though, you can still get your guest post in their front page for almost a week so that’s still maximum exposure there.

Lesson learned here is to always look for new traffic sources. I mean last year this blog is unknown, and this year it’s one of the most popular blogs in this niche. You’ll never know so you just gotta keep finding that new traffic source and see how you can cater to it.

Now the mic up to you? Have yout tried guest posting on FamousBloggers? or maybe you can share some of your experience with guest posts?

What Type Of Blog Post Can Get You the Most Traffic?

by Melvin · Jun 30, 2010

This is the question that I got from a good friend couple of weeks back. I was about to post it last Monday but I got super busy. Anyways back to the topic. So you’re feeling good to write something you think would crush the blogosphere right? You sit down and wrote it, published it and boom, not much traffic. Where do I get wrong, maybe you’re asking.

Anyways first I’d like to answer the question first on what is the best day to post a good article? The answer (I know you’ll be disappointed) is it depends. Mostly and from my experience the best day is either Monday or Tuesday. This is when I mostly post my “pillar articles” as what Yaro Starak calls it. I was also inferred that Friday and Saturday are good days as well but as I’ve said it depends on the behavior of your readers.

So what type of blog post can get the most traffic? Here’s a list based on my own experience as well as some research. No particular order:

Personal posts

I talked about this in my post about personal posts and voyeurism. Again the reason why this type of post gets so much traffic is because people are always interested to know private things about the author and also add the fact that literally everyone can participate in this type of conversation. Once in a while, it’s nice to let our readers know that ‘hey Im human too and I screw up sometimes’ Here are some examples:

“How To” Type of Posts

Arguably and obviously the best way to get it done during high traffic days. “How to” posts are basically like definitive guides wherein you write an article with a minimum or longer than 1000 words. The reason it works well is obvious, it gets people to read more. And if you do this write, you will not only get a lot of traffic, you will also get a lot of links from other blogs in the blogosphere.

I have done a couple of this post in the past few years but this year I’m trying to do it more and more to provide the best value for my readers. Here’s my portfolio of my own how to posts:

Resource Guide

This is another type of post that seems to rake in instant traffic to a blog. Here in this blog, you really will not find that much but I know for most blogs this is usually there main driver of traffic for their sites. The reason this works so well is because people see it as handy, meaning something that they can bookmark or use for future use. And besides people love lists so no wonder why it does well. Ex:

Interviews With Other Bloggers

Actually this goes well specifically for interviewing high profile bloggers in your niche but for this I would like to use bloggers as a general example. This type of post can attract so much traffic mainly because most bloggers, if not all, love talking about themselves on where they’re up to lately! Instead of just you spreading the word, they help you spread the word and if they’re big enough, let alone their massive number of readers do the job for you. Examples:

Contest Posts

Contest posts are the type of posts that can get it done pretty quick. For obvious reasons, contest posts can very much get massive traffic, comments and attention in just a span of an hour. The cons though is that the long term effect and benefit of it is non-existing since people don’t need to read if it’s already done. In short, it’s time-sensitive. Examples:

Controversial Posts

Controversial posts can get an equally massive traction around if done properly. However, never ever do it for the sake of being controversial. Know what I mean? When you expose something or rant on someone, make sure you back up it up with facts, not just speculations. There’s a good chance that the traffic you will get can only do harm for you if you don’t do it correctly.

My favorite guy in doing is a dude named NickyCakes. Nick has been exposing and calling out on people especially if he thinks they suck. The good thing is he always backs it up with facts. But the one thing that you have to keep in mind when doing controversial posts is that you have to be ready for everything, regardless of you’re doing it right or you’re doing it wrong.

Linkbait Posts

Linkbait type of posts kind of like included in each and every type I mentioned above but the reason I had it seperately is because there are some bloggers out there who use compelling headlines alone to get massive traction.

I’m sure you’ve read intriguing titled posts wherein the content doesn’t really fall into the other type of posts I mentioned above. A good example of this are the April fools posts wherein it’s intriguing and that alone get so many people to read their stuffs.

There’s not much return in it because people are gonna either find it nice or they would get pissed off and it could result to a high percentage of visitors just bouncing off.

Conclusion

Those are the different types of posts that can potentially get the most traffic. So far I think I’ve done most of them and this blog post is more from my experience in blogging.

Also when considering on publishing on any of these posts make sure to spend an ample amount of time and work on them carefully. As I’ve said a lot of times already, it could completely go the other way and more likely just harm your blog if not done correctly.

That’s it for now, how about you do you have any types of guest post that works the most for you? or maybe you would want to share your own reason why some of them work so well?

Image credit to: http://hermawanputra.files.wordpress.com

Definitive Guide to Driving Traffic With Forums

by Melvin · May 17, 2010

This topic has been covered several times but I do feel most articles are just junk ones. Either not really adding anything significant, or not covering the topic properly. With that in mind I decided to write this in-depth article on how to drive traffic to your blog using forums.

First and foremost, forums are always a good source of traffic to your blog because its highly-populated by nature. A lot of people lurk in forums, people want to engage in talks and debate and more importantly they know how to appreciate something good that’s done to them.

Due to the intrinsic nature of forums, a lot of bloggers abuse them badly. I’d like to be honest and would like to share I was one of those. During my early years, I was one of those morons who annoy the members by posting as much as I could without really adding anything of good value. If you feel guilty of doing this, then I highly suggest you read this post more and quit what you’re doing right now.

1. Pick Forums Carefully

It all starts by doing a small research and picking the forums that you would want to join in. Obviously it has to have some relation to your niche. In this niche, I am fortunate to have so many forums related to what I’m talking about.

This is the first step and this is a crucial step. Targeting the wrong demographics is a serious mistake so make sure you pay attention to that a lot.

2. Start By Building Your Identity

This may seem to be a basic one but I bet you a lot of people are doing this completely wrong. When you are just signing up, make sure to pick the appropriate name, a name that people could easily remember. In most forums, my screen name is Melvin and because of that they easily recognize me as a blogger who blogs at this site.

Do make sure to complete as much details as possible. You will be easily surprised on how a lot of forum members actually look at the profile of other members (voyeurism at work eh?). Make sure you add an avatar or a real pic. Lastly carve out a good signature. Do take note that the main goal of the signatures is to make other members engage, not and never for search rankings.

3. Help People Out

The main reason why forums exist is to help people out on certain topics. Yes we want to get traffic but our main goal always, should be helping people out. A lot of people in forums give good quality advice for free and do take note that it is costing them energy, time and other stuffs.

What I like to do is go to the “new posts” section of forums and then respond on those things. Since most of those are basic questions, there’s a good chance that you can help them out and start gaining good karma.

4. Explicit Promotion

I am guilty of this before. Never ever post anything that doesn’t add value and then explicitly put your link there. People don’t need half-baked information, what they need are quick-fix ones. A lot of bloggers make this mistake and not only it annoys the members, but it also does tune you and your blog out.

5. Its Ok to Argue, But not that much!

As I’ve said forums are a good place to debate and share insights. There’s a good chance that you would be encountering instances where someone would disagree with you and criticize you. It’s important to argue and stay competitive yet not have so much negativities. Too much hating will do no good and may even harm your reputation in the end.

We cannot please everyone but it’s good to side with the majority.

6. Write Precisely, Be Cool to them

Whenever you present your answers, make sure you tell it to them in an organized manner. Although forums really aren’t too strict with grammars, spelling and punctuation, do take note that any sentence your write, any help you provide reflects directly to you and the brand of your blog. We don’t want to sound like the most intelligent person but at least we want to look good.

Being cool is just all about helping so you could easily see if you’re being helpful by observing your reputation icon. People on forums aren’t too shabby on hitting the icon especially if they know you’re genuine interest is helping them out.

Final Words

Like in your own blog, you build yourself first before you benefit. If you’re a newbie this may sound a bit overwhelming especially if we are about to combine it with other marketing tactics like commenting, guest posting and etc. What I’d like to do with this is set at least one day in one week where all I would do is build my expertise and credibility on those online forums. I highly suggest you to do the same so that you are highly focused on what you are doing.

By following all the rules I outlined above, you don’t only get to gain additional traffic, you are also presented to a large number of people as an expert. By being cool to them, following rules and just being like a genuine person, its a win-win situation for everyone.

How cool is that?

Why Personal Posts Get LOTS of Traffic

by Melvin · Apr 29, 2010

I was playing with the logs and stats from my Google Analytics account and it really didn’t surprise me that some of the posts that gets the most traffic were the ones that really didn’t have anything to do with internet marketing, blogging or make money online (w/c is the topic of this blog). Here’s a short screenshot from G.A:

Contest posts are naturally high traffic ones due to its intrinsic nature, while some of the other posts here go within the theme of this blog w/c is internet marketing and blogging. The hits from other couple of posts and pages may seem unnatural though. The post about the best birthday gift for the girl I love have the most no. of unique counts and pageviews in terms of posts and the about and photo pages are the most popular in pages.

That is voyeurism at work. It continues to amaze me how offtopic writeups, mostly are personal posts, get so much traction. When I wrote that “teenage-love” affair post I really wasn’t so keen that I would get responses but I was surprised when so many people I do not know commented and gave me their tips. It also went hot on social sites and eventually just got so many traction.

Why it rakes in traffic

People love personal posts, there’s no doubt about it. Most of my readers read my blog because of my expertise in this topic so that being said, any other post outside my niche can either spark a good interest or no interest at all and luckily for me its working on a good side.

Voyeurism is a superb traffic technique just because of the fact that it enhances your relationship your audience. It brings you closer on a more personal basis and in marketing, that’s an added trust and credibility.

Top 3 ways on how to take advantage of Voyeurism

Build your expertise first and foremost – Ok, you cannot just start a blog and write random personal posts and then expect a heap of traffic. It is not gonna happen. What you can do though, is work on building a presence first, overdeliver good content in your niche and focus on growth. As I’ve said people become more interested on your personal stuffs when they trust you for what you provide.
Share your personal craps BUT STILL add value – One thing you would notice with all the personal posts is that they all add value. No one wants to read something they wouldn’t enjoy so whether that value accounts for enjoyment, or learnings, its all up to your readers. Just make sure they are going to pick up something useful.
Don’t hold back anything – People love honest stories and it’s always one thing that people admire. You cannot call that post personal when you’re lying so make sure you don’t hold anything back.
Limit yourself in doing it – Ok now we know that personal posts are the ones that get good traffic. We also understood that people like it for intrinsic reasons so what now? Make all your posts personal posts? Naah! Like anything there’s a limit. When it comes to superb content, you can’t feed your readers with these each and everytime as they will get overwhelmed. That goes the same with personal posts. Once you abuse the use of it, it would start boring the heck of your readers.

So what now? Here in my blog, I’m proud to say that people like my personality (debatable). I get both good and bad feedbacks but overall I think I’m doing things fine. Voyeurism is an effect of good personal branding and if youre not leveraging it, you’re missing a lot.

You Need a Pitch for Your Blog, Here’s Why

by Melvin · Apr 21, 2010

Most bloggers are blogging in a certain niche and if you’re reading this blog for quite some time you probably have heard me say that having a clear niche is very important to be successful in blogging. Gone are the days where you could just blog about anything and expect a heap of traffic in return. When I was just getting started, I pretty much did things that way. I felt, “oh, those are for just those sleazy marketers or just for get-rich quick scammers”. But it didn’t take long for me to realize that hey maybe I really need one.

Darren Rowse 31 Days to be a better blogger eBook calls this an elevator pitch, wherein you have a very short space and time to pitch what is your blog really all about to visitors, especially new visitors. This also helps you as blogger to have a nice idea of what to post and what to not. If you’re blogging about car insurance, then pitch it in the way where the visitors can find it unique. You also need to find an enticing angle to present it. Just pitching it as a “great [niche name] blog” is not enough.

Ok I know what you are thinking. I know you’re saying “Im not a salesman and I never want to sound that way!”. I don’t want either! In fact, I really haven’t sold almost any stuff here in my blog. I don’t sell info products (I did for 1 month last year), I don’t do consulting, I don’t psyche you that what I provide costs $XXXX amount).

The truth is a blog pitch doesn’t really need to become like a traditional pitch. If you look at the most successful blogs in this niche, you really wouldn’t think they’re hardselling or pitching something that sounds like they’re selling. The ever famous Shoemoney’s tagline is “Skills to pay the bills”. Not that he says he’s a make money online blogger, but still people come to him as an authority.

By bringing in your blog’s pitch, you’re making a clear and concise detail on what your readers should expect in your blog. You’re telling them ‘hey I’m in this industry, Im an expert in this field’. But of course, your pitch must stand out from the rest so you should not just make use of old generic ones.

Another good reason why you need to have one is to target your audience very well. All of us want a huge number of audience. Unfortunately, it’s all useless when some of them are not really aligned to what we offer and present. Isolating the right people as our audience is crucial for having a tight and well-targeted blog readership.

Final Words

So by now, you should’ve already understood the value of a pitch or elevator pitch for your blog. If you still feel you don’t have a pitch for your blog or you are unsure whether its the proper one, then take some time to think one. If you, yourself is not clear about it, then how would you expect your readers to get it too?

What do you think about elevator pitch for blogging? What is your own pitch for your blog? My blog pitch is “Internet Marketing for Bloggers” or some variations of it. I would be pretty interested to know yours as well.

Start A Logo Contest at LogoMyWay – LogoMyWay.com Review

by Melvin · Mar 14, 2010

This is a paid review sponsored by LogoMyWay.com

By now, you should’ve already realized that logo is probably the most important aspect of your design. Not only that it symbolizes your brand, but also it’s the first one that your audience see when they reach your site. So for a very small space, you already get to express what your site is all about.

One of the common mistakes that I see in most bloggers is that they don’t seem to place that much importance in investing a logo for their site. And much worse is that they don’t even think it’s a necessity for their blog! I know it has been emphasized a lot but Im going to repeat it again, having a high quality logo for your site is a must. That’s the big difference between someone who is serious in his online business from someone who’s not.

LogoMyWay.com Introduction

I was contacted if I could take a look on the site LogoMyWay.com. The site is basically a crowdsourcing logo design marketplace that connects designers and business owners. Crowdsourcing here is the key. For a minimum of $200 you can get hundreds of talented designers all over the world to design a custom logo for your websites/blogs. The beauty of the crowdsourcing model is that you basically enjoy their concepts yet you’re not obligated to pay all of them. You will only pay the design that you want the most.

Going in depth, this is how the process go:

You basically register with them first, then go on and submit your project description including all your requirements. this includes all the basic stuffs such as your site’s name, your slogan, preferred style, font and the color schemes.
After that you specify the prize you’re willing to give to the winner (obviously the higher the better).
Then your contest will go live, you’ll receive a ton of entries and the good thing is you could rank them up or completely ditch the ones that you don’t like. You could also make adjustments within your contest. If you feel something is lacking, you can elaborate your requirements more.
After the contest ends you can basically pick your winner. The winner gets the money and you then receive Industry Standard Vector Logo Files that can be used in almost any application you choose. (Websites, T-Shirts, Mugs, Pens, Business Cards Etc.).

The process is pretty simple and logomyway handles everything reliably. So far I haven’t really seen or heard any problems about them.

Crowdsourcing vs the Traditional Design Process

I am fortunate enough to have my own sets of designers who do this work for me so I really haven’t done any logo contests projects before. But if you’re starting out from scratch, meaning you don’t have any connection, it would be a little bit tough to find a designer willing to do work for you. In fact, most of the designers that you can find through forums are the crappy ones as most of the premium ones aren’t usually available for work. Another downside is the high cost.

Crowdsourcing on the other hand is perfect especially if you are looking to get as much ideas as possible. And the great thing about it is you’re not committed to pay those people to take time and do designs for you. You just pay the best design, no questions asked. I’d highly recommend this model to you especially if you’re starting from nothing and have no connections at all.

Final Thoughts On LogoMyWay

Overall I can say LogoMyWay.com is a pretty decent crowdsourcing site. The only other site that I see competing against them is 99designs.com w/c is more established due to the fact that it has been in the business for a long time.

The one key advantage that I see in using this logo design company is that it solely focuses on logo and for me it’s always a plus to be with a company that specializes in only ONE thing.

In terms of quality of logos, just by browsing the current logo contests you can rest assure that the designers participating there are top-notch designers and that would be evident with the logo entries.

What do you think guys? Have you ever had any experience (both good and bad) with LogoMyWay? I know the owner would be very happy to get your insights about them by using the comment form.