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

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How ‘Not’ to Have a Successful a Guest Post

by Melvin · May 22, 2009

I have already  seen many guides on making an effective guest posts so I thought I would create one that is quite completely the opposite. 🙂

Anyways you might have seen me do guest articles on some blogs related to this niche. And to tell you honestly, guest post is really a great way to reach out to newer audience and types of people, interactive with them and hopefully have them following your blog. As I have been doing guest posts since last year I have learned a lot of stuffs about it and today I want to share you what are the things that you should do if you want to have your guest post suck big time:

  1. Crappy grammar – Well I have had some problems before with this because usually I just type what’s on my mind spontaneously so grammars had become one of my problems before. If you are no-english native, that doesn’t mean you should write posts with grammatical errors. But still if you like ‘Not” to have a successful guest post, then do your crappy article!
  2. Don’t comment/interact – While I don’t really respond to all comments, I try to interact as much as I can especially with guest posts. There is no worse thing than when a reader asks something on that certain post w/o getting a response from the guest blogger. Responding and interacting with them is like giving them another reason to subscribe and follow your blog. But anyway don’t respond back especially if you don’t want your author bio link to be clicked.
  3. Be boring – Every blogger has his one tone and by trying to pretend you are somebody is a big ‘YES’ if you want to have an unsuccessful guest post. If you speak like ‘chow’ then so be it! If not, readers would surely get bored with your ‘professional-like, pretending’ tone.
  4. Self-Promo Bio box – It’s not wrong to say that you are a ’10 year old blogger who has some experience in blogging’. But saying stuffs in bio box like ‘a guy who is making six figures a month and by purchasing my book you can learn how to’ is a big no no! The bio box plays a crucial role because it gives a short overview of who you really are and what value they can get from you in case they want to visit your blog. The box is not for bragging and self-promo but still if you think it can help you go ahead. Congrats, because you are destined to have no clickers for your link. 😀
  5. Full of fluffs – I have to confess that during my early days of guest posting, I get a rate of 10% success in guest posting! 90% won’t even get passed the owners approval because of fluffs and some nonsense in the article. Remember blog owners expect articles that are even better than what they are writing, so they expect you to write ‘scholarly’. Put fluffs and prepare to be criticized!
  6. Direct them to your front page – Ok here’s an example. On normal days this blog gets 150-250 uniques a day. On days where my posts on some blogs are published, I get 250-350 uniques. A 100 increase isn’t that high eh? Yes it isn’t (or it is depending on who you are), but on normal days my blog gets 700-900 pageviews and on ‘guest posting’ days it gets over 1500-2000! Why? Simply because of the use of landing page. LP is simply a page where the visitors  land. Here’s my landing page for instance. The page simply contains an explanation w/what your blog gives and what your best/helpful posts are. To be honest when reading a new blog for the first time using their LP, I usually subscribe after getting to read their best posts! It can increase conversions up to 50% depending on how you carve out your own.

Over the past years I think I have improved a lot in terms of making a guest post. Guest posts are really beneficial in such a way that it can simply bring you a lot. I know some of you have also your own ups and downs with guest posts so feel free to share your thoughts (or critique!).

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Social Media, Traffic Tagged With: Guest Post, guest posting, unsuccessful guest post

Driving Traffic With BlogCatalog

by Melvin · May 9, 2009

Blogcatalog is one heck of a social community website with hundreds of thousands of users everyday. The best thing about the users there is they’re so active. In case you don’t know, blogcatalog is one of biggest traffic referrals on this blog when it was on its earlier stages. Traffic from there is really massive and its just the matter of how you are going to convert them into loyal subscribers.

Well everything started really well with me using blogcatalog until I abused them and I got banned eventually. Anyway right now I am going to share some really good tips to you on how you can get a share of the massive traffic on BG:

  1. Carve out your profile well – It’s funny that a lot of people after signing up don’t even look to edit their profile page. They immediately jump into discussions w/c is wrong. By having a nice written profile, you’re giving yourself a chance to really introduce who you are, what niche you are into and what are your blogs.
  2. Add Friends & Interact – Like any social community, blogcatalog allows you to add friends and grow your own community. The more friends you have the more traffic and readership you would get from it. So take some time to scan profiles there and hopefully interact with them the right way. Add me as your friend. 😉
  3. Discussions – The discussions page probably is the most trafficked part of it. This is a part where there is a free-flowing discussions of literally about everything. Make sure you blend well w/it. If utilized properly it can bring you hundred uniques a day. Don’t be spammy as people there easily remember who adds value and who adds crap! A bad rep is not good!
  4. Join Communities – By joining communities you are putting yourself in a larger scheme of people w/common goals. Examples of the communities there are the “stumble” community, the “make-money-online”, the technorati, the twitter community and a whole lot more.
  5. Paid Sponsorship – There are two options in this one, first is the premium sponsorship w/c costs $60 and the category position ad w/c costs $8 per month. I find the rates really cheap since what you’re getting by having your site there is just too much. I’ve tried the $8 per month on my other blogs and I would say it really converted well. If you have some budget to promote, then I would really recommend this option.

All in all blogcatalog is really a nice social community. You want traffic, you get the traffic! But getting traffic is not the end right? We, as bloggers or marketers have to find our own ways on how we can convert their curiosity to loyalty. How we can convert those first time visits, into returning readers. It’s not about the quantity of traffic, it’s about the quality of it.  What do you think?

Filed Under: Blogging Experience, Blogging Tips, Social Media, Traffic Tagged With: Blogcatalog, traffic blogcatalog

I Thought It’s Hard To Edit Wikipedia!

I Thought It’s Hard To Edit Wikipedia!

by Melvin · Nov 11, 2008

Update: About 5 minutes after this post wikipedia removed those two names and well its not surprising. However if you search for the terms “melvin azoogle” or “raymille azoogle” the edited wiki page still comes up on Google.

Wikipedia is probably one of the more resourceful internet online encyclopedia (free) nowadays. The thing is that everyone can edit wikipedia. But then, its hard to game wikipedia because oftentimes they will check teh edited content and then 90% of the time, they will just reject your edited part. That’s understandable because Wiki is probably the most established encyclopedia site we have on earth today. 🙂

Anyway last week, we did some editing for some part of the wikipedia and we just did it for fun, to be honest. Obviously we’re putting up crap on some wiki pages. As I was browsing today, I was shocked to see that one page particularly about Azoogle that we edited I think was accepted. The Wikipedia about Azoogle today has my name into it as CFO and my friend Raymille Belleza as a hotdog Vendor. LOL…

I thought its hard to edit a wiki page!

Anyway, again I know this doesn’t really make any sense at all but then I think this must be something Wikipedia needs to work for! If each page could be edited w/o much effort, then probably wiki is not most reliable source then, or at least reliable source for people. Wht do you think?

Filed Under: Offtopic, Preachings, Social Media Tagged With: azoogleads, gaming wikipedia, wikipedia

Sphinn Is More Than A Social Network

by Melvin · Aug 12, 2008

SphinnLike any other stuffs in the world, social networks have increased a lot these days. You can submit your own content, find great discussions and chunk in with a lot of traffic. But well not all managed to create a buzz for themselves. So now I am going to talk about Sphinn, a social network for everyone who is involve in internet marketing, SEO, and blogging and so. Sphinn probably is one of my big favorites. It is owned by SEO godfather Danny Sullivan. They are like digg (not as polluted though) wherein you can submit your content. People who like it will sphinn it and those who do not will bury it.

One thing with I like with Sphinn is that it’s very educational and you can learn a lot from it. Before I used to jack up my content there and hope for a share of traffic. When you look at Sphinn, it has a lot of interesting posts there gathered and compiled. Unlike Digg who can easily be gamed, Sphinn prefers to be different. I like the way they nofollow links from the sites that do not hit the frontpage. It’s a great way to measure the quality of the articles. Most of the articles and entries there are about SEO and SEM which I am very interested about.

Oh well… Maybe someday they can release a book with the compilations of the best entries. Just my 2 cents

Filed Under: SEO, Social Media Tagged With: SEO, social network, Sphinn

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