A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.
Getting one of your social media channels hacked isn’t anything new these days however it doesn’t make it less frightening whenever that happens. Recently my Instagram account got compromised and you bet that made me crazy even though I know I’m the one to blame for not having a secure enough password. I’ll detail how it happened and how I recovered it in this blog post.
[Read more…] about How I Recovered my Hacked Instagram Account
2016 is going to be the 8th year of this blog, and I (somehow) feel very proud that I’ve managed to run this blog for that long even though my posting has been somewhat inconsistent for the last couple of years or so. What are my plans for 2016 for myself and this blog? I’m not sure I can answer that but if you’re craving to read some ramblings about this, then read on.
Uber entered the country early in 2014 and the first time I heard and tried it was around September of the same year. I already know what Uber was but I never thought it would be possible for it to be available in the Philippines due to the country being poor (no pun-intended). Now that it’s here for more than a year, I figured that considering doing an Uber business is not too insane to consider.
I have not really written here for a long while now but I wanted to take this time and greet everyone a merry merry Christmas (or Happy Hanukkah if you’re a Jew). Be sure to enjoy the holidays but at the same time don’t consume too much alcohol and unhealthy foods. :p
I have been meaning to write another post soon where I would disclose more about what I do these days but for the sake of brevity, I have sort of settled for a more normal life (as some of you probably know already). I took a job in mid 2010 and I still am working for the same company as of this writing. Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen. 🙂
As for online stuff, I have mostly been helping out some friends with their basic SEO stuff and have been dabbling with some freelance work (fyi I have been since 2009). And finally, the only personal project that I have been working on sort of is my Headphone Philippines website. The progress is going quite well since I started putting in more time on it during the middle of this year. Nonetheless, I’m quite excited for the potential of this even though I’m not really on it for money.
So that’s it! Again have a merry and fruitful Christmas and a happy new year!
Despite of me being totally busy with work and other stuff, I decided to launch a new website purely based on it being a hobby (or maybe not even really). ‘Passion projects’ aren’t really the best thing in life because aside from the fact that it doesn’t give you assurance of making money, its also a time sink and something that could hinder you from doing other things that are more “worth it” financially speaking. But life is all about being happy eh? 😛
[Read more…] about A New Challenge — Effectively Marketing a Local Website
If there’s a type of blog entry that is potentially getting traffic from search right now, its undoubtedly your old blog entries. As we all know, search engine traffic takes time. No one really writes or puts out something, and then expects search engines to start sending traffic to that content as soon as its published. That’s why its really more long term and that I always tell people to just do the basic search stuff, but not get too obsessed with it. In short, do other online marketing stuff as well and don’t really on Google.
In this blog entry I would just like to share some rambling stuff regarding search engine traffic here in this blog. As you all know, I haven’t been blogging actively for quite a while now and in fact I’m not that much into the game anymore. So understandably, the traffic that this site is getting is considerably lower than ever. And because of that, its easier for me to spot the increased search traffic that I started getting.
While the traffic increase for the past 18 months is not massive, its very evident that I started getting more traffic from search and that comes with me not posting that much during the period of increase. And the traffic is still consistent as of this writing. More search traffic when not posting too much, amazing? No.
The truth is even if I am posting consistently, I would still get the same (or more) amount of search traffic because the content that are getting the hits from search are old blog entries.
Now I’m not really a search guy. I wrote before about writing for search engines but I don’t mostly work with doing SEO stuff. I love putting out content and engaging but I’m not a search guy. However, the reason I started getting more search traffic is quite a bit surprising.
About 3 years ago I wrote a cheesy post about the best birthday gift for the girl that I love (or more accurately I have a crush with). That was college days so please understand that I was dealing with puppy loves and whatnot. :p. Now, I noticed that I started getting like 10-20 hits a day regarding keywords related to that blog entry. I was obviously surprised because the article was not written in a way that one would expect it would get traffic.
So when I got convinced that I had to do something to get better traffic, I studied the Analytics and Webmaster Central data even more. And then I edited the said blog entry to try to ‘massage’ it more and eventually get better rankings. I’m not really able to follow it closely because of work but for the past 2 months, I realized that I’m now getting 30-50 hits from search from keywords that are related to that blog entry. It was fascinating because I never really expected it to get traffic from search at all. Also, its on the first page of Google right now when you search for ‘best birthday gifts for girls’ which I thought was amazing.
And now there are some other keywords that I never intended to rank for that are ranking well and are getting me some traffic.
So what’s the moral lesson of this blog post? The lesson is to never underestimate traffic from search engines. But another is that when you feel like you are starting to get some, don’t be afraid to make modifications to that specific blog post. You have all the data to look at from Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Central and it reveals almost everything to help you. Do some tweaks and those little tweaks can definitely help.
My stance on not getting too caught up with doing SEO is still the same and I don’t still consider myself as a guy doing search engine optimization primarily but it definitely gives me some things to experiment for now. And getting search traffic and maximizing it is something that I know will be useful in the long run.
How about you? What’s your no.1 tip in maximizing search traffic?
It’s been a while since I created a guide on blog marketing/driving traffic to a blog and obviously the need to update the material has occurred to me. Especially with the fact that I got lots of feedback based on the old one that I created and those feedback that I received were really good.
Now if you haven’t been reading my blog since last year, then the book that I’m referring to is the one entitled ‘Blog Marketing for Fame’. This free guide generally received positive feedback from most of my readers and I was happy with how it turned out. There were a couple of good suggestions that I put into work with regards to the new one.
So there I upgraded the guide and it has been rebranded as …
Aside from the old one having a long flimsy name, another reason for the renaming of the book is the fact that there’s really no guide on blog marketing in general available. And perhaps, ‘Blog Marketing Guide‘ as a name is pretty good and something easy to remember. It may not really be the perfect name for now but its something that’s good to start with.
The book just like most of my guides are free if you subscribe to my newsletter which is totally a no-brainer if you ask me. :p. The book has 5 general sections on how and where you can get traffic plus a detailed explanation/elaboration of the different things that I do that has worked extremely well for myself and hopefully can also work for you.
But the book isn’t really just the cool stuff here as the newsletter is the one that I would say I’m pretty proud of. Over the past few years I haven’t really had gotten a huge amount of people on my list. I have a couple of hundreds to be honest but I’m very proud to say that the community in my newsletter is a tightly-knit interactive group. Lastly, I usually put out lots of great advice and tips that I normally don’t publish here. And hey there were a couple of times that I even gave free goodies there. 🙂
Pretty simple. Just like in my old post about most bloggers failing at marketing, the reason I created this thing is to be able to help out lots of bloggers on how they can market their blogs competitively.
Not much has really changed. Most bloggers aren’t still good at marketing their stuff and its pretty understandable. When I was getting started I looked at blogging as just writing and I believe this is how most bloggers trying to carve their niche look at blogging as well. Obviously its the wrong way to look at it.
We, bloggers have to be somehow in the middle of ‘writers’ and internet marketers (salesmen). We need to write out our usual selves while being good enough to promote it and get enough people in our community. But we don’t need to sound like those marketers right? Nor do we need to push out one product after the other just to get affiliate sales. In short, we don’t want any part of being salesy yet we want to know how to market.
Hopefully that’s what the Blog Marketing Guide brings to the table.
So that’s my reason. Again, your feedback is highly appreciated and feel free to get this guide across the blogosphere.