MelvinBlog

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

Internet Marketing

The Big Glitch In Guest Posting

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By now you probably have been already told that the quickest way for a brand new blog to get traffic and build some buzz is by doing guest posting. It doesn’t just apply to new blogs, it also applies to mid cap blogs like my blog and probably your blog. To sum it up, doing guest posts is vital in increasing your blog’s brand awareness.

Anyways, I’m always a good observant when it comes to the blogosphere and all the things that are currently happening in it. And one thing I noticed is that there is “somehow” a big glitch in guest posting (glitch means minor problem, adding the word big means it’s a big problem, lols!).

It usually happens like this. A famous blogger is entering a busy weekend thus no time for blogging. Then he would offer his readers to guest post. Lastly he would publish the said post. Where’s the problem? Well if you observe it’s not hard to figure out that the certain guest post SUCKS! In formal terms, it doesn’t meet the quality that the owner usually publishes. What the heck? How is that possible?

This is debatable and many will not agree with me. That happens simply because of the fact that the owner blogger is busy. When someone submits a guest article, the owner doesn’t really read it, he just skims at it! He just looks at the basic things, the grammar, spelling, if the sentence makes sense, if the paragraph is well done and etc. They don’t really analyze that much if it’s a generic boring article or a regurgitated concept. In the end they think like it’s better to post something than have nothing for your readers right? Wrong!

This is obviously a big glitch. It harms both blogs. No one will click on the link of the guest poster because the blog post sucks and on the other hand, the loyal readers of the famous blog would feel bad that the quality they used to see is not met. And worse, they might start lose your trust if you do it again and again. Reputation tarnished!

Guest posting is good, cool and nice. You reap both benefits. But if done like the way I mentioned above, it becomes a recipe for failure. This is my call both to guest posters and the blog owners. Be sure to do it right.

Do You Know You’re a Boring Blogger?

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The number 1 advice people always say to you to succeed in blogging is that you need to create good and high quality content. So there ya go! Because of it you’re forced to write articles like a freelancer, you’re fed into acting like you need to be like Darren Rowse and stuffs. The end result, you become a boring blogger.

Most people get it wrong by thinking that writing top-notch content is all about the perfectness of the grammar, the formality of how words are written and just sounding absolutely professional. Believe me it’s not! The problem with most bloggers is that they try to be perfect and because of that, they sound like a robot. It’s just like reading an article in a monotonous tone. Try reading books in your school library and you’ll know what I mean.

Ironically sometimes, you don’t realize that you’re starting to bore your readers to death. Results? A decline from just about everything (readers, subscribers, traffic , etc). Anyways here I compiled a list why you might be or starting to become a boring blogger:

  • You sound like a lawyer – and you don’t need to. I don’t know but professional blogging for me is not really about being professional words-wise or with the proper grammar and stuffs. Pro Blogging is about treating blogging as a serious business. So if you’re a 15 year old kid who’s trying to sound like your teacher, then you’re not helping your blog.
  • Generic Articles – generic articles is a really big NO NO. Or at least minimize it. Generic articles is like the ones that has been tackled 300 million of times and you still tackled it and talked it in a none unique way. Articles like “how to earn money from blogging” or “Make Money By starting a blog”. You see, it’s hard not to regurgitate a topic. But you make it unique from the rest by adding something unique and breaking it down to more specific topics.
  • Transformed into a  news site – Blogs like TechCrunch can certainly do this considering the audience that they have right now but smaller bloggers SHOULD NOT. I see a lot of bloggers just writing the same news on their blogs w/c really adds 0 value. Just because Dennis Yu is popular,  does it mean you have to write about him too?
  • All Promotional stuffs – I guess we can blame a guy named John Chow for this? lols. It turns me off so much when I see someone promotes a product for the obvious sake of just earning a commission. How many times do you see someone make a clickbank product writeup and then recommend it to people w/o even him knowing what the product is really all about? Booooring stuff!

There’s nothing wrong in being quirky and putting some humor in your posts. At least in this way, you don’t get to have them have the impression that you’re a lame, boring blogger that makes  “robot-ish” sounding articles. By not being that, you are easily separating yourself away from 70% of the bloggers. What do you think? Does this article make any sense to you?

Really Want To Make Money? – Find Your Strengths!

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I remember when I was just getting started with my making money ventures I was like “I want to try this, want to try that and whatever”. My mentality was like I want to try everything so that when something fails, there’s still a good chance some of the methods I tried would work. Imagine if I would try 20 different money-making tactics, maybe at least 1 or 2 would succeed. Did I do the right thing? NO!

The Problem Noobs Encounter

When some new guy is entering the industry, you could easily expect that guy to be full of energy and enthusiasm. Or maybe inspiration for some people. Like my case, they jump into everything head first and has that aggressive mentality and “hail Mary please work” mindset. But it isn’t wrong right? The answer is YES and NO.

I’ve written a lot here in the blog about how people should TAKE ACTION and I know other million dozen bloggers say the same. It’s true, you won’t succeed reading for 10 years before acting. But the same can be also said to being too aggressive. I had this cousin who really wanted to jump into affiliate marketing and because she’s really wealthy, she dived into it without having any basic startup knowledge. The result was she lost a ton of money.

You know me, I really love to test, love to take advantage of “unheard” stuffs and just always think outside the box. But do bare in mind that I can already afford to fail given my experience with internet marketing. If you’re a noob, has no money and has that unnerving mindset then LISTEN. I know it’s cool to look real brave, its good for the ego for people to see you as a courageous newbie business person. But don’t be an idiot. Work your way up first before acting like you’ve done it already.

Finding Your Strengths

Just because you heard arbitrage is cool, doesn’t mean you have to go into it. I hear a lot of people saying “I heard this thing makes big money, I heard I could become a millionaire with this and that”. That’s exactly the no.1 recipe for failure.

If you really want to start making money, then start analyzing your strengths. Start planning the directions you’re going to take. Narrow down your huge options and think. I understand everyone wants to be that “entrepreneur”, a CEO-like business person who is at the top, foreseeing whats happening, getting the biggest money but you have to understand it’s not gonna happen. Successful freelancers remain as freelancers, graphic artists could never become programmers and bloggers as CEO is far-fetched.

What do you think? Do you think you’re playing the game using your strengths or playing it with others strength? Let me know by using the contact form below..

Conversion Testing Is Old School

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Anyone in the internet marketing niche would easily agree that conversion testing is vital. For those who don’t know it, conversion testing is simply doing different testings (a & b or c&d or whatever!) that could make an impact on conversions. Let’s say I’m selling an info product. I created several landing page with totally different looks. One has red fonts and the other one has white big fonts (just an example). After quite some time I found out that the white one converts 10% more than the other.

Conversion Testing Is Important Yet…

Doing several testings could give you an increase (or decrease) in sales as high as 200% BUT I’m going to tell you it’s mind-boggling. Why? Because you really have to study a lot of variables side by side! And these are variables that we rarely have control about.

Example is if you changed lets say you’re buy now button to orange and increased your font by 1px. Then you saw a 10% increase in your sales, does that mean the change in buy now button impacted the increase? or the increase in font size? Or maybe that’s because it’s promoted during weekends (where most people don’t go in office)? Get my point?

Testing is something that I have deal with for a long time with me being an affiliate marketer. Rotating multiple ads, using  several trigger statements, split-testing on different keywords, name it! And yet I don’t still consider myself a good one and mostly people really don’t become one.

Build Good Relationships Instead…

Yaro of Entrepeneurs-Journey once revealed he hates all conversion testing stuffs and so he doesn’t do it. Yet, he makes a good chunk of income with all his products and membership sites. And that’s because of how he was able to manage good relationship with his readers and subscribers, his potential customers.

Building a good relationship ALONE can make a big difference. And unlike conversion testing, this is something that you have control with. Write good blog posts, provide something for your readers, give free high quality products, reward loyal followers and the list goes on.

When these people at certain point see you sell something to them they would say, “Ah, this guy treated me well.  I learned a lot from him and he’s awesome. Regardless of whatever pitch, I’m going to buy because he has proven he’s for real!” Isn’t it heart-warming to hear that statement from your customers?

What Now?

All those testing and marketing stuffs have been there even before internet marketing started. And they would stay forever. But why jump into it if you can do it the different way, yet easier and probably more profitable? I don’t know but I think marketers have to start thinking “modern ways”. Love to hear what you have to say about it..

The Death Of Site Flipping

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Probably all of you now know the term “Site flipping” as it’s had its growth late last year up to the middle season this year. During it’s growth over a hundred info products teaching people flipping started to come across and it seemed like everyone wanted to get on that bandwagon immediately.

And as of this writing the hype of site flipping has really seemed to plummet. Death of site flipping mania? Probably yes, not in the sense that no one is making good money anymore with flipping websites and blogs. Death in the sense that probably people have realized it’s not really as easy as counting numbers and hence they moved on a completely different thing now.

I don’t know but I think the business model really became saturated (with noobs) when its growth skyrocketed. I mean the ratio on seeing a new startup site get listed on major marketplaces is just astounding, as if the potential buyers are dumbass stupid business people. Obviously what happened was that people created tons of startup sites only to get stucked on their  own server after some time. That’s the problem when one doesn’t have an idea of running a website properly.

So that has what happened. It’s funny to think these people are selling startup sites they boast to become ‘profitable’ YET they themselves couldn’t monetize it. I’m not ranting but I just think people need to learn first before jumping into ANY business model.

Too late to profit then from this business model? Naah, the whole point in this article is that people may have somehow realized site flipping is MORE than just installing wordpress on their sites and cranking out cheap dirt articles (and saying its SEO’d!). I am no site flipper myself although I have sold good websites in the past few years and my piece of advice is that, just try to put yourself in the position of your potential buyers. Are you gonna buy the crap out of that site? (be honest!)

I Am Going To Steal Your Ebook!

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Disclaimer: This is not a post teaching you to do this evil thing. I, myself  HAVE NEVER EVER stolen any eBook. I don’t need to, I make enough money to live. Just look at this post as a guide to have a basic understanding on how this process works and how you can protect yourself when you do selling eBooks.

Internet Marketing in whatever niche you are, involves a lot of selling. And 90% of the products is what we known as info products or eBooks. But do you know that most of the eBooks that these people are selling are usually just ripped off for free? Or do you know that a lot of people have a ton of good quality eBooks they don’t even pay for? Well I’m sure you, as a reader of this blog are selling ebooks, or have plans of doing it, so this post can be a good read for you.

So most people do sell ebook via Clickbank. In selling, you are required to do two pages.  First is the salespage itself, where you would pitch your  offer and the second is the thank you page, a page where a paying customer would be redirected once they have made the payment. The problem that I see most of the time is that any user can easily access the thank you page!

One good example is the sales page Problogging BluePrint. So the main page is the index page while the download page is just located in /thanks.html part. Fortunately the link is broken (and its unfortunate for paying customers!). The surprising thing is that most salespage function that way! They have their download page accessible almost by anyone! I mean the usual locations are the ff:

  • /thanks.html
  • /thanks.php
  • /download
  • /download.html
  • several variations

That’s why Im not surprised that a lot of info products just leak like crazy. Another bone head mistake most marketers do is make use of robots.txt. Oh my god! I mean yes you can tell the search engine to hide your download page but have you forgotten humans can read it? So if you guys want to steal someone’s ebook all you have to do is try to go /robots.txt and see the page that they disallow, LOLS… Another problem is the noticeable increase of PDF search engines. It’s surprising that a lot of popular eBook shows up on sites like pdfsearchengine. So altogether, it’s an uphill battle to combat eBook fraud and many people so far fail to do it!

How Do I Protect My Ebook?

Well this post is not really a guide on info product protection but since we’re here Im going to give you some brief explanation of what I know. If you’re a clickbank merchant, make sure to have a third party plugin to protect your download page. One that I came across through is DlGuard. Since I have never done any clickbank thing I would suggest you to do your own research as to what the reliable third party plugins are.

If you’re just selling a product yourself, using e-junkie is the smartest thing. E-Junkie is one of the leaders in terms of handling info product automation, payment and delivering the product itself. So far I haven’t heard any issues about using it and even the top marketers like Darren Rowse is using it. $10 per month is a reasonable price for the protection that it gives.

Lastly, always do a simple Google check for your eBook to see if some asshole is sharing it. Use the query “title of your ebook” filetype:PDF, and then scan the search results THOROUGHLY. It’s because sometimes you protect your download page a lot that you forget the file itself. Again some morons do buy it only to share it to other people while other people accidentally (or not) stores it on their server only to leak when someone does a search. Just consider doing this like a maintenance thing.

It can also be a good option to use the PDF search engines we mentioned earlier to your advantage. Search for your eBook, then if you find it, contact the site owner and tell him to remove it (or send him a DMCA notice). Obviously when someone shares it, he knows it’s illegal so he’d just more likely laugh at you when you contact him. The best thing to do is send the notice to their hosting provider by doing a quick whois on the site that distributes your copy illegally.

Conclusion:

Selling eBooks is a big and still growing industry and unfortunately not a lot of people are techy enough to protect the hardwork they exerted. Protecting your own info product can be really hard but there are ways. Im not saying people are evil but put yourself in their situation. You are craving for some expensive info product and you see a flaw that would make it free for you, are you not going to download it? The obvious answer is the answer for 98% of us!

I don’t know about you but if you’re just letting your product leak like waterpipes, then I think your product and you deserves to be ripped off for free. After all security is part of any business model both online and offline that should never be neglected.  I would really love to have your opinion about it. Or maybe you can share your own tips that you implement yourself!

Problogger Forums Is Fine As Long As…

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Darren Rowse, the genius behind the popular blog Problogger has already launched the forum which is more known as the Problogger Community. Although he hasn’t yet made a formal announcement of it in his blog, the community is rapidly growing already with over 3000 members on board . Some of the prominent figures I’ve seen there are the likes of Daniel Scocco (DailyBlogTips), Jim Kukral (JimKukral.com), David Risley (DavidRisley.com) and more.

Although there is no scarcity in blogging forums, the Problogger Community is still expected to surpass all other forums and get to the top in no time. Registration is NOT free but at $1.95, heck it’s a bargain. According to most, this registration fee exists to filter out spammers. The price is set to increase soon so if you’re planning to register then the best time to do it is now.

The forum is going to be big soon and there’s no doubt about it. But on whether it can be different on other blogging forums remains to be unseen. I have been doing some detective works and observing the forums. To be honest, the forum is really good because there aren’t so many categories yet it’s not lacking anything it seems. But still I am seeing a lot of reasons why this forum can be just your another average blogging forum and here are the reasons:

  • Experts Are NOT going to lurk there – The main selling point of the forum I believe is that it’s packed with several authorities in the niche. While it can really be exciting (and astounding), it’s still the fact that these bloggers won’t devote 10% of their time in that forum. I mean these bloggers are business guys and they are busy for most part of the day so I don’t see any reason for them to lurk over there. And if I’m correct, then the main selling point is canceled out already.
  • New Forum, Same Mindset – People who go to forums usually just go there to make promotions and marketing, both direct and indirect (debatable). Aside from its a paid membership, there is really no difference between it and other blogging forums. The rules are kinda the same. You still see people drop gazillion of links (like me, or Im just joking!), see annoying members, and see a lot of blog critiques with less than 2 critiques! The forums shows leniency and in my opinion I think it needs to be more strict.
  • Lurking is Bad – Like what I’ve talked here in the blog about lurking on forums, I think it can still harm people’s productivity. Most bloggers love to lurk and waste their time lurking. Im sure they enjoy it but since they joined the Problogger Community, then I’m assuming they want to be a professional blogger. And hurting your productivity doesn’t help to become a Pro Blogger.
  • Getting Bigger – Theoretically there’s nothing wrong on having a large forums, but I always prefer smaller forums. Why? Because a smaller forum can give you a tighter community where everyone really gets to maximize every benefit they could ever gain. It builds better relationship amongst bloggers and it can really help benefit everyone. Digital Point Forums and Warrior Forum used to be a good forum and it only gets out of hand when it became highly populated. You can post a thread asking for something and in the next 20 minutes your thread is already on the third page w/no replies. Big is good, but toooo big is not!

I don’t have anything against the new community. If I have, then why would I join? Why would I care about writing this post? It’s a good forum that can be a future source of awesome content to the right person. But as far as seeing the difference of it to other blogging or webmaster-related forums, I don’t see much. I may be correct and I may not be. And someone can prove me wrong here.