MelvinBlog

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

Internet Marketing

Revisiting Online Profits Membership and My Experience

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Online Profits Training ProgramYou could remember last June that I reviewed OnlineProfits.com, an internet marketing course maintained by the ever popular Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips. In that post, I provided a comprehensive analysis of what the program is really all about and how you can benefit from it. Now in this post, I’d like to get back on the program and see how it’s been doing so far.

The main reason why I took the course is to add up my knowledge on the subject of internet marketing. While I’d always like to call and believe myself as an internet marketer, I somehow feel I lack that basic foundation. As many of you know, I didn’t have any formal education of marketing and with that I realized I need to know at least the abc’s that I may not be aware with in the first place.

So in the first seven days, I was really ecstatic. I’m all over the members area almost like a mad man scrambling for information (even though I don’t need to). My thinking was the course used to cost $50 a month and it sold out on less than 10 days so for me to get it for free, it’s insane! Well after that initial excitement, I started focusing more while reading less. I started using more the resources tool and the tools area.

The resources area is just amazing. There are a lot of stuff there that the membership site gives away for free. You don’t see a lot of Woothemes theme being given away nor do some premium wordpress plugins that usually sell in for 30 bucks. But it’s all for FREE.  The tools are is for more the geeky ones or the ones who’d like to do research more on niche. In that page you’ll see 20+ useful tools that you can use to research or optimize what you’re doing.

The social club is also a nice bonus as it contains mini clubs that agree on a common goal. For instance, there’s this retweet club wherein all members do is retweet each other’s articles and there’s also the WeVote club which is more for social bookmarking.

There’s a little forum but as of the moment it isnt really as high-traffic as some of the other forums. But if you’re a newbie, Daniel lurks there a lot so expect your concerns to be answered immediately.

Do I like it? Guess what?

While I haven’t read the main lessons that much, I’m happy with what I’m getting so far. The Live case studies portion is awesome and that’s probably the proof that what’s inside the program really works.

What I like about it the most is that its not full of hype. When you’re inside the membership area, you wouldn’t see those animated flashy designs saying “you’re now ready for financial freedom” or variations like that. Instead, you’d feel that your inside a real internet marketing training sessions. The lessons are well organized, not cluttered and Daniel is quick in helping everyone.

As I’ve said the program used to cost $392 in total, and Daniel decided to make it open to public for FREE because he believes more interaction inside is much better than cash. Go now and become a member of OnlineProfits Membership site.

Here’s the Catch

Here’s something that would further more sweeten this deal. As some of you know, the membership program is FREE but you have to avail hosting from its partner Hosting Nine. So basically, you need to sign up for a hosting deal under OnlineProfits to be able to get the program for free.

I know some people have problem with it due to the fact that they already have their own hosting. So here’s my sweet deal. Sign up to OnlineProfits.com under me by clicking any link in this post, follow all the steps, pay the hosting and I’ll reimburse everything that you paid. That’s right, I’ll initially cover your hosting by doing so.

So doing the math, you will basically get the OnlineProfits membership program for free and also you get free hosting courtesy of MelvinBlog.com. How nice is that? 😀 All you have to do upon paying for the hosting is email me your receipt ID from Hosting Nine and I’ll refund your money asap. Let me know!

Making Money Isn’t Really Hard, It’s Just a Lot of Hard Work

Making Money Isn’t Really Hard, It’s Just a Lot of Hard Work

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The hype with making tons of cash from blogging has considerably gone down for the past few years as probably a lot of people have realized that the hype surrounding blogging is all but hype. In fact I’ve seen a lot of people quit blogging to focus on doing  more “secure” stuffs like a day job or a real offline business.

I remember when the make money blogging hype is on its peak, people have the mentality of like “I need to put this ad to make some serious cash”. Of course I was one of those people. I had my little basketball blog back then plastered with all sort kinds of banners, CPM, CPC, CPA, you name it. Of course it all backfired for me. The only positive thing then was that I am enjoying running a basketball site. It’s my passion, my hobby.

Eventually and fortunately I said to myself, “bug this! I’m not gonna do any money-related strategy, Im just gonna do what I enjoy, I’d write posts after posts and just do my thing. A kid like me should be enjoying life anyway!” And it was a crucial turning point for me.

After almost a year, the blog started gaining traffic and then money afterwards. The blog was doing good in page impressions that the CPM banners that I used to hate before started giving me respectable daily earnings. Then I started getting private ads from big sports-related companies and it really blew off for me. For some people the money I made back then may not probably be that big, but for an enthusiastic kid like me, it’s an unforgettable experience.

I always reflect back to it and I love telling this story to my friends over and over again. And I’m always amaze when my friends respond to me and say “wow that’s a ton of work. I can’t imagine myself putting that much hard work!”

Looking back, I didn’t really realize that what I did was “a ton” of hard work. All i knew was I was putting up some posts on how this New York Knicks suck, on how LeBron James is the best player ever and stuffs. Heck, I enjoy it so it must not be really hard work.

And oh, what you read above is the elongated version of my about page. 😉

Disparity between Hard and hard work

I used to do lots of programming back in college and so if you know everything about it, you’ll know it’s really hard to be one. As a programmer/coder you need to know a lot of things, you need to have a broad perspective, you need to have  superb logic to make things work and you need an immense patience testing and trying different lines of codes. In short, its hard.

Blogging (or making money from blogging) isn’t. Hell, just as long as you know how to read, write, type, copy, paste, act as human, interact, you’re qualified. Everyone does qualify for it but why is it that very few succeed? Yes, lack of hard work. Blogging isn’t hard, its just a lot of hard work. It’s so true. It’s easy to write an article but you need to work hard to come up with 50 high quality ones. It’s nuts to interact but its a challenge to do it with over a hundred of people. It’s tough.

I don’t consider myself a guru and no one of my readers do but I can share here some insights that I feel can be helpful to you:

1. Just do it, stop strategizing!

I usually get a lot of flak when I tell people about this but just from experience (and from observing how big bloggers like Jeremy did), I can tell that this is one key aspect why I’m somehow more successful than some people.

I just do it, if it doesn’t work then I gotta move on! The problem with strategizing too much is that people keep on speculating, lurking, observing that nobody does anything! The biggest problem has and always been getting off your ass. I don’t know about you but I certainly wouldn’t refrain from doing things unless experience tells me that ‘hey this isn’t working’.

The statement “Experience is your best teacher” is corny but its still powerful and proven. You just don’t let people dictate you things, do it yourself. After all you really don’t have anything to lose. Every of our failure racks up to our own education and this is one good thing you will always have.

2. If you enjoy it, just go on! (Passion)

That’s why passion is a key element in blogging. I mean why write about something you don’t enjoy in the first place? That’s probably the biggest reason why most bloggers fail, its because they really don’t feel passionate about what they’re blogging. How can you enjoy talking about making money online if you don’t know it?

It’s always been the same parallels over and over again with all of these successful bloggers. They enjoy just blogging on something that they don’t really expect anything. Why don’t you go on Darren Rowse blog’s archive and look for some of his oldest posts. Its amazing how this guy churned out almost over a hundred of blog articles with over 1000+ words each that never even got any comment/traction? Of course these days Darren can write an article w/any length and still get a heap of comments but the lesson here is that you’re not going to get noticed overnight and if you don’t have passion, I doubt you can last too long in the blogosphere.

3. Stop chasing for shiny golden “secrets” because there’s none.

Ok again I used to be like this one when I was on my early stage of blogging. The scenario is usually like this: A blogger reads a post on some blog that making money is hard. You have to do this, do that, implement this, test, blah blah.  So what happens is that this blogger says to himself “No, there must be something better than this, I need to keep looking for one”. And of course the cycle never ends. That blogger would never ever get to work because all he does is chase for secrets.

There’s a big misconception about “premium info stuffs” and secrets. Most people think that these are just the same. The truth is its not. Most info products whether its $9.95 or $999.5 is all about educating people. I’ve consumed a lot of them and I hate eBooks actually all I can say is that the main goal of most of them, if not all is just to organize infos around the web, compile them and present them well. You’re paying them not really because of the “premium stuffs” but only because they’re saving you from getting overloaded. In short, they are giving you blueprints so you never have to find them yourself.

Why not take time to look Technorati’s top 100 blogs? Do you think these guys have secrets? All you can notice is that these bloggers provide massive value to their readers and that alone sums up why they’re popular.

Wrapping it up

As I end this I’ll repeat. Blogging and making money isn’t hard,  it’s just a lot of hard work. “Hardwork” is an overly used term but surprisingly not a lot of people value it. From my experience, and from other people’s experience, there’s really no need to reinvent the wheel and chase for something more. Besides if you’re exerting hard work on your passion, then it’s really not hard after all.

I haven’t written a long post like this for a while and I got carried a bit while writing this, lols. But as always, I’d like to hear back from you.

Can you Really Depend on SEO for Your Site?

Can you Really Depend on SEO for Your Site?

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Search engine optimization is one overrated thing. And I know its not just me who thinks it this way. But even with that fact, I still have a lot of respect for the top SEO guys like Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan and some other ones. They’re the guys whom I think have the most extensive and updated knowledge about the topic that’s why I keep on following them.

Anyway back to the topic. I know a lot of newcomers in the business or even the experienced ones rely too much on search engines. I mean, the time that they allot in planning and strategizing for SEO is just too much. Now this leads us to the question, “Can you really depend on your SEO tactics for the profitability of your site?”. I’m sure we will all have mixed takes about it.

As most of you know, I guest post a lot these days and I wrote an article over the cool folks at Sem-group which is all about SEO, SEM and Social media. In that post I discussed a lot about how they’re connected and how SEM and social media play vital role in giving the site the initial boost. Here’s an excerpt:

When building a website or any online-based project, you want to build SEO in it from the get-go. You want to optimize it for those key terms that you’re looking into from the start. I know you’re saying, “how can you do that, you don’t even have content yet?” Yes, you’re right but what I mean is that with every websites you can already set up things from the start that would give you a dramatic effect later on. Let me explain.For example, if I’m building a site based on a WordPress platform, I can start fine-tuning the site’s search goals by doing the necessary things like adding an All in One SEO pack, canonicalizing the domain, setting up the meta descriptions properly and creating a robots.txt (and many more of course). You see, these are the things that you can already do from the start yet it doesn’t take that much to do those. On the flip side, it may not yield that much results for the first few months but its future benefits would be enormous for sure.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t a short-term goal in the first place right? Organic rankings is something that can be achieved over time and if you’re getting lots of traffic from search engines then you know what I’m talking about.

Again you can visit my post about SEO, SEM and Social media and feel free to add your insights about it too. I know people have various opinions about this topic and Im willing to take criticisms for it.

It’s a Contest, Help me Win it!

Yes, the article I’ve written above is a contest entry. Sem-Group.net was lucky enough to gather over $2000 of prizes at stake and as all of you know, I love joining contests.  Here are the cold-blooded prizes and their sponsors:

$200 Prize Sponsors

$150 Prize Sponsors

$100 Prize Sponsors

$50 Prize Sponsors

Other prizes: Non-Cash Sponsors

  • Hostgator.com is offering a 1 year Business Web Hosting plan. Includes toll free phone number and SSL, a $179.40 value.
  • David Harry is offering a full years membership at SEO Training Dojo, a value of $250.
  • Link-Assistant.Com is offering SEO tools – SEO PowerSuite Enterprise (max. functionality license) $599 worth with a life-time LIVE! plan subscription.
  • Special thanks to the contest media partner My Blog Guest, the free guest post exchange community by  Ann Smarty where users meet to exchange guest posts and network.

What’s needed for me to win

To help me win the contest, simply visit the post above, share your opinion by commenting and retweet it. The more comments and retweets the more chances of me winning. As you can see right now, I’m in the last place as far as both are concern but that would change if you help me out. 😀

Again here’s the post: http://sem-group.net/search-engine-optimization-blog/sem-seo-social-media-and-their-connection-to-each-other/ feel free to check it out!

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

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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:

MelvinBlog Fan Page

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.

facebook default 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.

The Big Challenge After a Blog Contest – The Dropoff

The Big Challenge After a Blog Contest – The Dropoff

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By now I can relax a bit after all the contest related tasks have been completed. With this I realized that no matter how small or big, how short or long a contest will be, it will always take a lot of work. As I’ve said, I worked for this contest in as early as late April so I’ve been really doing most of the planning myself since this is a one-man blog.

But still, I don’t have any regrets whatsoever. I know by now, you know how grateful I am with how the contest turned out to be and how this has been so beneficial to the blogosphere. Traffic wise it’s been great as well. I got the most traffic ever during those months although I didn’t ramp up my posting. But now that the contest is over, here comes the big challenge.

Traffic Dropoff

Traffic dropoff usually happens after the end of each contest. Its nothing revolutionary, it’s just normal.

Let’s say a blog just gets 50 visitors prior to running a contest. As soon as the blogger runs the contest, he instantly notices that he doubles his traffic immediately.But after the contest, he soon realizes that his traffic starts to go down and back to the normal 50 visits per day.

As I’ve said, this really happens to any bloggers who run contests. The main reason for this is sound and simple,  people only get to your site/blog because they’re incentivized to do so.

One thing you can easily notice is that throughout your contest, some other bloggers who haven’t been into your blog were the most active ones. They comment a lot, interact and almost have been always there.

Don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong about that. It’s human nature that in a contest you want to be as nice as possible because its part of your strategy in winning the contest. However when the contest ends, the participants interest on continuing on following you and your blog highly depends on whether they won something or they didn’t. With that in mind, the incentivization factor that had them to follow you in the first place starts to diminish.

The challenge then is to make them stay even after the contest.

Hook them through the contest, Make them stay for the content

So what I usually try to do is test if they’re really in for a long haul by producing good content. How? Well a contest usually runs for a month, in my case its for 1 and a half months. So that period is your  period to convince them that you’re blog is more than just a blog holding a contest, that you’re content is far more important than the prizes of the contest.

This is hard to do and it’s really challenging to make them stay mainly because they may not be the right people in your blog in the first place. Most people who join contests are those who live with contests. Not that I have any problem with that but proliferation is really important. If I have 100 new audiences that aren’t willing to spend money forever, then isn’t it worth it more to have just 15 potential customers who are loyal enough to stay for the long haul because of the good stuff I’m providing?

The takeaway here is still the content. People read stuffs because they like reading it isn’t it? And with contests, it’s not really good content, is it?

As you can see we as bloggers, as contest organizers have an ample time to prove ourselves to them. Write good content, make sure you make them feel they belong, always keep that conversation even after the contest is over. Those and other small things may be enough to make them stay for a while, maybe for a little bit longer.  What say you?

How to be Great at Your Affiliate Business with Content

How to be Great at Your Affiliate Business with Content

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In this guest post, Corry Cummings discussed the role of high quality content in succeeding with affiliate marketing.

If you are familiar with running an affiliate business, you know how important promotion is. You must promote your business partner’s product in order to be successful. The factor that determines whether or not your business generates profit is whether you can get the visitors to your website interested in the product. One of the best ways to do this is with high quality content. You must make sure that your content is professional, clean and attention-grabbing. If you can manage this, your website will garner attention, gain credibility and most importantly, be interesting to your visitors. Here are some suggestions for how to become great at your affiliate business with content.

Choose the Right Type of Content

Different business plans will necessitate various kinds of content. Think about the direction that you want to take your business in and the type of content you think will appeal to your readers. Every business will have different needs, but the kind of content that tends to work best for affiliate businesses include the following:

  • Blog Posts
  • Reports
  • Articles
  • E-Books

It may be helpful to mix and match in order to appeal to a variety of people. Consider your product when deciding what kind of content to use. Is it a relatively uniform demographic or are you writing to people of multiple ages or different countries of residence? Think about the needs and desires of your readers. If you can satisfy those needs and desires, your readers will be more willing to explore the product further.

Choose Your Topics Carefully

Just like choosing the form your content will take, it is important to carefully plan your topics. You will want to feature content that is varied but can all relate to your topic. Do not just ceaselessly promote your product. In general, customers will be put off by obvious advertisement. Instead, you will want to get them legitimately interested in the product. Provide content that discusses the history or simple facts about the product. Keep in mind that you are still trying to sell a product, but approaching that goal from multiple angles might increase your chance of success. Again, consider your audience and choose topics based on what you think they will want.

Provide High Quality Content

Having a variety of content with multiple forms and topics can help draw interest to your business, but only if the content is high quality. This is perhaps the most important step. If your content is poorly written or simply uninteresting, it will not matter what the topic is. The visitors to your website will associate shoddy writing with an unreliable seller and a substandard product. One recommendation is that you consider hiring a content writing service. This way, you will be guaranteed high quality content from professional content writers. You will still have control over exactly what you want from each article, and you can be confident that the end result will be clean, professional and interesting to your visitors.

Corry Cummings is the owner of Content Customs, a content creation company that specializes in high quality web content writing services. He also runs a blog over at Content Customs, which is managed and written by one of the head writers of the company.

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

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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?