Internet Marketing

MelvinBlog’s Marketing Tip Contest Winners

by Melvin · Aug 7, 2010

The time has finally come. As I’ve promised, today the winners for the MelvinBlog’s Marketing Tip Contest will be announced. And as I’ve said, I will not be late this time in announcing the winners I will try not to be late but still I did (lols, its Aug.7 in Philippines).

As I’ve mentioned thousand of times, the entries were really great and I’m sure the judges had a hard time rating each article. I myself had a hard time too! Anyways for the last time I’d like to thank the sponsors for gracing this event as if not for them all these things will not happen. I’d like to thank my media partner Fergal of Business Advice Forum who has done an exceptional job in spreading the news. Now for the last time let’s give these people a round of a plause for being sponsors:

Now the Winners

So all in all we had 16 entries and as I’ve said the winners will be judged by two factors; quality and popularity. Quality is 70% and is largely based on the ratings given by the five judges. The second one is popularity which accounts for 30%. This is basically the amount of comments and retweets the posts have received. For the sake of getting you more excited here’s the screenshot of the scoreboard (Click for a larger view)

As agreed upon, I’m not going to disclose the name of the judges for now. If you saw the image above and still you were not able to figure it out. Read below to see the complete list of the winners.

1st Prize – Lee Ka Hoong

Lee’s entry was entitled 3 Effective Blog Marketing Strategies That I Use and it got the highest score overall. He scored a total of 8.1 points and got the nod of most judges. Aside from that it also got a lot of traffic that his blog was one of the main traffic drivers for my blog on that month. Congratulations Lee! You win the following:

6 months free for the standard package of CrazyEgg valued at $19 a month – $114 value
1 character design courtesy of LogoNerds – $97 value
1 multi-use package of Themewars premium theme – $70 value
WordPress SEO service courtesy of ShoutMeLoud.com – $250 value
1 First Class Package of Ultimate Blogging Theme 3.0 – $147 value
1 license of OIO Publisher – $47 value
$20 cash from FamousBloggers.com – $20
6 months free Web hosting courtesy of MelvinBlog.com – $45 value
1 copy of Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco – $17 value
Premium Interview featured here in MelvinBlog.com – $70 value

2nd Prize – Murray Lunn

Murray which is more known by the name Murlu wrote a post entitled Write 10 Articles A Day, Market Yourself And Avoid Burn Out. In that article Murray made a really interesting point and approach in terms of not burning out yourself so you still have time to do a lot of things. Personally this my favorite post as I find this really really unique and innovative. Congrats Murlu! You win the following:

$50 cash and one year PRO membership for MyBlogGuest – $170 value
1 copy of Blogussion Thesis theme package – $46 value
1 character design courtesy of LogoNerds – $97 value
1 license of OIO Publisher – $47 value
1 copy of Crowbar Content courtesy of Buzz Marketing guru Dean Hunt – $97
1 copy of Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco – $17 value
$15 cash from BlogTactic
1 copy of 70 Posting Ideas courtesy of Liane – $15

3rd Prize – Devesh (no surname)

Dev wrote a well-received posts entitled 10 Best Marketing Tips that Will Blow Your Mind | Make Money Online. I can say that’s a good post to start with and its nice that his readers really benefitted from that article. Actually he’s tied for second place with Murlu but for the tie-breaker I asked all the judges on who deserves the 2nd and 3rd place more. Congrats Dev, you win the following:

1 copy of Gab Fire Theme – $59 value
1 year membership for ElegantThemes -$19
$15 cash, one advertising space and one copy of Facebook ad coupon eBook valued at $15 courtesy of Smartbloggerz.com – $54 total value
1 copy of Easy Blog Traffic worth $59, Insider SEO Revealed at $39 and Twitter Marketing Power worth $57 courtesy of WebTrafficROI.com
1 copy of Thirtyday blog eBook by Jimvesting – $15 value
1 copy of 70 Posting Ideas courtesy of Liane – $15

And to everyone else.

To all others who have joined the contest namely, Agent Deepak (man! you’re the favorite one on this contest), D3s0, Felix Albutura, Elie Palima, Cynthia Boris, Febap Liew, Sourav, I’d like to thank you for participating in the contest. You know what? I feel really really bad that I only got this number of sponsor prizes to give away. I mean I should’ve begged for more.

All entries are just exceptional and as you can see in the scoreboard, the difference between the winner points and a non-winner points do not even have a disparity of 1 point! It only means that this contest is really well fought so everyone should really deserve more than just a mention.

Again I hope I could’ve grabbed 10 – 20 more prizes so maybe I can include 2 or more winners but I didn’t really expect it to be this tight.

I wish I could give away $50 to each one too but that would be too much for me. Still for those who didn’t win, again just because I appreciate your entries, it’s closely fought, almost had same scores with the winners, I am going to contact you (using your blog’s contact form) for a surprise prize. Yes that’s how I appreciate you and your entry. Just wait and I’m sure you’re gonna be happy about it. 🙂

Twitter Retweet Contest

I nearly forgot this! I was about to publish this post yesterday midnight until I realized this contest. If you would remember, there was a side-in contest which was more to twitter users. As mentioned I’m giving away 10 prizes for that as well. Here are the awesome winners drawn randomly via random.org and in chronological order:

The 10 highlighted names are the winners and they are arranged chronologically. Its kind of funny because John Chow who retweeted my article won too although Im sure he wouldn’t mind giving that thing away to others anyway. Here’s your winnings btw:

Deanna_J – GabFire Theme
AgentDeepak – Blogussion Thesis Theme
whatswithjeff – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
easy4com – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
John Chow – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
AhsanHussein – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
MyBlog2day – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
d3so – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
Elie Palima- 1 copy of Social Media Marketing Book
Funbu – Youtube Made Simple Video Series Book

To all winners both in retweet contest and the main contest, don’t contact me. I will be contacting you to give you directions on how you can claim your prizes. It goes the same to non-winners on the main contest as I would be surprising you by giving you something. 😉

Again, don’t contact me. I will be the one who will contact you.

Successful Contest, What’s Next?

Well this contest ran for almost 2 months and I prepared this for almost 4 months. With that, I wanted to weep that it ended up being successful and I was really happy with the turnout. Congratulations again to all contestants, you’re all winners as I learned a lot from you. Also to sponsors, which are mostly my peers and friends, I appreciate you helping me out. This isn’t anywhere possible if not for you guys!

Obviously I’m don’t have the time I used to for this blog as I’ve started working a normal job but rest assure that this blog will still be as alive as ever. And if you’re looking to maximize and take advantage of my traffic, then why not submit a guest post entry so that your article would be featured for a long time since I don’t really have that much time to write a post? clever idea eh? 🙂

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?

The Best Blog Marketing Tips Around the Internet

by Melvin · Jul 31, 2010

The contest has finally ended and it’s really really such a great one. It ran for almost 2 months and we’ve had successful feedbacks all over. On top of that, the quality of the entries that we’ve received is just superb. So if I am about conclude now if the contest was successful or not, there’s no question it is.

Anyways first I’d like to apologize for not having this post earlier nor reminding people that the contest has already ended. Actually, it is just this month that I started feeling the sting of having a day job. Although it’s enjoyable and exciting, it disables me to do a lot of things that I used to do when I was still in college.

Anyhow, the winners for the contest will be announced in August 5 as the current entries are already in the hands of the judges. But with that I’d like to honor those entries and give them some link love not because they participated in the contest but because they are really good reads. So if you’re looking for the best marketing tips around, then you may want to read these articles:

I’ve personally read all of them and I’m so happy with the quality. As I’ve said before, the goal of this contest is really to give back to the community and with the participants adhering to that, I think this is the most awesome contest I have ever run so far. With that I’d like to congratulate everybody already for really doing a good job. 🙂

Now if you’re contest entry was not there, feel free to hit me up via comment form asap. I tried to find all the articles, tried to moderate all the trackbacks and even went as far as the spam comments page just to make sure all entries are received. Yes, I know how it feels when an entry is ignored. Anyway, again feel free to hit me up in case your article isn’t here.

So what’s next? Well there’s a lot of things to watch out for in this blog but as for the moment, why not try to support your favorite blogger by reading, commenting and retweeting his article above? What do you think?

I Don’t Have Anything to Blog for Today, Help!

by Melvin · Jul 27, 2010

Most people get into this thing called as “writer’s block” wherein they cannot get a topic they can write about. Literally nothing comes out of their mind, zero, zilch! I had experienced it too and in fact I did more than 10 times already.

There has been really some good and lengthy guides out there discussing how to cope up with writer’s block and if you came across some of those and you find them helpful then I suggest you to bookmark them so you have a copy of it which you can reference back continuously.

Anyways in this post, I want to share my unique take on how I deal with it and what I usually do when I literally have nothing in my mind to blog about.

1. If you don’t feel writing, then don’t!

Well this is the basic thing to do. I mean why force yourself to write if you don’t like or feel writing?

This was really my motto since the day I created this blog and many other blogs. If I’m not in the mood then I wouldn’t. After all it’s nice to show a great post which is quite of not the latest rather than show a latest yet crappy low quality ones that will harm your blog more than benefit it.

2. Go outside, Relax

With the first one, obviously you can’t just refrain from writing forever and expect to get same readership after a month or two. That being considered, I’d usually go outside, maybe in the mall and relax. This small thing can help you get back on track and hopefully get some ideas for your posts.

A good rest also helps since no one of us wants to get burned out writing that we end up not enjoying it at all.

3. Read other Stuffs

If you’re still not back in writing mode, you can simply just browse the blogosphere, go to your favorite blogs in your niche and just read and observe what’s going on. Eventually by still being connected and updated to the blogosphere, it can help you think of the topics or just get you involved to maybe write on the current trends or simply just have an opinion on whats currently in.

Those are my 3-step process. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? I feel fortunate that I can crank out blog articles one after another and with that I really don’t struggle that much with producing content for my blog/s.

But then I know a lot of people who struggle with this. And I hope the 3 step process I outlined above can somehow help you break the writers block. How about you? Do you have any other strategies that you may want to share with me?

Being Just a Marketer & Not an Internet Guy

by Melvin · Jul 19, 2010

In the internet marketing world, I see three different kinds of people. The first kind is a techie person who knows a lot about the internet but does not have any knowledge in marketing. Basically this is where most people are coming from. Second is the type of person who has offline marketing experience but hasn’t really have much idea on how the internet works and third, is a someone who does not know either, meaning a newbie or newcomer.

I’ve been into this space now for quite a while and I’ve noticed a lot of things. Most of which is directly related to internet marketers who aren’t that geeky enough to understand the internet.

Remember my post on how to easily steal an eBook? That’s just one of them. I mean that post was even outdated by now yet a lot of people still seem to fail to comply to that. Just take the simple way of hiding their eBook from public access is something that most of them, if not us, could not do.

Why this is a Big issue?

I know most marketers would say that “who cares? my customers aren’t geeky so Im just contented” This is a big issue just because of the fact that there’s so much ripping and fraud going around. I mean if an eBook you badly want becomes available for free on some blackhat type of forum, are you still gonna pay for it?

How about a membership site where you can literally access it even without you being a member? These days there are so many tools that are available (not for free of course) that can really help you with this thing. Being a marketer and not an internet guy, you can always seek help from people who know more about these technical details.

How about free reports to build your list? It’s funny because I’m seeing quite a lot of people offering freebie in exchange for an email but the thing is that freebie is freely available even without giving up your email. Yes, most people fail at this.

The Solution

Well this is a very broad topic and the solution would have easily been very lengthy if I state it all here. The best way to see if people can rip your files off is to simply just become that *other people. I mean why not do a thorough search on your own stuff and see if you can get it for free. If it’s the case, then it’s a major problem for you.

It also does pay to ask for help in related forums where people do the same thing. For instance, if you’re an eBook whore seller, then maybe hang out quite a bit in Warriors Forum and see if people can provide you some help. These people are just in the same situation as you and as I’ve people in forums are always ready to help.

Lastly there’s a lot of tools out there to help you. If you’re doing a business online, having all of those needed tools is a worthy investment after all (even if they’re expensive). Would you rather not spend money and lose a lot of money with your product getting freely shared or the other way around? Again, it may be hard for you if you’re not a “tech” person to make those third party tools to work but that’s why you outsource right?

I’d like to of course get your take with this subject matter. I’m sure most you do the same thing as I do and have you found any tools and techniques that you can recommend to the community?

And lastly, are you just being a marketer and not an “internet guy” as a whole?

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?

Joining Blog Contests, What’s Your Motivational Factor?

by Melvin · Jul 9, 2010

Contests or specifically blog contests are a great way to attract a huge number of people from a wide variety of demographics. Not only because its full of hype, but more likely because almost everyone joins it.

I’m sure you’re aware that I join as much contest as I can and bragging aside, I usually win a lot. From the simple, “subscribe to feed, comment here” type of contest to the harder affiliate marketing competitions, I probably had participated in all of those. Joining contest is really fun in the sense that if you lose, then you lose. I mean people don’t grudge when they lose in contests, instead they ponder on how it’s super fun and how they learned a lot. Another benefit is that it really brings you closer to other bloggers.

I know like me, you also like joining contests probably for the same reason and amazingly for me I don’t just join contests giving iPads or whatever gadgets, I literally join each and every as much as I could. Even if the prize is a Flip Mino or a simple quality eBook or even just a template, I am usually urged to participate.

I love Competing

This pretty much sums it up. I’m a gamer and I’m ready to compete all the time and every time I look back I always see this as a determining factor. I joined a lot of affiliate marketing contests by Market Leverage and I won I think 3 of them. For me it’s just nice to compete with all these people around the world doing the same thing with me and proving them something (I’m sure they’re proving something too!).

When I join contests, I don’t just carry my name and my blog but also my country. Philippines is a third-world country but what a lot of people don’t know about us is that we’re good. I mean again bragging aside, we’re good. There are a lot of marketers here who literally kill it with whatever business model and I know a lot of bloggers here who are really well-known internationally.

They say competition is always good because it just means there’s money in it. The same goes with contests. When you see you’re up against someone, you have that determination inside you to win it all. And the best thing is that you don’t treat others as a competitor, instead you treat him as a peer.

Feeds our ego well

If you’re winning, it satisfies us ego-wise. Who doesn’t want to get recognized as someone who emerged victorious in a contest? It helps you build your online portfolio, your image and you get more chance for people to visit you because you won the contest.

A good example is Lyndon Reid who won the shoemoney’s gambler contest. He won the contest so he got the prize of attending the summit for free and an additional cash but on a side note, he received so much traction because big blogger like John Chow blogged for him as well.

Prizes are good, too good to be true

In one of my old posts about how to make money outside internet marketing, I mentioned that joining blog contests is a good nice way to go. I mean seriously, how hard is it to actually tweet something or blog about it? Is it hard to write an entry to a contest? Seriously, oftentimes its just so worth it.

John Chow has had a post about this entitled “Are you scared of success” in which he pointed out how people are scared of joining contests. That is so true and I think there’s another factor that hinges with that and its a word called “laziness”. That’s a good point too since most people want to succeed but almost none can move, no one can really do anything.

What do you think? What’s your main driving point on why you join contests?