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

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You Still Trying to Make Money Blogging? That’s Old School!

by Melvin · May 19, 2012

Well, its really not! 🙂 But blogging has changed a lot over the past 10 years that a lot of bloggers were left (in the dust) because they’re still doing blogging the same way they’re doing it 5-10 years ago. I gotta admit that I sort of consider myself one of those who have not been doing what I’m supposed to be doing different than what I was doing before.

A couple of days ago, I read a post from one of my favorite blogs entitled ‘The Future of Blogging‘. Now I know you’re probably thinking that this is one of those cheesy posts where the author just puts something together about how blogging will still change the world, whatever, but trust me its not. The post is the longest post I’ve read in a while, and more importantly it tackles the reality of blogging and where its really heading in the future. Here’s a pretty long excerpt:

This is an important blog post, because it makes a prediction. A prediction about the future of blogging; a platform actively used by over 181 million people (Nielsen data for October 2011). Not only will you learn why I think most blogging advice is dated and ineffective, but I’ll also reveal where I believe this entire industry is heading, so you can stay ahead of the competition.

This is not only an important post, but also the longest I have ever written. It’s more like a mini-eBook, without the price tag. Don’t let its lack of cost make you doubt the value here though. I will at least sell you on what you’re about to learn:

  • A weird tip I personally received from Google’s Matt Cutts which increased my ViperChill search rankings
  • What Gawker does once per week to double their traffic figures. That’s going from two million to four million uniques per day
  • Why the Daily Mail recently surpassed the New York Times as the number #1 newspaper website in the world
  • How Mashable crushed TechCrunch on traffic numbers (even though they used to be the underdog)
  • Why the successful ‘make money online’ blogs of the past have now faded into obscurity
  • The number one reason Leo Babauta dominated the personal development industry in two months
  • What Steve Kamb did to build a six-figure blog in the overly saturated health niche
  • Why feed counts mean absolutely nothing (and never really have)
  • Which Huffington Post articles attract 3X more clicks than any other
  • Why the Verge was one of the fastest growing blog launches in history

…and most importantly, how this all helps me to make a prediction about what it now takes to build highly profitable blogs.

What I love about the post aside from that it covers a lot of different interesting subtopics is the fact that Glen backed up everything with numbers and proofs. I know research is overrated but the amount of effort that was done here is just phenomenal. I rarely print blog posts (not sure I ever did before) but when I read the first 60% of it, I was convinced that I should.

Again, give it a real read and I can guarantee that this post will benefit you.

Filed Under: Blogging Tips, Internet Marketing, Link love Tagged With: blogging in the future, future of blogging, making money blogging is old school

Joidiamonds – The Company Behind my Twitter Background

Joidiamonds – The Company Behind my Twitter Background

by Melvin · Oct 17, 2010

So I was about to post this a month back but I was too occupied with some of the other  things that I have to do first. But now the time has come to talk about it.

A lot of people have asked me who’s behind my slick twitter background that I released about 2 months back. And in today’s post I intend to talk about him her. OK so the company behind my twitter background is Joidiamonds. Joidiamonds is a one girl designing company that is situated in Atlanta, Georgia. She does almost every kind of design work such as Twitter layouts, WordPress Designs, logos, headers, banners, business cards and whatever you could possibly think of.

Speaking of business card, she’s also the one assigned to make that one for me and I’m currently collaborating with her with regards to it.  Just in case you’re curious what her name is, it’s Crystal. 😉

Going back to my twitter design, just in case you haven’t seen it yet, it looks like this (click the image for a larger view):

melvinblog twitter background

Don’t mind my face in the right side. 😉 It’s totally my idea, lols. Anyway Crystal has been really really approachable as far as the design is concern. I think it took us about one month to complete it due to the fact that we’re both busy and I’ve been really not giving my instructions clearly so it’s my fault. But nevertheless we were able to get it done.

You could also follow Joidiamonds on Twitter because she occasionally gives out discounts so that is something that you may want to take advantage of.

All in all if you’re looking for a premium design and you don’t want to shred hundreds of dollars only to be surprised that there are just limited number of revisions, then you may want to check Joidiamonds as one of the options. I would definitely recommend her services for these types of design. What say you?

Filed Under: Designs, Link love Tagged With: joidiamond, logo design, twitter background

An Interesting Guest Post Analysis on FamousBloggers

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.

johnchow guest post

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:

FamousBloggers guest post

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?

Filed Under: Blogging Tips, Guest Post, Internet Marketing, Link love, Social Media, Top Posts, Traffic Tagged With: Contest, famousbloggers, guest posting analysis

FamousBloggers & ComLuv Contest = Insane Contest

by Melvin · Jul 4, 2010

FamousBloggers ComLuv ContestI know I myself here have started an insane contest but the guys over at FamousBloggers.com and Comluv.com are more insane than me and they started this really big contest wherein there’s literally over $3000+ of cash prize at stake. Yep, it’s CASH prize, not anything else but cash. So if you’re trying to be too good to be true and you want that cash to spend on maybe a gadget rather than one year of hosting or something equivalent of that, then  make sure you check out the contest.

Ok since there’s no length required for this post, here are now the sponsors for the said contest:

Contest Sponsors

This is the FamousBloggers ComLuv Contest Sponsors, feel free to check them out, also check the Online Contest page for more information. Special thank to Gail our Social Media Marketing Strategist for the great work.

$300 SPONSORS

The ComLuv Network

ComLuv Network

Claims.com specialists in road traffic accidents Claims and Compensation

$150 SPONSORS

  • FamousBloggers ~ Group blog about how to start a business, making money blogging and blogging for business.
  • Brian Longest ~ GoDaddy Coupon UKTop10 30% Off
  • Executive Gift Shoppe ~ Personalized gifts including Money Clip
  • Social Implications – Exploring the impact of Social Media ~ Social Media
  • Local Proud ~ Start Your Own Discount Card Business

$100 SPONSORS:

  • FiddyP. Personal blog of Andy Bailey
  • FiredWok Chinese Takeaway & Delivery ~ Chinese delivery in Lancaster
  • GoodMillwork ~ Florida Based Architectural Moldings
  • Andrew Rondeau Ltd ~ Blogging Guide
  • Marc Duquette ~ Scribnia Blogging Directory
  • The Happy Guy Marketing ~ Professional SEO services
  • The Online Recruiters Directory ~ Search Firms
  • Monster Auto ~ Car industry news
  • Bill – ANS Gear ~ Paintball Guns & Gear
  • Cori Padgett- Big Girl Branding ~ Business Marketing Strategy
  • NowRelevant.com ~ Google alternative search
  • The Internet Time Machine ~ Trends and new product ideas
  • Joe & Colleen ~ Richland Wa Homes For Sale

$50 Sponsors

  • DiTesco ~ Home based business resources
  • DennisEdell ~ Direct Sales Marketing Coach
  • Firas ~ WP Worx – WordPress Services
  • Kiesha ~ Blogging Tips & Tricks
  • Melinda ~ Simple Home Organization
  • Dan Keller – TycoonBlogger ~ Promote Your Blog
  • ProjectCenter ~ Club Flyers
  • PPI Claims ~ PPI Claims
  • Free Gifts ~ Free Gifts
  • Zoomit Canada ~ Social Bookmarking just for Canada
  • Fence Houston ~ Houston fence contractor
  • Fence Philadelphia ~ Philadelphia fence company
  • Location Villa Espagne ~ Location Villa Costa Brava
  • Lube Oil Sales ~ Buy Amsoil Motor Oil
  • Olympic EyeWear ~ Designer sunglasses
  • Miss Wise Law ~ Law & Legal Information
  • Michelle Mangen ~ The Social Media Virtual Assistant
  • Chris Guthrie ~ Make Money on the Internet

There ya go. I know some of the guys, bloggers on the sponsors list but majority is pretty new to me but I guess Hesham and Andy had verified these folks’ genuineness so I don’t think we’ll ever have a problem claiming our prizes. 😉

Why I’m Joining?

I believe I made mention of it already on my blog post about contests but just to repeat, its because I just love joining contests. I love the prizes, I love the competition, I crave for hearing my name announced as a winner and its a good time to network with a lot of people as well.

As you being a part of my community, I’m expecting your support here for me. So far I have written these X  (meaning this can add up soon) amount of articles and to show support all you have to do is comment on those articles and tweet it for me.

  • Major Realization of Blog Commenting and It’s Best BENEFIT – Tweet the article

That’s it for now folks! The article may add up or not. Again, I highly suggest you to read the article and if you like it, let me know!

Filed Under: Contest, Link love, News Tagged With: famousbloggers contest

$2000 Blog Marketing Contest Recap & Announcements

by Melvin · Jun 19, 2010

Update: Super sorry for a 5 day delay in the drawing of this contest. Was super busy with work. All in all there were 10 entries so great odds for everyone. The winner through random.org is @danalingga. Contact me on how to claim your prize. 🙂

So the first two weeks of the MelvinBlog’s Marketing Tip Contest w/c does have $2000+ of prizes at stake has ended and today I’m going to make a recap of  the entries thus far. If you haven’t joined yet or it’s your first time to learn that I have a contest, make sure you join now.

The contest itself has received so much attention (and traffic) from the blogosphere but I’m quite surprised that less than five people have so far joined. As expected (like in any type of contest), most bloggers who say they will join NEVER really join (or haven’t yet). It’s expected considering the contest will still run up to July 15  and most of the entries will come as we approach that date.

However like I said, joining today is by far the best way. Remember each participant can write up to 5 entries and with that being said, I’m sure some of the contestants who started out early will have a decent advantage over those who will wait, before they write.

Anyways as for the recap, I’m really happy with the turnout. The entries that I’ve received so far are good entries and reading comments from their audience I know that it has become so beneficial them. As I stated initially that’s really my goal, to give good value to the blogosphere through this contest. And for the entries thus far, here they are. Be sure to check them out and give feedbacks if you like their articles.

  • Elie Palima wrote an entry about “his best blog marketing tip so far“
  • Dev from Technshare shared his “10 best marketing tips that will blow your mind“
  • Deepak from AgentDeepak did it with a twist by creating a series instead. So far he had written “comment marketing ” and “social marketing”  as the entries

As you can see, only three people have participated in the contest yet with a total of  4 entries. (If you had written your entry and wasn’t mentioned here, feel free to shoot me a PM). There’s really no risk in this contest so if you have the best marketing tip then just throw it in.

Like I said, it’s people’s mentality to wait for the last minute before entering but if you do yourself a favor and actually start right now, you’ll be getting much higher chance of winning. Remember we will only have 3 winners for this main contest with each winners receiving prizes not less than $200 worth of good products from good people.

Surprise “Side-in” contest

As I’ve said, we’re going to make this entire celebration more special by having in more “smaller contest”. In short, its contests within contest and for this post, I have made this really easy for you.

So for this mini contest, all you have to do is follow me on twitter and retweet this statement:

Reading MelvinBlog’s Best Blog Posts from his blog http://bit.ly/bestbloggingtips  RT @melvinblog

That’s it! At the end of 21st of June 2010, I’m going to randomly pick a winner which will get $10 paypal cash straight to his account.  Remember, you have to follow me first on twitter and then retweet the statement. You can do it just once or it depends to you. There will be only one winner and since this is not really the biggest blog in the universe, your odds of winning is really high! Easy eh?

That’s for now, see ya soon!

Filed Under: Announcements, Contest, Link love, Preachings, Ramblings Tagged With: announcement, blog marketing contest, melvinblog contest

This Is How I do Link Love, Plus Some Announcements

by Melvin · Feb 22, 2010

Been a long time since I’ve done this thing and I thought this is the best time to do it. Before anything else, I would like to greet you belated happy valentines. I would be very interested to know how has your Valentines day went.

Anyways this whole February is a pretty exciting month and the blog has been doing well for the year. I’m also quite happy that I am managing my time well considering Im a graduating college student as well.

And now for the link love. One thing I’ve noticed is that most bloggers link to big bloggers in the industry for the great posts of the week. It’s not really wrong but I don’t find it useful. Why? Because more likely, your readers have already read that post considering they are well-known bloggers. So all in all there’s not much value to add. Anyhow for the top posts here we go:

  • Get Your Face on Facebook from AgentDeepak.com
  • Creative Lesson from Steve Jobs from BetterBloggingforBloggers.com
  • 10 Reasons For Office Employees to Switch into Google Buzz from Twitter from WorthyTips.com
  • Make Money Online Is Just a Story from TheBadBlogger.com
  • Simple Secret in Making Money From Facebook from AffiliateHat.com

Let’s start of with this good post from Deepak on why you should get on Facebook where he talked the benefits he has had. The beautiful Liane from BBB wrote a great analysis on creativity and why its a much game-changer. A funny post on worthy tips is about why employees should switch to Google Buzz. Fourth is from the one who I will call Mr.Comeback who has written a refreshing post about the whole make money online concept. Last is from the sister site of this blog w/c has tackled the simple secret why some people really seem to leverage Facebook and make some good money out of it.

Announcements

Well actually there is really no announcement. I just find that if you do link-love, you have to have announcements as well. lols.

Anyways, in the next few days Im really going to put out some strong, useful content so stay tuned. I’m also planning to release something that is really going to add value here in this blog.

Lastly, if you haven’t done yet, please subscribe to my blog’s newsletter and receive your free copy of my eBook entitled “Blog Marketing for Fame“. Chill everyone!

Filed Under: Link love Tagged With: Announcements, Link love

Link Lovin’ And Some Announcements

by Melvin · Apr 26, 2009

Hi guys, another great week here in Melvin Blog and it means its time for another Link Love (words borrowed from Net Fool 🙂 ).

Before everything starts here. Let me remind everyone that there’s a small contest running here in MelvinBlog that would end at the end of this month. The contest has 12 great prizes up for grabs and there are 12 participants thus far. If the contest ends today, no doubt everyone is bound to win! Make sure to check it out.

So this week has been great as I can read a lot of blogs now because my summer vacation has started. A lot of great posts have been produced this week and here they are:

  • How to be a Successful Make Money Online Blogger – Shoemoney.com
  • 20 confessions being a blogger influences your life – Balkhis.com
  • 7 Secrets To Eyeball-Sucking Ad Banners – Carlocab.com
  • 5 Things More Important Than Blogging – StandoutBlogger.com
  • Monetizing An Email List From Your Blog – CarolineMiddlebrook.com

Shoemoney’s post discusses a very interesting topic which I think is a must read for all make money online blogger. Balkhis (or his wife?) puts up a nice post about how blogs and online presence could influence your life. My buddy Carl does a list of how a banner can totally suck someone’s eye. Tom from SOB writes a very realistic article about stuffs that are way more important than a blog and lastly Caroline gives her readers some tips on monetizing email lists.

Just Acquired AffiliateHat.com

Well in a seemingly fast pace of life, I just acquired an affiliate marketing blog. The former owner was a great friend of mine who happened to be real lazy in typing posts. Brim is a super affiliate and obviously who would want to exert more effort on something that would give lesser money? Just in case you don’t know, the blog is an affiliate marketing blog that focuses more on newbies trying to get off the ground and fly them to the outerspace. joking… Well I really like to domain name of it and now that I have it I am so excited. Because I was, I immediately replaced the generic ugly looking theme with the premium UBT theme and wrote the first post. I have also fetched some freelance writers to write for the blog since I couldn’t afford to write on two blogs with almost same topic. But anyway I would still love to have writers, so if you write about that certain topic you can mail me using my contact form with your rates and samples. If you feel it’s a nice blog, then feel free to subscribe to it. 🙂

Filed Under: Link love, Ramblings Tagged With: affiliate hat, Link love, Ramblings

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