Preachings

Get With It – Businesses Need to Be More Eco-Friendly

by Melvin · Jan 3, 2013

This is a guest post by Amanda Green.

Becoming Eco-friendly in the business world is more than just a fad. For many entrepreneurs, it is a way of life, and more businesses need to jump in on the cause. Not only will recycling and saving energy increase profit and lower costs, but it will also serve as an inspiration for employees and work associates. It is just as important, if not more so, that businesses participate in making the planet greener, as it is for anyone else.

Going green for a business can be as simple as switching to energy saving light bulbs, or as complicated as converting the entire office or building to some type of sustainable energy source. There are many cost saving ways a business can participate in making the world more Eco-friendly. Here are few of the more popular ones:

1. Go Paperless

For a long time, industry leaders have been trying to promote the paperless office; it is more efficient, safer and saves money. Use digital memos, calendars, emails and documents to reduce paper waste.

There are actually several business benefits to going digital: employee efficiency increases and it can create a substantial savings on paper, which can amount to as much as $1,800 a year. Additionally, a company that uses less paper also spends less on file storage, printer ink, toner, copy paper and document shredding.

2. Energy Efficiency

Save money on energy by replacing regular light bulbs with fluorescent. Turn off unneeded lights at night. Adjust computer power settings so they run on “power saver” mode and replace appliances with energy efficient appliances. You can learn more about getting great rates on electricity at www.Electric.com.

3. Start a Recycling Program

Recycle as many products as you can. Make recycle bins available for employees. If you are a small business consider combining your recycling efforts with those of other businesses in the building. Most businesses and people already recycle so making this a daily business activity shouldn’t be that difficult. Be the change you wish to see.

4. Promote Telecommuting One or Two Days a Week

By having some employees work part time from home you can promote better energy efficiency. The fewer computers used in the office on certain days, the more you can save business on energy costs.

5. Sustainable Energy

Sustainable energy is very popular all across the country right now, so you may be able to find inexpensive solar power or wind energy options that will power your installations at least partially. This can save you a lot of money on energy costs, lowering your overhead and increasing your revenue.

If each one of us takes it upon ourselves to make these practical changes in our personal and professional lives, collectively we can go a long way. Don’t get overwhelmed by the forces of disinformation: your planet is depending on you!

What’s Your View on Facebook Timeline?

by Melvin · Sep 28, 2011

Mark Zuckerburg announced in F8 Conference that the profile page in Facebook will change dramatically and the change will be known as Facebook Timeline. Little later after that, Techcrunch posted a trick that will make you enable your Facebook Timeline even though its not released yet. The limitation though is that only your ‘fellow’ testers will see that effect on your profile. But even still, lots of people rushed into it just so they could try. Obviously I was one of those many people.

Facebook Timeline has received a bunch of chatter over the past few days. Some people think its heading towards Myspace wherein its starting to clutter itself more and more while some others plainly just like the new timeline.

Aside from this, let’s also not forget that Facebook implemented some new designs on their homepage that drew ire from lots of its users. The biggest concern regarding the new design is the fact that it gives little importance to privacy and that it seems it would benefit stalkers a lot. Also its very easy to get lost in the process considering there’s too much to look at the same time.

Considering all those things, truth is Facebook has been successful in forcing us to adjust to ALL of their changes. People who are currently complaining will only do that for about 2 and a half weeks up until Facebook rolls out new changes again. I guess its a cycle.

Views on Facebook Timeline?

I first saw the Timeline from a beautiful woman named Lisa Bettany who happens to be a contact of mine in Facebook. When I first saw it I was like ‘are you kidding me’. I researched for it and like many of you, I was able to do so successfully.

I view the timeline profile positively. To be honest, it instantly made me melancholic and emotional. I joined Facebook in mid-2008 and for me to see my old posts so easily, that’s so appealing to me. I laughed a bunch of times when I saw some of my ‘retarded’ posts in those old days, when I was just getting started with this blog and spam promoting the hell of my friends, when I was bullying some college friend of mine, there’s just a lot to look back.

I know there’s a lot of people on the hate bandwagon of this new Facebook Timeline thing but for me I view this new feature entirely positive. Sure there’s a bunch of bugs and flaws for now, but that’s fixable. Also, it made Facebook much more cluttered but I’m sure people will adjust, just like forever. It’s not like its really like MySpace where you can put a bunch of widgets and glittered images right?

Lastly, productivity issues will always count. I wasted like 1.5 hours just by scanning my entire timeline and while we’re not gonna look at it everyday, we’re still going to use Facebook as how we’re trained to use it. Nothing’s changing as far as Facebook being a big distraction.

That’s my view on the Facebook Timeline. How about you?

Confirm You Are Not a Spammer – Seriously?

by Melvin · Sep 13, 2011

I’m seeing this plugin in LOTS of blogs that I’m reading and commenting to and I wasn’t really that much concerned about it, initially. However when I started commenting again on lots of blogs as part of my back to blogging tasks, I started getting annoyed with this plugin. Why is that so?

Confirm you are not a spammer

What I’m talking about is this plugin called Anti-Spambot created by GrowMap and Andy w/c are people that I know and respect a lot. The way this plugin works is that there’s a checkbox in a comment form and before you can submit your comment, you will need to tick the checkbox to indeed confirm that you are not a spammer. How much sense does that make?

Well its not really that much of a big deal for me actually. I just find that its a workflow killer. I mean, you’re typing comments and doing this and that and when you click submit, you will get this notice that you have to confirm. Not that its annoying but it just gives me the ‘wtf’ look on my face. It doesn’t reload the page either so your comment will still be there but I guess its just human nature to get the ‘what’ look when you submit something and it doesn’t get submitted immediately. lols.

The other side

I haven’t tried the plugin yet so I haven’t had a chance to see what’s behind it yet. However from a bloggers perspective, I can’t really see much the value of it. I mean, what makes it different from a captcha? It requires you to do a thing before submitting your comment. Is it not making it hard for your reader to do commenting? Or maybe its just being lazy to moderate comments all in all?

If you’re reading this blog for a while you know that I value comments a lot and that I make it easy for people to interact (I always ask for their take, whatnot). With that I’m thinking having this ‘confirm you’re not a spammer’ box will only give your readers a step more before they can do what they want to do. And that maybe there’s a conversion part there that gets unconverted instead.

But again that’s just my opinion. Or maybe is there something that I misunderstood with regards to the plugin? Is Akismet not enough?

Creative Ways To Reduce Your Bounce Rate

by Melvin · Aug 17, 2011

As a blogger, its one of our goals to try to reduce our blog’s bounce rate. Of course, we all want to have people read our stuff and if possible stay on our site for a longer period of time. And do take note that its not just about staying on our blog doing nothing, its about them staying on our site but reading various content from us.

In this blog entry, I’ll discuss different ways on how we as a blogger can reduce our blog’s bounce rate.

What is Bounce Rate?

According to Google themselves, bounce rate is simply just the percentage of single or one-page visits on your site. This is also when a visitor exits on the same page as they entered. So as an example, if you visited this post and then left my blog through this post, you will be considered as a user who ‘bounced’ from my blog.

A very high bounce rate is indicative of various things like a).incorrect sets of audience for your site, b).poor content on your end and etc. So generally if you’re having a very high bounce rate, then you must be concerned that you’re falling into one of those two things I mentioned.

And you can read the following tips below on how you can reduce bounce rate on your site.

Ways to Reduce Bounce Rate

1. Have a landing page

I have been preaching on this method ever since and it seems that lots of bloggers don’t really understand the value of it. I’ve written a post on how using a landing page can increase your traffic but more importantly by using one, you are allowing yourself to attract the right people for your blog.

Think about it, a visitor is more likely to stay and navigate if he is directed to a specific landing page rather than straight to the homepage. Why would we want them to read our stuff more? We want to prove that we’re worth reading of course and that we know what we’re talking about.

2. Eliminate annoying elements

If you think about it, most people who navigate away from your site do it very quickly. Most of time its as quick as less than 10 seconds. There are various reasons for this but by analyzing it yourself, its more likely because they are annoyed on your site as a whole.

Most people don’t like ads, or they don’t like those lightbox popups. Some of them don’t like the sliders and all the fancy stuff. Obviously its hard to please everyone but you should at least try to please the majority. Easiest solution for this is to try minimizing your blog elements.

3. Write good content

Visitors don’t just land on your homepage or designated landing page. Most of the times they land on the specific blog post or article. With this, its very important to write good content to be able to persuade first time visitors to stay more and read more. You can do a simple test and compare your crappy posts from your best posts. You can easily spot the difference in bounce rate and see that your visitors stay with good content. Pretty fundamental tip!

4. Improve Loading Times

I am guilty of this myself. I used to sport themes before that load horribly slow due to lots of javascript stuff. As a result, lots of my readers probably just went away.

Make sure to work on always improving loading speed of your site. Check with Google Webmaster Central Site Performance Tool to see if your site is loading quick enough to satisfy the majority.

5. Minimize External Links

As bloggers, we’re naturally aren’t too shabby to hand out links to other bloggers. Its definitely not bad to give link loves but it sometimes has its own disadvantages and one of those is people going away from your own content. Another is diluting your pagerank although if you know me, I don’t really care that much about search benefits.

So just try to limit linking externally to other sites as it may be one of the reasons why your bounce rate is high.

Conclusion

Just like anything else, bounce rate is just a metric. I am always a proponent of studying your numbers and tweaking based on what it reflects. But still, you must never ever dwell too much on it. Don’t look at your bounce rate stats every 6 hours or so as it can obviously hamper your focus and productivity.

Personally, I do analyze my bounce rate a lot and do the necessary things that I think can help me out more in the long run. How about you? What’s your bounce rate and what’s your best tip to reduce it?

The “Other” Things that You Can Enjoy in Blogging

by Melvin · Jul 31, 2011

So before I start everything else in this post, I just want to (proudly) let everyone know that I make money from most of my blogs and its one of the reasons why I really love blogging.

I said financial benefits is one of the reasons, the other half is the happiness and the satisfaction that it brings to me. It’s always been my mistake to write blogging and internet marketing tips to bloggers as if everyone is aiming at making money and being famous. It amazes me (and I’m thankful) when someone goes out in comments and says “not all people have making money on their minds and I’m one of them”. That gives me a very good realization that blogging for money like we do is just less than 10% of the whole blogging community.

I figured out that most people blog because they’re happy with it and it fulfills them greatly. That’s something that I’ve realized late last year and in this blog post, I’m going to tackle how you, as a make money online blogger can still be happy with blogging even though you’re not making that much money or not meeting your expectations financially.

1. The “intrinsic love” for blogging

When I started my blog MelvinBlog.com (see I’m not linking to it), I was very sure that I can do this forever AS LONG as I could make money with it. Its tricky but when I had hard times late 2009 and the blog wasn’t making that much money, I thought I would lose my interest in it but I was wrong.

The reason for that is the intrinsic love that I have for blogging for the topic. I do internet marketing since late 2007 and every time I talk about it in my blog, I really, really feel that great satisfaction for doing so. And that should be the case for most of us. People who have been blogging forever that aren’t getting compensated are the ones who have that “real love” for what they do and as a result, they don’t bother with the money that they make. That’s how I equally feel, how most of my blogging peers feel and hopefully that should be how you look at it as well.

2. The community

This second factor does not come immediately and it may take a while for you before you realize it.

The community is what makes a blog alive and without it, a blog is nothing but a plain static web entity. It just so happened that our blog community is one of the reasons why most of us stay and feel fulfilled. Imagine having tens of people, if not hundreds, commenting on our posts. Imagine thousands of people daily visiting our blogs even though its written by a simple person like us. Isn’t it self-fulfilling?

That does not even stop there. I know most of you here have received personal emails from your own audiences on how they’re so thankful for one of the things that your blog have done for them. It sounds corny, but that’s sweet right?

3. Friendships and relationships

While its very rare to see an occasion where two bloggers end up being into a romantic relationship (lol), forming friendships through blogging is a very frequent case. How many of you here have actually treated a blogger as a good friend of yours without even seeing or talking to that blogger in person? Yes, I know the feeling.

It doesn’t end with friendships. Most of the times, it leads to fruitful partnerships and joint ventures that can later on pay off for both of you.

You see, I could take 20 friends any time over 20 rotating 125X125 sidebar banners on my site. 😉

4. The Experience (with a big E)

Consider the following: I wrote a blog entry and got over a hundred comments. I got in front page of Digg, I got a thousand pageviews just this day for this post.

I can’t stress enough for myself how blogging has given me so much unforgettable experience in life. I was told that people don’t crave for things, they crave for experience and I can say that’s 100% true based on my experience.

All the things I mentioned above, the love for blogging, the community and the relationships. It all leads to a superb real-life experience on something. And I’m not just talking about good experiences that make us happy, I’m also talking about experiences that are a bit negative. No one actually forgets them and its equally memorable for us just as with the good ones.

5. The rewards (outside the money)

Every time I look back on what blogging has brought to me except the money, I usually end up smiling because it has brought me a lot more than I expected.

One of the best rewards that you can get from blogging is the increased expertise and brand that you get. “Who would think that by talking about this topic people would see me as an expert in this niche?” Is it not nice for us to realize that?

Another unsung reward is your personal learnings from it. I mentioned above that I learned blogging isn’t just about making money and we are just a minority of the blogosphere. That’s just one of the myriads of things that I’ve learned from blogging. I consider these learnings as a reward since I don’t really need to study something (formally) to gain those things.

I got tired of putting a heading called conclusion because not all blog entries have conclusions like this one right? I’ll let you put your own conclusion on this post. What do you think about blogging minus the “making money” part? Do you think its still as fulfilling?

Image credits to Smemon

Learn What Writing About Practical Matters Has in Store for You

by Melvin · Jun 11, 2011

This is a guest post written by Laurence Mitchel

Let’s face it; we’re all either trying to be the next Perez Hilton or the founders of a tech-focused version of The Huffington Post. Even if our pursuits aren’t exactly to relay the latest rumors or break the most recent news story, when we blog we tend to focus on subjects that we know to be exciting and culturally relevant. The only problem with that is it produces an echo chamber blistered from the amount of repetitious information that trickles its away down through Internet popularity. You might have a wholly unique perspective on the Arab Spring but that won’t do much but add on to the millions of emitted opinions on the issue that make their way online, many of which come from people directly involved. It’s hard to compete with that no matter what you have to say.

Sometimes all it takes is re-looking at the relevancy of certain things in our own lives to realize there’s actually a lot more we could be talking about that we actually can provide some authority on. Successful blogs derive their success from the writer’s authority on a particular issue. Even if you’re just a Californian gossip queen, if you can talk about celebrities in a way most others can’t, that’s how you net a massive following. Since the seemingly exciting topics have already been taken, new bloggers should consider less dynamic and more practical topics to write about.

Topics like how to choose the right sealing wax for your car might seem boring, but not when you consider the fact that there are surely a few thousand people at least who would read what you had to say on the subject if you knew what you were talking about. You might even be the only person online who projects any level of expertise on the subject and collect all the potential readership. A storage blog, as completely uninteresting as that may sound, is above al practical. People commit personal property to long term storage all the time and are probably dying to get some layperson’s opinion on the best way going about it. You’d really be surprised how some of these off-center topics catch on with the right readers.

Everybody is an expert at something. I happen to be pretty good at doing everything I can to work the least amount. That’s a blog topic that could last me months right there. Maybe you’re a former dry cleaner or medical coder, and being laid off has actually given you the opportunity to turn that talent around and use it as a means to sound off free worthwhile advice. Who knows you could be initiating a movement. Just think: “how to store dry cleaning long term – part one”.

Sounds really practical isn’t it? What do you think?

May 21 Aftermath, Is Your Blog Still Alive? (lol)

by Melvin · May 22, 2011

We were long told by Mr.Camping that the world would end by May 21st and not surprisingly, it didn’t happen. Out of curiosity, during that day I kind of like acted like its going to really happen. I was very quiet and vigilant. I tried not to go online that much and just reflected on my own life. Well, just a weird act on my end. 😉

Anyway, May 21 has ended and one thing I realized is how I haven’t posted in this blog in a while. Its funny because I’ve just written a post on how I could focus on this blog again. Long story short, shortly after writing that post I went to the province and when I came back it seemed like I have forgotten everything about what I’m doing online.

May 21’s Doomsday

Obviously, that’s another failed ~~scholarly~~ guess by Harold Camping and every person who believed in that prediction is downright stupid. But even still, let’s not mention that. We could pick a few takeaways on that day though that we could use on our very own advantage.

In my case, I haven’t worked in this blog for like the entire 2011. All I have are plans, specifically elaborated by strategies. Yeah, I’m good at creating long-ass plans but whether I could take action and implement those things consistently remains unseen. So there, I could pick that up and use that deficiencies to my own wonder.

May 21 2011 is a date to remember in one that it brought a lot of humorous things online and offline. The hashtags related to that were so popular in Twitter and reading all those things could take forever. But maybe the important thing here for us bloggers is to evaluate if we’re still blogging at our very own pace. If not, then maybe we can use that day, reevaluate things and start working again like its a new beginning. I know it sounds corny.