Ramblings

The Only Thing You Need When Starting an MMO Blog

by Melvin · May 4, 2010

make money online blog It doesn’t take a lot to figure out that most of the bloggers who are trying to make money online is blogging in the dirty polluted make money online niche. Simon from Teenius.com has written a superb guest post here in this blog on whether you can still make money from the mmo niche or not. I’d recommend you to read that post as he has pointed out valid points about that topic.

Only a small fraction of bloggers in the MMO industry is actually making money (not a secret) from talking some craps about making money and the rest simply do not make anything. Listen, if you are a noob reading this and you’re planning to start a make money online blog then please don’t. Don’t and you’d thank me later, I swear. 😉

Credibility

In any niche, before people could even notice you on something you must establish credibility first and foremost. A good reason why a huge chunk of bloggers aren’t getting read is because they are not credible enough to pay attention to. Who would like to read an “expert” tip written by some Average Joe? “Heck, how would I even know this guy is for real?”

In MMO Niche, the only thing you need is…

…The actual experience of making money online. Yep, that’s right. In this business, today, you’ll never ever succeed talking about making money online if in the first place, you have no idea on how to do it!

I know what you are talking. How about the “follow me as I make money online” or “track the journey of a 12-yr old student on making money” kind of concept? The answer is those concepts are already obsolete. It doesn’t work anymore. A good number of people have probably had some success with that but right now, it’s already outdated and lame!

People are critical. If you speak on something that you really don’t know, even if you’re claiming it’s just your personal opinion, you’re gonna get busted. And the news that “your blog is just a crap” spreads faster than good mentions. You don’t want to ruin your ENTIRE name just because of this mistake.

Dig Deeper in what you really know

“How about you Melvin? You are blogging in the dirty niche; do you have an experience with the crap you’re talking about?” The answer is yes. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you probably already know everything about me. How I started within a sports niche, got into the beginners mistake of using Adsense ONLY, getting into internet marketing, making a ton of money (ton w/c is equal to my standards. 😉 ) with affiliate marketing, engaging into some blackhat, doing freelance work (for startup cash), doing SEO-related stuffs, and a whole lot more.

I probably am qualified (or not) to talk into this niche, but I beg not to. Why? Because mmo is already a niche that has a lot of qualified people to speak into. In fact, these are people who know MORE than what I know.

So instead I just dug deeper and went into the marketing part of blogging. I am an internet marketer, have bought tons of stupid eBooks, got enrolled in a lot of quality coaching programs and have about 3 years of experience. And that’s why I try to incorporate all of this into blogging where I know I’ve done well because of the fact that I have the knowledge on how to market my sites.

Ok enough self promo. We all want to make money online and become (or look like) expert in our own areas. But don’t do the mistake of getting into something, just because you feel it’s ideal. You cannot claim yourself as a blogging expert if you just write crappy articles, you can’t fool people you are a loss weight expert if you yourself aren’t fit.

Hmmm.. Is there something fishy that we need to know about you? 😀

Image Credit to: Paradigm Business Consultancy

Blogging Without Borders, Why Location Is Not a Limitation

by Melvin · Apr 26, 2010

Do take note of this, Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse are from Australia, John Chow is from Vancouver Canada, Daniel Scocco is from Brazil, Chris Garrett is from UK, Murray Newlands is also from UK I believe and my friend Carl “KidBlogger” Ocab is from Philippines and etc.

Ok now from outside this niche. Alborz Fallah of CarAdvice.com.au is from Australia (arrgh, again), the ever famous Danny Choo is from Japan, Lhong Zheng was from China (although he resides in Mulgrave), and again fellow Filipino tech blogger Jehzeel Laurente lives here in Philippines. And yea you’re right, I probably have missed a ton of other people still either because I did my research poorly or didn’t do research at all. Anyway, lols. 🙂

Whew, that was quite a long list! I was watching NBA (w/c is one show I always watch no matter what) and they have this segment called Basketball without borders where they usually go to places outside US to have campaigns on basketball. They even play official ball games there sometimes. It’s refreshing to think that you can play basketball no matter where you are.

Thinking of that, I kinda relate it to blogging. You can easily notice that all bloggers I mentioned above live outside the United States. Most people who are just planning to get started blogging worry a lot on whether they can even get attention, relating it to the fact that they live outside big and profitable countries like America and Europe.

To make it worse, most bloggers even do recommend bloggers to target bigger countries mentioned above if they are considering making money from blogging. As a result, bloggers are discouraged even before they get to have a chance.

I would tell you this one straight to your face, successful blogging has no borders, geographical location is NEVER a limitation! Whether you are blogging just as a hobby or using blogging as a business tool, you should never ever get discouraged just because of where you live. Remember that in any country there is always a (profitable) market for something. There are always things where people want to spend some money to learn and educate themselves.

If you’re just going to get wet or in the middle of that (very slow) learning curve and you’re feeling discouraged, I feel for you. I was once like that. When I started my past blogs and websites I basically plastered them with Google Adsense. My neighbor is reading it, my classmates are reading it, and they are clicking the ad. And it sucks to realize that those clicks even with a good quantity totals to just a very small amount (since most clicks is from my country).

And then as I was signing up with other different ad networks I was a bit disappointed to learn that some networks rejected me just because of the fact that I live outside the US. It can really be depressing but having the proper mindset, here I am today.

It’s important to always look at the big picture, not get discouraged by all those cons and instead work on things you could care more. I myself live in a third world country, Philippines. As I was looking at my Analytics and logs, I was seeing the most of my traffic comes here in Asia, and I can say those readers are big factors why I make money from this blog, why I’m somehow read by people.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter where you live from or where your target market is. The only thing that matters is your dedication. Sure, you can count the disadvantages of living in your place at your fingertips or you can elaborate the advantages of living a big country but that’s not a legitimate reason, in fact it’s not even a reason.

As I end this, I do hope you can look at those bloggers I mentioned above and use them as an inspiration. Inspiration not just as big and successful bloggers, but also as bloggers who live in different parts of the world. Yep, blogging doesn’t have any borders, just like basketball.

iBlog 6 Blogging Summit Recap and Some Photos

by Melvin · Apr 19, 2010

Long time no post here, at least for my preference. 🙂 Anyways, last Friday and Saturday I attended the biggest blogging event here in Philippines which is the iBlog Philippine Blogging Summit. The conference was held for the 6th time already and I actually can’t believe that I missed the previous 5 ones considering that I’ve been blogging for 3 years already.

I also mentioned in my post on attending Wordcamp 09 that since late last year, I’ve shifted my focus on trying to network more with my fellow citizens here and connect with more local bloggers. Since I’ve started I was more always on the international side of things. Most of my blogging colleagues are from the other side of the world. I have few Filipino blogging friends but I realized I have to have more.

So I attended iBlog 6 Summit. It’s a 2 day event, the first day was more targeted on businesses on tapping blogs while the second day is more on blogging as a whole. Unlike most of the iBlog posts, this is going to be a comprehensive one. 🙂

Disclaimer: I’m a nice guy but I’m honest so i would put out my personal opinion on every talk. If you’re name is misspelled, hit me up. 🙂 Im also a horrible photographer so I had to steal borrow other photos from other people

Day 1

Since its just my second event, its understandable that I am holding myself back a bit because Im shy. Ok, I arrived just on time by myself and with no friends on sight.

Janette Toral spoke about Blogging for business which is a pretty general talk on how blogs make money and how they are intended for business. It was a pretty broad talk wherein she covered making money from various things like paid review, corporate blogging and selling products.

Janette is a reputable figure here in Philippine and while its my first time hearing her speak, I was not disappointed. I think she laid out all the necessary info especially for noobs on how the money works on blogging.

It was followed by Abe Olandres speech about Advertising in Blogs which is a more in-depth topic than the first one. Abe is one of the pioneers of blogging here and is one who probably have generated the most revenue. Its a pretty great talk and he was not too shabby to share his figures. 🙂

The next one was the sponsor talk and its really something I dont want to talk about. The next speaker is Mr. Gary Viray who preaches about SEO and SEM. Its pretty fundamental for me but I know it really opened the eyes of most new bloggers in the world of SEO. It also debunks the myth of old SEO practices wherein it used to be based on quantity of inbound links.

Next is the lunch and networking part. The food is “” but thats considerable considering its a free and open for all event. Again I was not able to network that much because I was really really shy. But at the time, I met four people by then namely: Mariel, May Ann, Paul David and Jilcae w/c are the people that I pretty much talked with for the whole day.

Carlo Ople then presented something about measuring blog buzz in w/c he tackled on how traditional businesses are so much hurting themselves not putting up proper online campaigns and lacking specific goals. It was one of my fave talk for that day since it presented me to the offline business side of things. Im always like the guy who knows things online but its refreshing to see the “foreign” side of things. Carlo reiterated that we must “show respect to social media” which pretty much sums it all up.

Emerson Banez who is a lawyer tackled legal concerns in blogging w/c I initially thought was boring but he made a way to make it enticing to listeners. It was basically about copyrights, and disclaimers which was beneficial as well. Law is really not my forte but its good to learn something from that side too.

The next one is about the win-win situation for bloggers and advertisers which was presented by Didi Paterno. It was a bit sound and fundamental to me since most of the money made in this blog is through advertising.

Lastly that day, Manuel Viloria which i thought was dressed a bit overformal, discussed about attraction marketing which was a really fruitful topic. This topic was about building a list, capturing them, then using social media to leverage them is something that was an eye-opener especially for most bloggers here. Up to now, it still amazes me how a lot of bloggers dont go into the “relationship-building” business model and instead just stay on the old blogging bandwagon techniques.

Day 2

Day 2 is mostly for bloggers. I anticipated that this day is for newbies, people who haven’t had much experience yet with blogging. With that in mind, I still attended.

The very beautiful, mesmerizing and eye-capturing and lovable Ms. Hannah Villasis started the day by discussing about Blogging 101 which is basically just about blogging and how it has become it is today. I’m hitting my head so hard because I actually missed this talk and wasnt able to take a pic of her while on stage. I woke up late that day and it sucks!

Then the equally handsome Vince Gollangco discussed about Video Blogging which was enticing to me since I’ve been planning to go into that route but never actually have done it. Vince made a great emphasis that we should never really care about those negative feedbacks because there would be always. He also handed out some great tips on how to do videoblogging and how its easier than what most people really think.

PhotoBlogging101 is another interesting talk since I am fascinated with photography lately. Im not a photo blogger but I love taking random pics. Juned discussed it more on a photography aspect rather than the blogging side and it was really a nice session.

Then it was the sponsor talk, and then the talk about launching successful blog contests which is something that I already have an idea about. But again Im sure this talk has become useful to a lot of other people on the said event.

It was followed by the very interesting topic of Impact of Blogging to the community wherein Joseph Gonzales (by far the most lively speaker, also humorous), cited the intangibles of blogging and how he leveraged it in helping his community. It was so inspiring to hear that blogging can do more than what we all think it could and in his case, its really for a bigger cause. And then it was lastly followed by Marghil Macuha’ of Macuha.com talked on how SEO is a must for making money online. It was pretty a fundamental talk but I picked up some nice techniques of his as well. 🙂

Conclusion & Things Learned

The biggest blogging conference and event was really living to its bill. I was so happy that I was able to attend and meet all other bloggers and prominent figures here personally. Of course I still wished to have done better especially with the networking part. In conferences like this, I should be introducing myself, shaking other people’s hand, taking pics with other people, and just building relationship with them, almost none of those were done. (shy alert!)

All in all I would like to thank to all who have stumbled upon in the event. My new buddies, May Ann, Jilcae, Paul and two other persons I didn’t recognize that much. The speakers who I know really prepared so hard not just to present something, but to make sure they give out the best ones.

And of course the organizers, Ms.Janette Toral, the emcees, the photographers (hey how can I find the pics that may possibly include me?), the hyper-active Mike Abundo, and all those people who worked to make this happen. Usually organizers are the ones who don’t get much credit but here I’d like to put an emphasis to them for doing such a wonderful job. Having an event for 6th straight years is just plain awesome.

iBlog 6 Group Pic — Photo is from Carlo Ople

If you have your own coverage of your iBlog 6 Summit, please comment here so I can post your link here as well. 🙂 Do share your opinion as well about this Summit and let me know what talks did you enjoy the most.

Other iBlog 6 Press/Blog Coverages:

More Photos are located on the photos page

Getting Subscribed to Email Poll Result & Announcements

by Melvin · Apr 4, 2010

A couple of weeks back I’ve written a post asking you, my readers on your personal take on automatic comment subscription. For those who haven’t read that post, I basically tackled how automatic comment subscription was not really that evil and annoying and it’s interesting to see different people’s view about it. I also openly stated that I may use that tactic depending on the result of the poll and here’s the result.

[poll id=”5″]

First off I was quite surprise with the low no.of participants in the said poll and maybe next time I would move the poll widget higher in the sidebar. Anyways, the result was close. 51% voted for “its not fine with me” while 49% (including me) voted for “it’s fine with me”. Overall there were less than 50 votes and it’s tough to make a decision when the outcome is that close.

Aside from the poll result itself, I also considered the post comments and to be honest, those comments gave me some good perspectives as well. Obviously people have mixed opinion towards that topic and its nice to learn why some people feel its annoying, why some like it and why others think its completely retarded. That have helped me make a better decision I guess.

Final Verdict

Since your opinion, by far is the most important thing here I considered NOT to implement the automatic comment subscription. HOWEVER, the checkbox on comment subscription is checked by default. So if you’re not at all interested on receiving those annoying emails from me, make sure you unchecked the box before submitting your comments. Again it’s checked by default and theres a reminder below that will constantly remind you guys about it.

I hope that my decision is for the majority. I know I can’t serve everyone but whats important is that I please the majority. What do you think guys? Did I make the better move or am I annoying the heck out of you? 🙂

April Fools Pranks, Are you one of those fools?

by Melvin · Apr 2, 2010

First and foremost, Happy april fools day to everyone! Here in my country its already the second of April and I know in most countries its just the 1st so today I would be tackling something about April fools and the pranks from some websites/blogs.

Anyways its funny how a lot of people are just sooo gullible that you could really laugh out loud when you see them just get persuaded that easy. Whether they were really acting foolishly or just getting with the flow is up to them.

So for today I collected some of my fave april fools prank for the year 2010 and let me know what you think about them.

1. Google Changes Its Name to Topeka

It has been announced in Google’s blog and by reading the post alone, I could obviously tell that it’s an april fools prank. Nice try google though! I just couldn’t fathom why people would say “I did a topeka search for blah blah”.

2. TextP from Youtube

Lols, this new feature from youtube allows you to watch videos in text only mode. According to them, it would save them $1 per second of bandwidth. You can view any video in TextP format by appending &textp=fool to the end of any URL on YouTube. Lols..

3. An App for Android that will translate Animal Speech

Google UK is said to be offering an app that would easily translate Animal Speech. Funny concept but it’s an obvious prank I must say.

4. Shoemoney Modeling Agency

From the time I’ve seen the title of the post, I instantly knew it was shoe’s present for this year’s april fools. And watching the video would really make you laugh. It’s basically about shoemoney doing modeling for a hefty amount of price. And since shoe is baldy-wise, he again held comments that would spoil the post on moderation. I tried gaming the commenting system but to no avail.

5. DailyBlogTips Television Deal

Daniel Scocco tried to be unique this time but I still won’t bite his prank. 🙂 Interestingly a lot of people are FOOL enough to believe his claims. LOL. If blogging could land people TV shows then im sure this would only become more saturated than ever.

6. College Humor Banned by the Government

Going to the site, you would get redirected to this april fool page in which it would tell you that they logged your IP and may subpoena your address from your ISP for further investigation. Im sure it scared the hell out of those fools eh? 🙂

Techcrunch has a bigger list and you can go there if you’d like to see other april fools pranks.

April Fools Day Never Die

I don’t know but April fools never die even though it seems that most people are prepared for it. Even though, its still surprising how a lot people are foolish enough to bite the claim w/c made it more fun and enticing.

Post note: Me saying the word fool is not intended to offend people, its just going through the tradition. 😉

Surprising Announcement!

And there is my surprise announcement! 🙂 I’m completely removing my self from operations in this blog and other several website of mine. No not really, I will still own EVERYTHING but would appoint several key players to staff my network of sites especially this blog, MelvinBlog.com.

I’ve worked with myriads of talented within my 5 years and so it gave me the opportunity to really get them for the long haul. Does that mean i’m not gonna post in this blog anymore? probably yes (heck don’t be sad). Maybe I still would (3 times a year or whatever). But rest assured the people I’ve hired to continue run this blog is as competent as I am and I know they have better grammars than me, lols.

Don’t really want to dive a lot on the reason but its basically because I was hired as a soon-to-be IT Project Manager for a prestige company called IBM. It’s amazing because I am just going to graduate this May and to have that job is just life-changing for me. I mean I’m not even 20 and i’m getting this opportunity already. I know it would be a hard transition for me but I guess im just willing to take and I promise that I would do everything to get the money they would pay me worth it! Here’s the press that IBM issued regarding this.

Again no reason to be sad, I hope you as my readers would be happy for me and still continue to support this blog.

Making Money Online & then Quitting School

by Melvin · Mar 27, 2010

There’s usually a trend not just in online space but in the business as a whole. And this is usually when a kid, or basically just a young person starts becoming successful (making tons of money is included in that of course). What happens most of the times, is that that young kid quits school and goes his own way. Does it sound surprising? No!

For the last couple of month, last couple of weeks specifically, I’ve been into probably the busiest, most exhausting days of my college life. I am a graduating student and I’ve never really like gave everything in school. Even if its exam or just any subject, I never had any day where I was not able to do what I really want. Of course until now.

Just a wrap up of what craziness happened the last few weeks, it includes the agonizing process of developing a software, then the super duper lengthy amount of paperworks that comes with it, then all the meeting and then the revision and then the defense. Do take note, that is just one subject. How about the others where we have a project, exams, stuffs, just craziness.

And it surprised me that I can’t even afford to login to the dashboard page of this blog. I can’t do a lot of the usual things I do in a day. Seems like all I can do is the school work (and tweeting of course)

Quitting School

Let’s go back to the main topic of this post. If you are into this niche, you could easily realize that most successful marketers/bloggers never really finished college. Instead they quit and stuffs.

To tell you honestly quitting school when you are making good money (or even just some money) is not a hard decision to make. I mean who cares about school anyway? I’m always like “hell Im going to school this month and I would then make lesser money as oppose to I’m not gonna go to school and I would triple my monthly income when I go to school”.

The only thing worth considering are the outside factors. The factors that doesn’t do anything with all the benefits that you get to enjoy when you quit school. Like for example is your parents. I don’t know about you but if I’m quitting school today (or even before) and say to them Im making enough money, then they’d still be upset. Why? Because of the degree that you’re going to miss out.

I know having a degree is probably one of the many overrated things here on earth but a lot of people just value that. Not having one is just like not having a future life.

Another good factor is your friends, your enjoyment and attachment with them. I would be the first one to say that I go to school mostly because I want to see my friends, have a talk with them and do our craps all together. And if I quit school right now, then I don’t think I would see them anymore for maybe the next few months (seriously!).

There are endless factors when it comes to this and it includes, financial stability, security, freedom, values and cultures that you are used to and etc. And its important to weigh them all down equally before making a decision. It wouldn’t also harm to seek out advice from people you trust.

Lastly, quitting school is ALMOST synonymous to having your own business, doing your own thing in future. Because of not having a degree, the chances of you, getting employed becomes smaller. Of course anyone out there could disagree and give me twenty-five reasons why its not the case but I’m pretty sure that it applies to majority, if not all. In short, you’re taking the risk and you’re less secure.

Am I Quitting School

Heck, no is the answer! As I’ve said, Im going to graduate one month from now and If I am about to quit then its the most stupid decisions I am going to make.Maybe if I have stumbled upon that thought 2 years ago, but now? Definitely not! 😉

School has taught a ton of nice values to me, enabled me to become who I am right now, helped me be with equally talented people, brought me experience I could never forget, hooked me up with pretty girls, got me with cool persons, party casinos, sports, drinking sprees and etc. Even if I was making $1 million 2 years ago, I probably would’ve still not quit, or maybe I would. 🙂

Automatically getting Subscribed to Comments, Good or Bad?

by Melvin · Mar 9, 2010

For the past few years I have been quite a bit critical and open on tackling blog comments. In fact, there’s even a dedicated category of it here just with that topic. Anyways today I would like to touch on something that I know people have mixed opinion with and that is comment subscription.

One of the guys I really look up into named Neil Patel has this enabled in his blog QuickSprout. What he basically has done is automatically have people commenting on his blog subscribed to their own comments. What happens is that if Neil (or some dude) replies to my comment, I would be notified vial email that someone has replied to my comment. 88 replies to my comment would then mean 88 notification emails (I know its unrealistic).

I’ve first seen that tactic on Gyutae Park’s blog at Winning the Web where the check box is automatically checked. To be honest with you, as a blogger myself, I find this tactic insidious and annoying. Why? Because of uhm, uhm, getting added emails and probably just really not caring to know if the guy replied or not. Both of which are lame reasons as well.

I was checking my subscription to comment plugin stats and I was surprised to learn that I’ve actually had a good number of audience here subscribing to comments. I was like wow. Over the past few years I’ve realized a couple of handful things on blogging generally. Maybe replying to majority of comments is not silly at all, or maybe this, maybe that.

So since we are talking about this topic, I am going to ask your opinion about. I would also like to say that by now, I’m discerning on following that tactic where each and every one of you who will comment will automatically be subscribed to comments. I’ve realized it’s not really annoying at all! But again thats just me…

[poll id=”5″]

Please let me know what you think by voting in the poll and also interacting in the comment forms below. Your feedback about this topic will largely affect my decision on whether to use that or not.