MelvinBlog

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

Ramblings

Promoting Email Submits? Don’t!

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affiliate fraud Pictures, Images and Photos

When every newcomer enters the world of affiliate marketing, he’s normally advised to try out the low-risk email submit types of offers. Why not, I mean email submits are pretty easy to convert. All you need to get a lead is an email of a customer. Also you don’t need to compete for those very high keyword competing keywords Promoting email submits ‘could’ really be the way to start for newbies.

Anyway here in this blog I have written some email submit walkthroughs that I have done (which has become outdated already). The last successful email submit campaign I had was last year when I heavily promoted the Obama vs. McCain thing. The campaign nearly brought me $20+ for almost 1 1/2 straight months and I was promoting them through Copeac.

Just to let you guys know email submits work this way. The merchant  ‘is ‘said’ to pay affiliates (us) $1+ for every email submit lead. The truth behind the offer is that when someone enters his email, he is then presented to 20+ more incentivized offers which the merchant runs as an affiliate as well. Affiliates get scrubbed when the certain customer enters his email but never completed 6-7 more offers (both paid and free offers). On some shitty email submits offers, they even demand 15-20 offers to be completed before they even get you the $1.50 per lead! Sucks? Yes it does!

For the customer’s side (our lead) here is how it goes.  So what is going to happen about that “free” something on email submit? Well as I’ve said they’d be entered into a larger plethora of offers in which in order to get that freebie, they have to complete those. To be able to complete, they have to purchase something and again in the end, it’s like they just paid  that free stuff.

Convert2Media founder Ruck told me in their IRC channel that these types of offers are something that they don’t have control at. So the best thing they did is just to eliminate all email and zip submit offers. If you look around the other affiliate networks, Copeac has taken down all of them as well, Market Leverage on the other hand has lessened theirs. It seems like the once mighty and in-demand type of offer has rapidly plunged down.

So to end this one is it still worth promoting email and zip submit offers? Hmmm, partly? Well if you could go for other higher converting offers that don’t scrub your balls that much then why not just go for them instead? I would very much love to hear your opinion about it

Link Lovin’ And Some Announcements

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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:

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. 🙂

March Traffic, Earning Details & Announcements

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So it’s been a long time since I have done this one here so I will be writing one now. The reasons why I don’t do the usual monthly recap are:  1) my blog isn’t really wrecking high revenue numbers, 2) I don’t have the time to do this. But now I have the time so I just thought I would put an effort to do a recap of what has happened the past month. So here it is without much further fluff:

Traffic & Growth Related Details
  • Alexa Rank – 144,726
  • Technorati – 55,363
  • Average Uniques – 220
  • Average Pageviews – 620
  • RSS – 150
  • Pagerank – 0

The blog stat-wise has actually declined from almost everything except feed subscribers. I’ve been working so hard on getting returning visitors by forum interaction and commenting around. The pageviews is more than 2 times of what the average unique visitor is. Maybe it’s because of some folks who keep refreshing the page because they are waiting for a new post, LOL> 🙂 As usual, Pagerank is still 0 as I just implemented the canonicalization thing last month and I am hoping that it would get something on the next update.

Blog Revenue Details
  • Text, Sponsored Links – $30
  • 125X125 Banner Sponsorship – $80
  • 468X60 – $50
  • Paid Reviews – $50

As usual the blog almost had a sold out advertising spot (despite me refusing to

blog-earnings

use OIO). The text links are so cheap ($5) that a lot of dudes on digitalpoint forum don’t even ask for stats. 🙂 The popular banners at the sidebar is sold out as well. The premium banner at the top has 2 rotations each up for $25 and fortunately it’s taken also (thanks to the reverse funnel guys, 😉 ). I got 2 paid reviews this month and I gave discount on that one. Yes, I give discounts! The economy is tough so I understand that a lot of marketers are skeptic to spend. As much as possible, I give them 10-50% on the first month so they could decide whether the exposure fits well. Don’t be a moron dude, don’t sell your ad spot for $40/month if your Alexa is over 500,000 and you just get 1-2 comments per post.

As this blog is relatively small, I don’t spend much expenses here more than just the hosting and the flip-flops I use while typing here. 🙂 Unfortunately I have 5-6 other websites that aren’t making any revenue as of now so the income is good to cover up other expenses from failed investments startup investments.

What’s up this April & May?

Well I have done a couple of guest posts on different types of blogs w/different types of audience. I conclude it’s doing good actually because it kept my traffic steady while my blog is in lull. I still have about 5 more guest posts to issue so just look around me on other blogs. Also, you may want to greet me. 🙂 April 21 is going to be my 18th birthday and I am planning to hold a small but very nice contest here in Melvin Blog wherein everyone can almost win! Watch out for that! Anyway if you would like to send me something, like a car or a yacht just use a contact form. But don’t worry I accept small gifts like shirts, usb drives, steaks or any tangibles. LOL, just joking. You’re presence is more than enough!

Failures That I Implemented in This Blog…

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So you probably have read it everywhere. A lot of people are really open into sharing their mistakes and faults with their business. Why? Because it takes so much interest from the readers. Readers are usually interested about these things and so I think I need to create my list as well. 🙂

But with a twist. I think if I would put a general list then it would quickly grow up to over 200 major failures. And so I would limit it to this specific blog known as melvin blog. Here they are (no order):

  1. Putting a pop-up ad on this blog –> Not a lot of you might have noticed it but I actually did it about 2-3 months after I started. The pop-up geographically targets US, canada visitors so traffic outside those countries wouldn’t experience it. After 2 months it drew over $10 before I learned the company actually is on hiatus for about 1 year. sucks!
  2. Putting an incentives page –> The page was actually still active and is found on /incentives of the blog. The initial thought was I would present incentivizable offers and have people sign to it and get paid (like gpt sites). It’s only at the end that I learned that merchants were scrubbing most of the leads and actually bots taking over the chatbox. 🙁 In the end I’ve spent $20 and barely made $5.
  3. WidgetSucks Experiment –> Well I thought this one is gonna be successful but its not. I implemented it for 2 months and never barely made a dollar with it. I am getting the impressions but for some reasons its not matching with the Widgetbucks stats. Failed!
  4. Thinking this blog was popular –> When the blog was on its peak during September and October, I almost neglected it. I thought “oh wow, my blog is now popular like a rockstar!” I am getting great number of responses and sold out ad spots as well. It wasn’t until November that I realized I lost 2/4 of my readers (for not posting useful stuffs) and 3/4 advertisers…
  5. Selling the blog on DP –> I’ll tell you what, the reason I actually had thoughts of selling the blog was because I eagerly want to have macbook Air before january this year.. Because I am idiot I listed it in DP instead of Sitepoint. The maximum bid I got there is a lil over $100! wtf!
  6. Not Canonicalizing –> It wasn’t until last month that I found out my url isn’t canonicalized. Hmm, thats why my pr is 0!

Well they say you learn from mistakes and failures. But I say I enjoy mistakes and failures after I actually realized how pointless those mistakes are. Sure it could be fun but I guess sometimes we have to be wary because it could hurt us sometimes not just financially. How about you and your blog, maybe you can tell your own story as well!

I learned my lesson!

Happy Easter, What Have You Accomplished This Holy Week?

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Many people would flame me maybe for not posting for almost a long time. I’m not really busy but few things just happened that made me not able to even look at the admin page of the blog. As I’ve mentioned last week I was terribly sick and I had to take a rest and so on. Then the internet connection went crappy making “online” an impossible for me. Then the holy week.

First I would like to greet all folks Happy Easter. Most people do sacrifice and fasting every holy week and my family isn’t different. For the first time, I completed a week w/o eating meat or any pork etc. I am really used in eating meat for almost everyday and I think passing for it for the whole week is a great accomplishment. Another is staying away from the internet. Of course we all know, we are internet geeks and it always seems that we couldn’t carry on living without getting a glimpse of the online world for a day. I never had an internet for almost the entire week and I think it makes me more productive with other stuffs in life.

The past week I also started my “fitness program”. Jogging every morning, working out, then eating as much as I can to make sure I wouldn’t lose more weight. My main goal in doing this is just to be physically fit. I mean of course gaining weight, and building muscles, having a greater looking body is in it, but basically it’s just trying to be fit.

I am planning on putting more posts on this blog for the next weeks as school closes. I was looking at the stats right now and it’s not a surprise that a lot have dropped. Uniques, pageviews per day, rss subscribers, Alexa Rank and total online visibility. I guess that is what really going to happen when you abandon a blog for almost 2 weeks. What do you think?

No Updates for A While, Where Am I?

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Some of you may be wondering why I haven’t been posting lately and some dudes have hit me through my IM on whether I am busy with something or what. Well to tell you, I am not busy with other money making stuffs and other projects, in fact I was sick. I’ve been suffering from influenza for the past three days or so and I’ve been having terrible headaches every morning. I haven’t been into doctor yet but now I’m feeling better.

Another reason is because I don’t have an internet connection for the past 2 days as well and since I’m sick I cannot go anywhere. With almost 10 days of hiatus in this blog, you can see my Rss numbers dropped as well as the Alexa rank. Don’t worry I wouldn’t be out for long. Hopefully I could be able to get back to my old ways before the holy week starts and have this blog back in the crowd again.

Meanwhile, just stay tuned. 😉 Buzz Marketing Expert Dean Hunt has a guest post here soon and I have a lot of great surprises for this month of April. How about you, what are you doin’ lately?

Sell A Blog for $9500 and Get 9500 Spams!

Sell A Blog for $9500 and Get 9500 Spams!

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Sly Blanco, the famous dude who sold his blog for $9500 has been having his new blog beaten, swallowed, shove in the ass, destroyed, bludgeoned, attacked by spambots. Look:

spambots

And John has been his loyal reader commentator. 🙂

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I am pretty much sure Sly’s really taking his time with the huge chunk of almost $10,000 that he got from his previous blog. So as the spams, taking their sweet time turning his blog to a splog.