MelvinBlog

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

Ramblings

What’s The Best Birthday Gift For A Girl I?

by ·

Pre-note: The post that you’re about to read below is an old blog post where I was asking my readers about the best birthday gift for girls. And quite frankly the post was done during my college days which means its a very old post by now. But still the entire goal on this post was to survey my readers on what they think are the best birthday gifts for girls or more specifically, the best birthday gift for a girl I care a lot. 🙂

So I have a big crush in school (I am in 3rd year college) and some people call it “genuine attraction” because I have been having it for the past 3 years and I still admire and love her up to today. I am a very shy guy as in really shy. I do have a lot of friends but I don’t speak much to those people whose first name is unknown to me! 🙂 Well back to that girl, I haven’t really even talked much to her a lot because of again me feeling coward shy. But then I think I have kinda given her some gifts anonymously way back 2 years ago.

For me it doesn’t really mean anything if she knows me or not or blah blah. But then here’s the time I have realized I should give it this time personally. I have planned for this way back June and well you can say I am kidding but my initial fund that I planned for a gift for her before is like $100 – $150 and what I am planning to buy is a ring! 🙂 LOL, it symbolizes commitment!  But well long story short, here comes October and I paid all my bills and Adwords and hosting (of many sites) and my debt to my mom! So, the only money I can spend is about $20-$50! I know its ridiculous for some of you but its still a big value here in Philippines. 😉

Now with less than 3 days, what’s the gift you think I should take a look at for the girl I love? I’ve dabbled with pendants, bracelets, chocolate cakes and etc. A stuff toy is the worst thing that you could ever say here so please!

A great friend told me that when I give a gift I should make sure it has value not only romantically but in real life. I’m w8ing for your take. 😉

The Sunday Thing Everyone Is Doing

by ·

Love

So being busy for almost the whole week and coming weeks to come(search for the word busy in this blog, and you’ll find a ton), I have to do the link love that most people do. Btw, just want to say the comment rewards would be inactive at least for a short month as I was looking for a more eye-popping prizes. So Stay tuned! Also I was very happy to have sponsors for this blog that have booked long term!

For the best post that I have seen and bookmarked, here they are:

The perfectionism thing is a great read. When I have read the title I was about to contracdict it and when I read the content I suddenly agreed with it. 😉 Shoemoney’s most commented post that week is an eye-opener. Just because guys like him who never finished college  became succesful, all of a sudden everyone wants to quit going to school and start making money online, which again I say is not for everyone. The Why do you blog question is popular these days and its interesting to see what are people’s take with it. Mr. Cooper talks about the importance of design. It’s so true that because everything has become a 2.0, design seems to be an important factor(very important) for getting viral.

For this coming week, I have a lot of unique ideas that can surely piss you out. 😉 I have prepared some posts that will break your neck make an emphasis on reality rather than what most people say. 🙂 So again stay tuned and make sure you are not subscribed to my feed

September 2008 Income From My Whole Life

by ·

Sorry for the crappy title. 🙂 The month of September is a busy month for me! I have to go full time in school and Pay Per Click campaigns! Anyway September is a nice month and I just thought I will do a roundup like what most people pretty much do. This is the first time I will do this one 😉

Rankings and Blah Blah…

  • Alexa down to 136,000
  • PR dropped to 0 for no reasons at all
  • Technorati in 50,000 now!
  • 12,000 Pageviews from last month
  • Top 130 in 45n5
  • Improved Google SERPS
  • What else

I have improved slightly overall even though I haven’t done much promotions. I have also not been posting anything related to making money and most post from this month don’t have the quality that most blogs offer. Still my readers are still visiting and have seen increase return visitors traffic. The number of comments per post is still great and I just think the best way to say is thank you for my readers! 🙂

So for the income of the blog this month

  • $25 from Paid Post
  • $55 for direct sponsorship

Believe it or not this is the highest paid advertisement I got in this blog. From June to August, it was just like $10 – $20 and last month was probably the best month. I also got a long term bookings and some really took advantage of my cheap rates (my advertise page is still not updated)!

Income from Affiliate Networks

The Copeac thing is doing great. You may remember me for posting the Pay Per Click Campaigns that I did with Copeac. $165 is damn impressive for me because I just kick started things off last September 20 until the last day. The $62 from PJN was actually $62 way before the 15th month, before I took all my camps down from them. Still a decent amount for me! Btw, PJN still pays new signups $10 for signing under my ass! $20 from Clickbooth is I don’t where it actually came from and the my smallest earnings that came from Comm. Junc. is great considering I even have forgotten my password with my account with them.

Basketball Betting

So Actually I and a great friend Raymille had this little bet on our teams, me w/Ateneo and him w/his LaSalle crap! Eventually LaSalle sucked that bad and was swept in the entire series.

Expenses

  • Adwords – $120
  • Food and Transpo for school – 500 PHP ($12)
  • Bills ($20)

So I really hate talking about expenses because it makes me feel I have earned nothing but lets face it everyone spends on something. The adwords cost for the entire month is just actually when I started running Copeac’s campaigns. I set up a very poor low budget campaigns. For the food and transportation, I have always been over what’s my money for school. My parents give me about $6-8 per day for my expenses and its like I was always $10 per day not because I have poor budgeting but because everything has skyrockted in terms of price.

So, that’s everything for the previous one. What should you expect from me this October? Literally none! 🙂 I will be trying to post some of my PPC tactics and some blogging tips that I have learned along the way as well as my ramblings and blah blah. I would also like to beg Market Leverage to accept me to their network because I think I was like rejected for about 20 million times and all I wanted is to get accepted to their program and hopefully dominate Tyler’s New Signups Affiliate Challenge! 😉

The Flip From Market Leverage

by ·

Last month some of you knew that I won a contest by Collin Lahay which was sponsored by Market Leverage. After a month I finally was able to get the Flip from the post office and well they charged me some tax amounting to $45 to it. I just thought this is an example of how corruption has swallowed the Philippines entirely. 🙁 Anyway, thanks Market leverage… After I have opened the flip I got a short video by someone on their staff (Debby or Dina or who?) and well I really appreciate it. I took me some sweat to get that Flip as there was a typo on my name on the package…

So in return I did a video of my mine saying my appreciation! (I suck at doing videos!)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmu5j2QNsww

Guess What, My PR is 0 Again!

by ·

Just woke up this morning and well upon looking at the toolbar of my firefox, it stated that I got a pr0 rankings anew. I immediately head on to my SEOMOZ account and indeed my blog has became a pr0 just a couple of hours ago..

Let’s face it the pagerank on toolbars is something a lot of people building links are always looking at. Although, it doesn’t make much sense and the real PR algo is what counts, it still makes sense to have a fair overall ranking. Back to the PR update, its strange because I have never done any paid post and all links and banners ads here are nofollowed so I’m not passing the PR juice. I don’t think I have done black hat link building stuffs or so… Hmm. what do you think?

Every Kid Who Has A Blog Is Busy Right Now!

by ·

Student Blogger
Student Blogger

Yesterday I was looking on blog premiere forum (kid and teenager bloggers) and have observed that it seems most kid bloggers today have had some adjustments with his posting frequency and others have just simply stopped because of studies. Well this is true especially the latter part of the year wherein the school resumes back and more probably take a huge chunk of time of bloggers and marketers who are studying still. It has also been noticeable that the comments and activity of young bloggers through forums and social sites have decreased. Really hard to manage time right?

Well I think it’s one crucial thing here and most kid and teenagers will learn from it. How they should be able to manage their time and how we should maintain our online stuffs without having our studies suffer. For me the trimester of our school has ended. There will be a one week break before I head back again to the second trimester. This trime by far is the busiest one and I really learned a lot on it. It’s ironic because the blog has never lost its ranking. I mean from August to July, I have stopped promoting it and well mainly because I can’t, everything related to school has been like eating my whole time.

How about you? I know most readers here do also study and split their time doing different stuffs, do you think you are managing your time well?

They Hacked This Blog And How My Determination Fixed it

by ·

Most of you probably know that this blog was hacked a couple of days ago. In fact, you can see in my archive page that there is a notice (until now) saying to just go directly to my posts instead of going to the homepage. Well, long story… (you may not want to read this because this is boring!)

The day started when I tried loggin in to my wordpress blog admin page. I was surprised to see that the my login wasn’t succesful so I retried it. But well still to no avail. I immediately pressed the forgot password and well my password was reset and I was able to login again. Being curious, I immedaitely visited my site and saw that I am hacked! Well, I was surprised at it that I wasn’t even able to take a screenshot of it (if everyone has, please give it to me 😉 ) I then panicked a bit mainly because obviously I know little with things like this and well its just that from my point of view I can do nothing by myself.

So I then turned to the busiest forum in the world, the digital point. I have made a thread there saying my site was hacked and I immediately got great responses. Some were saying that I should check for some shells, others are saying this and that and those. I also went through the teenager internet marketing forum, blog premiere. Many people have responded as well, but in a longer span of time. Jason pointed out saying that I should get the db from my host which is gator. Oh, yeah! I forgot I should have a conversation with my web host which should be done first and foremost. I immediately called them and talked (they were polite) and they say they would get back to me asap. The incident reminds me of the hacking of Carl Ocab’s site. When his site was hacked, what he did was to change host and update the nameservers and it became fine. The process is a little lengthy though.

I was busy all throughout the day. I then called Rajaie who could probably help me with this. he responded immediately (thats what friends are all about:-) ). He asked for my wp account and I immediately made one for him and made him an administrator. One clear thing is that I dont have a clear path of what to do. While waiting for him, I emailed Scocco of DBT, I tweeted Shoemoney, and the number of replies from dp kept on growing. I then revoked the admin privileges to Alkorani because I feel I should on a more clear direction.

Turned the PC off and think more. I had to be more focused and DETERMINED for it. The blog, well aside from having sold out ad spots, hundreds of readers, the main thing is that it’s a part of me. That’s why my name has on it. After 2 hours, turned the PC again, got reply from Scocco saying I should reinstall wordpress and load the backup. Problem is that my last backup was made way back June, wtf! I told him if there;s other solution? and he said none! I am a click away from removing wordpress and reinstalling it and loading an outdated backup but I said No! Then the great light came in and it seemed that in a blink of an eye I know the end of the tunnel is very close.

I, have searched on C99 shells and have found some of them on my public_html folder, then I also found suspicious files which I fearlessly deleted. Then still not fine~ oh shit! Then an idea popped out and well I changed my template back to the old and ugly Kubrick theme. I loaded it and to my surprise it loaded succesfully… Aha! The problem was on my template. Obviously, the site’s main page is the only one not functioning. What I did is look at the index.php and bingo! I have found out the culprit! I immediately restored the code back and it was back again. The rest was history…

What did I learn? Many things; always back up, never lose composure, trust yourself, and believe in your friends that you can do it, they add positive things. To all, thank you for the help, digital point, blog premiere, the bloggers I have contacted and everyone. A very great experience to me!