MelvinBlog

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

Ramblings

Catching up with Technology

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Since my family is not considered to be a wealthy one, I did not get to experience all those expensive toys or gadgets that other people do growing up. I was most of the time given what is adequate and needed but nothing else beyond that. That helped me a lot in not craving for the hottest gadget in town as my interest in having them is non-existent.

It’s not until I got a job that I started having more interest in having them. I grew up having a computer that is very much useable. During my middle high school years (2003-2005), I was given a Pentium 4 computer and while it’s a decent computer, it’s not considered one of the best at the time. I also did not have any other gaming consoles other than the legendary Ps1. Most of the time I was contented playing brick games because I genuinely think it was cool back then.

Fast forward to the last 5-6 years or so, not a lot has changed. I am using a dual core computer as I’m typing this. I still do not have a console (PS1 is dead by now) and I don’t have a tablet or any fancy gadgets like that. Now I mentioned the word “not a lot” which means some things have changed.

Couple of months ago I got myself a Nexus 5 mobile phone to upgrade from my ancient Samsung Galaxy Mini purchased in 2011. Imagine the massive upgrade in Android version as I went from Froyo to Kitkat in one change. The Nexus 5 at the time of this writing is a flagship from LG/Google (albeit a cheaper one).

Even longer before that I also purchased a decent camera in Sony Nex 6 which definitely was expensive. Prior to that I have an even more ancient Sony DSC-whatever camera that uses AA batteries geez. Of course the Sony Nex 6 camera is purchased with a purpose in mind which is to learn photography by investing time and money into it. I won’t say I’m going to be looking for a career centered around it but I want to hone a skill in that.

Finally, there is this headphone hobby which is by far the most expensive investment that I have. It started sometime late in 2011 and the fruit of that is the creation of Headphone Philippines which is primarily a headphone review website. While the hobby is expensive and the return from a financial standpoint is quite minimal, I would say that I’m very happy and satisfied doing this whole headphone thing.

In the next 4-6 months I am planning on upgrading my main workstation which by the way is still an Intel Dual Core that has a passmark of 1,200 (yuck!). I would obviously not go for the best but anything that will make me more efficient is a good and worthy upgrade.

You can say one way or another that me having a consistent job, while still getting some money online has allowed me to change a bit in terms of how I view gadgets and new technologies in general. While I certainly won’t spent a fortune on things that are not useful to me, if given the right time and preparation (financially), I can’t see why I won’t be able to catch up on new technologies and upgrade myself a bit for the better hopefully. Then again, there’s this risk of spending too much and spending what you don’t actually have which I have to be extremely careful about.

Technologies also don’t just revolve around physical things like gadgets, etc. It’s also found online like this blog and my other blogs, my hosting, CMS software that  I’m using, CDN network that I’m on, email newsletter system,  and many other things that I probably don’t even know myself.

Finally, it might not necessarily be purely tech but over the past couple of years I’ve started buying more stuff online as oppose to the traditional ways. For gadgets that I’m not able to find locally I use Amazon. For clothing, I use a company called Zalora and they actually have a wide inventory of items to choose from. Fila Philippines is one of the examples. The classic Fila brand isn’t widely sold in malls these days but Zalora has them which is nice.

It would be interesting to see how buying clothing and other stuff online will grow more in the coming years as people start discovering and realizing how convenient this is when compared to physically going to stores.

Nonetheless, I guess it’s safe to say that I’m catching up a bit here.

My First Post for 2014

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It’s amazing that this blog is approaching its 6th year. I have to say that time really does fly rapidly and reading some of the first posts, it’s clear that I have improved in many ways related to blogging itself. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for me anymore to pump out content the same way as I did before and do other things related to making this blog popular again.

This is my first post for this year and if I’m lucky, I might make at least 10 posts for the year. But then again, I’m not looking at it as a goal for myself. Perhaps making money online exclusively is not for me (first post).

Anyway, I’ve been busy with the same things on a daily basis. My work still takes most of the priority here and a big part of that is also traveling back and forth as I spend 3 hours on transportation time daily. Work-wise, I have been upgraded a bit which is always good for my young career.  Due to that, I may not look to move anymore.

Outside of work, I do work mostly on my hobby project which is about Headphones. The site is thriving slowly but surely and I can’t be more than happy with the progress. In a way, I would say it’s very satisfying as I get to try many headphones myself w/o incurring any costs at all.

I’m very happy too that I’ve received my first check from Amazon which is the only way I intended to monetize the website. While the amount is not extraordinary, I’m surprised that the website was able to make any money as I certainly did not have any expectations from it yet. Overall, I’m quite optimistic for its future.

Finally, I have very much decreased doing consulting work for friends, acquaintances because my interest in it is much lesser now compared to the previous years. The idea of delegating some part of work has only remained as an idea unfortunately.

That is pretty much what I’ve been doing for this year. I also currently tune in to the NBA playoffs which is appearing to be a competitive one for this year. Who do you think will go all the way? 🙂

Getting Back to ‘Basketball Blogging’

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I mentioned many times in the past how I got started with blogging, and it was through blogging about basketball, particularly the NBA. Ideally it was my plan to blog about other areas of basketball like local basketball, European leagues, collegiate basketball, etc. however it was pretty obvious that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with it due to my lack of knowledge on other areas and time constraints as well (was a student at the time).

Anyway back to ‘getting back’ to basketball blogging, I used to own a personal basketball blog called Basketball Nonsense that I started 2007. It was nothing really eye-catching as its just a ramblings blog about basketball (NBA) where I just rant about players that I don’t like and write about my own analysis on things. Long story short, it started getting popular and started making money although it was never massive. I sold the blog for 300  some dollars which at the time was amazing for me. I was so thrilled with the amount that I accepted the bid right away.

Even with the sale, I still wrote for the blog as a paid writer for the next 4-5 months. And even after that period, I would still normally write or comment about an article there just because I needed a place to write something regarding my thoughts about basketball.  Offline, I usually have friends who I talk to about basketball almost every single day. I guess anyone who follows basketball know that it isn’t really out of the ordinary to talk about basketball 24-7.

Back to Blogging about NBA Basketball

It was a long story and even now I don’t still have the complete ownership of the blog. But since I’ve hosted the site for perhaps over a year now for free, I decided to take on a more active role regarding writing content on the blog.

Basketball Nonsense is not an amazing blog at all and in fact, it gets less than 50 hits a day for the past 1.5 years. My goal is to write more content again on that blog however I’m not really too keen on monetizing it or making it like Slam Online or something. If it gets traffic and comments, fine but right now, I just want to write my thoughts about basketball on some web property. And since there’s a property that I used to own, why not write on that existing one?

All in all, this is ‘blogging for passion’ in action. I’m just so glad I can write once more about basketball and offer my ‘scholarly’ thoughts about what’s happening and engage to the community once again.  And to start with, I made some minor revamps on design and will still continue to enhance its look and then later focus on writing more.

But that’s it for now. Visit the blog and let me know what you think!

The Death of Complex Blog Designs (& My Own Redesign)

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When I started being aware of blogs, most of the blogs at the time were pretty much sporting a generic design. The simple blog layout was usually just a 2 column layout, a simple header, simple footer and dull colors. Of course I just followed the herd and had those design on my blogs.

Now as time passed by, more and more blog design companies introduced more flexible yet complex themes.  All of a sudden all normal blogs started sporting the ‘magazine’ look and I was one of them of course. 😉 The simple 2 column layout became obsolete quickly and multiple sidebars, multi subheaders and footers started becoming the ‘in thing’. And based on the past designs of this blog, you can see that I was very much following the trend.

MelvinBlog 4.0

Even though I’ve been mostly using magazine style themes, I’m a big fan of simple blog designs such as DailyBlogTips and DoshDosh (which is dead nowadays). I always thought like their blog loads in no time and that its very very pleasing in the eyes. And thus, it encouraged me to find a simpler design and finally move away from the magazine style template.

Now you can argue that my current design may still not be the ‘simplest’ of all however you can easily see that this design moves far away from the previous designs where I had fancy sliders, colorful images, thumbnails and etc. Instead, this design just focuses on content and nothing else. The readability, spacing is definitely much better and the elements can breathe easier based on how the theme is designed. And while I still have 2 sidebars, the widgets that I have utilized is much lesser than the past designs. And lastly I cut down on redundancy by eliminating stuff that are pretty much just wasting the space.

Now using StudioPress Framework

And if you’re wondering what theme it is, then the answer is its StudioPress. In the past designs I mostly pick themes that are not so mainstream. The past theme was from someone in ThemeForest and while I like it, its clear that its pretty hard to expand from the theme itself due to that there’s really not much people behind it.

With StudioPress, you’re talking about the flexible framework but you’re also after the interactive support from the community. I’m sure its still going to take me some time to understand features such as hooks but they’re definitely not lacking on resources on how to help users like me understand it. So all in all I’m happy so far with my transition to the StudioPress Framework and thus I would highly recommend you to at least take a look at them.

Death of Complex Designs.

Now getting back to the death of complex flashy blog designs, I would say that most bloggers in this space have moved into a more simple approach as well. Shoemoney’s blog has been much cleaner now and loads a ton quicker as well. John Chow who has been notorious for plastering his blog with as much stuff as possible has also decided to cut down more. I have a lot on the list but you should find out yourself that blogs these days seem to be getting back more on basic designs with basic layout and stuff.  Or perhaps is it just in this industry?

Perhaps this has also something to do with the decline of the ‘meta-blogging’ (blogging about blogging, blogging about making money blogging) trend. The strength of meta-blogging mostly hinges through advertising money, affiliate referral, and product sales in general and when you’re talking about those things, you’re talking about putting more and more ‘clutter’ to your blog one way or another. Its like the ‘more banners the better chance I can make money’ kind of thinking. And now that its dead, bloggers are quickly moving away from all the clutter by either changing their approach or just simply forgetting about blogging for money.

And therefore, what used to be “dull” seems to be the cool thing again these days. What say you?

Resurrection of my Blogging Life + Drastic Changes Ahead…

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So what’s up? It’s been almost 3 months since I last posted here in this blog and the last two posts didn’t even seem like “real” posts from me. 🙂 Overall, I just posted less than 40 posts for the past year and just 4 in the past 4 months. Oh yea!

I’m sure you’ve heard me before coming up with a lot of alibis and excuses for the lack of posts and today, I would still do the same by saying that I’ve been busy the past year with my work primarily and other client tasks.  But the difference is that I will not come up with a list this time of what to expect from this blog. But rather I would discuss some drastic changes going forward.

Reverting back to casual posting

One of the things that I’ve done in the past 2 years (more evidently the past year) is that I moved slowly from being a casual blogger that has passion for internet marketing and blogging to a blogger who wants to build expertise and strictly cater to that expertise. I started to “act” like a guru on something and thus wanted to connect to my audience as someone who knows A LOT about something rather than just simply being myself. Obviously this has burned me out to the point that I hated writing here anymore.

When I was just getting started about 4 years ago, I idolized Shoemoney because he’s just so ‘plain’. He writes something useful about our industry but he also writes a lot about ‘personal crap’ or things that he’s interested but most of is audience are not. And I used to post like that. I had a lot ‘childish’ posts about having a bunch of mouse for my PC, receiving gadgets from companies, and even love life posts. It’s not really “so professional” but its enjoying.

Going back to what I was doing the past year, it became clear that its “unfulfilling”. I started to work on things like capturing more newsletter subscribers, strategizing on funneling prospects to buyers, writing bait posts that will eventually get readers to get my incentives and all of those ‘Frank Kern’ type of ninja things.   Of course, no offense to Frank, but I was not built that way.

And last but certainly not the least, Robb Sutton’s post about ‘Blogging needing to get back to its roots‘ made me realize a bunch of things as well. So props to you Rob!

What will change & what will not

Does this mean I’m not going to monetize this blog anymore? No of course! Ads are still there and will always be there forever. I haven’t really made that much money from ads recently (probably less than $1500 for the past year) however I still see a lot of value in the “spaces” of this blog. I’m not going to push this too much but ads will remain. 🙂

How about the usual ‘marketing’ shit like capturing email leads, funneling them, selling info products to them, upselling etc.? I will probably still however this will never ever be a priority. In fact, I don’t even think I’m going to do anything aside from getting some newsletters out. I don’t see myself putting out any product today, and in the future. 😉

How about the posts? As mentioned above, I will do more casual posts. More of “I feel good about writing this today” kind of thing. Maybe not so much as say posting cat pictures, or ranting about neighbors and colleagues and stuff. But it depends on how I feel. I’m sure I’m going to lose out some readers along the way but hey this is my blog.

I will probably be doing some massive changes to some pages to reflect the shift of focus for this blog. Sure, pages like Freebies, Why Subscribe to my Blog will remain unchanged but as mentioned, the blog will not revolve around showcasing those things anymore. I’d be happy if I get more and more readers however, as long as I’m feeling good about what I’m doing, then I will just continue it. 🙂

So whats next?

I don’t know! I’ll probably write next about the version 4.0 design of this blog and then some ramblings here and there. The one thing to keep in mind is that MelvinBlog will still continue to be an internet marketing /blogging blog however I wouldn’t be pressuring myself too much about coming up with guides and rich-content type of posts. I may put out some posts about a marketing strategy that worked well for me but that would be few and far between.

As I’m writing this, I’m actually getting more and more excited about this ‘rebirth’  in blogging. I haven’t really written anything on ANY other blogs of mine but that FOR SURE will change in the coming months. Either for the good or the bad, not much that I cared anyway. 😉

What’s Your View on Facebook Timeline?

What’s Your View on Facebook Timeline?

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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?