Ramblings

How I Got the Job that I Really Want

by Melvin · Aug 27, 2010

By now you are probably feeling that the owner of this blog has a real world job as evident with the lack of posting here as well as lack of interaction in the blogosphere as a whole. It’s true. It’s quite hard to manage two worlds in same amount of time while balancing your life altogether. However, I can tell you its really super rewarding, especially if you like what youre doing in your job.

I’m pleasured that one of the most popular blogs in the world Jobmobs have allowed me to share my experience with job hunting via a guest post. In that blog I created a post entitled “How to Define Your Ideal Job and Why You Have To”. Part of the interesting points I tackled there are as follows (quoted):

Admit it, it’s hard to go outside wearing that funky eccentric dress while splashing that confidence if you’re not really sure you want what you’re going to do. Or in the case of a job search, most people just ignore so many job listings because they feel they aren’t ready yet, which is obviously related to not having enough confidence in yourself.

If you really think a job is ideal for you, why would you lack confidence? Why would you feel scared?

So here it is!

My belief with the whole job hunting thing is that people get employed more quickly depending on how much they like the job.

How is that so?

Read more at: http://jobmob.co.il/blog/define-your-ideal-job/#ixzz0xjMhb1uw

I’m getting some interesting feedbacks about it so far and I’m looking forward on hearing your piece as well. I’m sure there are so many people that can relate to that post so let me know! 🙂

The Big Challenge After a Blog Contest – The Dropoff

by Melvin · Aug 22, 2010

By now I can relax a bit after all the contest related tasks have been completed. With this I realized that no matter how small or big, how short or long a contest will be, it will always take a lot of work. As I’ve said, I worked for this contest in as early as late April so I’ve been really doing most of the planning myself since this is a one-man blog.

But still, I don’t have any regrets whatsoever. I know by now, you know how grateful I am with how the contest turned out to be and how this has been so beneficial to the blogosphere. Traffic wise it’s been great as well. I got the most traffic ever during those months although I didn’t ramp up my posting. But now that the contest is over, here comes the big challenge.

Traffic Dropoff

Traffic dropoff usually happens after the end of each contest. Its nothing revolutionary, it’s just normal.

Let’s say a blog just gets 50 visitors prior to running a contest. As soon as the blogger runs the contest, he instantly notices that he doubles his traffic immediately.But after the contest, he soon realizes that his traffic starts to go down and back to the normal 50 visits per day.

As I’ve said, this really happens to any bloggers who run contests. The main reason for this is sound and simple, people only get to your site/blog because they’re incentivized to do so.

One thing you can easily notice is that throughout your contest, some other bloggers who haven’t been into your blog were the most active ones. They comment a lot, interact and almost have been always there.

Don’t get me wrong there’s nothing wrong about that. It’s human nature that in a contest you want to be as nice as possible because its part of your strategy in winning the contest. However when the contest ends, the participants interest on continuing on following you and your blog highly depends on whether they won something or they didn’t. With that in mind, the incentivization factor that had them to follow you in the first place starts to diminish.

The challenge then is to make them stay even after the contest.

Hook them through the contest, Make them stay for the content

So what I usually try to do is test if they’re really in for a long haul by producing good content. How? Well a contest usually runs for a month, in my case its for 1 and a half months. So that period is your period to convince them that you’re blog is more than just a blog holding a contest, that you’re content is far more important than the prizes of the contest.

This is hard to do and it’s really challenging to make them stay mainly because they may not be the right people in your blog in the first place. Most people who join contests are those who live with contests. Not that I have any problem with that but proliferation is really important. If I have 100 new audiences that aren’t willing to spend money forever, then isn’t it worth it more to have just 15 potential customers who are loyal enough to stay for the long haul because of the good stuff I’m providing?

The takeaway here is still the content. People read stuffs because they like reading it isn’t it? And with contests, it’s not really good content, is it?

As you can see we as bloggers, as contest organizers have an ample time to prove ourselves to them. Write good content, make sure you make them feel they belong, always keep that conversation even after the contest is over. Those and other small things may be enough to make them stay for a while, maybe for a little bit longer. What say you?

Can We Connect More in Facebook?

by Melvin · Aug 15, 2010

Since having a job late last June, I took it as a challenge to maintain everything that I’ve been doing. I always think I’m a good darn multitasker and with that, every plan that I had prior to taking my job has still been the plan.

Obviously its getting tougher and tougher each week as I realized things are not as easy as I thought they would be. I’m sure you notice it that there were times that I couldn’t even publish a single blog post here or maybe respond to an email in a timely manner. Yes, having a day job is a huge time sink.

So it left me thinking what could I do to still maintain my connection with you, as my readers like I did before. Since it’s nearly impossible to pop out as much blog posts as I used to in the old days, I had an idea of being more into the social media scene.

Obviously I thought of Twitter. I mean, I tweet a lot of time, I have a thousand followers so maybe I can just tap into it and communicate with you more. Good idea but I realized something else.

Twitter is good but still it doesn’t really possess the “real-timeness” of Facebook. I mean how many times can you reply to someone, only to get a reply after a day or two? and then getting confused with the reply because you already forgot you asked a question.

Since I brought up Facebook, then it’s a good idea to use it right? Facebook probably is the largest social network outside Twitter and people there spend more time than with the latter one. I have a Facebook account with a couple hundred followers but the problem is it’s used more to connect to friends and people here in my country. If you’re my friend there, I’m sure you see me say a lot of “Tagalog” words that you just don’t care at all because you don’t understand it in the first place. Most of my things there are just catered to my friends and relatives, not in a wider user base as for instance, my blog’s readers.

With that I realized, the fan page. Yes, the MelvinBlog Facebook Fan Page. The fan page started late last year and I even held a contest to populate my fans, lols. It started off good and nice, I was active there, some of the fans are replying on a daily basis and I’m also using it to gain more traffic back to the blog and vice versa.

I started automating things, connecting it with Twitter and my feed and eventually what happened is that it became stagnant. I mean who cares replying to an automated wall status message right? As days passed by, it started becoming more and more dull. The usual 3-4 replies I get in my wall messages turned to zero, zilch! My bad eh!

The Resurrection of my Fan Page

Yes, you guessed it right. I’m going to switch it back to its old setup and start being more active there. I know the fan page has been “dead” for the past 5 months but its time to resurrect it.

As I’ve said my plan with it is to use it more to communicate with you when times are hard (means busy days). Just to give you an idea, here’s what you can do with my fan page:

Greet me hi or hello
Say I look good
Ask questions
Complain about something
Collaborate with your ideas
Spam your links 🙂
Beg for money
Shoot me with your funny pics
Tag me with your food for the moment
Use it as an email alternative
and super many more

As you can see, you can literally do anything by being hooked up in my fan page. And I can assure you that I’ll never let you down. Fortunately, surfing Facebook is 110% legal in our office so rest assure that we can then be closer with each other.

You may want to closely follow it since I’m having some brilliant contest ideas that I may throw just in that fan page. Its going to be really nice and fun out there as we can learn more about each other on a more personal scale. Be a fan of my blog now and let’s start connecting. =p

MelvinBlog’s Marketing Tip Contest Winners

by Melvin · Aug 7, 2010

The time has finally come. As I’ve promised, today the winners for the MelvinBlog’s Marketing Tip Contest will be announced. And as I’ve said, I will not be late this time in announcing the winners I will try not to be late but still I did (lols, its Aug.7 in Philippines).

As I’ve mentioned thousand of times, the entries were really great and I’m sure the judges had a hard time rating each article. I myself had a hard time too! Anyways for the last time I’d like to thank the sponsors for gracing this event as if not for them all these things will not happen. I’d like to thank my media partner Fergal of Business Advice Forum who has done an exceptional job in spreading the news. Now for the last time let’s give these people a round of a plause for being sponsors:

Now the Winners

So all in all we had 16 entries and as I’ve said the winners will be judged by two factors; quality and popularity. Quality is 70% and is largely based on the ratings given by the five judges. The second one is popularity which accounts for 30%. This is basically the amount of comments and retweets the posts have received. For the sake of getting you more excited here’s the screenshot of the scoreboard (Click for a larger view)

As agreed upon, I’m not going to disclose the name of the judges for now. If you saw the image above and still you were not able to figure it out. Read below to see the complete list of the winners.

1st Prize – Lee Ka Hoong

Lee’s entry was entitled 3 Effective Blog Marketing Strategies That I Use and it got the highest score overall. He scored a total of 8.1 points and got the nod of most judges. Aside from that it also got a lot of traffic that his blog was one of the main traffic drivers for my blog on that month. Congratulations Lee! You win the following:

6 months free for the standard package of CrazyEgg valued at $19 a month – $114 value
1 character design courtesy of LogoNerds – $97 value
1 multi-use package of Themewars premium theme – $70 value
WordPress SEO service courtesy of ShoutMeLoud.com – $250 value
1 First Class Package of Ultimate Blogging Theme 3.0 – $147 value
1 license of OIO Publisher – $47 value
$20 cash from FamousBloggers.com – $20
6 months free Web hosting courtesy of MelvinBlog.com – $45 value
1 copy of Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco – $17 value
Premium Interview featured here in MelvinBlog.com – $70 value

2nd Prize – Murray Lunn

Murray which is more known by the name Murlu wrote a post entitled Write 10 Articles A Day, Market Yourself And Avoid Burn Out. In that article Murray made a really interesting point and approach in terms of not burning out yourself so you still have time to do a lot of things. Personally this my favorite post as I find this really really unique and innovative. Congrats Murlu! You win the following:

$50 cash and one year PRO membership for MyBlogGuest – $170 value
1 copy of Blogussion Thesis theme package – $46 value
1 character design courtesy of LogoNerds – $97 value
1 license of OIO Publisher – $47 value
1 copy of Crowbar Content courtesy of Buzz Marketing guru Dean Hunt – $97
1 copy of Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco – $17 value
$15 cash from BlogTactic
1 copy of 70 Posting Ideas courtesy of Liane – $15

3rd Prize – Devesh (no surname)

Dev wrote a well-received posts entitled 10 Best Marketing Tips that Will Blow Your Mind | Make Money Online. I can say that’s a good post to start with and its nice that his readers really benefitted from that article. Actually he’s tied for second place with Murlu but for the tie-breaker I asked all the judges on who deserves the 2nd and 3rd place more. Congrats Dev, you win the following:

1 copy of Gab Fire Theme – $59 value
1 year membership for ElegantThemes -$19
$15 cash, one advertising space and one copy of Facebook ad coupon eBook valued at $15 courtesy of Smartbloggerz.com – $54 total value
1 copy of Easy Blog Traffic worth $59, Insider SEO Revealed at $39 and Twitter Marketing Power worth $57 courtesy of WebTrafficROI.com
1 copy of Thirtyday blog eBook by Jimvesting – $15 value
1 copy of 70 Posting Ideas courtesy of Liane – $15

And to everyone else.

To all others who have joined the contest namely, Agent Deepak (man! you’re the favorite one on this contest), D3s0, Felix Albutura, Elie Palima, Cynthia Boris, Febap Liew, Sourav, I’d like to thank you for participating in the contest. You know what? I feel really really bad that I only got this number of sponsor prizes to give away. I mean I should’ve begged for more.

All entries are just exceptional and as you can see in the scoreboard, the difference between the winner points and a non-winner points do not even have a disparity of 1 point! It only means that this contest is really well fought so everyone should really deserve more than just a mention.

Again I hope I could’ve grabbed 10 – 20 more prizes so maybe I can include 2 or more winners but I didn’t really expect it to be this tight.

I wish I could give away $50 to each one too but that would be too much for me. Still for those who didn’t win, again just because I appreciate your entries, it’s closely fought, almost had same scores with the winners, I am going to contact you (using your blog’s contact form) for a surprise prize. Yes that’s how I appreciate you and your entry. Just wait and I’m sure you’re gonna be happy about it. 🙂

Twitter Retweet Contest

I nearly forgot this! I was about to publish this post yesterday midnight until I realized this contest. If you would remember, there was a side-in contest which was more to twitter users. As mentioned I’m giving away 10 prizes for that as well. Here are the awesome winners drawn randomly via random.org and in chronological order:

The 10 highlighted names are the winners and they are arranged chronologically. Its kind of funny because John Chow who retweeted my article won too although Im sure he wouldn’t mind giving that thing away to others anyway. Here’s your winnings btw:

Deanna_J – GabFire Theme
AgentDeepak – Blogussion Thesis Theme
whatswithjeff – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
easy4com – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
John Chow – Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco
AhsanHussein – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
MyBlog2day – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
d3so – Thirtyday Blog eBook by Jimvesting
Elie Palima- 1 copy of Social Media Marketing Book
Funbu – Youtube Made Simple Video Series Book

To all winners both in retweet contest and the main contest, don’t contact me. I will be contacting you to give you directions on how you can claim your prizes. It goes the same to non-winners on the main contest as I would be surprising you by giving you something. 😉

Again, don’t contact me. I will be the one who will contact you.

Successful Contest, What’s Next?

Well this contest ran for almost 2 months and I prepared this for almost 4 months. With that, I wanted to weep that it ended up being successful and I was really happy with the turnout. Congratulations again to all contestants, you’re all winners as I learned a lot from you. Also to sponsors, which are mostly my peers and friends, I appreciate you helping me out. This isn’t anywhere possible if not for you guys!

Obviously I’m don’t have the time I used to for this blog as I’ve started working a normal job but rest assure that this blog will still be as alive as ever. And if you’re looking to maximize and take advantage of my traffic, then why not submit a guest post entry so that your article would be featured for a long time since I don’t really have that much time to write a post? clever idea eh? 🙂

I’m Decreasing My Posting Frequency, What’s your Take?

by Melvin · Jun 26, 2010

My last post last week is a very clear indication that some necessary changes are imminent in this blog. So now in this post I would particularly talk about the decrease on the blog posting frequency here in MelvinBlog.

Over the past few months I have been consistently churning out 8-10 blog posts per month or a post per three days. During my school days, it was I think 6-8 posts a month. That being said, for a very long time you as my reader is trained for that frequency. You’re not expecting me to post twice a day because you get used to the current frequency that I have

Now that I obviously don’t have the same time to be dedicated in blogging, I’d like to make a short announcement that I would be decreasing my posts more. I don’t have an exact figure in mind but I think 5-6 a month is where its currently heading.

I’m sure a lot of people really don’t think it’s something that important and I really don’t think it is too but because I care for my readers so I’d like to let everyone know. Couple of years back, there was an awesome post at Problogger on that subject and it has been concluded that blog post frequency doesn’t really matter that much in as much as people would like to think to. And I agree.

Right now, I look at bloggers like Glen of Viperchill, Marko of HowToMakeMyBlog and even Neil Patel of QuickSprout as good examples. They really don’t need to commit into writing everyday, what they commit to is writing high quality content each and every time they write and it’s really something that I’d like to implement here.

I’m sure you would notice it with my recent “how to” posts that I really have started to shift into that writing way. That being said, Im not really worrying on a sudden drop of traffic (maybe that would be evident on the first few weeks) because my aim since this year was to make this blog more as a reference guide where people could actually look into this as a reference, not just a blog.

Another reason I’m doing it is because I want to set aside time some time to some of my bigger projects in conjunction with my real-world work/job. I’ve announced a couple of weeks back that I’m working on my relaunch of my info product called MMO Blog Monetizer 2.0. I’m also working on some side projects that may need to take some of my time as well.

How about you guys? Whats your take on posting frequency? Do you think it’s overrated too or what? I’d like to hear you out on this matter.

Finding a Job, err.. Career. Do I Really Need to?

by Melvin · Jun 22, 2010

Been a long time since I’ve done a post here in my blog w/c does have some sort kind of a personal touch. Lately I made a commitment to really take the blog to the higher level by actually posting definitive types of articles and guides. As you may recently notice here, there were really some very wordy posts here that provides very good quality for my audience.

I want to take a break on that and want to focus on this post about… my life. Yes, my life. Not very many of you know that last May, I graduated with a degree of Computer Science. Even before graduation I was really looking for jobs. I actually applied on a very popular bank here for a computer programmer’s position but eventually failed the 5th step of the process. I also applied on some several other IT firms but haven’t yet gotten any confirmation. Ironically some of the companies like Accenture and etc. surprised me because of their very low entry level pay w/c had me backing out. Oh well.

Anyways back to the topic. I usually get asked with the question “do I really need it? why not just ramped up my effort in what Im doing online?” I don’t know but I think people don’t really understand the reality and the situation.

We, people who make money online usually are fascinated with the fact that the internet has enormous opportunity and it’s totally true. We also see a lot of those success stories wherein “John decided to make his internet efforts full time and eventually he succeeded”. In fact, guys like Darren Rowse, David Risley and many others took that path and were huge figures right now in the blogosphere. But the thing is when people fail doing this, they are usually left unnoticed.

The reality is that almost all people who decide not to take a real world job usually fail doing things online. That’s the truth. We can talk about mindset problems here, or lack of strategies or many other more geeky stuffs but the bottom line is, it’s hard. There’s a very thin line between people living off the internet dream and having a real world job.

How about me?

Aside from the question above, my friends usually ask me “aren’t you making enough?” This question really is a funny question for me. My answer is yes and no. Yes, because I’m a bachelor right now. I don’t have a wife (heck Im 20 yrs old!), I don’t need to pay anything besides my internet (yes I pay for it) and my food. On the other side, the answer is no because I’m the eldest of the family.

I know you will say, “whats the relation with that?” I don’t know about you but basically here in my country, if you’re the eldest then you have tons of responsibilities in your shoulders. As I’ve stated many times before, we’re not a rich family. My dad is a seaman and my mom has a small store business here in Philippines. I know they’re not getting any younger so it’s time for me to help out and maybe 5-10 years from now, I may have to earn what they are earning from now.

For me I think I’m doing good in the internet but still not enough to call it a living from the internet. This blog is doing good financially, some other sites do well too. I also am a paid writer on some of the popular sports websites. I used to also make a lot of money with affiliate marketing before I decided to take an hiatus in it because I want a more steady business model.

The problem that comes with that is I invest a lot of money. I have 3-4 designers right now for my bigger projects. I also have a guy working for me full time to write blog articles and I also pay for stuffs like hosting and whatever. It didn’t also help that I inherited that Western Culture in terms of spending money on foods and other royalty stuffs. Eventually it leaves me just enough to enjoy my month off the money I make. That’s going to change though as my responsibilities gets bigger.

Financial Security

The reason why most people work is because of financial security and that’s the path I’m looking at right now. My parents aren’t too high on what Im doing (although they somehow support me all throughout) and even up to now they still don’t get it. They were always on this speculation that I’m doing something scrupulous online and it’s not really something reliable.

I don’t know but I think thats really it. As of this writing I am about to sign a contract with a company for my first job and it’s a mixed feeling. As like many people, I’m looking for financial security and of course coupled with my responsibilities as a the eldest child of my family. I don’t know but I’m a bit worried on how my first job would impact my life, impact my business overall.

Now to you! I know most of the readers here have a real world job. I know you’re doing it and also alloting some part-time effort on blogging or whatever business you may have. Finding a career (the more elegant term for job) is the path I’ve gone into. It’s the better decision or maybe its not but one thing is for sure, it’s the realistic demand of life. Any insightful tips that you can give to me or any words of wisdom?

$2000 Blog Marketing Contest Recap & Announcements

by Melvin · Jun 19, 2010

Update: Super sorry for a 5 day delay in the drawing of this contest. Was super busy with work. All in all there were 10 entries so great odds for everyone. The winner through random.org is @danalingga. Contact me on how to claim your prize. 🙂

So the first two weeks of the MelvinBlog’s Marketing Tip Contest w/c does have $2000+ of prizes at stake has ended and today I’m going to make a recap of the entries thus far. If you haven’t joined yet or it’s your first time to learn that I have a contest, make sure you join now.

The contest itself has received so much attention (and traffic) from the blogosphere but I’m quite surprised that less than five people have so far joined. As expected (like in any type of contest), most bloggers who say they will join NEVER really join (or haven’t yet). It’s expected considering the contest will still run up to July 15 and most of the entries will come as we approach that date.

However like I said, joining today is by far the best way. Remember each participant can write up to 5 entries and with that being said, I’m sure some of the contestants who started out early will have a decent advantage over those who will wait, before they write.

Anyways as for the recap, I’m really happy with the turnout. The entries that I’ve received so far are good entries and reading comments from their audience I know that it has become so beneficial them. As I stated initially that’s really my goal, to give good value to the blogosphere through this contest. And for the entries thus far, here they are. Be sure to check them out and give feedbacks if you like their articles.

Elie Palima wrote an entry about “his best blog marketing tip so far“
Dev from Technshare shared his “10 best marketing tips that will blow your mind“
Deepak from AgentDeepak did it with a twist by creating a series instead. So far he had written “comment marketing ” and “social marketing” as the entries

As you can see, only three people have participated in the contest yet with a total of 4 entries. (If you had written your entry and wasn’t mentioned here, feel free to shoot me a PM). There’s really no risk in this contest so if you have the best marketing tip then just throw it in.

Like I said, it’s people’s mentality to wait for the last minute before entering but if you do yourself a favor and actually start right now, you’ll be getting much higher chance of winning. Remember we will only have 3 winners for this main contest with each winners receiving prizes not less than $200 worth of good products from good people.

Surprise “Side-in” contest

As I’ve said, we’re going to make this entire celebration more special by having in more “smaller contest”. In short, its contests within contest and for this post, I have made this really easy for you.

So for this mini contest, all you have to do is follow me on twitter and retweet this statement:

Reading MelvinBlog’s Best Blog Posts from his blog http://bit.ly/bestbloggingtips RT @melvinblog

That’s it! At the end of 21st of June 2010, I’m going to randomly pick a winner which will get $10 paypal cash straight to his account. Remember, you have to follow me first on twitter and then retweet the statement. You can do it just once or it depends to you. There will be only one winner and since this is not really the biggest blog in the universe, your odds of winning is really high! Easy eh?

That’s for now, see ya soon!