A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.
Hey fellow iBlog fellas!
Here’s the secret page that I’m referring to and you can easily get the free gift by putting in your name and email address below:
After doing so, you’ll receive the report straight into your email. While waiting for that, you may want to check out the following links below as well:
See you soon!
Melvin
P.S. If you have questions or just want to say hi, feel free to contact me. I don’t bite people eh!
This is a guest post written by Jayson Jones
It’s a virtual age. Life is shaped by technology, the days are defined by online explorations, and all college graduates have been exposed to the world of networks and exchanges.
It is only wise therefore to expect those exchanges to yield results beyond the common greetings. They are instead to offer potential careers.
Industry is changing. What was once a limitation of resources, a force of on-site conversations, has instead sprawled out. Virtuality now connects all companies; and graduates seeking to inject themselves into the fray must understand how to use this to their advantage. Social media dominates all things — and, while there can be no guarantee of succeeding through this venue, the statistics are shaded favorably. The benefits can’t be denied.
Career Decisions
The future is a vast thing — frightening with all of its possibilities. There is no certainty of victory, only the desire for it; and recent graduates may find themselves overwhelmed, unsure of what career path to take. Social media helps to lessen the burden, however. Individuals who don’t know how to properly tailor their degrees can use sites like LinkedIn to discover all of the many opportunities.
LinkedIn (established in 2003) is a business-oriented network that encourages those of similar fields to become aware of each other. As of 2011, however, it also offers a unique tool for guests: the Career Explorer.
Graduates can provide information like their experiences, degrees and interests; and the Explorer will then calculate potential positions. Paths can be discovered, rewritten and possibly even began all from the computer. This helps to ensure no decision is ignored.
Network Aid
The world of business is shaped to communication. No company is formed of silent managers, the dull employees. Instead there’s a demand for words and ideas. Networking helps to make those ideas a little easier to trade, though.
Popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and Reddit allow individuals to recognize all relevant posts and conversations. Instant access is offered, and this ensures that no graduate will be without the necessary updates. All can instead track corporations, note any career openings and follow developments. Knowledge provides a better chance for success.
Brand Building
No resume is enough. No first impression can be won with just a smile. This is a modern era and the traditional notions of earning careers are now considered antiquated. Individuals must instead understand who they are and what they wish to offer. They must build a brand. Social media provides graduates with the ability to present themselves to the world — through videos, blogs, RSS feeds and more.
All information can be charted out and posted. A brand can then be formed, with readers gained and a presence developed. This makes it far easier to contact companies, offering credence to all inquiries (rather than simply sending in a dull page and praying it isn’t overlooked).
Business is no longer confined to the standards of the past. It’s instead reaching toward the convenience of the present — and graduates are urged to do the same. There can be no promise of an online marketing career, but there can be a promise of potential. And that’s all many need.
Jayson Jones is an art student with a focus in Fashion Design. He’s an amateur blogger, and you can find his work at http://www.catwalkcatfight.com/, or follow him on Twitter @jaysonjonez.
Hard times, they always come don’t they? Imagine, you worked your butts off pretty hard for 6+ months to get steady traffic. You really dedicated your effort to make sure there’s growth in your blog and all of a sudden you learned that you’re going to be busy for the next few months, thus you can only spend so little time for your blog.
Think about this, things online move rapidly. Spending 2 months to promote a blog and get traffic would only take 1 week of full absence to have that traffic diminish. With that in mind, we’re in big trouble. But of course like anything else, there are smart fixes and solutions for that and in this blog post I aim to talk about those things.
If you’re really busy, there’s a good chance that you can still have a day or two where you can write some blog posts. Believe its more than enough.
The way I do it most of the times is write my blog posts in one sitting. So basically you could pick your most productive day, in most cases, its every Monday, and then sit down and don’t do anything other than write blog entries. You would be surprised how many high quality articles you can pump out in that day.
For me I usually do it every morning mostly in my home office (anyone can call their room their office 😉 ) and spend almost 6 hours in writing articles. I can then come up with 5-8 blog articles that I can now set on queue. The important thing here is that you have the continuity of content which will definitely help with consistent traffic and awareness around the blogosphere.
In the event that you cannot really go out and market your blog through commenting or other things, you can simply just utilize your social media accounts such as Twitter, Facebook and etc.
Most people can access this through their mobile phones so just a simple tweet maybe every three hours can do wonders. Social media is still a hot commodity when it comes to traffic generation and if you have good following on social sites then there’s a good chance you can benefit from it a lot by doing it consistently.
One thing that I learned a lot ever since having a job is making things automated and structured. Of course before, I thought I was very structured but I know I improved a lot.
Here are some of the things that you can automate so you no longer need to do it manually.
Note: OIO Publisher usually costs $47 but if you sign up under my link, you can get a $10 off and instead get it for $37
In an event where you feel you really need outside help, you can simply just hire freelancers out there to do things for you. My buddy Carl Ocab, noticeably has done this extensively as he has almost moved away from posting articles on his blog.
Contrary to what most people think, its actually not that expensive. You can simply do a contract that would pay a freelancer on a per article basis so you don’t need to shed a lot of money for something that is not done daily.
You can also hire virtual assistants that can oversee minor operations on your blog such as publishing blog posts, deleting spam comments, answering emails and maintaining small things. Hiring someone can be really really helpful especially if you want to maintain consistency in your blog.
There ya go! Those are the 4 things that you can do to be able to maintain your blog even when you don’t have time to do it on a daily basis. Strategic blogging involves being wise enough in facing certain problems mentioned above. If you can make yourself involved lesser than ever while still reaping the same benefits, then you’re doing it right.
If you’ve been reading the blog, you’ll easily see that I’ve been whining quite a lot about how I’m super busy and how hectic my schedule is. I mean if you go to each of my previous posts for the past few days and weeks you could easily notice that I always open the articles with the “I’m so busy lately” kind of line, lols.
Anyways sometime last year I wrote a post called “I wish there’s more than 24 hours in one day” and I got some interesting feedback about it. Now in this post I’d like to go a bit offtopic again by tackling the 5 different things that I always strive for before each day ends. The list starts now (in no particular order).
Those are the 5 different things that I aim to accomplish and complete everyday. It’s a bit daunting but it has become a part of my daily routine that it’s normal now for me. How about you?
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?
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!
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:
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
The contest has finally ended and it’s really really such a great one. It ran for almost 2 months and we’ve had successful feedbacks all over. On top of that, the quality of the entries that we’ve received is just superb. So if I am about conclude now if the contest was successful or not, there’s no question it is.
Anyways first I’d like to apologize for not having this post earlier nor reminding people that the contest has already ended. Actually, it is just this month that I started feeling the sting of having a day job. Although it’s enjoyable and exciting, it disables me to do a lot of things that I used to do when I was still in college.
Anyhow, the winners for the contest will be announced in August 5 as the current entries are already in the hands of the judges. But with that I’d like to honor those entries and give them some link love not because they participated in the contest but because they are really good reads. So if you’re looking for the best marketing tips around, then you may want to read these articles:
I’ve personally read all of them and I’m so happy with the quality. As I’ve said before, the goal of this contest is really to give back to the community and with the participants adhering to that, I think this is the most awesome contest I have ever run so far. With that I’d like to congratulate everybody already for really doing a good job. 🙂
Now if you’re contest entry was not there, feel free to hit me up via comment form asap. I tried to find all the articles, tried to moderate all the trackbacks and even went as far as the spam comments page just to make sure all entries are received. Yes, I know how it feels when an entry is ignored. Anyway, again feel free to hit me up in case your article isn’t here.
So what’s next? Well there’s a lot of things to watch out for in this blog but as for the moment, why not try to support your favorite blogger by reading, commenting and retweeting his article above? What do you think?