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Maintaining Your Blog When You’re Busy

by Melvin · Feb 10, 2011

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.

Write in one sitting

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.

Utilize Social Media accounts

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.

Make things Structured and Automated

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.

Automate your tweets – This can be done in various ways. You can signup to a service known as twitterfeed. What it does is simply just automatically tweet your latest post published so there’s no need to do it manually. Another is by utilizing this plugin called as Tweet Your Old Post. This brilliant plugin simply just tweets any random posts of yours in a certain time interval and the beauty about this is that you can have control on types of posts that you want to publish. Let’s say you just want to continually publish your top posts. What you can do is filter it using your categories so that you can eliminate your personal posts from being tweeted.
Structure your newsletter series – Just like in posting blog posts, you can actually do your newsletter of one week or 2 in one sitting. In my experience, the best way to do it is every Sunday since you are much more relaxed to write a series of newsletters.
Manage your Ad Inventory with Ease – There are times that you wouldn’t notice there are advertisers looking to advertise on your site. The best way to manage your ad with ease is to use a third-party advertising platform and in my case, I highly recommend using OIO Publisher. OIO automates everything, from setting up banner spaces to accepting payments and even sending out stats. Those things can be done easily with OIO.

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

Seek for outside help

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.

Making Money from Ads, Overrated or Underrated?

by Melvin · Feb 5, 2011

Over the past good years, myriads of posts have been centered with the topic of making money through banner advertising or simply just any type of advertising. Way back from the dot com boom where startup companies were spending lucratively on banner advertisements, from the emergence of blogs and Google Adsense to the last years recession and now today, it seems like so many people just like to talk about banner advertising and their obnoxious take on it.

Initially it was the BEST way to make money online. I mean all you need to have is a web property, a topic and surely you can find some sort kind of sponsors to pay off your living. From there on, you’ll wait for them to get bankrupt and after that you chase for another sponsor. That’s the way it used to be before until big and small companies realized its all overhyped. And from there on some pundits started writing how making money through advertising is overrated and not for everyone. And until the day I write this post. 😉

Why it’s Overrated?

So to tackle it equally in both sides I decided to discuss it separately. Overrated is define as something that’s highly “perceived” as effective yet in reality its not (or maybe thats just the way I define it). Profiting from advertising is overrated because:

It’s very hit and miss – In my blog post about how I doubled my blog advertising income, I concluded everything by saying that advertising income is still very hit and miss. What I mean there is that you can never expect to duplicate the same amount of money or more that you made last month to the current or succeeding months to come. It’s hard to rely on sponsors every month and expect they could pay all your bills.
It’s hard and impossible for an average guy to make a living from it – Advertising is good however, if you’re just like most of us who don’t get millions of hits then its hard to squeeze a lot of money from it. As David Risley stated, if you compare a blog with 1000 visitors trying to make money solely from ads from a blog with 500 readers that is selling something, it’s obvious that the latter one is more profitable. Again, unless you are a site like YouTube, its nearly impossible to live off that advertising income.
Couldn’t be even considered as a business model – This is true. I mean where’s the business in there? All you have to do is set up ad inventories and or use third-party advertising networks. You’re really not doing anything aside from copying and pasting codes and setting up ads so I don’t consider it a business model.

Why it’s Underrated?

Now let’s tackle it from the other side of the fence. Many people nowadays seemed to be so prolific in bashing making money from ads. If you read a lot, then you know what I’m talking about. Profiting from advertising is underrated because:

It’s the pioneer of making money while sleeping (passive income) – Although nowadays there are many ways to make money passively, banner advertising probably is the pioneer of that. From the dot com boom days up to now, if you have a good web property then you can literally set it and forget it. Big sites like Cheezburger can literally not work for one month and I could assure you they would still be making the same amount of revenue from banner advertising. How’s that as an autopilot thing?
Duh! It’s easy – Totally easy that even a man that came from some random cave could literally do it. We heard a lot about selling your own product or having a membership but those things are not for everyone. While on the other hand, trying to profit from Google ads or some other forms of advertising are definitely doable by any average Joe.
You just need traffic and nothing else – In modern blogging, we all know that it’s all about building relationships. After building it, you can funnel it and then later on sell your stuff to them or promote affiliate offers. So with that, it means more than just getting traffic. When you’re profiting though from advertising, all you need is traffic (albeit massive traffic). You don’t need to respond to the comments, you don’t need to watch things closely or whatever. Just the traffic, and you’re living off that traffic.

To end this post, I hope i was able to give each argument a fair explanation on why they’re the best thing ever or not. If you ask me about my personal opinion, I would say banner advertising is still something thats worth looking at not just now but for 10-20 years to come.

Yes I can sell a product or a membership site but I can do that with ads on my sidebar right? Since I have the traffic, why not leverage it more? How about you, what do you think?

Reviewing Year 2010 – Just Another Year End Post

by Melvin · Jan 2, 2011

Time flies really fast, isn’t it? Just few more hours and Its already year 2011. So for that, I’d like to make a recap post about things that happened for this year. I’ve never done this before so I thought its exciting to do one now.

Year 2010 overall has been good to me. At the start of the year, I went back to my college university after two painful stints of OJT on some companies the past year. It was exciting because that happened to be my last term in college which means goodbye school. Here’s the summary of my 2010.

Early 2010

Everything started with the Advance English kind of like training for us. I live in Philippines and although people here speak better English than some other Asian countries, our school felt the need for this so that we’re more prepared when we go out and find/get jobs.

College-wise, its kind of like one of the most challenging trimesters for us because of the pressure of being a graduating student. There were some tough software development projects but overall it was just fine.

As far as my online stuff is concern, I decided to focus on growing this blog more and it did. I tried engaging to more bloggers and putting up better content. Luckily, this blog grew and obviously the income increased mainly because of increased number of ads.

Summer of 2010

I also held the best blog marketing contest and it had about over $2000 of real prizes from real people at stake. I was so glad that sponsors helped me out in this. The contest got good popularity around, a lot of people have joined but the best thing was it benefitted bloggers themselves.

In return I joined some contests as well and won some. It was always good and challenging for me to go out and try to win these contests.

Aside from that, I attended two blogging conference for this year. The first one was iBlog which is THE biggest blogging summit in the Philippines and it was a good as I met a lot of new friends and got to see people that I admire in the industry. The other conference was Wordcamp 2010 in which Matt Mullenwegg flew down to grace the event. It was equally a nice event and I was able to see Matt in person.

Getting Employed, & Starting New Stuff

Then June onwards became a really busy month. I got employed in a software development company as their online marketing guy and later I was also assigned as a software tester. From there on, I started spending lesser and lesser time in this blog and other of my web properties. I found that a day job really sucks time.

It didn’t prevent me though from pursuing other of my online businesses. I founded Killerlogodesigns late July (although we’re kind of like in beta) and got some good clients. I also started some sites in the sports niche just to increase my visibility in that space. Lastly I opened doing client work and consulting for clients. I used to do a lot of that couple of years back before I got bored with it. Late this year, I opened it up again.

Because of those things and my job, I was able to make tons of money in a very short period of time. Consulting and client work rakes in the most, then I still have passive income from ads from my blogs and then the day job. But then a good portion of it was spent to hospital when one of my family members got confined.. I also helped out my parents in paying some stuff.

Year 2010 in General

All in all, 2010 is a good year for me. I feel blessed to be given with these opportunities and feel equally elated that I was able to deliver and satisfy people that I’m working with. There were some challenges along the way, most are minor ones and some are tough ones but what’s important is that I was always given this opportunity to prove myself as a interim father of the family and the eldest son.

So to conclude in a long sentence, in 2010 I was able to grow this blog and monetize it well, was able to finish college and land a job, was able to make good amount of money in my first 6 months outside college and on the other side I was able to surpass most of the problems for me and my family.

Looking forward to 2011

So to be straightforward, I know 2011 is going to be a much more exciting year for me obviously equally full with challenges and obstacles. I’m not fazed with it and I want to continue improving myself and maximizing my potentials. How about you?

Making Money Blogging by Not Trying at All

by Melvin · Dec 5, 2010

I know the title of this post raises the eyebrows of some of you here but let me just get my point here. So basically here in this blog, what I have been preaching is that you can never make money blogging unless you put in enough effort. you do it wisely and execute things strategically. Heck, most successful bloggers even take like one year before they even get to where they are now. And that comes with the fact that they are consistently putting effort from day one.

In this blog, I wrote some few tips related to making money blogging although this blog is NOT about that topic. I wrote posts like how this blog makes money, how I doubled my advertising income, monetizing local traffic and stuff like that. Another popular blog posts is this post which is entitled making money isn’t hard, it just involves a lot of hardwork which has completely nothing to do with making money blogging.

If you read those posts, you can see that most of the things that I do or attain are possible because I’m workaholic. I do exert a lot of effort in this blog (although not these days though) and most bloggers that I know do the same so there’s a commonality between bloggers who are making money.

Work hard, Don’t Expect at All

Ok I know I’ve been taking both sides of the fence here which definitely will confuse you but let me explain. Some of you here know that blogging isn’t really the main way I make money ever since. Before it was affiliate marketing. I did a lot of CPA stuff, promoting offers through PayPerClick, making a lot of money back then and some of you are aware with it.

I don’t do it that much today because of all regulations and affiliate marketing is a fly-by-night thing. I can be making $100 in one day or losing more than that. There’s that much risk that convinced me to stop doing it.

I also spent some little time with freelance writing early back in my college days and was associated with some companies. This was just a part-time gig for me as I was studying so I could have some allowance on my part.

I enjoyed blogging ever since and probably had spent the most amount of time in it without really making nearly the amount that I make with other things.

Having a Day Job

So late last June, I took a job at a certain software development company as their online marketing guy and with that I applied all the knowledge that I have to that company.

Obviously its nice for me because it was my first ever job and it allowed me to kind of like have an income source outside the internet which I also considered consistent (at least for the first 6 months) because you’re getting paid monthly.

Consulting & Client Work

The demands of having a day job is tough but that didn’t prevent me from pursuing this consulting & client work business. Very few know that I manage a startup company at Round Table Networks and that I did some consulting way back last year. It was good and the money was enough but back then I didn’t find it that fulfilling so I stopped doing it and instead focused on my sites.

Late September I started doing it again to just try to see what would happen. Luckily I got some clients that I have been working until now and that has brought both good things and bad things to me. The good is obviously the compensation and the bad is that I have lesser and lesser time to spend for my web properties which includes this blog and some other stuff.

Making Money Blogging & Not Expecting at All

I don’t know. I, myself is confused on what the topic of this blog post really is but I guess its just about accepting the fact that living off with the sole money that you make from blogging is almost not possible these days. I mean I still make a decent (not phenomenal) monthly passive income from this blog and some of my other sites but they just take a backseat with what I do primarily.

The main point here is that if you’re trying to make money from your blog but you have a job that you make consistent amount of money with, then just don’t expect too much from your blog. Sometimes its better to just work without expecting something because in that way, you don’t get depressed or frustrated when you don’t make that much money.

Looking back now, I realized that blogging was NEVER the main thing for me. Sure, this blog is one of main prized assets that I have online but it just acts as a second fiddle to the things that I really do. It was affiliate marketing before, having a day job and consulting work for now.

I think it’s equally important to have this mindset that sometimes enjoying something is enough and may alone justify the effort that you put into it. I know that statement is debatable.

I try to make money blogging, but I don’t expect that much. And that helped me a lot in focusing on more important things that I need to prioritize without getting frustrated. How about you?

5 Clever Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog…

by Melvin · Nov 14, 2010

In this blog, I probably have given a lot of tips already on driving more traffic to your blog and you could see all of them simply by checking out my traffic and blog marketing sections.

So in this blog post I would like to share to you some *clever tips on driving more and more traffic to your blog. These are tips that are uncommon and on whether they are blackhat/shady or not, its up to you. 🙂

1. Setting referral traffic source as your site.

I’m not sure if this is something that a lot of bloggers and webmasters know but basically you can set your site as a referrer for all sites that you visit.

The way you do that is through your browser. In Firefox you can simply just download this plugin called RefControl. What this does is simply just allow you to set the referring URL either for all sites that you visit or for a specific site.

The good thing about this is that the traffic that you will get can potentially be a repeat traffic(recurring) since you’re letting real people (not bots) see your site/blog. And the best part is that there’s literally no work involved. If you’re like me who loves to read stuffs online, then thats it.

2. Link baiting in forums

Couple of months back I wrote this really definitive guide on how you can drive traffic to your blog using forums. It was well-received by a lot of people and you may want to check that out.

So with link baiting in forums, I’m not really referring to you creating a new thread with some controversial topic and then linking back to your own blog. That’s actually an idea forum members usually frown into. Link baiting in forums is simply just posting a thread that you know a lot of people can relate into.

So as you can see in the image above, I just simply created a thread that I know a lot of people would be interested to engage in. I didn’t even put a link explicitly to my blog and as you could realize, this forum thread reached more than 5 pages and a lot of replies from the forum members. Obviously it drove a lot of traffic back to my blog through the signature links and the header itself.

The interesting thing is that the thread was created May last year and people are still replying up to today which brings up the thread above.

3. Talking about making money online

I don’t know what’s the reason behind it but obviously if you make a certain post targeted to making money online or maybe a tip about it, people generally respond positively to it.

Not so long ago, I wrote this post about how MelvinBlog makes its money and up to know its one of the highest viewed page/post in this blog. It’s even viewed more than the recent post on “making money isn’t hard, its just a lot of hard work” which I thought was the best post I have ever produced.

Of course you may not want to talk about making money if you don’t have an experience with it yourself or lack the knowledge about it.

4. By Joining Guest Blogging contests

Its kind of like odd to include it here right? I have joined a lot of guest blogging contests this year and have talked alot about it too but the truth I think is that it simply just drives you traffic without you really realizing it.

Most people join these contest not to find new readers, nor drive traffic but to win a cash prize and I think that cash serves as an incentive for us bloggers to work harder in driving more and more exposure to our articles. So little do we realize that in trying to win it, we’re unexpectedly driving more and more new readers to our site.

Note: On a little side note, I am participating in Blog Engage contest. Please read, comment and tweet my article on how to drive consistent traffic to your blog. 😉

5. Taking advantage of your newsletter/email list

Most people now know that having a list is essential in blogging yet STILL believe it or not, most bloggers still don’t have one. What do we do now? Simple, take advantage of the fact that we have a list! Having your own email list has several advantages. You could a).connect with people who are interested in the niche that your are into b). drive them to your blog, get them to read your content c). cultivate that relationship that could eventually enable you to sell and push some products to them.

I know some people would find it quite an investment to pay $20 a month for an email marketing tool like Aweber but I think its really really a major investment. I think Aweber still has this $1 for 1st month promo. If you’re interested, take advantage of it now and see if its for you or not.

So, those are my 5 clever tips that could help you drive more traffic to your blog and more importantly, this is a traffic that converts (as a reader, as a customer). If you have some questions or would like to share some other tips, please comment on the comment form below.

Driving Consistent Traffic is the Key

by Melvin · Sep 29, 2010

You wonder how those bloggers can actually just spend very little time in a week yet they still get the same amount of traffic to their sites? You wonder how they participate so little in the blogosphere, almost never make comments on other blogs nor do they lurk on forums? There are two simple answers, 1). They’re already an established blogger and 2). The traffic that they get is pretty consistent.

Now the first answer is understandable, they are an established blogger. We all know it takes time to be an established authority blogger. Some of the top bloggers in the space were fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time.

But for us who’s definitely not considered as a top blogger in this space or any other space, what we could work on is getting consistent and recurring traffic to our blog. Yes, this is the same traffic that could repeat again and again with little to no maintenance at all. By driving consistent traffic, there’s a better chance of getting more loyal readers to your blog as oppose to just a one time visit.

Here’s a short quote on my guest post on BlogEngage about driving consistent traffic:

“One thing that sets apart good bloggers from just the average ones is the ability of the former to drive traffic on a consistent basis. Driving traffic these days is easy but what counts the most is on whether the traffic that you’re going to drive is going to convert or not.

Conversion can vary depending on the goals that you set as a blogger but the bottom line here is that every serious blogger must aim for consistent and returning traffic, not just a one time spike.

In this post, I would like to talk about different things that you can do in order to get that consistent stream of traffic. But before that, let me just cover first the facts about traffic and why you need to aim for consistency.”

I also happened to share some personal stuff on this post on how I thought I was already getting consistent traffic but still I don’t so you may want to check the article out.

Making Money Isn’t Really Hard, It’s Just a Lot of Hard Work

by Melvin · Sep 14, 2010

The hype with making tons of cash from blogging has considerably gone down for the past few years as probably a lot of people have realized that the hype surrounding blogging is all but hype. In fact I’ve seen a lot of people quit blogging to focus on doing more “secure” stuffs like a day job or a real offline business.

I remember when the make money blogging hype is on its peak, people have the mentality of like “I need to put this ad to make some serious cash”. Of course I was one of those people. I had my little basketball blog back then plastered with all sort kinds of banners, CPM, CPC, CPA, you name it. Of course it all backfired for me. The only positive thing then was that I am enjoying running a basketball site. It’s my passion, my hobby.

Eventually and fortunately I said to myself, “bug this! I’m not gonna do any money-related strategy, Im just gonna do what I enjoy, I’d write posts after posts and just do my thing. A kid like me should be enjoying life anyway!” And it was a crucial turning point for me.

After almost a year, the blog started gaining traffic and then money afterwards. The blog was doing good in page impressions that the CPM banners that I used to hate before started giving me respectable daily earnings. Then I started getting private ads from big sports-related companies and it really blew off for me. For some people the money I made back then may not probably be that big, but for an enthusiastic kid like me, it’s an unforgettable experience.

I always reflect back to it and I love telling this story to my friends over and over again. And I’m always amaze when my friends respond to me and say “wow that’s a ton of work. I can’t imagine myself putting that much hard work!”

Looking back, I didn’t really realize that what I did was “a ton” of hard work. All i knew was I was putting up some posts on how this New York Knicks suck, on how LeBron James is the best player ever and stuffs. Heck, I enjoy it so it must not be really hard work.

And oh, what you read above is the elongated version of my about page. 😉

Disparity between Hard and hard work

I used to do lots of programming back in college and so if you know everything about it, you’ll know it’s really hard to be one. As a programmer/coder you need to know a lot of things, you need to have a broad perspective, you need to have superb logic to make things work and you need an immense patience testing and trying different lines of codes. In short, its hard.

Blogging (or making money from blogging) isn’t. Hell, just as long as you know how to read, write, type, copy, paste, act as human, interact, you’re qualified. Everyone does qualify for it but why is it that very few succeed? Yes, lack of hard work. Blogging isn’t hard, its just a lot of hard work. It’s so true. It’s easy to write an article but you need to work hard to come up with 50 high quality ones. It’s nuts to interact but its a challenge to do it with over a hundred of people. It’s tough.

I don’t consider myself a guru and no one of my readers do but I can share here some insights that I feel can be helpful to you:

1. Just do it, stop strategizing!

I usually get a lot of flak when I tell people about this but just from experience (and from observing how big bloggers like Jeremy did), I can tell that this is one key aspect why I’m somehow more successful than some people.

I just do it, if it doesn’t work then I gotta move on! The problem with strategizing too much is that people keep on speculating, lurking, observing that nobody does anything! The biggest problem has and always been getting off your ass. I don’t know about you but I certainly wouldn’t refrain from doing things unless experience tells me that ‘hey this isn’t working’.

The statement “Experience is your best teacher” is corny but its still powerful and proven. You just don’t let people dictate you things, do it yourself. After all you really don’t have anything to lose. Every of our failure racks up to our own education and this is one good thing you will always have.

2. If you enjoy it, just go on! (Passion)

That’s why passion is a key element in blogging. I mean why write about something you don’t enjoy in the first place? That’s probably the biggest reason why most bloggers fail, its because they really don’t feel passionate about what they’re blogging. How can you enjoy talking about making money online if you don’t know it?

It’s always been the same parallels over and over again with all of these successful bloggers. They enjoy just blogging on something that they don’t really expect anything. Why don’t you go on Darren Rowse blog’s archive and look for some of his oldest posts. Its amazing how this guy churned out almost over a hundred of blog articles with over 1000+ words each that never even got any comment/traction? Of course these days Darren can write an article w/any length and still get a heap of comments but the lesson here is that you’re not going to get noticed overnight and if you don’t have passion, I doubt you can last too long in the blogosphere.

3. Stop chasing for shiny golden “secrets” because there’s none.

Ok again I used to be like this one when I was on my early stage of blogging. The scenario is usually like this: A blogger reads a post on some blog that making money is hard. You have to do this, do that, implement this, test, blah blah. So what happens is that this blogger says to himself “No, there must be something better than this, I need to keep looking for one”. And of course the cycle never ends. That blogger would never ever get to work because all he does is chase for secrets.

There’s a big misconception about “premium info stuffs” and secrets. Most people think that these are just the same. The truth is its not. Most info products whether its $9.95 or $999.5 is all about educating people. I’ve consumed a lot of them and I hate eBooks actually all I can say is that the main goal of most of them, if not all is just to organize infos around the web, compile them and present them well. You’re paying them not really because of the “premium stuffs” but only because they’re saving you from getting overloaded. In short, they are giving you blueprints so you never have to find them yourself.

Why not take time to look Technorati’s top 100 blogs? Do you think these guys have secrets? All you can notice is that these bloggers provide massive value to their readers and that alone sums up why they’re popular.

Wrapping it up

As I end this I’ll repeat. Blogging and making money isn’t hard, it’s just a lot of hard work. “Hardwork” is an overly used term but surprisingly not a lot of people value it. From my experience, and from other people’s experience, there’s really no need to reinvent the wheel and chase for something more. Besides if you’re exerting hard work on your passion, then it’s really not hard after all.

I haven’t written a long post like this for a while and I got carried a bit while writing this, lols. But as always, I’d like to hear back from you.