Top Posts

The Challenge of Reading and Responding to Emails

by Melvin · Sep 9, 2010

When I was just getting started, I always thought that those big bloggers are simply absurd for not responding to all emails they receive. I mean there’s this guy right here sending a genuine email waiting and hoping for a response, only for him to be ignored because the blogger that he wrote to was simply just too “busy”.

Yes I always thought this is just part of the gimmick of those bloggers, pretending they’re doing a lot but in reality, they’re just never in the mood to answer emails unless it came from and advertiser or a friend of theirs.

That was before until I experienced it myself.

Since late last year, I have been having difficulties maintaining my email inbox to an organized one, much more definitely to replying to each and every genuine email that I receive. Its funny because there are times where I can reply to emails that just arrived within less than a second yet I fail to reply on the ones that have been on my inbox for a long time.

From the sender’s perspective, they would really get pissed off at it. As I stated above, its painful to send an email, patiently wait for a response not knowing whether the receiver will ever respond or not. At times, they even had to resend the email or reconfirm just to make sure they’re really waiting for something and not nothing.

I don’t know but over the past 5-8 months, I think doing these micro tasks like reading emails, responding to tweets, checking stuffs have become a daunting task for me. And this is where I realized that ‘hey, maybe these big guys are really genuinely having difficulties really’. If I myself who is not a big figure at all is getting bombarded, maybe they, themselves get 3 times more than I do.

Because of this I had to put systems in place. I usually set a time where I can read emails (usually at night) and I make sure I respond to them. I had this bad habit of checking my emails, then waiting for an hour or two before responding to it. Why read an email twice or thrice in the first place before responding to it?

Now I can say I’m really getting more and more organized with it but still I find it challenging. I’m sure there would still be many bugs with what I do but I guess I just have to adjust to it and eventually learn from my mistakes. What say you?

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

by Melvin · Aug 30, 2010

As I mentioned in my last blog post, I’m trying to be active in Facebook once more, not with my personal account but with the blog’s fan page. So far it’s been good, slowly but surely I’m getting people to communicate with me through that medium.

Anyways, I set the fan page last year and even up to now, I am constantly getting asked on how I do it. I’d love to point to amazing and definitive guides like the one from Pat Flynn and some others. Pat has absolutely helped me set up mine by writing a Facebook Guide for Bloggers which is an extremely popular article.

Now the reason I’m doing this post is that I want my readers to have a place too, or just a reference just in case they want to set up a Facebook Fan Page for their blogs. Another is that Facebook has made some changes with the custom box and I believe most of the articles haven’t updated their guides yet so it’s good to have the latest one right? 😉

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page

First things first

I’ll go straight into the topic. To start creating a page, head on to the Create a Page page. You have three options there, you could create a fan page, a community page, or a Facebook group. In this what we’d like to do is create a fan page so click on the Fan Page section. Don’t worry creating a page is FREE to anyone.

Make sure you name your page carefully because it’s something that you can never change later on. So take your time in naming your page (usually it’s just the name of the blog as well), and double check if you typed it correctly.

You may also want to put in some status messages first. People don’t subscribe to a fan page that has empty interaction. I know its odd to put a status message when there’s no one following you yet but trust me this is what is needed. Plus, everyone does that initially.

Personalization

Now make sure you don’t become one of those millions of fan pages that create just a generic page for their brand. Facebook fan pages almost look the same but you can customize it by personalizing the way it looks. And you can do that by simply uploading images.

Upload your photo, make sure it’s something that would represent the brand of your blog. You could either place a custom logo image of your blog or simply just a pic of you. Do not also forget to write details like the tagline (the one that appears under the logo) and the info tab which would contain all the basic information about your fan page. Again take time to write those information.

Lastly, create a custom box! A custom box is just basically a box that is outside the default “Wall” and “Info” boxes. The main use of this is you can create a custom landing page for your fan page. Here’s how mine looks:

You could easily do that clicking on the + sign on tabs and adding a custom box. You can then name it and put content inside the box. The “in thing” however is the use of images. As you can see above, my landing page just consists of an image and a simple html text. Make sure to get your message clearly across your target audience. Do not also forget to ask them to LIKE your fan page.

To create an HTML, simply add the application Facebook Markup Language and you’re ready to go. Using it is as easy as using an HTML editor.

Little update that I’d like to emphasize is that Facebook has updated their terms when it comes to custom boxes. Before the maximum width for an image is 760px but Facebook has reduced it now to 520px. Make sure you comply with the settings or else the custom box would look ugly.

Finishing Touch

Now maybe you’re wondering, where is the custom box for? As I’ve written a lot in the past few months, I’ve always emphasized the importance of landing pages. With landing page, you can actually “convince” your potential readers more to do something that you want.

Now head on to the settings of your fan page and change the “Default Landing Tab” to your specific custom box. Now every visitor that goes into your fan page will land to that custom page where they will be more enticed to “like” your page as opposed to just landing to the default wall tab.

As you can also notice, your url is pretty not personalized. That’s normal. As soon as you hit 25 fans, Facebook will give you the ability to change the vanity url of your page. Again, make sure you are sure with what you input as this is pretty much unchangeable.

Conclusion

Now you have a Facebook Fan Page for your blog. Utilizing a Fan page is like using Twitter except that there’s almost no limit. And since anyone uses Facebook more than Twitter, you could literally build a powerful community behind that communication medium which in turn can translate as traffic to your blog or vice versa.

But how do I get people to like my page? There are thousands of ways but the most clever way first and foremost is to initially contact your friends in Facebook and tell them politely to fan your fan page. It’s easy, if you have 50 friends, Im sure almost all of them wouldn’t mind “liking” your page.

Did I miss anything here? If you would like to add something or ask anything, feel free to write in the comment form.

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?

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

by Melvin · Aug 10, 2010

Everyday a lot of people in the internet scramble for traffic. Internet marketers, PPC affiliate guys, bloggers, or even just the ordinary upcoming newbie. The internet is just so diverse that people are sold into an idea that there’s always an unknown place with millions of people that other marketers haven’t found yet. That’s why I love to experiment about these traffic sources. It’s because at the end of the day, I know it’s all worth it.

I mentioned bloggers above as one of those who scramble for traffic but one thing I noticed is that bloggers don’t that much look for new traffic sources, instead they just focus on what they have and try to leverage that into something more. I have no problem with that and in fact that’s what I try to do on an everyday basis. What I’d like to state is that we, in conjunction with that, should also not be that shabby in terms of finding new sources of traffic to our sites.

As I’ve said, the internet has been so huge and that is the reason too why things get saturated and diluted so easily. I mean when was the last time you run something profitable that lasted for more than a month? When was the last time you found a social network that consistently gives you over a 100 hits for a week? The thing with the internet is that things change so rapidly that if you’re not ready, you’re gonna be left out so quickly.

Why Should I be Looking for New Traffic Sources?

First and foremost is to enhance what you already have in your hand. For example, my blog has been getting traffic from forums ever since. So naturally what I would do is leverage that more and try to see if I can get more from that. Now with that, the way to enhance is to look on other other forums which may be catered to my blog as well. I mean it’s not rocket science. If this forum about blogging is constantly giving me good amount of traffic maybe this forum about blogging and internet marketing can do it too. You know what I mean?

Now back to answering the question. It’s proven that there’s always a place untapped to get traffic and from time to time, there will be always be new high-trafficked places just springing over and over. We should continuously be on the look because these untapped sources are so worth it. I mean wouldn’t you want to get 50 new readers on a daily or weekly basis just by engaging in some place you haven’t engaged before?

It just works for everything. Forum marketing, guest blogging, social networking or just anything else. For instance, you guys have probably seen me guest post on popular blogs like JohnChow or DailyBlogTips and etc. But to take that further, I’m constantly on the search of blogs that may not get the same traffic but are worth guest posting to.

For instance, ShoutmeLoud.com is a high-traffic blog yet I was not aware of this site prior to this year. Another is SiteSketch101, which probably has a ton of audience that has never heard of me or my blog. There are many more out there but what I basically do and I hope for you to do as well is to try to give value and engage in their audience as well. By doing that, you’re giving yourself a chance to open the door for more readers, more traffic, more potential customers

For social network, many people use the standard sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, or whatever but for me what I do is use the smaller ones and try to be active there which will eventually build up over time. Not a lot of people know Blogengage or MMOSocialNetwork but the truth is these sites can give you much more traffic than what you can get with Digg or any other big sites out there.

Conclusion

I could go on more but the takeaway here is being creative and constantly on search for new sources. I’m not saying you have to do this everyday, what Im saying is that we should always give some time on this task.

For example, my friday schedule is usually set out on that and by setting a certain date, you’re enabling yourself to be productive with whatever task you have. It doesn’t just apply to finding new traffic source but it applies to everything, writing blog posts, networking, and many more. So do you have your own way of chasing for new traffic sources?

I Don’t Have Anything to Blog for Today, Help!

by Melvin · Jul 27, 2010

Most people get into this thing called as “writer’s block” wherein they cannot get a topic they can write about. Literally nothing comes out of their mind, zero, zilch! I had experienced it too and in fact I did more than 10 times already.

There has been really some good and lengthy guides out there discussing how to cope up with writer’s block and if you came across some of those and you find them helpful then I suggest you to bookmark them so you have a copy of it which you can reference back continuously.

Anyways in this post, I want to share my unique take on how I deal with it and what I usually do when I literally have nothing in my mind to blog about.

1. If you don’t feel writing, then don’t!

Well this is the basic thing to do. I mean why force yourself to write if you don’t like or feel writing?

This was really my motto since the day I created this blog and many other blogs. If I’m not in the mood then I wouldn’t. After all it’s nice to show a great post which is quite of not the latest rather than show a latest yet crappy low quality ones that will harm your blog more than benefit it.

2. Go outside, Relax

With the first one, obviously you can’t just refrain from writing forever and expect to get same readership after a month or two. That being considered, I’d usually go outside, maybe in the mall and relax. This small thing can help you get back on track and hopefully get some ideas for your posts.

A good rest also helps since no one of us wants to get burned out writing that we end up not enjoying it at all.

3. Read other Stuffs

If you’re still not back in writing mode, you can simply just browse the blogosphere, go to your favorite blogs in your niche and just read and observe what’s going on. Eventually by still being connected and updated to the blogosphere, it can help you think of the topics or just get you involved to maybe write on the current trends or simply just have an opinion on whats currently in.

Those are my 3-step process. It’s pretty simple, isn’t it? I feel fortunate that I can crank out blog articles one after another and with that I really don’t struggle that much with producing content for my blog/s.

But then I know a lot of people who struggle with this. And I hope the 3 step process I outlined above can somehow help you break the writers block. How about you? Do you have any other strategies that you may want to share with me?

An Interesting Guest Post Analysis on FamousBloggers

by Melvin · Jul 14, 2010

We all know that guest posting brings in real traffic if done correctly. As a member of my community, you’re probably also aware on how I’ve been guest posting on a lot of blogs for the past few months for now. I have done a lot of guest post but I realized I haven’t really done any analysis on the effects of this guest posts for my blog. And while it’s impossible to do one posts for all guest posts I’ve done, I think it would make more sense to at least try to pick one and feature it every week. What do you think?

Anyways, I’ve been trying to do 5 guest posts per month and its a level I’m trying to maintain for now. If you can remember I made a commitment to take this blog to the next level but increasing my efforts. However, that took a hit after my current employment. Nevertheless here’s an interesting analysis of my guest post in FamousBloggers.com

What is FamousBloggers?

FamousBloggers is multi-author blog which is blogging in topics related to online business. It’s a relatively *new blog. I said new because it has just been in the blogosphere for less than one year yet it has already made so much strides and it has a good overall community behind it. Hesham and his community is one of the very few teams in the blogosphere who are serious in taking their whole thing to new heights.

If you know me I love testing out different traffic sources and experimenting. You may probably have seen me do couple of guest posts for high traffic blogs like John Chow and also you’ve seen me in smaller blogs as well. Guest posting for FamousBloggers is really intriguing to me for a couple of reasons. First is that its a new source of traffic as I’m sure most of the readers their haven’t heard my blog and second, I want to build a good relationship not just with the blog but with their community.

Guest Post Analysis

I’ve done about three guest posts on FamousBloggers.com for the past few months and there’s really some interesting number I am seeing. Before that, let’s just first analyze how’s the return on a normal John Chow guest post considering that Chow’s blog is one of the most high traffic blogs around in this niche.

The reason I showed you the statistics from Chow’s guest post is because we are going to use his blog as the barometer. John’s blog is always an interesting cover for me in the subject of guest posting first is because he gets so many traffic yet these traffic are mostly trigger-lucky readers who read myriads of content everyday. Usually they end up bouncing up too quickly on most blogs just because of where they’re coming from.

Another thing is that John’s posting frequency is always weird. Sometimes you can get your post in there for more than 24 hours but most of the times, it can be there for less than 6 hours. That’s why stats always fluctuate and with that, you always need to have some sort of perfect timing to maximize your traffic with his blog.

Now as for FamousBloggers, I did start guest posting for that site last May and initially I don’t think there’s that many people in that community that were aware of my blog. Here are the initial stats:

As you can see with the numbers, back then nearly all of his readers don’t know my blog so its a whopping 94% new visits. I got a fairly good amount of traffic with 50 unique hits for that one guest posts and some followup comments throughout the entire month. Another nice return here is the page/visit stat. This is one of my determiner on whether the guest post is worth it or not. As you can see, each user nearly has visited 4 pages of my blog so it’s nearly 200 pageviews for that guest post and for me it’s an always nice indication.

After that one guest post I tried doing some other more to have a bigger picture on what I can really get on that blog in terms of exposure.

Now there’s a weird stuff here as far as this specific stat is concern. I was getting over 5 views per visit yet my bounce rate is 51.61%. Again the discussion between the difference between bounce rate and exit rate has been there for years. Anyways I’m still happy with the turnout of it thus far since I’m not getting a massive traffic yet, it’s targeted. Another thing that you can notice is that the % of new visits has gone down which means the goal of my guest posting campaigns there is already met.

But of course, it still doesn’t stop there. Just late last month up to this month, Hesham launched a $3500 cash contest and obviously I joined that considering the fact I’m obsessed with contest.

However, I was quite curious since if it’s a contest then maybe it could prove my theory that guest blogging contests really differs from normal guest posting campaigns in which not a lot of people really convert mainly because all they care about is the contest and not the intrinsic reasoning behind a guest post. Either way, I booked my spot and wrote a definitive guest post on blog commenting. Here’s how it turned out:

And it turns out I was right. 🙂 I got the most comment and retweet in that post but that’s simply because it’s a community contest and so the whole community was trying to help me out as well. But as far as converting them to click my author bio and go to my blog, not that much.

However, one thing I was happy about is that most of the readers of that blog are not anymore new to MelvinBlog. I started out with a new visits percentage of 94% and now its amazingly down to 13% which is really nice thing to have. Again the traffic wasn’t ever massive but conversion is everything and I can get 10 people to subscribe to my blog then its certainly better than 1000 bouncing readers.

How I do and prepare for that

Well most bloggers just do their guest post and leave it up in the air but I always prefer to welcome those new audience in the most polite way I can.

As I have been preaching for a long time, a landing page is a must. It’s because new visitors may not always like your current posts and if you direct them to your best posts instead, then you’re giving them an option to explore more which should be your goal anyways. Here’s a nice screenshot (again) of the my traffic when I direct people to my landing page:

So there ya go. You can see that by getting them to that page, they get to explore more and there’s a high chance that they will subscribe to your blog or follow you for quite a while. Heck even those who came from Google didn’t bounce that quick.

FamousBloggers Guest Post Conclusion

Actually there’s no conclusion yet, since I’m still going to do occassional guest posts on that blog. But for the moment it’s all good. One thing that blog has is an interactive community wherein you’ll expect almost 30+ comments on each and every of your guest posts. So with that, I know that I’m posting articles to real people, not just bots.

Drawbacks is that Hesham and his folks publish articles on an everyday basis so like John Chow’s blog, you get to have a small time in the featured area which is at the top. But even though, you can still get your guest post in their front page for almost a week so that’s still maximum exposure there.

Lesson learned here is to always look for new traffic sources. I mean last year this blog is unknown, and this year it’s one of the most popular blogs in this niche. You’ll never know so you just gotta keep finding that new traffic source and see how you can cater to it.

Now the mic up to you? Have yout tried guest posting on FamousBloggers? or maybe you can share some of your experience with guest posts?

OnlineProfits.com Reopened its door, for FREE! (wtf?)

by Melvin · Jun 10, 2010

Internet marketing is a very broad topic. In fact, some school are either having an exclusive course on this subject or integrating it to their marketing course. The internet has been around for quite some time so expect it to have more and more impact to our offline ways.

Anyways, if you can remember Daniel Scocco last year launched his own internet marketing course called OnlineProfits. For those of you who are not familiar with it, it’s basically like a university course on the subject of internet marketing. It contains 24 huge modules which would take you from the start up to the advanced modules. Those modules are the main core of the program.

OnlineProfits.com Relaunched, now for FREE

Yes, thats not a typo or whatsoever. I actually had to refresh Daniel’s announcement to make sure I’m reading it right. His main reason is that he wants to have as much people as possible to gain access to his membership program. Whether that’s true or there’s something fishy remains to be seen. 😉

There’s actually a catch though. In order to get lifetime access to the OnlineProfits Membership area, one must sign up either to the hosting plan of his partners for this program. The partners I’m referring to are Hostgator and Hostnine. The deal is that if you sign up to them via Daniel’s affiliate link, you can get the whole membership site for free.

Now I understand that each and everyone of you already have your own hosting but as Daniel said “sparing an extra $10 to get a $325 membership program” is the best deal and if you don’t find it lucrative enough, then the program may not be for you. To be honest, I didn’t mind paying $10 to get this membership site that is this good. Actually if you use the code “onlineprofits” you will get your hosting almost free ($0.01) but then you have to sign under Daniel’s link. So it’s definitely a no-brainer.

OnlineProfit Overview and Comprehensive Review

From a hindsight, Daniel Scocco’s membership program claims to be the most complete internet marketing resource on the web. It contains all strategies that you will need to do to anything you desire, may it be blogging, affiliate marketing, information marketing and etc.

So as I’ve said, the program contains 24 content-packed modules, from the rudimentary history of internet marketing up to advanced tactics like link building and social media.

Each lessons consist of 500-1000 word article specifically targeted to the certain topic. Another good thing for me is that there is this handy “play now” buttons on most lessons. This is also downloadable so just in case you want to listen to the mp3 while on the go or whatever, you can. Btw, my computer resolution wasn’t able to capture all the modules through the print-screen function so to see all the modules and the topics inside them visit onlineprofits site below:

www.onlineprofits.com/

Altogether the lessons are so-packed in meaty content that I don’t have an idea how Daniel was able to produce all of this. It can be a bit overwhelming for you to look at it, but since its presented in modules, its good to take the lessons one at a time.

All Star Faculty Mentors

One unique feature OnlineProfits.com features is their All-star cast faculty. Again I don’t have any idea on how Daniel pulled this people as mentors for his membership program. Some of the lessons inside the program were produced by them depending on their expertise. For instance, Zac Johnson on Affiliate marketing topics while Hamlet on SEO related ones. I never had seen any other membership sites that have experienced people like them on board as mentors

Live Case Studies & Several Add ons

What’s unique with OnlineProfits.com recently is the addition of live case studies. This case study is produced by Daniel himself so this is one exciting way to really understand how the lessons should be applied. It contains exactly the steps as well as the monthly stats that Daniel would be providing as well.

Like any other program, this does also have several addons to inflate the value more. One of which is the tools section. If you’re not new with internet marketing then most of the tools here are probably not new to you but still there are some nice ones like domain name ideas generator and stuffs like that.

One of my favorite place aside from the lessons in there is the Resources Page. In that page one can find all the resource free exclusively for OnlineProfits students. It contains useful stuffs like list of free and paid web directories, list of dofollow blogs, list of dofollow social media networks and etc. I also like the free premium wordpress themes that are given away. These aren’t just your cookie-cutter free template. In fact, the premium ones you see on WooThemes and iThemes are given away here for free w/c is pretty amazing.

Lastly are the library and social clubs. The library is just basically a compilation of all useful (or useless) articles on any niche. It also comes with a MRR rights so just in case you want to resell them, then you can totally do it. The social clubs on the other hand is just simply a club for promotion. Just like a community for retweeting articles, digging, sending it to stumbleupon and etc.

How to Avail the FREE access

The entire program costs $392 before and I’m sure those who joined the program before will be ‘not-so happy’ with the fact that its offered for free now.

Again you have to sign up to Daniel’s partners which are HostGator and HostNine and you have to do under his affiliate link. After signing up all you have to do is email him you’re invoice number and in less than 5 minutes you can immediately access the program.

Verdict & am I recommending it?

Internet Marketing is a big part of online business. Actually for some people, it’s all what online business is all about. I was fortunate enough that I had experience and that I started young. But even with that, I still took the course.

I know most of you here are bloggers and there’s a good chance that since you’re reading my blog, you’re serious with what you’re doing. You hear me preach a lot that blogging alone is not enough, if you don’t have enough knowledge on internet marketing and you’re not a competent marketer, chance is you’ll not succeed.

I rarely promote info products and membership sites here in my blog and even though I consume a lot over the past few years, I made a point that I wouldn’t promote it here if it’s not possible for my readers to avail it or study it. With OnlineProfits, not only you can get it for free. But it also gives you a good and organized lessons on how things work and why they work. I’m sure most of us here learned internet marketing through experience and with this program, it only aims to sharpen up those previous learnings and organize them in such a strategic manner that we can use them immediately.

Be a part now of the highly-touted OnlineProfits membership program for FREE and start learning internet marketing from people who actually do it and not just teach it. Let me know!