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How I (Literally) Doubled My Blog Advertising Income

by Melvin · Jun 7, 2010

In one of my featured posts, I discussed about how this blog currently makes money including all the tools and the reasoning behind the monetization tactics I use and how I do it. The post was received so well that I got some questions asked privately asking for some more additional clarifications. I love helping people out so I did walk them through as much as possible but of course time is so limited that I can’t do that to everyone.

In the last post, I did make mention that direct advertising sales is highest source of income for this blog. I know a lot of bloggers have this as their primary monetization model as well but also I realized that a lot of other bloggers are having so much trouble with it.

In this another lengthy post, I’d like to discuss how I literally doubled my advertising income through the past few years. And here we go:

Pre note: This is not, at all, a walk-through on how to do blog advertising. Its mainly a post where I share how I doubled my advertising income. That being said, consider this post as a post targeted to intermediate to advance users who may probably be already making money with blog advertising. Also there’s no traffic tip in this post.

Getting the right tools & technology

When I started, I installed OpenX on this blog primarily because I have been using it on my other blogs created before this one. And OpenX is really an awesome free tool because they have all sorts of features that are available on so many other paid tools.

Not too long, I realized that I have to jump on the OIO Publisher bandwagon. Again in case you don’t know, OIO is an advertising manager platform that handles the advertising for you. This means that you no longer need to manually accept payments, add banners, track expiring date and stuffs because OIO does that all for you.

It costs $47 with an unlimited use so you can pretty much use it on every of your site. It’s beneficial first because, you can manage ads literally with your hands tied back (heheh, a marketer’s usual hype) and second because it pretty much works alongside any other networks and integrates well with almost all payment processor. It does also have tons of features like geo-targeting and stat-tracking.

Note: If you still does not have OIO Publisher on your blog, you are very fortunate because OIO gave me a coupon code that entitles everyone to a $10 discount. By signing up with OIO Publisher under me, you get the unlimited usage license for just $37 which is definitely a huge steal. Click this link now and make sure you enter BLOOM-MELVS to claim your discount.

Alternatively there are other third party networks that you could look as well like BuySellAds and AdvertiseSpace.com, both of which sell your space for you in exchange for a revenue cut (50%). Some people do well with those networks and while other prefer using OIO to keep profit 100%.

Setting Up the right Advertise Now Page

It’s funny but one of the most viewed pages in this blog is the advertise now page which goes to show that potential advertisers really care about the stats. The mistake that I mostly see with other bloggers advertising page is that the statistics are not as comprehensive as it should. Usually they just put paragraphs with no proofs at all or worse they don’t even use any screenshot from Google Analytics and other logs.

You have to understand that advertisers spend soooo much money in their campaigns and as a wise person, what they want is to get a good bang for their buck. Oftentimes they buy space from as much blogs as possible and then track what’s doing well and what’s not. By having a “proper” advertise now page you’re giving them a clear and concise information of what to expect in your blog.

Don’t Direct Link to the Payment Page

Most people who use OIO Publisher or other third party tool does the mistake of linking their Advertise now box directly to the payment. Why is that a problem? It’s a problem because there’s really no value from the advertiser’s side. I mean if you put yourself in their shoes, you don’t want to buy an ad space without knowing the stats first right?

I conducted an test last year and found an interesting result to where a lot of advertisers will buy an ad space when you direct link it to the payment page while a good number of advertisers will buy but then subscribe for future payments when you send them to the advertise page. You see, a good advertising page builds trust and I have some advertisers here who are advertising ever since last year which I thought was pretty cool.

Giving them reasonable pricing

I understand that all bloggers value their traffic as much as they could but sometimes you have to bent a bit to make things work. It’s not really that you’re selling yourself cheap but its more of determining how the marketplaces prices it. Jeremy Schoemaker even told us before that he is selling initially his ad spots for like 2/10 the price.

Another reason is that you want to build relationship with these advertisers. A lot of times when an advertiser talks with me, he usually asks for an initial month discount and most of the times I accept it. I understand that banner ads have very poor clickthroughs and as a blogger, you want to establish that relationship where you can let people know what they can get from you and how they can benefit.

Stalk, look around

The one thing that’s so good (or so bad depending on where your siding) about online business is that it’s very transparent. You can easily stalk on what others are doing, how they are doing it and stuffs.

Just the same with direct ad sales. One of the tricks is to always look on blogs within your niche and observe who are the advertisers advertising. Then contact them up and tell them you’re offering advertising as well. There’s a good chance that they will respond since most of them are just small business owners and chances are they’d negotiate with you to push their campaign through. That’s because they understand it’s all about market penetration and branding. Once a brand gets through these markets, it’s amazing how it spreads like fire without that much effort at all.

Outsource

I have pretty come to a point now where I have already appointed someone to do things for me. For instance, every two week or so a person I hired would go to all webmaster forums, find advertisers looking for related advertising and offer them the space. He also does a listing on big boards highlighting advertising on my blog and the benefits of it.

If you’re going to chase advertisers (there’s no need to when you have a nice blog like me. 😉 ), it’s almost essential to have someone working for you, contacting advertisers, flaunting the benefits and such. That makes the process very automated at the end.

Blog Advertising is STILL hit & miss.

In this post I didn’t hold back anything, I completely shared to you how I grew my blog advertising income. But still at the end of the day, it’s still a hit and miss income opportunity. A lot of people still claim it as an unstable way to make money from blog and that’s true. If you’re into making more, you would want to definitely work more on a more “in-house” and consistent money maker w/c can bring you more money without having the need for tons of traffic.

But of course if you’re like me and you have those wide sidebars and nice spacings, you might as well just leverage your traffic too and benefit from selling these spaces. After all, probably 80% of blogs still make money from blog advertising. And do take note that they are doing it, without really sacrificing their more profitable monetization ways.

MelvinBlog’s Best Blog Marketing Tip Contest

by Melvin · May 31, 2010

Update: This contest has been extended up to July 25. For more info, read here:

It has finally come. Today I am bringing you probably the largest contest in the history of MelvinBlog Dot Com. This contest commemorates the second year of this blog (funny how I thought its 3 years) and as I’ve planned, we’ll celebrate it with a big bang!

I have been preparing this contest since early last month and I want to make sure that my contest is going to be different. Different in the sense that first, it will add a HUGE value to the blogosphere and second, that every blogger, big or small has an equal chance of winning. I’m very proud to have had this contest finally polished.

Introducing the MelvinBlog’s Best Blog Marketing Tip Contest

This contest says it all. The contest will be about blog marketing which is part of what this blog tackles on an everyday basis. The idea of the contest came after I witnessed (and won) the same type of contest held by Market Leverage w/c is entitled Affiliate Marketing Secrets Contest. I’d like to first and foremost thank and introduce to you guys my media partner slash sponsor for this one. It is Fergal Crawley of the Business Advice Forum who will be handling all the promotions and stuffs for this contest. By the way Business Advice Forum is a good community forum giving out free business advice both to online and offline business forums. Its a nice forum so I highly suggest for you to check it out.

And to the sponsors. I can’t believe we were able to get this much prize for the contest. Compared to last year’s contest, we basically doubled the amount of the prizes and Im really thankful for the sponsors for that. As you know me, I just don’t get every Dick and Harry as sponsors. We got reputable and popular internet marketers as well as established companies that backed us up in this contest and again I’m giving them my biggest appreciation for helping out.

Contest Mechanics

So this contest like I’ve said is a creative writing contest. In order to gain an entry, the blogger/contestant has to write a blog post on his blog about his best blog marketing tip. That certain blog post accounts for 1 entry. Each blogger can submit up to 5 entries all throughout the duration of the contest. There is no rule aside from that the post has to be original, must never have been copied somewhere.

Each entry has to link back to this contest post so I can track all the entries. The link bank can either be in the beginning or at the end of the post. To be uniform with everyone, you can just copy and paste this line:

This post is an entry to MelvinBlog’s Best Blog Marketing Tip contest where there are $2000 worth of prizes at stake.

There will be 3 winners overall and they are gonna get determined by two factors: quality of posts, and popularity. In terms of quality, I have hired 4 judges who are gonna gracefully judge all the entries. I really like to disclose their names but I was told its better not to. Popularity on the other hand, is just about the no.of retweets and comments. So to increase your entries’ popularity, you have to at least give maximum exposure to it (letting it in front for more days means better). Lastly, the criteria is 70 to 30, the higher one goes for quality while the latter is for the popularity.

The popularity factor which is 30% hinges on few metrics which include the no.of retweets of that certain post and amount of comments. I’d like to point out that the popularity criteria is just 30% because I want to give a fair chance of winning especially to those smaller bloggers.

Just for this mechanics alone, I have created a sample entry located of course on my personal blog. (this is just a sample). You can use it as a reference.

Prizes

A little side note: Like in the previous year’s contest, I don’t want to boast just the value of the prizes based on its financial worth. I’m sure there are a lot of eBooks out there thrown for $1000 and by giving 5 copies, it would already be $5000 worth of prizes in a contest, lols. Fortunately, this is not. Like last year, I tried to gather the best prizes from the best people in this space. So just by looking on who they are you will know what I mean. 😉

1st Place – Total at stake = $877

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 Place – Total at stake = $504

$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 Place – $302

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

Retweet Contest

Due to some demands and also taking this advice from some of my blogger friends’, I would be running a totally separate contest on Twitter which is all about marketing this contest through Twitter. So in order to enter the retweet contest all you have to do is retweet this post using the tweetmeme button above or copying this text and pasting it directly to your twitter:

“RT @melvinblog, Best Blog Marketing Contest, win over $2000+ in REAL prizes http://bit.ly/bestblogcontest pls RT “

You can modify the text or do it your own way, just make sure you append the @melvinblog reply so I can easily track all the entries. This small contest would run the same as the main contest and would end after one and a half months so do keep on tweeting. At the end of the duration, 10 lucky entries will be drawn and will receive each of the following:

1 copy of Blogussion Thesis theme package – $46 value
1 copy of Gab Fire Theme – $59 value
1 multi-use package of Themewars premium theme – $70 value
3 copy of Killer Domains eBook by Daniel Scocco – $51 value
1 copy of Social Media Marketing Book & Youtube Made Simple Video Series courtesy of WebTrafficROI
3 copy of Thirtyday blog eBook by Jimvesting – $60 value

Some Secret Contests

To add another layer of excitement (or confusion, whichever you prefer), I’d like to include some other contests that may go live along the way. Not really secret, but more of short contests within the main contests, that can make this whole thing more exciting and the best is that it gives more opportunity for the participants to win.

So lets say, you don’t have a tip. Still you can join the retweet contest and some secret contests that I am going to throw as well. So what’s the best way not to miss these other exciting hidden contests? Well make sure you’re subscribed to the blog, so you don’t miss anything out. 😉

Duration & Other Rules

The contest would run for one a half months and it will end on July 15th 12 am ET. After that date, no more entries will get accepted so make sure you start working on your entries right now. Also please give us 5-7 days max to compute all the stats and announce the winners (patience is virtue my friend).

Questions, Clarifications, Suggestions?

No contest is perfect, most are faulty especially at the start. If you have anything to ask, clarify, suggest or criticize, feel free to do so in the comment form. Remember that good contests are good not mainly because of the prizes, but also with the participation from the audience like you. 😉

I will reserve this space for other rules which I dont have at the moment. But Im sure this comment box will get populated as soon as possible. And that would only be probable, if you start asking questions now. 😉

Note: An update and clarification on contest was published here. It also contains the official FAQ

Can You Still Get Traffic By Being Active In Big Blogs?

by Melvin · May 25, 2010

Before, one of the most effective ways to get your new blog noticed is to comment on as many number of big blogs as possible. Back then it’s not just effective, it’s almost considered as a standard. You are basically going to be considered fool if you’re not utilizing this free traffic technique.

But like anything, as time rolls out quickly, things change so drastically. The once so popular blog commenting on big blogs has somehow declined. Not that people aren’t commenting anymore but these days, you’d rather see bloggers do a guest post, run a contest, focus on writing a series post or do more productive stuffs than by being active in their favorite top blogs.

It’s Not as Effective as What It Used To Be

There are really a ton of other things that aren’t as effective as they used to before. One good example is link exchanges. 5-10 years back, it was like the only method that webmasters use both to drive traffic and increase their rankings in the search engines. That’s why people always say that the pace of an online business is much quicker than the real world ones. This day what you’re using may be still effective, the next day you’re not guaranteed it is still gonna work.

As for being active on top blogs, here are some of the reasons that I see why it has somehow declined as not as good as what it used to be.

Poor Quality of Traffic – It doesn’t take a lot to see that most bloggers who comment on those sites do it for the lone sake of commenting. I don’t know but I’m really puzzled why bloggers like Chow allow comments such as “thanks for this interesting post” as it doesn’t really add anything. Most of these bloggers were inferred that they need to comment on 200 blogs a day so they do it as fast as they could.
Happy-go trigger audience – This one relates to the first factor. The good reason why no one will notice your comment is because 98% of bloggers don’t really read comments of other people. They just comment and then leave, comment and then leave. Oftentimes they don’t even recognize who have written the posts. For instance everytime I do a guest post, most commenters would comment and not even think the post was a guest writeup by another blogger and not the author.
Saturation – its plain common sense. Why does one thing work so well before than today? Because before, the method isn’t abused, its used by a reasonable no.of bloggers. But now that everyone uses it, its really hard to see a return.

</end of rant> Anyways as I was writing this post, I just thought it would be interesting to share with you a little case study on what interacting with big blogs bring to the table for me.

For the past month i have been really trying to become active lurker reader on some of the big blogs in our niche. I had observed what ZK has been doing and basically I gave myself a go. And here’s what I found out (in last months period):

From John Chow’s blog

From Shoemoney’s blog

From Carl Ocab’s blog

And from DailyBlogTips

It wasn’t ever massive but it’s a good proof that by being active on other people’s blogs you can still reap some traffic. It would also be interesting to see how different blogs have different visitors and behaviors. For instance Shoemoney’s blog, returned a bounce rate of 39% which is pretty good considering that all audience came from just reading my comment and then clicking my link.

John Chow has sent me the most no.but its hard to determine it since I’ve done a couple of guest post on that site as well. As expected it returned a higher bounce rate since most of the blog’s readers are trigger go-lucky ones.

Carl Ocab’s blog sent me a pretty nice stat to play with. His blog was like in hiatus for three months and to receive that no.of traffic and bounce rate is pretty amazing. DBT on the other hand, had the least new visits % . This means that most of the readers of that site also read my blog as well.

Importance of this

Why am I telling you all of this? You may probably have been scratching your head on whats the importance of this. Two things, first is I love playing with stats. I spend a lot of my free time with Analytics and analyzing my logs and second is that stats can help you a lot in terms of improving the usability of your blog and eventually driving more traffic. As an old adage says,”the number will always speak for itself”. I’m a huge advocate of that.

So to conclude, yes we can still get good traffic from being an active commentator on those big blogs. But it just does not gonna happen right away, you have to be creative and make sure you’re adding good value to the community and not just being spammy. After all, we’re not just concerned about the quantity, we’re all after the quality as well.

The Only Thing You Need When Starting an MMO Blog

by Melvin · May 4, 2010

make money online blog It doesn’t take a lot to figure out that most of the bloggers who are trying to make money online is blogging in the dirty polluted make money online niche. Simon from Teenius.com has written a superb guest post here in this blog on whether you can still make money from the mmo niche or not. I’d recommend you to read that post as he has pointed out valid points about that topic.

Only a small fraction of bloggers in the MMO industry is actually making money (not a secret) from talking some craps about making money and the rest simply do not make anything. Listen, if you are a noob reading this and you’re planning to start a make money online blog then please don’t. Don’t and you’d thank me later, I swear. 😉

Credibility

In any niche, before people could even notice you on something you must establish credibility first and foremost. A good reason why a huge chunk of bloggers aren’t getting read is because they are not credible enough to pay attention to. Who would like to read an “expert” tip written by some Average Joe? “Heck, how would I even know this guy is for real?”

In MMO Niche, the only thing you need is…

…The actual experience of making money online. Yep, that’s right. In this business, today, you’ll never ever succeed talking about making money online if in the first place, you have no idea on how to do it!

I know what you are talking. How about the “follow me as I make money online” or “track the journey of a 12-yr old student on making money” kind of concept? The answer is those concepts are already obsolete. It doesn’t work anymore. A good number of people have probably had some success with that but right now, it’s already outdated and lame!

People are critical. If you speak on something that you really don’t know, even if you’re claiming it’s just your personal opinion, you’re gonna get busted. And the news that “your blog is just a crap” spreads faster than good mentions. You don’t want to ruin your ENTIRE name just because of this mistake.

Dig Deeper in what you really know

“How about you Melvin? You are blogging in the dirty niche; do you have an experience with the crap you’re talking about?” The answer is yes. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you probably already know everything about me. How I started within a sports niche, got into the beginners mistake of using Adsense ONLY, getting into internet marketing, making a ton of money (ton w/c is equal to my standards. 😉 ) with affiliate marketing, engaging into some blackhat, doing freelance work (for startup cash), doing SEO-related stuffs, and a whole lot more.

I probably am qualified (or not) to talk into this niche, but I beg not to. Why? Because mmo is already a niche that has a lot of qualified people to speak into. In fact, these are people who know MORE than what I know.

So instead I just dug deeper and went into the marketing part of blogging. I am an internet marketer, have bought tons of stupid eBooks, got enrolled in a lot of quality coaching programs and have about 3 years of experience. And that’s why I try to incorporate all of this into blogging where I know I’ve done well because of the fact that I have the knowledge on how to market my sites.

Ok enough self promo. We all want to make money online and become (or look like) expert in our own areas. But don’t do the mistake of getting into something, just because you feel it’s ideal. You cannot claim yourself as a blogging expert if you just write crappy articles, you can’t fool people you are a loss weight expert if you yourself aren’t fit.

Hmmm.. Is there something fishy that we need to know about you? 😀

Image Credit to: Paradigm Business Consultancy

Blogging Without Borders, Why Location Is Not a Limitation

by Melvin · Apr 26, 2010

Do take note of this, Yaro Starak and Darren Rowse are from Australia, John Chow is from Vancouver Canada, Daniel Scocco is from Brazil, Chris Garrett is from UK, Murray Newlands is also from UK I believe and my friend Carl “KidBlogger” Ocab is from Philippines and etc.

Ok now from outside this niche. Alborz Fallah of CarAdvice.com.au is from Australia (arrgh, again), the ever famous Danny Choo is from Japan, Lhong Zheng was from China (although he resides in Mulgrave), and again fellow Filipino tech blogger Jehzeel Laurente lives here in Philippines. And yea you’re right, I probably have missed a ton of other people still either because I did my research poorly or didn’t do research at all. Anyway, lols. 🙂

Whew, that was quite a long list! I was watching NBA (w/c is one show I always watch no matter what) and they have this segment called Basketball without borders where they usually go to places outside US to have campaigns on basketball. They even play official ball games there sometimes. It’s refreshing to think that you can play basketball no matter where you are.

Thinking of that, I kinda relate it to blogging. You can easily notice that all bloggers I mentioned above live outside the United States. Most people who are just planning to get started blogging worry a lot on whether they can even get attention, relating it to the fact that they live outside big and profitable countries like America and Europe.

To make it worse, most bloggers even do recommend bloggers to target bigger countries mentioned above if they are considering making money from blogging. As a result, bloggers are discouraged even before they get to have a chance.

I would tell you this one straight to your face, successful blogging has no borders, geographical location is NEVER a limitation! Whether you are blogging just as a hobby or using blogging as a business tool, you should never ever get discouraged just because of where you live. Remember that in any country there is always a (profitable) market for something. There are always things where people want to spend some money to learn and educate themselves.

If you’re just going to get wet or in the middle of that (very slow) learning curve and you’re feeling discouraged, I feel for you. I was once like that. When I started my past blogs and websites I basically plastered them with Google Adsense. My neighbor is reading it, my classmates are reading it, and they are clicking the ad. And it sucks to realize that those clicks even with a good quantity totals to just a very small amount (since most clicks is from my country).

And then as I was signing up with other different ad networks I was a bit disappointed to learn that some networks rejected me just because of the fact that I live outside the US. It can really be depressing but having the proper mindset, here I am today.

It’s important to always look at the big picture, not get discouraged by all those cons and instead work on things you could care more. I myself live in a third world country, Philippines. As I was looking at my Analytics and logs, I was seeing the most of my traffic comes here in Asia, and I can say those readers are big factors why I make money from this blog, why I’m somehow read by people.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter where you live from or where your target market is. The only thing that matters is your dedication. Sure, you can count the disadvantages of living in your place at your fingertips or you can elaborate the advantages of living a big country but that’s not a legitimate reason, in fact it’s not even a reason.

As I end this, I do hope you can look at those bloggers I mentioned above and use them as an inspiration. Inspiration not just as big and successful bloggers, but also as bloggers who live in different parts of the world. Yep, blogging doesn’t have any borders, just like basketball.

April Fools Pranks, Are you one of those fools?

by Melvin · Apr 2, 2010

First and foremost, Happy april fools day to everyone! Here in my country its already the second of April and I know in most countries its just the 1st so today I would be tackling something about April fools and the pranks from some websites/blogs.

Anyways its funny how a lot of people are just sooo gullible that you could really laugh out loud when you see them just get persuaded that easy. Whether they were really acting foolishly or just getting with the flow is up to them.

So for today I collected some of my fave april fools prank for the year 2010 and let me know what you think about them.

1. Google Changes Its Name to Topeka

It has been announced in Google’s blog and by reading the post alone, I could obviously tell that it’s an april fools prank. Nice try google though! I just couldn’t fathom why people would say “I did a topeka search for blah blah”.

2. TextP from Youtube

Lols, this new feature from youtube allows you to watch videos in text only mode. According to them, it would save them $1 per second of bandwidth. You can view any video in TextP format by appending &textp=fool to the end of any URL on YouTube. Lols..

3. An App for Android that will translate Animal Speech

Google UK is said to be offering an app that would easily translate Animal Speech. Funny concept but it’s an obvious prank I must say.

4. Shoemoney Modeling Agency

From the time I’ve seen the title of the post, I instantly knew it was shoe’s present for this year’s april fools. And watching the video would really make you laugh. It’s basically about shoemoney doing modeling for a hefty amount of price. And since shoe is baldy-wise, he again held comments that would spoil the post on moderation. I tried gaming the commenting system but to no avail.

5. DailyBlogTips Television Deal

Daniel Scocco tried to be unique this time but I still won’t bite his prank. 🙂 Interestingly a lot of people are FOOL enough to believe his claims. LOL. If blogging could land people TV shows then im sure this would only become more saturated than ever.

6. College Humor Banned by the Government

Going to the site, you would get redirected to this april fool page in which it would tell you that they logged your IP and may subpoena your address from your ISP for further investigation. Im sure it scared the hell out of those fools eh? 🙂

Techcrunch has a bigger list and you can go there if you’d like to see other april fools pranks.

April Fools Day Never Die

I don’t know but April fools never die even though it seems that most people are prepared for it. Even though, its still surprising how a lot people are foolish enough to bite the claim w/c made it more fun and enticing.

Post note: Me saying the word fool is not intended to offend people, its just going through the tradition. 😉

Surprising Announcement!

And there is my surprise announcement! 🙂 I’m completely removing my self from operations in this blog and other several website of mine. No not really, I will still own EVERYTHING but would appoint several key players to staff my network of sites especially this blog, MelvinBlog.com.

I’ve worked with myriads of talented within my 5 years and so it gave me the opportunity to really get them for the long haul. Does that mean i’m not gonna post in this blog anymore? probably yes (heck don’t be sad). Maybe I still would (3 times a year or whatever). But rest assured the people I’ve hired to continue run this blog is as competent as I am and I know they have better grammars than me, lols.

Don’t really want to dive a lot on the reason but its basically because I was hired as a soon-to-be IT Project Manager for a prestige company called IBM. It’s amazing because I am just going to graduate this May and to have that job is just life-changing for me. I mean I’m not even 20 and i’m getting this opportunity already. I know it would be a hard transition for me but I guess im just willing to take and I promise that I would do everything to get the money they would pay me worth it! Here’s the press that IBM issued regarding this.

Again no reason to be sad, I hope you as my readers would be happy for me and still continue to support this blog.

Making Money Online & then Quitting School

by Melvin · Mar 27, 2010

There’s usually a trend not just in online space but in the business as a whole. And this is usually when a kid, or basically just a young person starts becoming successful (making tons of money is included in that of course). What happens most of the times, is that that young kid quits school and goes his own way. Does it sound surprising? No!

For the last couple of month, last couple of weeks specifically, I’ve been into probably the busiest, most exhausting days of my college life. I am a graduating student and I’ve never really like gave everything in school. Even if its exam or just any subject, I never had any day where I was not able to do what I really want. Of course until now.

Just a wrap up of what craziness happened the last few weeks, it includes the agonizing process of developing a software, then the super duper lengthy amount of paperworks that comes with it, then all the meeting and then the revision and then the defense. Do take note, that is just one subject. How about the others where we have a project, exams, stuffs, just craziness.

And it surprised me that I can’t even afford to login to the dashboard page of this blog. I can’t do a lot of the usual things I do in a day. Seems like all I can do is the school work (and tweeting of course)

Quitting School

Let’s go back to the main topic of this post. If you are into this niche, you could easily realize that most successful marketers/bloggers never really finished college. Instead they quit and stuffs.

To tell you honestly quitting school when you are making good money (or even just some money) is not a hard decision to make. I mean who cares about school anyway? I’m always like “hell Im going to school this month and I would then make lesser money as oppose to I’m not gonna go to school and I would triple my monthly income when I go to school”.

The only thing worth considering are the outside factors. The factors that doesn’t do anything with all the benefits that you get to enjoy when you quit school. Like for example is your parents. I don’t know about you but if I’m quitting school today (or even before) and say to them Im making enough money, then they’d still be upset. Why? Because of the degree that you’re going to miss out.

I know having a degree is probably one of the many overrated things here on earth but a lot of people just value that. Not having one is just like not having a future life.

Another good factor is your friends, your enjoyment and attachment with them. I would be the first one to say that I go to school mostly because I want to see my friends, have a talk with them and do our craps all together. And if I quit school right now, then I don’t think I would see them anymore for maybe the next few months (seriously!).

There are endless factors when it comes to this and it includes, financial stability, security, freedom, values and cultures that you are used to and etc. And its important to weigh them all down equally before making a decision. It wouldn’t also harm to seek out advice from people you trust.

Lastly, quitting school is ALMOST synonymous to having your own business, doing your own thing in future. Because of not having a degree, the chances of you, getting employed becomes smaller. Of course anyone out there could disagree and give me twenty-five reasons why its not the case but I’m pretty sure that it applies to majority, if not all. In short, you’re taking the risk and you’re less secure.

Am I Quitting School

Heck, no is the answer! As I’ve said, Im going to graduate one month from now and If I am about to quit then its the most stupid decisions I am going to make.Maybe if I have stumbled upon that thought 2 years ago, but now? Definitely not! 😉

School has taught a ton of nice values to me, enabled me to become who I am right now, helped me be with equally talented people, brought me experience I could never forget, hooked me up with pretty girls, got me with cool persons, party casinos, sports, drinking sprees and etc. Even if I was making $1 million 2 years ago, I probably would’ve still not quit, or maybe I would. 🙂