MelvinBlog

A blog that chronicles my journey on online marketing, blogging, social media, technology and life.

Traffic

10 Signs that a Blog is Getting Bigger than Ever

10 Signs that a Blog is Getting Bigger than Ever

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Everyone starts out as small bloggers and over time eventually some of us reach the greener pasture and become a bigger blog. By saying big blog, what I mean is that the blog gets more readers than ever and obviously starts making more money. Not a lot of bloggers get into this stage and to be honest, I still think that this blog far from that.

Anyways in this post I just like to enumerate different things and signs that obviously make a blog bigger than ever.

1. Humongous number of comments

It all starts with this. I was reading shoemoney’s blog ever since not a lot of people are reading it yet. And when he started becoming popular, the number of comments per posts has started rising crazily. And long story short, Shoemoney’s blog is now one of the most popular blog in the weight loss internet marketing niche.

Of course this does not apply to all. Long time ago,  I made a post about whether comments justify the success of a blog and in that writeup I revealed that anyone can really get 50ish comments per post, but that doesn’t make them established at all.

2. Increased number of ads

This is very logical. When a blog starts out with so many white space in its layout and all of a sudden looks like a Nascar, you know its just trying to make the most of its traffic. Again this does not mean any blog that looks like Nascar is a big blog, but its at least an indication that the blogger who owns it is trying to make the most out of the opportunity. 😉

3. The blog starts out churning out multiple articles per day

Heheh. This is so true. Look at problogger, look at JohnChow, these guys are posting 3-4 posts per day and the reason is sound, it is to maximize their exposure for their writing. Another more recent example is Hesham of FamousBloggers.com

If you get over thousand hits per day and 80% of them expect that you will post a couple more post before the day ends, how many repeat traffic could that possibly bring? 😉

4. When one can already confidently sell their own product or membership program

Most bloggers/marketers fail in selling info products and membership sites fora simple reason, they do it even before they establish a presence.

Now when a blogger can confidently sell something to its readerbase, then most of the time it means that he is getting enough traffic and enough publicity to be able to see his/her stuff to other people. That’s another sign.

5.  When one tweets for 20+ times a day

Another thing related to getting bigger as a blogger is an increased popularity in social sites like Twitter, Facebook, or whatever it is. So naturally when you have already 10,000 (real)  followers, you don’t want to waste that. Instead you want to make the most of it by either pointing them to your blog frequently or pushing affiliate products.

6. When a blog gets featured occasionally

This is pretty obvious. When someone makes mention of your blog even if its just a small mention, then it means you’re not just an ordinary blogger (lols).

A lot of mid to big bloggers occasionally do roundups of blogs that provide value to readers and when your blog gets mentioned in there, it means a lot.

7. Getting Interviewed

This is related to no.6. If you started getting those interview requests, then it means you’re slowly carving out your name in the blogosphere. Although like other reasons mentioned in this post, getting interviewed doesn’t directly mean you’re famous. There are a lot of bloggers who interview random people on a daily basis which I obviously find lame.

8.  Making redesigns

Not really spoiling Problogger’s new design eh. 😉 Ok so its noticeable that once a blog gets big enough and come to the point that the theme can no longer handle whatever it has, bloggers will make that redesigns.

It’s always part of the reason. Most bloggers who start getting traffic decide to do other things like starting a newsletter or publishing more posts and in that case, making redesigns is almost always part of the equation.

9. Starts getting negative publicity

This is of course the bad side of becoming more popular. When your blog eventually gets bigger, you will start receiving troll/hate comments and messages from people who are wasting their time. You will also start getting into these controversies obviously created by other people who are looking to ride into your momentum upwards.

Its important to understand its normal. People love hating other people and they can never be contented with everything that they do. Negative publicity is still publicity after all.

10. Lesser activity in the blogopshere

This is sad yet true. When bloggers like Yaro Starak, Darren Rowse, David Risley and etc. are just small bloggers who own small blogs back then, you can almost always see them participating in forums, commenting on other blogs, replying to their readers frequently and just being active overall in the entire blogging scene.

Unfortunately as they started getting bigger, they realized its more worthy to start putting efforts on other things than interaction. Is it a bad thing? Definitively no because that is really how the process works. Hence, its a sign the blogger is getting bigger.

So you have any other ideas in mind? 😉

5 Clever Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog…

5 Clever Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog…

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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

Driving Consistent Traffic is the Key

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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.

Can you Really Depend on SEO for Your Site?

Can you Really Depend on SEO for Your Site?

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Search engine optimization is one overrated thing. And I know its not just me who thinks it this way. But even with that fact, I still have a lot of respect for the top SEO guys like Aaron Wall, Danny Sullivan and some other ones. They’re the guys whom I think have the most extensive and updated knowledge about the topic that’s why I keep on following them.

Anyway back to the topic. I know a lot of newcomers in the business or even the experienced ones rely too much on search engines. I mean, the time that they allot in planning and strategizing for SEO is just too much. Now this leads us to the question, “Can you really depend on your SEO tactics for the profitability of your site?”. I’m sure we will all have mixed takes about it.

As most of you know, I guest post a lot these days and I wrote an article over the cool folks at Sem-group which is all about SEO, SEM and Social media. In that post I discussed a lot about how they’re connected and how SEM and social media play vital role in giving the site the initial boost. Here’s an excerpt:

When building a website or any online-based project, you want to build SEO in it from the get-go. You want to optimize it for those key terms that you’re looking into from the start. I know you’re saying, “how can you do that, you don’t even have content yet?” Yes, you’re right but what I mean is that with every websites you can already set up things from the start that would give you a dramatic effect later on. Let me explain.For example, if I’m building a site based on a WordPress platform, I can start fine-tuning the site’s search goals by doing the necessary things like adding an All in One SEO pack, canonicalizing the domain, setting up the meta descriptions properly and creating a robots.txt (and many more of course). You see, these are the things that you can already do from the start yet it doesn’t take that much to do those. On the flip side, it may not yield that much results for the first few months but its future benefits would be enormous for sure.

Search Engine Optimization isn’t a short-term goal in the first place right? Organic rankings is something that can be achieved over time and if you’re getting lots of traffic from search engines then you know what I’m talking about.

Again you can visit my post about SEO, SEM and Social media and feel free to add your insights about it too. I know people have various opinions about this topic and Im willing to take criticisms for it.

It’s a Contest, Help me Win it!

Yes, the article I’ve written above is a contest entry. Sem-Group.net was lucky enough to gather over $2000 of prizes at stake and as all of you know, I love joining contests.  Here are the cold-blooded prizes and their sponsors:

$200 Prize Sponsors

$150 Prize Sponsors

$100 Prize Sponsors

$50 Prize Sponsors

Other prizes: Non-Cash Sponsors

  • Hostgator.com is offering a 1 year Business Web Hosting plan. Includes toll free phone number and SSL, a $179.40 value.
  • David Harry is offering a full years membership at SEO Training Dojo, a value of $250.
  • Link-Assistant.Com is offering SEO tools – SEO PowerSuite Enterprise (max. functionality license) $599 worth with a life-time LIVE! plan subscription.
  • Special thanks to the contest media partner My Blog Guest, the free guest post exchange community by  Ann Smarty where users meet to exchange guest posts and network.

What’s needed for me to win

To help me win the contest, simply visit the post above, share your opinion by commenting and retweet it. The more comments and retweets the more chances of me winning. As you can see right now, I’m in the last place as far as both are concern but that would change if you help me out. 😀

Again here’s the post: http://sem-group.net/search-engine-optimization-blog/sem-seo-social-media-and-their-connection-to-each-other/ feel free to check it out!

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

Setting Up a Facebook Fan Page for Your Blog

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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:

MelvinBlog Fan Page

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.

facebook default 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.

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

Why You Should be Always Looking for New Traffic Sources

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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?

Blog Posts Retweets, Do they really make sense?

Blog Posts Retweets, Do they really make sense?

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When retweets was first introduced, I was really really so much into it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever especially with the fact that if someone retweets your article, then there’s a good chance more than a thousand people can actually see it and have the opportunity to retweet it as well. It’s mainly because the potential of Twitter is really there.

Of course at first, I really didn’t figure out how I can get that much retweets that would enable me to reap those benefits. I started to install that little Tweetmeme plugin so that my readers can start retweeting my article for me. Obviously I started to realize that each of the 100 visitors will not really retweet it.

So what I did then was start using Twitter genuinely. I started following people that is related to what I’m blogging and started really giving tweeting some time. Eventually my follower count started growing and interaction has been more lively now.  And not surprisingly with that, I started getting retweets.

The highest retweet count that I got is 133 and not surprisingly it came from a contest post. But then I got a little contented with the fact that at least I was getting more than 10 retweets almost every time. And now I started wondering. Is this retweets really worth it? or is it just a number that you could flaunt and brag to other people?

Ok ok. Unlike in the previous posts, I’m not gonna flash out some geeky numbers on your screen or some screenshot from Google Analytics and then explain it one by one. Studying the behavior from Twitter is a quite a it tricky that just showing stats doesn’t mean anything that much.

So for this year, Twitter has sent me over a 1000 uniques and more than 2500 pageviews. Of course the bounce rate and stickiness weren’t as effective as let’s say guest post campaigns and stuffs. Twitter has so many bot accounts and in fact I have a couple for myself and the reason for that is mainly for testing. If someone is being followed by 1000 bots, that will not make any sense right so I guess that’s why it’s not converting that well.

Of course the main benefit of it is that it’s free and if utilized well, it can be a source of free yet targeted high quality traffic for any site. But how can one utilize it and maximize its benefits? That’s  literally the question of every blogger in this space. I know big guru bloggers utilize it so well that for instance, Shoemoney even called as “the best marketing medium” right now.

For me what I do is basically just host all my shortlinks via bit.ly. Bit.ly has some free basic tracking which is pretty darn good. You can find the no.of unique clicks, no.of referrers/retweets, the location they were retweeted and even the day to day activities of your posts. In fact, I already considered it’s PRO program just because of how slick it is.

If you’re using other shorteners, I’m pretty sure they have their built-in trackers as well so make sure you’re making the most by using that to analyze things.

So all in all, retweets really matter. As I said above, I got some pretty good (yet not really massive) traffic from it and from a hindsight I can say that it’s one good way to get new readers to your blog.  The number of RT’s alone can quite a bit be misleading but the traffic stats will always speak for themselves. From that on, its just a matter of  tweaking it more and more.

What do you think? Maybe you have some secrets to share as well?