I was invited to give a 45-minute talk on how to make money with blogging during the recent Blog World Philippines 2010 conference at Crossroads 77, QC. I was initially expecting around 500 participants but I was really surprised when I saw that the entire auditorium was filled to the brim! According to the organizers, more than 1,000 people actually attended the conference. The talks were actually divided into two groups. I had several speakers in my team who talked about making money through blogging which included multi-millionaire bloggers Philip Tiangson and Julius Sison. Financial blogger...

If you care about your online reputation and your readers you better make sure that you constantly monitor what ads are being displayed on your site through Google Adsense. There’s been a surge of “dating” sites in the past few months and they’ve been advertising regularly via Google. What’s alarming is that even big publishing companies like GMA7 doesn’t filter their Google ads. This begs the question if the measly dollar earnings that they get from Adsense is worth the potential PR disaster waiting to happen. Here’s a screenshot of GMA7’s online...

My fellow blogger and good friend Brian Ong asked me on Facebook last night how he can remove the Manny Villar ads on his blog. Apparently this is also a concern shared by a lot of bloggers and website owners as well. Having political ads on your site has a lot of implications, the most obvious one being that your viewers will think that you actually support the candidate being advertised because it’s in your site. Here’s a more compelling reason to filter ads though – adsense earnings. I noticed that the CTR of my various sites went down over the past few months. I decided to...

I was finally able to watch the movie Julie & Julia last night and I appreciated all the lessons it imparted to me as a blogger. In one of the scenes, Julie is confronted by her husband because she’s been having too many meltdowns and she’s getting to stressed/affected by her blogging. This damages their relationship and turns everything sour – including Julie’s blogging. I think this is a valuable lesson that we all have to take to heart as bloggers. At the end of the day, readers are just readers. The world does not revolve on what they say and their comments. The...

Here’s a quick and effective tip for bloggers and website administrators out there who use Google Adsense. I recently doubled the click through rate (CTR) of my anime & gaming blog, Waukster Online, just by changing the ad units and their placements. This was suggested by my good friend and fellow blogger, Francis. Basically I got three link ad units side by side just under the title of the post and above the actual body content. Here’s a screenshot: The CTR increased by around 40% the first day and now it’s consistently double (sometimes triple) compared to the CTR I got...

Viral Marketing rarely happens by accident. As Malcolm Gladwell would say, it has to reach a tipping point first before it gets picked up eventually spreads like wildfire. The same concept applies for Viral Blogging – or the publishing content that gets passed on by different people across various mediums. Note that there is no sure formula for hitting a home run with Viral Blogging however the tips here that I’ll share will definitely help you increase traffic. In this post I’ll identify what are the important components for Viral Blogging and then share with you case studies...

Hi everyone. I know I have a lot of readers who are bloggers because I get a lot of views each time I write posts that give tips and advice on blogging. With this in mind, I’ve decided to come up with a series of posts called “Value Blogging Tips“. This will run for the next 2-3 weeks wherein I’ll make it a point to regularly share with everyone my experiences with building traffic, search engine optimization, personal branding, making money, and a lot of other ideas. I’ll also try to tackle some topics on e-commerce and online shopping since it’s slowly starting...

One of the pitfalls of online marketing is that a lot of people don’t really understand how to gauge the performance of their websites. There are several schools of thought at play here. For some, they put a lot of value in the page hits or the number of unique visitors that their website gets. Others, on the other hand, would rather focus on their RSS or E-mail subscribers. If you’re an e-commerce based site, then you’re probably monitoring your sales. However, one critical issue that a lot of bloggers and marketers often forget about is the reader churn. Ask yourself this question...

Getting constant traffic is the lifeblood of your website or blog. We’ve all heard about how Search Engine Optimization does wonders but the problem with SEO is that it takes time and effort to work on. You might also have to spend on a Google AdWords campaign to make it more effective. There’s also the saying “Content is King”. However, you can’t really rely just on what you write for your blog or website to get decent traffic. You have to market your site to the right people so that you can get quality traffic. This short article will tackle 7 free and effective...

In the past few weeks, I’ve been helping out a few friends start their own personal blogs. I’ve keep on repeating the same advice on how to make money with blogging so I’ve decided to just write a post that sums up everything I know about how to monetize your blog. By no means are all the methods I’ll mention are exhaustive. If you have other tips and ideas, feel free to share and leave a comment. The ones I’ll list down are just the ones that I’ve used and earned from in the past 3 years of my blogging.

Over the past few days months, the local blogosphere has been abuzz with talks about blogger credentials, bloggers being used by PR agencies, changing writing styles, and so many other issues. I would just like to take this opportunity to share my sentiments on this. There’s this common misconception that bloggers write for everyone. I strongly disagree. Bloggers write for their communities – their readers. If you try to please everyone, you’ll stretch your content and writing style to the limit that you’ll just turn everyone off. In this post, let me try to put into perspective...