The Philippine Blog Awards is one of the most prestigious blog award giving bodies in the country. They’ve been doing this for 4 years now and the live event keeps on getting better and better as the years go by. Anyway, the Philippine Blog Awards 2010 will start accepting nominations on September 12. They have a lot of categories and special awards so you might want to get your blog in the running.

Here are the categories listed on the official website:

• Technology
• Travel
• Entertainment
• Personal (Diary/Journal)
• Food and Beverage
• Home and Parenting
• Lifestyle
• Business
• Sports
• Hobby and Recreation
• Beauty and Fashion
• Photoblog
• Culture and Arts
• Commentary
• Videocast and Podcasts
• Humor
• Gaming
• Advocacy
• Pets
• Science
• Literary

* I’m thinking of entering New Media Philippines under the Business Category.

Other than the main categories above, the 2010 Philippine Blog Awards also has several special awards which you can also shoot for. Here’s the list:

As most of you know, I’m getting married in 2 weeks time. Preparing for the wedding was definitely hard but I’m sure it will be worth it come the big day. Anyway, while going over my budget, I realized that we’re investing a lot on photography and video. This is probably the same for a lot of couples who are getting married in this day and age. Technology has drastically evolved to the point that we can preserve and even enhance memories. We now have the ability to leave a digital footprint in this world — in full color and HD! This may sound really simple and not something to celebrate, but if you think hard about it we actually have the means now to leave a legacy that our grandchildren can listen, hear, see, and maybe even touch (in the future). We can actually invest in building their future by building a library of digital content that will hold life lessons and experiences that we want to share to them. Here are some ideas on how to do just that.

1. Record Videos of special moments in your life
Share your most memorable experiences via video. I really try to make it a point to have all the biggest moments in my life recorded. When I proposed to Mich last October, my good friend, Bu, recorded the entire thing. Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it yet:

A video camera is a very good investment these days. Video editing software is also easy to come by and it’s not too hard to use. For sharing you can always just upload on Youtube. Let’s make the most of today’s technology to connect with future generations.

2. Create short videos with life lessons and reflections.
I haven’t done this yet but I hope to do so soon (via vlogs or video casts). Just get a camera in front of you and start sharing some of the most important life lessons that you’ve come across. You can have this for everyone in the whole world to see or you can just have it in a CD which you give to your loved ones. If it’s really good it will probably end up getting uploaded though, lol.

Here’s a lecture given by the late professor Randy Pauche about how to achieve childhood dreams. He made this for his kids. It’s a long lecture at 1 hour but believe me when I say that it’s worth every single second of download time. I learned so much from his lecture and I think you can too.

Which brings me to my next point — your legacy is not just actually for your kids and grandkids. It can be for the entire world. Every person has a unique life and it means that we all have different life lessons that we can share to the world. We have the potential to touch and bless millions of lives. All we have to do is to start talking and sharing.

3. Leave messages
This is something I’ll probably do when I’m a bit older, haha! Just record yourself giving messages to your unborn grandkid or something. It’s a great way for them to know you even if you’ve already passed away. Don’t leave the story telling to others. Share your life story yourself.

Technology, the Internet, and social media are all gifts from God that we can use to enrich the lives of other people. It’s not just for Farmville or uploading photos. If used properly we can make the world a better place to live in.

Postscript: I celebrated my 28th birthday yesterday (July 21, 2010). That’s probably the reason why I’m so emo. Hahaha.

I’m currently mentoring a few new bloggers so I’ll be posting more about blogging in the coming weeks. For today, let me share 3 awesome plug-ins which incorporate your social media accounts to your WordPress blog. Putting social media buttons and badges are very important because it can exponentially multiply the traffic you’re getting especially if you’re churning out valuable content. This is simply a must and those that don’t put these in their blogs are missing out on a lot of potential new readers. My favorite 3 social media WordPress plug-ins after the break.

Socialize
First up we have Socialize. This is a really powerful and effective plug-in which EASILY integrates “Share and Retweet” buttons on your home page and inside posts. You get to pick which buttons are shown. I usually just put in Facebook and Twitter as my primary buttons and the rest will just be inside the post at the bottom. Here’s a screenshot:

This is my personal favorite and I strongly recommend this plug-in!

Social Slider
Next-up we have Social Slider. This plug-in basically displays small fixed badges on the side of your blog. This is currently active right now in New Media Philippines so you should be able to see it on the left side of this site. Once you mouse over it the box expands (nice touch). Screenshots for your reference:

This is a cool plug-in especially if you’re having problems with space on your sidebar. This is very helpful if you’re using a one column sidebar theme. Frees up a lot of space for other widgets.

Social Widget
If you want your social media badges on your sidebar, then Social Widget is for you. They have different styles for the badges making it a bit more fun to use. You also get to pick which social media channels you want to display. here’s a screenshot of it in my Apple Manila blog:

Again let me just stress how important it is for you to integrate social media to your blogs. These simple changes can really make a world of difference in the traffic that you get. However don’t expect to see spikes the moment you implement it. It boils down to how “shareable and retweetable” your article is. Make it remarkable, make it fun, and make it valuable.

That’s it for now. Let me know if you guys are using other social media plug-ins that are effective by hitting the comments section below. Cheers!

Another interesting question this time via e-mail! A reader asked what should she do if she found some people annoying or insulting on their social network in Twitter or Facebook. My answer is pretty straightforward and blunt. Unfollow or Unfriend them. There are too many distractions already in life and the last thing you need are people who do nothing but spread negativity and stress on your social network. I recall this conversation I had with a good friend a few days ago. He was talking about how he really hated someone to the point that each time he saw this guy’s face on his Friends column on Tweet Deck he’d feel bad. Er… then take him out of your list so you don’t have to see his face anymore?

And to those who do nothing but spread negativity and insecurity online through their blogs and social networks, allow me to quote from an entry of Jayvee that I just adore and love:

Go and make a name for yourself. Don’t waste time in events. Don’t wait for news to come to you. Go and be awesome. Detract from the trail of the script they give you in press conferences. Let your personality shine. If you want them to respect blogs, then give them a reason to.

Don’t go to the PR guy. Go direct to client.

Respect the PR guy. He can help you in the future when things get sticky.

But first, write something awesome. Not in praise of the machinations of the PR industry, but in praise of free speech. Write it well.

Do it again.

Push yourself to say more than the obvious.

Don’t take photos. Cull emotions. Don’t drown it with text.

Be relevant.

Be indignant about the status quo. Change it.

Change your template also.

Be more informed than them.

Be friendly. Be more than friendly. Be controversial.

Don’t whine. Don’t complain.

Say no sometimes.

Use keywords. But also be brazened.

Ship.

End with a bang.

Sometimes in life we keep pointing fingers at others and blaming them for the ills of our life. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned is to not judge other people because we really don’t know them or what they’ve done in life. Of course I still struggle with this but I am working on it, lol. Stop looking at others and pulling them down and just focus on building your career and blessing others with the fruits of your labor.

Cheers everyone and I hope you’re all having a great week.

Most of the time internet marketers and bloggers tend to focus on their analytics and their website numbers. We spend hours trying to interpret and analyze where we get our traffic, what page they visit, etc. There’s nothing wrong doing this but it does become troublesome if you focus too much on strategy and forget about churning out good content. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned so far as a consultant it’s this: every single eyeball on your site is just as important as the next one. Why? Because you never know if that 1 out of just 10 people who visits your site has a network that will open up the heavens for you. Ultimately it boils down to churning out and leveraging value-based content that people will appreciate. Let me share some personal experiences and tips. These are all based on my current career as a Social Media & Marketing Consultant.

The iPad Trap
This site, New Media Philippines, gets tons of visitors because I write about the iPad. If I’m not mistaken nearly 60% of the traffic I get on this site is mainly due to the articles I write about this particular device. Initially I was thinking of writing more iPad articles because of this data. However what value do I get out of this? I don’t run advertising on this site so the extra traffic doesn’t generate any revenue unless they happen to be iPad fans who also are marketers who need my services.

A few days ago I was meeting a new client who represents a rather big group of businesses. After presenting and discussing what we can do together, I asked him where he found out about me and what I do. He shared with me something that I will forever keep in my mind, heart, and soul ’till the day I join the good Lord.

“I’ve never heard of your blog before or about social media. I found out about you from a friend who said she got an e-mail from another friend telling her to read your site because you did good work for them. That friend then called me and asked me to check your site and I did. And here we are now.”

It sounds so simple but it actually has so much meaning. I was curious to see how my other clients and former clients found out about me so I spent some time this afternoon making calls. I found out that it was pretty much the same across the board. Mostly referrals or they “chanced” upon my site when someone shared the link. Most, if not all, are NOT direct and regular readers.

Which leads me to my advice to all of you aspiring bloggers and consultants out there — In this day and age where blogging and internet marketing seems to be drowned out by search engine optimization and other technical stuff, don’t forget to write beautiful, valuable, and thought-provoking content about your niche. Your articles have to be so compelling and powerful that they will have a life of their own and they become so attractive for your readers to spread via their social networks and e-mail.

Every single person who visits your blog is not just one person. Every single person who visits your blog has a network of his or her own which can be in the tens, hundreds, or thousands. The ripple effect of social media is so underrated because it’s so hard to measure but it can definitely make or break a business.

I remember one thing that my late grandfather mentioned to me before about his writing. He said that when he wrote he felt that a part of him was “imbued” in the article that he made.

Maybe that’s how we should treat our articles. At the very heart of blogging is passionate, personal, and emotional writing. Let’s put enough effort so that we “imbue” part of ourselves into our articles. Maybe that will be enough to spark it’s animation so that eventually it will find a life of it’s own.

It’s amazing how words these days can truly change one’s life.

Here’s a good tip for bloggers and SEO students. People go to the web not just for information, they go to the web to look for solutions. I’ve been blogging across various niches for the past few years and the entries that get the most views are the ones that offer solutions to specific problems or needs. For example, my gaming blog is getting thousands of hits from short guides that I made on Final Fantasy XIII and Dragon Age: Origins. For New Media, the posts that generate the most views are the ones that give tips and advice on internet marketing, blogging, and social media. Articles like these also get the most number of retweets and Facebook shares.

The next time you’re coming out with a blog post, try to offer more value to your readers by providing them with real solutions to their problems. When you give value to others, you add value to yourself.

A lot of Filipinos think that blogging is a form of being “emo” or it’s just a personal online journal. That’s how people in the 1990′s thought about blogging. It’s already 2010 and the opportunities and possibilities blogging offers can literally change lives. It can bring you money, it can put your career on the fast track, and much more. I always try to encourage my friends and colleagues to blog because it has definitely made such a huge impact on my professional and personal life. Here are 4 reasons why I think Filipino professionals should start blogging.

Everyone has a personal brand and our brands are defined by our words and our actions. What people see us do, what they hear us say, and what others say about us are the primary three ways that determines our brand. Blogging is one the most powerful and effective ways to build your personal brand.

In the eBook, Social Media Guide for Filipino Entrepreneurs, I said that companies should use the internet to focus the eyes of their prospects to the good things about their product. The same can be said for career professionals. You can use the internet to keep the eyes fixed of your prospective new employer, colleagues, and boss on your “good” side. Blogging provides you with a platform to publish content that you want to associate yourself with. You have full control of what you post and upload. Think of your blog as your portfolio where you want to showcase your best projects and your expert opinon on industry topics.

With blogging you just don’t have 15 minutes of fame, you have it forever. I’ll be discussing more on how to leverage blogs to build personal brands in the upcoming Make Money 2.0 Seminar this Saturday.

There are a lot of ways to monetize a blog. Google Adsense alone from my other sites pays for the monthly amortization of my car and also contributes to other utility costs. For more information on how to make money through blogging, you can check out this post: Make Money Online Blogging. Note that we will also be discussing this during the seminar on Saturday.

Bloggers get invited to a lot of events. Before there were only like 1 or 2 per month. Now there are dozens of blogger events going on left and right. The good thing here (other than the free food and the goodie bags) is that it allows you to network with marketing executives from host companies. It also allows you to meet fellow bloggers. I can’t count how many restaurant owners that I now know personally because of my Pinoy Food Critic blog. This site, New Media Philippines, also opened the door for me to meet fellow internet marketing professionals and entrepreneurs.

This is one of my favorite reasons why I blog. When you’re a blogger, you need to regularly update with fresh and new content. This means that you need to be constantly on the lookout for news and trends on your niche/industry. This keeps you very hungry for knowledge which in turn leads to your growth. Ever since I started blogging I’ve been a voracious reader. I follow a lot of blogs, read a lot of books, and sometimes I can’t take my eyes off Twitter doing searches on topics that I find interesting.

Blogging offers so much for Filipino professionals. Start one now.

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 and fellow Atenean Tyrone Solee was also there to give a talk about his blog. The other group was led by my good friend and mentor Janette Toral and she talked about blogging for influence and power.

Full house at Crossroads 77 for Blog World Philippines 2010!

Let me just take this opportunity to thank the organizers for inviting me to share my experiences in this prestigious and big event. I felt very honored to be on the stage with the likes of Janette and the millionaire bloggers. The added bonus was that majority of the crowd were also students and I just find so much joy and fulfillment in talking to the next generation. So to the organizers – maraming salamat sa pag-imbita sa akin (thank you for inviting me).

Image courtesy of Kelvin

Q&A Time

Ms. Janette Toral giving her talk

Make Money Blogging
Bulk of my talk revolved around basic tips to get people started on how to make money online. I also shared a lot of personal experiences and learnings that I’ve had being a blogger and marketing consultant for the past few years. I’m not an expert in affiliate marketing so I didn’t delve into that. I talked more about how to make money via two ways: advertising and services. For a primer on how to make money through blog advertising, please check out my Make Money Blogging post. For driving traffic, you might want to check my Viral Blogging entry.

One of my main revenue channels right now is my Internet Marketing consultancy company and I built that using this blog, New Media Philippines. Selling services or products to a captured audience can be one of the most enjoyable and fulfilling jobs ever. Especially if the product or service that you’re promoting is something that you’re very passionate about.

Blogging is not about reinventing yourself. It’s about taking what you love and owning it. It’s not just thinking out loud, it’s thought leadership. It’s channeling your passion into effort and eventually into financial security. If you do it properly, it will open up a world of opportunities that will just blow your mind away.

Here’s a short 2-minute talk I gave when I accepted the award for Professional Blog of 2009 for the DigitalFilipino awards. It’s a heartfelt testimony on what blogging has done for my career and my life.

To make money blogging, you make yourself in the process. And that is something that is just priceless.

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 TV with an ad promoting a rather “controversial” site, Orient Brides.

Here’s another screenshot of my political commentary blog, Juan Country, with another ad from a different online Filipina dating website:

Here’s an article I wrote about how you can filter the ads from Google. Time to start filtering ads.

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 observe for a week and I noticed that my blogs are being flooded by political ads. Not just from Manny Villar, but also from Bayani Fernando and Mark Jimenez. It looks like my site visitors are sick and tired already of politics to the point that they refuse to click them at all, hahaha!

Anyway, it’s fairly simple to remove political ads. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Log-on to Google Adsense and go to Adsense Set-up.
2. Click the Competitive Ad Filter in the navigation bar.

3. Put down the URL of the site that you want blocked from advertising on your blog. To get the URL, just look at the ad, note down the url, and update your list.

It takes a while before it takes effect but it shouldn’t take longer than 24 hours.

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 most important things are actually the people close to us that we tend to take for granted when we find a new shiny toy to focus on our attention on (like blogging). I remember going through something like this when I first made Waukster Online and I had a lot of negative comments from LU Gamers each time there was a problem with any of the games we published. I would really stress out and I’d snap at Mich and obviously this would hurt her. It communicates the wrong thing… by making the blog a priority, you’re literally telling her that the blog is more important than her, which is just absurd.

And that lesson applies to everything that you do that takes your attention away from your wife, family, and dear friends.

Spread the love this Christmas season! Stop blogging and spend more time with your family and loved ones! Uh… I should stop too, haha!

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 before I made the change. I’ll play around some more with the Adsense units in the site and see what else I can do to increase CTR and over-all earnings.

Cheers!

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 based on my personal experience in some of my other blogs. After explaining Viral Blogging, I’ll also share with you some books that you can read which will give you a better understanding of the subject being discussed. These are books that I’ve read and I strongly recommend to everyone.

Components of Viral Blogging
I’ve identified that there are four fundamental components to Viral Blogging. They are:

1. Content Strategy
2. Identifying Influencers or Network Hubs
3. Reaching the Tipping Point
4. Following through

First let’s talk about CONTENT STRATEGY.

Ultimately, the topic of your post has to be RELEVANT. You can’t expect old or passe topics to be interesting because it won’t really catch the wave. Viral Bloggers should have an eye and an ear for trends. One good way is to be up-to-date with the current news and events in your industry or niche. But that will limit your readership and relevance just to your existing market. For you to be really viral, you need to talk about things that matter to everyone. You don’t need to become a current events or political/lifestyle blogger to do this. Find a way to tie in the latest controversy to your niche and write about it.

My best example for this would by Pastor Dennis Sy who blogs at Clueless Church Planter. You’d think that a Pastor would blog only about boring stuff right? But that’s not the case with Pastor Dennis. The reason why his blogs get a good following is because he’s able to relate current events to the bible. For example, he recently wrote about Michael Jordan’s induction to the hall of fame. He even wrote about the infamous Hayden Kho – Katrina Halili controversy.

Your post has to matter for it to spread around. Your observations about the sun can’t spread… well unless you write that balls of fire rained from the sky and destroyed your town.

Which brings me to my other point – Copy Writing. This is a skill that is highly paid for in the advertising agency. It takes a lot of creativity, insight, and research to come up with a product slogan or tag line. Let’s take San Miguel for example. They’ve launched a lot of campaign ads in the past decade but ultimately the line that sticks the most is still “Iba ang may pinag samahan”. The title of your post needs to emotionally connect with your readers. Right now the entire social media world is abuzz with US President Obama calling Kanye West a jackass for what he did to Taylor Swift during the MTV Awards. If Obama called him “improper”, do you think it will generate the same amount of interest?

Here’s a good example. A month ago Happy Feraren wrote on Facebook about how Jamby Madrigal gave away bracelets with her face on it during the memorial service of former President Cory Aquino. I found it really insulting so I decided to write about it. I wrote about it, posted it on my social networks, and sent e-mails and texts to some contacts. Here’s what happened after a week or two:

Another important but often overlooked factor is TIMING of your post. I had a very good conversation with my favorite Mom Blogger, Noemi Dado about this. She shared that if you publish an article before it’s released on tri-media or shortly after, you’ll get a lot of traffic from the search engines. Main reason here is that Filipinos tend to search Google for more details since Television and Radio can say only so much in the little time that they have.

If you’re writing a post and you want it to spread, ask yourself if the topic is interesting, relevant, and if your title is compelling.

Now that we have content strategy out of the way, let’s talk about IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS OR NETWORK HUBS.

Imagine the world as a series of modems and network hubs. There are a lot of cables that connect with one another but there are routers that connect to a lot of other computers. Routers or Network Hubs are people who have the power to reach out to a wider audience. Network Hubs can be bloggers, political leaders, media people, celebrities, party people, trend setters, etc. The pitfall of a lot of bloggers and marketers is that they don’t identify and build relationships with these kinds of people. By not doing so you are just limiting yourself to your own circle or network and this stops your readership from growing at a faster rate.

Whenever I have a really good post, I always make it a point to send out Facebook messages, e-mails, and SMS to my contacts that I consider as Network Hubs. Sometimes they share it to their network, sometimes they don’t. However I don’t really lose anything if I send them a message right? But I have everything to gain if they do.

As a warning, don’t just spam the hell out of Network Hubs. The moment they see you as spam, they’ll ignore you. Make it a point to always offer value with your articles and don’t send every single article you have to them. It will also help if you build relationships with these people first. Coming out of nowhere will land you… nowhere.

Now that you have your message and you’ve identified your hubs, let’s talk about pushing your content so that you CAN REACH THE TIPPING POINT.

Let me go back to what I said in the first paragraph – Viral Marketing rarely happens by accident. You have to seed and promote your content properly so that it spreads. If the content is good and you promote it properly, that’s the time where it will take a life of it’s own and explode from online to traditional media. You might even get a call from TV stations asking for interviews.

So the question is – how do you reach the tipping point?

There are a lot of tools at your disposal. Most of them are even for free. Let me tackle some of them in detail.

Social Network Marketing
E-mail Marketing
SMS Marketing
Forum & Community Marketing

Let’s start with Social Network Marketing. First things first though. If you’re not regularly updating and adding contacts to your social network accounts then this isn’t for you. If you have like less than 150 friends, then you should focus first on building your network before you leverage it for traffic. Imagine social networks as waves in the beach that you surf on. The bigger your network, the bigger the wave, the bigger the reach!

For Social Networking, it’s pretty simple. You can set-up your account to aggregate content from your blogs. A more effective approach though would be to actually post it as a note and tag NETWORK HUBS or send them as messages so that you can get their attention. You might also want to consider adding a call-to-action at the end asking them to pass it to others if they find it interesting. You can use this for all major social media in the Philippines – Facebook, Friendster, Plurk, Multiply, and Twitter.

If you have a really good post, you might also want to consider direct marketing it at a small cost like sending out SMS messages to your contacts. This works well if your content matches the industry or interests of your contacts.

Don’t believe in the power of social media? Then let me share with you a screenshot of my Google Analytics for one of my blogs.

In a couple of weeks, Facebook delivered more than 20,000+ views to my blog, Plurk gave around 1,000+, and Twitter delivered 604+. What’s great about this kind of traffic is that the people are genuinely interested in reading what I have to say.

Last, we have FOLLOWING THROUGH.

Viral Blogging is not about one-hit wonders. It’s a style of blogging so that you can generate the maximum buzz and interest for your site. It’s not just all about search engines anymore with the advent of Social Media. You’ll have a lot of hits and misses in blogging and this is no exception. However like what I said above, you’ll still get new traffic and you get to build your readership by using this style.

This kind of blogging is just like dropping bombs. Some posts are grenades wherein you can blow up a room. Some viral posts are like dynamite, which can decimate mine shafts. Every now and then you’ll have one that can turn into an atom bomb and level a city.

The reach varies, but the underlying effect is the same: you grow your readership.

To summarize, always ask yourself these questions when you plan on making a Viral Blog Post:

1. Is the topic relevant?
2. Is the title compelling?
3. Who will I inform about this post?
4. Did I properly promote it on my social networks?
5. What’s the next post that I can write about?

And that’s a wrap for the first post. Bombs away people.

RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
2. Unleashing the Idea Virus by Seth Godin
3. All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin
4. The Purple Cow by Seth Godin

For the next post in the series, I’ll be writing about a very controversial, interesting, and powerful topic: How to Really Make Money from Blogging.

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 to become a huge industry here in the Philippines. If you have friends that want to start blogging or are currently “cluelessly” blogging, I suggest you recommend this site to them since I can promise you that the articles you will be reading are real and based on actual case studies in the Philippines.

It would be a waste if I just write normal articles for this since so to make the series interesting, I’ll try to use the following tools in some of my posts:

- Podcasts
- Video Blogs
- Blog Articles
- Comic Strips
- Interviews with Bloggers

Most of the case studies I’ll be using will be coming from all of my other blogs. I actually have more than 6 blogs but I’m actively running the ones on gaming/anime, internet marketing, politics, and leadership. I used to have a food blog but I had to take a break from writing since I’m working on losing weight, haha.

The first post will be out this coming FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2009. Be sure to check back as I’ll be talking about one of the most effective ways of generating traffic for free – VIRAL BLOGGING. I’m going to put a lot of effort and research for this so I hope you guys learn from it.

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 – how many people have checked out your site and haven’t come back anymore? I personally believe that reader loyalty is one of the best ways to measure the success of your site. It’s always been my belief that marketers shouldn’t be building just websites, they should be building communities.

Build A Relationship
The key to building communities is to make sure that you have tools in place for your reader to easily connect with you. This is where social media optimization comes in. Building a relationship is a long-term process and is not something done overnight. Here are some practical tips that you might find useful:

- Icons of your social networks linked to your accounts prominently displayed on the site (this has proven to be very effective for my political blog, www.juancountry.com)
- A text link at the end of every post inviting your readers to connect with you on selected social media channels. My personal favorites are Twitter and Facebook.

After you’ve added them up, make sure you regularly update your social networks with the latest articles from your site. This is a form of direct marketing. An added bonus here is that if they find your article interesting, they might forward it or share it with their network on Facebook. This has proven to be an effective way to drive traffic especially if you write about relevant issues.

E-mail and RSS Subscriptions
Speaking of direct marketing, nothing is as direct as an e-mail or RSS feed. The problem with social networks is that there’s a chance that your connections might not get to read your post because of the deluge of activity going on in their profile. If you have someone subscribed via e-mail or RSS, it means that they are actively waiting and reading for your contents.

This is also a good way to build your personal database for future direct marketing efforts. This comes in very handy if you’re going to build and launch a new site and you want to populate it with readers quickly.

The Revolving Door Effect
To sum it all up, let me quote one of my officemates about customer retention. It’s like going through a revolving door in the mall. You spend so much time and effort in getting new readers and yet you’re not making it easy for them to keep on coming back.

Content is King. Marketing is Queen. Retention is the Prince.

Each time a reader clicks the “x” on your site and doesn’t remember your site url, that’s a lost opportunity for you to get a loyal reader.

Build communities, not websites.

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 ways that I’ve used to drive traffic to the sites of my clients as well as my blogs. Check them all out after the break.

1. Subscribe to Mailing Lists
This tip was shared to me by my good friend, Diwa De Leon. I can’t believe I didn’t think about doing this before he told me. Basically you search for mailing groups (Yahoo for example) and just apply to join. There are mailing lists that have more than 1,000 members. That’s potentially 1,000 new readers for your blog. Once you join, send a message promoting your latest entry every now and then. Make sure though that you join groups that are related to your topic and that you don’t spam the hell out of them.

2. Build Relationships to Get Links
I can’t remember who said that “Links are the currency of the Internet“. This means that the more links, the more referral traffic you get. This becomes even more significant if you get linked by popular bloggers in the same niche. However, you don’t just get linked for writing good stuff. You have to build relationships with fellow bloggers so that they might eventually link to you. Another good tip related to this is for you to start the link-love process. Link to articles from your fellow bloggers and maybe someday they’ll link to you as well as a sign of thanks.

The last thing you want to do is to start e-mailing bloggers asking them to read and link to your most recent article. You’ll just annoy them to death. Go to blogger events, and start real relationships. Not only will you get links, but you’ll also get to expand your personal network.

3. Participate in Forums
This is one of the most effective ways to drive traffic. However, it can be a little tricky. The good thing about forums is that they’re really categorized per niche. If you’re writing about anime in your blog, then you have a lot of anime forums that you can visit. For the Philippines, you may want to check out Pinoy Exchange, the 25th biggest forum in the world. If your a gamer, then you might want to try the various game forums of Level Up.

What’s important here is that you don’t just make new topics with links to your site. That will label you as a parasite and as a spammer. It would be better to link to your articles as responses to topics – or you can quote text from your blog entries and just add links after. Don’t hard sell in forums or you’ll fall flat on your face.

4. E-mail Blast
Over the course of your life, you’ve probably amassed hundreds of calling cards and contact information from your personal network. This includes your classmates in school, friends, family, and various organizations that you’ve worked with. Now this is the time to put this to use! Organize your virtual phone book and e-mail them links to your articles that may interest them. It’s crucial that you send e-mails that are either: interesting, funny, or relevant. Otherwise this will backfire and you’ll get branded as a spammer.

5. SMS Blast
I’m a fan of Direct Marketing, and nothing can be more direct than a text message in the Philippines. This isn’t really free but it can be “semi-free” if you subscribe to the UNLIMITED text services offered by various networks. What you want to do is to promote only your best articles. The chances of them visiting your blog will be higher if the article you’re sharing is relevant to them. If you have a marketing-based post, then send it to your friends who work for agencies.

6. Guest Blog
This is one of my favorite ways to increase traffic because it’s really a win-win scenario. You offer quality and good articles as guest blog posts to fellow bloggers in the same niche. I regularly do this for Inquirer.Net’s Blog Addicts and I also did a guest post for my good friend, Noemi Dado’s About My Recovery. Note that while Noemi isn’t really into tech or marketing, the post I made for her was a personal experience of mine (Gunshot incident) that was a fit for her blog.

May I also suggest that when you send guest articles, code it already in HTML so that the blogger will just have to copy-paste and review it. Make it as hassle-free as possible for them. Also, don’t drown the article in links to your previous articles because that won’t really look good for you.

7. Social Media Marketing
Another favorite of mine. You can easily configure your social media tools to broadcast your latest blog posts to your persona network. I use Ping.fm a lot so that I don’t have to log-in to all of my networks one at a time to promote posts. Ping.fm will just update everything for me with a link for my contacts to click. Other than Ping.fm, I’m also very aggressive in promoting really good articles on Facebook. I do this by having the RSS Feed of my blog publishing snippets of my latest posts on my Notes section. The bigger your social network, the more potential readers for your website. I wrote a more detailed post on this here.

And that’s it! Hope this article will help you drive traffic to your site. Cheers!

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.

Before we get into detail about the tools you can use to make money, here are some basic questions that I think I have to answer first.

How much money can I make?
It really depends on your blog niche, topic, and traffic. This applies especially for Adsense and a lot of the tools I listed below. Note that putting up your blog is just step 1. Applying the ads would be step 2. Step 3 would be the most important – building the community of your blog. You have to learn how to market your site so that you get a lot of readers. There are so many ways to build traffic, especially with the rise of Social Networks.

How do I get paid?
You will either get a check, withdraw via Western Union, or get money through Paypal. If you’re going to be in blogging for the long haul, I strongly suggest you get a Paypal account. It’s basically a medium for you to get money and then withdraw it to your bank of choice (5-7 working days processing time).

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let’s get into the tools that will make you money online. Below are the things I used to earn from my blogs. This is based on personal experience and like what I said above, there are more ways to make money and I can’t cover everything. If you have any tips or suggestions, feel free to post a comment below.

1. Google Adsense
This is what a lot of people us to monetize their blog. Basically you just sign up, create ad units, and embed them in key sections of your site. You earn mostly from the clicks on the ads. Note that Google can see if you’re clicking the ads yourself so don’t even bother trying. You’ll just end up getting a suspended account. By the way, the earnings from Adsense really vary and can be unstable sometimes. My only concern with relying only on Adsense is that you’re really at the mercy of Google. It’s advisable that you also look for other income streams for your blog.

Author’s Note: Monthly earnings from Google Adsense has been paying for the amortization of my car for the past year.

2. Text Link Ads (TLA)
The major problem with TLA is that you’ll get penalized for your Google Page Rank. The good news is I don’t think there’s any relation between your PR and your actual placement in the search engine pages. My other blog used to be at PR5 and got blown to 0 because of text links but it’s still ranking high with the key words that I’ve worked on. What’s weird though is that the income you generate from TLA is also dependent on Page Rank (WTF), haha. Anyway, I still have this on my gaming blog and it’s been doing well for the past 2 years.

Author’s Note: TLA earnings bought me a Macbook sometime last year.

3. Local Ad Network: Nuffnang
Due to the popularity of blogging and digital marketing becoming a buzzword, people decided to make local blog ad networks. Basically they are the ones who will look for advertisers for you and when they sell your space, they get a slice of the revenue. One of the newest blog ad networks in Nuffnang. They’re actually very strong in Malaysia and Singapore and they just started here in the Philippines almost 1 year ago. For Nuffnang, there are 3 kinds of ad units which you place on your blog. Note that while there is no active campaign running, you don’t earn anything.

4. Local Ad Network: Blog Bank
I believe this blog network was started by Jayvee Fernandez. Anyway, it functions like Nuffnang. You apply, get the code, and you place it in your sidebar. You’re paid for every thousand impressions on the ad units. I only joined Blog Bank recently so I don’t have a gauge yet of how effective this is. I’ve seen 2-3 campaigns run already on my food and politics blogs so I hope that adds up to something.

5. Local Ad Network: Red Sight Media
Another network that was started by another famous blogger, Abe from Yugatech. This one has no website and admin panel though so you’ll have a hard time monitoring the progress of your ads. I think this is also run by Havoc Media (re-seller of Friendster in the Philippines). Anyway, my only concern here is that I’ve been running ads from Red Sight for over a year now and I haven’t gotten paid a single centavo. Am I the only blogger who’s experiencing this?

6. Local Ad Network: Mad Crowd Media
Mad Crowd Media got a lot of flak because their business model is pay-per-post. Basically they’ll ask you to cover an event, review a product, or anything that leads to you writing a blog entry about their client. I’ve done 2-3 campaigns with them and they pay really well and they also turn over the cash fast. They haven’t been active though in the past few months, maybe because of all the problems they had with some of the top bloggers here in the Philippines.

7. Kontera
This used to be in my gaming blog and it earned quite well but I decided to take it out after I got so many complaints from my readers that it was annoying. Kontera is in-text advertising, which means that they transform several words in your post into links for their advertisers.

8. Amazon Associates
Another simple money maker – you sign up, get the code, place it in the part of your blog where you want the ad to be displayed, and wait for someone to buy the product being shown there. You get a cut from the sales. In all honesty, I’ve only earned peanuts from Amazon Associates but mostly because I don’t think I’ve tried to really promote it and maximize it in any of my blogs. I’ve heard of several success stories already with this program alone and I’m seriously thinking of ways on how to integrate it into my blogs.

9. Click Bank
Click Bank is similar to Amazon Associates. You sign-up, get the code, and put it up on your blog. You get % sales from the revenues. Please note that I personally haven’t used Click Bank myself but I decided to put it here because I’m thinking of putting it up on one of my blogs.

10. Sponsored Post
This is like Mad Crowd but on a global scale. Advertisers put up topics and reviews that you can bid for. You get paid through Paypal after writing the review/post. I’ve done about 4-5 of these in the past 3 years across my blogs. Here’s an example of a post that I did on my gaming blog about Warhammer Online. By the way, you might also want to try checking out Review Me. I haven’t gotten any jobs there yet but I heard of several bloggers who’s making good cash from this one.

Author’s Note: I know it’s not much but through this channel I’ve was able to go to a romantic date with my girlfriend in Discovery Country Suites in Tagaytay, haha. Thank you SponsoredPosts.

11. Direct Ad Sales
This has the biggest potential but would be one of the hardest to pull off. If you grown in traffic and influence, you’ll start getting approached by direct advertisers. They’ll ask for your advertising rates on your blog. Their ads can be in the form of text links, banners, reviews, or whatnot. In the course of blogging for 3 years, I’ve only gotten offers for direct ads around 4-5 times. They were profitable but it was hard to manage since the advertiser started asking about CPM/CTR rates instead of monthly fees.

And that’s about it. I’ll write other posts later on especially on traffic generation and community building. There’s so much to blogging that 1 post really can’t capture everything about it. I hope you guys find this short guide useful.

Good luck in your 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 the idea of blogging for your community and how to deal with negative comments.

It’s all relative
Yes, credentials are important – to readers who find credentials to be important. Yes, a loose informal writing style can work – to readers who can appreciate it. At the end of the day, what matters is whatever works for you and your community. If you are able to make a connection, sustain that conversation, and add value to them by giving them content that they deem good, then you are doing your job. This is one of my favorite quotes from one of the most prolific value blogs in the world – the Art of Nonconformity.

“Remember, there is no everyone. You want to attract the right people, and part of that process is gently steering the wrong ones away.”

Why do I say that you should focus on your community? Because there will always be nay-sayers and one-sided critics. There will be people who find their self-worth in trying to sabotage you. They find pleasure in doing nothing but sucking the life out of you and they will not budge no matter what you say or do. These are the kind of people who will not stop in trying to destroy you.

The question is should you be affected?

How to deal with negative comments
You can get really good feedback from comments, but at the same time you can also get really bad ones. The key is to recognize which comments can be action points for you to improve your blog, however, always remember that the commenters are not the total representation of your reader base. There’s a high probability that only 2-3% of your actual readers participate in the discussion.

No other medium exemplifies the phrase “silent majority” better than blogging. You should not stop just because a few people criticized your writing or your stand in a particular issue. There will always be conflict, and good writing will always polarize people. My advice to you is if you believe what you’re doing is right, and you know that you are connecting with your community, then please go on. Continue to write and give value to your readers. Share your life, expertise, opinon, or whatever it is you write about. Another cool quote from AONC:

“The person who says something is impossible should not interrupt the person who is doing it.”

Again, let me stress that you shouldn’t totally ignore comments, but don’t get to affected by it. Try to discern which comments merit actual changes and actions that will improve your blog make a stronger connection to your community.

Time and energy is finite. Don’t waste it by pouring majority of it into trying to convince people who have decided from the get-go not to listen to you. Instead, give more value to the people who matter – your community. Go to a coffee shop, order a drink, sit down, relax, and write.