Meet Sel
I met Sel last year (2007) during the DigitalFilipino Christmas Party and Culmination of Filipina Writing Project. His humility and unassuming character seem strange for someone who is regarded as the Number 1 Filipino Blogger. He was very open too, in sharing tips from his blogging success - including how he monetizes his blog.
How long have you been into blogging?
I actually started publishing my journal on March 1999 by manually creating webpages using Netscape's Composer and published them at the Geocities.Com. During that time the said free webhost was not yet owned by Yahoo!. The address of my personal site is geocities.com/selaplana but unfortunately it was already closed due to the hacking incident happened last 2004.
I started using the blogger.com free hosting only on May 2003. And the blogs created were under my Ka Webspy Network at kawebspy.blogspot.com. But all these blogs are turned into something spammy when I started the new one at the kawebspynet.com on January 2004. Kawebspynet.com was again closed (January 2006) due to some personal reasons. On March 2006, I started a new blog, and this is the selaplana.com.
You mentioned you have a computer shop in your hometown but needs to travel to the city in order for you to blog? how many kilometers do you have to travel by motorbike?
I have an internet cafe before not in my hometown but in Quezon City. I went home here in Soutern Leyte when I experienced financial problem last December 2005. But I continue blogging by writing my articles at home and publishing them into my blogs using the internet connection offered by internet cafes here in Maasin City. Maasin City is 40 kilometers away from my home. So I need to travel 80 kilometers daily (that is back and forth) using the Honda XRM 110 which I bought through my blogging income last March 2007.
However, as of writing this email, I already have my new home here in Maasin City just to maintain my blogging activities. I rented an apartment starting December 30, 2007.
How often do you blog? Do you blog full-time?
I really blog full-time daily except if I am away from the internet. I have no job and no other business but just blogging.
What other tips you can share to other bloggers - to generate traffic or monetize their blogs?
Blogging is of course a publishing business. You're the writer, the editor and the publisher. You need to know the basics in writing and the ways to make your articles interesting (I am actually still poor on this).
And in order for you to earn money from your blogs, you need to drive traffic to them whether by search engines, PPC campaigns, blog commenting, or by any means of advertising your blog. Once you have established readers of your blog, then money follows.
In other words, you need to know how to SEO your blog. To let you know, those who are responsible of sending me money via the adsense ads published at my blogs are those who are coming from the search engines searching for any information and accidentally stumbled upon my blogs.
You can also maximize your online income by selling products through affiliate or associate programs. For example, you can talk or blog about products of amazon at your blog and publish associate-links within your article or blogpost of those products. So that when your visitors click on that link and buy that product, you'll earn a commission.
You can even sell links from your blogs. There are lots of link-broker out there like Text Links Ads, ReviewMe, PayPerPost, etc. However, you need to increase the PR, the traffic and the subscribers of your blogs because most of the link-brokers consider these data in pricing the links from your blogs.
Talking about traffic, actually there are many ways in gaining traffic for you blogs and I will mention few of them:
How long have you been into blogging?
I actually started publishing my journal on March 1999 by manually creating webpages using Netscape's Composer and published them at the Geocities.Com. During that time the said free webhost was not yet owned by Yahoo!. The address of my personal site is geocities.com/selaplana but unfortunately it was already closed due to the hacking incident happened last 2004.
I started using the blogger.com free hosting only on May 2003. And the blogs created were under my Ka Webspy Network at kawebspy.blogspot.com. But all these blogs are turned into something spammy when I started the new one at the kawebspynet.com on January 2004. Kawebspynet.com was again closed (January 2006) due to some personal reasons. On March 2006, I started a new blog, and this is the selaplana.com.
You mentioned you have a computer shop in your hometown but needs to travel to the city in order for you to blog? how many kilometers do you have to travel by motorbike?
I have an internet cafe before not in my hometown but in Quezon City. I went home here in Soutern Leyte when I experienced financial problem last December 2005. But I continue blogging by writing my articles at home and publishing them into my blogs using the internet connection offered by internet cafes here in Maasin City. Maasin City is 40 kilometers away from my home. So I need to travel 80 kilometers daily (that is back and forth) using the Honda XRM 110 which I bought through my blogging income last March 2007.
However, as of writing this email, I already have my new home here in Maasin City just to maintain my blogging activities. I rented an apartment starting December 30, 2007.
How often do you blog? Do you blog full-time?
I really blog full-time daily except if I am away from the internet. I have no job and no other business but just blogging.
What other tips you can share to other bloggers - to generate traffic or monetize their blogs?
Blogging is of course a publishing business. You're the writer, the editor and the publisher. You need to know the basics in writing and the ways to make your articles interesting (I am actually still poor on this).
And in order for you to earn money from your blogs, you need to drive traffic to them whether by search engines, PPC campaigns, blog commenting, or by any means of advertising your blog. Once you have established readers of your blog, then money follows.
In other words, you need to know how to SEO your blog. To let you know, those who are responsible of sending me money via the adsense ads published at my blogs are those who are coming from the search engines searching for any information and accidentally stumbled upon my blogs.
You can also maximize your online income by selling products through affiliate or associate programs. For example, you can talk or blog about products of amazon at your blog and publish associate-links within your article or blogpost of those products. So that when your visitors click on that link and buy that product, you'll earn a commission.
You can even sell links from your blogs. There are lots of link-broker out there like Text Links Ads, ReviewMe, PayPerPost, etc. However, you need to increase the PR, the traffic and the subscribers of your blogs because most of the link-brokers consider these data in pricing the links from your blogs.
Talking about traffic, actually there are many ways in gaining traffic for you blogs and I will mention few of them:
- SEO. Optimize your blogs for the search engines and you'll gain traffic from the search engine results.
- PPC campaign. Advertise your blogs using the Googles Adwords and gain traffic from that ad.
- Blog Commenting. Regularly post your comment to other blogs and you'll gain traffic from the traffic of those blogs you commented.
- Personal Network. Be friendly and tell them about your blog... for sure, your friends will visit your blog.
- Joining Writing Contest or any contest organized by bloggers.
- Be published in papers or be shown on TV programs. Do something amazing, get the attentions of paper writers and the people from TV networks and I'm sure you'll gain popularity through them.
- Be a speaker. You can organize your own seminars or you can just be a speaker and tell them about your blog. I'm sure those who heard you will visit your blogs.
Published with permission from Selaplana.
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