You guys probably cannot remember when was the last time you saw me writing on Balkhis. I surely can remember though. It was on September 2, 2009 and today is October the 30th, so almost 2 months ago. The last post was about How to Launch a new blog Successfully. Well now after all my methods and hard work has paid off. So this post is just to keep you guys updated and tell you how I have been.

So October 2nd was my birthday. No celebration on Balkhis because it wasn’t the right time. I was still working hard on WPBeginner. Well today I feel very happy as the Google PR updated. WPBeginner received a Google PR 6 with many inner pages at PR 5 and PR 4. Where as Balkhis got a PR 5 which went up also, it was a PR 4.

Now the Alexa of WPBeginner also went in 17k which is also very good, so all to all this startup was a very successful one.

What’s next in the list? Well you should expect me back to the posting schedule on Balkhis. Although I will not be posting once a day, but you should expect a few posts a week. We are also working on the redesign of Uzzz Productions. The new site will also be powered by WordPress but it will be built with mostly jQuery. It should be done by mid November.

We are also working on new features for WPBeginner coming by Mid December with a slight additions in the design to make it more user friendly. Add more services and so on.

Personally, I am conducting a twitter experiment which I will update you guys later and tell you how it worked out for me. Hopefully it will be great and it will benefit me a lot, and when I share it with you guys, I am certain that it will help you guys also.

I will be attending WordCamp NYC 2009 this coming November 14-15. If you are in New York and want to hang out, let me know and we can arrange a meetup. Ofcourse if you attend WordCamp then we can chill for the whole two days.

A contributing member of Balkhis, Zain Balkhi will be turning 6 on November 24 this year. So, I will be updating his portfolio site Life of Blogger. The site got a redesign when he graduated from his Pre-K class earlier this year.

A special plug for Darren Rowse and his new Pro Blogger community where I am an active member now a days. Quality discussion for bloggers and a good place to be if you are interested in interacting and learning from bloggers on all levels. There is a $1.95 monthly membership fee but it is well worth it. Join now before the price goes up because I am sure it will. The price is to avoid spammers and keep the quality discussion with paid moderators. I love it in that community. Good source of traffic also.

Something I realize that most people were confused about and I got many emails about it also. People asked me why does WPBeginner get better results than Balkhis. What you need to understand is that WPBeginner is a niche blog for WordPress users. Balkhis is my personal blog where I happen to share SEO tricks, Web Design tricks and basically my experience. Do not mistake Balkhis for something it is not. Personal blogs get big over time whereas niche blog gets big faster.

I also want to suggest if you want to stay updated with what I am doing then follow these two twitter feeds. @syedbalkhi and @wpbeginner.

I am also contemplating closing comments on posts that are older than 90 days to avoid SPAM. What do you guys suggest? Obviously the final decision will be mine, but I want my readers input in making this key decision.

I do encourage you to tweet with me, or email me if you have a specific question. I am glad to help out when I can. I missed you guys just as much as you probably missed me

In this post, Melvin discusses the importance of good marketing and properly targeting your audience and readers (editable).

It has been a huge misconception that a good number of traffic (pageviews and uniques) is the result of good blog marketing. I, as a blogger, have seen a lot of bloggers attributing increased number of traffic as a success for the promotions that they do. Although we can say that it is somehow a factor, we cannot just completely base it there. Here in my short post, I would explain why good marketing IS NOT just about getting good amount of traffic.

Most new and intermediate bloggers make the mistake of doing what I call as “hard promotion” (kinda similar to hard selling). Aggressive promotion is when a blogger considers quantity more than quality. If you’re into the blogging for fame or money, you probably have heard of the cliche statement “Blogging success doesn’t happen overnight”.

The problem with the statement is that many people, including myself, think it’s already obsolete! Tell me, are you going to wait for some period of time to implement new methods when you can do them now? The same applies to bloggers on getting traffic. They see other bloggers get ahead of them, they become impatient and they do things “aggressively”.

Why it’s harmful to your blog?

Just like the saying “Slowly but surely”, it goes completely the same the other way as well. I’ve spoken with some of my blogger friends and they describe the aggressive marketing as “annoying”. The harm here is that if your target audience gets annoyed, they would more likely tune you and your blog out. This is bad especially if you’re trying to establish a brand for your blog. You may not want to be known in the blogosphere for all the bad and wrong reasons, do you?

Good Amount of Traffic/Pageviews/Hits Doesn’t Mean Good Promotion and Marketing

Sure we can get a thousand unique hits to my blog in a day, but is the quality of traffic we are sending to my blog a good one? Or are we targeting the proper audience? During some point last year I know I made this mistake and the problem you would normally get is inconsistency in traffic and a very high bounce rate. These factors are crucial, especially if you’re working out on a certain goal to make your blog well-known.

Talking about increasing traffic and all the stuffs about it has become really mainstream. We, oftentimes read ways on how to get a thousand hits doing this and doing that but the real thing here is conversion. Are we converting on the traffic that our blog gets? Whether you’re focusing on building subscribers or having a good lively and interactive community, it’s imperative to assess whether what we are doing is worth it or not.

What about you and your blog? Yea, you’re getting more traffic than I do and that’s given. But are you converting enough and reaping the benefits of having a well-trafficked blog? Do you have a lively interaction on it? If not, maybe its time to re-evaluate. Maybe time to list the marketing strategies you did and evaluate whether it’s proper or not. After all we (bloggers) live altogether with one goal in mind, which is to benefit from something that we’ve done.

Melvin is a young entrepreneur and student who has been doing internet marketing related stuffs for more than 2 years now. He shares his experience and ramblings in his blog located @ MelvinBlog.com in w/c you can subscribe to. He also uses Twitter and hopes to get followed by more people.