By Anna Valmero
INQUIRER.net
PARAÑAQUE City, Philippines — Blogs are also business tools, according to some Filipino bloggers.
Apart from being personal diaries, blogs are increasingly becoming sources of income for some bloggers.
Janette Toral, blogger and author of DigitalFilipino.com E-Commerce Workshop E-Book, says some Filipino bloggers have turned their blogs to effective tools for advertising.
Combining e-commerce and blogging, for instance, allows people to earn some income while doing what they are passionate about: blogging.
But before turning a blog into something income-generating, she says it is important to maintain a consistent following. Content remains king in blogs.
“There was a time I did not update my blog for a month but still traffic is consistent, I think it really boils down to good content and good keywords for each entry,” blogger Jehzeel Laurente of Jehzlau Concepts adds.
The 22-year old blogger from Davao says he earns enough income from blogging to support his stay in Manila.
Laurente said he is able to maintain traffic growth in his blog through good content and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, a means to increase a blogs or a websites so-called page ranking in search engines like Google or Yahoo!
SEO involves combining good blog design and content using keywords to increase the chances of blogs of landing on top of, say, a Google search.
“Based on the top 100 list, bloggers need to create good content, use of SEO tools like keywords to help define the blog,” Toral concurs.
During a blogger awarding cum eyeball at the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. in Parañaque City, Filipino bloggers who were attracting a large traffic of viewers were a colorful mix of personalities, age, niche topics, location and gender.
One of them is Filipino overseas worker and blogger Rheynz who is behind ReynaElena.com. This blogger thinks her blog appeals to a niche market of OFWs. Based in Philadelphia, she says 80 percent of the blog’s readers are Filipinos based abroad and in the country.
Also based on the traffic Filipino travel, food, parenting, photography and gender blogs, such as baklaako.com, are getting, Filipino readers have varying tastes.
Which only means that during this period of economic crunch, bloggers need not look far to find ways to earn some income and feed people’s thirst for information and good content.
January 8th, 2009 at 4:43 am
[...] passed the DOST-SEI scholarship program! Yay! 6. Was mentioned on Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Filipino blogs Suit Up for Business article by Anna Valmero 7. Ranked 1st in the Philippines’ Top 100 Blogs for 2008 based on [...]
November 7th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I started with one blog…it wasn’t enough due to my continuous testing. I now have more than a dozen and they have helped me to earn some while at home.
November 6th, 2008 at 4:50 am
[...] at sabihin nyong maganda talaga ako and visit the Inquirer’s entry and here’s the link: Filipino blogs suit up for business by Anna [...]
November 5th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Congrats to all Filipino bloggers who are earning effectively using their blogs. Congrats to Jehz as well.
November 5th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
PS: at saka c janett toral, queen of philippine e-commerce, wish ko nga maging apprentice nya.. hehehe.. cheers lots to learn from her and from the bloggers community