General Trick Blogger

Blogging would have been a much easier job if all you had to do is just write great posts.

Try that you may, but you cannot really avoid that phase of blogging – to find readers to your blog. It’s a general notion that if you write great articles, traffic would automatically come in. Well, not really.

There are two ways of driving traffic to your blog.

Both strategies are unique in it’s own way. The hunting strategy is more aggressive, while baiting is more strategical. It’s like playing Mortal Combat and Thief.

Let’s look into the Hunting ways first.

The following sites and networks are fresh grounds for finding the perfect readers for your site.
– Orkut, Facebook, Linked in, Hi5 etc
– High traffic blogs like Johnchow.comand Problogger.

Baiting your readers

When we were planning for this trip, we knew we should visit Danjugan Island in Cauayan, Negros Occidental. Upon a quick online research, we learned that the terminal of buses going to Cauayan was located along Lopez Jaena Street. This weighed heavily in choosing the inn or hotel we would be staying at on our first night as we planned to take the early morning bus to Cauayan — we wanted a hotel near the terminal.

That’s when we came across the reviews of The Circle Inn.

The Circle Inn is a budget hotel at the corner of Lopez Jaena and Malaspina Streets. This meant that we wouldn’t have to travel long early in the morning should we choose to stay here. The reviews at TripAdvisor was also very encouraging.

We immediately approached the Reception Desk and shared our reservation details. After settling payment, we were handed the key immediately.

What I loved most about this hotel was that they were easy to talk to. Remember the research thing I told you at the start of this post? It happened the night before, just the night before. LOL. It was at the wee hours of the morning and we still didn’t have any hotel reservation. Once we learned about the hotel, we gave them a call. It was around 2am. We asked them to reserve a room for us for that day. Without asking for deposit, they did reserve a room.

At 6pm that day, while we were at the Ruins, we received a text message from them asking if we would still take the room. Imagine, no deposit yet they trusted us and took our word.

When we entered our room, we were delighted. It was clean and there’s enough space for the three of us. There were two beds and an extra bed was just added to accommodate us. There was a cable TV in the corner. The rest room was also very well-maintained. Overall, it was better than expected considering the rate.

The room we booked was a standard twin. We ordered for an extra bed. The total overnight cost for all 3 of us was P1300 (including the taxes). That’s a bit over P400 per person.

Here’s the complete address of The Circle Inn.

Lopez Jaena – Malaspina Sts.
Capitol Shopping Center 6100 Bacolod City Bacolod / Philippines

It is within walking distance of Robinson’s Bacolod. In case you run short of cash, there are ATMs in the Robinson’s area. There’s also a convenience store outside it called Munsterific (which is like Bacolod’s version of Mini-Stop, hehe). A lot of jeepneys also pass by so it’s a very good location.

The Circle Inn – Bacolod
Lopez Jaena – Malaspina Streets,
Capitol Shopping Center, Bacolod City
Contact No.: 63-34-709-9111 OR 63-34-709-9009

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Yoshke is a part-time digital marketing consultant, part-time travel blogger, and full-time dreamer. He has three passions in life: social media, travel, and — wait for it — world peace. Yoshke has won 3 Philippine Blog Awards and received 9 nominations. Learn more about his personal journeys at Yoshke.com.

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Fifa’s Sepp Blatter with President Vladimir Putin during his visit to Moscow in October. Photograph: Klimentyev Mikhail/ITAR-TASS Photo/Corbis

Cut through his meandering, condescending waffle and fondness for endless “roadmaps”, regulatory processes and other diversions, and the ultimate will of Fifa’s overlord to hang on to his job tends to prevail. So it was with the summary, from the ethics committee judge, Hans-Joachim Eckert, of the findings of Michael Garcia’s long-awaited investigation into the contentious and chaotic bidding processes for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.

Russia and Qatar were effectively cleared – with the former insisting their email evidence had been wiped and despite a long list of questions over the latter – and Blatter hurried to close the book on the investigation.

Those bidding countries that took Garcia at his word and turned over all their emails and evidence, such as England, saw it used to castigate them for comparatively minor infractions of the rules. Those who refused to talk were cleared. The whistleblowers who were supposed to be protected by Fifa producing a 42-page summary, rather than publishing the 430-page investigation, had their reputations trashed.

Even with a respected US attorney leading the investigation and an eminent German judge handing down his summary ruling, it has not been difficult to conclude that Blatter, again, managed to subvert the process for his own ends. That is not to paint him as an omnipotent puppet master. Rather, he has become expert at turning events to his own advantage, subverting Fifa crises for his own ends, and using football as the canvas for his personal fiefdom.

That is true of the last Fifa meltdown, in 2011. Then, Blatter’s one-time co-conspirator turned presidential rival – the Qatari former Asian Football Confederation president, Mohamed Bin Hammam – was cast from football for life and some of the longstanding frenemies who had become more trouble than they were worth followed him out the door.

The journalist Andrew Jennings, a long-term thorn in Blatter’s side, likes to cast Fifa as a mafia family, with the 78-year-old as the Don and those beneath him constantly scrapping for power and patronage. It is hard not to agree. So where others see crisis, Blatter usually spies an opportunity.

Just as the former Fifa vice-president Jack Warner and company were finally, belatedly, forced out once they were no longer useful, so Blatter has been endlessly weighing up how to turn the explosive decision, in 2010, to take the World Cup to the tiny Gulf state of Qatar to his advantage.

Thursday’s farce, when Garcia dramatically upset the attempt to close the book on the bidding process by claiming Eckert had misrepresented his conclusions, had its roots in the near collapse of the Fifa house of cards three years ago. That was when a rattled Blatter set in train his supposed “reform roadmap”.

“Fifa does not need a revolution. What Fifa needs is iron-clad laws that are implemented forcefully and allow world football’s governing body to conduct its affairs transparently, properly and professionally in every respect,” he said, with a straight face, in the wake of his uncontested re-election in 2011.

By the time he ascended to the presidency in 1998, Blatter had been at Fifa for 23 years. He was as bound to Warner, Nicolás Leoz, Julio Grondona, Ricardo Teixeira, Chuck Blazer and the rest as they were to each other. If they were motivated by money and power, for Blatter it was always all about the latter.

An earlier investigation into the ISL affair, long seen as a ticking timebomb for Blatter, can be seen as a dry run for the 2018/2022 investigation. Slipped out in summary form, it found that Blatter had been “clumsy” rather than “criminal” in allowing a $1m bribe meant for João Havelange to cross his desk, and dumped on some of those aforementioned rogues who had already left the building. Close the case, job done, move on.

Watching Blatter as he toured the various confederations before the Fifa Congress, in São Paulo, in the summer – even as his organisation was again besieged by corruption allegations – was to see a master at work. Dripping honey by promising an ever-increasing flow of football development cash, generated by booming World Cup sponsorship and broadcasting revenues, all bar some in Europe rushed to acclaim him.

It is always interesting to see the reaction of those exposed to the Fifa circus for the first time. The Football Association chairman, Greg Dyke, no ingenue given his battles with the BBC and the government, wore the bemused air of a man who had been teleported into a 1960s banana republic.

Fifa’s twin-headed ethics committee was born of Blatter’s botched reform process. Mark Pieth, a respected academic hired to oversee it, came to the end of the confusing “roadmap of reform” mired in frustration that he had not been able to finish what he started. Respected organisations such as Transparency International walked out.

The 2018-2022 investigation – which has taken 18 months and cost more than £6m with Garcia travelling the world to talk to representatives of the nine bidders – was always going to be up against it. Of the 11 men who have left the executive committee since 2010, many under a cloud, Garcia was able to speak to five. Of the remaining six, two could not be located. He had no power to compel anyone no longer in football to talk; no power to seize evidence; no leverage.

Even some of those still in football loftily dismissed him. The joint Spain-Portugal bid, overseen by Ángel María Villar Llona, still involved in football and theoretically obliged to help, did not even feature in Eckert’s summary. It was Villar Llona who was said to have brokered a vote-swapping pact with Qatar that delivered seven votes. It is barely mentioned.

Blatter can tolerate Jeffrey Webb, Moya Dodd and Sunil Gulati – part of the new broom on the Fifa executive committee who are helping give it a sheen of respectability – calling for the report to be published, safe in the knowledge that he has the rulebook of the ethics committee on his side, and that Eckert will resist. Yet he might still have some cause to be worried before the presidential election in May, which he is expected to win comfortably.

The ongoing FBI investigation into tax and money-laundering allegations that centres on some of those old rogues, and forced Blazer to turn supergrass and bug his colleagues at the London 2012 Olympics, is one such unknown.

Garcia’s position is another. By his own admission, he had few links to football before he agreed to take on the role. What concerns him is maintaining his professional reputation – if he is seen to have presided over a high-profile whitewash, that does him no good at all.

Meanwhile, the very real problems surrounding the Russia and Qatar World Cups cannot simply be wished away with a Fifa press release. They will dog Fifa until the final ball is kicked in 2022. Yet, in recent pictures of the Fifa president visiting Vladimir Putin in Russia, to check on progress, and receiving the emir of Qatar in Zurich, Blatter looks pretty satisfied. Certainly far more at home than he was in Brazil in the summer, when he was ferried around behind dark glass in constant fear of a public that had come to hate Fifa and all it stands for.

By the time of next spring’s election, Blatter will have been at Fifa for 40 years – perhaps they will get him a watch – and for all those obstacles on the horizon, history suggests that Blatter will find a way around them and continue to sail on as the captain of his own bloated, warped and leaky ship. For the game, for the world.