Indio. This was a name given to us by the Spanish colonists long ago to remind us of our inferiority to their race. It was used as an insult and of mockery that suggests that we are nothing more but ignorant savages.

For 300 years we have endured this maltreatment from our oppressors. But instead of getting discouraged, their name-calling fueled our determination to rise up and prove them wrong. This eventually gave birth to the Filipino passion of showing the world that we can do anything in spite of what other people say.

I am an unlicensed Engineer, an unemployed graduate, an online games addict, a fan of Naruto, and a full-time blogger blogging directly from Maasin City, Southern Leyte, Philippines.

I am a weird man who loves to stay alone and spend the whole time sitting in front of the computer if not writing articles for my blog, playing online games. I was known before as Ka Webspy, but now they’re calling me SELaplana.

I only heard about blogging when the blog of a certain guy from Iraq became popular because of his posts about his experiences, the things he saw, he heard and he learned from the invasion of United States to Iraq. That was on the year 2003.

I became an avid reader of that blogger… Until one day I became interested of the blogging platform he used. That was the free blogging service of Blogger.com. So, I then signed-up an account and tried it.

My previous self-hosted Wordpress blog was the “Ka Webspy” at kawebspynet.com but I was not happy on its performance and the things I posted there. It was on January 29, 2006 when I planned to quit blogging as Ka Webspy. But the plan was implemented only on March 6, 2006 when I bought a hosting account from the Ploghost.Com with the new domain, the “SELAPLANA.COM”.

SELPLANA.COM is my personal blog that contains my personal write-ups related to topics such as Technology - Latest news on gadgets and electronic devices; Discussions related to the Internet and Blogging, Entertainment - Songs Lyrics, Discussion on Anime and Manga such as Naruto, Bleach, Air Gear, etc. and Society - Religion and other social-related talks.

You mention a lot of times in your blog that people are calling you “idiot blogger”. Doesn’t it bother you to be called as such?

Well, it’s not really good to be called as an idiot blogger. I think, no one will be happy if other people will call you idiot, dumb or similar terms. But I couldn’t deny also that the reason why they called me that was because of the write-ups that I published on my blogs.

So, instead of being embarrassed on what they call me, I consider it a challenge for me to write articles with less grammatical error. After all, the very reason why I blog was to enhance my writing skills.

Now if I will stop blogging just because people who visited my blog called me idiot, then I wouldn’t succeed on enhancing my writing skills.

Are you going to stick with the brand as an idiot blogger throughout your whole blogging career?

I am not saying that my current writing skill is already good, but at least you can see the difference.

I added the topic of make money online and blogging on my blog because it’s just part of my way of riding the trend in blogging.

Just like what I noticed, blogs that became popular on the year 2003 to 2006 were all about Technology. Then newbies on blogging followed what those successful bloggers did and started their own blogs about Technology. Then on the early days of year 2007, I noticed that the Problogger.net blog changed its title to “Make Money Online” although this topic was already part of the blog. After several days John Chow changed its blog’s main topic from personal to making money online then competed with the Problogger on topping the Google SERP on the key-phrase “Make Money Online”. After several days, all the blogs were focused to making money online.

At first I was just observing the blogosphere and enjoyed reading the blog-articles about making money online. But after visiting the blog of the 13-year old blogger (carlocab.com), I finally decided to follow the trend.

So tell us, how did an idiot blogger reach the top 1 spot in Ratified.org and with over 6000 Subscribers?

I really don’t know how the Ratified.Org ranks the blogs and I was not even aiming to top the Ratified.Org ranking. My real goal is not to top the Ratified.Org ranking but to increase the traffic of my blog and the regular subscribers of its feeds because I believe that traffic is money. I mean, the earning of my blog depends on the number of visitors that flock into my blog.

I can say that I am quite successful in increasing the traffic and feed-subscribers of my blog without thinking that the Ratified.Org is giving higher weights on the number of feed-subscribers than the in-bound links.

I am not really sure how I did convince the visitors to subscribe my feed especially that most of the subscribers are coming from 4 categories of my blogs.

The first one would be the examination results. As you have noticed, publishing the list of passers on the licensure examination of different profession is part of my blog. Some of the feed-subscribers are coming from my posts related to this.

There’s also my SEO campaign on sex and scandal related topic. Well, I know that visitors know that my blog doesn’t contain any scandalous and adult related materials. But I am surprised that lots of feed subscribers are coming from my SEO campaign posts against the real Sex, Scandal and Porn websites.

I am also promoting DVDs on Korean TV Series and Korean Movies here on my blog. I am successful in making money with these DVDs and at the same time gain a lot of subscribers through my posts on these products.

My blog on the Songs’ Lyrics (http://songslyrics.selaplana.com) is part of my main blog. I inserted the code on that blog that tells everyone to subscribe my feed. And few percent of the subscribers are among the visitors of that blog.

My monthly earning is not actually in uniform. There are times that I earn more than a thousand of dollars but there are also times that I only earn few hundred of dollars. Maybe I am just earning more or less $500 per month (average). Well that’s just my rough estimate.

I heard some stories that you travel a long way everyday from your home to a computer shop just to blog. Is this true?

Yes. There’s no internet connection in the town where I stayed here in Southern Leyte. So I was forced to use the internet connection offered by internet café in Maasin City, which was 40 kilometers away, just to perform my blogging activities. And that’s the main reason why I bought a motorcycle.

However, starting December 2007, I am already blogging at the new apartment unit that I rented here in Maasin City with my own SMART Bro account and using a desktop PC and a NEO Laptop which are all my blogging juices.

Can you share the biggest lesson that you learned throughout your whole blogging career.

There are lots of lessons I learned from blogging and I can’t point out what’s the biggest among those lessons. But I just want to tell you this: If you want to succeed in blogging, you must have the following:

1. Knowledge: In blogging or writing articles, SEO and dealing with your visitors.
2. Passion: In blogging and SEO.
3. Hardwork: In writing articles, gathering information and the SEO of your blog.

But of course, you must always think positive and consider the negative things people throw unto you as a challenge and turn them into the form of energy that will strengthen you to continue to blog until you reach the success you’re aiming for.

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