Came across this wonderful interview (on Guy Kawasaki’s blog) with Darren Rowse who talks about making money with blogging.
I am sure you gonna get something out of it….
| Topics: Blogs, Entrepreneurship |  Email This
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This post is a part of the series of posts about my experience in growing mywalkin to a more than 1,00,000 unique users a month website. I had previously talked about the strategies that we used to increase the traffic and the importance of retaining the users to the growth of a website. However all these startegies are useful only when you have a minimum level of traffic to start with. Ofcourse if you have a good advertisement budget then you can get this initial user base. Rest everything else will depend upon the strngth of your offering.
However we did not have an advertisement budget. So we had to get a little more innovative. Here are some tricks that you can use to get those users.
Tell your contacts: This is something very obvious. If you are starting something new then you can always try to convince your freinds to spread the word. However my experince is that telling them directly is not the most effective way. Rather put the url as a signature on your emails. Add it to your status message and your orkut profile. Your freinds will get curious, try it out and if they like it then they will definitely talk to you about it. Now if you ask them to help you spread the word, they will be more willing.
Classified sites: If your site is about some topic, that are covered by classifieds, then go ahead and put up a link about your website on the classifieds. click.in, kijiji and sulekha were some of the classified sites, that we had used to get traffic to mywalkin initially. One advantage of this method is most of these pages rank quite high on google and hence pass on significant link-juice to your site.
Forums: Identify active forums in your area and start participating in the discussions. Most of the forums allow you to put your url in the signature. Moreover whenever approporiate, you may place link to one of your webpages for a more detailed answer. Caution: Hold your temptation to spam. My experience says building a solid reputation by meaningful participation pays off much better in the long run, than spamming.
Comments and trackbacks: If you read some blogs then leave your comments with your blog url. I get more than 50 users a day from my comments on techcrunch alone. The trick is to again say something that people will appreciate and not just spam.
Target the long tail: This is one topic that needs to be dealt with in a completely separate post.
The diffcult methods of getting traffic
The methods above were fairly easier methods to get some initial traffic. There are couple of other methods that will get you a much higher traffic but they require a lot more effort.
Get others to link to you Identify people who are complementary to you. If we take mywalkin as the example then any site talking about interview preparation, resume preparations, fresher jobs etc were complementary websites. The advantage of exchanging links with such sites is you have a common userbase but you are not competitors. Hence such people will be more likely to link to you. Though you will need to convince them as to why they should link to you.
Site about sites check webyantra.net to understand what I am talking about. These are sites that talk about other websites. If you can convince at least one of these to link to you, then you can easily solve the entire problem of getting initial users.
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There is just too much of importance given to getting new traffic. Most of the webmasters seem to miss the importance of one of the most critical aspects of growth of a website. Retaining your users and making them repeat users. I have just created an excel spreadsheet to prove the point.
If you play with the spreadsheet a little, you will see that if your website manages to convert 50% of the traffic, then in 3 years you will get less than 1 lakh users. However if you manage to retain 100% of visitors then you shall get more than 7 lakh users. 100% may be a bit unrealistic. However even if you manage to retain only 75% of your users then your site would have recieved close to 3 lakh users.
I hope the data below would manage to convince you that retaining the visitors is the single most important requirement for the growth of a website/blog.
| Topics: Blogs, Entrepreneurship, Internet, Tips and Tricks | Email This
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Pagerank of a blog or site is an important input for text advertisers and people interested in exchanging link with you. You can attract potential advertisers by displaying your pagerank on your webpage. You can see a demo just below the feedburner box on the sidebar of this page.
I have written a small tool to do so for any webpage. You can show a similar image by adding a single line to your blog. Add the following within php to display your pagerank
include “http://www.binaryday.com/pagerank.php?url=[your site url]”
| Topics: Blogs, Resources, SEO, Tools | Email This
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Last week I had posted Nitin’s take on Blogging. This week I got a chance to talk to tarun of TechBanyan.com Here is his take on Blogging.
Tell us something about yourself and your blog.
I am a computer professional working in US for the past year and a half. Before that I was working for the same company in Chennai, India. I graduated from DU, with bachelors in Computer science.
How did you start Blogging?
I started the blog because I was interested in writing, was passionate about open source and wanted to keep up to date on technology. It all started when I was exploring a Content Management System to maintain information at my workplace. I came across WAMP - windows, apache, mysql, Php - and Wordpress. After implementing it at my workplace, I thought since I am now quite well versed with it, why not use the same to publish info on the internet. Techbanyan was started in the mid of November, 07.
Is time a constraint and how do you manage that?
Other than consuming most of my free time, I don’t think its a time constraint. But being a one man show, if I have to travel or if I take a break, then the blog lags behind. But I am trying to get over this by writing multiple articles and saving them as draft for publishing them on a rainy day.
How do you monetize your blog? How much do you earn?
Monetizing is through the impressions, clicks, Text Links Ad. Right now its just good enough to cover the cost of hosting, as you
would know how a few months old blog is. I have garnered a good Alexa ranking though for a startup -
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/techbanyan.com
Advice to fellow bloggers?
My advice to the fellow bloggers would be to write good and write persistently, but be shameless in promoting your blog. Get the word out and get people to see your blog.
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Here’s a small list of some really nice tech related links. Will add more to the list as they come to my mind.
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/ -> coding blog
http://www.labnol.org -> general tech
http://fakesteve.blogspot.com -> tech fun
http://www.linuxquestions.org -> best place for any linux related query
http://www.searchenginewatch.com -> news about search engines
http://www.topcoder.com -> online programing
http://www.webmonkey.com -> web development
| Topics: Blogs, Resources | Email This
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I chanced upon http://www.techtracer.com while researching for the last post about searching for movie timings through Google. I was impressed by the clean and intuitive design of the blog. By the time I had finished reading 3-4 posts on the blog, I was hooked. I started reading the about me page and liked what I read there. So I sent an email to Nitin, asking him for his contact number. He agreed. We had a chat today and here is his story. I am putting it here because I am sure many of you will like his story.
Tell us something about yourself and your blog.
I am Nitin Pai, author and creator of TechTracer. I work full time as a software engineer in Larsen and Toubro Infotech. I am a certified Java EE developer. That is why you would primarily find many Java EE articles as you continue to browse this site for a while. TechTracer speaks about web technology. As far as the name is concerned it traces technology. It follows the complexities of technological artifacts and leaves behind a simplified trace of knowledge. This trace is very much useful to those who sometimes come across the same complexities and do not have the time to resolve them. TechTracer comes to the rescue of such people and helps them by the traces it already has encompassed.
How did you start Blogging?
It was in my mind to have a personal web site. I started with a simple web site in geocities which provided free HTML uploads to have a static site. I was happy but only for a short while. The static nature of the site did not appeal to me. I had seen some blogs round this time and thought about having one as one can atleast update a blog and have it hosted for free with a URL having the blog company’s name in it. I did blog for a while with personal adventures and emotional overturns. But one thought was always ringing a bell in my head. What is the purpose of my rants to anyone? They are no more good than just plain text for someone else.
This was something which made me think about a different avenue in the field of blogging. When I got employed I got inclined quite deeply in Web Technology and its vast arenas. I thought maybe if I wrote on technology at least it would be of use to someone somewhere. The thought that someone would thank me for something I had done for them gave me a kind of deep satisfaction. With this in mind I entered the field of serious blogging. I wanted to have a professional administration for my blog and so I tried out with Wordpress. With Wordpress I got addicted to professional blogging.
Wordpress helped me to get fame and recognition. My technology blog was in the meantime listed among the top most blogs and I was becoming happier by the day. It was only during this period that I got knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Internet Marketing. With the power of this knowledge I strategised my blogging activites. This bore its fruits and my Google ranking improved day by day. And today, after having launched Techtracer about a year ago, I am really glad to say that Techtracer gets on an average 30K visitors per month, 68100 rank on Technorati and has a subscriber base of 500.
Is time a constraint and how do you manage that?
Yes, time indeed is a big constraint. Since I have my full time job as a software developer on one hand and the ambition of becoming established as a blogger, time goes unnoticed. Sometimes I get into a big low when I am not able to push up my spirits even to care about writing. And other times when some of my articles become popular it makes a large impact on my level of confidence and boosts up my self esteem. That is why I make it a point not to try to pump too much into blogging. After writing one quality article I try to learn altogether some new concept which refreshes my mind and then when it gets rejuvenated I concentrate on my next article. That is probably why you won’t notice follow up on the same article as most other bloggers do. My articles come alternatively on different topics and I occasionally follow up on an article when I feel that people are craving for more. Of course feedback acts as a major foundation for writing quality articles. I dont have a routine as such and it is the sudden accumulation of new ideas which strikes me that I produce it to others through my blog.
What is your motivation behind blogging?
My readers and the blog statistics. I constantly monitor what people tend to read more on my blog by keeping a hawk’s eye on the page views and the keyword analysis that brought readers to my blog. The more I come to know what are peoples expectations the more I become determined about the direction to give to my ideas. I also take a lot of care for my subscribers. Its because they don’t come easily. There was a time when my subscriber list was not moving ahead of 50. It was only a few months ago. But now I feel really happy to have a 500 subscriber base. I always maintain the quality of my articles by keeping them in mind so that they don’t feel like having done anything odd by subscribing to my blog.
How do you monetize your blog? How much do you earn?
My blog is completely and solely monetized on adsense. It acts as a savior for a small time blogger like me who does not have the adequate amount of time or resource to hunt for sponsers. I frequently face this question “How much do you make from your blog”. I would like to make one thing clear over here is that my blog is a collection of my ideas and ideas cannot be commercialized and I do not intend to either. When I think of money making I don’t get new ideas and which in turns ruins the spirit of blogging. But I don’t blog for charity too. I make a decent amount from my blog though, but I treat it as a side effect to my efforts and not my mainstream goal. My aim to blog is to make a repository of my knowledge as I traverse into different worlds and to make a way of others so that they could easily tread the same path as mine without having to reinvent the wheel. I would like to impart a small piece of advice to the readers of this site, please do not make money your main goal. Let it come naturally as a cause to your initiatives.
Advice to fellow bloggers?
Do not blog for money. Have a particular direction set for your blog if you want to get established quickly. This is something I learnt over these months after I started to blog. Write quality content which is upto date and also relevant to the site. The most important thing is that whatever you write must help people in some way. This is the principal which I follow. That is why I am really satisfied when my article strikes a chord with someone and they write me some feedback in return. I do not intend to sound like a preacher, but whatever I have I said till now is a way of my working. One last thing, have faith in yourself. To all the upcoming bloggers and reader of this site I extend my good wishes and luck.
Do you have any question for Nitin? Leave a comment below and I will try to get it answered by him.
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Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux Operating System, thinks that OS X Leopard is worse than Windows Vista in some aspects.
Geek enough to be interested?
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Why do I need to Market my blog?
This is the most frequently asked question that I have heard from blogger freinds who blog as a hobby and do not intend to earn money. As a matter of fact many of them find it beneath them to market their blog. So I will like to address that issue first.
It is your duty to the Internet Community
There are two types of people creating content on the internet. People who are creating content for easy money and people who are doing so because it is their passion. The second class of bloggers may monetize their site but money is never their primary motivation for blogging. IMHO the quality of the content created by the second class is better than the quality of the content created by people who create content simply to make money.
Unfortunately the passionate bloggers do not want to market their blog. And the quick maney bloggers have a huge incentive to do everything to get more and more people to read their blogs. Net result of it is that the normal reader is bombarded with inferior quality content while the better quality content remain hidden from him.
If you want to prevent this deterioaration of quality of content on the internet, then you must actively try to make your blog accessible to as many people as possible and try to bring other good quality blogs to the front.
| Topics: Blogs, Make Money, SEO | Email This
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