Thursday, February 28, 2008

Problogger guest post

Today my guest post appeared on problogger.net. I wrote about 9 Tips to Start Blogging Successfully.


Let me give you a bit of a background about where this article originated from. I have been blogging for close to 3 years now but I have been doing it seriously only for the last 2 months. I then analysed what were the things that I should have done in order to have become a successful blogger based on what I have noticed on the ones that have become successful. The final analysis of my study is what I put into that article and it is what I am trying to implement since the last 2 months.


Reading the comments it was exhilarating to notice that some of the readers actually thought Darren was writing the post :-). It was also nice to notice that many readers agreed with my analysis and that strengthened my belief that what I have written if followed will work.


How did I get to do a guest post on problogger.net ? A little more than a week ago Darren invited bloggers to do guest posts. I was quick to jump at the opportunity and I asked for the chance to submit a guest post. When I was given one of the 100 logins (luckily I managed to get in early thanks to the time difference between Australia and India) I was all pumped up. I then put down some of my ideas and thoughts about blogging and was able to come up with the post which I submitted and voila it appeared on problogger today.


I thank Darren for the opportunity to do my first guest post. I really enjoyed it and would like to do many more for anyone else as long as it is something I can talk about. If you are interested contact me about the topic to blog about and I will let you know if I can contribute.

13 comments:

NetFliXer~ said...

Hi sandeep,

I read ur post at Pro blogger. I am starting out myself to blog seriously and was actually looking to team up with someone for my blog.

Check out my blog and tell me what u think of it..

thanks

Anonymous said...

Congrats Sudeep.

I read problogger.net regularly, I read your post today. It was a creative post written for bloggers. I impressed. I read your blog also. your blog have so many nice topics, with a mature thinking. Be continue on you blog.

Sudeep Dsouza said...

Hi NetFlixer (sorry could not find your name anywhere),

Thanks for reading my blog and appreciating it. I took a look at your blog and it looks great.

Teaming up with someone and blogging can be a challenge. I have thought about the same so that we can get more content and different perspectives but I have stayed away from doing it for the following reasons

1. You and the people you team up with have to think on the same length and all of you must be equally passionate about what youll are blogging about.

2. How do you divide the revenue that you earn among all the members of your blog. Money is always a tricky issue.

3. A blog has a life it has a style and people stick to the blog because they can relate to the style as much as the content - in a blog you talk to the person on a personal level - if multiple people are blogging then that can dilute the style and the content.

4. How do you ensure consistency and depth of each post that is put up by each of the team members - this can lead to a lot of issues.
Who decides on what to post about - you should make sure that youll do not post on the same subject.

Coming to your blog - in order to really make money it may be hard for the following reasons - although I may be wrong I am giving you a frank opinion

1. It is hard to beat the movie review sites out there such as imdb and a ton of other sites if you stick to just reviews in google to get your site listed when someone searches for a movie. That way you are not going to get google traffic which is almost 70% of the traffic that comes to my blog.

2. You will need to improvise on the content instead of just sticking to reviews - some of the ideas that pop out from the top of my head -
* My top 2 movie picks - do this every month.
* Where can you get the best deals on renting dvds
* How and where can you download the best torrents - that are crisp and clear

3. Try to understand what your reader may want to read about. You must try and get into the mind of your reader. Right now if I want reviews Im not sure yours will be the first site I visit as IMDB gives a more wholesome review with trailers and all.

Regards,
Sudeep

Karthick Gopal said...

Great post, I enjoyed reading it. Especially when I saw it was written by an Indian!

I have a burning question though, how in the hell did you remove that navbar from your blogspot page?!! It has been driving me crazy to remove it.

Sudeep Dsouza said...

Hi Karthick,

Thanks for the feedback.

It is easy to get rid of the nav-bar and do it immediately for the following reason - if you are using adsense then you are losing revenue due to the nav-bar search feature.

Add this to your css on your site

#navbar-iframe
{
height: 0px;
visibility: hidden;
display: none;
}

NetFliXer~ said...

Hi Sudeep,

I really appreciate your honest remarks and opinion. Thank you taking a look at my blog.

I am not thinking of big bucks here, just starting out small here, but i really did like your input.

I do agree with some of the points that you made about teaming up, but i would still insist that you give it some thought.
I am a English major, and i can write with relative ease. You can concentrate on other things if you wish. Money should not be a problem as we can agree to the rules before hand.
I know of many people who have successfully teamed up. So, its just an idea.

Thank you.

Sunny.

Sudeep Dsouza said...

Hi Sunny, Lets take this offline - can you send me an email at sudeep.dsouza (at) gmail.com.
Sudeep

Anonymous said...

Congrats Sudeep. Looking forward to meet you this weekend. Make sure to share those tips there at the meet.

Anonymous said...

Let me honest and ask the question anybody would like to ask... What is the figure you earn with this blog ? 10k US per year ?

Sudeep Dsouza said...

Hi Balaji, I actually went last week itself to Microsoft having got my dates mixed up. I will be there this week and I would love to talk about my experience.zl

Sudeep Dsouza said...

Hi Venkat, Being successful is one thing and earning money from your blog is entirely another thing. I write my blog out of interest in the subjects that I write about and the idea of putting down my thoughts so that others can read about them.

Making money from your blog is much harder and a full time job which requires a thought process of an entrepreneur who looks at his blog like a product that he is selling to the world. Currently I have not earned even 10K rupees a year leave alone dollars :)

But I will still continue to happily blog as I get to connect with a lot of wonderful people out there.

Kelly said...

Good post on problogger. I've read Darren a small bit and your tone of writing seemed in line with his. Good job. I enjoy hearing experiences from mere mortals (granted, you may be a lot more talented than me).

Question - can a person make money leaving their blog in the blogger domain? What's your experience with that? I'm not asking about the possibility, I'm asking about "where the rubber hits the road."

Sudeep Dsouza said...

@ Eric : Thank you for all the wonderful things you have to say about me and the post that I wrote :).

What I have realised is that it really does not matter what the url of the blog is whther it is in its own domain or in the blogger domain because the blogger/wordpress domain have become very famous and people remember it quite easily.

The URL is like the address to the best restaurant - you want it to be catchy, simple and easy to remember so that your readers don't forget it. Thats all that matters.

If you have generated a lot of traffic from your existing URL it does not make sense to move to another one and lose all your existing traffic - there are ways to move without effecting the traffic but it is not a simple process.

The key is consistency - in URL, content, look and feel and style.

Another thing that I have realised is that it is hard to make money from generalistic and creative blogs (stories, poems, paintings...). It is easier to make money from tech, product related, specialistic blogs (eg. problogger.net) because of the following reasons
1. The second type of blogs are very search engine friendly. If you seach for something specific you may be able to see your blog on top of the search results. In the first case it is hard to get to the top of the search pyramid. So this effects traffic. Less traffic less money.
2. It is easier to put targetted ads on the second type of blog than the first. Your readers are not generalists and they come to your blog for something specific and so you can have ads specifically targetting them. It is harder to do this in the first case.
3. There is a higher probability that the reader will click on the ad in the second case than the first provided the ads are appropriately positioned. The reason being they read their topic of interest and the ad is related to that topic and so the probability increases and at the end of the day this is what makes money.

Keeping all this in mind it is good to have a realistic sense of how much money you can make from blogs like ours. Frankly I do not make any out of this blog. I just do it for the fun of it and to meet wonderful people like you'll. I have a full time job which I enjoy. This is more like a hobby for me.

You do what you are

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