My name is Aditya Reddy and I am a student in Computer Science major in VIT (Vellore Institute of Technology).

SMASH BLOG TIPS is my personal blog and is aimed at teaching people about making money online through blogging and other means.

I have a very common story. Long story short, I was an online multiplayer / gamer, stumbled across how to make money on the web, got interested, took action and have gained success.

 

Could you give us a brief overview of your blog, when and why did you start? How have you built it up, where is it now?

Before SmashBlogTips I was mainly flipping websites for profit.

I used to buy them, improve traffic and sell for a better price. One of them is an ecommerce site FineBeautyMart.com. I sold it for around $600 as I can remember.

I always wanted to start my own blog about blogging and making money online since I was already doing it very well and had a lot to write about.

The opportunity arrived and SmashBlogTips.com was registered in May 2010 and was run by a guy called Fareed Khan. It was doing quite well and I followed its success.

Then there was a sudden burst of plagiarized articles (I have no idea what happened there). Google punished it by taking it out of its index, and the blog almost died. I haven’t seen blogs just die like that before.

I thought the domain was amazing and it did already have small readership. Its Alexa ranking was around the 400,000 range which is relatively impressive.

When it was put up for sale I was ecstatic! Due to the current situation of the blog, I won it for a merely $210 in an auction. I started working on this blog from around March 2011.

The Blog is about Blogging, SEO, CPA, Traffic Sources, Internet Marketing, Wordpress and lots more.

In a short span of two months I lifted it from a mere 2,000 unique visitors per month to over 10,000 all purely because of SEO work done. I got the Alexa rank down from around 400,000 to 105,000 in just over two months. The result was obvious, good quality unique content, design and SEO are the keys to a great blog.

Originally I planned to get the blog to around 50,0000 on Alexa and flip it for around $10,000. But I changed my mind, I decided to make this my personal blog.

There are added advantages with keeping the blog. Flipping gives me temporary income and I need to work for it. Once I am finished with my blog, it will be auto-pilot/passive income.

Why a blog versus a traditional static website?

Well, there are a lot of advantages to a blog:

• Connect with your customers/readers: It allows you to easily connect with your customers through offering dynamic, constantly updated content.
• Increased profits: There are many times more opportunities to monetize a blog versus a static website.
• Search engine friendly: Blogs are highly search engine friendly. It’s much easier for a blog to rank well in Google compared to a traditional static website.
• Build a readership: You can easily build a loyal customer base with the helpful blog posts.
• Social media: It is easy to spread the word through social media with the help of a blog and a few plugins.

What system is your blog run on, why did you choose it?

My blog is run on Wordpress. Again many advantages:

It is free, easy to work with, huge choice of free templates, plugins, widgets, easy customizations, search engine friendly platform, self hosted, no hassle of complex codes or DreamWeaver.

If you were starting to blog again what would you do differently?

If I was to start over, the first thing I would do is find a good SEO expert and outsource all my link building work.

This would give me more time for the content and would help me concentrate more on monetizing the blog rather than building traffic.

And the most important I would start building my list straight away. I made a big mistake of waiting for two months to promote my email newsletter.

How have you marketed your blog?

Social Media Marketing is what I have done till now for my blog.

Twitter was quite a success but Facebook was a flop.

Not many likes even after advertising my page. Hence n0 activity on Facebook so far. But my Twitter profile is growing strong and is driving a decent amount of traffic back to the site.

What are your top 10 plugins and why?

My top 10 plugins are :

1. Akimset spam comment killer: For spam comments
2. WP super cache: For caching purposes
3. All-in-one SEO: For SEO purposes
4. Wp-subscribers: For list building purposes
5. Google Sitemap Generator: For generating and submitting sitemaps
6. Sexy Bookmarks: For social Media purposes
7. YARPP: Yet another related posts plugin
8. Gravity Forms: For form related works
9. Subscriber to Comments: For notifying users of follow-up comments on a post
10. KB robots.txt: For handling all robots.txt files

Where did you learn about blogging, SEO and copywriting? Do you think our courses would have helped you become a better blogger and digital marketing expert faster?

I learnt about blogging on my own from reading blogs like Johnchow.com, Smartbloggerz.com, Shoemoney.com, Problogger.net etc. I still read them regularly.

Yes that was one big drawback for me. I never knew there were complete courses on blogging. I knew there were 100’s of ebooks, but not classroom-based courses delivered by experts.

It took me over 1 year to learn everything to level where I could survive in the blogging business. I am sure If I had undertaken your courses I would have saved a lot of time, probably a month or two.

So yes, any new blogger I do advise to undertake these professional courses and save a lot of time.

Do you ever get writers block, and how do you overcome it?

At one point I just didn’t feel like writing anymore and went blank.

I just took rest from the content part. Opened up guest-blogging on my blog, let other people write for me, outsourced SEO and had fun with my friends.

After a while I was back up writing. Basically just relax, stretch out and have fun from time to time. Don’t be glued to your blog 24/7!

How much time do you dedicate to your blog every day?

I spend a minimum of about 4-5 hours on my blog a day currently. Sometimes even goes as high as up to 9-12 hours. Although this is not required.

A serious hour of dedicated work on your blog per day will do the job.

I go to extremes because I want to see how fast this blog can reach the 20,000-30,000 Alexa ranges. It has dropped from 400,000 to 105,000 in two months. I am hoping to hit my target by the end of this year. Once I reach my goal the blog will be on auto-pilot so 15-20 minutes a day should do.

What are your top 10 tips for new bloggers?

My top 10 tips for newbie bloggers are :

1. Take Action: Don’t keep reading and reading about blogging. Jump in there and take action. Experience is the best teacher.
2. Don’t Lie: For example, don’t blog about making money online if you haven’t made anything yet. It just wont work out.
3. Work Hard: Hard work is the key to success. In any business you need to work hard to achieve something.
4. Promote Yourself: Make an “about me” page. Write some stuff about yourself and make yourself visible to the public.
5. Don’t Be Penny Wise Pound Foolish: Buy a hosting service, get a good domain and a decent blog design.
6. Set Your Goals, Focus: Set your goals and focus on them. Don’t deviate from your goals.
7. Don’t Compare Yourself With The Top Blogs and Complain: Don’t complain looking at the top blogs. They have spent lot of time and money to get there. They started from your position, too. Instead start small, dream big ;)
8. Ask for Help: Don’t be shy to ask for help.
9. Treat Your Blog Like a Business: Imagine you owned an airlines company. Put that much amount of seriousness into your blog. Treat it like a big business. Separate accounts etc.
10. Lastly Don’t Give Up: You know why 90% of the bloggers fail? It’s because they quit. 90% of bloggers never get beyond the 60 day mark. They get depressed to see around 2.01$ in their Adsense account after 2 months and hence shut down everything. It takes a year for your blog to start gaining some momentum. Another 9% quit within the first year itself. The remaining 1% consists of the top bloggers today. Making money online is not a get rich quick scheme. It is just like any other business. Takes time and work.

I got this blog up so fast because of some SEO experts on my side. If you can invest you can save time. You can always contact me for these SEO services if you like. Just hit me up on admin@smashblogtips.com with the subject SEO.

Summary

Thanks to Aditya for doing this interview, if you want to find out more about blogging and become an expert in the subject then I recommend taking one of our courses.

Our courses are aimed at four types of people graduates whose marketing or other degree didn’t cover digital marketing to an adequate level, professionals looking to upskill, start-ups and small businesses looking to maximise their sales online and corporates who want to train a team or individual in online marketing.