In this blogger interview Mayank Gupta of Blog Design Studio talks about how he found the right partners to take him from hobby blogger to professional blogger.
Tell us a little about your blog.
Blog Design Studio is a blog about blogging and WordPress. Blog Design Studio offers blog design services and this blog helps us in generating business for our business.
We started this blog by the name of DesignSaurus around couple of years back, then rebranded it as “StudioWordPress” then after Matt’s suggestion – we had to rebrand the service as “Blog Design Studio”. It’s been almost 1 and half years since we are running it.
How long have you been blogging for? What made you want to start blogging?
I started a personal blog in late 2005, however I was never serious towards it. After few days – I started http://www.reviewsaurus.com with the aim of making money from it. Even after putting lot of efforts in it (and learning about blogging from http://www.problogger.net) I got little success with it. However, ReviewSaurus gave me a good platform to partner with right people as I was able to build connections and that eventually helped me start Blog Design Studio with my business partners – Rajat Bhadani & Nikola Dimev.
What were some of your biggest challenges when you first started blogging?
One of the biggest challenge was that I had little knowledge about blogging and while used to spend time in learning it by reading about it, lot of time also went by in doing experiments.
Other than that, I was always a tech guy at heart – so taking ReviewSaurus as business was something I couldn’t do then and thus I was never able to justify the amount of time and efforts I was able to put in and make a business sense out of it.
How did you overcome these challenges?
“Making money from blogging” was the ultimate challenge that I had to work on. I was ready to spend time on writing however as I mentioned in the last question – “business” was never my cup of tea.
I was able to overcome this challenge by partnering with the right people. Rajat is a brilliant “businessman” (with vast experience in e-commerce design projects) who saw the opportunity in blogging, however didn’t have much clue about it then. So, we partnered and thought of starting up a “blog network” (AOL’s acquisition of Weblogs Inc. always rang bell in our ears!) however, as it turns out that we were one of those startups who couldn’t get things right in starting and in order to survive we started providing blog design services.
Basically, the idea of partnering was that “do what you are good at” and this strategy has certainly worked!
What is a recent milestone that you have accomplished with your blog? How were you able to achieve this milestone?
Our latest achievement has been that we have crossed 1200 subscribers. Without putting much efforts on the blog and only publishing targeted articles, we were able to build a decent subscriber base and all of this was mainly achieved through decent use of Search engine optimization.
It was mostly search engine optimization that was our main focus – it has been growing at slow pace, however it has been consistent and worked pretty well for our business.
What is your next goal that you want to achieve with your blog?
Even though our blog has 1200 subscribers and pretty targeted subscribers, it has never been a thriving community. One of the major reason was our involvement with the clients. Our next goal is to ensure that our blog enjoys thriving community.
What is your best tip for other people out there who might be new or struggling with their blogging?
- Be consistent.
- Don’t forget to try new things.
- Follow Darren’s suggestions religiously.
- Keep your eyes open and partner with right people.
- Don’t make the mistake that I’ve done – Not commenting on other blogs regularly!
Thanks again Mayank for taking the time to do this interview.
Mayank Gupta has been a professional blogger since 2006 and runs Blog Design Studio with business partners Rajat Bhadani & Nikola Dimev. Follow him on Twitter at @mayank.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Earlier in the article you said that you studied Problogger.net but didn’t achieve much success. At the bottom you suggest following Darren’s suggestions religiously.
What is the reason the tips from the same source worked for you later but not earlier? Was there something you weren’t doing right earlier?
@Mark – Yeah! you can say that. Earlier it was more about passion and even though we didn’t have much experience we thought of coming up with blog network. We learnt from our mistakes and are still learning.
Darren provides excellent and very practical advise, although only advises can’t help a blog – its the right application of those tips.. we made mistakes not Darren.
@Paul – Thanks a lot for this interview :)