The iMarketing Cafe Team
Jeet Banerjee is a 23 year-old serial entrepreneur, digital marketing consultant, public speaker and an author. He is also a seasoned blogger who has been writing extensively on Entrepreneurship. Visit www.jeetbanerjee.com to know more about him.
In this post, he answers 10 interesting blogging questions. Here we go..
Time management is a big challenge for part-time bloggers? You are a busy entrepreneur, how do you manage to find time for blogging?
Time management is something that I have definitely struggled with over the years, but I have finally seemed to get a grasp of it. I think it really begins with being organized and planning your days out really well. For me, I was always extremely unorganized which caused me to spend a lot of time doing unproductive things. By staying organized and planning my days out properly, I’m able to create time slots for when I can blog.
What is the biggest learning so far from your blogging journey?
The biggest thing I learned so far from my journey of blogging has been in regards to creating content that people want to read. Initially when I had started, I was focused on just writing about what I thought was going to be useful for others. However, I quickly realized that understanding your audience and asking them what they want to see you write about can really help your blog grow quickly.
Your advice to people who want to become full-time bloggers.
If you’re trying to do it for a living, you need to create a funnel that will allow you to generate revenue. Too many people make the mistake of thinking that just by writing online, they’ll be able to obtain thousands of readers and make thousands of dollars. However, it’s never that easy. You need to create a process for how you will obtain users and how you will get those users to convert into revenue. Once you have a plan, then I think you can become a full-time blogger.
How and on what basis do you generate topic ideas?
It comes down to two things really. The first thing is really understanding and asking my audience what they want to hear me write about. Surveying your readers is the BEST way to create content in my opinion. After that, I just go through my process of being an entrepreneur and note down different challenges or learnings I have on a regular basis. That allows me to come up with some really good topics or ideas for my blog.
What do you think are the qualities of a successful blogger?
Relentless, persistent and passionate. I think if you have the right mixture of these three qualities, you will be a successful blogger. You have to be passionate about what you write about and it genuinely has to be conveyed in your writing. You’ve got to stay persistent and relentless in knowing that you’re not going to be successful overnight. It requires a ton of hard work to create good content, build an audience and to monetize a blog.
Which are the monetization options you would suggest to a blogger?
There are thousands of different ways to really monetize a blog. It comes down to who your audience is, what they are looking for and how you can best deliver it to them. For some people, selling themselves and their consulting/mentoring services is a great way to generate revenue. For others who have massive traffic, they use newsletter marketing and advertisements to generate revenue. The opportunities are endless, you just really need to see what your audience needs help with and how you can deliver a solution to them while catering to their needs.
What do you think are the common mistakes committed by newbie bloggers?
They try to be someone who they aren’t. I was very successful blogging because I was extremely original and authentic in my words. While other young entrepreneurs were hiding their age and pretending to be older, I was straight up about it. I told people my exact age and I wrote with my true voice. By doing these two things, people were able to genuinely connect with me and they felt closer to me as a result. My biggest tip for newbie bloggers is to be yourselves.
If you have to recommend a couple of great tools/resources for bloggers, which ones would they be?
WordPress. I think that’s one of the best tools that you can utilize for creating a blog especially early on. It’s cost-effective, easy to learn and can help you get your foot firmly in the ground fast. I think Google Analytics is probably the second most important tool for your blog because it gives you the basic statistics and analytics that you need to understand who is on your website. If you can read the data well and cater to it, you have a very high chance of being successful.
The blogosphere has become highly competitive. What should a blogger do to stand out among the crowd?
It goes back to what I was saying earlier. I think it really comes down to being authentic in your writing, finding an angle that others haven’t taken when marketing yourself and sharing really good content. The truth is that the blogosphere is extremely competitive, but still very few people actually write good content. Majority of people outsource their blogs to third-world countries or put the proper time and energy needed to create good content. If you try to automate your content creation process, you will have lower quality content. I would say to focus on the quality and to make every single post as good as you can.
Who is your favorite blogger and why?
This is a tough question as I have a few, but I guess I’ll share one of the earliest ones that I came across that inspired me to become an entrepreneur and taught me a lot. His name is Neil Patel and he runs the blog QuickSprout.com. His articles were extremely insightful and he didn’t beat around the bush. I enjoyed that greatly about his blog and I learned quite about entrepreneurship and blogging from his successful blog.
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