Welcome to the Blogger Interview Series on The Mistaken Man.
In this series, I invite people from the blogging sphere who have achieved pinnacle of success in Blogging Domain.
I personally believe that:
“Experience Is The Best Teacher”
There’s no better option, other than Personal Experiences itself, to learn & grow your career/life, etc. You get to learn directly from people who have already achieved, what you want to.
So, without wasting any more time, let’s learn from Anil Agarwal, who is successfully making more that $10,000/month from blogging.
Q.1. Sir, Plz Introduce Yourself To The Readers Of TMM.
What you do, & what your blog is all about?
Thanks a lot, Palash for inviting me to your blog at The Mistaken Man.
Hey Guys, my name is Anil Agarwal, and I own a few blogs including BloggersPassion.com, HostingMonks.com, and MakeBlogging.com.
I started working on BloggersPassion blog from Jan 2010.
BloggersPassion.com is the online home for those guys, who want to launch a successful blog.
Here I cover actionable tips around Blogging, SEO and affiliate marketing related topics.
I launched HostingMonks.com in 2019, and the motive behind this blog was to help website owners and bloggers, in picking the best web host for their domains.
I took over MakeBlogging.com from a friend of mine in September 2020.
This is one more blog around blogging topics. But due to time constraints, I’m not able to contribute much to this blog till now.
Right now, most of the revenue is coming via BloggersPassion.com, while selling affiliate products. From this blog, I have been able to earn over $10,000 every month for the last two years.
In Feb 2020, I started creating premium eBooks and launched three eBooks so far around Blogging, SEO & affiliate marketing related topics. Your blog audience can purchase my premium eBooks from here.
Q.2. When & How Did You figure Out That Blogging is the career you want to take further ahead?
Was it the monetary benefits, passion, or freedom?
I took lots of time in taking blogging as a full time career. For the first few years, I was using free blogging sites to run my blogs.
And after that, I started using self hosted blogs while doing blogging along with my day job.
Since 2018, I’ve been blogging full time and I’m doing it because of monetary benefits, freedom and my passion for blogging.
Q3. Has your perception changed now regarding Blogging?
I mean if you started blogging for monetary benefits, & now you do for Freedom?
My perception has not changed much. Blogging is something that I have been doing for a long time now and it has become part of my life now.
Key Learnings:
Loving your work is the best & the fastest way to gain success.
Q.4. It’s been more than 10 yrs. since you’re into this blogging sphere.
What changes have you seen in these years & how it felt adapting to these changes?
Blogging has changed a lot over the years and the way we blog has also changed. Now we have more means to blog like Standand blogs, YouTuber Channels. Instagram and Pinterest to name a few.
To get success with your blogging efforts, you should be really good at one channel at least. It could be your standard blog, YouTube channel or anything.
And then you can use the rest of the platforms to promote your main blog or YouTube channel.
Q.5. What are your future plans with Bloggerspassion?
Any specific target or point you’re trying to achieve in 2021-2025 as such?
We want to take our content representation to the next level in 2021 and 2022 on BloggersPassion.com.
I feel that’s going to differentiate us from rest of bloggers.
With more focus on user experience, that should help us gain more search traffic and more revenue over the period of time.
Right now, we are able to make $10,000 per month from this blog. And trying to increase our revenue by 50% in the next one year.
As you also know, BloggersPassion is already doing well for blogging related topics.
We want to make it the #1 blog around blogging, SEO & affiliate marketing related topics by 2025 not only in India but internationally.
Q.6. How many hours do you work a week with your blog?
How much effort do you put in?
I try to spend 40 plus hours every week on my blogs. Mostly prefer working during the day time.
Q.7. What’s your typical schedule of your day when you’re at work?
Can You Explain in detail how & what you do when you get up in the morning before you go to sleep?
Let me share my typical day schedule here:
- Getting up in the morning, a couple of hours went to my kids’ school or study related activities.
- Happen to be in office from 11:30 to 7 PM. Try to be productive for six hours at least in this duration.
- Not much time for blogging after reaching home. Happen to be busy with my family and their dependencies.
- Try to walk 10,000 steps every day in between the breaks from blogging and in the evening. Not getting time for walking in the morning these days.
Key Learnings:
You need to work like this for 10 yrs. straight to match his earning potential.
Q.8. In today’s time with so much competition in blogging.
What’s the most important tip you’ve for the readers to beat the competition & make blogging profitable for them?
Don’t try to do what every blogger is doing.
Take your own unique approach towards blogging and how you will be making your blog profitable.
Don’t try to promote products that are being promoted by every new blogger in the blogging domain.
Go for the products where the competition is less and that are not talked muck by other bloggers.
Go to websites like G2.com, TrustPilot.com and Capterra.com to find the relevant products that you can target through your blog.
But make sure that you are promoting just high quality products only to your blog audience.
Key Learnings:
Researching Affiliate products before promoting them is necessary. Once you recommend a bad product then from the next time, no one will ever buy from you.
Q.9. Though I personally know how much money you make & I’ll also share your latest earning report for my audience.
But still I want you to personally tell from your side your last month’s earning breakdown?
I have been able to make $10,000 plus revenue from BloggersPassion.com blog only.
70% of this revenue comes through the sales of SEO related affiliate programs like Semrush and Serpstat to name a few.
25% of revenue comes through the sales of web hosting related affiliate programs.
And the rest of 5% comes through the sales of my premium eBooks and a few more affiliate programs I’m trying to promote.
I’m trying to diversify my income sources and in the coming days, will try to get into categories as well apart from blogging.
Income Reports Of Anil Agarwal
Q.10. Blogging is a business & you understand that perfectly.
Can anyone start blogging free of cost & expect to match your earning potential without investing into tools?
I don’t think blogging without any investment is going to help much.
You need to make a small investment of $100 to start a blog of your own. No one is going to take your blogging efforts seriously if you will be reaching out to people with free blogs.
People will also not buy stuff from you as you are not doing blogging professionally.
After the initial investment, you can keep making more investment on your blog from the earning of your blog. It’s like reinvesting the money you are making from your blog, This way, you will be able to take your blog’s traffic and revenue to the next level.
Don’t make the mistake of keeping all revenue with you. Keep reinvesting that in your blog to make it even better.
Key Learnings:
Don’t expect any results without significant investments into your blog. Just like every business, this also needs some sort of investments.
Q.11. What’s the best form of traffic according to you & which type of traffic has given you max. affiliate sales/results?
How can a newcomer take advantage of this traffic?
Traffic that we get from Google and other search engines happen to be most converting traffic.
Most of traffic on BloggersPassion.com is coming through organic search.
So you need to learn SEO to start building organic traffic to your website.
As a new comer, you should target long tail keywords where you see 1-2 new websites or blogs ranking in top 10 results.
Try to create better content than the top 10 ranked websites for your target keywords. This is how you will be able to build some traffic to your new website.
Key Learnings:
Focus on a single source of traffic you believe will bring you the most traffic. Then when you start seeing results, start to diversify later.
Invalid optin campaign IDQ.12. What’s the one thing you hate about blogging?
Like you don’t want to do that task yourself?
And how do you cope up with that feeling of denial?
For some time now I’m doing videos on my YouTube channel.
Initially, I was doing editing for my videos. But that was taking lots of my time and this is something I don’t want to do at my end.
So I outsourced it to someone else. Apart from this, there are few more tasks I don’t do from my end.
So I used to get them done through my team members or get help from a freelancer.
Key Learnings:
You need not to be expert at everything. Focus on the most important tasks yourself, & outsource everything else.
Q.13. Many newbies are stuck on blogging.
They create a blog & join multiple affiliate networks at day 1 & end up achieving nothing.
According to you, what should be the correct step-by-step formula from selecting an affiliate product, to promoting that product?
Give a breakdown of that formula.
You should not pick too many products when you are starting out.
Also you can start with promoting those affiliate products that you are currently using and happy with.
You can start with 1-2 products in the beginning and once you get some success, can give a try to other affiliate products.
Let’s say you want to promote an SEO tool, start with the SEO tool you are using right now, that has an affiliate program in place and you should be damn sure about the quality of that tool.
Don’t promote an affiliate product just because everything else is promoting it or the payout is really high.
You should pick an affiliate product that’s going to solve your blog audience problems.
Key Learnings:
Prioritize helping people through your blog posts. Don’t run for high ticket offers.
Q.14. When is the right time to scale a blog & how one can do that effectively?
How & what tasks need to be outsourced, & what should you never outsource?
You can give a through to scaling your blog once it starts getting some revenue.
You can use that revenue to get more contents written for your blog or take your blog design to the next level.
Also you can also create your own product if you have a killer product idea in mind.
You should do the things from your end that you feel you can do the best and then you can outsource the tasks that can be done by others with your guidance.
Q.15. If someone starts a new blog today in any niche, in how much time & also in how much effort, can anyone gain a substantial income from blogging to take it full time?
There is no exact formula for that.
Success with a blog depends upon lots of factors including your own blogging skills, niche you pick for your blog and monetization possibilities with that niche.
If you are starting, you should aim at giving at least one year of full effort to your blog before making any assumptions.
Key Learnings:
It takes a lot of time, hard-work & patience to make money online. It’s not a get rich quick scheme.
Q.16. Where can my readers find you? Plz mention your blog & social media handles?
Your blog audience can mail me at [email protected] or over to my blog at BloggersPassion.com.
You can also reach out to me on Social media handles that are shared below:
Final Thoughts About The Interview With Anil Agarwal On Starting A Money Making Blog
Starting A Money Making Blog is quite hard & requires a lot of hard-work & patience.
More than that, Blogging should be taken as a business where you should be knowing beforehand how you’ll monetize it.
Another important thing we learnt from this interview is that Blogging isn’t a get-rich quick scheme at all. It requires work.
I’d like to personally thank Anil Agarwal for taking out his precious time to be my guest on TMM.
“Thank You So Much Anil Sir, It Was A Great Time Interviewing You”
And If you’ve any doubts regarding any topics above, message me on social media or E-mail me at [email protected]
And if you haven’t started your money-making blog yet, feel free & check out:
How To Start A Blog In 2023 That Makes $2593/Mo On Auto-Pilot
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Till Then, have A Nice Day 🙂