Today we have Harsh Agrawal, who is a ProBlogger and Entrepreneur from India. Harsh is the guy behind famous blog ShoutMeLoud.com On ShoutMeLoud, Harsh covers topics related to blogging, SEO, making money, web hosting, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing.
Apart from ShoutMeLoud, Harsh owns some niche specific blogs. I would also suggest checking his personal blog at DenHarsh.com.
In this Interviw, Harsh talks about his journey to become a professional blogger and his favorite monetization strategies and much more!
1. Hi Harsh, Can You Tell My Readers and Me More About Yourself
Hey Rahul, Thanks for the invitation and I’m glad to be a part of your personal space. And for the intro, why not:
Hi, I’m Harsh Agrawal from New Delhi, India. I’m a blogger by profession and engineer by education. Blogging is my full-time profession. I started blogging career with ShoutMeLoud.com where I keep sharing everything which I learn in my online journey.
2. How did ShoutMeLoud happen
3. When and where did you make your first dollar in Internet Marketing
This is an interesting question, as first dollar is always the most memorable. Before I share that incident, let me share a silly story. When I started online in 2008, I had no idea about how people are making money online. I started blogging out of curiosity and my love for writing. It was around January 09 when I helped someone to fix his Google Webmaster tool problem and I earned my first $10. That was the day I created Paypal account and for hours I couldn’t believe that people could really make money online.
4. What strategies are Evergreen and help generating revenue month after month despite what some big search does
White-hate SEO blend with quality is and will remain evergreen. One important aspect for generating revenue is work in a niche market. There are various strategies one can follow, and what I suggest to my reader is; work on evergreen content. This way, you will get peace of mind and you don’t have to fight every day for producing content. By the end, before writing a new blog post always ask following questions:
- What is the purpose of this blog post?
- Is this post going to help others apart from you? If yes, hit Publish and work on post promotion.
One important thing to focus on in new age blogging is; Treat your blog as a brand. Reflect your true personality with your blog and writing.
5. What is your biggest online marketing challenge
One of the biggest challenge is owning the readers. Right now I have more than 100,000+ subscribers on different social-networking platform like Facebook, G+, Twitter and couple more. At the same time, I only have only 16,000+ subscribed Email users, and if I have to reach all my readers, I can reach out to only 16K+ with full surety.
From 2011-12; I invested a lot of time to create my Facebook page engaging and attract new readers and it paid really well in the form of numbers. Right now It has more than 60K+ fans (@shoutMeLoud) but with recent Facebook changes, it’s hard to reach out to even 5% of fans. This made me realize, Social-media is indeed a great platform for marketing and branding, but the real way to have readers on your blog is via Email list. Something which I’m focusing the most right now, and something I would suggest to you and others.
6. What are your top “must follow” Internet marketing blogs
Back in days, I used to follow specific blogs via RSS, but these days I use content discovery apps like Zite, Prismatic to discover content based on my interest. There are many internet marketers and bloggers I follow for inspiration. It’s hard to name all of them, but here are some I could think and recommend at this moment:
- Kristi Hines
- Glen from Viperchill
- Syed from WP Beginners
- Ileane from Basic Blog Tips
And many more…