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Interview of Uttoran Sen from Guestcrew.com
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Hey you bloggers we are back again with another brilliant interview.
As part of our BloggersIdeas interview series, today we Uttoran Sen here, he is the founder of guestcrew.com, and having good experience in Online Marketing, SEO and also called Social media expert. He loves blogging a lot. In this interview he would be sharing some useful SEO strategies.
Let’s start with interview!
Please introduce you to my blog readers? Explain who are you apart from blogging life?
Answer – Hey, am Uttoran Sen – a self proclaimed SEO and Social media expert, an online writer and the CEO and Founder of Guest Crew.
Other than blogging, am a 27 year old guy who loves to read books, play online multi-player games like Travian and a lucid dreamer.
Please define terms “blogging” and “money making from a blog” your experience on them?
Blogging, in my opinion is a platform that can be used to reach an audience. When you monetize your reach – it becomes – Make money from Blogging.
I have made money from CJ, Adsense, Infolinks, Kontera, Chitika, payperpost, sponsoredreviews and pretty much any platform that was ever made to monetize blogs. My niche blogs have made a total of $17k from Adsense alone so far.
What type of hosting services you would recommend to bloggers? As reliable hosting is very much important in blogging ?
Go for a VPS is you can afford it. Guest Crew is hosted on a level 5 Hostgator VPS – we have occasional issues, I find atleast one downtime in 2 to 3 months time. There are a number of web hosts that I have come across; each of them had their own issues. If you are on a shared hosting and your blog is getting a lot of traffic – then no web host will be good for you. Move to a VPS as soon as possible.
I prefer hostgator because their live chat help is excellent and they solve script related issues that no other hosts does.
What inspire you to build a big guest platform guestcrew ?
I was one of those early birds who started doing guest blogging back in 2007. I used guest blogging to promote my own blog and my client’s blogs. I was an active guest blogger doing several hundred guest posts a month. The process is very time consuming – and wasting time on getting a post published is not a constructive use of our time. Time should be spent on writing great content – not trying to get it published.
So, to simplify things – I started Guest Crew.
Guest Crew is nofollow, so it is safe to use for guest blogging. Other than guest blogging we have social features which can be used to promote your content on the social media. Guest Crew already have a good portfolio of Influencers who can promote your content.
How many years you have been blogging.What do you feel about blogging?
I started blogging back in 2005 – it is ages now. I got my first domain in 2006, before that it was mostly free hosted blogs like – blogspot etc .
Blogging provides a platform to reach an audience – it is fun, it’s a source of income – for me it was hobby when I started out. I made a few sites on yahoo’s geocities etc. but nothing worked as good as blogspot. It was when the traffic had started to flow and I got my first clicks on my niche sites that I saw it’s true potential.
Very quickly I started doing niche research and built a small network of micro niche sites – each getting about 200+ unique a day and converting to about $800 to $1200 a month. I still do not have a primary blog though, unless you count my personal blog at UttoranSen.com or the Guest Crew blog.
I focused too much on micro niche blogging, did not really had any time left to build a strong personal blog. Am still trying that with UttoranSen.com.
How many blogs do you have? Which blogs do you follow regularly?
At this moment I have only two blogs. My personal blog and the Guest Crew blog. I had over 30+ blogs at a time on different niches but slowly I have sold them all. Guest Crew takes away most part of my time – so really do not have time for anything else. I follow a number of blogs regularly.
Popular A-list blogs that I follow.
Copyblogger – Here is my latest Guest Post on Copyblogger.
JohnChow – My Guest Post on Johnchow.
WriteToDone – My Guest Post on WriteToDone
BoostBlogTraffic – My Guest Post on BoostBlogTraffic
Problogger – My Guest Post on Problogger
LifeHack – My Guest Post on Lifehack
KissMetrics – My Guest Post on KissMetrics
Some more Top Blogs that I recommend:
Apart from these, there are a number of blogs that I follow and recommend to others:
Growmap, by Gail.
Make a Living Writing, by Carol.
BloggingCage, by Kulwant.
Seo Writer, by David.
Adrienne Smith, by Adrienne.
Aha-Now, by Harleena
Basic Blog Tips, by Ileane
Famous Bloggers, by Hesham
Enstine Muki, by Enstine
Kabenlah, by Emmanuel
What are your tips on traffic generation? Please reveal some must use techniques to get more traffic to new blogs?
Sure, traffic generation is not that difficult. One just needs to be disciplined and consistent. Here are 3 traffic generation tips that one should absolutely follow.
Organic Traffic: Organic traffic is not that difficult to get. There are two big issues with this step. Some people don’t optimize and some over optimize. You just need to get a balance and keep going on.
At one time, I had a 100k+ monthly combined traffic on my small group of health blogs. It was never difficult, you need decent content – nothing extra ordinary and it is something that you can create yourself. Give 3 to 4 hours a day for content creation. That can easily get you about 1 really good – 1500+ words article.
Once you complete the article – take a small break and get refreshed. Then get back to work and start revising. Once you are sure that your article is great – post it. Do basic social promotions and some comments on related blogs. That is just enough.
Repeat this step everyday and in a few months time you will get some 100 to 200 very high quality content. Your organic traffic will rise everyday and in a few years time – you will have a very strong blog with thousands of visitors a day.
It is a slow process, you have to work hard – and be really consistent and disciplined about the entire process. But it will work out in time.
Social Media: Social media requires work – that is constructive social media. There is plenty of fake profiles and fake traffic available in the social sphere. Anyone can manipulate and send traffic – but that is not a long term strategy.
If you want a long term benefit from social media – start working on your social profiles.
Give it time, spend atleast 2 hours a day on your social profiles. Make sure to tweet atleast 8 times a day and keep following targeted people. Try to build as many profiles as you can on separate social networks. Focus on the big ones – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, G+ etc.
Here are a few additional tips:
1) Make self promotion look good.
2) Post natural content on the social media.
3) Share videos and infographics related to your business. Your followers should know more about you.
4) Write informational articles about the social network where you share your content.
Referral Traffic: Referral traffic comes from various sources. Here’s a list of things you can do to get referral traffic.
) Be active on the smaller social sites like – blogengage, blokube, dosplash, kingged etc.
Build a really strong profile in these sites – make sure to comment and engage with others. Then post your own links and get referral traffic.
2) Do Guest Blogging – Guest blogging still works and you can use Guest Crew to do nofollow guest posts and be safe from Google.
3) Blog comments – Blog commenting does not really works for the SEO purpose as it used to in the past. However for getting referral traffic – blog comments is a great way to do it.
4) Do round ups – link to others – promote other blogger’s posts. They will do so in return. That is how it always works – bloggers reciprocate.
How to handle guest post spam request?
The Easy way is to join a site like Guest Crew and mention clearly on your – “Submit a Guest Post” page that you only accept guest posts via Guest Crew. Since, guest crew always checks content for quality, all spam requests will be filtered out before reaching you.
Alternatively, spent another hour going through the requests and delete the 90% of the spam and reply to the 10% of the good ones. Some people delete the entire lot of guest post requests, with more and more spam getting into their inbox – I can’t really suggest them otherwise! But one should look at the benefits before killing guest blogging completely.
I allow guest posts on my sites mainly due to the following 3 reasons:
1) There are good writers out there and they have their own voice and style. My community can always take benefit of new ideas and tips and my blog can make sure of fresh content.
2) Am already active on multiple social networks – but I can’t be everywhere. When I accept a guest post and publish it – I make sure to explain the guest blogger for promoting the post on the social media. I have got plenty of traffic, social shares and comments from their promotions. I get traffic from social sites that I did not even know about.
3) Having a multiple author blog helps a blog to grow quicker. You can’t do everything yourself – you will need others to boost things up.
Matt cutts is now against guest blogging. Would you still prefer guest blogging?
Matt Cutts is against anything related to link building that works. Technically, he is right – links should not be built, they should be earned. The only problem is that it does not happen. If you don’t build links, your competitors will build them and beat you at Serps.
Anyway, Guest Crew is nofollow – so we are not worried about Matt Cutts.
What to do best in guest blogging.
Aim for bigger blogs – target the A-list blogs. One link from a huge site makes a major difference. It can help you land a big client as well. There is no point building hoards of smaller and spammy backlinks. Get a guest post on a strong blog that is related to your niche. Try getting a few of these every month and you are all set to make a popular blog yourself.
How to Reduce Landing Page Clutter?
We are doing a landing page redesign ourselves. You can check it on guest crew when we are done.
A Good landing page should have the followings things:
– Name and Email id signup form.
– A video or an image next to it.
– And a few points explaining why the target audience should subscribe / buy etc.
Anything other than that, like social sharing buttons, extra information, useless details, longer signup forms etc. are all waste of space. If you want an optimized landing – keep it up to the point and nothing more.
On which platform you share your content, please share some unique content marketing platforms ?
I share my content pretty much on all possible platforms. There is no point leaving a single leaf unturned. I have used social bookmarking sites, article directories, sites of all sizes for guest blogging, web 2.0 sites etc.
Things change with time and I no longer do article marketing. That particular marketing method has run its course and no longer works. Here’s a few platforms that I do suggest for content sharing:
– Build strong profiles on major social sites – facebook, twitter, g+, linkedin, pinterest, stumbleupon, reddit etc.
– Be active on the smaller social sites like – kingged, blogengage, blokube, dosplash, bizsugar, inbound, scoop.it etc.
– Share your content on web2.0 sites like medium, linkedin today (long form posts), storify, etc.
– Share your content on the community blogs of popular sites like buzzfeed, moz etc.
What kind of certification courses you would recommend to SEO & Online Marketing enthusiastics?
I don’t recommend any courses. If you want to learn something – go do it, get firsthand experience and learn from it.
Whay type of tools you use for keyword research please share.
I have used several tools over the years, saw them getting changed or shut down – and I had to move on to using other available tools. Adwords tool was my favorite, now it’s changed into keyword planner.
Am sharing a keyword search tool that I have used extensively over the years – Hope you like it.
I hope you all readers enjoyed interview of Uttoran sen !
If you have any questions or doubts please do ask in the comments below !
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