An Interview with Adnan from Blogtrepreneur

Jul 27th, 2007 by Leonid Shalimov | Scroll down for comments

Yesterday I had the great privilege of setting up an interview with Adnan from the highly respected website Blogtrepreneur.com. I remember discovering his website around 3 weeks ago and not being able to divulge myself from the catchy title. I became an avid reader and then decided that it was time to pursue things further and try to get in touch with the creator.

Well I did, and he was nice enough to answer some questions. These should open up a lot of doors for discussion. I was more than pleased with the answers as they contain tons of golden nuggets of information for Web Entrepreneurs and people interested in Finance alike. Now, let’s meet the brains behind Blogtrepreneur.com.

All of the questions are in bold while the answers are in blockquotes. Enjoy!

Give me a little intro about yourself and the blog you run.

Well, my name is Adnan and I’m a 17 year old kid from the UK. 2 years ago I got into wheeling and dealing at school and really wanted to expand my horizons as I felt the true entrepreneur spirit takeover. One thing led to another and I ended up getting scammed in the importing and exporting business.

This led me to turn to the internet, where you didn’t have to invest in a large amount of money (for stock) before you could make money. I somehow stumbled on blogging and realised its potential. Last February, Blogtrepreneur was born on a Blogger account but it wasn’t until July last year that I bought my own .com name from the money I had earnt through Google Adsense.

What spawned the idea behind Blogtrepreneur?

I’m not sure where the idea behind the blog came from. All I can remember is that I wanted a hybrid name, as they sounded cooler. So this led to: Blog + Entrepreneur > Blogtrepreneur! Some people think it’s pretty weird, I think it’s quite catchy. Honestly, the ideas of riches led me to blogging.

I saw Darren from Problogger and read up on how he was earning 6 figures from doing the same. However, I soon realised as I entered the blogosphere, that the main thing you need is traffic, and this traffic is hard to come by quickly.

I remained determined to make an impact, and so stuck with blogging for a year where I started to see results. However, in that time, the ideology for me about blogging changed. I no longer became obsessed with money - I felt that my best asset was the community I was building on the site - a community which tracked my every move in the blogosphere and one whereby I could announce new sites which would then have a quicker growth.

Today, the increased revenue after a lot of hard work is only one of many rewards I have found working online.

What type of pre-planning happened before the launch?

Before the launch of the Blogger version of Blogtrepreneur.com there really was little planning. The best way to get experience in any niche is to get your hands dirty and start playing around first, so this is what I decided to do. I attempted to familiarize myself with the concepts of blogging in the first few months - like commenting, trackbacks, blogrolls, a little coding, marketing, Search Engine Optimization and monetization.

As a result of this, I managed to build up knowledge, which meant that whilst my blog was pretty dead, the new ideas were forming in my head. This helped with the relaunch of Blogtrepreneur.com on my own hosting account. The cool thing about this was I had met a guy who had started to comment a lot on my older site. He said that he would be willing to help setting me up a new site on Wordpress - so I took him up on the offer. This in itself showcased the brilliance of a community.

How did you go about marketing the website when it first launched?

When I launched Blogtrepreneur.com I quickly setout to garner backlinks. This happened through emailing other bloggers in my niche and commenting ferociously (but not spamming), others’ blogs to gain a reputation online. Another great technique (and one which is heavily underused) is to take part in Carnivals (http://blogcarnival.com/bc/). There are Blog Carnivals for most niches and by submitting a post, you’ll have a chance to get backlinks from the sites which host the Carnivals weekly.
With hindsight, writing “viral” articles would have helped to bring traffic more quickly to my site.

Try writing a tutorial about something in your niche, a list or a really useful and long article in general and submit to most of the top social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us.

Motivation, how do you keep the fire alive?

Having the motivation to keep the site running is hard at times and easier at other times. Blogger “burnout” is very common among those who have a strict posting strategy and then feel the effects of that and don’t have the motivation to keep going on. For me, I’ve been through 3 phases of burnout and each time I’ve considered selling the blog. I’m so glad I didn’t! T My way of dealing with this feeling is to let the blog sit, and take a break.

I soon found after thinking it through, that my RSS numbers didn’t really change in periods of inactivity and that I wasn’t losing anything by doing so.

My other motivations lie around the people I stay in contact with through Instant Messenger. Whenever I’m feeling low, I generally have a chat with friends who do similar things online and ask for advice and opinions. They are generally very kind, good-hearted and get me motivated and back on my feet. And whenever they are successful, I strive for the same successes that they have - so it’s sort of like healthy and friendly competition - even though many of my friends operate in different niches.

What other blogs do you read?

At the moment I have around 30-40 blogs in my feedreader (which is Google Reader for the record). The blogs I read range from a mix of smaller blogs which are more personal to blogs about blogging (like your Probloggers, Daily Blog Tips and Copyblogger) to other Entrepreneur blogs such as Entrepreneurs-Journey.com, NorthxEast.com, SethGodin, Osworld.biz and YoungGoGetter.com. Then there are others like the notorious John Chow, the amazing FreelanceSwitch and the man himself Shoemoney.

What are your long-term goals for Blogtrepreneur?

Good question and one which I should really be thinking more about. My unofficial long-term goals really include breaking the 1000 RSS subs barrier as that would really mean a lot to me. Building my community into something strong is also another target that would help me launch other sites and maybe products.

Monetization goals include reaching earnings of $1000 per month online which is coming ever closer. But really, an everlasting goal is to really have fun and to learn and to enjoy working alongside other people who share similar traits.

Thank you! Any other things you want your readers to know about you or the blog?

Thank you Leonid for the great interview. I’ve got a Summer Special on Advertising which is coming to a close at the end of July, so if you want some quality and well-priced advertising, come on over and get in touch!

I hope to see you on my blog or as a feedreader and congratulations Leonid again on a well-launched and well-written site.

Hope everyone enjoyed. Just wanted to thank Adnan again for letting me pick his brain!

Leonid Shalimov posted this article under General News on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 9:49 am You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment or trackback from your own site. View Technorati Linkbacks.