Guess what today I have someone who is making 5 figure income from his WordPress blog SourceWP. Dhiraj Das who is experienced WordPress geek and blogger. He will be answering various questions related to Digital Media & other Internet Marketing stuffs . He recently got an offer over 150000$ to sold his site SourceWP. So lets get started with the interview.
Q1) Readers are pretty glad to have you. Please tell us about yourself and your journey into blogging?
Thanks for inviting me on your popular blog. It's an honor to be here.
Hi, I'm Dhiraj Das founder of SourceWP.Com and a few other popular blogs. I have been a full-time professional blogger for the last 7-8 years and founded a few interesting blogs. I have created and auctioned many websites on Flippa initially, the last one being Indexwp.com which I sold on Flippa for $22k when it was just six month's old.
I have outsourced most of the content job for my blogs currently, and I'm focusing on a big web media project that will come into existence soon.
Q2) Niche site vs. Authority Site.Which is best and why. What are the pros and cons of both?
I prefer authority site over niche sites because if you can create an authority site, it will continue to give returns for a long time. The niche site gets targeted by search engine updates quite frequently, and all the efforts get wasted.
Creating an authority site is a long term process. For example, I have started a new blog called begindot.com around online entrepreneurship and the resources required to start online business; I have been investing good amount of money every month on content and promotion for this site and I focusing on making money at the moment, but I'm sure it is going to be a huge property in the years to come.
Q3) How you are bringing traffic to Sourcewp, what is your main source of traffic?
Google is our main source of traffic, and it works perfectly for this site. The kind of content we publish on SourceWP is for niche users, so the visitors who land on the site through a search engine is extremely targeted.
We have tried Facebook ads and continuing to promote there, but it is mainly for the brand awareness not for traffic.
Q4) How much worth is SourceWP, are you planning to sell it?
I have recently received an offer of $1,60,000 (over one crore) from the Flippa brokers, but I'm not in a mood to sell the site as of now.
I'm planning to expand the brand with our own product, we have already launched a couple of products, and few are under development.
Q5) How to increase your Facebook shared post reach to your audience. Any ideas?
Timing is a critical factor when it comes to Facebook reach, for that matter on other social media sites as well. Once you understand your audience, you can choose the best time to share your content. Regularity is another factor that is very important, you must post 2-3 posts on a daily basis to get the best result.
Personally, I don't focus on the social media traffic because the conversion is extremely low as compared to search engine traffic.
For example, if someone is looking for a specific kind of WordPress theme he/she will not go to Facebook to find that product but make a Google search. I feel social media is good for brand awareness & works perfectly for the viral content site that depends on PPC ads.
Q6) Mention some SEO myths you know and what the actual facts are?
There are many articles available to discuss SEO myths already, so let's not go into that.
As far as my experience with SEO is concerned; I have seen that the basic of SEO never changes. If you stick to basic SEO & create content for human your site will pass any SEO algorithm update.
By basic SEO I mean the title tag, the length of content, maintaining a natural flow, the meta description, etc. If a new user is starting a blog on WordPress, the SEO suggestion by Yoast SEO plugin is good enough to get a decent result; obviously, the time and domain age is another important factor to consider.
Q7) What are your favorite social media tools? Which tools do you prefer to use to increase user engagement?
HootSuite is my favorite social media tool. The basic free plan is good enough to maintain active social media presence.
Q8) How Can I Turn Price-Sensitive Shoppers Into Customers?
By creating a quality freemium model. I'm huge believer in that fact that your free plan must carry a lot of value if you want to expand your customer base and eventually make them paid members. If you see most of the free plans don't carry any value and it just acts as the doorway to their paid plans.
At the same time, you have products like the Yoast SEO plugin, you get almost everything in the free plan which helped them to create a huge customer base (in millions) that eventually boosted their revenue as well.
Q9) How Can I Grow My Home-Based Business like Blogging and Freelancing?
Blogging is a long-term process; it needs consistency over a period to make good money. Freelancing can be a great career option these days; the only important thing is to be very professional. I know a few individuals who are making thousands of dollars every month through platforms like Fiverr.
If you are starting a freelancing service now, I would suggest you to choose one or two platforms where you can promote your services and be very active there. Once you get some initial work try to offer great quality service and stick to timeline, once you have some work to showcase as the testimonial; you will surely get a lot of work.
Q10) How Can I Pitch My Product to Large Companies? For example my product SchemaNinja?
It depends on your objective. I would suggest you to boost your free version as much as possible and create a huge user base.
Once you have a good number the things will become much easier. Also, it will help you to make a good amount of money in a long run, all you need to do is to come up with some discount plans time to time and pitch it to the free plan users.
Q11) What Are Some Good Business Books to Read?
I like to read spiritual topics, not the business. If you build your site with WordPress what plugins should you install? Suggest your fav plugins? Some of the important plugins that I use are the Yoast SEO plugin, Pretty Link (Affiliate Link Cloaking), W3 Total Cache (If your site is on shared hosting or VPS). Here is a list of important WordPress plugins you must use on your site.
Q12) Lastly, how do you motivate yourself to work hard and stay focused?
I decided to quit my well paid corporate job because I love this work. I love to create new websites; I love to write. So I don't really need any other reason to motivate myself.
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