Expert’s Tips – Ajith Prasad From Dollarshower.com

Dear readers,

I am so glad in meet you all with an expert’s tips category post and thanks for your great support to progress my blog. All your inspiration have pressed me to get some beneficial stuff from a blogging expert, Ajith Prasad Edassery from Dollarshower. I have contacted him through his Google Plus profile and he agreed my request to provide some useful replies and share his blogging experiences. I got staggered with his polite and quick response for my mails even in his busy schedule and let me tell you something about him and his blog.

About Ajith Prasad Edassery

Ajith Prasad is a software professional who lives in Bangalore, India. He has been on the internet since 1998 with his writing, publishing and blogging activities. Currently he is working in SAP (Labs India) as a development manager. He builds a blog, Dollarshower to write out his personal experiences and owns his personal & couple of niche blogs too.

Dollarshower.com

Ajith Prasad has created the blog “Dollarshower” in the year 2008 to educate the readers on topic related to earning money through both online and offline. He engraves blogging tips, SEO strategies and Internet marketing matters here and he also presents some social media updates in his blog. Moreover, you could get free WordPress Blog setup service and WordPress consulting services through this blog. He assured that you’ll get good results from good experienced professionals for its free or paid services.

As Ajith is having immense software background, you could find some free tools like Google Page Rank checker, a tool to compare the price of different products and few more WordPress plugins. If you wanna get in-depth about these useful plugins, do check this page Dollarshower Tools. Besides, you could grab some valuable coupons deals like WordPress plugin coupons, SEO &SEM services, hosting coupons and other promotions through this exceptional blog.

I hope you’ve inspired with the intro of Ajith and his blog, let’s check his worthwhile reactions for my questions.

Expert’s tips – Talk with Ajith Prasad from Dollarshower.com

Hi Ajith,

1. What inspired you to get into blogging and how do you manage both career and blogging?
Blogging for me was in fact a natural progression of what I used to do in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I had a bunch of personal pages as early as in 1997-‘98 on free hosting services like tripod.com. Also, as a programmer I was quite active on a few technical forums and used to contribute ideas there in. After sometime, I thought of putting all such content under my own domain name and hence I registered my first domain (AjithPrasad.com – my personal blog) with NameZero way back in 2001. From static HTML content which was quite cumbersome to manage, I slowly moved to dynamic contents and then over to free CMS software such as phpNuke and later on to WordPress based blog.

To cut the long story short, the inspiration to get into blogging initially was purely the urge to publish my ideas & identity online. You can safely assume that there was a little bit of show-off motive was there too. Having one’s own website was something really cool then!

The second dose of inspiration was purely the money aspect of it and I would be lying if I say otherwise. DollarShower.com was born when I realized that whatever online content creation skills I have could be used to make some money online.
As for the second part of your question; managing career and blogging can be quite difficult. Fortunately, I started ‘real’ blogging in 2006-07 when I was kind of settled in my career and freed of busy programming life. Even then, I wasn’t blogging every day so it wasn’t really an issue. However, having gained enough experience now, I am going to ditch my IT career for full time Internet marketing (if not blogging alone) and that’s going to happen in less than a month’s time.

2. Are you working alone for your blog or with some partners? Because, I checked a lot of blogging services (Free and paid) in your blog.
I am on my own from the beginning in terms of creating content, developing tools etc. As for the blogging services listed there, it’s something quite new and supplemental to what I am doing on the IM side. It’s not really a profitable and serious business yet. I put those pages up there because I keep getting similar service requests once in a while.

3. Most of the bloggers struggle to bring traffic to their blog. Reveal your traffic strategies for them.
Wish I had a magic strategy that work for me and everyone else out there. I have been a victim of those Google animal updates and Dollarshower now has one fifth of the traffic compared to what it used to be in the peak. However, everyone needs to get their initial traffic via search engines and social media referrals. Then the networking aspect takes over via commenting, guest posting etc. The next step would be to convert at least a part of that audience into long term patronage.
Hence, if you ask me to suggest a sustainable traffic driving mechanism, that would be building your own email list. I believe, an email list is the only channel that wouldn’t be affected by SE algorithm updates or Social media trends or technology changes. And the best part is that it fetches you exactly the kind of audience that you want for your content.

4. As you have “Make money” category, what is your opinion about “Online money making”? How did you monetize your blog?
Online money making is  real as I have proved myself and a lot of exceptional bloggers in India as well as outside have proven time and again. However, we always work under a lot of apprehension because a bad algorithmic update, AdSense ban, AdWords suspension etc. is good enough to damage your prospects and then you might end up re-strategizing all over. At the same time, if you have a solid business case (e.g. a service offered online as well as offline), you can sustain without a lot of fear. I wouldn’t say the same about pure content writing and monetizing the same. It’s a risky affair indeed!
DollarShower is monetized via affiliate links that includes banners as well as in-content links propagated by the affiliate ninja plugin. I always make sure that I have only relevant ads that strictly fall under the categories that the blog deals with. Moreover, I advertise products that I have actually used (and sometimes reviewed) and hence it works.

DollarShower brings in only a small part of my online income. I have 7 other niche sites which churn in smaller amounts of money that adds up to a decent online income. By the way, as a policy, I do not monetize my personal blog which has a different set of readers that connects with me on a long term basis for various reasons. By the way, I have tried almost every possible route to make money online – including AdSense, PPC marketing via Adwords, email marketing, private advertising, affiliate marketing, domain/site flipping – you name it.

5.How will be the future of blogging and SEO? Tell something specifically about WordPress blogging.
Blogging as a content creation mechanism would still exist but the question is ‘where’?. I have a feeling that, people will slowly go back to where they came from and start blogging more and more on their social profiles in the coming years. This could be the case if social networks like Facebook sustain for another ten years and Google slowly start fading in their content discovery and presentation business. The SEO’s relevance in that case would come down for sure. I believe that SocNets and Search/discovery portals would merge into single entities at some point of time.

WordPress truly is the unbeatable leader as of today. The only question is if my above prediction is going to happen will such CMS have a lot of relevance?

6. Your blog have been blessed with good page Rank and Alexa. Are you doing specific stuffs for them? I hope your reply will be related to back-links, is it so?
Well, as for the page rank, it gradually climbed from 0 to 4 over the years. Links and authority definitely play a part there. However, the Alexa ranks have fallen from the peak of about 25K to where it’s today – thanks to Google. I have definitely done some link building in the past, releasing sponsored themes etc. that added to the authority at peak. As for Alexa, I never did anything to boost the same.

7. Name some of your Favorite blogs and give suggestion for the people who wanna make money online.
To be frank, I am an irregular reader – be it books, newspapers or even the content online. However, one of the blogs that I visit and read more regularly than others is Neil Patel’s QuickSprout because I like the way he presents facts, results and then the underlying theory than hypothetical stuff. I regularly visit a few personal blogs too.
And if you really want to make serious money online and sustain it, I would say, find a suitable product or service to offer to your audience. Secondly, try to be as unique as possible in your methods and approach. If you follow the herd, you will be offered only a small pie and nothing big.

Thank you so much for spending your quality time for providing replies to my questions Ajith. I wish you to succeed in your both software & blogging profession and I hope that you’ll continue to contribute splendid blog posts to your readers.

@ Readers!

Thanks for reading this expert’s tips post with Ajith Prasad from Dollarshower.com. I am sure that you’ve grabbed some constructive data with this post. I suggest you all to visit his productive blog once to get awesome information related to money making and blogging. Stay tuned to acquire some useful blogging/make money online tips from another expert soon!