He intends to sell the book, titled ‘The Big Fat Blogger’, exclusively on dumblittleblogger.com, his small but popular blog (it gets about 10,000 hits a month) on online marketing, search engine optimisation and social media.
Sipping a bitter Italian espresso, Vishal speaks with a confidence that belies his age about how he earns $350-$400 a month. “I started writing my blog a year and a half ago, thinking I could make money from ads, but when I saw the revenues were too low — anywhere between $20 and $80 a month — I decided to branch out into social media services, search engine optimisation (SEO) and online marketing. I now have 11 clients whom I charge on the basis of services offered, size of the company and the difficulty of the task,” he says.
For instance, to promote a new service by online greetings company 123greetings.com on Twitter, Facebook and Digg, he charges about $150 a month as part of an ongoing collaboration. With over 450 friends on Facebook, 2,000-plus followers on Twitter and a network of about 400 ‘social media optimisers’ who swap among themselves Facebook and Twitter messages where they post links to their clients’ products and services, Vishal can make sure a post gets 70,000 eyeballs on Digg’s front page, or 20,000-40,000 views on Twitter.
Vishal admits he is not a pro-blogger, but with more time on his hands, he believes he can become a successful Internet entrepreneur. “The real money is not in blogging, it’s in social media and SEO. I want to launch a social media start-up but since my parents want me to do something more conventional after college, I am willing to explore career options in investment banking and finance, while expanding my online operations,” he says.
Other bloggers and social media networkers say Vishal’s strength lies in his sound knowledge of how to navigate the meandering alleys of the social Web and his understanding of techniques to draw traffic to his blog. A few months after he wrote about BidVertiser, a pay-per-click ad service, the site became popular and his blogpost drew a lot of visitors.
Mohammad Huzaif, a 27-year-old blogger from Cochin who hired Vishal to customise his soon-to-be-launched blog, techpy.com, says, “I have met many young bloggers, but he’s the best of the lot.”
Syed Vidwan Ali, a 21-year-old student of Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering who met Vishal at a bloggers’ meet three months ago and has since worked with him, says, “I was surprised with his age and his professionalism. With just five-six quality blog posts in a month, he manages to stay relevant and attract visitors who end up joining his social network.”
Aashish Banerjee, of 123greetings, says Vishal’s skills come in handy. “He is an amazing kid with an innovative skill set who knows what he is doing,” he says. Vishal’s clientele now includes online service providers such as Gigbucks and Tag-11. He recently sold gredhammer.com, a gaming site he owned previously, for over $200 and has started writing a tech blog, techgeo.com, where he gets paid for reviewing gadgets and Web services.
Every day, after school, Vishal spends three hours on the Internet promoting his clients, re-tweeting his friends’ tweets, writing his blog and sifting through 300-odd new emails. Weekends are almost always devoted to learning how best to exploit the Internet, and he has little time for anything else, including football, his favorite sport. He has, however, managed to juggle his growing career with school, consistently scoring 75-80 per cent, much to the relief of his parents.
“As long as he continues to concentrate on studies, I don’t mind it. We were somewhat concerned initially about the time he was spending online and about the money he was earning—we wanted to take him to a counselor. But I’ve realized he has his own road map, he doesn’t want to do engineering or medicine. And I’d like to believe in him. He has promised that he’ll finish college and take up a job,” his mother says.
No comments:
Post a Comment