In December 2010, Kulwant Nagi’s life was a wreck. He’d qualified for a number of top master’s programs in the United States, but couldn’t afford them, when the time came. This resulted in Kulwant leaving home due to rising tensions and expectations.
No master’s degree, no money, no career.
It was at this time that Kulwant was introduced to the world of blogging and online marketing. He’d always had a keen interest in the subject and, thanks to desperation, struck out on his first blog.
A few years later, and Kulwant is one of the Internet’s leading blogging-tip bloggers. He shares a wide variety of blogging tips at Blogging Cage.
Kulwant is a testament to the powers and possibilities of the Internet, if you know what you’re doing.
And in Kulwant’s own words: “Yes, your education plays a huge role in your success, but there must not be any excuse that ‘I cannot do this because I don’t have knowledge.’ We can master any skill if we want to.”
How did Blogging Cage get started? What need did you perceive that you hoped to fill?
It all started with the suggestion of a good online friend.
I started my first blog in September 2011 and started feeding content on it. I started reading stuff from various big websites and added it in my own language.
It was a damn struggling phase for me, as I was very poor at the English language, so I couldn’t compile the stuff in the proper format. But with my dedication and perseverance, my blog started getting some traffic and people were loving what I was writing.
As this was a personal domain, I started adding some personal stuff as well as blogging-related articles. One good friend noticed this mistake and pointed it out as soon as he saw it on my blog.
According to him, we shouldn’t mix personal stuff with a blogging guide on a domain that is just YourName.com. So I started looking for the new domain and suddenly this domain became available.
So Blogging Cage was born on January 15th, 2012.
Who is Blogging Cage’s main audience? What are some ways that people outside of that audience could still benefit from your site?
Great question.
I am saying it’s great because this is the pillar of any blog. Most of the people in the industry won’t be able to answer this question.
If they’ll answer, you’ll find that they are not delivering the same stuff on their blog as answered.
If any blogger answers this question by saying, “My blog’s audience is social media experts,” then you’ll be surprised to see that they are adding too much other stuff on their blog as well.
My answer is – newbie bloggers.
I have written a big guide on how to start a blog where my main motto is to inspire newbie bloggers and give them guidance to start their first blog.
For the diversity I have added some other categories on my blog, which can give another taste to different audiences. I have inspiration, WordPress, social media and other categories on my blog.
But once you go through any of them, you’ll find that articles under them are written for newbies only.
In your very moving bio, you talked about having your dreams shattered by not being able to afford the college of your choice, which led you down the path toward entrepreneurship. Are you happy with where this path has led you? As more and more people forsake institutionalized learning, what advice would you have for people who choose to become entrepreneurs instead?
We cannot relate to a situation when it is happening with us in real time.
We all want a perfect life where everything goes like we have planned. We want our life to be as simple as possible.
But life is not like we all have thought.
It’s full of miracles and surprises.
You might be feeling that “I am going through the worst phase of my life, I have lost this or that, I could do this or that” and so on. But once you try to connect the dots, you’ll see that you are here just because of that situation.
This video by Steve Jobs is one of the greatest explanations of connecting the dots.
When my dreams were shattered, I was in the same situation. I asked God, “WHY ME?”
I was in a situation where my life was getting destroyed in front of me. So I left my house and started my life’s first job in December 2010.
Soon I left that job (June 2011) and started working with an MLM company. I learned the basics and saw industry leaders making big money on the Internet.
Very soon I realized the potential of Internet marketing and started my blog in September 2011.
I am more than happy in this industry, as I am am making 15-20 times more income than my salary with the company.
I was dumb in coding, zero in English, with no marketing skills, but still I survived.
Your first entrepreneurial position was with a network marketing company that let you build your own team and earn commission as well as passive income. Can you talk about passive income?
MLM was the start of my career.
I understood the power of passive income and started studying great leaders from the industry.
Bloggers are a special breed who want to make their living on the Internet.
I will relate this question to me.
As I am a full-time blogger, I spend somewhere around 14 hours a day on the Internet and doing various things to eke out the money. Bloggers can start writing for others, do social media optimization, do SEO for companies, start WordPress services, try freelancing websites, write in-depth reviews and many other things. I would suggest spending at least two to three hours a day blogging to make a decent income.
Blogging Cage has become one of the Internet’s top blogging tip websites. First of all, how did you achieve this, and how long did it take? What does it take to help a blog rise to the top?
It all started with my vision to make it one of the top blogs in India.
Once you analyze my blog, you’ll find that I have a very neat and clean interface, things are in their place and it’s a lot less distracting.
The first vision was to make it an easy place to surf. Secondly, I have maintained a very good writing frequency on my blog, which helps me to connect with my readers more frequently.
According to one study, if a user doesn’t see fresh content on the website on three different visits, he/she is less likely to come back and visit your blog.
It all took my planning, my dedication, frequency, ideas and execution to take my blog to this level.
Can you share a couple of quick social media tips for bloggers? Have you found any special secrets for getting material shared?
I don’t pay much attention to optimizing my content for social media.
Right now I am very active running Facebook ads for my articles and they are bringing very good results.
You can check this article on how to get cheap clicks from Facebook ads.
You also wrote a post back in February where 12 SEO experts share their linkbuilding strategies. Could you also share a few of these strategies with our readers?
This was one of the best roundup on my blog, as I invited some of the finest bloggers from the blogosphere.
The best linkbuilding technique is to write such a dominating article that other industry leaders love to share that article on their blog.
As Google is becoming very strict to combat spammers in the future, only natural linkbuilding techniques are going to work. Although you would still be able to rank short-term websites by doing some wrong linkbuilding practices, at the end only authentic players are going to survive.
A few years ago, there seemed to be a lot of skepticism toward the validity of working on the Internet. Do you feel this attitude is shifting? How much demand is there for professional bloggers and content creators? Do you have any advice for content creators, as far as finding work?
If we’re talking about India, we didn’t have good Internet speed five to seven years back. I can recall the days when I started my blogging career in 2011 by using Internet from my mobile. For the first two years I did blogging by connecting to the Internet with a 2G data plan.
So as per my thinking, Internet speed was the biggest obstacle that was stopping people from growing. But with the advancement of technology and the growth of the Internet, many doors have opened to make money online.
Now the Internet has been integrated so badly in our lives that every third person is on Facebook and WhatsApp. The world’s population is 7 billion now, and you would be surprised to hear that more than 1 billion people are on Facebook today. Businesses on the Internet are growing and they will keep growing until something new comes along.
After analyzing a few of the biggest firms in the world that have evolved in the last 10 years, I found that most of them were born on the Internet. Twitter, SnapDeal, Flipkart, WhatsApp, Pinterest are the real examples of it.
As the biggest medium to convey messages on the Internet is text, we are going to see a huge requirement for content writers in upcoming years.
I would suggest to start finding small writing tasks on Odesk.com, Elance.com or other freelancing sites. Because with time you will make your profile more authoritative and you will have huge tasks in the future.
You also wrote an e-book, The Blogging Domination Guide. Can you briefly recap some of the strategies you discuss in your book?
This book was written for the complete newbie.
In this book I talked about the basic mindset of blogging, the components needed to start blogging, a few methods to make money online and interviews with some of the great bloggers.
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