This is the interview that I have taken of Akshay Hallur of bloggingx.com
Me: “So, hello, Akshay sir, how are you doing?
Akshay: hello praneeth, thank you very much for the interview, I am doing good what about you
Me: good sir, can you please tell us a little bit about you and your work for our audience, please?”
Akshay: So I am Akshay hallur, I am the founder of bloggingx.com, I have started my blog in 2016, I am a blogger and affiliate marketer, I get more than 1 lakh page views.
Me: wonderful of you sir, can you please take us through your journey and let us know how you got started with your blog?
Akshay: yeah sure, I basically started my first blog back in 2014, just like most other people it was just a passion for me of writing articles and content writing in general because I used to get a lot of free time since I was doing engineering back then so I used to write articles on my blog which was hosted on blogger platform and slowly when I started getting some views and made some money by displaying ads on my blog, i have started seeing
my blog ranking on Google and getting some traffic to my blog, I think from 2016 onwards I have started focusing on my blog more seriously and have started writing more articles after quitting my job in 2016, I have shifted my blog from blogger to wordpress after getting inspired from other popular websites back then like shoutmeloud of Harsh Agarwal and after watching their incoming reports I have got so much inspiration that I have started writing articles related to blogging, affiliate marketing and digital marketing field on my blog only since then.
Me: Can you share with us some of the mistakes that you have made in the past which you don’t want others to commit?
Akshay: Let me tell you that I have made several mistakes in my blogging journey like starting on blogger, building spammy backlinks, not writing consistently, not investing money in good seo tools, relying on google traffic, and i have learned many lessons along the way, but if I had to summarize the important mistakes and lessons that I have learned, I would say that there are three important lessons that I have learned from the mistakes, which are: I started my blog on Blogger and then moved to wordpress.com, not wordpress.org, so if you want to have a successful blog or grow your blog, you should use wordpress.com, you should also have to create your own ecosystem, you should not entirely rely on the search traffic of google, because there are many updates that happen in google algorithm and if something goes wrong with your blog and if Google update occurs then majority of the traffic you get from the Google will be lost so always build an email list from the traffic that you are getting on your blog so that you can build an audience of yourself, and third one is to write content very consistently and make sure that you have a content calendar and publish articles and build backlinks to your blog frequently to rank on google and more importantly update your articles if you want to stay ranking or increase your ranking in google without writing new articles, get more traffic.
These are the mistakes that I have made and I want other people not to do this.
Me: wonderful sir can you please let us know how much money you make every month, income streams?
Akshay: I usually make around $10000 every month on my blog, more than 70% of my income comes from affiliate marketing, courses and the remaining amount comes from sponsored posts, ads, I have a bunch of websites on different topics like soundproofing, health and fitness and finance, cryptocurrency, I also make good amount of money from those blog as well.
Me: wonderful sir, you are a 6 figure affiliate marketer, since you have mentioned that most of your income comes from affiliate marketing can you please share with us some of the secrets that you have learnt and some tips regarding affiliate marketing that would be helpful for us?
Akshay: Of course, affiliate marketing is where the majority of my income comes from, with affiliate marketing accounting for more than 60% of my revenue from my online businesses. I’d like to share the top three things about affiliate marketing with you all. First, it’s critical that you build an email list from the traffic that you’re getting on your blog because it’s not just about getting traffic, but also about building relationships with your readers so you gain trust of your audience and you can sell them high ticket affiliate products later, another thing is that if you want to increase your affiliate commission then make sure to contact to the affiliate manager because
since you are driving sales and high quality traffic to their website already, if you can contact and ask the affiliate manager to increase your commission then most likely you will get good response and your commission rates will get increased, this will help you make more money with the posts and same traffic and another thing is that you always have to promote and sell products and services in affiliate marketing which you personally either used or prefer and you know they are good, dont promote the products based on the commission rate of the product, if you promote products based on how much ocmmssion you get without knowing if the product is of good quality then you will later loose the trust of the user who buys the product from your recommendation and the most important and value thing is trust of the people not the commission you get because if you loose trust of users then you will lose more money which you could make more in the longterm. So only sell the products which you use, which you know and trust, and don’t sell products because they have high commission rates.
These are some of the tips I have for you if you want to grow your income through affiliate marketing, you can also read a bunch of articles that have been published on my blog to learn more about affiliate marketing.
Me: wonderful sir, can you please let us know what is your hiring process and how do you hire people to work on your blog and online business?
Akshay: So, as I mentioned earlier, hiring is very important because you cannot do everything on your own and you definitely need the help of other people because you have to treat your blog as a business that you are doing online, and if I have to answer your question, then I currently have more than 12 people working on my blog and online business, including all of the sites and all of the online businesses that I have.Other websites, most of the people working for me are young people, so I prefer hiring young, motivated, and enthusiastic people; I can definitely teach them the skill and knowledge later on, but my first priority would be checking if the person is truly interested and motivated to work or not.
Me: wonderful sir, I also want to know how did you find a niche for affiliate marketing, how do you find the product that you want to sell and how do you get the traffic?
Akshay: well, in order to find out the niche, you can use tools like explodingtopics.com or Google trends to find out what are the topics that are popular in different countries, languages, you can also search for different topics in different forums like quora, like this you can find amazing niches, you can also find amazing products that you might want to sell future on affiliate marketing platforms like commission junction, impact and share a sale,
like this you can find low competition niches, and in order to get traffic if you don’t want to write articles constantly on your blog, you don’t have the time to wait for your blog to rank on Google and get traffic then you can also get traffic from social media channels like Facebook and Instagram and you can also promote your blog through paid advertising using facebook ads and google ads, from there you can generate sales of your affiliate products, you can also generate lots of traffic from YouTube as well by republish your content as videos on YouTube.
You can also get high quality traffic from forums like Quora and reddit by answering the questions of people on these sites and you can get traffic from Pinterest and tumblr as well.
These are some of the tips I have for you to grow your traffic and get lots of amazing high quality traffic from other platforms apart from Google.
Me: wonderful, lastly can you share with us how to balance your work life, some tips to increase your productivity?
Akshay: sure, i want to say that I am not the most consistent person actually but I do get little bit lazy sometimes regarding publishing the content on my blog, but it is very important for you to consider that you have to start looking at your blog as an online business and if you want your blog to succeed and grow then you have to work as a businessman and a lot of new bloggers and digital marketers have reached out to me asking that they have a job but they want to grow their blog and make money and how do they manage their work and blog, how do they increase their productivity on their blog but my only suggestion is that it is very important
for them to sacrifice their luxury and comfort and always put a goal, for example if you have a full time job of 9 to 5 then after you come back home you should work on your blog like you should have a goal of at least writing thousand words article on your laptop everyday after you come back home so that in a couple of days, every week you can have lots of high quality articles published on your blog which will slowly rank on Google and get you traffic on your blog, and if you cannot write articles by yourself then you should also consider hiring people like content writers to write articles on your blog, it is very important that you maintain a good consistency of writing articles
on the blog in a particular niche, and if you want to increase the productivity of your work then I would suggest you to practice pomodoro technique & whenever you set a goal to yourself for example if you want to complete an article writing today then make sure that you set a deadline to it and also when you achieve the goal before the deadline you should also reward yourself by giving yourself some treat that you like so that you can get some dopamine high and happiness for achieving the goal and this will slowly help you achieve more goals in future.99
Me: thank you very much for your time sir, thank you very much for the interview sir, would you like to say something before ending the interview.
Akshay: yeah, why not, I only want to say that if you want to grow your business and make money from your blog and marketing then you have to think about it as a online business and you have to work upon it as one which means that you need to work on it every single day and you need to give a lot of time and patience, you also need to hire people because you cannot do all the things yourself, if you want to become successful then it might how do you like cliche but you have to work hard and there is no other option, thank you very much for the interview cheers.