Tag: Questions

An Interview with the Master – “Daniel scocco” from DailyBlogTips.com

Daniel-Scocco-Daily-Blog-TipsDaniel Scocco has lived and studied in several places around the world, including Italy, Chile and Brazil. After receiving a degree in International Economics and working for a year within a multinational company, he decided to quit and pursue entrepreneurial projects on the Internet.
His experience completely changed the way he interacted with the Internet. Through out these years he launched several successful blogs, and Daily Blog Tips is the place where he shares what he learned along the way. The blog was nominated under the “Best Web Development Blog” category on the 2007 Weblog Awards, and currently it is ranked number 29 among the most popular blogs in the world (according to Technorati).
Daniel Scocco is an inspiration to start this blog and his blogs have helped us a lot in learning about blogging. I highly recommend every blogger to subscribe to DailyBlogTips. And I take this privilege to thank Daniel for giving this interview.

1. How long have you been blogging?

I started late in 2005.

2. Where did you first hear about blogging and making money through internet?

On StevePavlina.com

3. Are you a full time blogger?

Full time web publisher.

4. When did you quite your day job —  Was it before/after you started getting more money from your blogs than your regular salary?

I quit before I was making any money online. But I was sure in 6 months to 1 year I would already be earning enough to live. That was the case.

5. Did you start with the purpose of making money?

No, I started because the lifestyle was what I wanted (i.e. the possibility to work from home and have plenty of free time).

6. How many blogs do you have or write for currently(otherthan Daily Blog Tips, Daily Bits, Daily Writing Tips…and hope you don’t write in Techcult.com ).

Those are the main ones. I have some smaller websites, but they are all static.

7. How many hours do you dedicate to them every day? How much time do you spend for each of your blogs? Do you sleep at night
🙂 ? (kidding!)

I work around 8 hours every day. The time is spent reading new stuff, writing posts for Daily Blog Tips, managing the other 3 blogs, and on some consulting projects.

8. Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, Yahoo Buzz! — Order them with your priority ?

StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Buzz.

9. How much do you make from your blogs, monthly?

Around $3000.

10. What is your main income source?

Direct ads and consulting projects.

11. Do you think Adsense makes a blog look unprofessional?

Depends how you integrate it. AdSense on the sidebar or below the posts are fine. Blended with the content they look spammy.

12. What were the 3 major mistakes you did on your blog?

On Daily Blog Tips I already had a good experience. On previous blogs I messed up pretty bad though.

My first web hosting was a Windows plan on GoDaddy…

My first blog was a hand coded HTML page.

My first WordPress install was not done on the root folder.

13. What would you suggest for a blogger, who have just started his blog.

i. Wait till they get direct advertisers or use ad networks?

Wait until you have 1000 uniques a day, then put ads. Direct or ad networks will depend on the niche.

ii. AdSense or anyother ad networks

Depends on the niche.

14. If you could give an advice for a novice blogger, what would it be?

Focus on the content.

15. If you could read only one blog, which one would you pick?

TechCrunch

16. If you could read only one blog(related to blogging), which one would you pick?

Problogger

17. How many RSS feeds do you track daily?

Some 200

18. Have you ever invested money in promotion of your blogs?

Yes

19. What are your 3 main strategies for blog promotion- In a line each?

1.valuable content
2. contact with other bloggers
3. social media

20. What are your other revenue source, other than blogging?

Consulting projects and niche websites.

21. What was the most difficult situation faced by you in all these years, regarding blogging(except Spam 🙂 )?

Content theft.

22. Which are the 3 major traffic sources for your DailyBlogTips?

1. repeat traffic
2. search engines
3. social media

23. What is the secret of your success?

Consistency

24. How important is the design aspect? (0 to 10)

7

Some questions to which we expect some detailed answers.

1. How you spend your day?

Wake up at 6am more or less. Check email. Eat breakfast. work until 10:30. Hit the gym. Lunch. Work till 5pm. Train Jiu-Jitsu or Kick-boxing (depending on the day). Dinner. Go to sleep at 10pm or so.

2. Personal hobbies and interests?

Martial arts, swimming, weight lifting, saxophone, chess.

3. Life before blogging, blogging life, where you want to see your blog in next 5 or 10 years time?

Before working on the web I used to work for a multinational company. Boring.

Right now I love my life style.

Hopefully my blogs will still be going strong.

4. Some of your life’s ambitions?

I want to start my own Internet company some day.

5. What projects do you have in your to-do list for coming days(2008-2009 and even 2010, if any).

Buy a house, preferable at some nice beach location.

6. We see all over the internet that, people earning lot from Internet usually have cool life style, they will be going to holiday trips to  their favorite places frequently etc etc….Do you think its true and do you also have such life style.

This is true for people earning bit time. I am not there yet.

7. Do you also complain of not having time?

No. I love the flexibility I have working from home.

8. 3 things you do, which you consider waste of time….

I don’t waste that much time actually. Don’t watch TV, don’t play games, don’t have gadgets or anything.

Only thing I could say is watching DVD movies.

9. How about your contacts with the outside real world(other than blogging life)? Do you meet and talk to people often or will you be busy almost all the time infront of your computer?

I think I keep a good balance. I workout or train martial arts almost every day, so I meet people there. On weekends I always meet up with friends and with my girlfriend, so it’s good.
I wish I would have more time for that though, but one got work hard.

We feel that everybody had great time reading this interview article. Daniel is one of our blogging idol and we are very happy as we started this “Interview” section with Daniel. If you have some interesting questions to ask your blogging idol or your blogging inspiration, then Ask questions here and Celebrity Bloggers will answer it(an Interview).

Ask questions here and Celebrity Bloggers will answer it(an Interview)

There is a good news to all Technotip.org readers….

We will be doing interviews of some of the celebrity bloggers in the future. So you can expect some inspiring articles being published here.

Its hard to interview a Celebrity Blogger, as there will be no time with them to answer everyone’s questions. But still we will struggle and try to do it. For now, the good news is, one of our favorite “Celebrity Blogger” has agreed to give us an interview this weekend( Shhh..suspense!). Cheers….

And we expect lot of Diggs, stumbles, buzz! etc from our readers, to make the interview stories big and to help as many people as possible by sharing these articles.

speak-upNow this article is mainly written to inform you all about the future posts, and we also want you people to participate.
We have already prepared some questions to ask, but we thought that it would be great, if we give a chance to our readers, to ask some more questions.

So please leave some interesting, useful questions in the comment section of this post.

And please remember that, you are asking questions to a “Celebrity Blogger”. Don’t just ask – How to install wordpress? What is your blog income ? What is RSS? etc. Please just don’t ask such questions. You can ask such questions in some forums and get the solutions to your problems.

Ask questions, seeing which the “Celebrity Blogger” should feel like answering them happily and he should also feel good for giving the interview.

You can ask questions like – how you spend your day, personal hobbies and interests, life before blogging, blogging life, where you want to see your blog in next 5 or 10 years time? etc.

Keep in mind that, your questions should be useful to other readers also.

We will include your questions while interviewing the “Celebrity Bloggers”. And we will give you full credit for asking good questions. We will write a special article(with link Love) to thank all people who give us a good question to ask.

And we make it clear that, all questions asked here will not be asked to “Celebrity Bloggers”, we will select good and insightful questions only. And please do not hesitate or underestimate yourselves, every  person on this earth has got his own abilities. So ask questions, even if you do not have a blog or if you have a small blog or no blogging experience. We will surly take your questions, if its a good one.

And please do not ask for the name of the “Celebrity Blogger”, because this will dilute the thrill and more over the interview is not only for one “Celebrity Blogger”, we will use some of your questions to interview some more “Celebrity Bloggers” in the future. While asking questions, think that, you are asking the question to someone who has achieved a big thing in his life and he is good and famous.

Please use this opportunity to full extent and make use of the experience and talent of the “Celebrity Bloggers” by asking relevant questions. Who knows, the answers given by the “Celebrity Bloggers” may become your key to success.
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