Blogging Tips From Mi Muba At Be A Money Blogger

Today I would like to extend a warm welcome to Mi Muba from Be A Money Blogger.  I have known Mi for a number of months now after we connected through a Google+ group.  Mi has extensive blogging experience and uses blogging as his full time income.  If you would like to learn how to make money from blogging, then Mi is certainly someone who can give sound advice on the matter.  

Please enjoy his interview and remember to share your comments and ask questions below.

1. Tell us about yourself and your blog at Be A Money Blogger. 

First of all thanks a lot Catherine for featuring me at your wonderful blog.

I hope it will be a great learning experience for me to share with your blog community my experiences of professional life and get their feedback to improve me further.

Now a few words about me; my name is Mi Muba. I am from Karachi, Pakistan – a South Asian country.

I have been blogging for the last three years and full-time blogging for the last one year.

I manage three blogs. Be A Money Blogger is my youngest blog while I have been managing the rest of the two: Capital Market Awareness Blog  and Green Blog for the last three years.

2. What made you start blogging?

Bossy attitude and frowning expression of my so many bosses in my previous eighteen years job-life made me do my own business.

I didn’t have much money to start an offline business so I dived into online business by paying just a few bucks to buy domain name and started my first blog on Blogger platform.

After passing through the initial phase of my blogging struggle as toddler blogger I came to know the real potential of money making with this amazing field of online marketing.

Earlier I was just taking it a noble cause to bring change in society. That is why my first two blogs separately aim to raise capital market awareness and green awakening.

I think once a person tastes the flavour of liberty in his professional life he can hardly convince himself to do a 9-5 job. Sometimes I fail to achieve my monthly earning targets but still I enjoy being free from all the restrictions a job can impose on me.

3. Be A Money Blogger is a relatively new blog.  What made you start over with a new blog?

It’s only been eight months since I started Be A Money Blogger. It’s actually logical output of my three years research for money blogging which I did extensively to earn big money with my two already established blogs.

Though I could not have earned with my two earlier blogs so massively, but I fully learnt money blogging while struggling to earn money.

The reason of my not earning big with my two blogs was their least competitive niche. Both green niche and capital market awareness niche do not have huge appeal nor do they have market value. So I decided to start a blog on money making.

Now I don’t have to learn how to earn while managing my blog. I have already learnt a lot while earning money or trying to earn big money with my two previous blogs.

4. What do you enjoy most about blogging?  On the other hand, what frustrates you most? 

My passion or rather you can say it my fad is to explore new and unique ways to earn money with my blogs.

If blogging is business you can sell on it anything you want. You just need to bring the right target audience at your blog and then earning money is not so difficult.

To bring right target audience at your blog and make it believe in you is a gigantic task and nowadays I am trying to accomplish the same task at my money blog.

5. On average, how much time do you dedicate each day/week to your blogging?  How do you keep track of what you are doing? 

As I told you I manage three blogs. I publish weekly post at two of them while at my green blog I publish three posts in a week.

To manage three blogs with all necessary blogging chores including content writing, blog commenting, sending sales pitch and a little tweaking needs daily 10 hours at least. I need to give two hours on weekends also to cover up the chores which I could not have done during week days.

 6. If you could go back in time and tell yourself ONE thing when you started blogging, what would it be? 

Selection of right niche is the main thing to start a blog successfully. A slighter confusion while picking a niche may send you into the blind alley of failure and you can never come out from it unless you change or alter your niche.

Let me tell you how I suffered from the selection of wrong niche.

I also have fifteen years experience of green advocacy. I am known as a very active green awakening expert in green industry of my country. So I picked go green and pollution control as the niche of my second blog. But after writing first 100 to 200 posts I faced a huge writer block. Then I came to know that I didn’t notice while selecting my green niche that the reason of my green advocacy is huge fee which I charge to green NGOs and earn decent amount of money. I never did any green activity voluntarily and always charged for it. So this was the mistake I took it as my passion though it was actually my source of earning.

Another mistake I did while picking the capital market niche for my first blog was selection of wrong medium of communication.

With my research I got to know that those who can’t read and understand English language in my country are the real target audience for capital market awareness. So I started my first blog in my national language Urdu. But I forgot the fact that Google does not support and index non-English blogs as much as it does to blogs in English language.

So I could not have expanded my target audience beyond a certain level and now I am just relying on a small number of visitors at it. But they are the most relevant people who buy various investment plans on my recommendation. Their number is so less. That is why I don’t earn so big with it.

 7. What would you say has been your most successful way of making money online to date?

Frankly speaking up till now my most successful way of money making is Google Adsense. It became my main source of earning accidentally because of the large number of unique visitors at my green blog.

The second most profitable way of earning money is product review at my capital market awareness blog where I charge to investment companies for writing reviews for their products.

But my favourite way of earning money is selling my own product and best seller affiliate products. I am doing home work for this purpose to apply this method at my money blog. Right now I am just trying to develop my brand as a money blogger.

8. As well as blogging, do you have another full/part time job or parenting responsibilities?  How do you juggle these demands? 

During my 18 years professional life I did nearly 15 small and big jobs and many times two jobs simultaneously at morning and evening for the consecutive 14 years.

I was also associated with online marketing and did freelance work as ghost blogger for two blogs of a UK NGO.

For the last one year I have been making my full-time living with my own blogs and enjoyed this field so much so that I never thought to make it part-time even in one or two months when I failed to achieve my income targets.

My wife is also a working person. She is a school teacher. So, half of the household chores and parenting is my responsibility which I easily manage after doing all my blogging tasks.

9. What would you say is your favourite social media platform and why? 

Google plus and especially the power of its communities is unmatchable. I observed that very mature type of people join its communities.

People with business objectives are found more than those who just join it to enjoy or be connected with their friends.

I hardly found a sentence “feeling lonely” at any timeline of Google + while almost daily I read this type of phrases at other very popular social media.

10. What has been the biggest hurdle that you have come across in your blogging career to date?  How did you overcome this?

I have spent nearly 22 years of my practical life in struggle so any kind of hurdle seems to me just a source of enjoyment and I try to extract opportunities from it.

Yes being from a region where people don’t make their purchasing decision after reading a blog is a little problem for me.

So I have to target the people from those regions where 75% people buy a product after reading about it at a blog. It means I am adding the supply load in internet-popular regions where already a big number of online marketers are selling products to their internet users.

In Asia (where I live) and Africa hardly 10 per cent people make a purchase decision after reading a blog or an online journal. Their source of information is offline resources. So to get my audience from my own region I need a long time to remove this hurdle.

11. How do you drive traffic to your blog and grow your readership? 

At my green blog search engines are the biggest source of my traffic. Most of the green keywords have thousands of searches but unfortunately they are equally least competitive.

At my capital awareness blog my main source is email list which I developed with my offline resources including institutional surveys and registered small investors of local stock markets.

At my money blog I aim to build an email list by offering a free product which I am soon going to install. So far I am getting quite good number of traffic from social media and from mentions and referrals from other online sources including a few big blogs of a few influencers who are kind enough to re-share my posts off and on and also mention me at their blogs.

12. What is the most important piece of advice you could give to a new blogger?

Never be afraid to make an attempt. If you succeed it is wonderful. If you make a mistake, learn from it and then succeed.

If you have someone who can guide you well then never make an attempt by yourself and learn from him. This is the gist of the lesson of my previous three years blogging struggle.

I’d like to say a huge thank you to Mi for sharing with us today.  If you would like to connect further with him further for more tips on money blogging, you can do so at his social media profiles.

Google + / Twitter / Facebook 

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