1. Please introduce yourself to our readers. How long you been blogging? What are your hopes and dreams?

I am a full time banker doing a part time home business. I guess it’s not important what our profession is, as there isn’t a unique profile of an online business entrepreneur.

I joined a MLM company some years back but found giving presentations, selling physical products to groups or individuals difficult to sustain my interest and quitted after 6 months. I joined PIPS (Plug-In Profit Site) 20 months ago confirming yet again a deep desire to leave my own comfort zone to venture into some business. Each one of us has his or her own reasons for starting a business but it’s usually driven by a common passion, no one outside this blogosphere could ever imagine existed.

2. What is the most important thing you have learnt about blogging and how has it impacted your success today?

I’ve learned that to be really successful, you need a passion to see you through each blogging day. This passion can only develop when you really enjoy your work and through the many friends you make in the blogosphere. Making the virtual world somewhat real is already a big success.

3. What is your favorite method of generating traffic and why?

Getting organic free search engine traffic is my favorite without any doubt. It does take some time to rank organically in Google. However, the time you invested towards earning this natural ranking in Google is well worth it because your ranking lasts a long time.

4. What top tip would you give to current bloggers?

One of the best tips I can give to bloggers is focus on blog branding early. Not just the look and feel of your blog but start discovering your own writing and communication style that you are comfortable with that works well with your readers.

5. What is your biggest challenge as a blogger?

The biggest challenge is to share with anyone and everyone my Internet Marketing journey through blogging as my chosen means of communication. Without friends and visitors arriving at my blog, it could never ever exist in the first place.

6. How do you cope with working a full time job and balancing your blog with your current lifestyle? Do you have an action plan?

Doing a home business is tough and doing it part-time is tougher. The mere fact that I have only about 4 hours a day to work on it, forces me to do things differently from others who have luxury of time. I focus on what’s more important and used the Pareto Principle or the 20/80 rule to help get things done in perspective. Spend 20 pct of time to achieve 80 pct of what other full timers are achieving. Then on weekends, it’s catch-up time as I work to complete all my “to-do” list of things.

7. What’s your most effective method of generating traffic?

I’ve seen big increase of traffic whenever I published a post that has a very catchy headline with a topic that applies to all niches and therefore one which will interest just about anyone. A good example is my post Case Study: How 5 Outbound Links Got Me 500 Incoming Links. So while the good old ‘content is king’ is important, it’s how you present it with a killer title that always brings in the visitors.

8. What would you do if you started blogging again?

Firstly I would have a separate domain for my blog instead of a sub directory of my main Plugin-Profit Site. I believe even with a PR3, this has somewhat weakened the site authority than had it been on its own domain. I had to work doubly hard to achieve my current search engine ranking, compared with others and that was a big mistake I made.

Secondly, I would never use my name as the domain name. In terms of SEO, it makes better choice if I were to use something else related to my niche. I was just like any other newbie then, with no mentor and not knowing how important this was until it’s a little too late. I guess I was just too eager to start my new website. Well we live to learn.

9. Where do you see your blog this time next year?

As you may already know, I’ve started focusing on guest posting on this blog selectively to maintain the blog branding I’ve somehow established and yet bring more good unique contents to my readers. I hope to see this blog go to PR4 with more traffic and subscribers one year from now.

10. If you could give one piece of advice to new bloggers that are starting out what would it be?

Starting an online business or blogging is never easy so if you can find a friend who is already an established internet marketer to guide you in settling down that would be the best thing that could happen to you. Most people quit too easily when they learned the hard truth after having the wrong perception that making money online is as easy as it sounds.

Thank you Peter for your time and answering these questions.