Interview With Santanu Debnath From BloggingJoy

Today, let’s have an exciting interview with Santanu Debnath from BloggingJoy. One great thing I admire is, he always aims to help the beginners or new bloggers to the extreme. Through his Facebook Group, he manages to interact with those. He is a full-time blogger now passionate about spreading the vibes of making money online. Recently, he launched his blog, BloggingJoy as he quits his another blog MyPassiveIncome. He is now with the entire spirit to blog on the blogging niche in sharing his knowledge.

Interview with Santanu Debnath, Blogging Joy

Through this interview with Santanu Debnath, he shares about his blogging journey, how blogging brings money for his living, SEO tools he uses, Santanu’s blogging partner – Manidipa, WordPress, and so on. He was an IT professional working in a software company. Later, he quits his job as he is more enthusiastic to drive his career with blogging.  Along with BloggingJoy, he also handles multiple other niche blogs too. And, he is my long-term blogging friend too. Let’s get into the interview with Santanu Debnath.

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1. Share a few words about your inspiration that leads to BloggingJoy and your online journey.

Thank you, Sathish for giving me this opportunity to get featured in your blog.

Blogging is a wonderful way to express your experiences or knowledge to help others. I have started BloggingJoy.com to write on different topics in WordPress & blogging initially.

But gradually, after starting my Facebook group, I have discovered the true purpose of blogging that is helping others with my experience & knowledge.

Learning is not only about reading; it’s all about learning through knowledge sharing. And that is the true message I am trying to express through my blog.

2. How partnered you are with Manidipa as professional bloggers? In what areas you both help each other for blog promotions?

I love this question 🙂 I have partnered with Manidipa long back, we are childhood best friends and always share everything. It may sound filmy, but we love to spend time with each other, discuss every single thing we do online & offline.

Specifically, in blogging, we always help each other to fill up the gaps. Manidipa is very good at editing, proofreading, analysis. We discuss every action plan for our blogs together. Not only that, we share our learning of different sources and prefer to learn mutually. I can’t expect anything more than this from almighty; she completes everything in my life!

3. How are you managing your time to blog apart from your 10+ hour’s professional job in MNC Company?

I love to spend my time with something of my own. This helped me to get into blogging, and after that, I just fell in love with it.

These days after starting the Facebook group, I am finding big issues in time management. But then also I am getting enough time to spend 3-4 hours for blogging and almost 100% time on the weekends.

I have changed things this way to manage my life & blogging:

1) Planning in advance what to post or how to engage my FB group
2) Focusing only 1 article every week as per the expectation of my blog audience.
3) I have good friends who are supporting me to manage the FB group, that’s a plus point
4) Manidipa is always there to take some quick actions

4. Share your experience with MyPassiveIncomeTips blog. The reason being moved on to BloggingJoy. Have you transferred or migrated your MPIT content to BJ? If so, how it affects your link profile and ranking?

Frankly speaking, my earlier blog was full of affiliate articles and was ranking for few. The return was not that satisfactory, and also I was not focusing much on that website.

Later I have realized that this niche is challenging and one can’t make an impact this way. I have decided to change my blogging style and then decided to go with BloggingJoy.com. And, I always wanted to have a blog with the term BLOGGING in it.

I used to consider blogging as a passive income or side income option. So, I never put enough effort to make it significant. But, gradually realized that blogging is not only about making money; but it is also a very good way to express your knowledge & help others. I am happy that I have started walking in the same direction as BloggingJoy.com.

Regarding migration, yes I have moved using a .htaccess file (301 redirects). But I have deleted almost 70% of my content as they are not required and not at all getting traffic. So, I am not bothering about the traffic & backlink loss with this migration. You can consider this as a new blog only as the motive is completely different now.

5. What was your first payout through blogging? By what means and how do you feel so?

My first Blogspot blog was on food & recipe niche. Manidipa & I am very good at cooking, and this is one of our best time passes. It took more than 1.5 years to accumulate $100 as Adsense income from that blog.

At that time, I had not concentrated on learning SEO and how to rank. Like many people, we simply used to post recipes whenever we got time. But when we got our first payment, it really forced us to think beyond this recipe blog.

I had started learning about how things work in the search engines. I started reading the stories of the top bloggers from India and worldwide and how they grew with time.

6. I could notice your social groups growing at a good rate. What would be your sole intention behind growing social followers (where other few are nudging it for training programs)? Share your #1 tips to grow social media followers especially the group members.

Frankly speaking, I have started this Facebook group with a typical intention of driving traffic to my blog. But, my perception changed, as I started interacting with people.

If you have noticed, I have not named the group with my website or brand name. It’s a team of bloggers to help everyone who needs help. Gradually, I can focus on building a strong community to get connected & grow together.

Of course, this is helping me to grow my blog traffic. But, right now I am focusing more on content updation, creating content which is helping bloggers to run their WordPress blogs.

I know the demand for a good course is high and they are selling like hotcakes. However, I don’t have any plans to create any course right now. I want to make my blog the best place to learn everything about Blogging on WordPress platform.

The #1 tip if I have to share to grow any social media platform is the involvement. One big plus point I found is that, I always try to interact with my readers, try to answer their questions from my personal experiences, with necessary humor (so it doesn’t look boring or too techy 🙂 🙂 . I never forget to appreciate or encourage someone even for small achievements.

7. Do you still believe in profile creation, social bookmarking, and all? What are the link building techniques you prefer to entertain these days?

Yes, link building is a must to get a higher ranking. Even experts have stressed many times that whatever content you write if your content doesn’t have enough backlinks it will not get higher ranking in the search engines.

Of course, all the advanced link building techniques like guest posting, blogger outreach, broken link building, HARO are appreciated by everyone. But for me, link building is link building.

And it is not possible for every niche to get such links. E.g. I am getting authority mentions, inclusion in the roundup posts, interviewed by pro-bloggers like you which is natural for my main website BloggingJoy.com.

But the same is not always possible for an Amazon affiliate website or a micro-niche coupon website. So, for those cases, we have to depend upon other link building techniques highly.

Link building is link building, whatever way you are building it. The purpose is to get a higher ranking for certain keywords.

8. Name a few favorite blogs that you follow and tools that you use for perfect blogging?

I read a lot about SEO blogs and SEO case studies. A few of my favorite blogs are Backlinko, GotchSEO, Detailed.com, Robbie Richards etc.

I try to depend mostly upon free tools as most of the beginners can’t afford to go for paid tools. E.g. I like smallseotools, Ubersuggest, Answer the public etc. as these tools am very handy to do the initial research.

Of course, I also use premium tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. But I don’t do research daily with them. I did my blogging research early and working on them gradually. For everyday research, I try to explore free tools only.

9. How do you foresee WordPress shortly? What upgrades it might undergo, in your perspective?

WordPress is simply amazing. Although I know that free blogging platform like Blogger.com is also enough for blogging. I know event bloggers are making huge money by creating a free blog only.

But, as a developer by profession, I love to play with design & look. And WordPress is the best platform to give me this freedom. Not only that, maintaining a WordPress site is quite easy as there is such a big community of developers around and so many plugins are available.

Only thing I found a little tricky is using this Gutenberg editor. I think the interface needs to be a little more flexible to understand and to be handy for the beginners.

10. How do you recommend Google AdSense or affiliate marketing for upcoming bloggers? How they could succeed in it and how long after?

When we talk about Adsense& affiliate marketing, success means making good money. And the formula is simple for both of them. You need to find out the right keyword so that you can get targeted traffic.

In the case of Adsense, you need high traffic. When in the case of affiliate marketing, low targeted traffic may do wonders.

Whatever it is, one must work genuinely to build a quality website with useful content to answer different queries of the readers. Give at least 4-6 months to build your blog to expect any income, especially for Adsense. In the case of affiliate marketing, I don’t mind putting the affiliate link from day 1.

11. Do you think it is too late to start a new blog as a beginner? What would be your advice for any young online marketers?

Nothing is too late in this ecosystem. If you feel you should start a blog, then go for it without bothering that every day millions of blogs are getting created. Even if you are in high competition, you will find your audience.

But, if you can record quality videos, then you must invest in YouTube also. People’s interest is shifting towards video rapidly, and YouTube is the best place to start a video blog.

12. Your most actionable content promotional strategies that you admired with the results in terms of organic traffic, social mentions, monetization or anything.

The very first thing for BloggingJoy that I am doing right now is creating the must-have content that my readers are asking. I am not bothered about the keyword competition etc. for that. Target is to create that content (mostly tutorials), which will help a new blogger set up his/her blog.

For promotion, mostly I do blogger outreach. I personally request my readers to have a look and share their feedback & suggestions on that article.

Besides that, I am also trying to capitalize on Facebook Ads and guest blogging on similar niche blogs.

13. How to use social media to the core for personal branding? How active are you in social media networks?

I am not that active in social media, except for my Facebook group. I am trying to learn and work on Twitter & Pinterest as well. You may get surprised to listen that I don’t have an account on Instagram yet.

But I am active on my Facebook group and a few others as I intend to respond to people’s questions & problems they are facing. I love to solve problems in my professional career, and that is what I found while following these Facebook groups.

14. How are you planned to take BloggingJoy to the next level? What are the monetization sources you entertained?

My sole aim with BloggingJoy right now is to make it a perfect place for every newbie blogger who is interested in starting a blog on WordPress, understand how SEO works and other promotional stuff to grow a blog.

Mostly I promote affiliate products through my blog. I am using a couple of popular premium tools to run my blog. Besides, affiliate marketing I am working on my other blog MoneyGyaan.com & will try to generate income using Google AdSense.

15. Feel free to throw your comments about Traffic Crow.

Traffic Crow is one of my favorite blogs, and personally, I know Sathish for a long time. I truly admire him as he is doing some great work by educating people around him through his training programs.

Teaching is the best profession, and Sathish can mix both blogging & teaching. Frankly speaking, this is something I am also passionate about and looking forward to doing something on a similar path.

Thank you so much for giving me this opportunity to become a part of your blog. This is a huge honor to get a space in your interview column with so many experts. I hope my answers will be helpful for the readers.

Conclusion

I must thank Santanu for accepting my interview request and answering all my questions. I am sure that this interview with Santanu will be more helpful for the new bloggers and motivational too. My readers, let’s all wish him to have a big success in his blogging career. And, he is happy to respond to your questions, if any. Do drop your comments below and interact with Santanu.