Transitioning from being a blogger into a digital marketer
The story of my online adventures
2003
I had just started my PhD at University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, USA. Didn’t have much time to fool around as I was busy preparing for classes and lab work. Towards the end of 2003, I started spending a lot of time online reading news or searching for scientific information when I started to see a lot of first page search results were in fact blog posts. I was new to blogging and it seemed like a fancy “time pass” at best.
2005
Two years later I was actively reading and commenting on other people’s blogs. Some topics of interest were astronomy, science & technology, sports (cricket), and learning new stuff — Photoshop, Illustrator etc. Towards the end of 2005 is when I really started writing my own blog on Blogspot which later became Google blogger. It was an exciting time as Google kept on releasing one feature update after another and I was really hooked on to this whole blogging mania. It was a time of great change in the way people looked on internet content. All of a sudden content became too personal and anyone can become an internet celebrity overnight. There was not much competition and whoever came first got the good domain names and were able to establish their digital real estate.
2008
By this time, I have been running several blogs one on each topic and it was difficult to keep them all updated while juggling with the pressure of graduation. It was a very difficult time for me and I completely stopped writing. I will always regret abandoning my blogs. Today it would have been more valuable just to retain such long standing internet real estate.
During this period, I relocated to Houston, TX to pursue my post doctoral fellowship training at MD Anderson Cancer Center. It was again an exciting time to be on the internet. Wordpress was gaining popularity and tumblr was the new kid in the block. I started fresh with a couple of wordpress blogs continuing on the same topics that I had abandoned previously. But it was never the same thing. The blogging space had become too crowded and getting traffic to your site was next to impossible. After six months, I felt miserable with single digit visitors per day on my blogs and literally zero comments. That is when I decided to spend some money to self host wordpress on GoDaddy.
I started exploring new ideas for my new blog and ended up launching a news portal for creative folks. I had written some really good articles on web designing and graphics designing. It ran successfully for many months before I shut it down for lack of growth. Again, I failed to backup the content — a costly mistake which I will never repeat again.
2010
http://wedesignapps.com is born
With the introduction of smartphones, Android OS was gaining popularity as it was cheaper compared to Apple. A new era of Appstore had arrived. Everyone wanted to jump into the App development business and the industry was getting all fired up with massive amounts of Apps released everyday. I decided to launch my first digital startup to join this bandwagon of App developers. After a lot of brainstorming, came up with the brand name of “we-design-apps” as I had originally intended it to be a community blog of App designers and developers.
It even had a nice slogan — { you define : we design}
Well it was OK for a while. I was busy with my day job and found very little time to handle all the business activities alone. I ended up outsourcing most of the tasks to a team in North India. Finally it was too much taxing on my work and one fine day I just forgot to renew the hosting.
In spite of my lazy and lackadaisical attitude the brand name survived because of guest posts. Unintentionally, the name had stuck in many forums and beta sites. People kept emailing me almost every week asking to develop their next big App idea but I never responded. To all those folks, please consider this my sincere apology for not providing you the customer support you deserve.
2012
I am back in India, starting a fresh chapter in career. There is absolutely no time for blogging. But being the business development guy, I ended up spending a lot of time learning about digital marketing starting with search engine optimization (SEO). SEO was huge those days — black hat or white hat nobody really cared. Today we worry a lot about SEO best practices and try to be on good side of Google’s radar.
My blogging experience really helped me in my career — tell that to your friends if they mock you for being a blogger. Plus it helped me to develop self learning practices, keep my mind active, made me an independent thinker, better connect with people, improve my writing skills, and also to improve my communication skills.
2013
I realized that digital marketing is nothing without quality content and where do you go for quality content — blogs !!!
Not just any blog, the best places to source original content is from the blogs of key opinion leaders (KOLs) in your respective industry. Social media has conquered the marketing domain by storm. Social sharing has become the single most important strategy of any digital marketer.
2015
Back to blogging
It was one hell of a roller coaster ride over all these years. And I am really glad that I found Medium as the next big blogging platform. This is actually my second article in six months. I am planning to write more frequently. So stay tuned and follow me for more updates
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