Interview With Pradeep Kumar: Secrets Of Building Valuable Communities!

The Insights Of Building a Successful Blog Community! With One and Only, Brother S.Pradeep Kumar! 

We had a privilege to have our brother Pradeep Kumar, of Hellboundbloggers for an interview, back in 2012, when we explored his personal side. Just loved it altogether, and he was an amazing inspiration in my blogging journey too.

This interview is unique and will explore one of the strong points of our brother, i.e building amazingly active communities, that are more like a family.

• [message]
• ##check## Who Is Brother S.Pradeep Kumar?
• Knowing him since about 4 years know, brother S. Pradeep Kumar is the founder of a very popular technology blog HellBoundBloggers (HBB). Since then, he has founded various successful online ventures including Moviesdrop, Foodgravy to name a few.
  Brother Pradeep is an inspiration for many in aspiring bloggers!

Without any further due, lets find out the insights and golden tips in creating healthy communities like Facebook Group, Forum etc.

Me: Question #1

First of all, thank you so much for being here once again for BloggingeHow readers. It's been a long time since we had you here for an interview.

A lot has changed since and you've MashaAllah progressed a lot!

Your Facebook groups are rocking I must say specially your FoodGravy one :P It makes me go hungry even when I'm full xD

Its been 4-5 years now that I've been following HellBound Bloggers (HBB) that has over 7k Facebook page fans.

You lately started two new ventures i.e FoodGravy and MoviesDrop which I absolutely love.

I was amazed to see your success with these 2 Facebook groups/communities that you have built up. When new brands start, one of the first things they do is secure their social media pages.

With these 2 recent projects of yours, we are curious to know, what made you go with building a community via a Facebook group, rather than creating another blog with it's Facebook page?

Him: Answer #1

Hi brother. :)

It's an immense pleasure to connect with you once again and I'm glad to see you are doing awesome as well.

I don't have a team for Slashsquare (our blog network and web consulting media), it's me and my blogs, so I don't think it'll wise to launch the blog first and then build the audience for that.

We all know how hard it is to manage a blog, it's like growing up a baby and I don't want to spoil my baby. I always believed in the power of communities and thanks to Facebook, I can easily start my journey with their Groups option.

The same happened for MoviesDrop, I didn't start the blog first, I first launched our Social Media profiles (like FB Page, FB Group and Twitter profile).
 
MoviesDrop Facebook group was doing potentially very great, I got plenty of active members, it was more or less like a family to me. It was easy for me to see what they want, what movie freaks usually search for and then I prepared the content for our MoviesDrop.com blog accordingly.

Instead of searching for the readers, I built a community and made the readers for our blog. But at the end, it's all about sharing & learning quality information.

Me: Question #2

Facebook pages offer a feature of 'user posts' to engage the fans. How do you see this feature vs groups as a whole?

What do you think makes Facebook groups more empowering in this scenario?

Him: Answer #2

Both Facebook pages and groups are more or less the same but with Facebook groups, it's a person to person interaction, whereas on Facebook pages, it's like brand to person interaction.

I felt I need to be connected closely with our members/readers to know more about their requirements and problems.

I also believe they feel comfortable with speaking with the person behind the brand, it increases trust and helps the brand to grow further.

Whatever brand I start under Slashsquare, it'll surely have both a Facebook page and a Facebook group. It's mandatory. :D

Me: Question #3

Me #3 Don't you think you're loose quite some revenue and traffic on the table by investing your time with Facebook groups vs if you had made a dedicated forum on your blog for interaction purposes?

Really curious on this one :D

Him: Answer #3

I somehow agree with what you have said mate. A dedicated forum on our blog would have been nice but a Facebook group is something people are close with and I can expect active participation via that.


Moreover it'll be hard for them (members) to get proper notifications for each and every thread if I have a forum.

We'll be launching a forum for HellBound Bloggers (HBB) or DeviceBAR soon, but the Facebook group will remain the same, even I feel very comfortable there, talking with my buddies. :D

Facebook groups are majorly for brand visibility and trust I guess. The more they love it, the more they respect it and it goes on.

Me: Question #4

How do you monetize these 2 popular groups? Do you share any relevant affiliate products every now and then?

I'm sure readers would be inch close to screen to read your response to this one <3

Him: Answer #4

 Sharing of direct affiliate links are totally prohibited on all the Slashsquare network groups bro. :D This rule helps me to keep the group clean and informative.

 That's why even I restricted myself from sharing our own affiliate links. We can share affiliate links if someone is requesting for a product or service, but apart from that, no way.

All those Facebook groups are not for monetization bro, my focus is much more bigger than this, I wanted to build a community, a proper community for the passionate people who want to learn and help others with their knowledge.

People often tell me why don't you take some time off from your Facebook groups and relax yourself from your work, but they don't understand, only when I'm active on my groups I feel relaxed. :D

Me: Question #5

Have you made Whatsapp groups (or on any other platform) for these popular brands (FoodGravy and MoviesDrop) too?

If so?

How do you see Whatsapp in contrast with Facebook groups? What's more rewarding in terms of ease of management, more user engagement and overall fast rise of a brand?

• [message]
• ##check## You Can Become a Part Of AskHassam Family! :)
• You can ask any questions related to blogging in AskHassam Forum, which is more like a family <3

Him: Answer #5

Actually we made WhatsApp groups for HellBound Bloggers (HBB), DeviceBAR, MoviesDrop, BookWritten, MusicBooze and FoodGravy.

Initially all the groups were awesome, irregardless of the annoying notifications, we totally loved it.

But, at one point, when the same people are present in all the groups, it's like, hard to control them to restrict the topics. People talk about Food on BookWritten, Gadgets on MoviesDrop and it goes on.

I didn't mind it to be honest. But I was quite busy with other works, and I was not able to properly moderate it. I usually keep in the morning, so when I wake up in the evening, it'll be like 1000+ notifications on all our groups.

WhatsApp groups are very very hard for professional community building. As an admin it's my duty to keep the groups focused and on-topic, but I badly failed. Lessons learned, hopefully someday I might re-open it or focus on expanding our Facebook groups further.

Me: Wrap Up!

Thank you so much brother for taking out time and sharing your experiences and valuable thoughts on creating a family like community! InshaAllah I'm sure we all would have learned a lot, out of this healthy discussion of ours.

• [message]
• ##check## How To Follow Brother Pradeep?
• You can checkout his main blog i.e Hellboundbloggers and Follow him On Facebook Personal Profile, HBB Facebook Page.

You can also checkout my interview with:

1. Interview Of Muhammad Mustafa Ahmedzai Of MyBloggertricks!
2. INTERVIEW: Fiverr's Top-Rated Seller Marc aka Anarchofighter!

Blogging Tips , Interview

Interview With Pradeep Kumar: Secrets Of Building Valuable Communities!

Featureso Thursday, 28 January 2016

5 Vital SEO Tips That You MUST Apply To Your Blog In 2012

SEO is a vital part of a blogs backbone. Beginners often tend to wonder the STEPS that they need to take right away to COMPLETE out their entire search engine optimization process. I take this opportunity to list out all those vital SEO tips that you must apply to your blog in order to expect any traffic as a result of consistent posting, that you would do on your blog.

What You Could Expect Once You're Done With This?

If you implement these SEO techniques on your blog right away, you could start expecting traffic from search engines with in months or even before. The purpose of search engine optimization is to make your articles search engine friendly so that they would index your content, as you really wish.

Other wise, at the end of year with out these steps, you would find you're self wasting your entire time in writing great articles. This is one of the greatest ways to reach out to the world with the help of search engines. And for that you got to make your site juicy for the search engines bots.

SEO Vital Step #1 Taking Care Of Meta Tags

You cant just get traffic from search engines without preparing your meta tags. These tags basically give out detail about your blog and its content in specific to the search engines.

The main tags that you need to use are:

• Title tags
• Keywords tags
• Description tags

 For that use the codes below (for blogger users). WordPress users can directly use these Top 4 SEO Plugins For WordPress In 2012

For Blogger Users:


Add This Code For Displaying Your Blog Title Properly. 

(Go to Edit HTML and add these codes under <head> tags)

<!--START Page Title Configuartion-->
    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;index&quot;'>
    <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
    <b:else/>
    <title><data:blog.pageName/> | <data:blog.title/></title>
    </b:if>
<!--END Page Title Configuartion-->

 Add This Code For Configuring Meta Tags

<!--START META tags-->


<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta content='YOUR BLOG DESCRIPTION' name='description'/>


<meta content='YOUR BLOG KEYWORDS' name='keywords'/>
</b:if>


<!--END START META tags-->   

That's all in terms of adding meta tags and title tags properly for your blog. Now search engine can easily index your blog in their search results and can find your articles easily. Now the more frequently you would write (may be daily) so Google bots would come by your blog and get your latest content into SERP.

SEO Vital Step #2 Use Keywords In Your First Paragraph (if not in the entire post)

Google often pays attention to the first paragraph. But these strategies are waving of with time as Google bots are getting smarter and you would often see sentences being indexed from within the entire content. But still using main keywords in the first paragraph really works well.

Say you writing a post on "white dogs cleanup techniques." Now make up your sentences that seem appropriate for readers too but also for search engines. Like using "white", "cleanup", "dogs" and most of these main keywords for which people can search in Google, can be used.

But again, make sure that you content quality in terms a good read of readers is not hurt. Your first priority would be readers. Write for people and search engines would be happy with your blog too.

SEO Vital Step #3 Interlink Your Articles

Search engines really love indexing and giving high rank to those articles that are interlinked well. Say you write 2 articles. One is linked with 5-6 of your previous articles but other not even to a single one. So the chance of the one with more links will better play in search engines.

Why?  Because the page rank that your main domain would get, could then better flow towards each of your linked articles. Think of these links are roads between cities (your articles). If there are no roads, than page rank could not access the next article. So its hell important in terms of getting traffic from your all articles through search engines.

SEO Vital Step #4 Nofollow Out Going links

Say your write an article where you need to link it to Facebook or YouTube etc. So always make sure that you tag those links with Nofollow.

How? Use the nofollow tag as shown below:

<a rel="nofollow" href="Your Out Going Link"> Your Anchor Text</a>

Add this rel="nofollow" tag to your out going links. Simple. That would not make your hard earned page rank to those sites.

BUT make sure that your post links (for interlinking articles) are dofollow (that you don't add that nofollow tag to them. Just leave them as they are).

SEO Vital Step #5 Make A Google+ Page

Google+ has being a hot topic in terms of the role it can play in your blogs SEO. Simply make out a Google+ page and plan its SEO properly.

Many times when you publish a post, Google might not show the direct link to your blog but instead a feed URL from Google+ page. So either way you get the traffic. So make sure you make one for you self.

That's all guys. Hope this post would help you out. SEO is much easy in WordPress as there are great SEO plugins for the users.

And Yeah, DONT forget to share the post with our friends if you linked. That means a LOT to me.

Astalavista!

You can now read out How I Increased Google Page Rank To PR 4 And Why You Couldnt

Blogging Tips , Building Traffic , SEO

5 Vital SEO Tips That You MUST Apply To Your Blog In 2012

Featureso Thursday, 14 January 2016

12 Effective Productivity Tips For Writers That You Dont Follow

We all want to be productive. Don't we? But being a productive personality needs a true level of commitment. 

We may set our goals high enough but only a productive day would  make us achieve those goals with the least amount of energy to put in. The more productive we make our self as a writer, the more targeted articles we could complete in a given set of time.

Productivity is the name of killing out distractions. And that's it. If you don't get disturbed with the environment around, i would say, congratulations!

The follow productivity tips would make you spend less time and achieve more in a given set of time. Every tip below is easily achievable, but the only thing that we need is a positive mind with aim to succeed. Once you're sincere with your self, no one can stop you touching the skies! Believe in your self.

For me, writing is exploration; and most of the time, I'm surprised where the journey takes me.
Jack Dann

Lets start-

Productivity Tips 1# Set Out An Aim For The Day

Easy. Just think over the amount of articles that you aim to write in a given day. This depends on every individual and the level of commitment in his daily life for other responsibilities to work on with. Say you're a student like me, who goes out to university from 8am to 4 pm.

In my case, i plan to write 1-2 articles daily. To make my day productive, i utilized the breaks between my lectures. By the end of the day, when i head towards home, i have already completed one of the articles.

The next one comes out later in the night, when i feel peaceful. The routine may change but the aim to achieve a set goal doesn't.

Productivity Tips 2# Start Research Instantly

The first thing that i start over with is by a research work on a particular topic that i wish to write upon. I often visit blogs (my hobby) and i get ideas for my daily writing material. Read out what others have to say about the given topic.

Combine those thoughts with your own experience and give it out a nice flow in your own style. The emphasis of this point is to carry out research before you start writing on.

Once you know what you need to talk about and what points you should be considering in the post, the rest gets extremely easy and becomes the matter of typing skills that you have.

Productivity Tips 3# Learn Typing!- Crucial For Writers

Not many people talk about this but to me, its one of the most crucial elements in making out your day productive.

I still remember the time when it use to take an entire hour for me to type in just a couple of sentences. I used to come to a point where i could even swear that a particular alphabet is not in the entire keyboard! Then finally it was like, "There you are!"

For this matter, i would recommend Typing Test. They really help me out in achieving a decent typing speed that i have today. Once you get the feel of the characters placement and your fingers start accessing the right points, then after that, its just about practice. Always write, even a smallest user name in the proper fingers placement fashion.

That helped me a lot!

Productivity Tips 4# Destroy All The Distractions

The worst distractions that i have to face while typing in my thoughts, or even while research time, are other 'attractive' articles around. I love reading articles. Greatly worked out blog post titles attract me like anything, and i often tend to start reading them.

You may wish to read: 4 Advices For Choosing The Best Blog Post Title For Better SEO

Focusing on what we do is the most important part. The moment you feel like you're getting out of the track, pull your self back! Apart from that, restrict your self from using any social media sites, or simply anything online that distracts you away from the writing goal.

Productivity Tips 5# Find Your Self a Peace full Place

Its too important! Make sure you don't lie in a place where you even forget your last sentence that you thought of to write. Many people face this problem due to childrens around. Get into a separate room where you can concentrate on your writing task.

Think of it as a meditation time. Maintain no connection with the world.

Productivity Tips 6# Put Your Cellphone On Silent

Cheap messaging rates have their draw backs! What more could you expect with a SMS package that gives you 700 free messages with 8 Rs/- or 0.05$ !

Friends wont let you live a life of peace. So i make sure that my cellphone is on silent mode and i wont reply to any before my writing aim is complete.

Productivity Tips 7# Standing Table Desk Are Preferred

While we think of choosing a peaceful place, with the comforts of life, you would often find your self in a situation something similar to this. So for this purpose, many people recommend working out with a standing computer stand where you feel like you're at the mission, the entire time.

Productivity Tips 8# Take Short Breaks

Taking short breaks in between what i do, works the best for me. Say i complete researching out the material that i have to write upon, i would often take a round at my house, eat things around and come back with in 5 minutes or so.

You don't want to linger it on too much as that would disturb your work flow. The more work you do, the more breaks you would be needing. It depends on every individual. Many people feel more productive in working out in a single go, with the first break coming up once they have completed their major task. Like after the first article completion.

Find out what works for you best.

Productivity Tips 9# Write First-Edit Later

This is one of mistakes that many beginners do, is that they aim to write the perfect material in the first go. That would not happen or it would take years to do so. An interesting article would maintain its flow and rhythm and you cant afford to break that.

Its the matter of word revelation that takes place once you are in momentum for typing. Keep the words flowing and write in your natural style. Minor spelling mistakes, or even structure enhancements can be done once you have the content written out.

Editing must be done at the end.

Productivity Tips 10# Be Clear About The Time To Be Spent

Time management is another philosophy that many of us fail to implement in our daily lives. Evey single successful personalities we know today had a respect for time. Make sure you know the rough amount of time that you need to spend on a particular task.

When i start researching out for my articles, i aim to complete it with in 30 minutes or so. That helps me start out with my actual typing after the deadline. Things floating in air without aims wont take us any where. We would find our self packed in an ever ending loop.

Productivity Tips 11#  Commitment- The Tool Of Leaders

Nothing can be achieved without commitment. You may write 10 articles today, but then loose hope after that. Stay committed to your daily goals. Make sure you don't get up or get distracted before you complete your article.

Anything that seems fancy in between is just the devil- Spit over it!

Productivity Tips 12#  Reading Out Success Stories

Reading out success stories and the way leaders make their life productive would help you out being committed to what you do. We all need that extra bit of pull and that is motivation.

You may like to read: Arnold Schwarzenegger's 6 Motivational Advices For Bloggers

So that's all my friends. All we could do is to think positively and find solutions of our problems. You know your problems, that is the lack of productivity. And you were hear to find a solution for it. You have the motivation with you.

Just need to implement it now. Good luck in utilizing your time in the best of your skills.

Peace-


Which of these productivity tips do you follow?

Blogging Tips , Building Traffic , Top Lists

12 Effective Productivity Tips For Writers That You Dont Follow

Featureso Tuesday, 12 January 2016

Genesis VS Thesis � Which Theme Framework Is The Future?

Genesis Or Thesis! This is the ultimate smack down between the two best Wordpress theme frameworks around!

 If you've a started a WordPress blog, the first thing you'd want to do is to choose a professional template. You've two options to proceed. Either you could install a standalone template. There are thousands of WordPress templates around. Free ones and premium ones on Themeforest too.

Though what many experts recommend is to make use of the amazing theme frameworks for WordPress that makes life a lot easier for any WordPress user. You would ask why so? Well, this post is all about letting you know more about these awesome WordPress theme frameworks and why I believe, Genesis theme framework for WordPress is taking over the market.

Why Thesis Died?

When Thesis theme framework was launched for WordPress in around 2006 or even before that, it took the Industry by storm. It wasn't that easy to customize any WordPress theme so easily. With the theme editor, you could simply customize any particular section of the theme you wished for.

Thesis was coming up with new updates and improved 'everything' until it the all controversial update 2.0

Epic Fail At 1.x To 2.0 Thesis Migration

After Thesis rolled out 2.0 update, it was quite an overall of the platform and it didn't had any considerable mechanism for the older version users to port their blogs current themes to the new 2.0 version.

That really turned off all the fans and soon we had another awesome competitor in the market, Genesis Theme Framework!

Thesis actually sucked at two things! Their documentation lacked a lot, specially after introducing Thesis 2.0. As per their team, they couldn't keep up with the work load and they understand that their documentation is lacking behind user's expectations.

Switching Over Of Matt Cuts

Matt cuts, heads of Google web spam team switched over to Genesis framework and soon after people started to wonder what could make him possibly do that? Was there any superiority that Genesis had over Thesis framework in terms of search engine optimization?

Difficultly Level

With Genesis, any beginner who doesn't have prior knowledge of programming or coding can get started. There a bunch of child themes available and there is absolutely no need to hire a developer to manage your theme.

Thesis definitely scared people when they had to know template specific programming functions to make changes to the theme. Thesis is a lot easier in this regard for sure.

If you're doing blogging professionally, you'd want to run multiple blogs and for that matter, Genesis is just amazing. You can set different child themes to your different blogs. In an all, you would be having an experience with the framework overall.

Genesis Specific Plugins

As the demand for Genesis continues to grow, more developers are creating plugins for Genesis rather than Thesis. There are a bunch of plugins that you'll just find specific to Genesis and are not available in Thesis. e.g Genesis Optimized Social Share, Genesis Footer Builder, Display Featured Image for Genesis, and many more.

That goes to show the power of Genesis Framework.

Genesis User Support

As Genesis is spreading like a viral, popular bloggers are shifting towards it, there is definteliy a lot of Q/A and FAQs already answered about the framework. In case you get stucked at something, you can easily get the answer with a simple Google search. Third party support for Thesis is shrinking.

Hope it would be easy for you to decide between the two WordPress theme frameworks. Do let me know if you've any further questions regarding the two frameworks :)

Blogging Tips , Wordpress

Genesis VS Thesis � Which Theme Framework Is The Future?

Featureso Thursday, 7 January 2016

[SOLVED] 'Your Computer Needs To Be Cleaned' Facebook ERROR!

Don't download it! It's a malware it's self!

Today I tried to login to Facebook to interact with AskHassam Facebook Family (Group) and Facebook gave me this weird login error/gate where I couldn't login. It mentioned that my computer is infected and I someone might be stealing the information with in. It suggested, that to solve the issue, you have to download this weird software 'Trend Micro' which would find the malware and clean it up!.

In fact! IT WAS THE MALWARE IT'S SELF! Glad that I first searched it up on Google and found that Facebook only officially endorses only McAfee and Microsoft Security Essentials anti viruses offically. Anything other than that is a pure malware its self.

How To Solve This?

There are many solutions out there BUT the easiest is to clear out all the cookies in your browers related to Facebook.

For Firefox:

Step #1 Go to Options >> Privacy >> Remove Individual Cookies

Step #2  search for "Facebook.com" and select and highlight all the cookies that mention Facebook in it's address. Then hit 'delete Selected'.

For Chrome:

Step #1 Go to 'Tools Menu'

Step #2 Click on 'Options'

Step #3 Click on 'Under the Hood'

Step #4 Under 'Privacy' section select "Show Cookies'

Step #5 A new window will open called 'Cookies' Here you can see all the cookies within your Google Chrome Browser.

Step #6 Simply highlight the Facebook related cookies and click "Remove"

Hope this will help! Once the cookies are removed, you can simply login back to your Facebook account seamlessly! Do let me know if this solved your problem!

• [message]
• ##check## Also Checkout
• 10 Facebook Cover Photo Themes You Can Make For Your Self

Facebook Tutorials

[SOLVED] 'Your Computer Needs To Be Cleaned' Facebook ERROR!

Featureso Saturday, 2 January 2016