Welcome to another episode of “The Naked Truth” on DailyMorningCoffee.. He calls himself the “WordPressNinja” and true to his blog’s title, he surely has some very interesting articles about CMS tools and WordPress in particular. Nico Julius has been writing for his blog wordpressninja.com for more than a year now and has covered most of the technical aspects of the wonderful blogging tool with emphasis on plugins, reviewing several books and third-party tools, various themes and how to customize them with a few little tweaks of the CSS and also he has a section of “WordPress Tutorials” which you really need to check out.
Back in September Nico wrote his first Guest Post for DailyMorningCoffee where he detailed out Why Not To Sell Your Website Cheap. I personally liked his post and immediately took credit for hosting it on my site 🙂
Recently Nico has reviewed the WordPress 3 CookBoook in a very detailed manner where he explains what can be found in the book(as in Contents), who the book is really meant for and also tells us what his personal gain was from reading the book.
Please do take a few minutes to read through this interview with Nico and do let us know your thoughts on the same. Comments and criticisms are always welcome @ DailyMorningCoffee.
I hope you are enjoying the naked truth series here on DMC. If you would like to get featured, reach out to me using the Contact Form.
| Nico Julius | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1. | How long have you been blogging? | I’ve been blogging for 1,5 year now. |
| 2. | How many blogs do you own and contribute for? | WordPressNinja.Com is my first and only blog for the moment. I also used to have a dutch blog, but I didn’t had the time to write enough posts for it. |
| 3. | What is the main purpose or objective of your blog? | When I started with WordPress, I found a lot of information on different websites and blogs about how to begin with WordPress. I actually put all that information, combined with my own experience on my blog. |
| 4. | How many posts do you write on an average per week? | Sometimes 1, sometimes 2. Most of my posts are tutorials and reviews, which take a lot more time then writing what’s on my mind. I always start with a lot of research or by testing plugins or services. Another important thing is keyword research. Then I write my post combined with as much screenshots as possible. Last months I also tried to make a video or presentation for my posts, especially video takes a lot of time. |
| 5. | How much time do you devote for your blog on a daily basis? | Everyday I check my mail, and I trie to answer all the questions. I think that takes about 30 minutes. I also try to write everyday a part of an article, also about 30 minutes. And then I think about an hour on checking other blogs, my stats,... |
| 6. | How much time do you spend on tracking RSS feeds? | None for the moment |
| 7. | What is your favorite social bookmarking site and Why? | Twitter is the only social media I’m really using for the moment. But I’m setting up a brand new Facebook page! |
| 8. | What is your blog’s monthly revenue? | Last 2 months it was around $100. That’s not much but also not bad because I only have 1 real affiliate article. |
| 9. | How many page views does your blog generate daily? | Around 370 page views a day |
| 10. | Name one blog(apart from yours!!) you read every day without fail. | I used to read blogs everyday, but now I don’t do that anymore. One of the blogs I still follow is ProBlogger. I also read dailymorningcoffee.com weekly, because it’s a very interesting blog to follow and to see it grow! |
| 11. | What is your blog’s main revenue generator? | Affiliate marketing. |
| 12. | Do you believe in Alexa rankings for measuring traffic? | For me it’s an indication, but nothing more then that. |
| 13. | Do you accept Guest Articles on your blog? | Yes, I accept them now and then. |
| 14. | Do you believing in spending money on promoting your blog? | I put a lot of efforts in SEO, but that’s just not enough. So now I’m writing my own e-book to promote my blog. I don’t pay for that, but it costs a lot of time to create that. I don’t want to spend to much money, because for me it’s a hobby. |
| 15. | Do you answer to all the comments on your blog? | I try, but sometimes it takes a couple of days. |
| 16. | How did you market your blog during your initial days to get the readers that you have? | I bought a domain that already had PageRank 1. I paid around $80 for it. Then I put all my efforts in writing SEO friendly articles. As a result, my articles indexed very fast in Google. I’ve also tried a lot of other things, but commenting on other blogs worked best for me. |
| 17. | Any mistakes to learn from and avoid? | So much that I could write a whole article about my mistakes. By the way, I’ll write that article in a couple of weeks ;-). |
| 18. | What is your source of new post ideas? | The best ideas are comments and questions I get from my visitors. |
| 19. | Is having a “niche” important to bloggers? | I think it’s important to write about a specific subject. Imagine you have a blog about different subjects. When a visitor comes to a page on your blog about cars through Google, chances are little that your visitor will also read your other articles about raising children (for example). But if your other articles are also about cars, chances are much bigger that your visitor will read more articles. |
| 20. | Any advice to a start-up blogger? | When starting a blog, you’re full of expectations: generating tons of traffic and maybe a lot of income. But you’ll experience very fast that reality is not like that. It takes a lot of work and dedication to gain some visitors, and most of us don’t even earn money at all. But if you keep this in mind, then you’ll see that blogging is fun, you’ll learn a lot new things and you’ll get to know a lot of people around the world. |
| 21. | Bio | Nico is a teacher, developer and likes to share his ideas and vision on WordPressNinja.Com |
| 22. | Follow me On: |
Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
RSS
Thank you for introducing me to Nico! As a web developer who loves working with WordPress, I will be reading his posts and adding him to my other good tech reads.
Leora – Thanks for the comment and I sincerely hope you two will hit it off, as I know how much you are into all the designing and changing CSS stuff.
Another great interview Praveen and I will also have to stop by and check out his blog. Anyone you think is worthy of an interview must be doing something right! 🙂
Keep them coming Praveen, I love hearing about bloggers I haven’t been introduced to yet.
Thanks for stopping by Adrienne. Good to know you found Nico resourceful for your website development stuff. Let me know how it goes.
Thanks for the introduction to Nico. I also blog about WordPress tutorials would have to check out his site see what I can learn.
Paul – I really think you two will have plenty to discuss about, am sure you will find Nico well versed with all the CSS and HTML code that you do so fine.