How to Become a Blogger | My Introduction

After hours of helping people make a killer blog and get higher visibility on Google, I decided to start this “How to Become a Blogger” Series. This Blog will consist of my own experiences and experiments in Blogging and are completely based on what I tried and turned out to be true (so far!). I will be covering most of the basic and few advanced topics in next few write-ups. Feel free to ask any question/clarification or if you want any post on a specific topic. I will be more than happy to assist.

First let me tell about my-blog-self, I am Tarun Kumar Jaiswal, mostly known by the name “Tarun Reflex” (Reflex is not my surname, It’s just my handle J), I started blogging on Yahoo 360 in 2003. Then moved to Blogger with my first blog “Tarun Reflex | Personal, Political and Technical” which is still running and had over 5,00,000 hits. It contains my personal rants and musing along with technical discussion/tutorial. I also covered some leading topics related to Indians (e.g. Six Pay Commission) and Technical news (e.g. launch of iPhone, Google’s new services etc). Its’ my principal blog and I tried most of the tricks and tweaks on this blog only. So it looks a bit garbled.

Next to pursue my technical interest, I started “Tarun Reflex | Tech Perk” and “Windows Help Center”.Tech Perk mainly contains XP to VISTA migration assistance tutorials like “How to Run Oracle on Vista” whereas Windows Help Center has system speed up tips & tricks . It also contains all the hacks on Windows XP that I published in my two series “Windows XP – Tips and Tricks” E-book in Summer-2006. It has more than 300 such hacks that will make work easier for a general user and advanced customizations for a power user.

Then came one of my personal favorites “Tarun Reflex” Wordpress Blog. It was a non-commercial blog dedicated to Indian Govt. Employees and had some flavors of technical and literary spices like some book reviews and new technological updates. It got Page Rank 4 in 3 months and had over 15,00,000 visitors. It’s featured in “Blog of the Day” List on official Wordpress Blog for 3 days in August 2008. It has had over 58,000 hits in a single day! However, It was banned by Wordpress due to some policy violations. It was about some book download links. You can still search for “Tarun Reflex” on Google and find this blog right on the top of the list.

“Tarun Reflex” Wordpress Blog helped me a lot in learning about marketing and publicity. I experimented with Email Branding, RSS Updates & Customizations, Viral Marketing, Incentives and contest schemes, Audience Capturing via this blog. Due to larger audience, I was able to perceive the general behavioral aspects of audience with respect to their needs & expectation from a blog/website. It made me realize the importance of Social Networking and Social Bookmarking. Because of all these experiments, I believe this blog got this much audience and exposure on Google. The Blog was on wordpress.com domain so customizations were very limited. It’s a very good example of having your Blog/website visible on Google without having html or SEO codes in your Design templates. And all the credit goes to Social Bookmarking as well as email branding to name a few! The gist is to make your Blog available in all formats at all the time, Be it mobile version,Facebook Notes,RSS,SMS updates,email,Tweets,Diggs,Blinks and trackbacks!

In winters of 2008, I had the opportunity to meet online a very good and creative person Neil from USA. He had just started his blog by the name – 1000 Awesome Things .It motivated me to list 1000 awesome things about India. Anyone living in India will undoubtedly agree to the fact that there is more to this country than others can see. One can visit India for a week or two & get a view that is like a view of a river through the mist above. As some sociologist made a hierarchy of understanding Inter Cultural and Cross Country relationships & interactions as: Action > Behavior > Thought Pattern > Culture > Values, where Action forms the first impression of a country and its people. My Blog: 1000 Things About India .On this blog I write what I feel about India and what’s so unique about it. We all have been hearing since our very childhood that “India is a country that’s one of its kind” and that “There are much more differences among different states of India than countries in Western hemisphere”. This blog is an attempt to enlist those features that make us so Unique, so Indian! This is a blog that I am proud to own.

Neil’s Blog has been featured on BBC, NEWSWEEK and many media agencies of international repute. Personally, I count his blog at par with PostSecret and Found .

I am an avid reader and personally love to read and share what I read. I always prefer hardcopy of a book over EBooks and mostly buy books even after I already have its electronic format. A book is a treasure that never diminishes. In summer of 2005, I found lots of people on the Internet searching for EBooks. There were posts all over the Bulletin Boards and Discussion Forums regarding Book requests. What I found ironic was the fact that all the books were available on the Internet but there was absolutely no order. No repository of links or available EBooks. So I started my two Esnips accounts: “Tarun Reflex” and “Reflex Tarun”. Both witnessed more than 15,00,000 hits before getting shut down. You can still find me on Esnips here . After discontinuing my Esnips Accounts, I decided to gather my audience and started an Orkut Community : Books and Books that will provide Weekly Deliveries of EBooks , Updates ,Reviews and answer to reader’s question about availability of EBooks and links along with bunching together like minded readers & having a good time. Now, this community has more than 10,500 members, answers to more than 5000 queries, 10,000+ EBook Download Links contributed by myself & other members of the community & Email List of more than 3000 subscriber who have registered for Weekly EBooks Delivery.

With growth in weekly subscribers, It became difficult for me to keep up with the growth rate of the community .Also the links posted in the Community were accessible to members only and were not searchable on the Google so in spite of having an organized collection of links and books, They were limited to few thousand readers only. To solve both these issues, I started a new support blog for BOOKS AND BOOKS Community by the name: Ebookspedia . It contains all that is available on Community in an organized way, tagged with appropriate keywords and searchable on Google. The three very basis of my “Books and Books” group are: Books and Books on Orkut, Books and Books on Blogger and Books and Books on Esnips .

Along with these three principal axis, I use Google Groups (not so efficient), Groups on Shelfari (A social networking site for Book Lovers), Facebook and FeedBurner. Among different audiences with entirely different reading tastes, The Romance Books Fan (or Mills and Boon Fans) have been one of the most regular visitors to my Blogs. As a notion of my thankfulness towards them, I dedicated Romance Books (Mills and Boon Book Blog) to them in May 2009. It contains links to my uploads on Rapidshare. It has a simple, easy-to-use, romantic look and feel for rich user experience.

Inspired by Abhinav Bindra’s Gold in Olympics, I started a Blog on London 2012 Summer Olympic. It will track the timeline to Olympics, the preparations and finally the games themselves.

Everyday, I receive loads and loads of email. While some of them have to be answered, some are just forwards. And believe me, the kind of forwards that I get are very interesting. However, I rarely forward emails to other so to make these general forwards available I launched Amazing Email Forwards Blog. Mostly, I post on this blog via Email so it is optimized for simple look.

Indian Budget 2009: This Blog consists of Union Budget and Railway Budget information along with download links for complete Budget report and announcements. It has section wise important announcements and new policies. “1000 Movies to See Before you Die” is my another blog.

The Indian Initiatives: 

Indian Initiatives is all about new policies & plans by Govt. Of India and new startups by Indian. It aims to bridge the semantic gap between the ‘Common Man’ and Government by spreading awareness about new Govt. Policies and how they could be useful for us. “Indian Initiatives” encourages new entrepreneurs and provides them a platform to voice their opinions and ideas.

For People: 

We are researching on web search patterns and intellignet information retrieval techniques . We aim to combine the three dimesions of Information – “How” ,”What” and “When” and provide you complete information in time and on the go!

For Government:

We bring into light the Government policies that embody in themselves a huge untapped potential of social change and development. By unfolding the jargaon, we present the central idea of policies in front you so that you can understand it in a DIY(Do it yourself) manner.

For Entrepreneurs:

We encourage new Entrepreneurs and strive to support them by voicing their ideas and opinions. Let us know about you new venture and we will do an independent third party review of your business idea and showcase it on our site in front of vast audience.

For NGOs (Non Government Organizations):

We support NGOs and provide them a platform where they can put forth their noble causes & stir awareness about their mission. NGOs can provide us with thier description and we will showcase them here, making their work known to the Web-World.


For more info on Indian Initiatives , you can contact me here or Register here.

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