Bloggers Face-Off: Keith Dsouza vs. Ross McKillop

Tech blogs are the bread and butter of the blogosphere. Launching one is no guarantee of success, but if you manage to set yourself apart from the crowd, the returns are pretty good. Just consider that combined the two blogs that we are featuring today receive around 50,000 daily page views….

The first blog is Techie-Buzz.com, authored by Keith Dsouza. If you are interested in software, freeware utilities and Internet tips, make sure to subscribe to Keith’s blog.

SimpleHelp.net is our second blog. The man behind it is Ross McKillop, and he basically answers to all sorts of tech questions, making the blog a must read for people interested in tech tutorials and how-to articles.

Keith Dsouza	Ross McKillop
1. How many hours per day do you dedicate to the blog?
About 2-4 hours on a regular day and 6 hours on the weekends	Depends on the day. Sometimes not at all, sometimes 16 hours. When I started out I did a string of 14 hour days for 3 or 4 straight months. Last month, I spent about 12 hours total working on my site
2. How many page views does your blog get daily?
The blog gets more than 15,000 page views everyday	Around 35,000 page views per day
3. Do you make money with it? From what sources?
The monthly revenue is around $2.5K per month, its consistently growing every month. The revenue mostly comes from Google AdSense, Infolinks, Affiliate Programs, Direct Ad Sales and Sponsored Reviews	Yes, my blogs are my sole source of income. I use AdSense, several CPM networks and a couple of affiliate products
4. How long did it take for you to reach 1,000 subscribers?
A pretty long time I must say, not that I noticed it initially, because most of the time I was focusing on increasing traffic, now I also concentrate on getting more regular readers to the blog	I honestly don’t remember. Due to the type of site I have, the number of RSS subscribers has never been an accurate reflection of its popularity or traffic. 80% of my visitors come from Google searches.
5. Can you build a popular blog on a free WordPress theme?
Yes, as long as you customize it and make it unique along the way.	Absolutely yes. As long as you customize it enough, use your own logo etc.
6. What is the biggest blogging mistake you did?
My biggest blogging mistake came in the initial lifespan of the blog, where I took a break for few months and did not concentrate on it, that period was the peek for bloggers, and many of my friends made it big, however I still regret it and have been working hard to nullify that mistake	Not talking to bloggers in my own niche and paying too much attention to “pro bloggers”. I’ve since found the “pro bloggers” often provide very general information that doesn’t apply to all sites or topics, in fact some of their advance can actually hurt your site. Daily Blog Tips (obviously) and Copyblogger are two that I do read regularly though
7. Twitter is a distraction or a good promotional tool?
It’s a great promotional tool. On the other hand, I do find lots of post ideas from Twitter and also use it to communicate with others, overall I love the simplicity of the service	Depends on the blog topic/niche. For me, total waste of time. I use it merely as a tool to chat with friends, not at all to promote my blog
8. Do you think AdSense makes a blog look unprofessional?
Yes, but it depends on placement of the ads, if placed improperly it turns out to be more intrusive to end users, AdSense ads are more likely to be clicked by search engine users and they should be targeted more at them	If it’s the blog for a large corporation/well established company – yes it would be hugely unprofessional. If it’s your *own* blog, AdSense is totally acceptable
9. If you could give an advice for a novice blogger, what would it be?
Don’t worry if you can’t write on a day to day basis, blogging is all about relaxing and giving your best, mistakes do happen, but then without mistakes how would we learn? So stop worrying about less traffic and revenue, they are bound to grow someday	It’s absolutely possible to make a living from blogging, but it won’t happen overnight. Pick a topic you’re interested in or you’ll find it more of a drag than any 9-5. Find friendly people in your niche and ask for advice. Try and find a topic that the ‘average’ person finds interesting
10. What is the best way to increase website traffic?
Organic traffic from search engines are the biggest traffic puller for all the top blogs, so concentrate on content, learn how to optimize your title and URLs for SEO, these matter pretty much, when Google or other search engines decide to show your blog on which position you sit at in search results	Write as much content as possible. Because I have a “tutorial” site, I look for questions that people frequently ask (on message boards, Yahoo Answers, etc.) then write the answers to those questions. The more questions I answer, the more traffic I get. It is very much worth mentioning – my answer to this question does not apply to all blogs. Don’t write something just for the sake of writing. You might end out with a very boring site