Deepak Kanakaraju Shared his Digital Journey and Tells us Why He Left his Job

 

As a part of our BloggersIdeas interview series, today we have Experienced Digital Marketing Consultant  Deepak Kanakaraju from DigitalDeepak who  has recently quitted his job to live his dream. Deepak will share his journey of 5+ years in Digital marketing world. I am sure you will learn lot from his internet marketing skills.

First of all thanks a lot for accepting my interview proposal. I and my readers are very pretty glad to have you. Please tell us about yourself and your educational background?

I graduated in 2008 from Salem. I am a Civil Engineering graduate. I chose civil engineering because I wanted to build big buildings (I still want to) and I love the art of creating amazing structures.

Towards the end of my engineering degree I had a lot of free time and I wanted to make money online so that I could buy myself a Moto Razr phone. That was the hottest phone at that time and my target was to earn $300 (Rs.15,000 approx at that time).

I started experimenting with blogging and BikeAdvice.in was born. I ran BikeAdvice.in from 2008-2012. I sold the website for $25,000 in 2012 and it was getting around a million page views at that time.

Now I am blogging about digital marketing at my blog DigitalDeepak.com and I am consulting companies on digital marketing strategy. I am also working on a book which will be published soon.

How to do SEO for new domain. What strategies you would use for its ranking and branding for that new domain?

Google is becoming very intelligent. I would like to think of Google as a real person who is reviewing millions of sites manually from an ivory tower. Google may not be as intelligent as a real person, but they are building algorithms so that it mimics a human reviewer as much as possible. They are always getting closer to that goal.

SEO is completely linked to quality and relevancy signals. Relevancy signals are sent by webmasters through on page optimization. Quality signals are sent to Google by users.

When a user spends more time on the site, comments and shares the article on social media or on his own website, Google picks up this signal and understands that your site is of good quality. They will send you more traffic via search.

When you start with a new domain, forget about Google or any search engine. Focus on making stuff that people want and spread the word as if Google doesn’t exist.

I am fortunate to receive a lot of free traffic from search engines but I would still be in business and continue blogging if there was no search engine traffic.

Which affiliate programs you worked with. What are your niches?

I have worked with a ton of affiliate networks and promoted all types of campaigns. CJ.com is my favorite affiliate network since 2007.

Mostly I try to contact the advertiser directly and sign up for their in-house affiliate program which cuts out the middle-man. I have had good success with health and education niches.

I am now focusing all my energy on creating products and have stopped most of my affiliate marketing activities.

How much money you made affiliate programs till now? Any specific monthly  earnings you would like to share?

The earnings are very up and down and there is no consistency. But I can confidently say that I have earned more than $100,000 in the past 7 years via affiliate marketing.

Amazon associates affiliate program contributes to around 25% of that. CJ.com would be another 20%. Rest is very scattered.

What are some content marketing strategies for tech bloggers? How can they rank for high competitive keywords like iPhone 6?

To be honest, I don’t think a tech blogger can rank for a keyword like iPhone 6. Too many factors come into play and unless you evolve into a publishing company, capitalizing on high search keywords would be very very difficult, though not impossible.

The best way for tech bloggers would be to focus on small tech niches or develop a unique voice in the industry. And BTW, I own the domain TechBlogger.com and I plan to develop it in the near future!

How is your experience while doing a job, do  you really like your job?

I have worked in 4 companies so far and that happened in a span of 2 years. That says a lot whether I love doing jobs or not 🙂

I have learned a lot and that makes working in these company worth it. I have quit my job again as of July 31st 2015 and I am back on my own now.

I guess I will never work for someone as a full time employee again. However, I am open to a V.P. of Marketing role with stock options in a reputed company.

What is the best & worst thing you would like to say about my BloggersIdeas blog. Please be open to this question?

The best thing I like about your blog is that you have a unique voice. I believe the blogger is behind the success of every blog. Else it is just a content portal.

Area of improvement: You can do a better job in organizing the best content that you have published in a neat way. And may be you can publish a book from the posts you have written already.

The website is a bit cluttered with too many elements on the site. You should work on the design and user experience 🙂 I also like the way you do the video interviews. That is something I have never become comfortable with!

To the readers: Thanks a lot for reading my answers and visit DigitalDeepak.com for digital marketing tips!

I hope you enjoy this interview with Digital expert Deepak. If you have any questions about this interview, please do ask in the comments below !

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