merkal2005: Hi Rajeev, please tell us about yourself

mintblogger: I'm a 31 year old professional blogger. Happily single and enjoy playing chess and watching birds. I graduated from Delhi University and earned my Computer science master's degree in 2000. After joining as a programmer, I spent about 3 years in software development. My software development domain was (CTI) Computer Telephony Integration. I am net savvy and follow about 192 RSS feeds to keep me updated about what's happening around the world.


merkal2005: When and why did you start blogging? Do you like writing in general?

mintblogger: In the year 2006, one of my old friend working in IBM, told me about blogging. Although I knew about it, but never took it seriously. He showed his own blog and gave me some insight about professional blogging. Since then I never looked back. First I created a personal blog on Wordpress.com, to learn the basics and brush my skills. Later on I started a blog on Blogger platform named 'Adsense Primer' http://adsense-primer.blogspot.com, which proved to be a fairly successful blog. Mintblogger was started in Jan,2008. After 4 months, it has PR3 with 104 subscribers and is making steady progress.


merkal2005: As you put your blog's name "mint blogger" I am sure most people will think you make good money from blogging. Do you make money from blogging?

mintblogger: To be honest, at present I do not make enough money that I can quit my day job. As you can see, I do not flood my blog with Ads. My strategy is to first gain the readers and later on monetize it aggressively. Presently, I earn about $40-$45/month from Mintblogger and about $30-$35/month from 'Adsense Primer'.


merkal2005: You started your career as a programmer. Do you have any interesting blogging software ideas? If I tell you I have a great blogging software idea in my mind, would you become partner with me? (I am serious man!)

mintblogger: I would like to hear your idea. Send me an e-mail and we can discuss it over Skype or Google talk.

Who knows, it may become the next revolution in blogosphere :)


merkal2005: What is missing today in the blogosphere? From your point of view, please tell us the future trends in social media and blogging.

mintblogger: I think the developments in blogoshpere are going at fairly steady pace.

In future, it seems the feed distribution services will undergo some major changes. For example, offering premium content to paid subscribers through same aggregators. Social Media services are bringing up some new and innovative ideas to market, brand and promote web content. Twitter is perhaps the most innovative social media service today.

With the upcoming of Opensocial, an initiative by Google, in future I think there will be central hub to maintain your social profile, friends and activities, which will be mashed up with all popular social media services.


Note: English is not my mother tongue, so please tolerate my English. Feel free to present this information in your style. If you have any question or doubt, just shoot me an e-mail.