Interview With Rafi Chowdhury

Interview With Rafi Chowdhury Starting at 20.15 Today

I am being joined this evening by Rafi Chowdhury and we are going to be chatting about Online and Internet marketing.

Tonight Rafi I am going to be picking your brains

Would you mind telling us about yourself and what you are doing online?

Sure I am actually a digital consultant and I am based in Los Angeles what I do is work with 1 – 3 clients at a time and I handle all of their social media digital marketing backlink building pretty much anything digital. Whether it is inbound or outbound I pretty much take over their entire web presence and try to get them more traffic improve their SERP just about anything you could imagine.

Whether it is email marketing or search engine optimisation I can handle all of that.

What got you interested in doing an Internet Business?

I got into it when I launched my own website which I did when I was in college, I wanted to have a personal portfolio talking about what I do and at the time I had a chess business. Where I was doing chess coaching so I thought it would be a great way for me to talk about what I did with chess.

When you first launch a website the first thing you do is try to get it to look as pretty as possible. The very next thing you do is try to figure out how to get people to visit your website. I started playing around with it and after a while discovered on of the easiest ways I could do that was using Facebook to drive traffic back to my site.

So I started publishing blog posts, blogging, doing different testing got into Google analytics and stuff.I then started getting traffic to my own website. But I couldn’t convert this traffic because they where just people reading my blog and nothing happened. That’s when I thought what if I started to do this for someone that that the traffic mattered and they actually made more sales and got more clients.

I got my first few clients just by asking them if I could help them for free and if I did give them more traffic or sales then they could pay me a little fee. And that’s how I got my first few clients.

When you started at the very beginning did you have any mistakes you made when you first started online?

That’s what AD testing is all about making mistakes doing more testing making more mistakes and learning from those. I did plenty of mistakes and I still make mistakes every day and that’s a good thing I want to make mistakes because that is the only way I can learn and hack my way into different things.

One of the most common mistakes I made when I first started was keyword stuffing, so I would write these posts and try to insert my keyword three times in the title if I could 50,000 times within the post use the tags feature on wordpress and put my keywords all over the place.

I would even change the text colour to match the colour of the website background and I would put all of these keywords in there so people wouldn’t see the keywords. I thought Google would index that and it would help me.

But I soon realised that all these kind of tricks don’t work so spamming is the first mistake I made.

Have you any advice you would give to a newbie just starting out in their new online business?

I wished someone would have told me how difficult it is to make money on the internet, there is no such thing as a get rich quick scheme it takes years to build a blog and get traffic to it. To generate any sort of revenue from that blog there is many ways but you have to constantly stay at it.

I would say expectations should be low it’s possible and you should start your blog as early as you can and start to grow it talk about it. Get your following make sure that you are creating value on that blog, but you shouldn’t expect to make any money from it till perhaps year 6.

You don’t normally even see traffic for even six months to a year sometimes even 2 years and monetising a blog takes a lot of time even if you are doing paid advertisements. So it depends really on the type of business that you have. When you are first starting out I would say to try and tap into other sources of income.

Have you any specific goals you want to achieve in 2015?

For my personal blog I don’t really have it monetised, the whole purpose of my blog is brand awareness and personal branding is what I do I share content and collect emails on this website as well.

My idea is getting it ranking as high as possible for different keywords try to get more organic traffic that’s one thing I am still struggling with a lot of my traffic is from social.

There is no other goals for that site now I am just about to launch another website for my consulting firm