How I Built a Successful Blog from my SmartPhone : My 3 Month Blogging Journey

Blogging without a computer? How’s that possible? Do you hire writers to post on your blog? These may be the questions you might have intended to ask me first after reading this title. Well, I’m here to publish my 3-month blogging journey on this blog without using a computer.

Yeah, TechBii has completed its successful (of course) first 3 months and I must convey my best gratitude to all of my friends and readers who brought my blog to this level. Here I share my past, present, and future goals as a blogger and I’m glad if this post helps someone to get inspired.

Who am I?

Oh, I forgot to mention earlier. For those who haven’t been here since the beginning, I’m Sidharth, a 17-year-old teenage boy from Kerala, also known as God’s own country. I am a part-time blogger and currently studying engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Chennai (formerly Madras).

As a frequent Facebook user, I’m online 24/7. I’m also interested in driving, listening to music, and cricket.

Life before TechBii

I’m sure some of you might already know me from my previous blogs TrickSmash.com and allindiantricks.com. I  started my blogging experiments when I was in 10th grade and eventually, it ended up with a Blogspot blog (allindiantricks.blogspot.com).

I used to be someone who copied content and posted it on a Blogspot blog just to get traffic (a little confession, I know). The funny thing is, my plagiarized Blogspot subdomain blog got a Page Rank of 5. Poor Google, right?

As a PR 5 blog owner, you can imagine how much I would have earned those days. I used to earn almost 60$ per day just with Adsense and URL shorteners. I was given many offers for that blog ranging around 2000$. Well, leave it.

One day, I got an offer from a webmaster from West Bengal. He was Sreejan Dey. He offered me a .com domain for my blog. In return, I had to place a link on every post I’ve written. The deal was pretty good and he even configured the domain with name servers. I had no idea how to set up a domain hence he did the job well.

Eventually, our relationship grew and we became quite close. He helped me a lot in configuring various things. I was in hell doing all that learning for that many days and read tons of articles related to blogging and rankings etc.

I also started to learn the basics of blogging and stopped copying content. Began to learn as much as I could and came across the term “WordPress”.

I read more and more articles related to WP and ShoutMeLoud was my reference blog. Once, I made a decision to move to WordPress, and thus the result, TrickSmash.com

I left plagiarism and started to approach blogging seriously thereafter. Learned so many things in WordPress and tried to improve my language as well. TrickSmash suddenly became one of the popular blogs for network tricks and hacks. But it didn’t live long.

It got suspended by my host due to nonpayment of hosting bills. I was less concerned about the expiry and never checked the mail associated with HostGator. I lost interest to renew it as it had so many crap posts which had only 50 words or less.

After that, I went underground for months and got involved in Facebook. There I tried to build contact with great persons and got many like-minded people including Bloggers.

How did TechBii Start

I’ve already mentioned this incident once, anyway, I would like to repeat this. I was surfing FB as usual and happened to chat with my friend, Kulwant Nagi (the man behind bloggingcage.com). I just asked him whether he had any cheap domain coupon codes. To my surprise, I got a coupon that let me get this domain for just 60 Rupees.

Thanks, Kulwant. But again I didn’t start blogging from that domain at the very instant. I installed the domain on various free hosting services as I had no intention of continuing serious blogging.

Playing with free hosts was very fun. I had even shifted my domain from one host other for 20 times. But it taught me how to assign name servers, DNS entries, WordPress installation, etc. It was a complex learning process where I also learned how to manage cPanel, MySQL, PhpMyadmin, etc.

I eventually became interested and started thinking about moving to a paid hosting service. I chose Zyma because their hosting was affordable, and I obtained it at a discounted rate from a friend. However, I later discovered that they were deceiving their users, and as a result, I lost my account. It’s important to note that during this time, I hadn’t begun posting articles yet.

After conducting extensive research, I decided to go with HostGator and I am proud of my decision. As a result, TechBii started its journey on 21st January 2013.

First Month Experience – January

As you know, the first month of a blog is crucial and cannot be ignored. I had to set up basic off-page SEO strategies first. Let’s review what I did initially after launching my blog.

•  First and most importantly, install important plugins.

Don’t Miss : 11 Deadly-Essential Plugins for Every WordPress Blogs – [Free]

• Submitted my blog to Google search and Google Webmaster tools.
• Build some quality high Page rank back links.
• Submitted my blog to some feed directories and syndication systems (Bloggers.com, TechnoRati, IndiBlogger, etc)
• Chose a perfect theme framework for my blog, Genesis.
• Wrote some posts and promoted it through social media.

That’s it. Though I only got 10 days in the first month, I did the basic techniques to get listed in search engines. As a tech blog, search engines should be my primary traffic source and hence I optimised my first 6 posts written in January.

February – The Worst Situation Begins

Worst situation, What’s that? I moved to the campus hostel where use of PC/Laptop has been prohibited. Hell. I lost all my hope and really brainstormed about how to continue my blogging.

I often thought to sell the blog to someone and started to search for some buyers. “Un(Fortunately)” no one did buy my blog as it was a fresh one.

I started hating myself for making the blog and felt I lost money for hosting and domain.

At the end of first week, we were allowed to use Mobile Phones in hostel. It was a life changing movement for us and we got thrilled about that. But there still had a problem. I can work on my blog from the phone but How to do Posting from a 3″ Screen Phone?

I installed the WordPress app on my phone and tried to post a sample article. There it’s. It took almost 30 minutes to scratch the first 3 paragraphs and my fingers started colouring like a tomato.

I lost all hope on mobile publishing and end up with great desperation. It was my friend who encouraged me to continue with that and I slowly started to publish articles. It had taken 2-3 hours to complete a 350 word post and I don’t know from where I got such inspiration to continue with that.

Main Obstacles

If you are a blogger and  blogging from your PC/lap, just close it and start managing your blog with your phone by considering these aspects : Posting, Accepting guest posts, aligning the paragraphs, adding images to the posts, playing with your blog design etc. I’m sure that sooner, you will start hating your phone and you may even throw it away.

The same thing was happened to me. All the things related to blog were adjustable (hardly) but tweaking with the design and off-Page factors were almost inappropriate for me.

I had to visit either Internet cafe or college lab to access a computer. But it wasn’t easy as you think. We only got less consideration as juniors and resulted into great hesitation. Thus, my blogging got confined to my beloved smartphone Samsung Galaxy Mini.

Accepting guest post is yet another daunting job for me. Usually guest Bloggers send their post as docx file and it’s extremely difficult to copy to the clipboard. Again hesitation.

Building back links was my greatest problem and still be. Commenting on other blogs from a mobile browser is tedious and I almost said goodbye to that.

Internal linking was a kind of headache for me. It’s nearly impossible to properly link the articles from the WP app. Thankfully, an automated internal linking plugins fixed the issue temporarily.

Though the SwiftKey keyboard app helps me greatly, I just hate the prediction feature sometimes. Example, when I type my name “Sidharth” it would be converted as “Sidebar” (by relevancy). This is something really irritating.

As I’m mostly providing How To guides, it’s essential to include the screenshot of the tutorial. It’s really a throat cutting job.

Here’s how I manage it. : I prepare the post and leave as draft. Then whenever I get access to the college computer, I immediately create the screenshot and send it via email podcast. But I have to wait a week for adding pictures to the next week’s posts.

And of course there are many more limitations as a mobile blogger that you can imagine. Being in the limitations, I still made some killer posts and kept the momentum. Appeared in various blogs as commenter and drove enough traffic to my blog.

Blogging in March – the Life Changing Month

March month is the most precious month for me. I made some more posts and promoted it on various social sites. Slowly, my blog got noticed and started to receive some cool traffic mainly though search engines and promotions.

I visited the Internet cafe once in a week to analyse the stats and to fix various “Bugs”. I also ran some giveaways to attract some visitors and it worked.

According to me, March month was my biggest experiment time and now wonder about the things I had done then. 😀

April – I Love you Baby a lot

I’m writing this in April and it’s the month where my traffic got quadrupled and stats like Alexa blessed me. I could came under 100k Alexa rank within the 2 months and currently it’s 60k (as of today) by God’s grace.

Since my blog started just after the recent Page rank update, I couldn’t get any Page Rank.

Being Frank, let me ask you a question. Could you find a blog with such Alexa but having 0 PR?

I ain’t self promoting, but couldn’t find my answer yet really. 😛

Read : Dramatically boost your points alexa rank in next 30 days

You may wonder by hearing this. I’m posting this post itself from my mobile phone. I’m much addicted to the WordPress app and love the latest update as well.

How do I Blog from my Phone

Opera Mini is my favorite browser and I use it to surf the Web and to find a new topic to write. Being in tech niche, I can’t manipulate any posts that are previously unwritten. So I surf hundreds of kind niche blogs and bookmark interesting topics for future reference. I also visit developer’s forums like XDA to grab tutorials as well.

When I decided to write about a topic, I just grasp maximum possible information related to it. Then open my WordPress app widget from my home screen and start writing in a single piece of time, in a single sit. Done.

Inspirations

When I struck at the above mentioned situation, I used to read some blogs and it boosted great inspiration to blog anyway. Hence I got familiarized with the touch screen of my blog and gradually gained high speed typing capacity.

Here are the persons who inspired me a lot to move further.

1. Harsh Agarwal (ShoutMeLoud)
2. Mohd. Mustafa Ahmedsai (MyBloggerTricks)
3. Rishabh Jain (HackingUniversity)
4. Rahul Kuntala (LearnBlogTips)
5. Ammar Ali (AllBloggingTips)
6. And my dear brother Kulwant Nagi (BloggingCage)

Regards to all for inspiring me to get recovered from the Worst conditions.

Resources

As a mobile blogger, I can’t use such tools like keyword research tool, webmaster tools, SEO plugins etc. But in my mobile, these are my companions.

1. WordPress official app

2. Opera Mini

3. AdSense dashboard

4. SwiftKey keyboard (can’t live without)

5. UC Browser

6. Ganalytics analytics tracker

7. PDF reader

My blog would not be there if these tools were not invented.

Earnings from TechBii

Well, this might be the most interesting part. I have earned a total sum of 1374$ till date from this blog. Sorry for not uploading the screenshot. I will update it once when I get into the computer.
My earning sources are,

1. AdSense (60 %)

2. Paid reviews (30 %)

3. Affiliate marketing (still experimenting – 5 %)

4. Development works (5 %)

Goals

I remember a great quote here “If your dreams are not making others to laugh , your dreams are certainly small.”

So, think big and you will definitely achieve it near future. It takes time to shine in a niche, but once if you proved you are a kind of big deal, people will start following you. Now my ultimate goal is to get a better Page rank (being in the limitations) and to get listed in top 50k websites in the world. Also, I’m suffering hard to provide somewhat useful articles for my loyal readers.

Here’s your Part

Here I’ve described almost everything that came across my blogging life since I started this blog. If you think  it will help someone to get inspired, then kindly please share. Your most valuable comments are always welcome. 😀

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