Interview with Jyoti Chauhan – Top 10 Female Bloggers in India

Today we are featuring an interview with Jyoti Chauhan, founder of Updateland.com who is one of the top female bloggers in India.

Jyoti Chauhan is so simple, helpful, and humble blogger and she is an SEO expert and freelancer at Upwork apart from being the owner and founder of Updateland.com.

I have been in regular touch with this awesome lady ever since I have started my blog in August 2015. To know the best of her, “BestOfGuru” approached her and was fortunate to have her interview in this series. So let us know more of Jyothi Chauhan in her own words below:

Gurunath: You are a well-known blogger and an inspiration to many other new bloggers. Can you please tell us about yourself?

Jyoti Chauhan: First of all, I would like to say thanks to you to interview me on your blog and provide me a chance to share my knowledge with your readers.  I hope they will enjoy it. I am Jyoti Chauhan, belonging to Sonipat, Haryana. I did school from Ghaziabad and college from Meerut. And after finishing my polytechnic, I came to Delhi for a Job.

After six months of my job, I left my job and started to work as a freelancer at Upwork (formerly Odesk). Currently, I am doing MCA and managing various blogs, my major blog is Update Land where I share blogging tips, software reviews, and important tools.

Gurunath: How did you start blogging and what inspired you to do so?

Jyoti Chauhan: In the starting, I created a blog just for collecting all SEO websites list for myself so that, I could get any required list from my blog easily. At that time, I had no idea about blogs or blogging.

After some time, I noticed people are providing their feedbacks at my blog by comments and some of them are requesting to share more SEO tips like how they can increase their website traffic or what is the best method to create backlinks.

Meanwhile, blogger Sanjay Choubey circled me and said he circled me since I am a blogger and he is the blogger so we can discuss problems related to blogging together. It was the first time for me when I heard the word “blogger”.  Sound surprising but true.

After this, I started to connect with bloggers and work on my blog passionately. Truly no one inspired me to start blogging, I love to help people and blogging offers me the best platform to solve lots of people’s problems in one place.

Gurunath: What makes your blog an interesting one and what made your blog popular?

Jyoti Chauhan: Mostly I share problem-solving articles as you know for a blogger to solve everyone’s problem separately makes it very difficult due to workload. That’s why I always try to write articles on those topics which are mostly asked by newbie bloggers.

It makes them happy and they like to check my blog when they face problems regarding blogging and SEO. I think this makes my blog interesting and popular also. Since when people find some useful and interesting stuff, they like to share it with others also.

Gurunath: What is your opinion – focus on a single blog/Niche or several blogs in various niches? How to choose a niche?

Jyoti Chauhan: I will recommend focusing on a single blog in starting. Since blogging needs time and money both. If you are a newbie and struggling to make money from your first blog, it is very difficult for you to manage several blogs. So only focus on one blog until you start to earn good money from your first blog and learn the required SEO techniques.

There are lots of things that everyone should keep in mind while choosing a niche like an audience, competition, monetization methods, writing comfortless with the niche.

Gurunath: What do you do in order to update yourself daily on the latest happenings and updates?

Jyoti Chauhan: To get updated with the latest happenings and updates in SEO, I check Moz blog and for normal updates, I use Facebook. Since what is trending, is shared by many bloggers mostly.

Gurunath: What’s your opinion on Guest blogging, Sponsored posts?

Jyoti Chauhan: Guest blogging and sponsored posts are totally different from my point of view.    Guest blogging is the best way to gain trust and establish your own name with already established sites. If you are doing guest blogging for link building, then forget you are going to get benefit from this.

But if you are doing it to build your online presence, it is a killer strategy. Imagine no one knows you but if you post a guest post on a very popular blog, you get lots of attention from that particular blog audience.

Now let’s discuss sponsored posts.

As we all know sponsored post is a good source to earn instant money. But here are some things which we should care about like niche, link type, content, and product. Only accept sponsored posts if they are related to your niche and only share the best product with your audience.

Since if you are sharing anything which is not worthy of some penny, you will lose your audience’s trust. I think like me you also know very well building trust takes time, but only a single mistake can break trust in seconds.

Gurunath: What are your earnings from your blog and any particular strategies do you suggest for the newbies who want to take you as inspiration?

Jyoti Chauhan: Sorry, but I don’t like to share my earnings publicly. Here are some tips for newbies to get success in blogging.

1. Work passionately
2. Always focus on quality and be unique.
3. Keep in mind both things search engines and audiences while writing an article. The audience should be your first priority ever.
4. Keep patience, to establish a successful blog and earn passive income, you need to give time to your blog. It will not happen overnight.
5. Choose niche wisely

Here is a complete guide for newbie bloggers>>how to start a blog and make money.

Gurunath: Do you use affiliate marketing for earning money? What is your advice on affiliate marketing?

Jyoti Chauhan: I don’t do affiliate marketing, I just started. If I get good results, surely I will share affiliate marketing tips in the future.

Gurunath: What are earning sources for bloggers apart from Google AdSense? Any tips for implementing them systematically?

Jyoti Chauhan: There are many earning sources from a blogger apart from Google Ad Sense. Some of them are following:

1. Sponsored Reviews
2. Writing Services
3. SEO Services
4. Establish a blog and sell it
5. Social Media Services
6. Affiliate Marketing

You will surprised by reading the next line but it is true, I never made a single penny from AdSense but it doesn’t mean I am not making money from my blog. I monetize my blog with other methods. A blogger can offer a different kinds of services like article writing, SEO services, and SMO.

Sponsored review is another great source to make huge money from the blog. Here are a few things that advertisers look in a blog to offer sponsored reviews:

1. Alexa Ranking
2. Domain Authority
3. Page Authority
4. Blog Traffic
5. Domain Age
6. Page Rank (Not all but some advertiser)
7. Domain social signal popularity
8. Blog theme

Gurunath: Which Social networking communities do you suggest our readers register for and how effective they are?

Jyoti Chauhan: Social networking communities are very effective to connect with brands and popular bloggers. Even they play an important role to drive massive traffic to your websites.

Below are some popular and most used communities:

1. Bizsuger
2. Inbound
3. Growth hacker
4. Stumbleupon
5. Reddit
6. Delicious
7. Blokube
8. Klinkk
9. Dosplash
10. kingged

Gurunath: What are the SEO tools you are using and any recommended tools according to you to improve one’s blog performance?

Jyoti Chauhan: Currently, I am using Ahrefs, Link Explorer, SEMrush, Google Webmaster, Google Analytics, Keyword Planner, Keyword Inspector. I will recommend all the above SEO tools to you to improve blog performance.

Gurunath: What is link building and backlinks and all? How do they affect a blog’s performance?

Link building is the procedure of building backlinks. Backlinks are the incoming links to your site from any other website. There are several methods to create backlinks like blog commenting, guest posting, social bookmarking, and directory submission, etc. More quality backlinks help to improve the blog’s domain authority and domain authority help to boost ranking and traffic. Here quality backlinks mean links should be created from relevant niche and trusted domains.

Gurunath: Which WordPress plug-ins in your opinion are MUST have ones and also list your favourite Plug-in list?

Jyoti Chauhan: Here are some must-have WordPress plugins for any blogger.

1. Akismet
2. Google Analytics Dashboard for WP
3. Jetpack by WordPress.com
4. Pretty Link Lite
5. W3 Total Cache
6. WP External Links
7. WP-Optimize
8. Yoast SEO
9. All In One WP Security

Gurunath: Themes play a role in SEO so which themes in your opinion or cost-effective and good for a beginner blogger?

Jyoti Chauhan: Yes, of course, themes play an important role in SEO and blogging also. If our blog theme is not SEO friendly and all browsers supportive, you can lose your traffic from search engines and your regular reader also.

I will recommend Genesis themes. Genesis themes are simple and elegant. They are very well optimized and have a fast loading speed. I know Genesis is costly. But if you want to make money from your blog, you need to invest some money. Blogging has been made business and every business need some investment.

Gurunath: Finally any tips, advice, suggestions from you to our awesome Best Of Guru readers?

Jyoti Chauhan: I think I have given all necessary advice above in answer to question no. 6. Again, I want to say again never give up and work hard with passion. As we all know “hard work never goes unrewarded”.

Thanks to Jyoti Chauhan for this beautiful interview and for spending some time with us.

Please watch Jyoti Chauhan’s latest online video interview on our Bestofguru YouTube channel to know more insights into her blogging journey.

If any of you have any queries, please do ask in the comments below!

Don’t forget to share this interview on social media. I will be pleased if you share this now !!! Cheers!!! Join Best Of Guru on Facebook & Twitter.

Note: Stay tuned for the next 2 interviews on this series which will be published daily until the end of the series.