Muhammad Saleem is a social media consultant and top-ranked community member of various social news sites. He started his blogging career on his own blog, covering social media. He later joined Pronet Advertising. Today, you can read his regular guest postings at Copyblogger, Search Engine Land, ReadWriteWeb, Problogger, CenterNetworks, PickTheBrain, and BloggingExperiment.

Please tell us something that we still do not know about yourself.

Sure. I’m originally from Lahore, Pakistan (born, raised, and educated there) and I have been in Chicago for 4 years now, first for college and now because I work from here. My favorite book is The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and I love to experiment with the social web and new media tools that web 2.0 has to offer.

Why do you blog?

I blog because I believe that I have a unique and relevant point of view that people can benefit from. Sometimes it is commentary on memes of the moment but for the most part I try to keep my commentary to educational (sometime bordering on academic). I continue to blog because I think that people can benefit by learning from my experiences - both my mistakes as well as successes.

How did you get into blogging?

Actually, I have had many different blogs over the years. I love the idea of being able to write something that is universally accessible through the web. The problem I always had was that I would write for a while, get bored, and then stop writing or move on to a different topic. I really became passionate about blogging once I was exposed to the social web (or web 2.0).

How much time everyday do you spend blogging?

Depends from day to day. Sometimes I go a week without blogging, and sometimes I spend 2-3 hours a day researching and writing for a couple weeks in a row.

How do you attract readers? Any tips on getting the word out about your blog and driving users to your site?

I think the way I blog is very unique. Since blogging is not my main ‘profession’, I’m not trying to build traffic to my site. Instead, I write guest posts on other sites that already have readerships of hundreds of thousands. Rather than writing on my own blog, I have focused on creating content for sites such as TechCrunch, Read/WriteWeb, ProBlogger, CopyBlogger, and many others. They benefit from the content, and I take advantage of their existing audience to get more exposure.

What blogs do you read? Can you share with us some URLs of your favorites?

One of my favorite blogs to read right now is Read/WriteWeb. I think the blog stands out from the crowd because of they either write about something from a unique perspective or they dont write at all. Apart from that I get a lot of my news and commentary from social sites and aggregators such as Techmeme and Megite.

Can you give us a ballpark figure as to how much you earn from blogging? How do you monetize your blog?

Although I have been offered up to $200 per post to regularly guest blog, I’m not making any money from blogging. I blog about the things that interest me and that I’m passionate about.

What common mistakes do you see other bloggers are doing?

One of the reasons so many people fail at striking it big through their blogs is because there are very few ways to do it right, and so many ways to do it wrong. People make mistakes in content (focus, differentiation, uniqueness, cornerstone content), design, monetization, promotion, networking and so on.

What advice can you give to someone who’s starting a blog?

The best advice I can give to someone who is starting a blog is to only start it if you’re passionate about something. Don’t start a blog to make money, don’t do it because everyone else is doing it, just do it because you’re passionate about something and you want to communicate it to others, network with them, and continue the conversation with them.

Is the blogosphere crowded already?

I wouldn’t say it is crowded in a way that there isn’t room for new entrants, but I agree that there is too much noise. Therefore we often have to rely on tools that use collaborative or otherwise social filtering mechanisms to separate the good content from the noise.

You’re regarded as a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news site. What does this mean?

Basically it means that I’m passionate about social media and therefore have been participating in various socially driven communities for a couple of years now. This gives me a unique perspective on these communities, how they have evolved, and how to approach and participate on them.

You guest post on different sites, what does guest posting bring you?

It allows me to express myself and share my thoughts and opinion with a much larger audience than I would be able to if I posted the same content on my blog.

Posted on March 4th, 2008 by Dominic Rivera
Filed under: Blogging, Interview