Today’s guest at shakin.ru - Darren Rowse, famous blogger from Melbourne, Australia, author of ProBlogger.net, Digital-Photography-School.com и TwiTip.com. I think that Darren is one of the best bloggers around. I appreciate that Darren took time to answer my questions.

Hi, Darren, thanks for taking the time, let’s start with an introduction. What is your background and what do you do?

For the last 5 or so years I’ve been working full time as a blogger. Before that I worked as a youth worker and minister in churches.

I understand that you run ProBlogger.net and also you are one of the founders of b5media.com. How do you manage to run these websites and still have time for family and fun?

Life is very busy but I work hard to have boundaries around the different activities in my life. I set aside blocks of time for work and work hard in those times. I also have times set aside for family and relaxation and protect those times too! It’s about being disciplined and working hard during the work times so you can relax and have fun at other times.

About how many visitors daily does your blog receive?

I have three blogs - ProBlogger.net, Digital-Photography-School.com и TwiTip.com.

On an average month they get around 2.5 million visitors.

There is a lot of competition in blogging. How does ProBlogger.net stand out from the crowd?

Part of the reason that it has done well was that I was among the first to write on the topic of making money from blogs. Being first can help a lot.

I guess the other part has been that I’ve worked hard at producing new, helpful and practical content every day for almost 5 years. I try to be as useful as possible - people respond to that.

Where do you get your inspiration for all of your blog posts?

Mainly it comes from two things:

1. what I’m learning about, experimenting with and thinking about - my personal experience
2. the questions I’m being asked by readers - I pay a lot of attention to what readers seem to want to learn about

What are your favorite social networks?

I’m most active on Twitter @problogger. I also am on Facebook (Facebook.com/problogger) but have less time for that. There are only 24 hours in a day - if I had more time I’d use facebook much more!

What are the suggestion you would like to give to Russian bloggers?

Keep building useful blogs - the key to successful blogging is to be satisfying some kind of need or solving some kind of problem that people have. Be useful and people will keep coming back (and they’ll bring their friends).

Globator