Today’s interview is with Akriti Joshi, the manager for the blog over at E-junkie, a popular online shopping cart site that allows website owners to sell digital and tangible goods on the internet.
Sometimes we look at blogs as “standalone” entities, when in fact, they are often a critical marketing tool for large businesses.
As a fan and user of E-junkie, I wanted to learn more about how the blog actually helps the E-junkie business and brand. Akriti was kind enough to answer my questions and tell us a little bit more about how she got involved with E-junkie.
It’s a quick interview, but if you’ve ever wondered about how large sites handle their blogging activity, you’ll enjoy it!
Let’s head over to the interview.
(As always, questions from The Daily Interview are in bold.)
Akriti, I’ve long been a fan of E-junkie and have used it to purchase several different informational products in the past. I also really like it as a platform to sell products as an affiliate.
Tell us a bit more about your role as a blogger at E-junkie – How did you first get involved at E-junkie? From your perspective, how does the blog impact the entire business?
I joined the E-junkie blog about 2 years back and I manage the blog, which includes mainly handling posting the content to the blog and its promotional activities.
If you ask me, the blog has helped us to connect with people who share a common interest with us which is eCommerce, self-publishing, small businesses and creativity.
Can you expand a little bit on how you got into blogging with E-junkie? How’d you get the opportunity, and what got you interested in blogging? We’d love to learn more about you and your back story.
Writing has always been a hobby and since my educational background is technical so I began as a technical writer.
One of my friends was already using E-junkie to sell her digital products and she introduced me to E-junkie and their blog. I was so impressed by their content that I decided to follow the blog and after sometime I took the initiative and contacted the blogging team inquiring If I could become a part of their blogging team, and here I am, writing for E-junkie.info for the last two years.
What has been your greatest success so far as a blogger?
When I initially began writing I was more of a technical writer but since I have joined the E-junkie team my writing repertoire has expanded, and not only have I shared my knowledge with our readers, but everyday has been a learning experience for me as well especially, in the field of eCommerce.
Even the most successful bloggers hit a few roadblocks along the way. What do you consider to be your biggest failure with respect to blogging, and what did you learn from it?
It may not be my biggest failure, but when it comes to working on eBook projects, meeting the deadlines is often a challenge for me.
We at E-junkie work on a regular basis on different eBook projects where we involve some talented and skilled bloggers, entrepreneurs, and artists. We compile a handful of articles for each eBook from the people involved, on a particular topic, and give it as a free download to our readers. When we start working on such projects we have to ensure that we are able to match our deadlines with the deadlines of the people involved and that is the biggest challenge.
The biggest lesson I have learned from this is how to improve my time-management skills. It’s often just a matter of staying organized and keeping the lines of communication open, touching base frequently.
In addition to adding a tremendous amount of great content to the E-junkie blog, I understand you also handle a lot of the marketing and promotion of the blog.
What are some of the strategies that you use to promote the blog? What have you found is the most effective?
We make sure that all our posts are shared across all social media channels. We invite esteemed bloggers to come and post high quality articles to our blog. We often share interesting content to our Facebook page.
We make it a point to feature creative sellers, artists and bloggers and inform them so that they can further share the content on their social media networks, thereby increasing the interaction on our blog. We have also written posts for other interesting blogs like Problogger and GKBCInc.
Apart from all the above promotional activities we employ, the most effective is publishing eBooks on our blog. This is because we connect with some talented artists, experienced bloggers, and entrepreneurs, which helps us in building a good rapport with them.
Let’s take a step back and look more generally at blogging. If you had to take your best advice and put it into one sentence or phrase, what would that be?
Remember the 3P’s of Blogging – Plan, Post and Promote. [Click here to tweet this]
What are your favorite online resources?
There is no specific tool or resource that I personally follow but I follow blogs of all media biggies like Google, Facebook and certain other technology blogs.
For someone who is just starting out and wants to create a blog in the e-commerce niche, what advice do you have? What do you wish someone told you about when you first started?
Keep your blog simple but at the same time keep it up-to-date with all the latest news in the fields of e-commerce and website management.
The one thing I wish someone told me when I started is that its not all about creativity but rather its ALSO about planning and executing properly.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
One question that people often ask us is: “How did you come up with the name E-junkie?”
The name “E-junkie” is a contraction of “Electronic Junkie” representing our devotion to modern forms of electronic media and communication. Using the “e-” prefix was really popular when the company was founded. If we were founded after the iPod became popular, we might have gone with iJunkie 🙂
Finally, where can people find you online?
- http://www.e-junkie.com/
- http://www.e-junkie.info/
- http://www.facebook.com/ejunkiepage
- http://www.twitter.com/ejunkie
- https://plus.google.com/+E-junkie
Thanks for taking part in this interview, Akriti!
What’d you think of this interview? Although it was brief, I liked learning a bit more about how an e-commerce business handles the blogging side of things. Feel free to leave a comment below!
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