Hello,
Today I met Dan Green, the founder of TheMortgageReports.com at Starbucks. It was fun to see him blogging.
Here’s a short bio from Dan’s blog:
Dan Green is a mortgage market expert, providing over 10 years of direct-to-consumer advice. You can also connect with Dan on Twitter and on Google+
I kind of interviewed him about how he started his blog and I took some advise from him about blogging and how to succeed.
The Q&A below is as closest as I could remember from my interview, so I may have paraphrased some of Dan’s answers.
- Me: When did you get started?
- Dan: About 10 years ago.
- Me: Did you learn from books or other people?
- Dan: No not really, when I started there were not much resources online and everyone was blogging in his/her own style
- Me: How do you make money from this blog? Selling ads?
- Dan: No, not really. It is by selling mortgage leads
- Me: What did you use to do before the blog?
- Dan: I used to work in a bank, working with clients regarding mortgage applications and what not.
- Me: Let me show you my stats on my blog; my stats are not very impressive so far. Can I see your stats?
- Dan: Okay. Let’s pull last month’s reports
- Me: Wow, that’s a big number (50k+)
- Me: My blog does not have a personality of its own yet, it has a little of everything
- Dan: Yes, that is normal. It takes time. Keep observing what people visit the most and write about what people like. Specialize it later based on the trend.
- Me: How many blog posts did you do on a daily basis?
- Dan: Around 3 a day. Don’t stop blogging all of the sudden. Keep producing good contents and the rest will follow
- Me: How to succeed while blogging?
- Dan: It is hard and long work. You have to persist. Don’t give up on it. It took me a long time before I could call this website as my primary “job”. It is kind of like “The last man standing”, keep at it.
- Me: Great, thanks for the advise. I appreciate your time. It was nice meeting you.
I wanted to keep my interview short and to the point. It was nice meeting Dan in person and getting some advise about blogging from a successful person like him.
For mortgage articles, please visit his website!
“Keep observing what people visit the most and write about what people like. Specialize it later based on the trend.”
I found your every blog post interesting
dcrystalj, you’ve been a long time reader of my blog and I am happy to hear that from you. It is encouraging. Thank you