Exclusive Interview with Nikola Roza: Great blogging tips for bloggers

Hi buddies, I had a stressful week and I almost postponed this interview. Today, I will be interviewing a great friend and professional affiliate marketer.

Let’s welcome my blogging buddy, Nikola Roza. Over to him now.

10 Interview Questions for Nikola Roza

Can you tell our readers about yourself and your blog?

Thank you Folajomi, It’s a pleasure and honor to be here.

Hi Folks,

My name is Nikola Roza, and I blog at nikolaroza.com

I’m from Serbia, and I’m a freelance gun for hire

I also do affiliate marketing on the side, my income from affiliate links is starting to overtake my freelance SEO writing earnings, which is something I really like.

What do you think is the best strategy that worked well for you to get more traffic to your blog?

As for the individual strategy, I guest posted on a huge authority website (Business2Community).

I got a link from that site and in 2 weeks my ranking jumped violently. From ranking for just 7 keywords in the first 100, according to Ahrefs; to ranking for 247 keywords in the first 100, also according to Ahrefs.

So one link pushed me for hundreds of keyword, and it worked because my site was tiny back then.

So one authority link meant a lot.

As for the overall strategy, the best tactic is targeting low competition keywords and going after them with gusto.

I use Jaaxy keyword tool to mine those and I can’t recommend it enough. It’s easy to use, very fast and accurate.

Because when you target low competition keywords, it’s only a matter of time before you start ranking and raking in commissions.

And then you can grow from there.

What was the most challenging moment in your blogging journey so far?

I started my blog on 4-12-2017.

And for the first 6 months, I had nothing to show for my work. I was getting maybe 2 visitors per day.

Then in July of 2018, I had to go and pick raspberries to get some money and wasn’t able to work on my site for 4 months.

At that time when I returned in October, I thought about killing the site and not renewing the hosting.

Because I still had no results despite putting in a huge amount of work and time.

That was the hardest mental hurdle I had to face.

Luckily at that time, I got a free membership at Wealthy Affiliate (read about them in my article here), and that free membership kept me going.

Because I was reading the success stories of other people and knew that affiliate marketing as a business model has many pros and only a few cons attached to it, and I knew I could make it work for me.

What are your best blogging tools?

• Ahrefs for backlink research
• Semrush for keyword research

Use these two and you have everything you need to make it online. No need to use dozens of expensive tools if you can learn to combine Ahrefs and SEMrush

Can you name some of your favorite bloggers and explain why they are your favorites?

My favorite top star bloggers are:

• Brian Dean
• Neil Patel
• Glen Allsop

I like them because they share their knowledge freely and don’t try to hoard it for themselves.

As for more mid-sized bloggers

I’d like to mention a couple of names

• Enstine Muki
• Lisa Sicard
• Moss Clement
• Mudassir Ahmed
• Sumit Sao
• Ryan Biddulph

I have many more blogging friends, but these folks have helped me along the way. Either directly by letting me guest post on their site (for example, Enstine Muki) or by sharing their knowledge with me via their blogs (for example, Sumit Sao).

I like them all very much and hope to connect with them more in the future.

How much time do you spend blogging?

As much as my energy level allows me to. I like blogging and have fun doing it.

And I want to have as much fun as I can:)

Is blogging your profession or just a hobby?

Blogging is a full-time job for me, so it’s my profession. 

And it never was a hobby for me because I knew from the get-go that I’d be building a business.

What is the best advice you can give to someone starting a blog today?

When you’re starting, you need to have a razor-sharp focus.

To grow your blog from day one focus on two things only:

1. Content
2. Links

That’s all there it is.

So forget Quora; forget Pinterest; forget Facebook groups. 

Just build useful content on your site (and useful is anything that solves your reader’s problems), and then go out and build links to that content

Newbie friendly strategies for building links are:

• Guest posts
• Expert roundups
• Link roundups
• Interviews
• Testimonials
• HARO

So to recap:

Spend the first 6 months of the year creating content and building niche relevance for your blog. 

Spend the second 6 months of the year building links and forming relationships with other bloggers in your space.

Later on, you can expand into email marketing, Facebook groups Quora…

These things aren’t going anywhere, but you need to focus if you’re going to get anything done as a one-man team.

I presume they’re just one-man team like I was when I started.

What Link building strategy as worked well for you?

Guest posting + influencer outreach

Here’s how it works:

I guest post on a website. From that post, I link out to the people I want to connect with and on whose site’s I want to guest post on in the future.

This brings their attention to me, and they let me guest post later on, but also start sending me links my way.

And they do it on their own without me begging or anything.

That is because I gave value first and asked for nothing, and because of my modesty and decency, I got rewarded. And I continue to get rewarded as this strategy compound on its own with time.

These links are as whitehat as it gets, and they’re free as in- they cost time, but you don’t have to invest money to do them.

Perfect for bloggers with no link building budget.

Which of your blog posts would you recommend for our readers (max 3)?

• Boost Your Affiliate Links CTR like a Boss! Make More Sales Today
• 19 Common Affiliate Marketing Mistakes- Avoid These at All Cost! And Don’t Say I Didn’t Warn You!
• Learn to Make Buttons in WordPress (With Shortcodes; Without Shortcodes; and a Whole lot More

BONUS QUESTIONS

1. Looking back to the start, How can you describe your blogging the journey so far?

Bumpy, grumpy and enjoyable

It was bumpy because I had a lot to learn and many mistakes to make so I can learn from them.

It was grumpy because I was often in a bad mood because of my slow progress and many a time wanted to simply give up.

Luckily- I didn’t 🙂

Enjoyable- I enjoyed the ride and still do. Even more so that now I’ve achieved a degree of success.

What do you think about this blog and what improvement would you suggest?

Your blog is clean and easy on the eye. I like it. 

Your content is excellent, and your English is very good, but you can do better. You can improve some more, and I suggest you do because the better you write, the more you leave behind your competition who’s too lazy to hone their writing skills.

It’ll be easier for you to stand out in the long run.

Thank you for inviting me to do this interview Folajomi, I had a blast:)

If your readers have questions, I’ll be there to respond.

Cheers!

Conclusion

Thank you Nikola, my good friend. In case you don’t know, Nikola is among a few people that gave me a warm welcome to the blogosphere.

Plus, this is an awesome interview, it’s very inspiring and will help newbies know what to focus on. Click here to read more blogger’s interview

Recommended:

• Advanced On Page SEO techniques: Ultimate guide
• 10 Blogging mistakes you must avoid
• How to write a quality blog Post in 30minutes