Home Archive Guest Blogging An Interview With Amit Banerjee : Lead Tech Blogger Of Ampercent

An Interview With Amit Banerjee : Lead Tech Blogger Of Ampercent

September 2, 2016

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Blogging is an essential part of sharing knowledge about technology. A good tech blog should be a really unique and resourceful content. Tech blogging is a competitive space and billions of blogs out there. In that scenario a successful tech blogger should have the unique credibility to prove his excellence. Amit is one of the renowned tech blogger of the present age. He delivered his tech blog through Ampercent.com.

We want to share his success story. Here is the extract of the interview with Amit.

tech-blogging- amit-banerjee — tech blogging- amit banerjee

1. Why it is named ampercent?

It all started when I was toying with an idea of starting a blog related to programming and writing about my learnings. The word has no meaning rather it was a symbolic name for the & operator used in most programming languages.

After sometime, I realized that writing about programming won’t cut it since there are already good resources on Stackoverflow and other programming related sites and I have to become an ace programmer before I can really write something useful. Then I switched to normal tech things which common people would want to read. My college friends often had problems with their computer, Orkut and other things so I thought let’s generalize it a bit.

2. How the idea of tech blogging came into your mind?

I started when I discovered that it is possible to make some money online, without having to do a full time job. I was studying then and I could use some of my time to earn pocket money without having to work full time. The only subject I knew a little was computers and that’s how it started.

3. Struggles and Challenges to form ampercent?

There were many struggles and many lows. I don’t write actively these days since I have diverged to work on other projects but the time when I wrote regularly, there were many many challenges.

The biggest challenge is well of course, writing. Writing every day something useful and feeling good about it. Discovering something new and then creating a really useful resource was the biggest challenge and it remains a challenge for every blogger, since the web is basically an echo chamber with 95% noise. Writing something really unique and resourceful will always be a challenge, no matter how big or small your blog is. A good way to deal with this situation is to be a freelance writer in another popular blog of your niche and see how their editorial team works to churn out good content ideas. Getting involved in a community of writers also helps, compared to doing it alone.

Another challenge was focus. Most bloggers lose focus after a while and then they lose the motivation to carry on. I am no exception. The challenge is to overcome from that zone and keep hitting the keys to produce good content on a regular basis. It sounds like a walk in the park but trust me, nothing can be harder.

Third challenge is monetization/revenue. When you start blogging (blogging to earn a living, I don’t mean hobby blogging), you obviously want a return of the hard work you are putting in. But reality is something different. Generating a decent flow of revenue takes years of hard work and it is even harder to maintain that revenue, since their is cut throat competition to rank higher in search engines.

Fourth challenge, keeping up with the status Quo. Most people in my community don’t know what blogging is and that you can actually earn a living by producing content. This puts you in a zone where you end up being an “odd man out”. No real friends or colleagues (most of your friends are actually working in some office). Work life becomes lonely and then you face writers block, hundreds of dilemma and confusion stems up. Your brain is not adjusted this way since it always feels secure when it sees other people doing the same thing what you are doing. The moment the brain sees that you are the only one doing something, it becomes depressed.

4. What is the future of tech blogging or a broader view Blogging?

The future is bright, provided you can keep up with the interest of writing good content for the next 10-15 years. If you are doing it for the sake of it or just out of curiosity, you won’t get far. You will quit, as most bloggers do.

5. Do you think that running behind the adsense or other advertisers, Quality of tech blogging is getting low?

Yes it is but then early bird will always catch the worm. If you keep the quality high and deliver real value to your readers, advertisements won’t be a big issue. Do not start a blog just for making money, do it only when you are genuinely interested in doing it for years. If you do it just for money, you will eventually not like it, just as you don’t like your day job and keep doing it for that monthly pay cheque.

Anything which you do for a monthly paycheque and not out of sheer interest is bound to be a failure. If you sweep streets for a pay cheque, you will lose interest and the quality will deteoriate. If you sweep streets because you like to, the quality will be high.

6. Future project

Right now, I am building (or rather trying to build) a start-up company on the Indian hospitality space. I don’t think too far like (3-5-10) years down the line since its quite vague to think that far and plan the current action on that thought. It should be other way around, you think for the short term, execute it and then see where the next logical stop is or could be.

7. Any inspirational guideline for upcoming tech bloggers?

Tech blogging is a very competitive space and gone are the days when you can seek attention by writing small tutorials or re-hash content. There are billions of blogs out there, so it helps to carve out a niche at the very beginning if you can. Also, focus on current topics and unexplored areas more.