Nirav Sanghavi is founder of BlogAdda, a BlogWorld 2010 Media Partner, and claimed to be the largest community of bloggers in India. BlogAdda is among the top 50 brands in India known for the most effective usage of Social Media and conversations on Twitter and Facebook. I recently talked with Nirav about the benefits of joining the BlogAdda network and the future of the site.
Where did you come up with the idea for BlogAdda?
I had been blogging earlier for a television series that found it’s entry into the Limca book of records and made me a national record holder. While I was blogging, I used to discover these awesome blogs with some great content but hardly any readership. This is when I decided to build a platform that will showcase these blogs. Till date, I discover newer & wonderful blogs and I am happy that I started BlogAdda.
How many bloggers currently are signed up with the website?
We have more than 50,000 bloggers and counting who have signed up. There is a manual approval process and so many of them do not find their way at BlogAdda. You’ll see some big changes here soon.
That’s an amazing number, and I’m sure it’s continuing to grow! What is the benefit to a blogger joining BlogAdda?
Benefits are multi-fold. A blogger gets to add his own description of the blog when he registers at BlogAdda. The blogger also adds tags that describes his blog(s) flavour. Other bloggers and readers can rate the blog. There are so many activities that the bloggers do, such as ‘like’ the blog, create blog lists and add their favorite blogs in it, review the blog, add other bloggers to their network as friends. We display the top rated & most popular bloggers in terms of most number of visits and the recently updated blogs on all pages of BlogAdda. The bloggers can suggest their posts to our editors to be selected for the bi-weekly best blog picks we do on our blog. BlogAdda helps to discover your blog and send in lot of readers on your blog. We also help bloggers to learn and improve their blogging skills with a series of how-to articles. There is a lot more at BlogAdda!
How do you promote bloggers who are part of the network?
Our team of editors read through several blogs every week to choose the best blog posts in our bi-weekly blog picks. These posts thus gets our badge and also are brought to attention of the readers. We interview one blogger every week that is read by thousands of users. We have a section called ‘Notable Newbie’ where we highlight two bloggers every week, who are new and notable. This way, the upcoming bloggers are motivated and appreciated for their writing as they get featured right on our home page. Our Editors Picks category serves the best blogs for readers. We work hard to promote the bloggers on our network.
How important do you think it is to aggregate content, especially on a specific topic like the Indian Elections?
It is so much fun to see everything about a particular topic on a single page. There is so much information being generated for topics like Indian Elections and it is difficult to keep a track of all that is being populated on Social Media. For e.g., during the Indian elections, we aggregated everything from Social Media and put it up on a single page, the dashboard. This page aggregated all the tweets, blog posts, pictures, videos all on one page and found it’s way to be featured on so many media including BBC who took a note of it in their coverage.
What led you to create Tangy Tuesday & Spicy Saturday?
Ahh… it’s the same fundamental of discovering newer blogs. We realized it will be great for readers if we can pick up the best blog posts every week from the blogosphere and serve them in a more simpler format. This lead to the Tangy Tuesdays and Spicy Saturdays, which are extremely popular amongst the bloggers now.
How did you come up with the idea of #perkytweets
BlogAdda.com is among the top 50 brands in India known for the most effective usage of Social Media. While we were engaging into conversations with our followers, there were a lot of tweets that made us smile. Those tweets used to get lost in the timeline and there was no clear way to share it with our readers. We decided to compile the best every week and called them Perky Tweets. So, in a way, we invented this hash tag which is now so popular amongst the Indian twitter users. Lot of our readers look forward to our edition of Perky Tweets every Monday. In fact, we associated this brand to a national FM broadcaster and are credited for the first Internet-radio association in the country. Today, thousands of tweets are marked with #perkytweets every week and we thank all the twitter users who do that giving someone a chance to smile!
Do you have additional features you plan to add to BlogAdda?
Oh yes, lots of them! We recently revamped the site with many new features and will continue to do so. BlogAdda.com is committed to serve the best to the bloggers, always.
Sounds great! Where do you see the website in 5 years?
I see BlogAdda.com as the single most useful resource for bloggers and readers alike, looking to read and share interesting content. There are lot of activities planned that will be launched in phases and the only way we can see is up from here! 🙂
Do you have anything you’d like to share with our readers or people interested in blog networks?
BlogWorld has been awesome to say the least. Partnering with BlogWorld and attending the event has been so much insightful and fun. I would like to thank all your readers and delegates who attended the event and who shared lot of posts on this blog. I would love to see more and more people blogging and sharing. We will help to serve you quality content, aggregate content based on your interests and make a wonderful experience for you.
Thank you so much for giving me an opportunity to do this interview.
Blogadda has been a good platform and has given connections with wonderful bloggers in India. Nice reading about the person behind it…