Interview of Pardeep Goyal- A Successful Blogger & Web Entrepreneur

We have been publishing interviews on several famous bloggers and web entrepreneurs on Techulator. In this post, we interview Mr.Pardeep Goyal who is a full-time blogger and the brain behind CashOverFlow. He is also a successful domain name investor, content marketing expert and a consultant to several startups across the globe.



So let's hear about his journey from his own words. Let's get started!

1. Hi Pardeep. Thanks for taking time out from your busy schedule for this interview. Can you please introduce yourself to our readers?

Hi, Thanks for inviting me for the interview.

I have started my blog CashOverflow in May 2015 out of my own need to express & share personal finance knowledge. It was my hobby project and I never thought of making money from CashOverflow.

I was totally dependent on my freelance work and content marketing consulting gigs to earn regular monthly income.

After 4 years, now CashOverflow is earning more than $10,000 per month (mostly passively) and won the best blog in personal finance award from IndiBlogger. CashOverflow received more than 1.5 million visitors last year who searched for terms related to earning money, investments and savings.

I am passionate about credit cards and saved more than 1 lakh rupees using credit cards last year. I love to travel and we went for month-long vacations in Goa, Thailand and Bali.

2. How did your journey exactly start? What made you move to the world of blogging & making money online from your comfortable full-time job?

I never aimed to become a blogger, I left my job to grow my startup where we lost 15 Lakh rupees in the first year itself. We shut down the startup even before the first anniversary.

Making money was not easy when you lack skills. I was a software guy before moving to marketing world. I have never written in my life before becoming a blogger.

I became a blogger accidentally when I started using the content as a growth hacking tool for my startup. Then I started earning from my blog accidentally when I was learning affiliate marketing.

The mother nature planned things for me - I just executed whatever was in front of me.

3. Leaving a comfortable full time high paying desk job would have been quite stressful. How did you cope up with the same, involve your family in this decision and align your finances to help you survive during the initial months?

I worked in a single company for 7 years, a job that I got during campus placement. I was in a comfort zone. Leaving a job and failing within the first year was shocking for my family.

But my wife Neha supported me in all my decisions. In fact, she also started a blog BeingHappyMom to share her motherhood journey and to help mom community. Her blog is counted in the top 10 parenting blogs in India.

She has been a source of inspiration & support for me. I take care of the finances and she takes care of health & nutrition.

4. If somebody intends to earn $1000 every month by working online, what would be your suggestion to him/her?

My first suggestion would be not to focus on $1000. The money as a goal is a distraction because most of the people would fail to earn money in the initial days.

What happens when people fail to achieve goals? They stop working, right?

Measure your success based on what did you learn in the initial days. Whether you make money or not, you would certainly learn something new when you work online. The learning would eventually convert into earning.

That's what happened to me. Even today, I measure my success with my learning goals. Money is the side product of what I learned so far.

5. How do you plan your work on a day to day basis?

There are 2 types of tasks every entrepreneur has to perform.

#1. Create Something
#2. Manage People

I keep some time aside for my creative work, like writing. I write most of my articles & emails myself.

The second task is managing team & freelancers. That consumes most of my time because we have to plan, brainstorm new ideas, review the work and execute collaboratively.
I block my calendar for the most important activities of the week and then do less important tasks in my free time. Social media is the least important task that I do in the evening when the creative energies are down.

6. Mention 5 mobile apps which you use in your daily life for managing your work & increasing productivity.

Todoist, Slack, Gmail, Evernote and Dropbox.

7. As an entrepreneur, how do you plan and manage your personal finances? A lot of our readers are successful freelancers & bloggers making decent money every month and would like to know your inputs on managing & growing that money further.

I keep my business finance separate from personal finance. We should create excel sheets to track every single penny that's coming in & going out of the business.

Take a salary for personal expenses and maintain finance as if you would with a job.

Re-invest business profits back into the growth of the business. Buy better tools, hire better people and buy more web properties.

On the personal front, spend only on the things that you really need. I spend more money on travel & experiences rather than gadgets. Invest regularly in stocks & growing technologies.

8. Looking back in life, which are the 3 things which would you have done differently?

It's easy to say in the hindsight but the truth is that we can't learn without experiencing failures.

Still, If I have to go back in the time and change 3 things then I would be in the following way.
1. Leaving Job the day I realised I was trapped (after 2 years of the job)
2. Not wasting money in my first startup, rather than using that for my learning
3. Running blog as a business from day 1 rather than after 18 months.

9. What are your future plans? Where do you see yourself in the next 5 years?

I would be doing new experiments with different forms of content marketing after 5 years. My mind works like a scientist who never tired of doing experiments.

Immediate goals are to stabilize the existing blogging business and then explore the bigger possibilities with videos & VR.

10. What would be your advice to our readers who aspire to make money online or start their own blog?

Just focus on one thing. No blogging niche is saturated. There is always an opportunity for new people to grow. People still read. People still watch. Blogging or YouTube, do whatever you like but just focus on one thing, one niche at a time.

It's better to earn 1 Lakh from one thing rather than earning pennies from 10 different things.

Thanks a lot, Pardeep for sharing your valuable insights with our readers. I am sure that our readers will learn & benefit a lot from your insights.

You can check out more Blogger Interviews on Techulator to get inspired & motivated.