Mohit, tell us something about yourself, a brief introduction from the man himself.

Well, I am a regular guy with a passion for Web. My name is Mohit Aneja, but, I’m more commonly known as CSSJockey. I am a full time web developer and own CSSJockey.com, NetChillies.com and a few other web based ventures under the hood of MediaLabs.Co, which is my parent company. I was born in Delhi and spent my childhood in Fazilka (a small town in Punjab if you’ve ever heard of it) and moved to Chandigarh in 1997. A Workaholic, Foodie, Coffee & MAC lover.

It’s been quite a journey, I must say! I started full time as a web developer in January 2009 as CSSJockey. Slowly, I’ve been able to expand my web properties to a good number of projects, i.e., CSSTreat.com, AppsMug.com, GrassAcademy.com, NetChillies.com, and most recently ProfileSquare.com. I don’t count any project as failed yet, simply because I’ve not been able to give them my best so far and they’re lined up in “To Do When I’m All Free” projects list.

CSSJockey.com and NetChillies.com did get me quite the attention and greens too J . They’re part of my core expertise. But for now, my focus is on ProfileSquare.com and I’m quite excited about the way its coming up. GrassAcademy.com was started to run Live & Interactive Web Design courses and we got a really good response.

This is quite interesting!! I used to hate programming and always got the passing marks by attempting only theory questions. I was driving to the examination center to attempt my last exam and I got a call from my friend to join him for a movie so I changed my mind and watched the movie instead. I know this is stupid but I really don’t believe in degrees, all that matters is your knowledge and experience but that’s just me.

After changing a few jobs finally I got into DELL where I started learning Microsoft Excel and VBA programming to make my life easier by generating the reports automatically. After looking at the automation my director asked me to take over all the reporting and headcount management online that’s when I got into the real deal of programming and learnt .Net and completed that projects in about 4 months. In the mean time I was a top contributor on Yahoo Answers and one day they banned my account because the solution link I shared later turned into a torrent site and as per their policy it wasn’t allowed. After numerous requests I failed to get my account back. But that couldn’t stop me from sharing best practices, so I bought my first personal domain mohitaneja.com to share whatever I know. I learnt WordPress and created my first ever theme (http://v1.mohitaneja.com) which was appreciated by a lot of visitors.

One day a random visitor offered me $80 USD to create a theme for him so I took the job and created a theme for his website. It kick started my interests and I started freelancing along with my job at DELL and ended up working for 18 hours a day on an average. Quitting my well paid job and starting my own business was not an overnight decision. I analyzed both options thoroughly and finally decided to take a leap for my passion since it was paying me more or less the same as my salary. So I quit my job in December 2008 and launched CSSJockey (http://www.cssjockey.com/) on 1st January, 2009 and since then, there’s been no looking back.

For me it was never a 9 to 5 job as I loved the tasks in hand at Dell. The projects required me to think out of box so I usually stretched my shift to 3-4 hours extra (without overtime of course). For me it was my passion.

The only significant difference I know between a job and my own business is that I don’t have a boss. I work for myself and do what I love the most. I work as much as it pleases me. I believe if you’re happy inside, your life and everything around it, falls in place automatically.

The biggest inspiration was to do what I love and luckily I got the chance to do the same for the whole day and without any restrictions. It was not difficult to decide as my business was doing good and I saved enough for surviving the next 3 months, should anything go bad, and took the plunge. However, if my business wasn’t doing as good, it could have been really hard for me to quit my job and start my own business.

I see my company providing best products and services with at least 100 satisfied and happy employees and an awesome office anywhere in or around Chandigarh.

It might be funny, but I don’t compete with anyone other than myself. I evaluate myself every 6 months and see if I am growing or not. I don’t want to be a part of “The Rat Race” as I believe if you are not satisfied with what you have right now you will never be. I set goals for myself and compete hard to exceed them.

Certainly Yes! My mom is my biggest inspiration of my life. She taught me to fight to achieve your goals and my lovely Wife always stood by me through thick and thin.

I would like to share what I did and it worked for me.

• First and foremost, keep learning and Be Your Own Competition!
• If you are good at something, strive to be even better. Groom yourself to serve the latest web standards and trends.
• Believe in yourself and always work hard to improve your skills.
• Evaluate your achievements every 6 months.
• Don’t waste time on anything other than your passion and stuff you like the most as we got only one chance.

Whatever you do, put in your best and success will follow. If you have anything to share, talk or discuss about. Please feel free to connect with me via Facebook (http://facebook.com/cssjockey)

Other Recent Interviews:

• Ricky Ahuja, CEO Affiliate Venture Group
• Daniel Scocco And Amit Agarwal
• Interview with Donncha O Caoimh-Developer of WordPress MU
• In Conversation with John Chow
• Interview With Andy Bailey – The Man Behind Plugin CommentLuv

Great Mind Thinks Alike, this is absolutely true.

I coined few questions before two heavy weight bloggers Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips.com and our very own Amit Agarwal of labnol.org. Expectedly on most of the issues both gave almost similar answers. Worth mentioning that while answering these questions both of these guys were unaware what other has quoted. Daniel love to explain things while Amit is a man of few words, spoke very clearly and to the point.

Well these guys need no introduction but for a newbie who want to know more about them:

Daniel Scocco started developing blogs and websites in 2005, on his blog Daily Blog Tips he shares what he learned along the way. The blog was nominated under the “Best Web Development Blog” category in the 2007 Weblog Awards, and currently ranked among the 500 most popular blogs in the world and among the 100 most popular marketing blogs in the world. He is also the founder of the online marketing and business training program Online Profits.

Amit Agarwal launched his blog Digital Inspiration in 2004 and is now the 40^th most-favorite blog on the Internet. Amit has appeared on TV and radio channels including BBC, CNN IBN, CNBC, NDTV, Star TV, ETV and Blog TV Singapore. He has been featured on the cover page of The Week magazine; Digital Inspiration won the Best Technology Blog award at Indibloggies 2006 and is also included in the prestigious “Blogs of Note” list compiled by the Blogger team at Google. The site also recommended as “must read” by “India Today” and is one of the top 20 blogs at Microsoft BlogStars.

Question: They say Video blogging is the next big thing? What you think about it?

Daniel Scocco: Video is huge. In fact it is not the next but the current big thing. If I am not wrong YouTube confirmed a while ago that it is streaming over 1 billion videos every day. As for video blogging, it depends how you define it. If you are talking about someone getting in front of a web cam and talking about general stuff, well I am not sure how many people will have success with that (some certainly will, but it requires talent). Independent video creations that try to explore different concepts have a bright future though.

Amit Agarwal: video blogging will get popular no doubt with the emergence of services like qik that bring live streaming to phones.

Question: Do you see any threat from “Video” blogging to the traditional/conventional “Text” blogging?

Daniel Scocco: I don’t think that video blogging threatens traditional blogging. Both media have their place. It is like when television came along. It certainly didn’t kill books and newspapers.

Amit Agarwal: They complement to each other, neither is a threat.

Question: Bunch of boys trying to make money from blogging and fails miserably, why people see blogging as a mean to make money rather than a platform to express their opinion and thoughts?

Daniel Scocco: Money makes the world go around, so people will chase it wherever they can. I am not sure if the majority of the people who start blogging do so because of the money though. As for the people who want to make money blogging and fail, well, I believe it comes from the fact that they are not willing to put what it takes. Making money with a blog is no different than making money with another type of website or with an offline venture. As such, it requires a lot of time and hard work.

Amit Agarwal: Money from blogs is a long term effort and you only realize this when you get into the thing, I mean you read success stories that Mr. x is making y from blogging and you tend to thing that I too can do it, But it’s a long term effort and lot of people quit before they reach that stage.

Question: Affiliate Marketing and Blogging is a lethal combination if you know how to go about it, do you think blogging was designed for this purpose?

Daniel Scocco: I don’t think blogging was designed for affiliate marketing. In fact I am not even sure that we can say that blogging was “designed.” I see it rather as a phenomenon that emerged spontaneously on the web, and that was shaped by a myriad of factors.

Amit Agarwal: I have no clue about affiliate marketing so no comments; I never sold any affiliate product on your blog.

Question: There is flood of Blogging coaching programs in the internet market now, everyone claims to give inside secrets of how to become a super blogger and a rich affiliate marketer. What do you think on this situation?

Daniel Scocco: Honestly I haven’t checked most of those programs, so I couldn’t say if they are good or bad. The only program which I have seen the material is Yaro Starak’s Blog Mastermind, and I confirm it is quality stuff.  Yaro himself generated over $500,000 last year if I am not wrong, so he knows what he is talking about.

Amit Agarwal: I am not sure if they offer value, there are tons of great blogs / resources on the web that talk about blogging and communities in depth, follow them, read their archives, and that’s it.

Question: People consider you as one of the Guru of Professional Blogging, your take on that and also. Tell me who your favorites are?

Daniel Scocco: I don’t consider myself a guru. I just have a passion for business and online marketing, and I am glad that people like the stuff I share on my blogs. Some of my favorite bloggers are: Darren Rowse from Problogger.net, Neil Patel from QuickSprout.com, Leo Babauta from ZenHabits.net

Amit Agarwal: It’s a level playing field, you write good and unique content and they’ll find you. There’s no “god” in blogging, my favorite is Om Malik from GigaOM, very successful yet so down to earth.

Question: Your one single piece of advice to budding bloggers.

Daniel Scocco: If you are blogging as a hobby, have fun. If you are blogging to make money, treat it like a business and work hard.

Amit Agarwal: Work hard.

I aways insist all newbie affiliate marketer who wish to try their luck in affiliate marketing to start their affiliate business with Affiliate Venture Group (AVG), why I recommend AVG, well if you look at their interface, it is very simple and easy to use, perhaps they have the most simple sign up process, very easy to understand.

Tell us something about yourself in brief, a small introduction of rick from the Man himself.

Shanker, thanks for making this happen. Well, what can I say, I just turned 40 something, I have an amazing wife, an adorable daughter and blessed to be surrounded by such a loving and supportive family. Affiliate Venture Group is my latest venture and I must say it has been one heck of a ride.

How it all get started, I mean your internet marketing business and this whole affiliate marketing thing?

I got into affiliate marketing by accident actually. One of my customers in a coffee shop I had while in Chicago wanted to get a site built and optimized I had some partners that enabled me to do that and truly find out the benefits and rewards and haven’t looked back since.

When exactly you realize that YES, this is the thing you want to do in life? This is the place where you would stake your claim.

Having been in the industry for over 10 years, I got a chance to see what a lot of people are doing wrong and what others are doing right and realized that there is an unfulfilled need in this space for a network that takes the time and effort to work with each and every partner. Launching AVG is just the start, aage aage dekho keya hota hai!

People says you must follow your passion, Is it your passion or your business (But somehow we know you love doing it) your take on mixing up passion with the business.

This is simple, if I wasn’t passionate about what I am doing – I would not be doing it. Life is too short to be involved in something that you could care less about.

Did you ever have a job?  What are some of the significant differences in terms lifestyle, work schedule choosing between your own businesses as compared to a 9-to-5 job?

I have had quite a few jobs in my career and in hind sight; they were stepping stones to what would be required of me in running this network. Although the schedule is crazy and around the clocks, it still affords me the time I WANT to spend with my family.

What inspired you most to jump into the affiliate and internet marketing business and start own affiliate network? How difficult or easy this decision was for you.

I do not think there was a single moment in time that perpetuated this decision to start a network but rather some shortcomings I saw as an affiliate in dealing with other networks and knew there had to be a better way. The decision to start the network was the easy part, executing the strategy and putting in place the pieces to make it work was challenging.

I hear you saying “probably the oldest (43) individual in this industry”, how does it feel to be in there between all this new lot of young entrepreneur.

I absolutely love it. This is such a dynamic industry and being around all these young guns enables me to keep abreast of what’s going on. I do not think you will come across one of my clients who think that I am 40 something, well – at least I don’t act like one.

What are your idols? Or should I ask whom you want to be like?

I like myself just fine, thank you very much! In all seriousness, all the guys behind Facebook, Twitter, and Google have totally changed the world we live in and that I find quite admirable.

Where you see your company “Affiliate Venture Group” in next five years from now?

Brother, I do not know where I will be 5 years from now so have no clue where AVG will be. I do know however that we put forth our best effort each and every day and do right by our partners so I expect we will still be a functional and a growing venture.

How hard it was for you to compete with big boys in your business, which was the turning point according to you that bring out AVG into the big arena.

We have a LONG way to go to be considered in the same paragraph as the big boys. They have all done a phenomenal job to get where they are and even if we can do a fraction of what they have accomplished, we will be pleased.

Say if you have to start it all over again, what would be the first thing you will do?

I live life with no regrets at all so I would not change a single thing. Everything we do in our lives has an action and a reaction and if it was not for those moments, I would not be here today. Agreed?

We also know that you are very close to your family, how they see your business? How you convince them or how they encourage you to go out and play the game you love?

My family members have been my biggest supporters. Any success I have attained or will attain in the future – I owe it all to them. Even my 8 year old daughter is always asking me how much revenue we have done today and if it is low, she tells me I need to do better.

There is a saying “behind every successful man there is a women” Is it really?

This is very true – in my case I have TWO women.

What you like to do in your free time; how you devote your time to your family as well as to your business to get best out of both worlds.

Free time? What’s that? Seriously, this business allows us to have ample free time and weather that means travelling, going to the neighborhood Starbucks or playing a friendly card game, it all makes it worthwhile.

Is there any change in people’s buying habits on internet in recent times, how it affects your business. How you deal with it.

The recent slump in the economy had severely affected consumers buying habits but fortunately for us, we do extremely well in the sub-prime space so we were not affected too much at all.

What is your “success mantra”? There are lots of people who fail in internet and affiliate marketing business. What are the major factors which define success in affiliate and internet marketing, where they are lacking?

There is a saying I like, “Failure is an Event – Never a person”. Many in the space tend to internalize their failures and never attempt it again. That is wrong, this industry is all about testing and retesting. Majority of your campaigns will suck – but the few that do work, will be magical.

What advice you want to give to a newbie affiliate marketer?

See point above, it applies here also. Don’t give up – there are a lot of resources available to help you succeed and if none of those work – you can always reach out to us at AVG.

We would also like to know about your social networking profile, how important social media for building brand?

Social media is a very critical part in building your brand. It is real-time and happening 100 miles per hour and if you do not pay attention to it, you could do serious harm to your brand. There has never been a time to engage your customers instantaneously and that is a very valuable proposition.

Anything you want to say to “Shanker Bakshi dot Com” readers.

I want to take this time to thank you for making this interview happen. I know we all get busy in our day to day lives but this is truly an honor. If any of your readers have any questions about affiliate marketing, AVG or anything else for that matter, please feel free to reach out to me.

gsahuja@gmail.com , twitter.com/rickyahuja, AIM – TheGoogleGuy

Ricky Ahuja with Wife Navleen Kaur

Well this man indeed needs no introduction. All you web developer guys out there know him very well.  An authority in his chosen field, a software developer and as they call him “Murphy’s Quality Controller” of Automattic Inc. He is Lead Developer behind weblog site WordPress.com and the multi-user version of WordPress WordPress MU. He lives with his lovely wife Jacinta in the scenic town of Blarney, Co. Cork, Ireland. He is also a passionate photographer, dragging around a camera everywhere and posting photos every day to Inphotos.org. Donncha is a Linux user and his primary post-production tool is The GIMP, using GThumb as an image viewer.

Donncha has released dozen of other useful WordPress Plugin. Some of them are No Adverts for Friends, Comment Referrers adds the referrer to comment notification emails, Flickr Comment Importer imports comments from your photos on Flickr into your blog. Flickr Blog This to Draft stops your post appearing when you blog a photo from Flickr. Brian’s Latest Comments Cached caches the output of Brian’s Latest Comments. WP Super Cache that creates static html files. Blog Voyeur – spy on your visitors! Cookies for Comments sets a cookie in your browser and marks a comment as spam if the cookie isn’t present later. WordPress Theme Tester enables you to test new themes without any impact on your visitors. Let’s talk to the man himself.

Shanker Bakshi: You are a lead developer of WordPress MU. There is lot of Buzz about its extension BuddyPress. Users are mixing up both WordPress MU and BuddyPress and creating powerful social media Networking sites just like Facebook. What’s your take on that?

Donncha O Caoimh: It’s exciting that the tools are there for users to build sites like Facebook. These same tools will raise the expectations of users for what their software should do, and possibly make it harder for proprietary software makers to compete with GPLed software.

Shanker Bakshi: When Ma.tt Mullenweg was here for attending WordCamp India a couple of months back I requested him to integrate BuddyPress with WordPress blog. He liked my idea. Do you think it will help bloggers if they have their blogs supported by an internal integrated social network community?

Donncha O Caoimh: Yes and no. Yes, it will help communication between bloggers to discuss issues but no, it might discourage those bloggers looking elsewhere for differing opinions. Their local social network could become an echo chamber where only the populist view prevails. I find the most interesting bloggers are those with original thoughts.

On a more positive note, an internal social network will help to gel a group of bloggers together. There will be friendships built, the site will become sticky and invaluable to those users.

Shanker Bakshi: Tell us something about how you guys works at Automattic. How its likes to be a part of the most influential work Group of Web 2.0

Donncha O Caoimh: Oh, it’s fabulous. We’re jetting off here, there and everywhere. We get to work on really cool code. Sort of. Working for Automattic is a superb opportunity and the job is very interesting and always throwing up new challenges. I never think much about how influential Automattic is.

I love working on code and doing interesting things with it so it’s a surprise to me when I hear things like that!
As you know Automattic is made up of people from all over the world so communication is vitally important. I think Matt’s recent post on P2 hits the nail on the head. IRC is really useful for immediate responses from those in your same timezone, but P2 does that too, plus the conversation I started on a micro blog can be joined by Matt when he starts work 8 hours later.

Shanker Bakshi: social-networking, video-sharing, wikis, blogs are the main evolutions on web 2.0. Where you see this movement in two years from now?

Donncha O Caoimh: Not surprisingly I think video will play a bigger role but there’s always going to be a place for the written word. I think we’ll find a lot more older people will get online. This may hopefully improve usability of websites. Some upstart website is going to shake the foundations a bit but for the most part technology will slowly evolve.

Shanker Bakshi: You have also developed a hand full of WordPress Plugins but it seems you are fallen in love with WP Super Cache. What are the other projects you are handing at this moment?

Donncha O Caoimh: Love? WP Super Cache? Ha! If you only knew the nights I fell asleep thinking of caching and why this or that didn’t work, or the weekends spent hacking on it when I wanted to be playing with my son. That plugin takes up a lot of my time!

Other projects are listed on my blog’s “WordPress Plugins” page, but I’ve also contributed to:
1. Tweetbacks – got it to use wp-cron to fetch tweets.

2. WP-hashcash – it now protects the MU signup form.

3. Subscribe to Comments which is now used on WordPress.com and I need to get a patch to Mark Jaquith

4. Viper’s adminbar which briefly made an appearance in MU but I’ll be merging the changes back into that plugin.

Shanker Bakshi: would you like to share some of the new features that you are incorporating in next versions of WordPress MU? I mean what major changes we will see in near future in MU Platform.

Donncha O Caoimh: The next major change will be merging WordPress 2.8 into MU, but mostly it’s bug fixing and incremental improvements. Any major improvements will likely come in the form of Plugins, if I find the time to work on them.

Shanker Bakshi: Tell us something about your other love Photography. You and matt both loves to click things. In fact I can see you post a new photograph every day on In Photos.

Donncha O Caoimh: Yeah, I love photography and drag my camera everywhere. It annoys some people but thankfully my wife is a photography fan too. I shoot whatever I find interesting, quite often from an unusual angle if I can and I have little time for the analysis of photography. My life is too busy with work and family life to worry about interpretation. If I like it, I’ll shoot it!

Shanker Bakshi: In the planet of more then 4000 WordPress Plugin which one is your favorite and which other WordPress coder’s works inspire you or impress you?

Donncha O Caoimh: Hands down, it has to be Subscribe to Comments. It’s currently maintained and developed by Mark Jaquith and has to be the most useful plugin of all. I cringe whenever I leave a comment on a blog that doesn’t use it because I know I’ll miss the rest of the conversation.

I also like what viper007bond did with his admin bar and Joost De valk did some neat things to make his Plugins easier to configure. He added a “Settings” link next to the “Deactivate” link on the plugins.php page in Tweetbacks. No other plugin does that so I copied it for WP Super Cache (Thanks Joost!)

Shanker Bakshi: Any thing you want to convey to your WordPress MU and Plugin users.

Donncha O Caoimh: Writing GPL software is a two way process. You get the software without paying an upfront cost in currency but the real cost is when you don’t give back in some form. That can be either by helping someone else use the same software, reporting problems back to the author, or submitting a patch to make the software better.
If you find a bug in a WordPress plugin, get in there with a text editor. Look at the error logs. Use Google to search for any error messages and then get back in there and learn. Sending the plugin author a donation or buying something off their Amazon wishlist will help too of course!

Shanker Bakshi: Thanks very much for giving time from your busy schedule to Shanker Bakshi dot Com readers. Thanks again.

Donncha O Caoimh: You’re welcome!

Best Buddies – Donncha O Caoimh with Matt Mullenweg

It seems I am enjoying interviewing fellow bloggers and biggies of blogsphere these days. First of all it was with blogging buddy Gyutae Park then coder craftsman Andy and now comes short conversation with Mr. John Chow. There is one more coming your way in a very short time. If you go through various pages of this blog I had quoted it at many places that I started blogging only after reading some great stuff of Mr. Chow on his blog, before that I was not even aware any such thing like blogging exists on this earth. So I’m very humbly and respectfully owe this whole blogging thing of mine to Mr. Chow.

Way back somewhere in October 2007, I won this prestigious million Euro Wiki Page from John Chow dot com in a contest where Mr. Chow and Shoemoney were fighting with each other on who could get more RSS subscriber in the month of during contest period, so like many other things John is also pioneer and expert in this blogging contest things, so before starting this lets Win this contest together -Season 2 I had a short conversation with him in which he guide me how to go about it.

Shanker Bakshi: I am starting a big contest, it’s a contributory contest, Am trying to contact big shot of blogsphere to make it big but they are not responding positively.

John Chow: That’s too bad; did you answer the “What’s in it for me” question?

Shanker Bakshi: “HOW TO RUN A CONTEST AND MAKE IT BIG?”

John Chow: That might make a cool blog post

Shanker Bakshi: they can at least response.

John Chow: That answer is pretty easy, you need to answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” Well, you need to answer their questions, it’s not yours, when emailing others to help, tell them what’s in it for them

Shanker Bakshi: okay – that’s a great tip. What is best place/way to promote a blog contest?

John Chow: any place you can, facebook, other blogs, twitter, etc

Shanker Bakshi: These days commenting helps more then anything -what’s your take on this?

John Chow: Yes, if you’re among the first

Shanker Bakshi: If I put a condition to participate in the contest like “TO BLOG ABOUT THE CONTEST” would it be amount to duplicate contents for Google? Lots of bloggers will copy and paste the contest post.

John Chow: Not unless every blog writes the exact same thing, you can solve that by asking a question like “What do you like about it?” that forces them to write something unique.

Shanker Bakshi: That’s a great advise again, thanks for your time, you been always so kind towards me.

John Chow: That’s good for you