Vineet Rajan is a full time director with Scissor Paper Stone Web Solutions Pvt Ltd and heads client strategy at IndiBlogger.in. In this exclusive interview with India Digital Review, Rajan discusses how brands can look at blogging as the primary marketing activity online.

What was the objective and idea behind launching IndiBlogger as a blogging community in India?

We noticed that the Indian Blogging Community was growing but offered no avenues to connect bloggers with other likeminded bloggers. We ourselves were bloggers and found it hard to network with others. When we spoke to other bloggers, we realized they felt the same need; and so IndiBlogger.in came into being. It is a social network that aims to connect bloggers across India with each other and build the community into a very strong network.

How many bloggers do you have in your network now?

We have over 27,000 bloggers in the network as of today. All the registrations are manually verified and have gone through a strict submission guideline process. The network is open only for Indian bloggers who have existing blogs.

What were the initial challenges that you faced while convincing the bloggers to be a part of your network?

The initial challenge was never getting bloggers on board; since this idea came from the bloggers themselves. The challenge lay in providing the right platform for the bloggers. Till date we have never advertised IndiBlogger.in and the growth has purely been organic. The entire credit for what IndiBlogger.in is now goes to the blogging community who have worked closely with us, giving us timely inputs to make it better. The IndiForum, where bloggers discuss a lot of aspects of blogging, has been a breeding ground for new ideas, suggestions and feature requests.

What does a blogger get by being a part of your network?

Bloggers, being part of IndiBlogger.in, can most importantly network with other bloggers. They can find numerous blogs of their interest, add people to their network, send messages, take part in forum discussions, get their blogs reviewed, attend blogger meets and take part in exciting contests.

We, at IndiBlogger.in believe that more than any of these services, it is essential to encourage new bloggers and to give due importance to diligent bloggers; which is why we came up with IndiRank; an organic scoring methodology for bloggers that takes not just the mozRank, Alexa rank, page rank etc in consideration but also the most recent and frequency of blogging.  Programmable badges and widgets can also be put on blogs by bloggers. Most importantly, it is the feeling of being part of a community that is active, which has avenues to learn and grow as a blogger.

What is your screening procedure while selecting bloggers in your network?

Every blog that is submitted for the directory listing is checked manually by a moderator to see if it complies with our submission guidelines, and also to check if the blogger is of Indian origin. A blog listing will show up in the IndiBlogger.in directory only after the blog has been approved.

The screening process involves checking for the following:

1.          It must be a blog and not anything else. The term "anything else" includes company websites, product promotional pages, discussion forums, link/doorway pages, and bulletin boards.

2.          If we suspect that a blog contains duplicate or unoriginal content without giving due credit to the original source, we check it with Copyscape or Google. Blogs found with plagiarized content will not be approved.

3.          Blog submissions containing pornographic, adult or obscene material is not allowed on the IndiBlogger network.

4.          If someone has just started blogging and has only a few blog posts up, or if they haven't updated their blog in a long time, the account is put on hold and we check back later.

5.          Lastly, the blogger must be of Indian origin

Many feel that blogging has been dead of late. What are your views on the same? How do you see the uptake to blogging in new bloggers?

Blogging has been in the process of evolution with the advent of social networks. But Indian bloggers continue to leverage newer platforms while enhancing their online presence at the same time. The way we look at it is, either you have multiple online properties and manage them individually; or you create a central hub for your online presence.

The increase of the number of bloggers joining Indiblogger.in has also been going as forecasted. We are growing at around 80% YoY. As a trend, we have seen that those who wish to create a stronger identity for themselves look at blogs along with other online outlets such as Twitter and Facebook.

Indian bloggers have also slowly started professional blogging, instead of doing it just as a hobby. This number is increasing each year.

What is the average number of posts you get on IndiBlogger.in in a month?

IndiVine is the place where bloggers submit blog posts which can be promoted by other bloggers. It’s a platform that both new and old bloggers use to popularize their content. The entries here link back to their respective blogs. On an average we get around 20,000 submissions in a month. There is a spike in this activity during contests; since the contest platform uses the IndiVine engine.

What is your revenue model?

We essentially leverage blogging as an effective communication strategy among online community influencers, thus helping everyone, including brands, to reach their target audience through bloggers.

So far we have conducted more than 50 blogging contests and an almost equal number of blogger meets across the country.

Through the contests and meets, bloggers also gain insights into brands and their products when such campaigns go live. So these are actually win-win for everyone since they all drive the core mission of IndiBlogger.in which is to bring the Indian bloggers together as a stronger community.

IndiBlogger has been in the forefront of promoting brands through their blogger networks. How have you seen brands perceive blogs as a marketing medium?

Blogger engagement activities are in right now and the credit for this goes to the bloggers themselves. Bloggers in a way are the top online socialites because of their various technical skills. Their inherent need to express their opinions and themselves goes a long way in helping them openly talk about everything on their blogs. They also have the skill to sell the content that they write to their readers through Twitter, Facebook and other content sharing websites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

One of the recent success stories is Surf Excel Matic, a brand targeted towards the urban woman, which had a total reach of over 2.5 million readers. Brands are looking at blogging very excitedly mainly because here instead of the usual media outlets online like ads, Facebook fanpages etc they are able to see the effectiveness of word of mouth marketing and the credibility associated with the same. Over the past years, we have also seen more and more brands looking at blogging as the primary online marketing activity mainly because of the sustainability of working with a community.

You have regional language bloggers in your network too. Have you done any campaign in any regional language for a brand?

IndiBlogger.in has been connecting bloggers across India for over 4 years now. As a network it has allowed bloggers to encourage other bloggers to blog in their mother tongue; helped other blog readers to take inspiration from bloggers and hence begin blogging. Close to 20% of the bloggers on IndiBlogger.in blog in regional languages, the biggest chunk being that of Hindi bloggers. So far, the brands have tried to reach out to all bloggers mainly focussed on genre and interest and not on language. So we see good amount of participation coming from such bloggers in contests and blogger meets.

What are your thoughts on competition from a social media agency as there are lots of them?

There are many social media agencies, but we don’t compete with any of them nor do they need to compete with us. We have a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with all agencies. IndiBlogger.in does not get involved in social media management; and sticks only to building better and effective blogger engagement eco-systems. Social Media agencies that associate us add greater value to their clients since in order to connect with the bloggers they need a partner which has the blogger community in place.

What are your future plans for IndiBlogger?

We will continue with our existing market penetration and product development strategy. Soon, we will be launching newer products which will make IndiBlogger.in a house hold name. But the entire product development and penetration would happen around blogging aimed at building better eco-systems for better brand-blogger engagement.