10 Questions with Mr. Dushyant Bhatia, CEO of Blogertize

Blogertize has been featured on Killerstartups.com, sold $27,000 in adspace within 75 days of it’s launch and surpassed 1000 bloggers in their first 3 months. One thing that sets them apart is the business model and target audience. They’ve chosen to sell adspace to bloggers, rather than large corporations. In addition to all the success the company has found, they have formed an official partnership with Fulmarxx Shorts Fest 2.0, India’s largest short film festival. Blogertize has found success in a struggling economy, where so many others have failed. It gives me great pleasure to present 10 Questions with Mr. Dushyant Bhatia, CEO of Blogertize.

BM. Please share with us a summary of your background.

DB. Well, here’s a brief background about our team.
Dushyant Bhatia - 23, Bachelors in Accounting and Finance from Mumbai University
Work experience
JPMorgan (IB Services – India) (Jul 2006 – Aug 2008)
Mid Corporate Banking (Jul 2006- Feb 2008)
Debt Capital Market (Mar 2008-Aug 2008)

Darshan Gusani - 23, Graduated from Drexel University June 2008, Finance & Economics
Work experience
Blackrock Inc, Portfolio Admin Analyst (Mar 2006 – Sep 2006)
Attalus Capital, Hedge Fund Analyst (Mar 2007 –Sep 2007)
Attalus Capital, Equity Long/Short Analyst (Aug 2008 – Dec 2008)

Other members of the team:
Dhruv Parikh- Public relations manager
Rohan Bhansali & Ahmed Naqvi (RaA Studios)- Website development services. They worked on our website and forum and are currently working on Blogertize shopping portal.

Darshan is currently handling our operations in US. Hopefully within this year, we shall be opening one of our offices in Pennsylvania.

DB. It all started in March 2008. I started exploring the possibility of a making a sound business model using pixel advertising. There were over 1,000 rip-offs of million dollar home page but a majority of them had no business model. There was nothing unique in those sites. I wanted to make some sense out of pixel advertising. After the conceptualization of my thought process, I approached Darshan in August and asked him about the feasibility of this startup in international markets such as US and Europe. He liked the concept and decided to join in. After further brain storming and some changes in the business model we launched this website on Sep 01, 2008. I quit my job in August 2008 to give more time to this venture and Darshan continued with his job to make sure we had enough resources to market the site.

We knew that this credit crunch was (or rather is) bound to affect many in US and Europe. So we thought, why not have a website for these part time bloggers who’ve recently lost their jobs or are affected by recession and encourage them to turn into full time bloggers by helping them in monetizing their blogs. Thus, BlogertizeWorld was born. We have combined five crucial elements of Internet marketing namely pixel advertising, e-commerce, promotional quizzing model, social networking and affiliate marketing.

DB. Sound business model is something one has to work on. There is no such thing like a quick buck. If you can’t satisfy your customer needs, any business plan, how good it may seem to be, would not work. That’s what we aim to achieve in this startup – BLOGERTIZER satisfaction. We’d like to grow as an organization and make sure that the interests of the bloggers advertising with us are taken care of.

DB. We are close to having 1,450 bloggers advertising with us and have space for another 1,400 odd bloggers. Bloggers from countries all over the world like US, India, UK, Malaysia, Thailand, Greece, New Zealand, Australia, Romania, Dubai and many more have purchased adspace buttons on our site.

DB. You seem to have done your research very well. Anyway, it’ll not be appropriate to discuss figures right now. But yes, we are considering sharing a certain proportion of our profits from all sources, be it shopping portal, ad revenue, forum revenue, revenue from sponsors or anything else. We’d be distributing a small proportion of profit to our bloggers on yearly basis for next 3 years. The concept would be similar to that of a dividend being distributed by a public company to its equity shareholders, the only difference being that the bloggers advertising with us do not own equity stakes in this company. The ratio in which the portion of the profit would be distributed would depend upon the pixel button sizes i.e. the ratio of profit distribution for $15, $40, $80 and $150 pixel buttons would be in the ratio of 2:4:6:8 respectively.

DB. I’d say 200%. With income streams including commission from shopping portal, adrevenue via traffic, profit sharing etc etc, I’d like to believe that bloggers would break even or if I may say so, make profit within a year itself. There are some other avenues that we’d be exploring in the next 3 years. So, recovering one’s investment shouldn’t be a problem.

DB. Every single element of blogertize is most critical to its success. I believe each of them namely pixel advertising, e-commerce, promotional quizzing model, social networking and affiliate marketing compliment other really very well. The only thing bloggers need to understand is that we’ll get them quality traffic but at the same time the conversion rate of visitors turning into loyal readers would depend entirely upon the content of their blogs and the frequency at which the content is updated.

DB. The newsletter that we’d be sending to our subscriber base would be sent on a monthly basis. Bloggers would be asked to submit two of their best posts for that month. Our team would then review each and every story submitted and will select the best 15 stories/posts for each of eleven segments. The link to the blog from where the content is extracted would be mentioned in the newsletter alongside the story. This would be yet another effective way of attracting quality targeted traffic. The stories selected would definitely attract some incentives, monetary or otherwise.

DB. We aim to launch it by April but bloggers wouldn’t or rather shouldn’t mind if we postpone the launch date by a month or so. We are going to launch this website only when we feel that all the things are at their respective places. Even if we sell all the adspace by the end of this month, we will not display the images the very next day. It’s the business model that bloggers worldwide have invested in and we have to make sure that everything is perfect when we launch this website. We’d be more aggressive with our marketing campaign in the month of March. Our ultimate aim is to make sure that the bloggers are satisfied with what they receive in the span of next 3 years.

BM. Can you give us any additional insight of future Blogertize plans?

DB. Right now, our team is focusing on getting our baby steps right. Currently, we’re working on the smooth transitioning of the following;

- Launch of shopping portal
- Sound marketing campaign
- Sponsors for quizzes and contests for visitors
- Forum popularity

Once we’re done with these, we’ll focus on other revenue generating programs/affiliations. We intend to run this website successfully and make sure that all the 2,850 bloggers advertising with us get a monetary return of atleast 100% in these 3 years. The layout of the website would be completely different when we launch this website officially. Currently our homepage is blogger centric but once we sell all the adspace, we would be redesigning the same to satisfy the needs of the visitors.