Blazing Minds

Merry Christmas everyone and welcome to another interview in my new series, as mentioned before each week I will be interviewing a fellow blogger who has kindly answered my blogging questions, so let’s get on with it…

Q: Please tell my readers a little something about yourself?
A: My name is Mike Crimmins and I’m a coffee addict. Sorry, wrong
meeting. In all seriousness, I live in Tampa, Florida. I’ve lived here
for about a year and have lived all over the United States – New York,
Chicago and even Portland, Oregon.

I pretty much have three passions. In addition to being a coffee
fanatic, I love the baseball team the New York Yankees and I love
writing. Currently, I’m a full time web content writer. I used to be a
newspaper reporter for a very small town newspaper where the pumpkin
fest was front page news. Now, also I write daily about coffee.

Q: Hi Mike, so tell me about your blog, when and why you started it and how you came up with the name for it?
A: I run a blog about coffee. It’s for the average joe coffee drinker,
not the coffee snob or expert. Although, I think just about everyone
can get something out of my blog. It’s mostly coffee reviews and
equipment reviews, but there’s also coffee giveaways, coffee related
news and more.

I’ve been blogging since 2005, but none of those blogs really ever
made me happy. I was looking for one blog that I could really focus
on. I wanted a blog that would be something I could get passionate
about. I love the New York Yankees, but there’s a million blogs and
most of them do the Yankees news a lot better than I ever could.
However, I saw an opening in the coffee niche for someone that could
write from the average person’s point of view. That turned into the
Daily Shot Of Coffee. I started it in March of 2009.

The name was actually created by my girlfriend at the time. I came up
with a lot of great names, but almost all of them were taken. There’s
times that I wish it didn’t have daily in the name because it makes me
feel like I have to write something daily. However, I think that
writing daily has helped the blog grow quickly.

Q: Do you find blogging takes up a lot of your time?
A: It does take up a lot of my time, but I love coffee so I have no
problem with that! I start with the research, which could be testing a
new coffee gadget to trying different coffee related recipes and of
course sampling a lot of coffee. I usually spend one to two hours
writing a post. I’m the king of typos, so I do a rough draft, then the
final version with lots of proof reading. After that I spend several
hours commenting on blogs, hanging out on Twitter and doing other
activities to promote my blog.

Q: Where would you say most of your traffic comes from for your blog?
A: I get a decent amount of traffic from Twitter and commenting on blogs,
but none of it compares to the amount of traffic I get from Google and
other search engines. I think they love that my site has a lot of text
and that it’s updated on a regular basis.

Q: Do you use social networks to promote your blog and if so which ones would you recommend to other bloggers?
A: While I have my links probably up on a dozen different social
networks, I use Twitter and Facebook the most often. I post up my
links there, but I think just important is interacting with people on
those sites. On Twitter, just from chatting with people about coffee,
I’ve grown a base that will retweet links, Digg articles for me and
more. I also don’t think you need a million followers, I wouldn’t
complain if I did, but I have a really targeted list of people that I
follow. They’re all real humans and I’ve had some great interactions
with them. In turn, I also have a really high click thru when I do
post links.

Q: If you could give some useful advice to new bloggers, what would it be?
A: Blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. You may not have to work on it
every day like I do, but you have to be constantly working towards
your goals. I’ve been blogging for eight months now and I’m only
really beginning to see some great results – affiliate income, loads
coffee samples to review, etc.

Find one topic that you’re really passionate about. I’m still not
making a load of money, but I’ve tasted some of the best coffees in
the world…and mostly for free.

Then find ways to promote your blog that you like. There’s a million
ways to promote your blog, but you have to find something you like to
do. Since I like reading, I comment on blogs a lot. Since I like
talking with people online, I use Twitter way too much.

Thanks Karen for letting me do this interview. I really am honored to
be included.

Thanks Mike.

Check out Mike blog (Daily Shot Of Coffee)

If you are interested in an interview on Blazing Minds then please use the Contact Me button at the top of the Blazing Minds blog..

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 24th, 2009 at 7:42 am and is filed under Blogger Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.