I had been trying to get hold of Darren for a longtime now. But some how we missed each other. He lives in Australia and I live in US..there is that distance factor.

I guess more than the distance, Darren is a super busy man with his ton of blogs and the blogger network Big5Media of which he is the co-founder.

When I met him at the BlogworldExpo 2008 I made a point that I interview him right there and then which I did.

I suggest that you listen to this interview carefully. The Audio is little poor. The interview was not scripted and we did it in a conference room where there were more people around us. So in a way we both were distracted.

Here are some highlights of the interview.

Daren amplifies my observataion that blggers go negative in business anytime between 3-9 months upon starting.

His advice: Get into it, establish an audiance, Produce useful content and respond to comments even if you have just 4 readers.

Invest time into readers and allow them to guest post.

There is no way to test the success of a blog quickly. He sites examples of the top 100 blogs on technorati and the common element across all of them is tha they had been around for three years and each one of them making 20 posts a day. That’s a lot of work, so take the long term view and choose a topic that you would do for free, you will enjoy and it will sustain you through the tough times.

There are no shortcuts: While its true that suddenly some blogs do appear with a great idea, that usually is not the norm.

Have a unique voice for the blog, have a unique spin and be prolific with what you write

Raise up to the next level with your blog. You can certainly make a good money with average content on the long haul

Here is the recording..

Listen to the recording Now: Right about 14minutes 30 seconds into the audio you will hear Darren introduces Andrew Jones to me. Apparently Andrew inspired Darren to become a Blogger -

It was so kind of Darren to do this interview for me.

If you found this interview inspiring, do leave your comments and suggestions.

For your continued success!

Srini Saripalli