This is a story that talks about the Origin of BeMyAficionado Blog.
I’m Varun Shrivastava and I’m a software developer who sells his time and code for a living. I first started this website in September 2015 under www.varunshrivastava.in domain back when I was in college. I used this website as my personal portfolio where I portrayed my work and resume and other information which would help me to get potential clients. The website remained as a portfolio for a quarter until when I developed a love for blogging.
In Jan 2016, I added a blogging section on my website. I was the sole blogger. I use to write about daily/social experiences, programming, philosophy and stuff like that. The website was not on a specific niche, it was just a culmination of everything that I learned in my day to day life. You can call it my daily diary. Slowly and steadily, the website started attracting readers. Although I was not specifically doing any extra effort in bringing visitors to my website, a little traffic started to develop. The funny thing was I did not even have a subscription form anywhere on the website. I was a complete noob :p
When traffic grew, my interest grew and I started paying a little more attention to the overall user experience of the website and learned about search engine optimization. This all started in early 2016. At this time I had written more than 30 articles out-of-which 5-7 articles made the first page of the google. I also learned quite a lot about SEO. I remember how I use to make small tweaks and changes in order to create the best user experience for my visitors. And now I have acquired sufficient knowledge so that I can guide others regarding SEO. Infact, I have already helped 3 clients in this area.
In May 2016, I was exploring WordPress. I use to import it’s functionality to my existing framework which I made using Codeigniter. One morning I was trying to create a plugin framework just like WordPress, then suddenly I realised that I was in the process of creating yet another WordPress. This thought was contagious. As a developer, I was about to break the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. I immediately stopped doing it and gave it another thought by comparing the pros and cons of the system which I was about to create. I realized that I was about to create a system which is very similar to WordPress and on top of that I would be the only one who will be writing plugins for it. By the time I realized this, I already had sufficient knowledge of the WordPress. So, instead of working further down the line, I made a decision to port my website to WordPress.
On May 7, 2016, I wrote my first article from my new website powered by WordPress under the same domain name. I found a way to integrate my existing CodeIgniter website with the new WordPress website and I also wrote two long articles on that explaining the entire process.
I started blogging from the new platform and everything was working fine. WordPress has got everything which enables you to start creating content immediately instead of spending time with the housekeeping stuff. So, I used that time to write more articles instead of tweaking with my website. I always made themes by myself and even thought about selling the themes at one point but as I was time constrained I had to drop the idea. The theme which I use on my website is made by me. I know a few things which I use on a constant basis to make it more user-friendly and Search Engine friendly. Although this shift was healthy for me, it wasn’t healthy for google rankings. I lost two first page articles after this port.
Origin of BeMyAficionado
BeMyAficionado is just a phrase my friend threw at me with that titillating look on her face. I did not have any idea of this word back then. So, like everyone else I googled about it.
Yeah, you got that right 😀
By this time, the website was getting more than 150 hits every day. It is not much, but by looking at the enormous movements in the website data and structure over the time, this traffic was considerable. By this time, we have a motive to take this website to next level. We stopped writing casually and started writing sincerely with a clear motive to help the readers of BMA with our experiences. We started sharing our learnings through BMA. Whatever we use to learn, we put it on BMA. We started putting efforts in producing the best content to help our readers. Now, we were more focused and knew where we were heading to.
The website was still hosted under the same domain (www.varunshrivastava.in). As more and more people wanted to project their thoughts and views through our website, I could no longer continue it under my name. I needed a more generic one. Be My Aficionado came into the picture.
I purchased this domain from Godaddy on a discounted sale of 1299 INR for 2 years. This time again I had to go through the entire porting process of my existing (www.varunshrivastava.in) website to the www.bemyaficionado.com. The migration was successful, although, I lost google ranking once again. But, by this time I have a list of more than 250 subscriber which really loves to read our articles.
Motive behind BeMyAficionado (BMA)
BMA has a lot to offer to its reader. We continually share our life experiences in the best way possible. With BMA we want to create a community of youth which will actively take part in helping each other achieve their goals. We have learned a lot in our journey and we personally believe that if we start sharing our knowledge and skills with each and everyone else around. We can create a better world for our younger generation.
I continuously express my knowledge in the form of articles. If you will navigate to the home page of BMA, you will find informative articles on various subjects. All these articles are a result of our learnings in life. We have shared our experiences from the fresher’s drive to how I got my first job. We have shared the problems and difficulties that an IT fresher has to face when he first came to a new city (in my case it is Pune). I have written articles explaining about how you can speed up the WordPress website, SEO techniques to obtain better search results and on and on. Each and every article is connected to one or the other experience in my life.
The content we produce every day is 100% authentic and honest. BMA is here to stay for long, as long as there are people willing to share useful and important stuff with the entire world. We want to boost the entrepreneurship in India and motivate people to move in the same direction.
Summing it up
BMA primarily focuses on Sharing Personal Life Experience as a mode of learning for others, SEO, Earning money online, Affiliation, WordPress and lots of other interesting topics as we continue to learn and expand. We are planning to step in the world of “Internet Marketing”, so if you are interested in learning the same with us then stay connected.
BMA is about to become a community pretty soon where we will allow others/bloggers to share their experiences with us. At the time of writing this page, there are only 4 contributors who are contributing to our informative contents. Soon we are going to accept the guest post in our blogs where different bloggers will be able to share their experiences and learning with the youth of our country.
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Phewww! That was a long post. Well, that’s all for now. See you soon.
And as always,
Be my aficionado 🙂