Thoughtful Interview with Pardeep Goyal from Cash Overflow on Making Money Online

There’s another fantastic interview up in the BloggersPassion interview series. This time Pardeep Goyal who is a full-time blogger, blogs at Cash Overflow which covers various topics including making money online, financial management, blogging etc.

If you’re someone who is looking to learn more about finance management and proven ideas to make money online, you should definitely subscribe to Cash Overflow.

In this detailed interview with Pardeep Goyal of Cash Overflow, you’ll find a ton of golden nuggets about making money from blogging, his lifestyle, his routine and other precious advice that you won’t find anywhere else.

So grab a cup of coffee and let’s get started!

Interview with Pardeep Goyal from Cash Overflow

1. Hi Pardeep, can you please introduce yourself to the BloggersPassion readers?

I am Pardeep Goyal, a finance geek, content marketing expert, and a growth consultant for early-stage startups.

I worked with an IT company for 7 years as the Tech lead before quitting to co-found two startups — SchoolGennie and PocketScience.

After not finding success with my first two startups, I founded CashOverflow in May 2015 to help people generate passive income and achieve financial freedom.

Since our launch in May 2015, CashOverflow has grown organically and currently has a traffic of 200,000 visitors per month.

CashOverflow is focused on two things — financial abundance & financial freedom.

Financial abundance is about fulfilling your desires through certain ways even though you might not be wealthy yet.

Financial freedom is about building enough wealth so that you no longer stress about money and care about things in life that are beyond money.

With that focus, CashOverflow provides practical insights on Saving money, Investing money, and Earning passive money.

People love my content on saving money on shopping and travel using credit cards and making money by investing into stock market. Look at the number of comments in the articles and you will understand the impact of the content on people’s life.

My vision is to help people in establishing a second source of income — and then hold their hands to manage their money & business whether they are earning through Freelancing, Consulting, Blogging, or Startup.

If you land on my website, you will definitely learn something to either save money or earn money.

2. What inspired you to start blogging? To be precise, why did you choose blogging?

When I was working as a Tech Lead in an IT company, I was not happy at all with my job. I was spending my days in the boring meetings, managing excel files. I was making decent money but IT job sucked the blood out of my life.

I was sacrificing my life – no vacations, no family functions, and no time for friends. I looked at the lifestyles of my superiors – my manager and my director of engineering, and realized that their life was the same.

I just saw my future and felt that something has to change so that I don’t have to continue in the same lifestyle.

I decided not to be part of the rat race. So, I quit my first job in 2013. It was a tough decision but I did not worry about money and failure.

I decided to start a business given my love for entrepreneurship and the freedom I would get to work on my ideas.

My first startup failed and I shared the case study publicly on YourStory and StartupKarma.

My second startup also didn’t work out for other reasons.

But I didn’t want to give up on my love for entrepreneurship.

During my tenure as a co-founder, despite coming from a technical background, I took it upon myself the work of digital & content marketing in the form of writing sales copies, blog posts, social media marketing, and so forth.

And I ended up falling in love with content writing and content marketing.

When I was figuring out what to start next, I realized that personal finance is one area that I really like. From financial news, financial products, credit cards, money saving hacks, investment related philosophies, income tax laws, and so forth, I enjoy talking every bit of financial stuff for entrepreneurs and freelancers.

My passion for personal finance + my growing love for content marketing + the freedom to lead the lifestyle I want to made starting up CashOverflow- the blog a no brainer for me.

3. What is your secret to making 3 lakhs ($5000) per month from blogging?

I ran my blog like a business, but I consciously avoided monetizing till it was having a monthly traffic of around 30,000. I started experimenting with Ads and Affiliate marketing in the ratio of 20:80 respectively to test which is a good fit for my business without compromising my reader’s experience.

Even today, you won’t see Ads on my website. I keep the Ads to a minimum and focus on other areas since reader’s experience is very important to me.

One of my main income streams is from Affiliate marketing. I built affiliate partnerships covering financial products, website hosting, amazon affiliate, travel-related booking, and content marketing tools.

Initially, with a traffic of around 30,000, I was able to generate a modest revenue of Rs 60,000 per month.

Eventually, I diversified to build a host of other revenue streams in the past 1 year that fetched me Rs 3,00,000 per month as seen below.

These income streams include:

• Affiliate Marketing
• Partnerships with brands
• Content Writing
• Paid Newsletters
• Display Ads
• Consulting
• Content Marketing Course

Coming to the secret, you can use following insights to double your profits on your blog if you are running your blog like a business.

There are two ends of blog business and most of the people are not aware of it.

Front End, that is visible to everyone on my website.

It looks like a simple blog but actually, there are powerful conversion funnel hidden inside the articles. We consciously keep the number of articles low to provide maximum relevant content to someone looking to save money, invest or generate passive income in India.

The flow of articles is designed in a way that people looking for starting an online business or freelance work signup for my emails.

Back End, Under the complete control of business owner.

Out of 200,000 monthly visitors, about 3000 people signup for my email every month. I send them free PDFs and valuable content via emails. I keep only engaging audience in my email list. I remove 50% of people from my email funnel who do not open my emails.

After removing non-relevant subscribers, I have more than 18,000 email subscribers who are highly engaged with my emails. I selectively share discounts on the products to my subscribers based on their interests and business level.

In that way, they get the benefit of joining my newsletter because they get free advice and discounts on their favourite products.

I keep on making money from front end and back end of my business without compromising with ethics. I don’t promote every product that offers me commission. Instead, I selectively share products that will benefit my audience. In 90% cases, I use the same product that I share with my audience.

4. What challenges have you faced when you started blogging?

I did not face any challenges that most of new bloggers face because I never thought that I will monetise my blog. I am from a startup background and CashOverflow was my side project.

Whatever I was learning about content marketing, I was just practising on my personal finance blog.

If I have to point out one challenge, then I would say that the biggest challenge is providing value to readers without launching a software product.

I did not want to invest in yet another software tool but still want to learn about the launch process of a tool and find paying customers.

So I started premium newsletters (weekly insightful email) in 2017 to help 1000 people in starting & growing an online business. The biggest challenge was making them committed to their own work. People expect the results (money) as soon as they start a website or blog.

To make them committed, I started giving them assignments and asked to fill up their progress in Google form. I removed the members from the Newsletters when they failed to submit their progress continuously for two months.

It worked both ways, I lost a few good members who could not fill up the forms because of some personal issues, and some who thanked me for pushing them to jump the wall every month.

I stopped enrolling new members into premium newsletters after filtering out a passionate and committed group of about 250 members out of more than 500 people who joined till date. I will continue to work with them in the future.

5. What does your average day look like?

I have been working from home alone since many years now. But, over the past year I have gathered a small team to help me manage CashOverflow and a few affiliate content assets.

So, my day starts with planning the tasks for the day, having a call with my team to discuss work, and getting to actual work done.

My actual work can include some or all of the below tasks depending upon the work

• Writing content
• Publishing the scheduled content on CashOverflow
• Promoting content on social media
• Strategy for guest posting for Cashoverflow
• Strategy for my amazon affiliate websites
• Creating new email funnels for CashOverflow
• Sending emails to Inner circle members (paid newsletters)
• Sending emails to people interested in workshops
• Calls with Clients (I am helping them in their content marketing strategy & execution )
• Conducting live session for the writers training program (A free program for people who want to excel in content writing)

These days, I start my day around 9 AM and work till 3 PM. Then I take a break to pick up my kid from school, play with him for sometime, and take care of other personal life activities till night 9PM.

Post 9PM I start working again for few hours before heading to sleep. Some days when I not feel like working, I just take rest or drive along with my family to outings.

On weekends, We don’t work at all unless there is some priority work that needs to be done.

6. What exactly would you do if you had to start blogging from scratch today?

Most of the bloggers spend several days in just deciding on the name of their blog. I think we should quickly choose a blog name and start blogging.

Second thing, I would leave my miser behavior aside and put the business hat from day first if I have to start blogging from scratch.

I would invest money in a good hosting service, SEO optimised theme and hire professional writers to grow my content business. I would invest next round of money in hiring consultants who can help me improve the SEO and conversion of my blog.

Even people like Pat Flynn invest money into SEO audit and consulting because they know the value of hiring experts. Every $100 invested in an expert comes back with $10,000 ROI in the future.

7. Which are the 5 blogging tools you can’t live without?

I am not a big fan of tools for blogging because I believe that success happens in blogging by executing a powerful strategy than investing in a lot of tools.

Since you asked for tools, I love and recommend following.

1. Thrive Themes

I use Thrive wordpress theme for all my affiliate websites. It is a premium theme that makes your website look beautiful and clean.

They have a lot of plugins and themes that you can buy separately or join their monthly membership to get access to everything.

2. Drip or Convertkit

Drip is a powerful email marketing tool that helps me to reach the inbox of my subscribers instead of spam.

It also helps me to have complete control on my subscribers, from the backend, by tagging them into various categories, allowing me to send separate emails to regular subscribers & buyers of my products, run separate campaigns etc.

3. Mammoth .docx converter

Mammoth is a WordPress plugin that helps me to upload my entire article from Google docs to WordPress in a simple way. It converts the docs format to HTML for wordpress without changing the structure of my article.

4. Mindmeister

MindMeister is my favorite online mind mapping tool that lets me to visualize and capture my thoughts during brainstorming, note taking, and other work tasks.

5. Zoom

Zoom is a cloud based video and audio conferencing tool that helps me to host live webinars, record them, and also communicate with my team & clients in a conference setting.

6. Workflowy

This is simple tool to plan my activities in bullet points format. It’s like putting your brain dump in a list format and then improvising your ideas.

8. How will be the future of digital marketing after 5 years especially in India?

India started buying online – thanks to e-commerce players like Flipkart and Amazon. And thanks to companies like JIO who made the internet accessible to every corner of India.

The future of digital marketing is bright till companies are selling their products online.

We started an amazon affiliate website a few months back and started making money recently.

Here are the income stats.

We will scale up the content and revenues in next couple of months. I am sharing everything about affiliate marketing in India through my blog posts on CashOverflow.

9. What are your plans for future?

There are three prominent future goals that I have set for myself:

The First goal is to make sure that I continue to publish valuable content on CashOverflow that can genuinely help readers in their path of pursuing financial freedom. I am no more worried about growing traffic or bringing in more revenue for CashOverflow.

The Second goal is to help other people succeed by

• Helping new bloggers in starting a blog and picking profitable niches
• Helping fellow bloggers in growing their blog and earn more passive income
• Helping fellow startup founders in getting better at content marketing

The Third goal is more to do with marketing. I intend to build a liberal digital marketing agency — where every process will be so transparent that every member would have access to client’s proposals, income/expense reports, resource allocation, and profit distribution.

Everything will be run on a voluntary basis. I will facilitate the process initially but hope to have the community running automatically after a few years.

The challenge is to find people who resonate with our core business principles of transparency and honesty. People who can take the accountability of the work when no one is looking at them like a manager.

It would be a slow process but I will enjoy building a team of liberal digital marketers.

10. What are the 3 solid tips you have for new bloggers?

1. Earn money by doing freelance work till you start making money from your blog. Spend 30% of your time on freelancing assignments and 70% time on growing your business. These freelancing assignments can be for

• Other bloggers in your niche.
• Startups that need help with content writing for their products or platforms.
• Paid guest posts on popular media platforms like YourStory, Inc 42, Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, and so on.

2. Building a community around your business can be a big asset since they can help you in building your blog in the right direction. From generating content ideas to taking feedback on your newly published articles to promoting your content, having a community will help you to optimize your content so that your traffic will grow further.

When I generate new article ideas for CashOverflow, I take the help of my community to know what they want me to write on. Below is a snapshot demonstrating the ideas I got from my community and audience.

3. Traffic is important but the most important thing is targeted traffic. In my workshops, I have come across people who have 500,000 monthly traffic on their websites but are having less than Rs 100,000 monthly income.

In general, there are 3 ways to get traffic on your website

#1. Organic traffic through Google SEO

#2. Paid traffic through Ads

#3. Referred traffic from forums/guest-posts

I get 80% of traffic from Google, one of my friends gets 80% referred traffic from Quora, and another friend who is an affiliate marker gets 80% traffic from Paid Ads.

All of us are successful in our respective businesses as we ensure that our traffic is aligned with our business goals .

So figure that one channel that can get you targeted traffic and just focus on that, also make sure to improve your loading times.

Final Thoughts

Thanks so much Pardeep for your precious time replying to all the questions and we’re delighted to feature your interview on BloggersPassion. Hopefully our readers can learn a lot from you and your blog and become successful online. Make sure to follow Pardeep Goyal’s blog, go through his content and subscribe to his email list if you like the content.

So what are your thoughts? Did you like the interview with Pardeep Goyal? Do you have any more questions for him? Shoot your questions and thoughts in the comments and we’d be glad to respond to all of them.