Interview With Pradeep Chopra, CEO And Co-Founder of Digital Vidya

Welcome to another round of Bloggers interview series where we’re going to chat with few blogging and digital marketing experts to explore new trends and strategies to create a money making blog from scratch.

This time, we’re fortunate to conduct an expert interview with Pradeep Chopra who is the CEO and co-founder of Digital Vidya, which is Asia’s leading digital marketing training company.

So let’s dive into the interview with Pradeep Chopra from Digital Vidya to find out what he has to offer about building successful online businesses and websites from scratch.

Interview With Pradeep Chopra from Digital Vidya

interview with pradeep chopra

1. Hi Pradeep, welcome to BloggersPassion. Can you please introduce yourself to our audience?

I am Pradeep Chopra, the CEO of DigitalVidya.com, a company that I co-founded along with Kapil Nakra, a college friend back in 2009.

To give you an insight about me, I passed out from IIT-Delhi and joined TCS for a brief period. In just a year, I got a grand offer from an American company and I was all set to move. It was at that time when I was waiting for my visa formalities to complete that I decided to take the path of entrepreneurship.

But in this journey of entrepreneurship, I got to understand the power of Digital Marketing accidentally. And to be honest, it was instantaneous love. So, I always like to say that I am a Digital Marketer by Passion.

Apart from doing my regular work as a CEO, and a Marketer, I love to share my learnings. Thatโ€™s something that drives me. I have been a speaker of conferences such as ES US, adtech, World Blogger & Social Media Summit Malaysia, NASSCOM India Leadership Forum, HubSpot, etc. Just to share, I also love contributing for the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Economic Times, etc as well.

2. Can you please talk about the journey of Digital Vidya?

Well, the journey so far has been very exciting. We came to learn about the value of Digital Marketing accidentally when we were trying to push our first product in a business venture that we started in around 2000. After trying everything we could, we could not get even a single sale.

But eventually there was a purchase, and that was made from the USA. It was at a much higher price than we were trying to sell it for. It happened due to some random SEO that we had done on the website. Back in the day, the SEO competition was not so intense and we thought that we found our way to selling. And thatโ€™s how we went about learning the art of Digital Marketing.

In 2009, we decided to teach our learnings formally and began to conduct training programs on Digital Marketing, specifically in the realm of Social Media Marketing. This was received very well. But in 2013, we decided to offer full-stack Digital Marketing training using the online platform. This led to the birth of our CDMM program which has trained more than 30,0000 Marketers from 55+ Countries till now.

At the moment apart from our flagship Digital Marketing training program, CDMM, we offer courses in Data Science and Analytics as well.

3. What are the stats of Digital Vidya?

I am proud to say that Digital Vidya has trained over 35,000 professionals in its 9 years of being. Our blog gets more than 250,000 visitors a month. This depicts the trust of people in our platform.

On a side note, our blog hosts a plethora of how toโ€™s and in-depth guides about all platforms of Digital Marketing and Data Science & Analytics.

4. Whatโ€™s the future of digital marketing? Do you expect any new trends in the digital marketing world?

Predictions donโ€™t really give value when you talk about Digital Marketing. Thatโ€™s mainly because it’s so abrupt and volatile that you canโ€™t predict for a long time.

The best way to understand the future of digital marketing is to follow the trends and keep monitoring the markets and customer behavior.

The more you can personalize your efforts, the better you are going to promote your service. Digital Marketers have not been genuine and have been causing interruptions. This trend will stop. So, personalization is the thing that is going to take you further.

Being authentic and relevant will pay off. Similarly being generous and helpful will give wonderful results. Relationship building will be a more regular practice.

Regardless of the Digital Marketing Channel you use, these tactics will be the way to go.

Key takeaway: The best way to get ahead in digital marketing is to follow the latest trends, find out what’s working best and implement them right away on your websites or online businesses to grow. The key here is to learn as much as you can especially from top blogs (take digital marketing courses if possible), get help from mentors and that’s how you can avoid making few biggest blogging mistakes.

5. What are some of the major challenges all digital marketers face?

Many Digital Marketers don’t lay enough emphasis on Planning & Strategising. Although I am not ruling out that many Digi-Marketers do make some strong in-depth plans, what most of them lack is that they donโ€™t give enough time for their activities to really drive results.

So, the industry needs to prolong its testing period especially when it comes to organic channels. But it is important to mention that since the digital industry is growing at a rapid pace, we are observing a cut-throat competition. This builds continuous pressure on Digi-Marketers to bring results from a very cluttered world.

Meeting business goals and testing new strategies might conflict. This means to solve the dilemma of how and where to invest time and efforts remains a grey box for Online Marketers.

Key takeaway: Planning is everything. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, you must have long term goals and proper planning to achieve your marketing goals. Make sure to figure out what’s working well for your competitors so you can implement some of the best strategies to outrank them in various channels like search, social media, paid advertising and so on.

6. Do you think digital marketing including blogging, SEO etc can be learned and mastered by anyone? What are the things one should consider before jumping into digital marketing or blogging?

Learning Digital Marketing is for anyone with good analytics & language skills. This is a dynamic field but anyone can enter it. Thatโ€™s because it is a very logical science. I have seen people as young as school pass-outs master Digital Marketing and better yet, I have seen people who are above 40 that have learnt Digital Marketing pretty well. All that you need to succeed at Digital Marketing is passion, and comfort with technology.

Key takeaway: Yes, of course digital marketing including blogging and SEO is anyone who has great logical and communication skills. After all, anything can be learned if you’ve the passion and consistency in learning new skills. Age is just a number as there are a ton of people making it big in the digital marketing world after the age of 40. Just get started, learn and implement what’s working!

7. If you had to start again, how would you start Digital Vidya for faster success?

It is a difficult question to answer. The experience and the expertise that I have now is incomparable to my experience with Digital Marketing & Entrepreneurship 10 years ago.

Theoretically speaking, if I was to create a strategy for a startup and in this case Digital Vidya, I would pay more attention to all aspects of SEO. In terms of maintaining a verbal and a visual brand, content in all its shapes would be given more attention. Just as they say, โ€˜Content is Kingโ€™, I would invest a lot more resources on it.

Key takeaway: What Pradeep Chopra said about the importance SEO is absolutely true. If there’s one thing that can bring massive success to your business, it would be mostly SEO as the visitors who come from search engines convert really high. So if you’re starting an online business or a website and looking for faster success, try to learn the SEO basics as much as you can and implement the key SEO strategies to improve your search rankings.

If possible, try to invest money on SEO on things like getting access to the right SEO tools or buy courses or take SEO related classes on platforms like Coursera, Udemy etc as the money spent on SEO is always priceless.

8. What are your top 3 tips for people who want to build a money making blog in 2024 and beyond?

My top 3 tips are:

  1. Know the Digital Marketing subject well, even if you need to take a course to build up a skill. And frankly, taking up a course is something that I would recommend. Thatโ€™s because a lot of free advice out there is just fluff and theoretical.
  2. Be persistent in your efforts, it may be that you donโ€™t get immediate success, but that is how the industry is. You canโ€™t get away with a lock-in period for your investments.
  3. Provide value to your readers, such that they love reading your work, watching your videos or having interactions with you. Be people-centric and people will love you.

Key takeaway: The fastest way to online success is to learn. Learn more about digital marketing, SEO and blogging so you’ll know what it takes to build an online business that actually makes money. Take courses, invest in the right tools, read as many books as possible. Above all, make sure to be consistent, after all, consistency is the key to success and you can never build a profitable business overnight!

Read: How to Start a Blog That Makes Over $10,000 Every Month

9. What are your future goals with Digital Vidya? Where do you see Digital Vidya after 5 years?

Five years is a long time and with the Digital Landcaspace, you canโ€™t predict such long terms. Generally, we want to provide more courses that are of benefit and value. We will feature into cutting edge courses that are in high demand as we see a dearth in quality courses around us.

Key takeaway: Digital Vidya is inclined more towards creating useful courses around digital marketing. If you’re someone who’s looking to learn about how to jumpstart your digital marketing strategies, you should definitely have a look at their courses as most of them are created by experts.

10. What is your advice on improving the search rankings of a website? How do you take care of the SEO part of Digital Vidya?

Get the basics of SEO right, and write for real people. Never write for bots and search engines! Googleโ€™s guidelines need to be taken seriously and they will reward you sooner or later. Apart from generating quality content, you must invest 50% of your time in building a strong backlink profile.

Key takeaway: It doesn’t matter how many SEO tactics you use, if you’re not pleasing people with your content, it won’t rank. It’s as simple as that. Always give priority to your target audience, find out what they want and serve them with better content and products. That’s how you get bigger benefits from search engines like Google.

Besides, great content, you should also focus on building quality links. Try guest posting, get interviewed, use testimonials and other strategies to build highly relevant and quality links to your site as it not only improves your backlink profile but also your website’s search rankings.

Check out our updated ‘free guest posting sites list for 2024‘ for the latest opportunities to expand your online presence.


Final thoughts on the interview with Pradeep Chopra

If you’re a beginner or someone who is interested to learn more about successful digital marketing tactics, you should check out various courses offered by Digital Vidya. Their courses are easy to consume, created by professionals and worth every single penny you pay for.

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading the interview with Pradeep Chopra from Digital Vidya. Just in case if you’ve any questions, you can use the comment section to post your queries. If you like this interview series, please share it with others.

About Author
Anil Agarwal is the Founder of Bloggerspassion. He is a full-time blogger and SEO expert who has been helping people build profitable blogs for over a decade Now. He has been featured in Over 100 Publications including Forbes, The HuffPost, HubSpot, Shopify, Semrush, Kinsta, Bluehost, Hostinger and G2.com etc. Know more about Anil Agarwal from here.

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