If you wanted to learn to make tiramisu at home, there was a time not so long ago when you would have had to sign up at a fancy, expensive confectionery class. Now, you can just visit any of India's extremely polished food blogs and learn how to make the base of mascarpone cheese from scratch, where to get your ingredients and exactly how to set your Indian oven before you bake.
The recipes are first-rate, with the writers having gleaned tips from their travels around the world, their chef friends in the F&B world and their favourite global magazines.
So you're getting the best advice, and it's free.
There are similar blogs on everything from how to invest your money to how to plan your next vacation, your next high-fashion outfit, even what to do on the weekend.
So, in a world where everything from mother's day to mourning has been commercialised, what makes people give away expert advice at no cost?
For many, it is the sheer thrill of being part of the open-source internet community and of sharing their passion for their favourite hobby.
At least, it starts out that way.
Eventually, the blog -if it is really good -gathers a momentum of its own and begins to turn the amateur expert into a household name, leading to workshop and seminar invitations, book deals or, at the very least, a self-sustaining website generating revenue through a cycle of hits and advertisements.
Travel blogger Aparna Roy, for instance, began her blog (backpackingninja.com) after she quit her brand management job in 2008 to backpack across Latin America. “I just wanted an easy way to keep in touch with family and friends,“ she says.
Roy returned nine months later to a blog with 500 followers and offers of advertisements and paid links. A year ago, when she hit 5,000 followers, Roy decided to accept some google ads and text links. “The money is not great,“ she says. “It's enough to buy me good beer on the road or a gigantic burger.But that's about it.“
Instead, what Roy has got from her blog are invitations to write for travel magazines and other publications -and paid trips or junkets where she has been invited on the strength of her audience figures, by organisers whose only demand is that she blog about their fivestar hospitality.
The really popular blogs are usually in the food, travel, marketing and personal finance segments, where there is utility value for readers, says social media expert Gaurav Mishra. For the blogger, meanwhile, the blog becomes a personal branding tool. “About 20% of India's 26,000-odd bloggers explore monetary avenues such as authoring a book or conducting workshops,“ says social media expert Moksh Juneja.
Take Mansi Podar and Kanika Parab.When they launched their popular lifestyle blog, BPB or Brown Paper Bag, in October 2009, Parab quit her job with a daily newspaper and Podar gave up a job with a PR agency in New York.
Today, on the strength of its roughly 15,000 subscribers, the duo gets exclusive invitations to events and openings and earns through content syndication for websites. They are also working on a guidebook on Mumbai. A travel site, a café, a dream come true In 2007, Ajay Jain took a break from his freelance writing and set off on a road trip to Lahaul-Spiti in Himachal Pradesh. A former sports manager, IT engineer and business journalist, he had always dreamed of being a travel writer, so, upon his return, he started a blog, www.kunzum.com, named after the Kunzum Pass near Manali.
“I knew I could never afford to set up a travel magazine, but a blog seemed feasible,“ says the 41-year-old.Today, in addition to about seven travel posts a week, Kunzum -now a fullfledged website -offers in-depth hotel reviews and detailed travel routes and distance charts.
“We try to keep operating costs as low as possible, around Rs 30 lakh a year,“ says Jain, who now employs a full-time editorial assistant and designer. “I am proud to say that revenues now exceed operational costs.“
With some of the revenue from the website, Jain and his wife Anubhuti Rana, 39, have set up the Kunzum travel café at Hauz Khas, Delhi, where they display their photographs and Jain's books. With no set prices and visitors invited to pay what they think they owe, the relaxed owe, the relaxed mood is ideal for weary backpackers looking for a bite, some new friends or a way to join the Kunzum network. A fashionista's blog blooms into a brand Malini Agarwal, former head of digital content for Channel [V], quit her job in February to focus on her blog, and she has no regrets.
“I just go to parties and events with my little digicam and I end up making Rs 3 lakh a month,“ she says.
With no office yet, Agarwal, 34, operates out of her Bandra home, using only a slim laptop, a smartphone, a swanky digicam specially built to take high-resolution photographs in low-light conditions, and the services of six freelancers and a manager.
“Office space would increase operational costs,“ she says, “though I'm sure I would still make profits.“
A former radio jockey and newspaper columnist with no real business experience, Agarwal has nonetheless mastered the art of niche brand ing, creating a blog that is a must-visit for her target audience -women aged 18 to 35 with no children, who therefore have higher disposable incomes.
Given her target group, and her page views, international luxury brands have been lining up for ad space since her blog first hit two lakh page views a month in November. Now, even Bollywood stars want some of the Miss Malini action; earlier this year, Agarwal interviewed Shahid Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra for her blog.
“They are starting to take this medium seriously and recognise its wide reach,“ she says. “Eventually, my plan is to develop Miss Malini into a consolidated brand with merchandise, a fashion line and a fashion and modelling academy.“ Nothing fishy about these gourmet tips A t work, Kalyan Karmarkar, 37, is known as much for his gastronomic skills as for his number-crunching abilities as a qualitative research executive.
“Colleagues often ask me, `Where should we go for Thai in Colaba?' or `How should I go about making tiramisu at home?'“ he says.
But that's not what drove him to start his blog. “Finelychopped was triggered by the plugs I saw in mainstream media, in the form of food and restaurant reviews,“ he says. “For a foodie like me, such plugs are a complete turnoff. So I decided to use my free time to do my own reviews, totally unpaid, totally unsponsored.“
Karmarkar spent about Rs 1 lakh setting up a home office space and investing in a camera for his food photographs and a sturdy laptop.
In addition to reviews, his blog features cooking adventures, shopping trails for exotic ingredifor exotic ingredients and tales of cultural cuisines from his frequent travels.Two years and lakhs of page views on, he steadfastly refuses all offers to commercialise.
“I am not looking for money from this,“ he says. “Instead, it is the good will the blog has earned me that has been most gratifying.“
Invitations to exclusive tastings, new dishes on a popular restaurant's menu sent to his home for feedback...Karmarkar believes it's all recognition of the fact that his opinion annot be bought.
“I never accept free goods for review,“ he says.“I am out there for myself and for my readers who are fellow foodies. I plan to keep my blog sacrosanct and ad-free.“
WHAT IS A BLOG?
The word blog is a combination of `web' and `log'. A blog is a type of website or part of a website usually maintained by an individual or group of individuals and offering regular entries of commentary, opinion and analysis. A free guide to finance R anjan Varma had been working in the life insurance sector for 16 years when a mishap on a local train forced him to take three months off from work. Chatting with a friend at home during this forced vacation, he realised that the average life insurance holder had nowhere he could get the fine print of his policy explained and the technical clauses discussed.
That's when he launched ranjanvarma.com. Within 18 months, he was getting 20,000 hits a month and earning revenue from advertisements. Four years on, his blog has become a comprehensive personal finance resource, a rarity in cyberspace, offering information on everything from banking and filing returns to insurance claims paperwork and managing multiple credit cards.
Last September, with his project still growing every month, Varma, 44, decided to opt for voluntary retirement and devote all his time to the blog. With questions steadily pouring in, he also launched RupeeCamp, one-day workshops on personal finance, which Varma conducts at the IMC Building at Churchgate. And he has been approached by a publisher to write a book on personal finance.
“It wasn't easy to make the transition from a PSU to a startup, especially at my age,“ says Varma, “but blogging is addictive“.
HT 18SEP11
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