Pioneer of Blogging in India Tony John

Tony M John

Today, I am introducing Tony John, one of the early bloggers, an inspiration to thousands of new bloggers and a pioneer of blogging industry in India. He is the founder of the #1 Indian Educational Site India Study Channel and many other popular websites.

Tony John has a number of popular websites. Some of the most popular websites he owns are IndianStudyChannel.com, Techulator.com, DotNetSpider.com and AspSpider.com.

Background

According to his personal website, he was born into a middle-class family in Malayattoor, Kerala, India. He studied in a Malayalam medium school and achieved heights in English blogging through his hard work and dedication. During early stages, he struggled a lot and went abroad after the death of his father to make enough money for his family of mother, sisters and a bother. He started his first website to combat loneliness when he was living in the USA, away from his family. Also, he was reported to have started an online .NET tutorial website to continue the free .NET training he was doing while he was in India.

A career as a software engineer

Tony John started his career as a software engineer with SRA Systems Ltd, Chennai through campus placement during his MCA course at Kongu Engineering College. After working 6 years with SRA Systems, he joined Hewlett Packard and later moved on to Omnicell Inc, Houston. After working for about 15 years as a software engineer, out of which about 11 years in the USA, he quit his job and switched to full time blogging in India. Currently, he is blogging from his home in Kerala, God's Own Country and living the dream life of most bloggers.

Journey as a Blogger

Tony started his successful journey on the web about the same time the term "Blog" came into existence. According to the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive), his first website SpiderKerala was started in 2001, even though he had some personal websites hosted on subdomains much earlier. SpiderKerala was one of the most popular websites in Kerala during the early years until he switched focus to more technical sites like dotnetspider.com. According to some of the messages posted by him in social networks, he started using Google AdSense about the time it was introduced, making him one of the early birds in online earning in India. In 2005, he founded SpiderWorks Technologies Pvt Ltd, the legal entity that holds all of his online properties, which include about 50 websites and blogs.

Professional Blogger

It is very interesting to note that Tony has been doing professional blogging without really quitting his primary job as a software engineer. I have seen his personal advice to many other bloggers not to quit the primary job even if they earn a lot of money. He shows his own experience as an example where he has been earning more from his blogs than his high profile job in the USA as a software architect in a multi-national company. He still continued his primary job until he decided to leave the USA for good and settle in India. His suggestions are to continue the primary job until people earn enough to secure their future living. According to him, online earning could lose its glory in the coming years except for the most successful bloggers. There are thousands of small bloggers on the web who make a lot of money but the trend may not continue unless they could build real authority websites. The new trend from Google is, it is killing a lot of small blogs and want to highlight only authority and trusted blogs. How many small bloggers can sustain is something that needs to be seen.

Earning from the blogs

If you check the top 10 bloggers list found all over the web, you will never find his name anywhere in the list. But if you look at the stats, his websites are very popular and could be earning a pretty high amount compared to most of the people in the top-earning blogger's list in India. Once he posted in a Facebook group that his websites receive collective traffic of more than 10 million per month, which indicates those sites could be earning somewhere between $25,000 to $35,000 per month if I match it with the traffic and revenue published by some other top bloggers. In a Facebook group, he mentioned he is not really active on affiliate marketing, which is a really big opportunity for some of the other premium bloggers.

Tony has been an inspiration to me and hundreds of other bloggers in India. I learnt the unlimited opportunities on the web through his popular website IndiaStudyChannel.com, which gives an opportunity for the people to earn while learning. It was this website which introduced genuine online content writing and earning opportunity to the masses in India. Many members who started their journey with IndiaStudyChannel became professional bloggers later.

Mentor and Helping hand

You can see Tony in many online communities, not in just his own websites. There are 2 Facebook groups he is very active on - LearnBlogging and Techism and he is always there to help the newbies. It is not common to see a busy professional blogger answering queries from newbies and strangers. You can contact him through his Facebook profile and seek his guidance in the blogging field. He was a very helpful person and guide to me when I was working with his websites and even after started my own websites.