An Interview with… Dennis Petersen

Dennis Petersen, owner of allbetanews.com and well known blogger very kindly did an interview with GG, and here it is! Feel free to comment and add your opinions on Dennis’ answers.

Many people struggle to get started and when comments don’t fly in straight away, they lose motivation. How did you manage to keep going when you first set up thebetanews.com?

I don’t blog for the sake of comments or others. I blog because I like to research stuff and share it with others. My traffic shows that I have some visitors, so that’s fine by me. Of course, it’s always nice when you know people appreciate what they read.

When you first set up how much time did you spend on marketing your blog and optimizing for search engines?

I haven’t really spent much time marketing The Beta News. I mention it when possible, but since it doesn’t really cover any specific niche, it’s tough to advertise it on forums. I tend to comment as much as possible on various blogs and stay active on social sites like twitter.

The other blog I run (www.fifa2008news.com, now www.fifa2009news.com) are examples of what happens when you actively promote a blog. I’ve spent a lot of time on different sports forums advertising FIFA news. That has really paid off.

With a busy job and lifestyle, how do you manage to fit in all your websites and manage to update them regularly?

When possible I write a few posts at a time, but often they are impulse posts. I spend an hour on transport every day, so I have time to think my posts through. I usually blog in the evening on the couch.

Where did the inspiration for thebetanews.com come from?

Originally I wanted to cover and review different services, sites and application that were still in beta. I still do that, but a lot of other things has been added to it as well. I think The Beta News is a combination of many different sites. No one mentioned, no one forgotten ;)

What’s your take on the number of social network sites - is competition good or are there too many around these days?

That’s one of the reasons why I blog. I just love to see how innovative many people are. They keep coming up with all kinds of new ideas. Some social network sites doesn’t make the cut, while others are pretty impressive. I’m not a huge social netowrk user. I haven’t accessed my MySpace in a long time, but I do check my Facebook profile once a week.

I use Linkedin to stay in contact with former colleagues.

A long as the quality is good we can’t have too many networks, but they need to be individual and unique.

June 17, 2008 · Filed Under Interviews

Comments

2 Responses to “An Interview with… Dennis Petersen”

  1. christopher on June 17th, 2008 1:10 pm

    Some interesting views there, i’m looking at LinkedIn quite favourably :)

  2. Dennis Bjørn Petersen on June 23rd, 2008 11:30 am

    Thank you very much for the link love.

    Best of luck with the interview series.

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