An Interview With The Founder of Hongkiat.com

If you’re into design, art, and/or tech, you’ve likely drawn inspiration from Hongkiat.com before.

Hongkiat is a design-focused weblog based in Malaysia and is founded by non-other than Lim Hong Kiat himself. The blog is ranked highly on Alexa (above 1,800) with a Google Pagerank of five. Hong Kiat also revealed that his blog generates a whopping 6 million page views per month and is profitable just by selling ad spaces.

I find his story interesting and thought it would be great to contact him to find out more about his background and thoughts. And I’m thankful that Hong Kiat is kind enough to share his story with us…

1. What’s the story behind Hongkiat.com?

Hongkiat.com was registered about five or six years back. Its initial idea was to redirect to a Blogger blog I registered. It wasn’t very active, merely an online journal for me to note down interesting websites, useful tricks, tips, and tutorials I learnt from the Internet.

Back then I was Head of Creative for a local company in Malaysia, but as the day job got more sucky I slowly resorted to spending more time updating the site than the one that actually writes my paycheck.

The more effort I put in, the more visitors and feedback I was getting in return; it also made me some sustainable passive revenue. Then one day came a crazy thought – I should be doing what I feel is right. I quit my politically ridiculous day job and solely focused on blog writing. I guess that’s how it all started…

2. What are the web statistics? Is it profitable?

Based on Google Analytics’ figures, Hongkiat.com generates about 6.0 to 6.5 million pageviews per month and is gradually increasing. On top of that, we have another 70,000 to 75,000 readers following us via newsletter, RSS feeds, and various social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc). It is definitely profitable.

3. How do you manage to rack up such high traffic? What are your tips/tricks?

I guess – ultimately – if you give them what they want, they’ll stick for a while. If you are writing content related to your visitors’ interests, they will eventually come back for more.