If you know at least a bit about the WordPress community, there’s no doubts that you already know Pavel Ciorici or his blog/theme shop WpZoom.
Pavel is a blogger and entrepreneur from Moldova who started WpZoom in 2008. One year later, he is now working full time on it and earn 100% of his income online.
In this interview, Pavel will told you his very motivating success story.
Hello Pavel! When did you started blogging? What was your main motivation? When did you started to monetize your blog?
I started blogging in December, 2006. Here is my proof – first article on my blog written in Romanian – http://ciorici.com/2006/12/06/hello-world/At that time I was one of the first bloggers from my country – Moldova. At that time we were a small community of about 10 bloggers for a whole country 
And almost everyone of us had some experience in web-design. My main motivation was to bring that “blogging trend” in my country, so everyone could know what is a blog, and why someone is trying to write it.
My first experience to monetize my blog was when I started playing with Adsense Ads, and it seemed to be very unsuccessful, because my content was written in Romanian.
When you started WpZoom, what was your goal? Did you expected to have the success your site currently have?
On my personal blog I used to have a category about WordPress Themes (http://ciorici.com/category/wp-themes/), but since this category wasn’t too relevant to my blog, I decided to start a new blog. So I started to blog on WPZOOM.com. From the start my goal was to become a popular resource for WordPress Community, because at that time only a few blogs were writing about WordPress.
It wasn’t so difficult to gain the success we have now, because we started with some quality articles, and this is the most important thing which will bring you enough readers.
WpZoom, which was originally a blog, is now a blog and a theme shop. Why did you decided to add the theme shop to your blog?
Until February we were known as a popular blog about WordPress. At that point we understood that we can do a lot more for the Wordpress community, so we decided to enter the Premium Themes market by creating themes that we thought were missing at the time.
On 1st of July WPZOOM has suffered some changes, and since then I started to work together with a well-known web-developer from my country – Dumitru Brinzan. Since that we start to focus more on developing new themes and to offer the best support for our customers.
A few month ago, you launched a big advertising campaign on sites as such as Smashing Magazine, WpRecipes, Noupe… How much did you invested? Do you think that advertising is necessary to get clients?
In July & August we launched a big advertising campaign, our goal was to inform everyone about the latest changes at WPZOOM, and of course to attract some attention from the web-design community. So we decided to advertise on the most popular blogs about design/web-design, such as Smashing Magazine, Noupe, Hongkiat, Web Design Ledger, as well as WpRecipes of course .
How much did it cost? Well, it’s not a secret that an ad on Smashing Magazine costs around $1000 USD, on Noupe – $800 USD, and so on… so yes, we did invest a few thousand dollars in this campaign.
Well, I don’t know how necessary an advertising campaign to get more clients is, but I’m sure that it’s a good way to inform everyone about us, so that they could easily remember us and our selection of themes.
Is WpZoom your only job, or do you work somewhere else?
Right now WPZOOM is a full-time job for me, as it takes enormous amounts of time, so there is little time left to think about something else.
What are your plans for the future? What do you think about those blog networks like Tuts ?
As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of work at WPZOOM. The future will bring more top-quality themes from us, as well as new updates/features for our current themes.
Blog networks are a great idea, and I think that the Envato guys are doing a great job.
What should be the advice you’ll give to a young blogger?
I would recommend anyone to blog about what they like, what is interesting to them, something about what they can write quality content, and not just noise. Blogging just for the sake of it won’t bring you much satisfaction, so stick to your passions.
Thanks for answering our interview, Pavel!
To get in touch with Pavel and Dumitru:
{ 4 trackbacks }
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Congratulations to Pavel, and thanks Jean for this interview…This is really inspirationnal for wanna-be bloggers like me =D
Congrats !
Everybody must know that moldavian teenagers are very smart !
So, don’t loose this opportunity to have one on ya future project !
I’m using Yamidoo Magazine (though I’ve tweaked it a great deal) for my blog and happy with it, great theme Pavel.
Great wp themes and great promotion… I bump on them everywhere now!