I am so excited Robyn Tippins, a successful professional blogger, responded to my email requesting an interview with her the other day about professional blogging.

What’s more exciting is the fact that not only she shared the tools and tips she uses daily to write her blogs and drive traffic to them, she also generously provided hard numbers and the exact revenue sources that earn her full time income every month.

Without further ado, let me introduce her to you, if you haven’t already known her.

Robyn Tippins have been online since 1996. She started to get involve with online communities as a chat moderator and board monitor for AOL in 1997. The next year (1998), she started business manufacturing cloth diapers and sold them online.

Now, she is a full time blogger at SleepyBlogger.com, GamesIndustryWire.com (b5), Innovative Advertising (Allbusiness.com), SocialRiots.com (KMM), InsideMotherhood.com (b5), Pittwatch.com (b5) and Gamingandtech.com. The last one is her video blog.

She also runs a blogger forum that focuses on networking. This forum will be a place where users could find blogger profiles and post blogging jobs.

Her success in professional blogging comes from the fact that she loves blogging. She insisted on doing it to replace her full time income. But, when she reached the goal last fall, she switches her goal accordingly to increase revenue while at the same time still enjoy blogging.

Her first blogging job was writing for $3 per post. Not a number that we would write home about, but in my opinion it contributed to her success that she achieved later. Being able to sacrifice her ego and passionate about blogging earn her growths in knowledge, experiences and revenue. If you are willing to do this almost for nothing at the beginning and being persistent, you are going to see results.

When it comes to the tools she uses for blogging, Tippins lists some of these software (mostly online):

• Flickr - She upgraded to the pro version of the online photo sharing tool to take advantage of more spaces and bandwidth.
• del.icio.us - Online bookmarking site. She also install delicious extension for Firefox.
• FeedDigest - An online tool that mash together some of her favorite RSS feeds.
• FeedBurner - Deliver RSS feeds with a lot of features.
• Blip.tv - Using the autopost feature for video blogging.
• ClearContext - An Outlook utility that allows her to prioritize her emails.
• Gmail - She also backs up her email by forwarding a copy to Gmail.

Tippins allocates between 9am to noon everyday for blogging. As with most bloggers, she takes advantage of feeds to syndicate content to her desktop.

Being resourceful is important. She regularly delivers content that her readers could not live without. Not only she writes great posts, but also content that other bloggers would be hesitant to write about. What can you do other than subscribe to such content?

In driving traffic, she taps into social bookmarking sites, subscription, external links (toptensites, gather, squidoo), search engines, commenting on other blogs and linking A LOT to other blogs. She also tries collaborative projects (carnivals) recently with success.

By doing exactly these, she grew one of her blogs, SleepyBlogger to 125K pageviews and 12k unique visits per month.

To encourage participation and have the readers comments on the blogs, she offers something of value. You might be surprised that another simple tip is just ask for it.

Blogging fits perfectly into online marketing because marketing is about knowing who you want to reach and deliver exactly what they want to them. She thinks bloggers are naturally good at this because they have to do it to keep their readership.

Tippins didn’t accept advertising on her blogs until recently. She has a bold opinion about ads. She thinks without credibility and traffic, ads could only add a level of smarminess.

One of the most challenging things in blogging, for Tippins, is still getting things in writing. If you think you have everything perfect before you get started blogging, think again. Every blogger I know started somewhere. They learn and grow with their blogs and become successful.

Although she likes the idea about user generated content, she can see that the blogosphere would become busier and tighter in the future. Splogs (spam blogs) will continue to be a problem, the Internet is also going to be flooded with ads. But still, blogging is going to stay because, she added, “when the user is in charge of what they view and where they go online, it just feels right, you know.”

Note: This interview is part of a series of interviews I am going to conduct with small business owners and service professionals who have practically use a blog and blogging to improve their business and marketing in many ways.

Hope we all could learn something from those who have been there and done it. If you want to be part of the interview series, you are more than welcome to contact me using the contact form here.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog feed to get updated for future interviews.