About Bilna Sandeep, Founder of Monsoon Breeze Blog
I am Bilna Sandeep. The lady behind Monsoon Breeze Blog. I grew up in Kerala and Bahrain and completed my Civil Engineering from Kerala.
After working for an year in Bahrain as a Civil Engineer, my marriage to Sandeep brought me to Abu Dhabi.
The past 5 years of blissful married life and with a 3 year old toddler, we have a simple and happy life here in the Sunny Bright city.
When my boy was almost one year old, I decided it was time to take a career break and spend all my time with my boy. This gave me a lot of beautiful moments with my son and realize the life of a Stay at Home Mom.
This is why you will find many articles directed towards Stay at Home Moms in particular on my blog.
I know how difficult it is to be a Stay At Home Mom and through my blog, I try to inspire all of them to pursue their passions, be it through owning their own Home Based Business or through keeping up with their career.
I recently joined back to work and I also try to share the moments of my life as a mom, our exact life in the UAE, Our little travel stories with our little dude and so many more.
How did you think about starting blogging?
Well! Though Monsoon Breeze is less than 2 year old, I started my blogging back in my college days. The blog was named ‘’Expressions” and I blogged by the pen name Cinderella. But then that was long lost after my life got busy.
Monsoon Breeze was born, when I decided to take a Career Break with my boy! I knew I couldn’t keep my mind idle. I have always had a passion burning in me and I wanted an outlet to throw in my thoughts and creativity.
However, it was only meant to be a hobby in the beginning, which later on developed into a passion and a source of Passive income in the later stages.
Explain more about Monsoon Breeze, what makes you special?
As for my blog, what helped me the most was I always tried to connect with my readers. A majority of my blog readers are expat Indian Moms and they very well relate to my own life situations.
In the beginning I was surprised when I started to get random friend requests on my Facebook from my mommy readers and many of them would do the extra step by trying to chat with me on my chat and also reply to my personalized email newsletters.
When people start sharing their own thoughts with you and some of them even personal stories from their life, you know you have earned their trust through your words and I am so happy a few of them out there have benefited from my articles.
That is the most important appreciation and encouragement you can receive as a blogger, right? No awards or recognition could outweigh it.
Who inspired or encouraged you to follow your passion?
In the beginning, when I started with the blog, many of them I knew in real life did not take it seriously. Some even asked me, if I had nothing else to do!
But I am happy my husband understood my passion. He knew I was into something and it was going to grow big someday. When I wanted to move my blog to a self-hosted platform, and I was too sceptical about it and did not have the courage to invest any money on my blog, it was my husband who gave me the perfect “Green Signal”.
And I have also had a few of my friends who always visited my blog and gave me their honest opinions and criticisms to help me improve.
What challenges did you face in your life and during your blogging carrier?
One of the major Milestone in my blogging career was making the decision to move to a self hosted platform and to do it all myself.
I had to go through tons of articles available online to make myself confident enough to go ahead.
Once the process was over, I grew more confident and I realized it wasn’t a very difficult task after all. I then put up an article on my blog regarding this to help my other fellow blogging friends and it became a hit.
First few months of blogging are the most difficult for a blogger and there are a lot of challenges that come across. What social media to concentrate upon, how to get more people to read your content, where to publicize your blog posts etc.
One point I realized a little late was there were so many Facebook Groups for your niche and joining them could totally change your blogging career. It was after joining some of the Blogging groups in UAE that I actually realized the potential of bloggers and the blogging scene here in the UAE.
Now I get to balance my thoughts and passions on my blog along with a few brand collaborations I get to do through the blogging and social media platform.
“Work towards making your Passion your Paycheck”
What’s the current path and future plans?
The two years of my career break gave me enough time to concentrate on establishing my blog. Now I am back to work, which also means I have a routine for everyday. I get to spend a fixed one hour time for my blog everyday during the office break hours and this has helped me to become more organized as a blogger.
I now also have enough time to Travel around with my hubby and kid in the UAE for the weekends and to our homeland every now and then. This also gives me opportunities to share our experiences of traveling in UAE, India and beyond as a family.
Sharing one of my favourite pics from our homeland here.
I love sharing our everyday life on Instagram, which is my favourite Social Media Platform and love to use it as my everyday Micro Blogging platform too. Every photo I share has a little story to share.
If you would like, you can share a few words about VID.
I am so happy to see this initiative by VID Team in sharing the stories of people and inspiring the lives of others. I fell so much privileged to be a part of one of the stories too.
Visit Bilna’s : Blog – Website | Facebook | Twitter