I don’t care about the stats and don’t have any goals, but instead view this as a great way to help you all see how I’m growing my blog and the kind of traffic sources you can use to do the same. Let’s look at the numbers, shall we?

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 49,627
• Pageviews: 84,359
• Avg time on Site: 2 mins 16 seconds

Not only were there an extra 15,000 visitors compared to last month, the people who arrived on the site also spent more time here. I promised that I would write more articles going forward, which I think has helped a lot with resulting traffic increase. The articles written in August, were:

• 2,897 Words on How to Create Viral Content (The Key Element Behind Every Successful Blog)
• What You Don’t Know About Blogging: A Masterclass on the Newsphere
• Living Self-Employed Online: The Manual They Forgot to Give You

Here at ViperChill there are a lot less articles published than most sites, but typically these articles are 2,000-3,000 words and cover topics in massive detail. You could say that we prefer signal over noise.

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of August:

1. Direct: 15,253
2. Google (organic): 6,284
3. StumbleUpon: 5,136
4. News.YCombinator.com: 4,858
5. Lifehacker.com: 3,380
6. Google.com: 1,712
7. Twitter.com: 1,328
8. Smartpassiveincome.com: 828
9. Facebook.com: 763
10. Retireat21.com: 731

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 6,566 visits via 1,675 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 1,039
2. wordpress seo: 711
3. viral marketing: 579
4. social media strategy: 318
5. viper chill: 297
6. guest blogging: 196
7. seo wordpress: 102
8. glen allsopp: 101
9. cloud living: 81
10. hqhow: 81

While search engine traffic is still a tiny portion of the traffic that arrives at ViperChill, it is growing steadily month on month with the number of referring keywords increasing by another 25%.

Subscriber Stats

Feedburner is so erratic that I just can’t take it that seriously anymore. Despite the current flaws in the system, I will continue to report on the numbers that it gives me. Although I don’t have any goals for the size of the community here, I still think it is an interesting metric to monitor.

• August 1st: 8,174
• August 31st: 8,814
• Change: +640

I picked up about 300 subscribers in the last few days which are yet to register, so expect the count to tip past 9,000 very soon. The number is usually highest the day after you post, so I should see the real figure tomorrow or Friday.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or inbox, thanks for subscribing!

Personal Update

Last month I told you all I was going to Thailand, and I should have been there for two weeks already. As is my luck these days, my passport was lost in the post and is nowhere to be found. I’ve spent the last week getting all the necessary documents together and reapplied for a new one.

As you can imagine, it was pretty depressing to be in a country you really want to leave, and then find out your passport has gone missing. I think the worst part isn’t that I can’t go to Thailand, but the fact that I can’t go anywhere. Thankfully my girlfriend is letting me stay with her (I had moved out of my apartment already) and I should be back on the road in a couple of weeks.

I’m about two weeks away from releasing my first software product, and I can’t wait to see the reaction in the marketing community. It has a couple of small bugs that need to be fixed, and then it’s ready to go. I guarantee this is something you’re going to want to use — and will make your life as a webmaster a hell of a lot easier.

Yep; that’s my attempt at a teaser

Happy 1st of September. I hope this month is a great one for all of you!

I don’t care about the stats and don’t have any goals, but instead view this as a great way to help you all see how I’m growing my blog and the kind of traffic sources you can use to do the same. Let’s look at the numbers, shall we?

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 34,196
• Pageviews: 57,077
• Avg time on Site: 2 mins 14 seconds

Every time I publish a new article, there’s always a spike in the stats for the site. With that in mind, it’s obvious to see why this month had less traffic than most, although the figures are still rather high for writing so little. The article written in July, was:

• Conquering Big Industries: My Bulletproof SEO Strategy

Here at ViperChill there are a lot less articles published than most sites, but typically these articles are 2,000-3,000 words and cover topics in massive detail. You could say that we prefer signal over noise.

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of July:

1. Direct: 10,337
2. StumbleUpon: 9,571
3. Google (organic): 5,337
4. Google.com: 911
5. Twitter.com: 754
6. Socialmouths.com: 686
7. SmartPassiveIncome.com: 551
8. Farbeyondthestars.com: 400
9. Pluginid.com: 340
10. Facebook.com: 335

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 5,629 visits via 1,434 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 928
2. wordpress seo: 580
3. viral marketing: 525
4. social media strategy: 248
5. viper chill: 230
6. guest blogging: 138
7. hostgatorestonia.com: 102 (Bug?)
8. viperchill anchor text: 99
9. glen allsopp: 98
10. seo wordpress: 90

While search engine traffic is still a tiny portion of the traffic that arrives at ViperChill, it is growing steadily month on month with the number of referring keywords increasing by another 25%.

Subscriber Stats

Feedburner is so erratic that I just can’t take it that seriously anymore. Despite the current flaws in the system, I will continue to report on the numbers that it gives me.  Although I don’t have any goals for the size of the community here, I still think it is an interesting metric to monitor.

• July 1st: 7,543
• July 31st: 8,174
• Change: +631

For writing so little, and having a lot less traffic than most months, July didn’t turn out too badly at all in terms of feed growth. If I managed to achieve this every month, that would be a growth of 7,200 subscribers in just one year, which I don’t think many people would complain about.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or inbox, thanks for subscribing!

Personal Update

It feels like there are a lot less things to do and talk about in South Africa now that the World Cup is over. If you read my last post, you will see that I decided to make a big change in my life and move to Thailand. One of my best friends is staying there – though that is not the reason for my move – so that should make the whole experience even better.

I visited Thailand for two weeks in 2007 and loved the place so I’m looking forward to getting back into the Bangkok vibe. As for why I’m leaving South Africa, I really just feel like it’s time to move on. I’ve loved my time here, have tons of awesome friends and a great girlfriend, but if you don’t feel right in a place, no matter what you have around you, you’ll always feel like something is missing.

I’ll be there in less than a fortnight, and I’ll be sure to update you all with pictures on the next monthly report.

Thanks for all of your support and patience for July. The rest of this year is going to rock!

I’ll be the exception to that rule and apologise for my lack of updates over the last few weeks – stating that I’m genuinely back for good – and with a big announcement to make: As of the end of this month, I’ll be living in Thailand. Bangkok, to be specific. Despite that possibly surprising announcement, this post is not going to be very personal. Let’s talk business.

My Change of Strategy

For the last few months, I have been working on some projects with friends that took up the majority of my time. These are projects that needed my full attention because of the amount of money that had been pumped into them, which became the main reason I wasn’t able to update the blog as often as I would like.

The reason for this change now is that as of yesterday I’m no longer involved in anything outside of my own set work – after parting ways amicably with my partners – and I’m back to focusing entirely on my own things. I love the learning experiences of trying something totally different to what you’re used to doing from time to time, mostly because you can apply the lessons you learn to your favourite endeavours.

However, you always have that longing to return to what it is you do best and enjoy the most.

After selling most of my small affiliate sites towards the end of 2009 and ending my partnership on a number of other jobs, I’m now only working on a very small number of websites. This means that for the first time since I re-launched this site, ViperChill is one of my top priorities.

You can expect big things on this site in the near future.

The Business Plan

One of the real reasons I’m writing this post – and the main reason I’m about to be so transparent right now – is because I wish other bloggers did this. Maybe I’m just nosey, but I would love to know how Everett is planning to grow his blog traffic, how Corbett is going to make money and what Adam’s plans are for the next year.

In fact, I would love to know what most bloggers are getting up to.

The business plan for ViperChill is not really a business plan at all. It should be called a strategy plan, because that’s all I have right now. The strategy comes in three parts: monetisation, traffic, and branding.

Over the next few paragraphs I’m going to share what you can expect in terms of me making money with this site and increasing the size of the audience, before I’ve even done it. I think it’s far more enjoyable to watch someone on their journey while it’s happening, rather than look back on it months later.

I hope all 8,200+ of you enjoy following along.

Monetisation

The first thing I want to say is that I have absolutely no plans to write another eBook. I haven’t owned Cloud Living for almost a year now, so it would be nice to have one to my name, but there are just far too many of them on the market for me to take many of them seriously. If I’m feeling overloaded by how many there are, and I rarely buy any, then I can’t imagine how other people must be feeling.

They can be a great source of income – and people have even sent me emails saying they wish I would write another one – but that’s not on the cards anytime soon. My plan, which is quite different to what anyone else is doing – is to focus on software. More specifically, web software for internet marketers.

I have been refining my dev team over the last few months, doing “practice” products such as the reputation management plugin for Wordpress I released, but I’ll soon be ready to take things to the next level. I’m very excited with the first product I’m going to release as it’s going to solve a huge problem I have and there are no other solutions out there. I don’t think there is anything better or more likely to sell than a product which solves your own problems.

On top of that, the worst-case scenario is that you don’t sell any copies, but at least have a solution for yourself.

To start with I’m just going to focus on one core product and make it amazing, rather than be a jack-of-all-trades and have a lot of mediocre things which do a lot of tasks well, but nothing remarkably.

I’ve been involved in selling web software online for years; just not in this industry. Because of that, I know that having amazing customer support is almost as crucial as the product you’re selling. I’m far more likely to buy from someone who has an email address, phone number and live chat option on their website than someone with just a basic contact form. Even if the other product is slightly better.

That’s all I’ll say on the topic for now. I’m working with some people that I know personally in Cape Town which I think is the best way to go about a product of any substance, so expect more information on that over the coming weeks and months.

Traffic

Now that ViperChill has a substantial audience, I don’t really have to do much to continue to receiving a lot of traffic. In July for example, I only wrote one blog post, but consistently had over 1,000 people per day landing on my articles. Over the next few months I’m not going to focus on any traffic source in particular and just rely on that, but focus on something that helps bring traffic over the long-term: networking.

Although I do have one of the biggest blogs in this industry, I literally have no connections with the top bloggers that I would call strong relationships. I’m not like Johnny or Jade or Dave who just seem to become best friends with the A-listers overnight. Thankfully I do have great relationships with people who write content I love, like Pat and Tamar.

Networking in terms of blogger relationships is one thing that I really, really suck at. If there is anything I would like to be better at it’s creating and maintaining these relationships online. I’m not sure how well this will work out, but I will be sure to share with you all the things that actually work for me.

If you don’t know the importance of blogger connections, you may enjoy this article. Of course, it’s a little “risky” writing my plan like this here, because if I get in touch with someone now – who reads the blog – they’re just going to think they’re part of my experiment or strategy.

This won’t be the case. I’m going to try to build closer bonds with people that I’ve spoken to in the past, and perhaps they’ve tried to contact me but I wasn’t available at the time, and put more effort into those connections.

I’m continuing to focus on different SEO efforts as I am a bit of an SEO geek if you haven’t noticed from many of the articles I write here. I like testing a vast array of different ideas – though the basic fundamentals still work the best – so I’ll continue to use ViperChill as a testing ground and see if I can increase this sites rankings for some very popular terms.

I’m not naive enough to think that people should still trust my advice if I can’t even prove that I can get rankings for myself. (Though I think ranking 4th for ‘Viral marketing’ is quite an achievement, so far).

In order to really leverage sites like Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon, at least for a blog, I think you really just need to focus on writing the best content you can, which is what I will continue to do. This has been my strategy since I started the blog, so I won’t be changing anything in regards to post frequency, length or style. Hopefully the value I provide in posts will be the same or even bigger.

Branding

I believe the brand that I have now, and the one I want to sustain, all depends on how I spend my time. I don’t want to be the blogger who you can expect to post a few times in one month and then none the next. Similarly, when I release products, the last thing I would want them to be known for is being full of bugs and coming with lacklustre support.

These two things, if I’m going to run this blog as a business, are crucial. Now that ViperChill is one of the few projects I run, I can literally spend as much time on it as I want. It would not affect my other websites – which are ran by virtual assistants – if I worked 9-5 on it daily. I won’t do that, as I don’t need to, but it will definitely get a lot more attention from me.

From the beginning of this blog I’ve always stressed something I believe strongly which is spending time on your content is the most important thing you can do. Similarly, I don’t just want to publish a blog post for the sake of having one out there. I want them to be the best articles I can write on a variety of topics. Your blog is nothing without your content, so I don’t think there’s any smarter way to be.

I will then spend time that isn’t directly related to writing content to:

• Come up with post ideas
• Tweak aspects of the blog for testing / analytics purposes
• Continue to write articles for other blogs
• Interact with readers via email, Twitter, Facebook, and the comments here
• Focus on new software launches and customer support

There are probably more things I’ll add to this list over time, but those are the main ones for now.

I’ll continue with the little white men I have going on in each post, as they’re often very relevant to what the article is about, though I see a lot of marketing bloggers now mimicking that idea and using them on their own sites. Sure, I wasn’t the first person to use them, but I would never see them in every post.

I had a unique idea for the other graphics that I include in my articles, that I think would be awesome if a lot of bloggers became involved with. Instead of just choosing random images from Google and Flickr, why not “team up” with a photographer and use only their photos for your blog. They get exposure from your audience, and you get great images where you don’t have to worry about licensing issues.

I think this could really benefit both photographers and bloggers in a big way. I have someone in mind for me so I’m going to approach him today and see how that turns out. I’ll let you all know.

Transparency / Ask Your Questions

I hope I’ve revealed enough information in this post which kept you interested and excited for the future of this blog. To take transparency to the next level, I want to open up the comments to any ViperChill or blog business related questions you want to ask me that you were afraid to before or the question just didn’t seem relevant to the post.

I’ll be as open as possible – though please don’t ask for links to my other sites (I’ve mentioned reasons why on multiple posts) – in income estimations, traffic figures, or anything else you may want to ask me about.

It’s good to be back.

June was quite a quiet month in terms of updates and activity on other sites. I’ve just bought two massive new websites (and I’m arranging assistants to run them) so that has taken up the majority of my time. Plus, I’ve been enjoying quite a few World Cup games while I’m here.

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 38,444
• Pageviews: 67,191
• Avg time on Site: 2 mins 29 seconds

Despite only writing four blog posts – and none at all last week – the site still received just less than 40,000 visits and almost 70,000 pageviews. The only traffic source which dropped was StumbleUpon, so really the site is still growing nicely in channels like search and direct traffic. The time on site also increased slightly so that shows the quality of traffic was higher. The articles written in June, were:

• Mass Engagement: How to Get Hundreds of Tweets & Comments on Your Blog Posts
• How a 3 Month Old Website Received 958,373 Visits from Google
• Getting Mass Traffic from StumbleUpon: A Definitive Guide
• ViperChill Surpasses 10k Subscribers (Or, How I Gained 9,000 Subscribers in 9 Months)

Here at ViperChill there are a lot less articles published than most sites, but typically these articles are 2,000-3,000 words and cover topics in massive detail. You could say that we prefer signal over noise.

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of June:

1. Direct: 12,548
2. StumbleUpon: 5,733
3. Google (organic): 5,584
4. Twitter.com: 2,121
5. Sphinn.com: 1,503
6. Google.com: 1,382
7. SmartPassiveIncome.com: 1,053
8. Facebook.com: 517
9. Sweeva.com: 446
10. Mediapost.com: 330

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 5,787 visits via 1,519 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 916
2. Viral marketing: 564
3. wordpress seo: 541
4. viper chill: 246
5. social media strategy: 215
6. guest blogging: 203
7. glen allsopp: 162
8. cloud living: 154
9. most important blog post: 132
10. hqhow: 55

While search engine traffic is still a tiny portion of the traffic that arrives at ViperChill, it is growing steadily month on month with the number of referring keywords increasing by another 25%.

Subscriber Stats

I really don’t know if I should continue reporting on Feedburner as the count is just far too erratic. Every day the figure fluctuates by thousands of readers, going as low as 4,000 to as high as 12,000. I now think my post on reaching 10K subscribers was indeed a bug (I did say it might be in the post) and the site is at 7,543 readers. Although I don’t have any goals for the size of the community here, I still think it is an interesting metric to monitor.

• June 1st: 6,866
• May 31st: 7,543
• Change: +677

I really don’t know what is going on (I’m still down over 1,000 Google Reader subscribers compared to usual) so that would suggest I’m at least over 8,500. But with Feedburner, who knows. If you’re also having issues, I urge you to @MattCutts on Twitter and ask him to look into it. It actually has nothing to do with him, but Feedburner aren’t updating their status blog nor answering support questions in Google Groups and he is in a position where I believe he can get someone at Feedburner to look into it.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or inbox, thanks for subscribing!

Personal Update

We’re coming to the end of the Fifa World Cup which is being held here in South Africa, where I live. I’m staying in Cape Town and managed to go and watch England vs Algeria (awful game) and then I was in the VIP box for Netherlands (my second country) vs Cameroon, which was much more eventful.

I was devastated when Germany beat England but we really played poorly. I spent Friday in my favourite pub, Dubliners, to watch Netherlands to beat Brazil which was a great win for them. As I’ve been there about 8 times in my life, I consider them my second team so I’m hoping they go on to win the trophy.

I’ve attached a few pictures of the games as I always find things like this interesting, so I hope that you do as well. The pictures with the white tables are the VIP area of Cape Town stadium.

When I ran PluginID I wrote a blog post after hitting 5,000 subscribers as that was a huge achievement for me at the time. I decided to refrain from that here at ViperChill until I reached 10,000 subscribers which I think finally puts this blog on the map. I’ve managed to grow this site by over 9,000 subscribers in 9 months which is quite rare in the blogging world. Here’s how.

I first want to say that I never actually reached 10,000 subscribers. My feed jumped from 8,500 to over 11,500 according to Feedburner. At first I assumed it was a bug, but it has stayed this way for over a week so I’ll assume everything is working as it should (Feedburner usually drops, not increases). In the rare case that this is still actually a bug, the message I’m sharing here would still be very much the same, so I’m totally fine with that.

I also must stress that the reason this blog skyrocketed is not rocket science. I’m going to share a number of principles here – some which may or may not be new to you – but there are really no secrets that anyone has been holding back from you. What it takes to grow a blog today is still very much the same as what it took to grow a blog two, three, four or even five years ago.

As always though, I like to think I have my own unique take on things.

Photo Credit

Put Importance on the Things You Don’t Do

In many blogging guides the authors always seem to focus on the things that you should do. Remain consistent, pick a popular niche, have a great looking theme, write remarkable content, and other similar advice is often thrown out there. These aren’t bad suggestions, but you can’t only focus on what you do.

The things you don’t do are also, very, very important.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, allow me to cover some of the things I won’t do:

• Write about internet marketing news
• Publish a post before I’ve re-read it 2-3 times
• Link to websites or products with an affiliate link
• Write short posts with little substance
• Claim to be some kind of guru or expert
• Accept guest posts from other writers

The first point is probably the most important because your blog is nothing without your content, so what you don’t publish is just as important as what you do. There are tons of blogs in the marketing space that cover news far better than I could. Similarly, in regards to point four, there are lots of blogs that will write quick tips to help you get the information you want fast.

I believe I could have had success in either of these routes too, if that’s the angle I wanted to take.

I don’t think using affiliate links would have hindered my growth at all, but it is something that makes me stand out in an industry where everyone is looking to get-rich-quick from their audience. The reason I don’t use affiliate links is simply because I want people to be able to trust my suggestions without thinking I’m just doing it for the money. This leads back to my core focus which I mention later in this article.

Is there anything you could stop doing that would help your blog grow? Have a think about that one.

Put Yourself Into Your Work

Every unique feature I implement in a blog design tends to get copied. Do you see the RSS section in the top of the right sidebar here? Those exact images (some of which I made myself) were saved by a blogger and added to their own sidebar without even changing the file-name to make it less obvious. They aren’t just a small blog either; they have over 1,000 subscribers.

My yellow “connect” section at the bottom of all posts – with custom “Tweet?” icon – was also directly copied by someone who regularly comments here and writes about making money online. And, since I started using the “little white men” in my post graphics I have started to see them all over the blogosphere.

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery so I’m not going to hold any grudges. The point I am making with this though – and the point that most bloggers miss – is that these things are not what make me successful. They’re just one example of me putting my ideas and my creativity into the finished result of this blog.

Hopefully for a while I’ll still be the only blogger with an about page titled “What the F***?” .

It’s not just my design where I try to do things a bit differently; there’s a lot about my content that you won’t find on other blogs. It’s fairly obvious that I write very long, in-depth posts so those help me to stand out in the internet marketing space as that’s quite rare. I’ll also only publish something if I’m really happy with it. I’ve deleted numerous 2,000+ word posts because they didn’t meet my quality criteria.

I don’t think that long posts are what make this blog successful; it’s more that I’m doing something different and providing value to people who want information packaged like that. I promise there are more non-readers than readers who would never want to read content this long. The key to my content, in my opinion, is that I write in a very personal style.

My excessive use of “I” and “me” aren’t to satisfy my ego, but because everything on this site is from personal experience. I only blog for one person, and that’s you. The conversational style of writing is very easy for me and I like reading posts in this way, so that’s why I write them. There’s nothing more to it than that.

Although I would love to have this skill, I can’t tell you how to put yourself into your work. That’s because if I did, then it wouldn’t be you. Don’t be afraid to show the real you in your design, your writing style, or the way you connect with your readers and your industry online.

Some people might not like how you express yourself, but you’ll maintain a greater connection with those who do.

Stay Humble, But Think Big

If you read the bullet-points further up you’ll notice that one of them said “Claim I’m a guru or expert.” You won’t be able to find one sentence in the 70,000+ words I’ve written here that even hints at the idea. Other people may think of me as one, and that’s not a bad thing, but when you get to the point where you start thinking of yourself as one then a few things start to happen:

• You’re too worried about taking risks in-case they fail publicly
• You make it much harder for people to connect with your writing
• You put a divider between yourself and your audience, which is never a good thing

I remember reading an interview with actress Jennifer Garner where she was asked how she feels about all of the praise that she gets. Her response was something along the lines of: “I don’t listen to the good stuff because then I’d have to take in all the bad stuff too.”

I try never to put people on a pedestal because at the end of the day, we’re all just humans. It’s this mindset that will help you to never put yourself on a pedestal ether. Nobody is really “better” than somebody else. When I was in Amsterdam I met two of the girls from my favourite TV show in the UK, Hollyoaks (very blurry pic). I just joked around with them like I would any other girls and I could tell they actually appreciated it.

Yet, just because you are “just another human,” it doesn’t mean you can’t achieve very big things. I hid my age online for a few years because I thought it would hinder me from getting internet marketing clients, but I didn’t let my age stop me from thinking I could make thousands of dollars per month helping companies succeed online.

If you’ve been following this journey from the start then you’ll know that ViperChill is just a case study to show you what is possible. I didn’t specifically aim to grow this blog so fast so quickly, but I knew I could do it because I think big and work hard.

“If you think you can or you can’t, you’re right” – Henry Ford

Remember in the intro I mentioned how I was writing that sentence in March? It’s not a lie. I simply had the belief that this site would grow to a large size, even before I was half way there.

I didn’t get lucky on the way or have some famous blogger teacher me the ropes. I simply thunk (thunk should totally be a word) big, knew what I needed to do, and started doing it. We aren’t cut from a different cloth so there’s no reason you can’t do exactly the same.

Photo Credit

Be Selective About How You Spend Your Time

Although ViperChill is now one of the biggest internet marketing blogs in the world, it’s really towards the back of my mind in terms of priorities. I love writing here and I love seeing the audience grow, but I spend only one or two days per week actually doing anything for the site.

My other activities – buying and building niche websites – simply takes up far too much of my time. It’s how I make my living, so I need to dedicate most of my attention to it. Because I only spend a few hours per week working on this site, I have to be very selective about how I do spend my time.

The most important thing I can do, by far, is work on writing an article. That is what keeps the blog going and it is the reason I have almost 12,000 subscribers in the first place. Everything besides this is secondary. I’ve had to make my contact page pretty uninviting because I was spending so much time answering emails that I never had the chance to even write posts.

Besides writing posts, the second most important thing to me is participating in the conversation. I’ll always personally reply to at least 30-40 comments on each post (sometimes 100+) because I believe that if people take the time to comment then they deserve the time for me to give a response.

If I had more time I would be more active on services like Twitter, leave comments on other blogs and try to build better relationships with readers, but right now my schedule just doesn’t allow that.

If I only gave you 5 hours per week to work on your blog, what would you spend it doing? With that question your mind should instantly zone in on the things that you believe are important to your blogs’ growth. If you aren’t spending most of your time doing those things, and instead spending more time on sites like Twitter, then maybe it’s time to change things around.

Have a Clear Focus on How You Want to Help People

As I’ve mentioned in a few posts: I only write on topics I want to read about personally and I will write as much as it takes to really cover a topic in-depth. Although I do only write on subjects that pass my personal interests, I do have a clear focus which helps me dictate the direction my posts go in.

My goal with this website is to help people make money online and build remarkable websites. You can view them as one thing or you can view them separately. Either way, the vast majority of posts are written with this aim in mind. I’m telling you this because I think it’s very important that you have your own focus as well.

• Do you want to make people laugh?
• Do you want to help people get out of debt?
• Do you want to keep people up to date on news in the X industry?
• Are you going to try and give the best stock picks?

Whatever it is that you blog about, it’s very useful to know what it is that you want to help people with. This simple vision will help you flesh out all posts, come up with new ideas, and find the right audience for your blog.

I don’t even think good blogging advice anymore is to “pick the right niche”. I think “know how you want to help people” is far more effective.

Thank You!

The only reason I can say I have over 10,000 subscribers is because you guys took the time out to subscribe (it’s free!) to the RSS feed. I sold PluginID when it reached 6,500 subscribers so I’ve never grown a blog to this level before and therefore I’m really excited about the future.  Although there have been quite a few haters on this journey and I’m sure there will be many more, the support I’ve received from you all has been amazing and it’s the reason I keep coming back with new articles.

I hope I’ve gave something back with the articles I’ve posted recently; especially with this one. I didn’t want to overlap ideas and I think it fits in nicely with the post on growing PluginID to 6,500 readers. Although I simply can’t reply to all emails, I do make sure I read every single comment and will continue to do so, so please keep them coming.

It has been a fun nine months. Thanks for joining me on the ride!

P.S. If you’re reading this in Google reader, could you please click the ‘like’ button just below this sentence? I’m running a test and curious about the results (which I will share here).

May, in all honestly, did not include much “ViperChill time” as I had my 21st birthday and a lot of coaching clients to work with. However, June is a new month and I’m ready to get back into work-mode and see where I can take this blogging case study.

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 44,944
• Pageviews: 76,605
• Avg time on Site: 2 mins 24 seconds

May had an extra 12,000 visits and 16,000 pageviews compared to April so I can’t complain with that. Most of the growth did not just come from StumbleUpon but there was a huge increase in search engine traffic as well. The articles written in May, were:

• How I Generated One Years Worth of Content Ideas in One Hour, and You Can Too
• How to Build a Superblog: Insights from the Technorati Top 10
• The Secret to Growing Your Blog Twice as Fast with Half the Effort
• 21 Lessons I’ve Learned After 21 Years Alive
• 6 Things I Wish I Knew About Blogging 4 Years Ago

Here at ViperChill there are a lot less articles published than most sites, but typically these articles are 2,000-3,000 words and cover topics in massive detail. You could say that we prefer signal over noise.

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of May:

1. Direct: 13,350
2. StumbleUpon: 12,038
3. Google (organic): 4,978
4. Twitter.com: 2,407
5. Google.com: 1,694
6. SmartPassiveIncome.com: 1,310
7. Facebook.com: 567
8. Rentier-blog.pl: 478
9. Thirdtribemarketing.com: 390
10. Farbeyondthestars.com: 306

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 5,093 visits via 1,370 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 924
2. Viral marketing: 584
3. viper chill: 288
4. wordpress seo: 258
5. cloud living: 215
6. guest blogging: 126
7. glen allsopp: 122
8. site:viperchill.com outsource: 97
9. hqhow: 75
10. social media strategy: 60

While search engine traffic is still a tiny portion of the traffic that arrives at ViperChill, it is growing steadily month on month with the number of referring keywords increasing by another 25%.

Subscriber Stats

Monitoring your subscriber stats is probably the best way to track how well your audience is growing. Although I don’t have any goals for the size of the community here, I still think it is an interesting metric to monitor.

• May 1st: 6,239
• May 31st: 6,866
• Change: +627

Not quite the 900+ subscriber growth we’ve experienced in each of the last two months but I did literally nothing to promote the site in May so I’m very happy with the growth. Although the site received more traffic than last month, a lot of it was from sources like StumbleUpon which doesn’t convert very well, so the ratio of traffic to subscribers doesn’t really match up.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or inbox, thanks for subscribing!

Personal Update

May saw me open up coaching for people who wanted me to personally look at their websites and I was amazed at the response. I ended up with so many people paying for my services that I’ve actually taken down the page altogether. I simply don’t have time to keep accepting new work with the amount of people who have now booked sessions with me.

Right now I don’t think I will re-open coaching once I have worked with everyone who has already paid but I’ll see how I feel once I get to that stage. Most people think coaching is easy work because you get a lot of money for the hour you consult, but they miss the initial 30-60 minutes where you write down what you’re going to say on the call and the emails that you follow up with afterwards.

On a personal level I have allowed my social life to take up far too much of my time this month. That’s to be expected with my birthday and other things going on, but I need to get back into working mode, as that’s the sole reason I’m in South Africa. It is going to affect some of my relationships but I have more important things to focus on right now.

(I do know about work-life balance, I just get better results when I go hardcore).

Thanks to everyone for the birthday wishes; this is my favourite photo from my main party if you’re interested in that kind of thing.

Otherwise, here’s to a successful month ahead!

Although this post is not directly related to internet marketing and you might think I have nothing to share because of my youth, I’ve been through a lot in the process of going from a college dropout to now making a living for myself online. I hope that there’s something you can take away from this post and apply to your own journey.

Although I would love to say this post idea was entirely mine, I do have to give credit to Baker who wrote a great post after turning 26 along the same theme.

1. There is No End Destination

Whether you like it or not, there’s no end goal to achieve in life. Society likes to teach us our role is to go through college, get a degree, find a job, attract a partner, have kids and then let our kids start that cycle again. At every step on this path we’re always looking to achieve something as if it was necessary.

I like to use an analogy with having a boyfriend or girlfriend to explain this example. Let’s say you’re lying in bed with a partner you love, gazing into their eyes and enjoying their presence. That’s it. There is nowhere to go from that situation. You can get engaged, married, have kids or any other “goal” we attach on to having a relationship, but you’re just going to end up lying next to each other and enjoying each others company.

Learn to appreciate the moment (the now) rather than hoping for some further end result.

2. You Are the Magic Bullet

I mostly came to this realisation by getting caught in the make money online trap. You know the one that promises you “$10k in a fortnight” or “How to secretly crush Google” so you end up buying eBook after eBook. I soon realised that the books which were supposed to be making me money we’re really just making me have less.

After a lot of failed attempts at making money online I eventually decided to just focus on one project and not stop until it made some money. It took a lot of work and a lot more patience, but sure enough, it did eventually start bringing in a decent income for me.

The lesson from this is that there is only so much other people can do for you in helping you get what you want out of life. There is no magic bullet to be found. You are the magic bullet. It’s you that needs to put what you learn into action, stay consistent with the process, and carve out the results you deserve.

In other words: make life happen. Don’t wait for it to happen to you.

3. Death Is a Great Thing to Think About

Death is not pretty and losing loved ones is one of the hardest things to go through. I lost a number of people close to me in 2009, so I know what it’s like. Whether you hate me, love me, or couldn’t care less, we both have something in common: We’re going to die.

Not one human in the history of the world has been able to bypass death. There’s no avoiding it. We all know this, but we rarely use it to propel our lives in the direction we want to take it. Anytime I’m fearful, anxious or nervous, I just realise that one day I’m going to die and I have to make the most of life right now.

I even have a sign on my wardrobe cupboard that I see every day when I wake up. It has the letters LEDLIYLAODYBR on it which stands for: “Live everyday like it’s your last and one day you’ll be right.”

The two great things that come from as a by-product of death realisation are going for what you want in life and living in the moment (because there’s no end destination, remember).

4. Your Social Circle is a Huge Gauge To Where You’ll End Up

Numerous studies have shown that people are not only highly influenced by their social circle but you can also estimate how much money someone is making based on how much their friends are making. In most cases, each friend is making no little more than their friends and rarely over 20% extra.

Most of the people I spend my time with either own large companies or work for themselves from home. It’s not a coincidence that my life is going the way I want it to compared to when I was getting nowhere spending time with people happy to work in a supermarket for the rest of their lives.

I’m not suggesting that you go out and ditch your friends, but do look to add more positive influences in your life and see how that affects you. I think you’ll be surprised with the results.

5. If You Have Haters, You’re Probably Doing Something Right

Some people really don’t like me. I’m totally fine with that, but it’s not something I’ll deny. The people I know who really don’t like me are the people that used to be some of my best friends. As soon as I started to grow and make more money, they didn’t like to see the dynamics of our social groups changing so they resented me instead.

Similarly, there will be some people online who hate me, simply because I’m building a successful blog. The logistical aspect of me making barely any money on this site and putting in hours of my time for each article doesn’t matter to them. Jealousy and change resistance are the two main reasons people begin to find haters when they start becoming successful.

Just remember that having these haters is perfectly normal when you start to improve your life and have success in different areas. Having them simply means you’re doing something right.

6. Pick a Focus and Ask the Question

There’s a lot of drama in my life at times and I like to think most of it isn’t created by me. I have friends changing because I’m growing (point 5), people I can’t see because I’m busy so they get annoyed and people who try to change business deals I’ve been working on for weeks at the last minute.

No matter what is going on though, I’m rarely fazed, and that’s because I have my set focus in life. My focus right now is a financial one geared towards my family. So, whenever any drama does come up in my life, I simply ask: “How does this affect [my focus]?”

It usually doesn’t and I just continue with my day as normal. This question helps to keep me on track and not get sucked into the never-ending drama that surrounds my life and I’m sure it will help you too.

7. Your Income Can Only Grow to the Extent That You Do

This is a quote from T Harv Ecker in the great book Secrets of the Millionaire Mind and rings true for me and from my experience. He uses an example where he asks readers to think about their income levels over the last few years and notice that there will be highs and lows, but you’ve probably returned to a similar wealth level time and time again.

The reason is that we unconsciously have a limit in our minds of how much we think we’re worth so if we make more money, we’ll spend more to get back to that level. He covers a number of case studies in the book and I can definitely relate to this on a personal level.

Once you realise you may have an income or wealth barrier in your head that is holding you back, you can learn to let it go and open your mind up to the riches that are available to all of us.

8. Procrastination is a Choice

You can read tips on procrastination till there’s nothing left to read and still find yourself playing games online rather than finishing an essay or writing your next blog post. Procrastination is simply your choice between whether you want to do something or whether you don’t, and the choice to take action on whichever.

My best tip for inspiring you to take action is to only work on something when you feel like working on it. That may sound counter-productive; but it does work. You may get so close to a deadline and worry about the consequences of not finishing something that it spurs you into action that way. Or, you may just stop pressuring yourself and find that you really wanted to do the thing you’ve been putting off.

9. Be Your Own Guru

I have a number of influences in my life. In terms of blogging, I have massive respect for people like Brian Clark and Darren Rowse. In the public eye I love people like Russell Simmons and Aubrey Graham (Drake). My favourite authors are Seth Godin and Eckhart Tolle.

The common factor between the people that inspire and influence me is that they’ve all worked hard to get to where they are and then focused on sharing their message. That resonates with me a lot. Despite having these influences, I realise that ultimately I have to take the information coming at me from all angles and process it to see how it best helps me on my own journey.

There’s no one path to follow or one persons advice that is the best. I simply recognise that I am the Guru in my own life (as you should be in yours) and take the value which makes sense to me then discard the rest.

10. Focus on What You Want. Not on What You Don’t

While I don’t like how the message of the secret was promoted and shared to the world, the main point of the movie – the law of attraction – has a lot of merits. Whatever you focus your mind on, you attract into your life. Through my research into NLP I found that our mind does not know the difference between negative and positive when it comes to thoughts.

So, if you continually think “I don’t want to think about X” you’re always going to think about X because that’s the only input you’re giving your mind to work with. If you’re thinking about things you don’t want, flip them on the angle of what you do want, and start focusing on that instead.

11. Take Responsibility for Your Own Life

At times, it feels good to pass things on to other people. When I’m struggling with a database move, I’ll ask my assistant to help me and then I can stop worrying about it. If my appendix were to burst, I wouldn’t try to deal with it myself. Instead I would go to a doctor I can trust to help me get through the situation safely.

Though there are things here and there that require us relying on other people, we ultimately have to take the direction and result of our lives into our own hands. Most people I went to school with are in dead-end jobs (if they’re lucky enough to find one in this recession) and don’t really have any plans to get out of living paycheck to paycheck.

I wasn’t lucky. I simply took right action for a long time and carved out the life I wanted for myself. This life is your responsibility.

12. Don’t Give People Too Much Permission

Just like I have people bringing drama into my life, there’s also a lot of people who – intentionally or not – attempt to deter me from my path. For example, the more that I grow ViperChill and build my presence online, the more emails I get on a daily basis with people wanting my help.

If I didn’t make emailing me quite difficult via my contact form, there would be a lot more mail to deal with. I don’t give people too much permission to dictate the direction I take my life, how I spend my time, or determine what my priorities should be. As I’m my own guru, I like to set my own guidelines.

Feel free to ignore this point, but you may find yourself advancing a lot slower than you could be.

13. Give Importance to What You Put Out, Not What You Get Back

Every time I publish a blog post, I’m either going to write something that you find useful or you don’t. One post may be a masterpiece and “perfectly timed” for one person yet for another be skipped over and ignored. We simply can’t control how people react to whatever we put out in the world.

We can however control what it is that we put out there. I spend a lot of time on each article because I want them to be packed with value. I try to be a positive influence in the life of my friends because I feel that will help them grow the most.

I don’t know if I really am helping people grow or providing valuable content, but I’ll spend my time caring about that, rather than the feedback I get.

14. Rejection is Only Rejection If You Let it Stop You

My English teacher told me that writing would never be for me. Seth Godin, one of my favourite authors, said my blog was too commercial for his time. College would not let me continue on with my second year. Yet, here I am, living wherever I want in the world and making a living online while helping thousands of people in the process.

If I had listened to my teacher, or Seth, or let college make me think I was a failure, I certainly wouldn’t be in the position I’m in today. You’re going to face a lot of hurdles on any journey that you take, so let them knock you down if they do. Just don’t let them stop you.

15. Women are (Mostly) Emotional While Men are (Mostly) Logical

This is a huge stereotype but it is definitely true of most males and females. Women talk and react about how they feel in the moment (which is why some people say women love drama) whereas men tend to think about things more and need to “retract into their cave” to overcome issues.

One of the best books that talks about this is “Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus” by John Grady. What Men can learn from this is that they must be the emotional rock for their partner so that their woman does not feel bad for expressing her emotions.

What women can learn is that sometimes it can be hard for men to connect and listen intently when they have other things going on in their mind or other tasks they may have prioritised. A common thing for men to do when a woman is sharing her problems is to constantly offer solutions and then get frustrated when their partner is still talking about the problem after offering these “fixes”.

What women want men to do at times like this is simply to listen. Though some people may not agree with the book, this one understanding can benefit any male-female relationship drastically.

16. Everything You Wanted Externally Will Come When You Work On Yourself

When I was younger I was really desperate to have a girlfriend. I thought, “if I just get this one girl, life will be perfect.” Little did I know that even if I had gotten the girl, I wouldn’t have kept her because she would have been the only positive thing in my life.

I’ve spent the last two years seeing lots of girls and partying 4-5 nights per week without caring for girlfriends in the slightest. I could have had many, but I just didn’t want it. As soon as I focused on my business, hobbies and most importantly on finding happiness in myself, it became a lot easier to attract what I had wanted externally.

Right now I’m in a great relationship and I think it works well because we both have other things going on in our lives and we’re not looking to each other for validation or happiness. As soon as I focused on me and stopped looking for things externally, it’s funny how everything external was available.

17. Make All Projects Easier by Focusing on Today

If you look at any project that is going to take you more than a few hours then you may get that sinking feeling in your stomach when you think about the effort ahead. When starting a blog, for example, you could view it as a project that is going to see you writing 4 posts per week, utilising services like Twitter and StumbleUpon regularly, and tweaking your design until you’re happy with it.

Writing 4 posts per week sounds like a lot. Building a house sounds like a lot. Yet, if you just focus on what you have to do today – writing one post or laying some bricks – then the whole task seems 100x easier. For any big project I undertake I simply focus on what I have to do today and let the rest siphon out of my mind.

18. Stop Looking for External Validation

Your Ego loves validation. When you win an award, someone thinks you’re attractive, or you get a flash new car, it feels good. It’s human nature. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s when you start looking for validation from others that life becomes more stressful and difficult.

If you only feel good about your appearance when someone says you’re good looking, it will affect you negatively when someone says you’re unattractive. If you feel like a million dollars due to how people treat you after buying a new car, you’re going to feel like half the person you were if you have financial troubles and have to trade it.

Internally validate yourself. You are enough. Nothing external will ever make you more of who you already are.

19. As You Grow, Some People Will Try to Hold You Back

Once you start to have success in any area of life or start heading in a new, positive direction, you may be surprised to find people “changing” around you and you just can’t work out why. For me, my friends started acting very differently towards me even though I hadn’t changed at all in the way I was communicating with them.

Similarly, my family who were always supportive tried to downplay my new focus as a dream and something I shouldn’t get carried away with. There are two reasons this happens. The first is the people who purposefully try to hold you back and they do so because they don’t like the dynamics of their own reality changing.

The second is the unconscious holding back from family members and other people who genuinely care for you because they just don’t want to see you build your hopes up and get hurt if things don’t go your way. Learn to recognise this early and you can also learn to ignore it when it happens.

20. Learn to Enjoy the Process

Though my own journey saw me failing college, spending two years working in a clothes store and moving to a country where I didn’t know one single person, I’m glad things didn’t go any other way. The challenges and hard times that I faced really allow me to appreciate the situation I’m in now and, most importantly, I know that I can help other people do the same because I’ve been there.

If the journey was easy for me then I would probably give up anytime I face a challenge in my projects or see the amount of work that something is going to take. I’m used to it now, so I’m happy to push through the difficult times. On that note, it’s also the process that I love the most (and you should too) rather than anything I achieve.

This week I closed my biggest business deal, turned 21, and was interviewed by a blogger with over 110,000 feed subscribers. That’s huge for me, but it’s the journey of getting to this point that I have enjoyed the most. Not the point in itself.

21. Fill in Your Own Blanks

There are only so many lessons that someone like me can teach you or you can take from any book or speaker. You’re going to learn a lot of lessons on your own journey so use them to benefit your life and help take you where you want to go. The best lessons are the ones that you discover for yourself, and they’re definitely the most powerful.

As a shameless plug for my birthday present from you (hey, it’s my birthday, you can’t be mad) I would appreciate you sharing this post on Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon or anywhere else you have a presence online. I hope to help as many people as possible with this post so it would be appreciated.

If you’re new here then each month I share the exact keywords and referring sites that sent traffic to ViperChill in the last month. I don’t have any subscriber or traffic goals so this report is purely just interesting for me to look at, as I hope it is for you as well.

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 35,696
• Pageviews: 72,243
• Avg time on Site: 3 mins 39 seconds

The pageviews on the site have doubled since last month and the time on site has increased so that shows the quality of traffic landing here. The site is starting to see the kind of numbers I would expect it to have which is excellent. The articles written in March, were:

• 28 Resources from My Internet Marketing Toolbox
• The Process That Makes Me Thousands of Dollars Per Month Online
• How I Helped Make a Bland Blog an Overnight Success
• $1M Case Study: Hiring an FHM Model
• Backstage Pass: How I Do What I Do
• The Most Important Blog Post You’ll Probably Never Read
• Buying & Selling Websites for Profit: An In-Depth Guide

Here at ViperChill there are a lot less articles published than most sites, but typically these articles are 2,000-3,000 words and cover topics in massive detail. You could say that we prefer signal over noise.

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of March:

1. Direct: 11,476
2. StumbleUpon: 3,491
3. Google (organic): 2,854
4. Twitter.com: 2,151
5. Google.com: 2,150
6. Sphinn.com: 1,446
7. SEOmoz.org: 1,130
8. PPC.bz: 755
9. Smartpassiveincome.com: 607
10. Facebook.com: 444

Private note from Glen: I have noticed one European blogger trying to mimic my traffic sources exactly each month. To you I want to say that what you’re doing is fine, but as my aim here is to help people as much as possible, I feel the need to say your time would be best spent focusing on your content and carving out your own niche.

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 2,967 visits via 874 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 894
2. viper chill: 280
3. guest blogging: 162
4. viral marketing: 110
5. viperchill.com: 54
6. glen allsopp: 44
7. wordpress seo: 29
8. internet marketing: 28
9. www.viperchill.com: 23
10. viperchill minimalist marketing: 18

Last month the search engine traffic grew by 33% and this month it has grown by almost 50%. Search engine traffic only accounts for 8.31% of visits to ViperChill but it’s still nice to see this figure growing.

Subscriber Stats

Monitoring your subscriber stats is probably the best way to track how well your audience is growing. Although I don’t have any goals for the size of the community here, I still think it is an interesting metric to monitor.

• March 1st: 4,337
• March 31st: 5,325
• Change: +988

988 new subscribers in a month is a new record here at ViperChill and something I’m both surprised at and happy with. If this continues the site should reach 10,000 subscribers well before the end of the year, which is a huge milestone.

If you’re reading this in a feed reader or inbox, thanks for subscribing!

6 Month Stats

I thought it would be interesting to look at a few metrics and see how they have changed over the course of the last six months.

Brand Searches

Here I monitored how many people have found the site using the term ‘viperchill’ in a search engine. If searches for your brand are growing then you know you’re doing something right and people are talking about you.

Subscribers

This month saw the biggest growth in subscribers yet. This is partly due to a few things happening that I probably can’t duplicate so I’ll see how the next month goes when I continue to focus on writing the best content I can.

Pageviews

Month 4 saw a huge amount of traffic from StumbleUpon hence the uneven growth. I don’t really rate traffic from StumbleUpon so it’s nice to see only a small portion of visitors from the site made up the 72,000 pageviews for March.

Personal Activity

I don’t really have too much to report this month on a personal level. One great thing that happened was my interview for Dan Schawbel at Personal Branding Blog which was syndicated on Forbes and Reuters. I’m quite proud of that. My brother finalised the dates for his wedding so it looks like I’ll be returning to the UK at some point next year.

Although I’ve only been in South Africa for two months I’ve already had the most profitable month of my life so things are going very well in terms of business. Hopefully it’s not too long till I can tell my brother and sister they can quit their job; there is absolutely nothing as important to me as that right now.

I am admittedly getting overloaded with the number of people I have to see each week and how many projects I’m working on. I’ve let down a number of people I used to be very close with in this country simply because I’m so focused on making what I do a success. I’m still trying to find the best balance between the two so I’ll let you know how that works out.

Finally, I just want to thank you all for your support over the last 6 months. I genuinely want to help you guys as much as possible so it’s great to get feedback which shows I’m doing exactly that. I have never been part of a more awesome community online of people who really want to succeed and help others do the same.

I have absolutely no goals for this site (which is why I think it’s doing well) so don’t mind if the traffic goes up or down. I judge my success here by the positive comments that each article receives. At the bottom of this post you’ll also find a personal update, which I write every month.

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 19,777
• Pageviews: 37,173
• Avg time on Site: 3 mins 06 seconds

The traffic has taken a large dip from last month, purely because StumbleUpon sent 22,000 visitors in January and just 1,600 in February. Thanks to that, the time on site has doubled and there has been quite a large increase in other traffic sources.  The articles written in February, were:

• How I Really Built a Blog with 6,500 Subscribers
• Wordpress SEO: The Only Guide You Need
• 7 Life Lessons I Apply to Internet Marketing
• Bloggers: This Is How Long Your Posts Should Be
• How to Really Build Backlinks and Dominate Google

Here at ViperChill there are a lot less articles published than most sites, but typically these articles are 2,000-3,000 words and cover topics in massive detail. You could say that we prefer signal over noise.

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of February:

1. Direct: 6,331
2. StumbleUpon: 1,654
3. Twitter: 1,552
4. Google (organic): 1,311
5. Google.com: 1,117
6. Sphinn.com: 1,096
7. Viperchill / twitter: 879 (I think this is a new reporting aspect to Google Analytics)
8. SmartPassiveIncome.com: 504
9. PluginID.com: 283
10. Facebook.com: 267

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 1,372 visits via 472 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 297
2. viper chill: 126 (it’s one word, guys! )
3. guest blogging: 97
4. glen allsopp: 41
5. internet marketing: 39
6. viral marketing: 32
7. viperchill.com: 23
8. viperchill case study: 20
9. life lessons: 19
10. minimalist internet marketing: 18

As the site is starting to fill up nicely with content and the posts here are getting quite a lot of links, the search engine traffic is increasing nicely. It’s growing around 33% every single month so I’ll be interested to see where this is at by the end of the year.

Subscriber Stats

Monitoring your subscriber stats is probably the best way to track how well your audience is growing. Although I don’t have any goals for the size of the community here, I still think it is an interesting metric to monitor.

• February 1st: 3,814
• February 28th: 4,337
• Change: +523

Last month the site grew by just over 500 subscribers but that was partly down to a number of my guest posts going live. This month, I’ve been fortunate enough to have a lot of big name bloggers talking about me, so even though I wrote no guest posts, the site is still growing well.

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Personal Activity (+ My New Apartment)

As I revealed last month, I have decided to cease globe trotting and stay in one location. This will help me get things done and reach my next (admittedly large) goals. I’m back in Cape Town, South Africa, which I first visited when I was 18, and I’m really loving it. I definitely made the right decision to come back.

The only downside so far is that I’m constantly having to schedule friends and turn people down because somehow (I don’t remember this being the case in the past) I have way more close contacts than I remember. And that’s after filtering out the people who just want something from me.

I’m living in an apartment that is 30 seconds away from the biggest mall in Africa and I go there at least once per day to go shopping or grab food, and it’s also really quiet during the week. Here are some pictures of how my new place looks, if you’re interested in that kind of thing:

(As a typical 20 year old, I’m planning on getting a large flat screen TV for this wall and moving that cabinet)

The apartment has 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms (yes, I live on my own) and even 2 parking spaces. It also has 24 hour security which is a must when living in this country.

Right now my plan is to stay here until around March 2011, as by then I should have accomplished most of the things I set out to do over the next year. When I came here at 18 I didn’t miss home at all and I think that’s because everything was so new and exciting. I’m still really, really happy to be here, but I miss this girl and my expanding family back in the UK like crazy, at times.

This month I also found out I won a SEMMY (internet marketing award) for the best post on blogging in 2009. I had been nominated for two years in a row but never picked up anything. Thanks to all of you who voted this time (and to Matt for putting it together). It’s great to have my work recognized in front of the big guys in the industry.

What’s new with you?

I constantly aim to find new, awesome articles to share with you all. Today I want to share: The Truth About Blogs and Money by Jonathan Fields, Quieting the Lizard Brain (Video) by Seth Godin, Cracking the Google Algorithm by Stuntdubl, 11 Characteristics of Highly Influential Bloggers by Tamar and 33 Ways to Be Remarkable by Diggy.

As I recently revealed, I’m moving back to Cape Town to focus on my next two goals: helping my siblings financially and buying a nightclub. The latter will probably not be achieved for 2-3 years. I love travelling but I really feel like I need to stay in one place to give me the best chance of making my massive aims a reality.

Each month I give a personal update on my life and where I am in regards to my Cloud living lifestyle. On top of that, I openly share all stats from this website in an aim to be radically transparent. I reiterate each month that I like to look at these stats but I don’t have goals for them. I don’t rely on this site to make money; I simply enjoy writing here. I of course like seeing the traffic go up, but I’m more focused on building a community than seeing some nice spikes in my Google Analytics account.

Overall Traffic

• Visits: 37,474
• Pageviews: 60,481
• Avg time on Site: 1 mins 24 seconds

Last month the site had 23,250 visits and 34,869 pageviews so I’m not going to complain about almost doubling my traffic month on month. The articles written in January, were:

• The Very First Thing You Should Do in 2010
• What You Can Learn From The Most Tweeted Blog Posts Ever
• How I Wrote a $30,000 eBook (And You Can Too)
• Minimalist Internet Marketing: My Personal Guide
• $1M Case Study: My CMS & Content Strategy

Here at ViperChill there are a lot less articles published than most sites, but typically these articles are 2,000-3,000 words and cover topics in massive detail. You could say that we prefer signal over noise.

Top Referring Websites

Here are the top referring traffic sources for the month of January:

1. StumbleUpon: 22,634
2. Direct: 6,001
3. Twitter: 1,872
4. Google (organic): 1,049
5. Google.com: 730
6. MaxBlogPress.com: 478
7. Copyblogger.com: 452
8. Sphinn.com: 398
9. Ow.ly: 295
10. SmartPassiveIncome.com: 261

Top Referring Keywords

There were a total of 1,081 visits via 281 keywords this month. The top 10, were:

1. ViperChill: 241
2. glen allsopp: 182
3. guest blogging: 80
4. viper chill: 36
5. glen allsop: 33
6. glen allsop guest post: 18
7. viperchill.com: 15
8. how I wrote an ebook: 12
9. site:viperchill.com 66 visitors: 12 (Not sure I believe this one)
10. pluginid: 11

Up until a few hours before hitting publish on this post, I had removed the keyword stats you see above. I did this because I know that as soon as I find a keyphrase that sends me a lot of traffic, I’m going to set myself up for a lot of competition. I quickly saw this as a silly move because a) no other blogger is your competition and b) if something helps people, I want to share it.

If you want to outrank me in Google for phrases that send me traffic then feel free. If it’s relevant to your niche and helps your own blog grow, then I’m achieving what I set out to do with this blog.

Subscriber Stats

Monitoring your subscriber stats is probably the best way to track how well your audience is growing. Although I don’t have any goals for the size of the audience here, I still think it is an interesting metric to monitor.

• January 1st: 3,284
• January 31st: 3,814
• Change: +530

Last month the site grew by 260 subscribers so it’s nice to see that doubling traffic has almost directly doubled feed subscriptions. I had 3 guest posts go live this month on some big blogs which obviously had an impact on the stats but apart from that, I just focus on writing the best content I can.

Personal Activity (+ National Press)

Without a doubt, the biggest thing to happen to me this month was being featured in the Guardian newspaper in the UK. The Guardian is the 2nd largest UK newspaper according to most sources, and I was featured in both the print and online versions of the piece.

Here is a picture of the actual newspaper:

If you would like to read the article online, you can do so here (I’m at the bottom). Please ignore the figures they quoted. I did ask for nothing specific to be mentioned and that is quite a lot lower than my average income now.

Of course, I’m delighted with the coverage which resulted in thousands of people “Googling” my name and landing on my various sites. It’s great to see that all of the hard work I’ve put in online over the last few years is starting to get recognised.

I made another big announcement this week when I told the world that I sold my biggest blog, PluginID. You can find my reasons for doing so over here, where I also revealed that I received a mid five-figure sum for the site. My duties there have officially ended now, although I’ll still be popping into the site from time to time to share my updates. Note: ViperChill is going nowhere. The site means far too much to me — and it was my first ever blog, so many (4) years ago.

On another note, as you’re reading this, I’m in Paris! I’ve been before and loved the place, so decided to go and check it out again. My next stops are going to include Prague (Czech Republic), Berlin (Germany) and then back to Amsterdam (Netherlands) before flying back to Cape Town (South Africa). If you can’t tell, I really love this lifestyle.

I want to help you live it too, so make sure you grab the feed.

This has been an excellent month for me and I’m excited to see more of Europe before returning to Cape Town and becoming a slave to my personal goals. Thanks to all of you for your support, comments, links, tweets and everything else. I’ll try my best to keep the value coming.

I constantly aim to find new, awesome articles to share with you all. Today I want to share: How to Really Profit from Your Blog via Pat Flynn, Working on the Web and Having a Life via David Turnbull, The Hustling Secrets No One Talks About via Jade Craven and finally there’s an interesting Stumbleupon advertising case study that might teach you a thing or two via DumbLittleBlogger.