Social Media, ViperChill

I’m a huge fan of personal development. For the last 19 months I blogged about very little else and like to think I made a mark on the industry – despite my age and “total nobody” status. I don’t really write about self improvement anymore but I still actively work on improving different aspects of my life.

Without books like The Power of Now, Psycho Cybernetics, and Tribes, I really don’t think I would be where I am today. In fact, I think that the majority of my success online is thanks to the life lessons I’ve pushed myself to learn and the knowledge I’ve picked up over the last few years.

Now that we’re one month into the New Year, I hope you all realise that this one is going to fly by as quickly as the rest. The people who stagnate are going to be left behind. I could relax this year and do absolutely nothing, but instead, it’s going to be my hardest year yet.

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.

Minimalism seems to be a hot topic these days and rightly so. People like clutter-free living and getting things done. After listening to a recent podcast between minimalist Leo Babauta and problogger, Darren Rowse, I started thinking about how I could apply minimalism to my internet marketing operations.

After all, I’m sure we can all agree there is time we spend on a computer each day that isn’t spent doing relevant tasks. I personally know that I check Tweetdeck, Facebook, and my email inbox far more often than necessary. Over the last few days, I have completely overhauled the way I do business online and setup the system and principles I’m going to share with you today.

As I write this on the last day of 2009, I have to say that I can’t believe how quickly this year has went. ViperChill has been ‘relaunched’ now for 2 and a half months and the community has grown by over 1,000 subscribers in this time which amazes me. Especially when I am doing very, very little in order to promote this site (apart from writing the best articles I can, of course).

As regular readers will know, each month I turn more transparent than most marketing bloggers as I share the exact traffic sources and keywords that drive traffic to this website. I also use this time to share a monthly update of my personal journey and projects that I’m working on. I hope these monthly reports show how much I genuinely want to help you all succeed online and that we’re going to make 2010 our best year yet.

They say time flies by when you’re writing awesome blog posts (;)) and I certainly believe ‘them’ as November disappeared before I was even ready for it. And while it is the start of a new month, it’s also time for another ViperChill monthly report.

These monthly reports serve a number of purposes. Firstly, I get to be transparent with you lovely people and allow you to use my blog as a ‘case study’ which can help you on your own journey. Secondly, I like to incorporate personal updates into my sites and the end of these posts allows me to do just that. Finally, I just find the stats of other people ‘cool’ so assume some people must like reading them here.

Welcome to the first ever monthly report here at ViperChill. The idea for this feature each month is to give you a little taster of what I have been working on lately and how traffic to the site is going. I don’t actually care how many visitors this site gets, but I do care about helping as many people as possible and I’m all about transparency so I’m willing to share as much of my business life as possible.

For the sake of nothing but interest, I have decided to do a monthly report which shares the traffic stats for this website. If you could not care less, then feel free to skip this post once per month. I personally love getting an insight into the traffic and other stats of people’s websites (maybe I’m nosey?) so here goes.

4 years ago I launched my first ever blog. At the time I was really passionate about internet marketing and SEO, so as anyone with half a brain would recommend, that’s what I blogged about. Unlike these days, I didn’t care about building an audience or getting comments. Instead, all I cared about was having more pages indexed in Google so that I could get more search engine traffic. (How times have changed)

That blog, was ViperChill. It has been over a year since I wrote here, and a lot has gone on in my life over the last four years since I started the site. For anyone who is interested, let me give you a quick run down…