This is just a quick update to let you all know why I haven’t been blogging much in the last week and that is because I’ve been working on a brand new website. I’ve always said I wish I had a product to promote online as I think I would do really well; although I haven’t found a product, I have actually found my passion in that of personal development and lifestyle design.

Since moving to South Africa in September 2007, I’ve learnt to live on my own and be in a completely new environment, all at the age of 18. It’s inevitable that these types of actions are going to help a person grow and I’ve came across so many new aspects of living and happiness that I wanted a place to share them.

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So, recently our feed count crossed the 500 mark and made it to 511. Whilst I don’t want to be “blowing my own trumpet” I am going to take a look at the main principles that helped us reach this target and some of the things that hindered it.

To be honest, 500 feed subscribers aren’t that much compared to some of our fellow bloggers but it is a milestone and one that I am personally proud of. It has taken 2 years to get to this point, i only believe I really started blogging in the last 10 months; we had only 40 feed subscribers when we first added the Feedburner chicklet.

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Despite how long I’ve wanted to do something as radical as this, I’ve never been able to bring myself to accept such a big change. Partly for the fear of letting others down who have come to know this site for what it is and what it offers, and partly because this is a complete u-turn in what I’ve been offering and doing for the last 2 years.

What am I talking about? I’ve decided I no longer want to be focused on doing services, and want to continue my passion for blogging and helping others succeed on an information level, rather than client level.

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While I like to keep most of the blog posts informative, I also like to write on a personal level and have as many operations in this company as transparent as possible. With that in mind, here are some status updates…

Reputation Management Growth

With the shift into being one of the main sites that solely focuses on Reputation Management, it’s interesting to see how others follow. As I spend a lot of time in not only brand monitoring but niche monitoring, I have been watching this industry grow on a daily basis.

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A lot of our posts refer to how readers can increase website traffic or get more subscribers to their blogs, something we still need to work on but aren’t doing a bad job. So when it comes to statistics we personally have to improve to have any credibility, this time I’m not just talking about traffic or backlinks though, here are some stats I took on July 29th, 2007:

• 53 Feed Subscribers
• 89k Alexa
• 247 Posts
• 220 Comments

Feed Subscribers - Starting off with 53 actually wasn’t too shabby, although there are a lot of blogs with more subscribers in this niche and it is a number I really like to see rise (probably more than any other). As I write this post (different day to when it goes live) the number is sitting at 221, that’s over a 4x increase and something I’m really happy with, no doubt this number will increase even more in 2008.

Alexa - The alexa is actually better there than it is now, so you may feel I’m strange for mentioning it, to be fair the current alexa has only dipped over the last month or two when I’ve been away in south africa and just didn’t have the time / energy to make any blog posts as I got my outside of work priorities a bit messed up. During the months from July to now though the alexa was usually around the 50k mark which although I don’t care about it too much; is an improvement.

Posts - I’ll be honest in that I’ve had a lot of fluctuations with my posting. I had started a new blog and spent a lot of time writing to that (it had massive success) but I neglected this one in the process and realised that was not a good idea. When I have been writing here it’s been pretty consistent and hopefully with a high quality of cotnent aside from the last few months where I have been away. The current number of posts is 294 which is nearly a 50 post increase in the last 5 months.

Comments - The previous comments to post ratio was less than 1 comment per post, this is due to the fact that when I started the blog I wasn’t writing for readers, for some reason I tended just to write for search engines and to have new content. Now I interact in the search marketing industry and write for readers, there are currently 911 comments on the site, thats a huge increase in the comments to post ratio.

After having wrote the hardest blog post of my life, and being very open and sometimes a little uncomfortable, I thought I would lighten things up and get a bit personal in a good way, showing off some of my time in south africa.

I arrived at Cape Town international on September 24th, greeted by the two SEO guru’s I had spoke to frequently on messenger and via email, Lyle and Carl. Getting to the office it was a pretty pleasant surprise, quite nervous about meeting all my new colleagues, was a nice touch that there’s a pool table in the office (and some google beanbags).

We will actually be in a new office by the time I get back to South Africa, something even swankier that I promise to add some pictures of. It certainly wasn’t all work though, I discovered that South Africa is a beautiful country.

I found some time to have a drink (occasionally) as well, well…quite a lot actually

I had quite a few apartments in south africa (long story), here’s a quick variety of pics from them:

Finished off with a few things I’ve learned:

1. South Africa is dangerous but not as bad as what most people make out. Yeah I would never walk the streets in the dark but I’m not sure I would do that in many places
2. Social Media is definitely up and coming, bluesouth and rival companies in SA are starting to offer related services and even things like online reputation management
3. The Internet is pretty slow, and sadly it’s also very expensive for a limited bandwidth line. I pay less in england for “unlimited” fast internet then I would for an average speed, 2gb capped connection in south africa.
4. People are awesome, I’ve met some fantastic people and the majority of ’strangers’ are surprisingly easy to talk too. Something you don’t really experience in England, well not as much anyway.

MERRY XMAS EVERYONE