Chris Meistre

There are only 263 days left until the hordes of soccer 2010 fans rock up on our shores and airfields. It is estimated that at least 500,000 people will descend on South Africa to watch the soccer matches held at 10 venues in 9 different cities.

What does hosting the soccer 2010 world cup mean for South Africa?

By hosting the 2010 soccer world cup South Africa will have a huge impact on their economy. The event will generate a direct expenditure of about R12,7 billion and will contribute R21,3 billion GDP. It’s estimated that about 159 000 annual jobs will be created and an additional R7,2 billion will be paid to our government in taxes.

There is also the increase in tourism and foreign investment that we need to take into consideration. It will foster confidence in our country as the profile of the country will be raised.

How can you profit from the 2010 world cup?

If you own a house, townhouse, guesthouse or flatlet you can rent it out to people visiting your city. To see what you can charge for rent, check out this soccer 2010 income calculator. At Soccer 2010 Accommodation they can list your property and have a qualified letting agent handle all the paperwork and legal contracts.

How do you go about obtaining tickets for the soccer 2010 world cup?

If you are from South Africa, you can visit any FNB (First National Bank) branch and purchase your tickets there.  Alternatively you can go to the FIFA website and register for it online.  Prices vary depending on which matches you apply for. There are 3 million tickets available when they started selling them.

A few minutes after posting the link to my post about Lexis Nexis Porn #fail a lady, Sarah, contacted me on Twitter to say that she works at Lexis Nexis and she has just contacted the person that will sort out the porn content on their website.

Hopefully that person will also put up an easier way for people to get in contact with the webmaster in the future.

I’m very impressed with how quickly someone picked up on the post and responded to sort out the problem.   I suppose that is the power of the Internet and Social Networking.

I wonder if Coega has qualified people working on their computers in the offices.  And by qualified people I mean a secretary or assistant that at least knows how to use an email program.  I received a puzzling email from Nelitha Tayi (Nelitha.Tayi@coega.co.za) asking me to provide a quotation on their ICT needs.  The puzzling part was the attachment.

Once opened I had a list of 41 IT companies in Port Elizabeth, obviously from the Coega database.  This contained information like the normal contact information.  The worst part is 2 very confidential information parts they give out.  The Average Turnover of each company as well as the Biggest Contracts awarded to those companies.

I replied to the email asking to speak to a supervisor about the incident because they need to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  What would happen if they “by mistake” forwarded other confidential information to your competitors?

I received a call back from Nelitha, and this is what pissed me off this most.  It wasn’t that she didn’t want me to speak to a supervisor, it was that she said, “No one else received the document because she had Recalled the email.”  For those that don’t know, check out http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HA010917601033.aspx.  It just means you can try and get your email back before it reaches the recipient, but mostly it only works for the internal office email.

Explaining to her that if I received the document, what makes her so sure the other 40 recipients didn’t receive it, she carried on to explain that it must definitely be so because she hit the recall button and out of the 41 people I am “definitely” the only person to have received it.

Let this be a lesson for those that trust their secretaries with confidential information.  Who knows, the next time she can send out employee salary slips to the wrong people.  Everyone can make mistakes, I can understand, but some mistakes can be avoided.

It looks like Lexis Nexis have decided to start hosting porn to supplement their income.

Lexis Nexis Porn

As you can see it seems that they really like Megan Fox.

The worst part of this is when I tried to find an email address or a contact form on their website to inform them of this, I had to fill in a long form before it actually allows a form to be submitted to them.

Hosting porn AND not being easily contactable…. Double fail.

If you want to drive traffic to your website you need to write articles for it.   It sounds a lot harder than it really is.  I used 1 article that I published to 1 site and it generated led 600 new visitors to Karma Sutra Positions.  That is 1 article submitted to 1 article site.  And because my domain name is still very young in the eyes of Google, my article also ranks higher in the search results than my actual website does.   But that’s okay because I still get the traffic.

I also used to think writing articles are difficult, but after seeing the results I got from just 1 article I decided I need to make writing articles a lot easier for myself.

Choosing your topic

This can be a very difficult thing to do.  The first thing you need to do though is do the keyword research legwork.  Doing this will give you the advantage of being able to incorporate your keywords naturally into your article, instead of trying to make them fit once the article has been written.  Read my article about keyword research.  Decide on 1 main keyword phrase and then 2 or 3 secondary keyword phrases that enough people are searching for, but that doesn’t yet have that much competition in terms of other websites having that keyword phrase.  It helps choosing something that is of interest to you, because there is nothing more difficult writing about a topic that doesn’t interest you!

Check out http://www.searchenginespy.co.za/ that shows you a list of what people are searching for each day.

Writing the article

Now go and look for some content on your topic.  Wikipedia, Ezinearticles and Goarticles are just some of the places that will help you find the content.  Find 1 or 2 very good articles and copy and paste their text into a word processing file.

Read the article once, and then a second time.  What I normally then do is start typing my article above the pasted text.  This allows me to have everything on the one screen while I type my article.  Write the article by trying to remember what you’ve just read and putting it in your own words.  Glance down to the original article only when you get stuck.  The idea here is to write a totally unique article and not just something that you are rephrasing.  While you’re writing, remember to incorporate your keyword phrases into the article as well.  If you’re going to directly quote the original article, be sure to include a link to it or mention it.

I aim to have about 300-500 words per article.  My main keyword I want to use at least 5 times and then use the secondary keywords if they can be used.

Reread your article at least 3 times to make sure there are no grammar and spelling errors.

That whole process shouldn’t take you more than an hour to do.  It gets easier the more you do it.  While you’re at it, why not write another one as well?

One last thing you want to add is a short footer for the article.  This is just a short link to your website making use of your main keyword as the link.  For instance: Learn more about the Karma Sutra Positions.  This will be the link that drives traffic to your website.

Words of caution

• Keep the article that you are writing sounding natural.  You don’t want to saturate it with keyword phrases that causes the article to have grammar errors.
• For articles you submit to article directories, don’t include any links in them.  This is what your footer is going to be for.  PLEASE NOTE this is just my personal opinion and using links in your article may or may not increase clicks  to your website.

Making it work for you

For the articles to start working for you, you need to start submitting them to article directories.  There are thousands of them and a simply Google search will yield the results.  My recommendation is to use an automated article submitter called Article Marketer.  This allows you to save some time by using their service to publish your article to article directories and other publishers.  It’s not necessary to do this, and you can do it manually, but I just prefer using this method.  It can take anything from 2-10 minutes to submit an article manually, so if you can save an hour by using Article Marketer, you can rather use that time to write another article.

How long will you wait to see results?

It can take up to 3-4 weeks before your articles get approved so just be patient.  I found that once the article is approved it instantaneously starts generating traffic for me.

Other examples

I also have an article about Blackjack Counting that I submitted.  It was approved about 8 hours ago and it has only led to 3 new visitors to my website on Blackjack Counting.   This goes to show you that the amount of traffic that your article will generate depends on your keyword and if you did your keyword research correctly.

Some tools you can use

How to write article

Article Marketer