Glen Allsopp is the brains behind Viperchill, a website related to entrepreneurship and Internet marketing. He’s the former owner of the successful personal development website PluginID and he’s back in South Africa on another business venture. I had the pleasure of breaking bread with Glen a couple of months ago and he’s a great guy in person. Now Glen’s at the controls for this next installment of Thoughts From. Read on!
Was there a key turning point or revelation in your life that led you down the Internet marketing/e-business path?
I always knew I wanted to do something different and not take the path that most of society follows. I didn’t realise it would be an internet business until I found a friend building a site one day and asked him to show me how. He was just using a basic site builder at the time but I loved the process and decided to create one of my own.
Since then, I’ve been hooked to the idea that I can create something in a matter of hours and it’s visible for anyone in the world to see. Of course, you have to get it out there, but the whole journey is exciting.
Is it getting easier or harder to break into blogging and Internet marketing?
As far as affiliate sites (how I make most of my money) go it’s definitely getting harder to get organic search engine traffic unless you really deserve to rank for your phrase which can take months or even years in some cases. I think there is room in any industry for a blogger to stand out. In the internet marketing space, for example, I hadn’t wrote for almost 2 years on a consistent basis, but my growth since coming back has amazed me.
Internet marketing blogging, of course, is one of the most saturated blog niches out there. I think I’ve proved that anyone with unique insights and a genuine aim to provide value to their readers can succeed. As more and more people adopt the internet and realise you can make a living online, it’s only going to get harder.
In a way I think that’s a good thing, as those with a real audience and a genuine desire to help people fulfil their needs usually rise to the top.
Do you find that there are as many similarities as differences between people of different cultures, based on your own experiences?
I definitely don’t think you can only find a certain type of person from a specific background or culture. I have made great friends everywhere I’ve been. I don’t really like saying this but most people I meet are greatly effected by the types of communities they have grown up in. I’ve had some great friends who grew up in bad areas and they sadly slipped back into the kind of lifestyle they are used to in that type of environment.
There are exceptions to everything, so I’ll just say that awesome people can be found anywhere, but I think where people grow up and how they are expected to treat others seems to stay with them for a long time. In a lot of cases, but definitely not all.
Is good writing in blogging and articles really THAT important?
If you look back over my earlier PluginID posts you’ll find that my writing was much worse than it is now, and I don’t think it held me back then. I say worse than it is now, as I really do not rate myself as a writer. I’m not saying that so people tell me otherwise, it’s just genuinely how I feel. I’ll often read books or articles from other people and think “Wow, I wish I could write that well.”
I don’t think having the ability to write well is necessarily that important, but don’t let it hold you back. By that I mean at least re-read your articles a few times before publishing them and run them through a grammar checker to help you spot small mistakes. The point you make is far more important than the way you get that point across, although improving your writing skills is never a bad idea.
Do you prefer to write in silence or with noise of some kind?
I am amazed that people can work (and especially write) with music playing. Whether I have something blasting through my headphones or just playing quietly in the background, there’s absolutely no way I can write an article. I actually pressed the pause button on iTunes to answer these questions because my mind simply won’t let me focus with music on.
I would love to know if I’m alone on that because when I worked in an office, 95% of people there listened to music as they worked.
Do you have mentors who you rely upon for guidance and support?
One of my earliest mentors was Michael Martine of Remarkablogger fame and he helped me quite a lot. It wasn’t so much the advice he gave that helped me (even though it was great), it was more the fact that I had someone to listen to my problems and struggles at the time. The process of simply talking about the things that are confusing you seems to help clear your mind naturally.
I have a lot of people that inspire me, but I don’t have any mentors and I rarely ask people for help. My work has stayed pretty much the same over the last year and a half so I’m quite capable of doing most of the things I need to do. Otherwise, I’ll hire a designer / programmer / copywriter to help me out.
Conversely, would you say that you act as a mentor to other people in the Internet world (outside of clients)?
Similar to my answer in the last question, I think I inspire quite a lot of people, rather than mentor them. There will be some people who have read my blog posts and may think of me as a mentor, but I don’t offer the type of support usually associated with that word. Thankfully I don’t work with clients anymore so the only people who receive my advice are friends and those who read ViperChill.
Can you describe a humorous incident that occurred as a result of writing a blog post?
I recently moved back to South Africa where I decided to meet up with friends of friends who also happened to be blog readers. One girl told me that her best friend would tell her things about me that she didn’t even know, simply because she reads my site so much. (She’ll probably get out an ego kick out of reading this 
). I think it’s funny that people are telling my real friends things about me that they didn’t know, simply because these other people have found out so much of my life through my blogging on PluginID and ViperChill.
That’s all I can think of right now though.
Pretend the Internet is destroyed overnight. What do you do the next morning?
Cry, and then watch TV for the first time in around 7 months. After that I would take out my 350+ vinyl records I have back in the UK and start getting to know my music again. If the internet didn’t exist, I would try to become one of the top DJ’s in the world because I love music (and making it) so much.
Failing that, I’m sure I would be involved in some form of online business and hopefully wouldn’t find myself back in a clothes store which is where I was stuck just a few years ago.
Any parting thoughts for our readers?
Realise that everything you need to achieve what you want to online is at your disposal, you just need to take right action. There’s no room for excuses as they’re just going to hold you back. It’s the easiest time in history to succeed by going solo.
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