Ivin Viljoen Interview – Surviving The Blog Contestant

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Following Ivins’ unfortunate exit from the  Surviving The Blog Contest - Here is his interview which will be followed up with some of his thoughts and reflections about the competition. Don’t forget that you can see his profile and all the other contestants over at this page

 Be sure to read to the end for Ivin’s thoughts and reflections on the competition.

Q1. Did you always see yourself working online? Or is it something that just happened?

I have never really looked at working online as an ideal. Working from home wasn’t even an ideal for me. All my life though, I have had a desire to work for myself. To create, build, pioneer. That has always been my desire and probably the crux of what I do online today. I like bringing new things and concepts to light.

Q2. Do you work online full time? If not would you?

I have been working online for a little over a year now, but just recently I was ‘forced’ to work online fulltime. Although my income is half from offline brick and mortar businesses, I was fortunate to find a balance to help me build and online ‘service’ business that is fused together quite well.

Q3. What motivates you to keep blogging and working online?

What motivates me to keep blogging and working online is seeing my ‘creations’ come to life, be it a teaching program, and online space or a new idea to build communities around a niche or a business model. What also motivates me is the many relationships I am able to build and people that I meet that become my friends.

Q4. What’s one thing that you hate about the web?

I hate that so many scams are out there and very little safeguards for unsuspecting ‘buyers’. So many new ‘prospective’ online entrepreneurs never make it because they get disheartened and quit. 80% of the money I used as startup capital has been wasted.

Also, I hate it (but think it’s necessary) that it’s difficult to find a network of ‘online buddies’ and that’s its SO hard getting into networks. You have to be resilient in pursuing relationships and constantly building new ones. I was lucky enough that someone adopted me at the beginning of this year and taught me a lot of what I know today and also introduced me to key players in the industry. That was invaluable to me and no money can buy that. I make a point of it to ‘adopt’ others and teach them what I’ve learned in return. That’s why I think Mastermind programs and ‘fraternities’ are very important.

Q5. What’s an interesting/odd thing that’s ever happened to you online? (Site hacked, odd email, takeover bid?)

Oh, one of my blogs got hacked a couple times. And it takes DAYS to nuke the culprits. Once when I got hacked, someone put a iframe script with an image the size of one pixel on my main blog that Google perceived as ‘malicious’, it took me almost a week to sort out that cost me a lot in traffic and business. Luckily, because of the relationships I built, people quickly informed me of the problem and because of keeping a good reputation intact with white hat online methods; nobody thought anything of it and helped me get it sorted out.

I can tell you TONS of stories of emails. Could be another thing I hate about the web too. Emails preying on unsuspecting, desperate people looking for a solution to poverty, wanting to get free from their 9-5 jobs and that nagging boss etc. Then they spend what little money they have on something that’s bogus and doesn’t work. The best product pitch I’ve ever heard is that people selling some kind of ‘push button software’ they apparently make money online from, when  in fact, the source of their income is selling this ‘dud’ software to these unsuspecting souls.

The most interesting though, would be how I started getting success online and blogging, getting collaboration requests and interests in my blogs when I wasn’t looking for it. It just came and the best advice I can give anybody that want to work online, is use the systems that work, build relationships and eventually, an avalanche will appear.

Q6. If you were given $500,000 that you could only invest into blogging, where would you invest it?

The BIGGEST drawback to online success is limited funds. I would use it to launch a brand new niche blog and go all out using the best promotion tactics I know of. There are lost of free tactics, but it would definitely help a lot if you had some money. Expenses would go to.

Hiring writers.

Professional, custom design.

Advertising.

Pr

Etc.

Now, what is happening in my business, is a lot of money that I make is being re-invested into getting it to grow more.

Q7. Some people prefer to blog anonymously and not share any personal information or pictures about themselves online, what’s your view on this?

I try encourage everyone I work with to get out there, get known, and stand behind you name. The most successful sites and  blogs, according to me, are the ones that are personally branded in their domain: ZacJohnson.com, John Chow.com, Ivin Viljoen.com

Q8. Would you consider yourself a social network addict?

Not really, more a social network leverager (is there such a word). I know how to use social media for the purposes intended, but not to be too social that it eats my time. For me, social networks are to build the relationships I spoke about earlier. It’s also fun to watch what other people are up to and social media makes it easy to ‘stalk’ your hero.

Q9. If for some unknown reason the whole web crashed and it took months to get it up and running again, what would you do with all your new free time?

I would use the principles I learned about marketing online and use them offline.

Q10. What kind of superhero would you like to be?

I want to be the sort of superhero (or person with superpowers) that have very clear and focused concentration and that can do things super fast. Like Eddie in the movie ‘limitless’ or Peter Petrelli in Heroes.

And now we have some more exclusive thoughts from Ivin on his experience in the competition!

 Q1. What do you make of your experience in the competition? What have you learnt from it?

Well, it was a challenge for sure. I launch many new blogs a year, so that wasn’t anything new. What I DO take away from this is perhaps a schedule need to be made for every new project I start, and with a few staff members one can pull off having a pumping new blog in 10 weeks with a TON of new content and a recognizable social presence.

Q2. What’s your biggest regret from the competition? Do you feel like you should still be in it?

Well, it was a great experience, no doubt, even if it was short lived. So, what I’ll share here would be dissapointments, and NOT nessasarily regrets. Our team bled all the time, and that’s not because we are bad bloggers. At the beginning we had two members that were non-existent in the preparation and even into the first week, after Rob came aboard (bless him), we were still running on limited potential, because we were running against a team of five with three people, and later four.

What makes this difficult is, with the TV series Survivor, you have an idea of the framework of the competition. In this one, which is similar, we didn’t have ANY frame of reference, so if I knew we had to do ‘X’ in the third week, I would have built that from the beginiing. We finished our blog early, and I mean all the setups, so there was nothing wrong with that. But once again, in a week where we would have to do ‘X’, we would be running 3 people against 5 all the time, and that number dimishes every week. I can honsetly say we all worked our butts off, it just didn’t take.

Q3. What would you do different if you were to enter the competition again?

Well, I’ll draw up a plan and a schedule. Whenever a chellenge comes up, I’ll know exactly what needs to be done and do it speedily. Also, week one and two we all waited for the vote before we started with the challenge. In week 3 we realized that we need to start on Monday BEFORE the vote is announced, otherwise we’ll have difficulty. It helped a little bit.