If you think back several years ago, had you ever asked a business a question on social media? Probably not, or at least very few of us would have. Ask yourself the same question now, and I bet my bottom dollar that most of you would have reached out to a business via a social channel before getting in your car or making a phone call. This might sound trivial at first thought, but after thinking harder it’s rather clear that this is a massive shift in the world of how businesses and consumers communicate.

These changes are forcing businesses to adapt; a business now needs to be armed with social media accounts on at least Facebook and Twitter. In this regard, we’re purely talking about communication. What about marketing? If consumers are operating on social networks then businesses need to be there and they need to be marketing. It’s not only Facebook and Twitter; it’s Instagram, Snapchat and a myriad of other platforms. The difficulty for businesses is that it’s so much more than just setting up an account; it’s managing the account correctly, and this is a large undertaking for any business.

This change from offline to online is coming to the forefront at a rapid rate, and what we’ve looked at above isn’t anything new. The topics that are flying around at the moment are Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. Augmented Reality (AR) is defined as a live direct or indirect view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are “augmented” by computer-generated perceptual information, ideally across multiple sensory modalities, including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory, and olfactory. Companies like Ikea have explored AR to allow customers to see how a couch would look in their living room or whether a rug would suit their lounge. Imagine you could see how your new house may look on a plot of land? There’s a whole long list of applications for AR which you may read about here. Virtual Reality (VR) works as the inverse reflection to AR, in that VR creates its own reality whereas AR enhances an experience. The best example of VR that comes to mind is that of being able to simulate a situation to understand what would work best before the situation arises in real life. Imagine being able to truly explore a situation in business prior to it happening. There’s a great article on Forbes that talks more about this.

We’ve looked at social media and the pressures it’s creating, and the rapid rise in popularity around AR and VR, but what we haven’t thought about is How Digital Disruption Is Forcing Businesses To Evolve Their Customer Experience. Let’s look at Airbnb, Uber, Netflix and the likes: These companies have literally changed industries and, with that, there are disadvantages and advantages for businesses that operate within these industries. Hotels which were previously holding a monopoly in an area are now fighting for bums in beds with lots of small hospitality options popping up around them through Airbnb. To the same extent, there is an opportunity–businesses that provide cleaning services are now able to become Airbnb clean-up crews. The point I’m trying to make here is that, with the advancement of the internet, there are opportunities available and there is also most certainly a lot of disruption, and businesses need to adapt quickly to stay in the game.

The concept of social media, I believe, isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. VR and AR aren’t going anywhere either–they are evolutions of technology, not fads. This is how the world is shaping up to be. I suppose everyone said that about Myspace at one point, but although the platform essentially died, the concept of having a place online to put your information is still there in Facebook–it’s just more integrated now. The idea of companies launching in industries and disrupting them isn’t going anywhere either – in fact, this has always been the case, for decades, but it’s accelerated through the newness that is the internet. Evolutions of technology aren’t going anywhere; they’re just changing how we do things.

Take this simple concept of social media and put AR and VR into the mix–both of these incredible technologies will only further accelerate the movement of the digital world. Businesses at the end of the day are going to really have to look at what’s going on in the digital space and look for ways to ensure that they are positioned where consumers are, and able to pivot when required. This puts a huge amount of pressure on businesses and some may argue that businesses are having their hands pushed for them, but it’s a matter of sinking or swimming with the flow.

I feel that 2018 doesn’t hold too much that 2017 didn’t. With that being said, anything that did happen last year will happen this year with far more strength and speed. Forbes reported that spend on VR in business will be $9.2bn by 2021! With that carrot dangling in front of all of us, businesses will be pushing harder and harder to get into that market space, so what happened in 2017 will happen in 2018 far faster as we approach a market size of this nature. I feel that companies need to be really careful about information overload and not allowing themselves to get scattered; they need to rather carefully look at what’s happening, pick the channels that feel correct, and stick to them. Becoming scattered in the information overload era puts businesses in an incredibly difficult position, and those companies that aren’t able to focus are going to spread themselves too thinly, which will ultimately dilute focus and result in problems. Having a partner like Merchants, who asked me to address this topic, work on your company’s business process outsourcing can help you focus and deliver in the important areas of your business.

Image Credit: enterprisersproject.com

After writing several blog posts about Bitcoin, a few people came out the woodworks and started to look at it more seriously and I found myself having a greater network of people to discuss this phenomenon with. It wasn’t enough people for the news to spread wide enough. We should have enjoyed that knowing that it would become globally known and we could have bought up more coins and then enjoyed the upward trend as so many individuals bought in – Metcalfe’s Law.

My posts:

• Bitcoins, Bitcoins, Bitcoins
• How not to make money as a South African with Bitcoins
• Let’s look at Bitcoins again

It was only in 2017 where mass media started to pick up on it and now everybody is talking about it. There are countless meme’s going around mocking how everybody is talking about it. With all the posts about people who’ve made tens of millions, it’s natural for it to have become the new in thing. These days I receive at least one query every single day from someone asking for advice about it – how do I buy, should I buy, how much will it grow? The problem with this is that the people asking these questions really don’t know much about it, they don’t know what the blockchain is, how it works and, most importantly, how volatile it is.

My concern is that a lot of people are seeing these headlines and thinking they’ll make a fortune, and although that could happen, it could go exactly the opposite way and people could lose a lot of money. Bitcoin is incredibly volatile, nobody truly knows what might happen with it. One might say that trading is volatile in general, but the difference is that if you’re investing in bluechip stocks, they don’t go up and down so dramatically and out of the blue like Bitcoin does. So, although trading is always risky, Bitcoin (and alt coins) are far riskier and I want all my readers to know this.

If you’ve caught onto the hype and you want to get in, I’d like to encourage you to read about Satoshi Nakamoto, what blockchain is and how it all works. You wouldn’t invest in a company that you know nothing about, why would you invest in Bitcoin if you don’t understand it? Don’t go to YouTube and watch a quick 5-minute video entitled, “Bitcoin for dummies”, spend a couple of weeks reading about it, see what it has been doing over the years and see where people anticipate it going. I’m so worried that people will look at big numbers, see gold and think it’s their ticket, only to get in at exactly the moment it all starts to drop.

I’ve been following Bitcoin for about 4 years, I do technical analysis with charts and I read the news. I’ve bought Bitcoins, I’ve sold Bitcoins, I’ve made money, I’ve lost money and I’ve taken the time to really understand it. BUT, I am still uncertain about so many things and if that’s the position I’m in, I can confidently say that most people catching on now have very very little idea of what it’s about and that’s a recipe for disaster. Don’t lose your hard earned money because you read an article saying you could make millions – don’t be that person, please!

If you’re in a position where you simply cannot spend time reading and just want to get right into things, do so with a very small amount of money. Bitcoins are not whole numbers, you can buy parts – in other words, buy 0.00000001 Bitcoins and see what happens with that rather than trying to buy a whole Bitcoin which will cost you well over R100,000 (R174,000 at the time of writing this) and that’s a great deal of money to take a chance on. Buy a fraction, see what happens, play with it and get a good feel for things from a practical standpoint. Perhaps whilst you wait for the money to go up or down, start doing that reading I recommended. I should note, though, if you’re going to buy, please look at the fees charged by the company that you buy them from – this is no joke. Understand the fees, all the fees! Research the place you’re going to buy from too, don’t just buy from anyone, there are only a few institutions that you can safely buy from in South Africa at the moment. The most common platform is Luno, I’ve personally used Luno a lot of times and can recommend it. My only concern about Luno is that it is its own exchange which means it operates differently to international exchanges, which means if something happens internationally, it might take time for the reaction on Luno – you could use this to your advantage though ;)

Promotion: If you click this link and buy R500 worth of Bitcoin, you’ll score R10 worth of Bitcoin free. I’ll also get 10 bucks.

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What if I could keep track of each time someone asked, “is there an app for that?”. Imagine I could compile a long list of app possibilities into one place that I could then look through for inspiration and possible business ideas. Well, let’s not imagine because I decided to make it a reality. I’m not going to go into too many details about how to set this up yourself, I think leaving the challenge with you is inspirational in itself but essentially I used IFTTT to check Twitter frequently against some search queries and when matches were found, add the tweets to a Google Sheet. In other words, I set IFTTT up to store all tweets it found where “is there an app” was mentioned into a nice spreadsheet, take a look:

My IFTTT recipe runs every couple of hours and updates this spreadsheet with all of the tweets which I can then go through from time to time to see if anything inspires me. Pretty neat, right?

My next step was to spend some time reading up on scripts for Google Sheets so that I could include a follower count for each Twitter user. I feel that knowing how many followers a person has gives a certain level of credibility to a tweet and from there I can use some background colour conditional formatting to highlight tweets worth observing. The sky’s the limit in terms of how you curate the list but the follower count made a lot of sense to me so I set out to write a small script. It was quite a hassle working with the importxml function but I got it working in the end thankfully.

During this process, I realised that the Google Sheet fills up quite quickly and a lot of the time it’s with retweets which is quite frustrating as they muddle up good information so I needed to figure out how I could remove an entire row based on a keyword. Not only would this help with that specific situation but I could also configure it to isolate certain words to remove junk, “is there an app?” tweets from my sheet. I also learned a fair amount about Google Sheets and scripts, and how powerful they are. I learned that you can write a function that includes a custom tab in your Google Sheet and from this, I put together a keyword match script to remove rows that included the word “free” in the tweet.

Here’s what the code ended up looking like:

This code once compiled and run would add a nice easy tab in my actual spreadsheet, like this:

Now when I click on this tab, it removes all the rows in the sheet that contain the word, “free”. I can naturally configure this, however, I like to remove rows based on whatever I want, thus removing a lot of the useless data from the sheet and putting me closer to seeing which apps people are searching for and hopefully draw some inspiration from this for another project.

My next step will be to try and write some sort of matching count script, which looks for words that occur multiple times in hopes that I may then be presented with app requests that are frequent. This way I can present myself with demand and with that comes the inspiration to supply. I also feel that there’s application here for tracking specific words within specific market segments, for example, seeing all “is there an app for that?” tweets that include financial terms, thus curating a list of app requests within the financial market.

As you can imagine, this isn’t limited to app ideas, this could be used for literally anything.

Hope I’ve inspired you!

To give you an idea, we have access to 100+ Google Analytics accounts, which allow us to see website visitors. Through this we can quickly segment mobile versus desktop users over the space of several years. One of the websites we manage received a few hundred thousand visitors a month. The breakdown shows that 60% of the visitors are on mobile devices compared to a couple of years ago where only 35% of the visitors were on mobile.

That is unbelievable growth and if that doesn’t convince you that mobile is growing and becoming increasingly important, then I simply don’t know what will.

The topic of how publishers need to cater differently for mobile users versus desktop users is becoming increasingly important. Those publishers seizing the moment to cater specifically to mobile users are going to be ahead of their competitors.

There are several options when it comes to showing a website in a way that suits both desktop and mobile parties. You may, for example, create a mobi site and redirect traffic accordingly, but this isn’t a commonly practiced strategy.

Right now, responsive design is ahead of the pack as the most commonly practiced option, mostly because the other alternatives, such as native mobile applications, are too expensive and have a high barrier to entry. So, as it stands, most people are focusing on responsive design until the next best scenario comes along.

However, there are two ways to do responsive design. There’s the easy route and there’s the complex route. Using responsive design, a website can literally completely change rather than just reshaping to suit the desired device. Of course, this comes at a much higher overhead.

With all of that in mind, what should people think about and take into account to make their website suit a mobile user over a desktop user? There are a lot of things to consider. I’m not a user experience expert, but through all of our marketing and conversion rate optimisation efforts, we’ve pushed ourselves to understand a fair amount about it. These are the items that come to my mind immediately:

1. Mobile users are usually on the move; they’re moving in and out of different settings. Although this might seem trivial, it’s really important to keep in mind because their context is continually changing and, in turn, their mood.
2. Users who are on their mobile devices don’t have a mouse. The use of a mouse compared to a finger on a touchscreen is hugely different. The platform needs to take this into account.
3. When a mobile user arrives on a website, the platform needs to load quickly for the user because, if it’s slow, it only takes a swipe of the finger to go to the next website.
4. Due to the small real estate on a mobile device’s screen, the most important information needs to most definitely be above the fold. Striking headings and calls to action need to sit clearly in view for the user.
5. Other simple things to consider are font size, darker text for contrast, and good spacing between links to allow for easy navigation around the platform.
6. Forms are a massive one for me; there’s nothing more frustrating than trying to fill out a tiny form on a mobile device. This happens on most websites and, although a small inquiry form isn’t too much of a headache, a detailed registration form can be very painful.
7. Shopping online on a mobile device is still a nightmare; checkout processes are far too awkward for mobile devices, and publishers need to be aware of this.

After chatting with PayU, South Africa’s largest payment gateway, something we’ve come across is that, actually, what happens when the user goes past the checkout screen on a mobile device has a lot to do with the payment gateway the site is using. Typically, this area of the payment process isn’t controlled by the publisher from a design perspective, but rather from the perspective of whether the publisher has chosen a payment gateway that takes mobile users into account to ensure that the process is seamless for them.

Of all the articles I’ve read and researched, there still isn’t a perfect approach to all of this. From all our marketing, we have conclusively been able to see that small adjustments in the direction of the 7 points above have lead to higher conversion rates, which essentially says that paying attention to the user experience of mobile and desktop users is incredibly important.

What are your thoughts?

Step 1

Open up Google Search and search for a few key words or phrases that you would want your website to appear in Google for. With each search, note down the addresses of those websites that rank in the first 5 positions. You can ignore adverts and map listings, we just want the natural organic results below all of that.

Here, I’ve searched for “surfing lessons” and highlighted what I’m referring to when I say “natural organic results”.

Step 2

Log into your SEMRush account and enter in one of the addresses you noted down. On the left, click on “Entire Menu” and then select “Positions” under “Organic Research”. What you’ll be presented with is a list of all the keywords that the website in question is currently ranking for.

There are a few important columns to take note of:

1. Keyword – The keyword the website ranks for.
2. Pos. – Where the website ranks for the keyword.
3. Volume – How many monthly searches are performed for this keyword (in your chosen country).
4. KD – The (Keyword) Difficulty of ranking for this keyword.

One by one, enter in the website addresses you wrote down from Step 1, each time capturing the 4 columns’ data from above (keyword, pos, volume and kd). You want to capture these into Microsoft Excel or a Google Sheet.

Step 3

Once you’ve captured all this data, what you’ll have is a long list of all the keywords that your competitors rank for, where they’re ranking and how competitive the keywords are. I’d recommend putting filters on the columns so that you can sort the data easily. You might want to remove keywords that have extremely low search volumes as you might argue that there’s little point putting a lot of work into ranking for a keyword that gets such low volume – depends on the business you’re in, though.

This is what you want your spreadsheet to look like:

Step 4

Save your previous spreadsheet now, and open another spreadsheet or a new worksheet.

Perform the same steps in Step 2, but this time for your own website, noting down which keywords you’re ranking for. What we’ll have now are all the keywords your competitors rank for as well as all the keywords you rank for. I’m going to pretend that Gary Surf (ironically, I project managed the redesign of the Gary Surf website all the way back in 2009, it was fun to stumble across the design we did. I didn’t do the SEO, though) is my website, here’s what the keywords look like once exported into Microsoft Excel:

Congratulations, all the data we need has now been captured. You’ve got two sets of data that is going to become incredibly useful in the next two sections. There are many ways to go about this, but I’m going to follow two different routes that I use, and that I know work.

Route 1

Turn your attention to the spreadsheet that has the keywords that you are for. Look for any keywords that you rank for position 6 – 15. If your website ranks for a keyword in position 6 to 15, it means that Google has recognised your website as being credible for ranking for this keyword, however, you haven’t proven that the page you have ranking is worthy of being in the top 5 positions. I should note down here that you don’t have to stick to the first 6 to 15 results, it sometimes makes sense to expand that range to capture more keywords based on what you see. For the sake of showing that, I’ve looked at Gary Surf’s keywords that rank in position 7 to 40:

From here there are 2 things you need to do:

1. Search for these chosen keywords and note down the 5 websites that are ranking in the top 5 natural organic positions. You’ll now need to analyse these websites (or specifically the pages that appeared in the search results) to determine what it is about these pages that make them better than yours. In other words, why are they in the top 5 positions and your page isn’t? Do they have more content, more links, more media and so the list goes on? This is a process that takes time, there will be a lot of websites and a lot of data to crunch, but we all know that good things come to those who wait. If you put the effort it, you’ll see the rewards.
2. Ensure that your page (which ranks) is as optimised as possible. Is your meta data up to scratch, have you got good images, is the content written well, has the page been shared on social media, does it have some good links?

I decided to look at Gary Surf’s website and see if I could pick up on something to run you through an example of what’s possible.

I noticed that roughly 6,600 searches for “Muizenberg webcam” happen every month – that’s a lot of searches. My guess is that these are people who are interested in looking at what the waves are like at Muizenberg beach to determine if it’s a good time to go surfing. Gary’s shop faces the beach, he could purchase a camera, set it up on the shop facing the waves and then create a page on the website that shows a webcam feed. This page could turn into an incredibly useful resource, and with some optimisation could move up from position 27. With time, and with people visiting the page and hopefully sharing it, the page could really have the chance of hitting page 1 of the Google results.

I wanted to do a little more exploration, so I popped into Google and searched for “Muizenberg webcam” to have a look at what would appear. I clicked through to page 2 of the search results and saw Gary’s website at the bottom, but I also noticed something really interesting, take a look:

Combining these 2 steps and implementing your findings on your page is a sure set way to move the page up into the top 5 positions from its current position (6-15).

Route 2

This route is a little more involved and takes some intuition, which is why there isn’t a definitive way to do keyword research. Open up the spreadsheet with all your competitor’s keywords, open it up nice and big on your screen. Now, there is a bit of a process that I can share with you, but you’ll have to adapt it a bit. Here’s the idea:

Order the keywords by KD because what we want to look for are keywords with a low difficulty level. Why? Because these are the easiest keywords to chase and rank for. If you find a keyword with a low difficulty and a decent search volume (and that is relevant), you have two choices: Create a page on your website targeting this keyword or write a piece of content to publish on your blog. I must warn you, in most cases you can’t quickly throw up a page or blog post with a couple hundred words, you’ll have to put effort into creating a valuable page, but if you do that there’s a very high chance that the page or post will rank well for a new keyword in your industry that you currently don’t rank for – therefore you will increase the traffic to your website.

In the case of Gary Surf, the same scenario around “Muizenberg webcam” could be applied here. There was a very high chance that Gary’s website wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) have ranked for “Muizenberg webcam” and that would have been a great example of a highly searched keyword with a lot of potential.

If you spot a keyword with a KD of 50-60 that you want to chase, this is where things get more complicated, simply because they’re more difficult. It’s at this point that you want to follow the steps in Route 1, above. Search for the keyword you’ve identified and start investigating the top 5-10 results to figure out why Google has put those pages at the top of the search results. Unfortunately, this is the part where we can’t just create a checklist to follow, a lot of this boils down to practice and experience.

However, let me give you a couple things to inspire you.

Time to get your spreadsheet skills on! Conditional formatting anyone? By using some simple conditional formatting or sorting of Volume and KD you’re presented with an opportunity to look for the green cells that match to identify high volume keywords that have medium competition levels. You can apply whatever formatting you want, of course, to narrow down to your goal. Below is an example where I’ve highlighted KD’s between 50 and 60. Looking through the list, I can see a few opportunities that we could chase after:

I could expand to a difficulty of between 40 and 70 to open things up even more.

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I want to move outside of this for just a moment to mention something important that often gets overlooked. If you’re someone who isn’t able to analyse a website to determine what SEO factors are ranking a specific page, you can still follow this process for other ideas. Once you identify which sites rank for the keywords you’re interested in, you could approach the sites to see if you could write a guest post for them and include a link back to your website, you could approach them for advertising options and so the list goes on. It’s not always about optimising a website or page for rankings, sometimes there aren’t skills or time for this, the option of writing something up or paying for a placement is another way of getting ahead.

In all my years, I’ve found that keyword research is very much about exploration. Sure, you need some fundamental understandings, some inspiration and useful software, but when you combine these and invest some time sorting, searching and exploring, you end up finding amazing opportunities. Search Google for other words, look past the first 5 competitors in the search results and gather as much data as you can. The more data available, the more combinations that present opportunities will appear at your finger tips. Invest time in writing great content for the pages or posts you create. If you’re not a great writer, hire a copywriter who understands SEO properly and commission them to do the writing, explain to them what your aim is, give them several keywords and let them put together a few pieces for you.

I really hope that this post has been interesting, and more importantly, inspiring. If you have, head over to SEMrush, use the search bar to run a test and then sign up. It’s not the cheapest software, but it’s incredibly powerful and is my go-to tool for anything research related to SEO.

Yours in search!

Like last time, I was approached to write something up for Hippo.co.za*, and this time we’re going to branch away from the previous topic but not too far away that we lose full context. This time we’re looking at the concept of unclaimed Life Insurance. I know that most people umm and ahh when it comes to life insurance, but in my experience, that’s mostly people who don’t have a full understanding of it. I was exactly like that, but when my child was born and I revisited the topic my opinion did change. However, this isn’t a post about selling life insurance so I’ll stop right there. Instead, the topic at hand is: Do You Have Unclaimed Life Insurance Benefits?

What is an unclaimed benefit?

This really might catch you by surprise, but an unclaimed benefit is exactly what the name says; it’s a benefit that hasn’t been claimed. In other words, your insurance policy has matured, you’re owed money and you haven’t collected it. Surely that doesn’t happen very often you might ask? Wrong. Did you know that in South Africa there are 3 million people who have unclaimed benefits to the tune of 45 billion Rand! That got you sitting up in your seat, didn’t it?

What if you’re one of those people? What if right this moment you’re owed money?

By my understanding, it isn’t up to the insurance company to continually ensure that they have all your correct details; as a policy holder, it’s crucial that you update them. Insurance companies have processes that take place to track people down, but they don’t always work and your money may ultimately end up going into a separate account and no longer be available to you.

Want to know if you’re owed money?

Maybe you moved, maybe something in your family changed, maybe you’ve been lazy? If you answered yes to any of those, then here are 3 ways you could find out if you’re owed money or have forgotten about a policy you’re linked to:

1. Contact your insurance company, and provide the policy details and your ID number. You will need to motivate why you have an interest in a specific policy of course. The company shouldn’t take longer than 7 working days to provide you with feedback.

2. If you believe that you’ve lost a policy, there’s an option called ‘Lost Policies’ on this Contact Page, which allows you to download a form for completion. Don’t forget to submit all the required documents.

3. VeriFi is another option. You enter in all your details and you’ll receive an email report with any life insurance or investment policies you may be linked to.

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With 3 million people being owed money to the value of 45 billion, there is a possibility that you or a loved one is owed money that you honestly might not even know existed. Imagine your parents set up a policy 50 years ago and have been contributing to it but have become elderly and forgotten about it. This might be the money needed to support them in the years ahead, or it might be inheritance available to assist your children with their education. Whatever it is, there’s a possibility and you really should follow the steps above to ensure that you’re aware.

As always, if you have any questions, please pop me a comment below and I’ll do my best to answer.

* Hippo Comparative Services (Pty) Ltd is an authorised financial services provider.

A few years ago I published a post about Bitcoin. In this post, I talked about what the various terms related to Bitcoin meant, I provided some guidance as to which websites are worth following and explained how you could go about buying Bitcoin as a South African. At the time of publishing the blog post, Bitcoin was trading at $212 roughly. Now, Bitcoin is trading at $1250 roughly – That’s an enormous increase in just a few years, but it wasn’t smooth sailing after my blog post. The price flew up to R11,200 a coin but then dropped steadily to R3,000 a coin by the end of the first quarter in 2015. If you bought when I wrote the blog post and had the courage to stick things out, you’ll be incredibly happy:

Yes, that’s a 2,809% increase!

Swings (big up or down movements), when you’re trading, are a way to make a great deal of money quickly, but they’re also a way to lose a great deal of money quickly. Any astute investor will know that what we really want is a steady increase in a share price, or in this case the Bitcoin price. Too much volatility isn’t a good investment due to the risk and uncertainty. One of the problems with huge upward swings are that they often result in a bubble, and we all know how quickly bubbles burst – just think about the .com bubble, real estate bubbles and so forth. With Bitcoin, I’m not going to go into detail on this topic because Vinny Lingham has covered it wonderfully on Medium.

So, steady growth is definitely what we want and it’s encouraging to see that there is good potential for this. One thing that I’ve tried to keep my eye on is the number of Bitcoin ATM’s around the world – The adoption of ATMs shows real-life buy-in of Bitcoin, and a steady increase in ATMs shows us good adoption. Here’s a graph I came across showing the (steady) increase in Bitcoin ATMs:

The ATMs are situated in the United States and Canada mostly, however, I believe that 24% of the Bitcoin ATMs were situated in Europe in 2016 – This shows good strength in areas outside of the West, which shows wider adoption, which is again what we want to see.

With all that being said, volatility is going to hit us shortly. Three Bitcoin ETFs are undergoing review by the SEC, the first being an ETF run by the Winklevoss Twins. The results are set to be announced on March 11, 2017 – However, Cornell University Law School shows the following, “Dates certain will be computed by counting the day after the publication day as one, and by counting each succeeding day, including Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. However, where the final count would fall on a Saturday, Sunday, or holiday, the date certain will be the next succeeding Federal business day.” – The 11th is a Saturday, therefore the announcement should take place on the 13th of March, 2017 if I’m not mistaken (NB: read this). This announcement is going to be incredibly interesting, an approval may easily result in hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the exchange which in turn could boost the Bitcoin price all the way up to $3,000/coin! The opposite may apply too, and therefore like I said earlier, swings are dangerous and are not want we ultimately want. The other two Bitcoin ETFs are also set for results shortly afterwards so I think we’re going to see major movements in the price over this period.

If you’re a trader (rather than an investor), then you might be looking forward to this period where volatility could make you a great deal of money. You may be buying on approval or buying low on disapproval. If you’re interested in the ETFs and want to get a better understanding of what to potentially expect, this article on EFT.com is very useful. What I can say, though, is that in the beginning there was a favouring towards a disapproval, but over the months it has become somewhat of a 50/50 chance that the ETF will be approved and this leaves predictions in the air and caution incredibly important.

I’ll end off by saying that all the reading I’ve done leads me to this conclusion:

If the fund is approved, we’ll see a massive spike in the price. If the fund is dissapproved we’ll see a drop, but the long term outlook is that Bitcoin’s price will rise again. So, like any trading, human psychology normally has people selling near the lowest point, so if it’s disapproved, it might be a good idea to hold on for the long term rather than trying to sell and save a buck.

In the meantime, this will be burned into my eyeballs:

This article consists of my thoughts, I’m not a financial advisor nor a professional trader/investor. Do not act on what I say, draw your own conclusions and act upon them carefully.

PS. Some people buy big:

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I’ve written about water saving tips before and I’ve commented heavily on electricity usage but up until now, the focus has always been on individuals. Now, it’s time to turn our attention to businesses. Businesses sustain our economy and there’s no argument that they are important, however, regardless of importance, businesses are a huge part of the problem. I’ve driven around at night and I’ve seen huge establishments that keep their lights on after hours. I’ve driven past large organisations where water is blasting into the perfectly manicured gardens. It’s time for businesses to become more efficient, to show consideration for the electricity and water crisis, and implement processes to reduce the usage thereof.

As much as us individuals install grey water systems, reduce the usage of fans, heaters, geysers and the likes, without the buy-in from businesses, our personal attempts are far less valuable overall than they may be. Please don’t get the wrong impression here; our efforts are brilliant and will make a difference but I’m not one to settle when I know more can be done. I want to encourage businesses to do things such as:

• Invest in a grey water system if you want your landscaping to look perfect.
• Reduce usage of air-conditioning machines.
• Fix plumbing problems which may result in leaks.
• Replace light bulbs with energy-efficient ones.
• Use the hibernation features on computers.
• Make use of tax breaks for energy efficiency.
• Encourage staff to participate in brainstorming energy saving strategies.

Outside of our natural resources, in my opinion, it’s all about optimisation and efficiency. Businesses invest a lot of time and money into creating seamless and efficient experiences for their customers. An ecommerce store, for example, will implement the right tools to ensuring that their website operates optimally or that the checkout process on a website is seamless using a payment gateway such as PayU. These are daily actions that businesses take to look after their customers, and to the same extent, we should be dedicating time and effort into maintaining energy efficient practices in our businesses.

Taking a stand and being part of the energy saving movement will have a significant impact on our natural resources and it’s this stand that will keep our world going and ultimately allow our businesses to run successfully.

If you’re really interested in understanding the challenges we face with water, take a watch of this really insightful film called Blue Gold World Water Wars:

From 1 December 2016 until further notice, all residents are charged according to the level 3 (30% savings) reduction tariffs. If you maintain your level of water consumption, your bill may be significantly higher if you are a heavy water user.

For example, the 2016/17 domestic full tariffs (stand-alone houses) for water are as follows:

The thing is, it’s not about the money, it’s about the water. A lot of people will be able to afford to water their gardens as if nothing has changed and there lies the problem. A large portion of the privileged will continue on as usual and they’ll much it up for the rest of us.

Because of this I’d like to share some water saving tips, and I’d like to encourage you to follow as many of them as possible. If I can encourage just a few people, and they can encourage a few, soon we’ll have a good portion of people respecting our beautiful city and perhaps with that we can move back to a level 2 or perhaps even a level 1. Because if we don’t, it won’t be long until the water gets shut off completely (like load-shedding) and that’s going to cause big problems (and a lot of frustration). So the next time you’re thinking of watering your garden with a hose, or topping up the pool or running the water whilst you brush your teeth, just remember that you are the cause when our water goes into shedding schedules.

1. Fill a coke bottle with water and put it in your toilet’s cistern. Each flush will use far less water.
2. Place buckets in your shower, at least catch some water whilst you wait for it to warm up.
3. Take the time to check that you don’t have any leaks (dripping taps) anywhere. It’ll only take you 10 minutes.
4. Pay attention to your water meter, if you’re aware of your usage the chance of saving water is higher.
5. Don’t run the water whilst you brush your teeth.
6. Use a broom to clean your driveway and paths, not a hose!
7. Wash your car with a bucket, you honestly don’t need a hose.
8. Plant indigenous plants in your garden, they need far less water and there are some stunning varieties.
9. Get a pool blanket for your pool to reduce evaporation.
10. Install a grey water system, use a professional or do a DIY job if you can.

If that’s not enough, here are 100 ways to conserve water.

As I love my garden so much I decided that I would spend a few hours setting up a simple grey water system. We have a one year old who has a bath in the evenings. We don’t fill the bath up too much and I generally bath with him, but it amounts to about 25 or so liters. This is a lot of water, enough to water a large portion of the garden. So I grabbed some paper, did some research, noted down items that I might need and headed off to Builders Warehouse. I purchased a few items there but due to sheer demand they’re out of stock because of how many people are doing this (woohoo). I picked up the other items from Mica and was good to go.

Some 1 meter 40mm PVC pipe, a t-bend, ball valves, joiners, a saw and some PVC weld is all that was required. I think it set me back about R250 maximum:

My helping hand didn’t, well, help too much:

I connected most of the parts before hand using the PVC weld and then doubled up using some marine silicon that I have from my fish tanks, but you can buy it at any hardware store – either the marine or shower will do. This sealed all the joints together and put me in a position to start assembling:

It really wasn’t too complicated, but I did take some time at Builders and Mica to lay things out on the ground and ensure that I had the correct sizes – I’d recommend doing this. I measured the initial PVC pipe by tying some string around it and marking it off to ensure I knew what sizes to buy.

The tap on the right is where water passes down from the bath into the drain, the tap on the left is where water will pass into a drum. In other words I can control the direction that the water goes in – ideally to the left always! I’ll be buying a 40 litre drum to run water into from the bath and at the top of the drum I’ll create holes with some PVC pipe that goes left and rightwards to flow into the direct surrounding plants – a spill over, just like a geyser. This will ensure that no water ends up getting wasted and that my plants may thrive.

Prior to writing this post, I just watered a large portion of my back yard :-)

Here are some other pictures for inspiration, both systems belong to Capetonians I believe (good going!):

This simple DIY solution I put together cost R250 and took about 2 hours in total, I was entertaining Ethan and eating some lunch whilst doing it, so if you put your head down, shopped around a little I reckon you could do it in 45 minutes and only spend R150! That’s a really small price to pay to keep Cape Town beautiful.

I challenge every single one of you to make some changes!

Oh, and with all the talk about boreholes, you might want to give this interesting article on the use of boreholes in Cape Town a read.

Because of my interests in investing and ETF’s, when this infographic popped up on Visual Capitalist, I thoroughly enjoyed it. However, at the time I didn’t think about blogging it and I’m not sure why. Nevertheless, I now have the time to do so, so I’m putting it below for all of you:

Click to enlarge, please :)

There really isn’t an answer as to which approach is better. Different approach for a different market, however, being informed about both approaches is how you make a calculated decision. Since publishing the initial post, I’ve spent time weighting my portfolio in a manner that I felt would be better.

I’d love to know how you’ve weighted your portfolio. Do you have a preference for ETF’s or Unit Trusts? Pop me a comment down below, I’d love to debate this if anyone is up for that.