Well I've just put up another website. This time it is a free online article directory called ArticleDirectory.co.za. While the concept of article directories is not new, this is the first of its kind in the South African domain space (co.za).

Article directories have great potential when it comes to online marketing and with such a resource now in the South African domain space I am hoping that people will start to make full use of the site to gain more exposure for their products and services. Of course the site is indexed by all major search engines, but what made this site so interesting is the use of RSS feeds to enable syndication of content by webmasters and newsletter publishers. 

Always wanted to run my own directory, classifieds and job listings website. So I finally got around to doing it. I've called it Walla! after the expression one makes when one has been searching for something and now you've found it. The URL is, of course, http://www.walla.co.za .

While building Walla! i was contemplating the balance between how much to give away free and what to charge for. At the same time I was thinking of other was to possibly generate revenue in addition to paid listings. Here's what I found and what I decided.

Management of electricity for body corporate and landlords is a major headache. So I've opened a website called PrePaid Meters that is  marketing PrePaid Electricity Management solutions. The website has been up for a few months and is already starting to generate business. I am very chuffed as I had no idea whether or not this idea would work, but since we already have sales it seems it can.

Search Engine Optimization in order to get the best rankings is hard work. It takes months to position the site and make things start to happen. If you have ever tried to rank a website, then I am sure you know what I mean and have experienced the frustration. So you can also imagine my joy when I finally manged to get my website CopyWriting.co.za ranked No.1 in the Google.co.za seach for the keywords "copy writing" or "copywriting".

Amongst other things I've been working on a free property listing website called Property Axis. The idea being that property owners and estate agents will have a quality website service to do free property listings. It quite interesting for me as it entails using a combination of free and commercial software packages for the Joomla CMS it is also important to try and rank this kind of site in the best possible position with the search engines.

About three months ago I started a website for Property Investors . The site gives a basic forum around which we have property deals advertised, articles and more recently YouTube videos. Everything is related to property or investment in some way. 

Well the good news is that Property Investor Network, or PIN as we call it for short, has managed to attract more than 100 registered members (107 to be precise at time of writing). Even better is that the site is not just a dead web of links. We actually have quite an active member base.

During my involvement with open source projects, the entrepreneur in me cannot help ponder on ways to apply free and open technologies or their concepts for commercial purposes. One such project/concept is The Freedom Toaster .

Having been involved in the Freedom Toaster project for sometime now, my mind has long been grappling with the idea of taking the technologies and concepts of the project and using them to start a company. These thoughts have also been in the mind of Jason Hudson, the founder of the Freedom Toaster project.