The blogosphere is thumping with chutzpah – creative people who decided to go it alone online, usually with no money.
Grubstreet is interviewing three very different, successful bloggers – Nigel Louw, Michael Trapido and Seth Rotherham – to find out the secret of their success. You’ve seen them moving up the Amatomu rankings and here’s the people behind the blog.

Daily Dispatch photographer and fisherman Nigel Louw started his blog, Fishing the Eastern Cape, in October last year and it has been quietly climbing up the Amatomu rankings. It is now hovering around the number 50 mark and gets about 9 500 visits a month and 3 300 unique users with people spending an average time of more than five minutes on the blog. There are more than 300 registered users on the blog.
The time spent on the blog is pretty impressive and what Louw has really got right is getting users to come up with loads of content for him.

QUESTION: So you’re risen up the Amatomu (blog aggregation) ranks slowly but steadily to around number 50 (most popular in

What a lot of cob... Nigel Louw with one of his catches.

South Africa). What’s the secret, do you think?
ANSWER: Probably just keeping the content going – you’ve got to have stuff going up every day or every second day and I’ve managed to get the guys to submit their catches, which hasn’t worked on a lot of other sites. Also, I’ve had a local (fishing) shop sponsoring a prize every month so I get the guys to post catches and the best one wins. It changes every month so this month it was steenbras and the best catch won a rod worth R800. This keeps the guys posting and I’ve got other shops coming on board now.
If there’s days when I don’t get fish coming in, then I try do a bit of research and write about how to catch a certain type of fish, for instance.
Q. In the beginning, it must have been relentless because you must have been doing all the posting?
A. It started off with the basic design and I had to go fishing often, catch a cob and upload it, catch another fish and upload it. Then I think I told friends about it and eventually some guys I didn’t know started coming onto the site and they told their friends… I also made an advert about the size of a business card and left them at counters in fishing shops and put posters up.
Q. Was it hard to fit it in with a full-time job?
A. Ja, it was long hours at work and then you get home, and it’s long hours again. Lately I can get away with working on my blog till about 10pm but when you redesign the site, sometime you can sit up till 1am trying to get it right.
Q. I presume you’re using Wordpress (blogging platform). Did you teach yourself?
A. I asked my brother (a graphic designer) a couple of questions in the beginning but then I figured it out by myself.
Q. Was it difficult teaching yourself?
A. It didn’t take that long as I’d worked on a photo website when I lived in the UK. I think if you have no background in websites or blogging, it will take a while in the beginning but Wordpress is pretty user friendly. It’s got a nice back end. It’s not like you’ve got to do everything in coding.
Q. Your site’s looking quite slick.
A. I just widened it the other day so that there’s more ad space. I’m hoping to get some ads. I don’t make any money out of the blog yet but you’ve got to try.
Q. Not yet?
A. The only money is through Adgator (the ads wing of blog aggregator Afrigator). Google ads are a bit crappy. You don’t make money out of them… But I’ve been visiting a few shops again recently as my stats are quite good now.
Q. When you started the blog, were you aiming to make any money out of it or was it just a hobby?
A. Any money I make out of the site goes back into it. I started it because I love fishing and thought I’d get more involved in the fishing community… On a public holiday a while back, I had a mini members outing and there were about 14 of us… some drove from Port Alfred for it so I guess I’m getting a bit of a following. It’s also good to learn blogging and design. I’m pretty confident with it now.
Q. Who would your competitors be?
A. There isn’t much out there. That’s why I started my blog. There’s Sealine and that’s just really a forum. And there’s the ESA website but it doesn’t get updated as often as mine does.
Q. So where do you want to go with your blog?
A. I want it to become the first stop for fishermen in the Eastern Cape, for example, if someone’s going fishing in Mazeppa Bay, they can come to my website and find accommodation, whether its hotels or holiday shacks. Then they’ll be able to look under Mazeppa Bay fishing spots and see what’s been caught there lately and know what to take and to target. I tried to get accommodation (advertising) on the blog when it was three months old but it was too new and I didn’t have the stats so I’ll try again.

Go to Louw’s blog, Fishing the Eastern Cape, here.

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