My Story So Far

Glen / 37 Comments / April 9th, 2009 / Subscribe via RSS

“Glen, take a seat” was the message that I received over Instant Messenger, “I want you to come and work for us in Cape Town. Flights + Accommodation paid for, we want you to head our Social Media department”. It certainly wasn’t a message I had expected, but one I had to turn down, “Sorry Daniel, but if the offer is still open in a year or two then I might take it”.

I mean, who could really move from Newcastle, England to Cape Town, South Africa at the age of 18. On top of that, I still had a job here and only 1 year left of a three year college course. Yet within four weeks, there I was, being introduced to my new colleagues.

When I was offered the job I spent the day with my cousins, completely forgetting about it. My dad was working away at the time so when I got home I told my Mam about it: “Guess what, some guy offered me a job in South Africa doing Internet Marketing”. “OMG, that’s awesome, are you going?” was her response, not quite what I had expected.

We spoke about it for a while and she reminded me how Internet Marketing was where my passions lie, and I have no interest in the courses at college, and especially not in my part-time job in a clothes store. I phoned my dad who laughed at me on the phone, but I eventually convinced him to the idea that I was going to do it, and that was it.

About 2 months ago I got back from what was 16 months in South Africa and I had the most amazing time of my life. Seriously, while it’s not the safest or most desirable country in the world, I couldn’t have had a better experience.

How It All Started

While I’ve never claimed to be a role model or someone to aspire to be like on this website, I think you’ll be surprised with the following sentence. I failed my first year of college, not really due to my intelligence or lack of it, but because my report card showed 40% attendance for most subjects.

When I was 15 I built my first website with a friend from school, it was just a basic website about IT and I honestly thought it would make me rich. Little did I know that I had to actually get people to the website to make any money. Therefore I decided to look into traffic driving methods and came across SEO, the ‘art’ of getting your website to rank in the search engines like Google for certain keywords.

From the age of 15-18 I spent a lot of my time learning SEO on various forums, offering Internet Marketing services and building my profile in the industry. For my age I was actually earning some really good money, but the only issue was that it wasn’t consistent. So I was ‘going’ to college for 5 days per week, working 8 hours on a Saturday, 8 hours on a Sunday and then trying to fit my social life and online activities around all that.

There was one website I was working really hard on, which was a DJ site in a ‘MySpace / Facebook’ style format (DJing was a big passion of mine). The site grew and grew, and we soon reached over 10,000 active members who were taking part in the site. It got so big that I was skipping college more and more so that I could spend more time helping users and work on it. We even got the site featured in ‘DJing for Dummies’ which is part of the popular for Dummies books series.

South Africa

After getting quite well known in the IM industry, I was offered a job in South Africa to work as the Social Media Manager for a number of the world’s biggest companies. I wasn’t expecting much from the country itself, to be honest I didn’t know much about it, except that my initial research told me it was going to be very dangerous.

To cut a long story short, a few things did happen to me in SA:

• Mugged at Knifepoint within my first 2 weeks in broad daylight
• Mugged again with my brother by 2 guys, both with Knives
• ‘Lured’ back to my own apartment to find 4 naked, 40+ white guys waiting to do some gay acts on me (I’m not gay, and used a friend to help me get out)
• Lots of cars in the underground, security protected parking lot where I stayed were broken into
• Guys who lived near me broke into my building and tried to stab my security guard in the neck

Is SA dangerous? Yes without a doubt, and although I haven’t painted the nicest picture, it is not as bad as it is made out to be. I’m sure some things happened to me because I was clearly a tourist, other things because a lot of this country is pretty corrupt. However, I did make some of the most awesome friends in the world.

And with those friends, I’ve had some great stories to tell:

• The time I tried to drive someone else’s car before I realised it wasn’t mine (my key worked)
• Going to a 3-day Trance party for New Years, living in tents, where I can safely say I got quite messed up (that’s all I’m willing to write on here)
• Taking a 1,000+km road trip with my brother, with no planned destination. Where we met lots of awesome people, stayed in hostels, bungee jumped and much more
• Leaving a nightclub at 7am, only to realise that when I got home I had left my friend in the club. When I got back there I found him fast asleep on a couch
• Getting home at 5am on Thursday mornings and going to work the same day
• The day me, my good friend Alex and 2 girls almost got killed by a truck on the highway

…and I also nearly missed my flight back home to England. Someone woke me up saying “are you Glen Allsopp?”. I said yes and they rushed me into a small VW Golf that drove me to the plane, I hadn’t slept for about 48 hours until this happened.

I probably shouldn’t have written all that, it doesn’t put me in a good light haha. Seriously though, of course I was dedicated to my job, working more hours than I should most days and producing some great results for our clients. I remember my boss asking me how long I planned to stay when I first arrived (this was after a three month trial) and I said ‘at least a few years’.

That wasn’t to be though, and 15 months later I decided I was ready to leave.

Back to the UK

I loved South Africa, I really did. In fact, even though I’m writing this a few months into being back in England, I wish I had of stayed a little longer. In the end my job was getting repetitive, stressful and certain factors really put me off working there (I won’t put a company down publically, I appreciate my opportunity).

I do miss my social life though; in SA I was going out 5 nights per week, had free access to most clubs and just generally had a very large and good social circle. While Newcastle is known as a party city, it’s not quite the same as what I’m used to, and a lot of my friends are now across the country in different universities.

I do know why I came back though, and that is to focus very hard on my online projects, so that I can build up my online income. I’ve been making enough to survive for quite a while, but I really want to ramp it up a bit so I can continue to travel the globe.

Ideally, in all honesty, I would love PluginID to be my number one income source because I love writing for the site and engaging in the community, but I think it will be a while before the site makes a large amount of money unless I started filling posts with ads and writing paid reviews which I would never do.

Now I’m back in the UK, and working on a number of internet projects. I’ve also taken up public speaking – Joy would be proud of me – which has helped me conquer a major fear of mine and then some. I can safely say I’m working around 16 hour days, 7 days per week at the moment so I’m sure if I can keep this up a little longer, things will continue to go my way.

Thanks to all of you reading, you’re a part of the next chapter…