The main source of traffic to your business website comes from potential customers using search engines like Google. Your path to success lies in creating interesting and relevant content that will feature in those searches.

Beyond just getting your name in front of clients, here are five key benefits that are just too good to do without:

1. Posting regular articles on your business blog page means more online visibility, driving new traffic to your website that you wouldn’t otherwise have had.

2. It’s a great way to give your company a voice, talk about your products and services, comment on market trends and share company initiatives beyond your website – let your brand personality shine and show people what you’re all about.

3. Having a two-way conversation with customers, prospects and industry peers encourages interaction, comments and feedback. This is the best way to provide your target audience with insight into your company, your philosophy, your employees and your ideas – tell your customers why you’re in business and how you can help them.

4. When you demonstrate your knowledge of a particular subject by sharing high-quality and relevant information with your readers, you will significantly enhance your website’s search engine rankings over time – you will be found and ultimately you will reach many more potential customers.

5. In the process of looking for new material for your blog post articles, you’re exposing yourself to fresh information about your industry and your area of expertise. Doing the research helps you to better relate to your customers needs, find creative solutions to problems and gives you a jump start on your opposition.

The frequency of your blog posts is up to you. You should post at least once a month. Once a week is better. Articles with relevant information will continue to generate valuable leads over the lifetime of your blog — up to 90% of leads come from old content, according to SEO experts HubSpot.

Can you afford not to have a blog on you business website?

Facebook and I have been separated since 2014. Today I’m making it permanent, Facebook and I are saying Goodbye for good.

Over the past 10 days since the Cambridge Analytica scandal was first made public, Facebook has faced a market loss of about $75 billion. It is abundantly clear that the reason for Facebook’s predicament is a fast and loose understanding of the principal of “user privacy.”

Each successive violation has reinforced this perception and revealed yet new ways of trampling on user trust and goodwill. Over the course of a decade, many straws have been added to this camels back, each incrementally pushing the boundaries of users’ privacy concerns. Some of these stand out, listed below in reverse order:

2018 — In a newly leaked memo, Facebook said the company’s drive to connect people online was a good thing even if “someone dies in a terrorist attack” planned and coodinated through the company’s FaceBook platform.

2016 — Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign harvested Facebook data of millions of people using an app that asked them to pair their Facebook friends list with their smartphone’s contacts list – in a bid to reach those people and persuade them to vote for Clinton.

2015 — Facebook finds out that information had been harvested by Cambridge Analytica. However, at the time it failed to alert users for two years and took only limited steps to recover and secure the private information of more than 50 million individuals.

2014 — A whistleblower revealed how Cambridge Analytica used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters. It used the information in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

2014 — Facebook is the defendant in a class action lawsuit in California for allegedly violating its members’ right to privacy. Facebook is being sued by members who claim the company intercepts users’ private messages, without their consent, and that Facebook mines this data for profit.

2010 — Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) identified two personal information aggregation techniques called “connections” and “instant personalization,” a pilot program which shared Facebook information with affiliated sites. The program enabled access by anyone to information saved to a Facebook profile, even if the information was intended to be kept private.

2009 — A new privacy policy declares certain information, including “lists of friends,” to be “publicly available,” without any privacy settings. Due to this change it’s no longer possible to keep this data private. Facebook simply changed users’ friend lists from “private” to “public” without even informing them. The change also removed the option to make it private again.

2008 — New user interface and changes in Facebook’s Terms of Use removing the clause detailing automatic expiry of deleted content. Facebook owns your stuff.

It’s time to leave Facebook.

Today we see some truly momentous events in the heavens,a total solar eclipse, which comes in the middle of four Blood Moon.

There’s more: a supermoon which will coincide with the autumn equinox. Of course, if you’re in the northern hemisphere, it’s the spring equinox. On top of all that, today’s new moon coincides with the occurrence of a phenomena known as the supermoon.

A supermoon happens once a month when the moon comes closest to Earth at the point called it’s perigee. That’s when the moon is at it’s biggest when viewed from the earth. According to Wikipedia:

“A supermoon is the coincidence of a full moon or a new moon with the closest approach the Moon makes to the Earth on its elliptical orbit, resulting in the largest apparent size of the lunar disk as seen from Earth”

There’s more. Today’s total solar eclipse happens right in the center of a series of four uninterrupted Blood Moons, known as a tetrad.

The tetrad of four Blood Moons fall on Jewish festival days and the solar eclipse occurs on Nisan 1, the Jewish New Year

Previously this occurred in 1967, 1949 and 1493, all years of major significance in Jewish history.

• 1493 — Spainish Edict of Expulsion of the Jews and Columbus sets sail for America.
• 1949 — The prophesied establishment of the state of Israel, the first Jewish state in 2,000 years.
• 1967 — The “Six Day War” when Israel miraculously defeated the combined armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan in six days.

Of the 62 tetrads which have occurred since the first century AD, only eight of these have coincided with both the feasts of Passover and Sukkot.

Many believe that that the current tetrad signals the advent of the Blood Moon Prophecy, a series of end-time events, beginning with the April 2014 lunar eclipse, as described in the Bible in Acts 2:20 and Revelation 6:12.

Sources: NASA; Breaking Israel News; The Wall Street Journal; American Thinker; Wikipedia; EarthSky.

Isabel le Roux was born in Rustenburg, a city situated at the foot of the Magaliesberg mountain range in North West Province of South Africa. She began her career as an art teacher and has been painting professionally since 1974.

Her dynamic style is both expressionistic and contemporary, employing the vibrant and bold use of colour to depict typical South African scenes, particularly the Cape and it’s people. She paints mainly in oils but also uses acrylics, watercolours, pen on paper and mixed media. Her passion and commitment is evident in her artwork and her travels abroad have brought a new dimension to her work.

She is one of the most prolific artists in South Africa. Her first solo exhibition in 1974 was followed by thirty-six more solo and group exhibitions, both locally and overseas. She was recently honoured with a three month sabbatical in the “Cite International Des Artes’ in Paris. (Flickr slideshow).

Source: Isabel le Roux website

Open Letter to the Honorable Premier of Western Australia, Mr. Colin Barnett

Dear Mr. Premier,

I’m writing to you about the Australian Shark Cull Policy, which targets various shark species, including the endangered great white. This policy was initiated late last year following a spate of fatal attacks in 2011. Despite widespread criticism in Australia, you have refused to back down, claiming your catch-and-kill policy is justified.

South Africa is a world leader in shark research and the killing of great white sharks is prohibited in South African waters.

Australia should not be allowed to make unilateral policy decisions that affect the global ocean environment. Furthermore, the Australian cull policy violates international laws. It targets various shark species, including the endangered great white. An independent study has found that there is no proof that this initiative will reduce attacks and shows that it would probably have an adverse effect on the environment. The Australian government has ignored a letter from over 100 leading marine scientists and researchers stating the same.

White shark researcher Blair Ranford, a member of Western Australians for Shark Conservation, says the great whites targeted in Australia are the same ones that annually migrate to South Africa. In fact, a recent shark-tagging project has detailed the migratory pattern of great whites and shows that sharks typically commute between South Africa and Australia. This means our great whites and yours are genetically of the same stock.

I appeal to you, Mr. Premier, to reconsider and urgently intervene in this matter. Please bring this senseless destruction of our common natural resource to an end now.

Yours Sincerely,

Editor

The Bot River Estuary lies on the Southern tip of Africa and is home to a magnificent herd of wild horses. It’s now low tide on the estuary with the river mouth in the background. These magnificent creatures are decended from cavalry stock released by the British administration after WWII.

According to the Cape Nature website, size for size, this 100 000 hectare UNESCO registered Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve is home to the most complex biodiversity on our planet. Here we have some 1880 different plant species and the next richest is the South American rainforest with just 420 species per 10000 square kilometres.

Bot River Wild Stallions are challening for leadership after “White Diamond” returns to the herd with his mare and a two-week-old foal. Watch for the kick at 48 seconds!

Wild Horses now peacefully roam the pristine banks of the Bot River Estuary, on the eastern border of the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve (see 7 Images or click here for Flickr slideshow).

South African icon Nelson Mandela passed away last night, on 5 Decemeber 2013. He is sadly missed and fondly remembered.

“Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.” — Nelson Mandela

God speed, Madiba.

“There is a frantic race to merchandise tinsel and trash under the guise of ‘modernism’. I can claim to have made the daily life of the 20th Century more beautiful.” — Raymond Loewy

Historians refer to Raymond Loewy as the designer of the modern world. He began his career drawing for Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair and Vogue before moving into industrial design towards the end of the 1920s. Loewy studied engineering at the Université de Paris and École de Laneau, before emigrating to the United States of America in 1919.

Loewy’s philosophy of design, it is said, can be summed up in the acronym MAYA (most advanced, yet acceptable). As one of the foremost proponents of the streamlined form, he created fluid, cutting-edge designs for a great many basic household goods and appliances, including refrigerators, vacuüm cleaners, sewing machines, radios, cameras and telephones.

Loewy was also responsible for a massive body of work involving the design and manufacture of trains, planes and automobiles and he was even engaged in aerospace engineering. NASA consulted with Loewy in the late 60s and early 70s to make manned spacecraft like Skylab’s Orbital Workshop more comfortable for astronauts.

TIME magazine featured Raymond Loewy on the 31 October, 1949 cover. He was born in Paris, France on November 5, 1893 and died at the age of 92 on 14 July, 1986 in Monte Carlo, Monaco. He possessed dual citizenship of the United States of America and France, spending most of his life in the USA. (Flickr slideshow)

Sources: NASA; Gismodo; Wikipedia – Raymond Loewy; The Coca-Cola Company; Sears Archives;