studiowhiz ramblings

Guest post by: Paul Sanderson
Hi all. Mr K is letting me ride his coat tails and allowing me to guest post over here at this wonderful place.

A little about me:

I’m a Pisces, 26, love long walks along the beach… oh wrong site… (Edit: Bl**dy oath, what sort site am I running?)
The long and short of it is that I am on a journey to become a dot Com Mogul. Yes that could be a bit pretentious but that’s the challenge. The plan is to use the techniques and advice that other “successful” blog owners are always talking about. Readers of page92 will be able to learn what works and doesn’t directly from my experiences.

One of the main factors that makes me think I am going to be successful is that I have a clearly defined set of goals. Mr K has talked about goals in this post here, but today I wish to let you know the way I went about setting goals.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re a cynical bunch aren’t we. If TV & Movies desensitize us to violence then the internet desensitizes us to charity & needs.

I’ve had a couple of things happening recently that have highlighted the issues faced when wanting to or needing too raise funds online and just how hard it is becoming to raise awareness and funds.

Lets take the case of my very good friend over at webhelp …
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve mentioned before that when you want to run a blog & bring in great levels of traffic you have to devote a lot of time to sculpting the content of your blog/website.

One of my issues is that I’m not a professional writer, I make no claims to being a good writer - however without content, without writing you have nothing to bring in more visitors. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems today that websites are in a battle to get more and more traffic. I wonder sometimes if people get the message wrong? I mean really is that all it’s about?

Of course traffic increases are fantastic and make a direct impact to any revenue a site, either through the online advertising, the increase in sales or the ability to promote the site through offline sales. A good thing about allowing a site to grow steadily is that you can see issues and resolve them. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I would try something. I’ve written quite a bit (well okay a little bit) on the site and was busy trying to promote a new post from the site each day.

So I stopped, for a few days and guess what. My site traffic went up and looks to be stabilizing around the 200 people a day mark. Not too bad given I only started blogging here again in December. Still I’m not back yet - the site doesn’t have a PR status yet (I’ll need your help for that - so why not link to Studiowhiz and help?). We used to have a PR 7 from Google, but that’s another post coming this week.

Now I’m not advocating that if you stop posting on your site your traffic will go up, however I do wonder if taking a few days off to let Google & others catch up, can be a good thing for your site.

I’m about to break one of my rules with this post but here goes.

Once you have planned your blog, and started your blog you need to really think about the things you are going to write. Actually you’ve probably already done that so lets look at something you are probably overlooking.

It’s all good and well to have great posts, but what is going to draw people in? The title. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s become a very easy process these days to start a blog. There are a number of services that can give you a free blog within minutes - however these are not always the best solutions.

Now that you have completed the planning of your blog you will have a firm understanding of what you are trying to achieve. For now we are going to assume your primary purpose is to share some understanding you have without having to shell out a fortune.

I am a fan of wordpress, a fantastic free application that powers some of the bigger blogs on the net today. They have both a download version and a hosted solution - we talked about this in the planning of your blog. For the sake of this article we’ll assume the use of a hosted solution. Read the rest of this entry »

You walk into a meeting with your web designer (marketing/advertising agency) and ask them to help you drive traffic to your site. They reply “There is no such thing as a free lunch traffic”

I’m here to tell you there is such a thing as free traffic and here are 5 easy steps you can follow to drive traffic to your site. Read the rest of this entry »

Well it finally happened. Dwindling traffic finally took it’s toll - that and I blew away all my old posts. I found an email in my inbox from TextLinkAds wondering why their system couldn’t find the posts on my site.

After tyring to explain that I was rebuilding the site, intending to grow traffic again (which is starting to happen) they kick studiowhiz.com out of their inventory. I was asked to resubmit - which I did & no longer meet their criteria. Sad really considering I’ve been with TextLinkAds (and still have other sites with them) for many years.

Oh well, for now Studiowhiz will run without advertising & I will resume funding the site from my back pocket.

I am currently looking for solutions to managing my personal finances. I’m currently going through a number of services. Sadly many online services only support US based banks - useless for someone in NZ. www.xero.co.nz is a New Zealand service they say is suitable for personal finances. They are wrong it’s a small business service, and it’s jolly expensive - heck even Quicken Online is only $3 a month.

It got me thinking though. Many banks now offer (and have for many years) online access to your accounts - however these are simply online versions of off-line realm. I don’t think I’ve really seen any serious innovation in the area of bank websites. (A side note, I’m pretty much blind to any online bank service outside NZ).

Why can’t I tag transactions? Why can’t I categorise my finances directly on my bank site? I want to set up tags for, coffee, computers, household, grocery, garden, vehicles etc etc. This way I could quickly get a glimpse of what I’m spending and where I’m spending it.

Come to think of it, with the amount of transactions banks do they should know what sort of things are purchased at what locations. Surely it isn’t too hard for them to suggest tags/categories for your transactions?

For now, it’s back to using Cha-Ching on the local computer