studiowhiz ramblings

In the first of our interviews we took the time to send some questions to Dwayne Alexander the brains behind the new social network Live My Goals. Here is our interview with him.

[Studiowhiz] Live My Goals is very new - still in beta right? So why don’t you start off by giving us a quick run down of just what livemygoals.com is?

[DA] www.livemygoals.com is a social network for goalgetters.

Our definition of goalgetters includes

• people who are goalsetters and want to achieve something specific in their lives (e.g. launch a business, achieve health & fitness, earn more money create better relationships or simply get their act together)
• professional goalgetters like coaches, trainers and mentors who help goalsetters create action around their goals.

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 »

I’ve been around the software development industry for around 15 years now. Because I am mainly self taught and now I’ve moved more into management roles I quickly forget all correct terms & jargon. This morning I found a great resource that gives 101 Design Patterns & Tips and provides a great place to refresh your memory.

» Check out 101 Design Patterns & Tips now.

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 have been slowly building up a collection of must listen too podcasts - podcasts for helping you learn. I was hoping to (and may still do one day) write a post here with the ultimate list of learning podcasts. I mean why pay a fortune for an education when you can get much of the information FREE online via podcasts?

Well I don’t need to any more as this morning I found OEdb (online education database) have published a fantastic list of 100 podcasts, from some of the best colleges in the world.

Learn from Stanford, MIT, Berkeley and more. These podcasts are well worth your time. From Quantum Mechanics to Human Nutrition, Business Skills to Search Engine Technology (this is a great podcast for all SEO people).

» Check out the OEdb list of 100 great podcasts by clicking here.

I’ve just spent about 4 hours looking around Google trying to find some solutions that I need. I only have a few requirements:

• must be free (open source)
• must be php & mysql
• must be (x)HTML & CSS compliant
• must integrate with PayPal
• must have Credit Card integration (c2o etc)
• manage memberships (free & paid - 1 off fee, paypal)

As a bonus I’d love one solution that can do all of that and can manage online tests - nothing over the top just a few multi-choice questions in each test. Would like to track users answers, not so worried about them being able to see their history. This however is proving hard to find.

Got any thoughts? Why not post some links in the comments & I’ll check them out.

I’ve just set up a new plugin for tracking my outbound links with analytics.

To help me test it, why not visit www.webhelp.co.nz and find out “Does Google love you?“.

Thanks everyone

Isn’t it funny the things we think are going to go great, don’t always. The things we throw together with little forethought often pan out better than we expect.

Case in point, “Stop writing and increase your traffic“, a post I threw together in minutes while waiting for a mate to pick me up for a Dad’s night out. I really wasn’t thinking “This’ll be a great post” it was more, “Gosh I better put something on Studiowhiz” 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 »