Terry Rydzynski

wow, i’m just testing the Flock Browser 1.2

its safe to say that the internet will never be the same again. most people probably wont ever pick up on it. their loss…

Download Flock now and try it for yourself. your world will change forever. or maybe you’ll just shrug and get back to watching Eastenders or Big Brother.

Just a quick update for those of you who read my previous post about Kieron’s blog contest that he was running.

Well, unfortunately I didn’t win so I’ll be sticking with the rather good (and free!) Cutline Theme on my Blog.

The winner was a very deserving lady called Sara from pajamaprofessional.com, so of course big congratulations to her. More info here.

To be honest, I didnt expect to hear anything more about it, so when i checked Google Analytics this morning and saw a nice increase in traffic all coming from Kieron’s Blog I was pleasantly surprised. A link from Kieron’s blog will help my blog as Kieron’s site carries a bit of weight with the almighty Google, on top of that extra traffic that his site sends.
The post that mentions my site will slip off his front page in the next few days as he adds more content to his site. I don’t think a link from his archives will carry a great deal of weight in the long run, but it serves as a welcome short-term boost.

What’s clear is that I need to capitalise on this by starting to add plenty of useful content to my site over time - maybe that would earn a place in his blogroll, which would be really powerful. I’ve been way too busy lately but will need to get myself in gear and get blogging again. I’ve got some really cool stuff to talk about as I’ve got an awesome project I’m working on at the moment.

Another thing, he even managed to spell my name correctly which is a rarity!

cheers Kieron

In this series of posts, I will be taking you through the rough elements of the process for developing an Adult Social Website (think Adult Friend Finder, Adultspace etc but way better!). I cant reveal the details about the site just yet, but I am hoping to give you more when we get closer to Beta launch. We expect the site to be ready for public consumption around March/April 2008. I know that sounds like a long way off, but we have so much to do before the site is ready.

We have now finished developing the site’s flow on paper, so we have a really good idea of how we expect people to move around on the site. Although we employed a development company to build the site for us, it is crucial that we acted as the architects to a large degree to ensure that the developers understood exactly what we wanted. Dont think for a minute that I dont trust our developers, because I do - I think they are an excellent bunch of guys who know their stuff, but in my experience of commissioning software development in the past, and also developing software on behalf of other people, there is always a huge element that is open to interpretation. When specifying a new development - expecially one thats costing upwards of £25,000 (£50,000 USD), you need to make sure you know exactly what you want before you ask for it. With so much at stake, I wanted to leave as little up to interpretation as possible. With that out of the way, we are just waiting to receive a functional and technical specification from the developers which will outline their interpretation of our requirements. Even though we have been as thorough as possible in our specification and met the developers numerous times, I guarantee there will be some functionality that hasn’t been interpreted as we orignal conceived it - its par for the course!

While we await the specs from the developers, we have also been sent some interesting design concepts and logo ideas that look really good. I expect we’ll go back and forth a few times before we get close to a final concept, as its really difficult to sum up an entire site in a single logo!

That said, I’m really impressed with what has been sent over so far.

Hopefully I’ll be able to post some pictures up here soon to show you the direction we are heading.

Ok, so it looks like every man and his dog is in on the act.

Following my recent post about Kieran’s competition, it seems like everyone in the online marketing blog is offering a competition. Most of them revolve around the principle of “you write a review of my site and link to me, and i’ll link to you plus you might win prizes.”

This is a great idea, so I’m joining in again

This time, Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim fame is asking people to write a post about why they read his blog.

Well, the answer is quite simple and has been alluded to by many others already. Basically Andy does an excellent job of keeping his ear to the ground with regards to a large range of marketing stories, and subsequently writing about them including his own original thoughts.

Andy covers a wide range of niche topics within the overall marketing arena in over 20 categories. the info ranges from the latest scoop to beginners guides and anything in between.

I’m a particular fan of his regular (weekly, i think) summary post “Pilgrim’s Picks” in which he blasts out a number of useful or interesting stories, posts, snippets etc from around the world. I usually find at least one brand new blog worth subscribing to every time Pilgrim’s Picks are published.

Why do I read Andy Beal’s blog. because its full of good stuff and updated all the time.

Disclaimer: I’ll admit, that i might not have been motivated to write this review without the incentive of a link back (well, not just yet anyway), but this is another example of the many things you can learn from Andy. I’m sure he’ll also be keeping us up to date regarding this competition, the results, what worked, what didn’t etc.

I’ve already covered the many reasons why Andy might want to run this competition in this post, so i wont go over them again. However, with andy’s unique take on it he’s going to get some fantastic information about what his active audience likes/dislikes. all for $500. the extra link love that he’ll get from competition participants is well worth $500 all on its own.

Its pretty hard to find a decent Affiliate Marketing Blog in the UK. In fact as Kieron has previously pointed out on his blog at www.here.org.uk, its pretty hard to find them full-stop (or ‘period’ for our cousins across the pond). In my travels across the wastelands of cyberspace, I managed to stumble across Kieron’s blog, and boy am I glad I did! [Read more →]

This page has been set up as an SEO Experiment. I first read about this idea on www.selfmademinds.com.

Gap Insurance Info at the BBC

Gap Insurance Info at CNN 

I’ll let you know how i get on. hope i dont get Google-slapped for this

Just a quick post here about the power of social bookmarking in Search Engine Optimisation. I’ll do a proper post once I have more data, but I have just used social bookmarking for the first time and within a week it has dramatically improved my search engine ranking, visitor numbers and my click through rate. I got so excited that I nearly peed my pants! [Read more →]

Scott at the rather excellent selfmademinds.com has just posted a nice little SEO checklist of the types of things you need to think about when getting your site optimised for the Search Engines. Its not exactly groundbreaking stuff in terms of what it tells you to do, but its a very handy checklist to ensure that you cover the essentials every time you build a site. It might also be handy when selecting an SEO company to do work on your site, if their proposals dont mention much of the stuff in the list, then your site is either in fairly good shape or they dont know what they are doing

If you haven’t already, I would suggest you subscribe to their blog. I don’t think I’ve seen a post from them yet that doesnt have tremendous value for site owners and affiliate marketers alike.

For more thorough coverage of the subject of SEO, you should check out Aaron Wall’s SEO Book, which is the industry bible on Search Engine Optimisation. Its only $79 US and will pay for itself instantly. Not only does it explain Scott’s checklist in far more detail, it moves beyond typical SEO and shows you how to build a site that gets repeat traffic for its entire life!

It was around a year ago that my friend approached me about his fantastic new idea for a web site (he has lots of great ideas, but this one is awesome). I was blown away by the concept of a site that merged the best elements of social sites such as Facebook, with adult dating/chat, and cybersex. While none of the individiual elements is particularly new, we have come up with a novel twist to complement his patented invention which will mean our site is compatible with any toy available. [Read more →]

So, I’ve been in the domain game for a couple of months now and have learned so much already. Having decided to stop reading about it and actually get my hands dirty, I have found out so much more than I ever could have from simply observing. [Read more →]