Developing apps can be a daunting and overwhelming process, especially if you are learning everything from scratch. As I have contemplated the best course of action for the last couple of weeks I think I have figured out the best method of learning application development for myself.

At first I visited clickbank and searched in their marketplace for an informational product that would walk me through the steps that I would need to take throughout the process. I didn’t find anything that provided exactly what I was looking for. Most of the products (with good reason) gave tips on how to brainstorm ideas for apps then outsource the creation/development/submission process.  I wanted something that would lead me through the basics of Xcode and Objective C as well as some tips on submitting to the App Store and marketing the app before and after submission.

As I continued my search, I eventually wound up in the iTunes University. There are a couple courses offered by StanfordU that are specific to app development. They are recordings of the app development course that they offer on campus so it is like you are sitting right there in the classroom. There are some good things in the course but also a lot of information that does not apply to my situation. I have downloaded some of the episodes and have referred back to them from time to time.

Finally, I was talking to a friend of mine that has developed some apps in the past and he recommended that the best thing for someone starting out without any experience is to just get a book from amazon that takes you step by step through the development of a couple apps. I found one at amazon called “Learning iPhone Programming: From Xcode to App Store” that I just got in the mail. It takes the reader through the step by step process of creating some basic functions in an app. It has sample code that the reader can start out with and build upon. I am looking at it almost like a course where each of the chapters is a separate lesson with actionable items that you can follow and complete. I am excited to get more into it in the coming weeks.

The first step in learning how to develop iOS applications is enrolling in the Apple Developer Program. The program offers everything you will need including technical resources, software, forums and support to be able to create applications for iOS and OS X. There is a $99 per year fee to be a member and submit your apps for inclusion in the app store, but you can signup for a free account and get access to (almost) all the resources before paying the fee.

Enrolling For A Free Account

To enroll for a free (or paid) account, simply go to http://developer.apple.com and click the “programs” link at the top of the screen. You will be able to choose between the iOS dev program and the Mac OS dev program. For my purposes, I chose the iOS program.

Click through the “enroll now” and continue buttons and it will take you into the details of the program. From the outset I assumed that you had to pay the $99 upfront before you get access to the program, but as I clicked through a couple screens, I realized that one can enroll in the program without actually paying the fee. As I have looked around in the program I have noticed a few features are restricted until I pay the fee but most of what you need to do to build and test apps is available for free.

What’s In the Program

Within the Member Center there are four main sections that you will notice – the Dev Center, Dev Videos, Support and Bug Reporting. Here are a couple quick sentences about each one of the sections.

The Dev Center is the first stop in the program because it includes the essential tools that you will need to download. In the download section of the Dev Center is Xcode, the main development software you will do ost of the work in. The other great thing is the resources that are available from sample code downloads, How-To’s, a library and Getting Started videos. It is wise to get dig into the section of the site and spend time going through the tutorials and documentation put out by the iOS experts directly from Apple.

The Dev Videos section contains all the videos that are listed in the Dev Center section but they also include over 200 sessions that were recorded at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in 2010 and 2011. The videos are listed by title rather than a step by step series so they are a great resource if you are looking for a specific way to do a certain task.

The Dev Support is just like it sounds, a section full of support tools. The support is broken up into 4 sections ranging from getting enrolled in the program initially and getting started with developing apps to what is Cocoa, Objective Oriented Programming and Xcode. There is also information on a workflow guide to distribution of the apps and app review guidelines.

The last section is the Bug Reporting section. This is for developers that find and report on bugs on the existing products.

The entire developer program is an invaluable resource for developing apps. Especially because of everything you get for free before and monetary commitment on your part. If you are at all interested in developing iOS apps, start with the app dev program from Apple.

It’s no secret. I have not posted anything here for a while. Part of that comes from the fact that I have not had much going on in my life of note recently that I felt warranted a new post. Almost as important was the fact that I was confused about what I wanted this site to be. Throughout the history of this site I have posted on a wide range of topics and never felt like I had a true voice on any one topic in particular. While I was okay with using this blog as a place to journal my life, I think I am ready to develop the content here with one particular audience in mind rather then continuing to drift in a sea of a million blogs without a rudder.

I have spent several years reading blogs on many different subjects. Obviously, the ones that I am most drawn to are those that are focused on a particular topic I am interested in. They deliver information that is of value to a group of people and eventually build an audience of interested readers.

That is where I am (hopefully) headed with this site.

Getting To Today

I have been developing websites since 2005. This site was one of the first ones that I ever built. I have used this site for nearly every venture in my life from my personal journal to my main business website to a test bed for code. A place to share family updates to information on speculative investments and Emergency Preparedness. Everything that I have learned about building and maintaining websites has been self taught. If I wanted to learn how to do something, I figured it out. I taught myself how to code in html and php. I learned about CMS tools such as Typepad, Blogger and WordPress. I taught myself how to customize WordPress templates and make them do what I wanted or needed them to do. I am sure it would have been much quicker to outsource these tasks, but what I learned in the process is invaluable to me.

It has been perfect for me and has given me a creative outlet to find out what really interested me in life.  It has been a blast and I wouldn’t trade it for other type of formal education.

Moving Forward

As I look forward to the future of technology and how this industry is developing, I am amazed at the changes in such a short period of time – specifically the last couple years. I was listening to a popular podcast this week and the hosts were talking about some private consulting that they do on the side. The conversation was centered in the fact that even the largest corporations are beginning to replace laptop computers of their employees with iPads and other tablet type devices.

Think about that. What does it mean when a company replaces thousands upon thousands of laptops with iPad devices. That represents a huge shift not only in the way we consume data, but also in the way information is delivered. We are at the start of perhaps the biggest shift in technology since the personal computer was introduced.

With that being said, I am going to jump in with both feet and try and ride this wave rather than having it wash over me and leave me behind.

I am beginning to study about the development of mobile applications for iOS and Android devices and this site is going to be my brain dump of what I learn.

As I learn and study about app development, I will be posting what I am learning and working on here mostly as a reference point for me to review and look back upon. I invite you to join me in this journey and feel free to bookmark the site or join me on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or YouTube where I will also be posting updates. Feel free to interact with me and let me know if I am missing anything. I value any and all feedback and will do my best to make the content easy to understand and digest.

Thanks for reading this far and I look forward to the future and this journey.

This year when I started running more seriously, I weighed 223 lbs. Two weeks ago I weighed 192. I have gained 5 lbs back in the last two weeks and can’t have it continue to creep up.

Because the sun doesn’t come up in the mornings before I go to work, I decided I would start to go on some short runs at lunch when the time permitted. I also have this goal in the back of my mind to do a mountain marathon next year so it seems like a good time to start running more on the trails that are so abundant here in Utah County.

Today I went up Battle Creek Waterfall and then continued up the path on top of the waterfall. I have never ventured much beyond the base of the falls but am excited to explore it a little more. One of the great benefits of living near the mountains is the trail system that is so accessible.

Running trails is much harder then road running. One really has to pay attention to every foot step and be on your toes. Road running allows you to put your mind in a more relaxed state and not have to pay such close attention. I like the trails… a lot.

Now is a good time to start running. I, for one, am excited to get out and enjoy the changing weather and colors.

Most goals are poorly set and therefore unattainable. Maybe they are not specific enough, maybe they are not realistic or maybe you are not inspired by the potential achievement of the goal to actually follow through.

This is a problem.

What is the point of setting goals if they are not inspiring enough to follow through with? I have noticed that when I set goals, there is usually one (or more) of four things missing. I ask myself these 4 questions to get a feel for the validity of the stated goal.

• What is the specific type of behavior I need to engage in to reach my goal?
• How often do I need to participate or follow through on this action
• At what intensity must the activity be performed?
• How long am I going to give myself to accomplish the goal?

This last week has been filled with necessary but unproductive, frustrating work.

Late last week my server got bogged down. I had to take the time to figure out what was going on and after a few back and forth discussions and emails with my hosting company, i got it all figured out and turned back on. It took a few days but ultimately got to the point where it was salvaged.

Then a few days later, the site was CRAWLING slow and it was very difficult to navigate through any of the pages making it very painful to update anything.

I found out what the problem was and got that resolved. Everything sped up again and we were back in business… until today.

I changed a line of code on the theme I was using and broke the site. I tried to re-upload that particular file with no luck and the more I messed with the code, the less likely it was that I was getting it back. Luckily I use the Thesis theme so I ultimately re-uploaded it to the site.

While the site was coming back online and I realized that all the customization to the site were lost and would have needed to been re-done I threw my hands up in the air in frustration and just said forget it. Lets get back to the basics.

I’m going minimal.

The way I see it, most websites are way too cluttered and distracting. The content is lost is a sea of pop-up banners, pop-under banners, flashing fonts, silly videos and the worst of all (IMO) – automated songs that start up when you hit the site. Everyday I see sites filled with great content only to have it lost in the clutter.

Don’t get me wrong, some of those features have their place but should be used more sparingly by over ambitious website owners who think they need to fill every square inch of of screen real estate.

It gives me a headache.

I was looking at using a new theme for the site, but that would require me either paying for or taking the time to customize a new theme and I am not in the mood right now. I kind of like the basics.

At some point I may, probably, will likely change the look of this site, but for now I am kind of partial to white, clean space.

Time again for the weekly update (#3) on the Million Dollar Blog Project (MDBP) for the week ending October 22. These reports are part of the MDBP going on at ThinkTraffic.net. These reports are designed to detail the progress of my participation in the project and my attempts to turn an old blog of mine into a profitable, helpful resource.

In addition to these reports, you can follow my progress (and other participants) by following me on twitter.

By no means do I consider myself a guru in the internet marketing field. I have more mistakes then successes and this is my little spot on the web for me to write about my experiences. Connect with me through one of the methods on the site and you can join my on this little journey.

Important Happenings This Week

Earlier this week, I have been noticing some slow downs on my site (as explained here). I have been fighting the speed on the server where a few of my websites are hosted and feel like I have been losing the war. If you are actually reading this on my site then you no doubt know what I am talking about.

Needless to say, these issues also affected my MDBP site as well. That being said, I am troubleshooting some potential culprit sites on my hosting account and figuring out where the issue lays. I think I have it narrowed down to the site that is causing the issues, now I have to go through and start figuring out if it is a particular file or the entire site.

How This Relates To MDBP

When I would try and log onto my MDBP site, one of two things would happen. Either it would take several minutes to load the site then several more minutes to navigate between pages within the dashboard. It reminded me of the old dial-up days when I would click a link on a page then go off and do something else while the page loaded. Frustrating. Many times it would not even load and I would get a page load error.

So, I didn’t get the site updated like I wanted to.

This week I am focusing on getting the server back to a decent speed then I will work on the updates.

I have noticed some terrible slowness on my sites lately. Especially here on this site, it has been painfully slow the last couple weeks. I know that there are several things that need to be cleaned up and taken care of in order to have the site load quicker and perform at a higher level.

I was in a meeting today and happened to check my email to realize that I had received this from my hosting company.

Dear Brandon,

Your web hosting account for brandonhansen.com has been deactivated, as of 10/19/2011. (reason: site causing performance problems)

This deactivation was due to a Terms of Service violation associated with your account. At sign-up, all users state that they have read through, understand, and agree to our terms. These terms are legal and binding.

Although your web site has been suspended, your data may still be available for up to 15 days from the date of deactivation; if you do not contact us during that 15 day period, your account and all of its files, databases, and emails may be deleted.

If you feel this deactivation was made in error, or in order to gain access to your account, please call our customer service line as soon as possible at  _____and press 5 to speak with a member of our Terms of Service Compliance department.

After the meeting I jumped right on with them and they forwarded me some instructions that I could follow to clean up the account and get it up and running again.It went into a little more detail later in the email about possible causes and resolutions. Even though I couldn’t call them up right away I had my computer available and was able to jump onto my site. Sure enough, it was replaced with an error page from them.

A few minutes later, it was back activated and functioning.

Through this process of figuring out what was going wrong, I came to the realization of a few things.

Testing Out Your Site Performance

The first suggestion was to test out the site performance. I did this through http://gtmetrix.com. Check them out.

After running my site through that test (free) I received the following report.

Hosting

One other thing that concerns me, and ultimately was the culprit in the above email, was one particular site on my server. It is a site that is generating a lot of page views as well as several spam comments (over 215,000). When talking with the rep at my hosting company, I was told there was a pretty simple fix which I have taken care of. 

Now I have the task of actually speeding up the site and figuring out how to best optimize its performance. Sounds like a lot of fun, I know.

Welcome to my weekly update on the Million Dollar Blog Project (MDBP) for the week ending October 10, 2011.

The purpose of the report is to help me keep track of my progress as well as to update those that are following my status on Twitter, those others participating in the MDBP and anyone else who happens to stumble upon this report.

Not only will I write is some detail my successes, but I will also cover some areas that are not working for me.

In the weekly reports (at least initially) I will lay out in detail the income that is generated from the MDBP and any expenses associated. While I am not earning any money from this particular blog yet, I have a couple monetization strategies in mind that will begin to be implemented throughout the coming weeks.

I provide this report for a couple reasons. First of all it is an effort to provide transparency into what works for me and what doesn’t. I believe that this will be a huge learning experience for me and the more detailed and clear I can be,the better the experience will be for all. It will be based on honest reporting and straight talk. No BS or hype.

By no means do I consider myself a “guru” in the areas of internet marketing or online business. I am learning as I go and if I can provide you with anything that will help in your efforts to make money online, then I will consider it to be a success.

Thanks again for stopping by and I hope you enjoy the report.

Important Happenings This Week

I am still in the initial process of getting the MDBP up and running. It was important for me this week to set things up from an administrative point of view. Really exciting things like getting set up on the MDBP leaderboard, getting the right tracking plugins installed and figuring out the layout of the page.

My goals this last week were to get the home page organized how I wanted it with the opt-in page and the recent posts. I also wanted to get a “Getting Started” link at the top of the page for first time visitors to the page. I think I got it figured out how I want it and just need to go in and write the content for the page. The whole home page and design are not set in stone by any means yet though. In a couple weeks when the ThinkTraffic team gets to the topic of “Designing A Good Looking Blog On Your Own” there may be some pointers that I implement. I’ll decide upon that when the time comes.

Onsite Changes

The specific changes on the site included an opt-in with the offer to get 5 free interviews. One of the keys to getting people to take action is to offer them something that they want. In my case the site is geared towards helping financial planners market their business. A couple years ago when I registered the domain, I had the idea of interviewing a successful financial planner each month and selling through a continuity program. I tried to sell the audio interviews and never had much success. Now I am just going to offer them for free at signup. We’ll see how that goes once I start getting some traffic.

The other main change to the site was the removal of the sales letter on the home page. I have set it up in more of a blog format and just have recent posts showing up there now. The posts that are there are old and need to be updated but that will come with time.

Offsite Promotion

I didn’t do any offsite promotion this week. I did review a couple pdf’s that talk about promotion. I am excited to implement some of those strategies in the future.

SEO Rankings/MDBP Leaderboard Rankings

I haven’t pulled my SEO rankings in a while and am sure they are not good. I did some research on the keywords that I want to target and have an idea on 2 or 3 that I am going to focus on. I need to run with the Google Keyword Tool and make a final decision on the top 5 keywords that I am going to use.

Again, later in the MDBP course there is a topic on “Developing An Epic Content Creation Strategy”. I am sure there will be some good pointers and instruction there that I can implement.

As for the MDBP rankings, I started out on page 12 and am currently sitting at the top of page 10. I think it is #81. The biggest reason for this was getting the proper setting on the getclicky.com dashboard set. I had it installed and knew that i was getting 1 or 2 visitors but they weren’t showing up on my dashboard. I figured out that you have to enable public access on your dashboard. I am sure that most of the folks in the leaderboard have missed this part of the setup and are therefore not showing any stats.

Income Breakdown

$0.00 – There is nothing on the site that generates income. I have a couple ideas that I will talk about in the next weekly report or two.

Things I Learned

I think the biggest lesson I learned was to set a schedule and stick to the deadline. Seth Godin talks about deadlines and actually shipping your product and how nothing happens unless the product ships.

Get it out the door.

Ship it.

It does no good to sit on an idea and “ho-hum’ about it. Set yourself a deadline and stick to it. My goal is to publish these weekly updates on Saturday morning and I was up until 2:00 last night finishing the work I had to do so that I could get the update out. I have a deadline and specific goals that I am going to accomplish. If  When I mess up I will make course correction along the way, but I will always to my best to meet the deadlines that i have set.

Next Week Goals

My goals for for next week are simple. They are the following:

1. Get the first auto-responder message set up with the audio interviews
2. Get the “Getting Started” page written and posted with a clear link on the home page