If you’ve been following me on Twitter then you may have seen me drop a few hints about a ‘massive secret project’ that I’ve been working on.

Well today you guys are the first to get a sneak preview of what it’s all about. I’m afraid I still can’t give too much away about the project, aside from the domain name, and vague concept. However, I’ll be posting more details here soon, as the private beta test date approaches.

So without further ado here’s a first look at CommentBoost.com.

Yes… I know it’s just a subscription form right now, but some of you may be able to guess certain things about the service from the page.

I’ve noticed in the blogging, and more specifically design communities that many comments are left, but that most of these go to a few large blogs. However, those leaving the comments often run awesome blogs that are simply neglected by commenters due to their size. These are the people driving these communities, the ones who are spending their time and effort giving feedback on other’s posts. Despite this, their own blogs will often show the depressing count of ‘(0 Comments)’, or at best a couple.

CommentBoost aims to tear down these imbalances, and give the average blogger the quality comments that they deserve. Again, I can’t go into the specifics of the service just yet, but it should work out that for each comment left by a member they receive approximately one comment back on their own blog. This is big news for those active commenters leaving 10-20+ comments each day.

I’ll post more information and screenshots of the service soon, but for now why not go:

Subscribe to be Notified of our Official Launch!

OK, so this no updating business has gotten a little ridiculous. The good news is that I’m still very much alive and active within the design community. The bad news is that between running my more lucrative websites and keeping up with my clients I simply have no spare time for blogging here.

However, things are going great for me. I’ve amassed a HUGE number of clients since I last posted, and will be updating my portfolio soon. I also feel like I’ve grown a lot as a designer, and become a lot less naive in regards to many things online. PSDFAN.com is doing fantastically. It’s currently pulling around 125,000 unique visitors each month, and has gained over 1000 RSS Subscribers as of yesterday. Both of these things are more than I could ever have hoped for in such a small space of time.

As for PushStandards, it obviously can’t go on in this dormant state. To my potential clients it looks desolate and as if nobody is running this blog or accepting design work. To my readers (if I have many left) - well they can’t be expected to wait months between posts. So… here’s the plan:

I’m going to relaunch PushStandards in the near future, but as a portfolio only website. That means no blogging, and most likely just a simple contact form, examples of my work and some testimonials. I’m thinking about actually going for a cool 1 page layout that contains all this information.

As for the blogging part, I’ve never been a big fan of personal blogs (hence I always blogged about design, blogging or business here), but I might set up a personal blog just to give more frequent, but shorter updates about what I’m up to. If you want updates on design and the design industry in general then I recommend that you check out psdfan, as I’m also posting this kind of thing fairly frequently as well as the regular Photoshop tutorials.

So I guess just hold tight until the new design comes through. I don’t want to give a time frame on this as like I said I’m pretty busy these days. However, I am keen to get this new portfolio set up asap, so hopefully it won’t take me forever to come up with the design etc…

Thanks for dropping by,

-Tom.

I’m planning on a large update soon, but for now I just wanted to let you guys know that advertising has just become available for PSDFAN. If you want to learn just how great an advertising opportunity this is you can read more here, but for the sake of this post I’ll just let you guys know that it’s cheap, but very profitable for advertisers (we’re drawing a lot of traffic these days).

If you like you can skip the sales pitch and purchase your ad directly: here.

I’ll post again soon :).

This will seem really broad and general to you I’m sure, but it’s late and I felt like sharing the secret to my modest successes.

It’s not about having the next greatest idea in the world.

It’s not even about being unique, if you wait around for a completely unique idea you won’t get anywhere.

It’s about 3 things:

Being good at something

Putting time/effort into that thing.

Keep putting time/effort into that thing.

This may sound very simple, but I’m shocked every day at how many people break these rules. Your average ‘make money fast’ blogger knows jack all about what they’re writing about. They just aren’t good enough to make a success of their blog.

I’m going to use my new website PSDFAN.com as an example here. There are thousands of tutorial sites out there, but most don’t get anywhere. The main reason for this is because people aren’t good enough at Photoshop to write good quality tutorials. I’m doing PSDFAN because I am good enough. That isn’t to say I’m amazing, or even great, but I’m good enough… There are tonnes of people better than me at Photoshop, and a lot more that are worse I’m sure. So there we have it, point number 1 - I AM good enough at Photoshop to write tutorials that have the potential to make a successful tutorial site. And I know that without a doubt, I’m being realistic. Most people just don’t think realistically, they start an idea because everyone else is doing it, or because it’s the in thing, or because they want to try something knew. YOU HAVE TO KNOW WITHOUT A DOUBT THAT YOU HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO BE SUCCESSFUL!

So point number 2… I have the time to put into writing tutorials and promoting the site. I also have the effort, and I’m willing to work hard doing these two things. So great! I’m writing good tutorials and people are reading them.

Step 3 - keep doing it. This is the hardest point for me. It’s not hard yet, but what about when I’m back at university? what if I get bored? and so on… This is what will put me either in with the big boys or with everyone else.

My points here are… to be realistic with yourselves, and do what you’re good at. To work hard, and not expect an easy ride. To keep at it, and not give up too soon. Remember, don’t do what you think you should be doing, do what you are good at doing.

To give you a brief summary:

Traffic is consistently reaching 1000+ unique visitors per day. (with 100+ return visits!)
RSS subscriber levels are creeping up.
I can feel the beginnings of a community

All very exciting news, and of course more motivation for me to keep writing the best tutorials that I possibly can. I’ve got some great tutorial ideas lined up, as well as cool stuff like a Flickr group, some opening competitions and much more!

I’ll keep you guys posted on the site’s progress, but so far, so good!

I have to say that I love this post-launch madness. It’s SO much work - promoting/writing content pretty much non-stop. However, if you look at how much the average person is willing to work, then by working as hard as you possibly can you really stand out from 99% of people out there. I just wish there were more hours in my day.

If you would like to check out the first two PSDFAN tutorials (and let me know what you think), then please click the thumbnails below:

Hope a new router later this week will fix things…

Apologies to anyone who’s having trouble hearing from me or if I’ve sounded a little exasperated in my emails.

I’d really appreciate any opinions from people if they like the final result and are interested in knowing how I made it.

Thanks!

PSDFan is coming. Soon. It will be awesome.

Thankyou for your continued patience and support.