And Happy New Year to you!

It has been an eventful year, I gave an overview of the year yesterday and so today I would like to have a look back to the first post and see what we have all achieved and what we have not.

I have many plans for this website but I shall only give you the short term goals for now.

• At least one interview a week
• Daily or bi-daily posts
• Loyal commenters
• Emails from readers, perhaps success stories?

As you may of noticed, I do not like to follow trends. Unlike many people’s goals I do not have any targets for RSS readers or traffic, although of course the more the merrier.

Hmm… not all of those goals were reached were they?! One interview a week, no but a fair amount of good motivational interviews. Daily or bi-daily, no but there was very little filler. Loyal Commenters, yes! Success Circuit has some amazing commenters that I owe much to! Emails from readers… yes, I get a lot of emails from people that have read Success Circuit and I love it. To recieve an email from a reader is so very motivational and it is a great way to get to know people. In fact, not only do I recieve an email but one amazing person (the great Paul Sabaj) sent me a whole package (across sea!) of motivational books including some by Mark Victor Hansen which have possibly inspired me to write my own book.

So that is enough about the past, lets have a look through the next year. I feel good great about this year, so lets hope that it stays that way. Actually… no… lets MAKE it that way!

What do you want to see from Success Circuit and yourself this year? My goals include:

• Best quality posts only – I am really restricting myself this year, absoloute no filler content this year!
• More regular posts – I am not promising daily or bi daily like I did last year, especially as I refuse to write any filler, but very good posts on a regular basis.
• Guest posts – I love guest posters as it helps them with their website, especially if it is just getting off the ground, as well as providing something different for you to read (and of course give me more time to work on other posts to keep the regularity going).
• Do more guest posting elsewhere – Well I cannot ask for guest posts without writing some for other people can I?!
• Write a book – This is not for definite yet but it is something I would love to do, especially about British Young Entrepreneurs… so if you know any, get them to contact me!
• More people to read Success Circuit – I did not want to set a goal of 10k visitors or RSS readers or any other statistic last year and nor do I today. However, I want more people to read Sucess Circuit, benefit from it and to help it benefit others. Remember, through your comments and even perhaps guest posts, you are able to help so many people… surely the more the better? So, invite your friends and family, tweet, facebook, stumble, digg… lets make 2010 a year to remember!

What do you have planned for the next year? Any new years resoloutions? Goals? Let us know!

It is New Years Eve and I cannot let the year, and indeed the decade, go without an overview. 2009 has been a very eventful year for most of us so I would love to know what has happened this year for you!

Personally a lot has happened which has changed my life, the first of course being the birth of Success Circuit. The New Year will be 1 year since the first post in which I spoke of the goals and what I hoped to achieve, more about that tomorrow. This has pushed me in many ways, I have met many new people (both readers and interviewees), many of whom have been of immense help to me and are some of the most motivational people I know.

Another new aspect of my life came and an old one left, I finished School and started College. That may sound a very silly thing to talk about, but it was a big change that happened this year. New friends, teachers and motivational people to meet. In September I decided to join the Young Enterprise group at College which is basically 14 young people (first years – between 16 and 17 years old) joining together and starting a company. We started Neo Flow, which I am currently working on a website for. Neo Flow has sold a variety of products, including Christmas gifts and hot chocolate, to raise money for our main venture… customised hoodies, lots of fun!

This post is called ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ for a very good reason; many good things have happened, luckily very few bad but there is some ugly! What would an end of year post be without some photos?

Yep, every year since I started School, I have been involved in a local amateur dramatics group… we had a lot of fun this year, not just with performing Cinderella but also because I was in the mood for photos. Over 200 all of me, and I’m usually the guy that stays behind the camera! I mention drama because I believe that my first performance (which was Peter Pan and I played John), dramatically changed my life. Why? CONFIDENCE! I was so shy when I started but by the end I had improved my confidence by a lot and there is a chance that without it I may not have had the confidence to try to have an “online presence”. So, for all you shy people out there… try acting, or some other group club, it’s fun!
Now it is time to have a look at some of my favourite posts of the year.

• Maslows Hierarchy of Needs – This has to be my favourite post of the year as it taught me many lessons. I believe I have told the story before but this post was meant as a guest post for ProBlogger but Darren graciously declined it due to the fact it had nothing to do with blogging. Fine! I was expecting that. I then spoke to John Chow, a big figure in the Make Money Online niche which is in some aspects similar to my own, he did the same.
  I did not let that get me down. I published it on Success Circuit and am now laughing. That post is my most viewed page of the year. In my opinion it is perfect for my little niche (whichever it may be, Success, Motivation, Inspiration… I call it my own little niche as some believe it covers many other niches and others say it covers none) as it is about improving oneself… perfect!
• The Truth about Lonely Designs – One of my first posts, I am still proud of it as it allowed me to start afresh in terms of moving on and forgetting about the problems I had with Lonely Designs, it allowed me to show my honesty and give everybody the opportunity to learn from my mistakes.
• The (Gigantic) Link Fest – I love to help people, linking to their sites is one way of doing that. So this massive link festival was a great way of me “sharing the love” as well as helping some of you find new websites to follow. Also, it was a great way for me to learn about new websites and meet new people!
• He’s A Lady – The Sickening Story Of James Chartrand – A recent post of mine which is basically just an introduction to the main post on copyblogger. It is in this list because of the story behind it, so powerful and sickening at the same time. It is a story that everybody in the world deserves to have read and learn from.
• Interviews – Okay, not a post but each interview published on Success Circuit is published for a reason… they are all inspirational and motivational. I had to put an interview on this list but could not choose one… so have them all!

Now I must go, please let us all know your good, bad and ugly of 2009!

Hello everyone,

As you all know, Success Circuit is being updated. But I have been thinking “To make Success Circuit even more successful I am going to need help, suggestions and a whole lot of bug hunts”, so, I am now begging looking for beta testers to help me out!

What is a Beta Tester?

A Beta Tester is somebody who looks for bugs/glitches/problems on both new and old features. It is somebody that is able to work closely with me and the rest of the team to improve this website. If you have ideas or want to help in any way, beta testing is just one of the ways you can help (see below).

What do Beta Testers gain access to?

I have just released a brand new forum for beta testers, this will act as both a storage system for bugs and ideas so that I can keep track of them (though hopefully there are not too many!) but also as a community. I have always said that Success Circuit should be a community but how can it be one if there is no interaction (I shall speak about this in the next post).

• Access to every new feature of Success Circuit whilst it is being developed – there is no waiting for features, beta testers will be able to see every error I make (and I make a lot of errors!).
• Access to their own forum – to keep track of bugs/errors/problems/glitches and so that they have their own community

How do I become a Beta Tester?

Simples! All you have to do is register to the forum. The beta testing forum is not currently private (though in the future we might have expansions to the forum, who knows!) so just pop over to www.Beta.SuccessCircuit.com and register. Once you are registered there, introduce yourself and go back to www.SuccessCircuit.com at where you will see the new theme.

Beware!

If at any times you find fatal errors on Success Circuit that do not let you use the website, feel free to post it on the forum though hopefully it will be my fault if that happens and I will fix it instantly… I hope! But if you want to get back to the current theme then just log out of the forum.

More Positions

At first I was only going to ask for Beta Testers, however if you are interested then there are a few other positions available.

• Guest Posters – not really a position but if you are interested in writing a single post for Success Circuit then you can become a guest poster.
• Authors – these are posters that write for Success Circuit quite often. Although I sometimes call it “full time posters”, there is not really any regularity to it at all. Though if somebody would like to do something like a “weekly column” then I would love them to do that!
• Coders – Currently I am the only person working on coding Success Circuit (though sometimes I do get some help) and so that takes a lot of time away from actually writing any content! So if anybody is interested in helping to code then please contact me.
• Designers – As with coding, I do not have much time for designing, luckily most of what I do is through CSS but sometimes pictures would be very nice. So if you are interested in helping design Success Circuit then once again, contact me.

Unfortunately, and to great regret, none of these positions will be paid positions however you never know what might happen in the future!

Suggestions

If you would like to suggest something to do on Success Circuit, whether it to be with the design, content or events, then either contact me (see below) or register to the beta testing forum. On there is a suggestions forum which will allow me to track every suggestion!

Contacting Me

I expect most of you know how to contact me but here are a few ways you can do so.

• Commenting – I read and usually reply to every comment I get on here and each one goes straight to my email
• Email – If you would like to send me a private email then you can do so, I read and reply to every one. My email address is Shane@ShaneHudson.net
• Skype – This is a great way of getting to know people and I love using it, if you would like to add me to Skype then you can do so by adding successcircuit (or just searching my name)
• MSN – As with Skype, MSN is a good way to contact me, just add shaneye2003@yahoo.co.uk (which by the way, was my first ever email address!)

Well as you all know I am currently working on improving Success Circuit. I was not planning to change the colour scheme or anything however I would like your opinions. Also please share this through twitter, facebook.. whatever! I want Success Circuit to be at it’s maximum potential. So without any further ado, here is the choices (you can choose more than one if you would like to and please comment here saying why you chose what you did):

Thank you!
Shane

As I previously mentioned, Success Circuit is going in for a complete makeover (well not complete, I am trying to change as little as possible but still give it a massive update). So before I get too far into the production stages, I want to know what you want.

What do you want to see from Success Circuit?

Do you have any ideas on how to improve the current theme/layout?

What kind of posts do you prefer?

If I was to interview just one more person, who would you wish it to be?

Please let me know anything that comes to your mind, absoloutly anything! Do not worry, there will still be real content before this upgrade comes.

Shane

Hello everybody,

As you know, things get old and boring very quick. The internet some how speeds up this process. So I have decided it is time to spice things up a little. Now, I have big plans for Success Circuit which shall hopefully begin implementation by the end of the month. No promises though!

However, as you know I visit ProBlogger.net (and.com!) a lot. The other day a post was written by Mary Jaksch of Goodlife Zen regarding a Wordpress plugin called Apture. I am trying to cut down on plugins, which will hopefully be noticed very soon, but this plugin really amazed me. It looked so useful! So I have installed it, and it is not going away.

This is actually a test post to make sure Apture does everything that it looks like it does, so I am going to try to embed some videos or something in a minute using Apture. This plugin will allow you to have a lot more access to a lot of information by using links and embedded media. For example it can find me the link to information about Richard Branson or Mary Poppins!

I can also embed this interesting marketing mistakes video.

Have fun and if you are doing anything interesting let me know!

Shane