Our studio has been one person for most of its short life, but that's changed when my wife came on board to do most of the coding. She fell in love with the simplicity of .lua and the great articles and resources from Ansca Mobile the creators of Corona SDK. Although she isn't on board full time, it's great to be able to bounce ideas off of her. She is most definitely the Left-Brained side of the buisiness, but is very creative as well. As I write this, we're testing two really cool features for the next major update to "Hippos Name" which in its third day is selling quite well. On its second day, it topped "Miss Spider's Tea Party" and "Toy Story 2" which I thought was quite impressive. So our original plan was to pump out four books a year. As I was finishing "Hippos Name", I was also writing the script for the next book because our schedule was so tight. My wife realized that I was a bit overwhelmed and thought that we should "ReThink" our plan and devote more time to Marketing the first book, before tackling all of the new issues of the second book. Since Marketing is such a crucial role for any small studio, I agreed. We were originally hoping to get the second book out for Christmas, but we realized we would only have about four weeks to do so. And we'd much rather have a quality product out there than one that was rushed in to meet a deadline. This is fine by me as I actually love the marketing aspect of the process just as much as I enjoy the creative.

And while my wife is busy making "Hippos Name" even better, I can try to get as much exposure for the company as I can. Now let me tell you, this is no easy feat! Your best bet is to have a marketing plan. I have a general plan of tweets, announcements, blog posts, and articles that I need to write. But it also means building a detailed plan for specific marketing objectives with deadlines built in. I probably won't be able to build that plan until next week, since I'm taking a small break this week.

I will tell you though that what I am doing is working. My stats on traffic have increased 1000%. I had somewhat modest figures to start. On an average day without any marketing, I was getting about 25 unique visitors; a real drop in the bucket. I noticed that when I increased my tweeting, blog posts, and such, that those numbers doubled! And each subsequent month, it was increasing by 20-25% across the board. This month is entirely different. My numbers for the month to date, is now three quarters of what last month were. My goal for hits was 8,000 for the month; still very modest. I should see closer to 12,000. And I'm now averaging 200-250 visitors a day! Why is the reason for the uptick in traffic, you ask? Well for one thing, any time I introduce a new app, my traffic always spikes. But it's different this time. It's very probable that September and October will equal Jan-Aug for traffic. And there's good reason for it, I'm working even harder to make sure that people see us. I'll talk more about that in my marketing plan that I'll release in November.  I'd love to hear from you with a comment if I'm on the right track. It will help me to deliver better content. Thanks for reading! –Nick

If you're like me and love to create, then you'll love the present. It's a great time to be alive! I was fortunate in that I have this creative talent that has been unlocked! I love what I do and couldn't be happier knowing that God has given me the talents, and Apple has given me the tools to help me succeed! I just celebrated my first year wedding anniversary, and Apple has given me a gift that I'll never forget; the permission to sell my new app, Hippos Name in the App Store! This is only the beginning, but it's the start of something big. I've already started the wheels turning on the second book and have a mile long list of things I need to do for the first one. But this is where the fun continues. I get to tell people about how much fun it was to create this app. How I started with an idea almost 18 years ago telling stories to my niece and nephew and taking those characters today and weilding them into something more than words in the air. It was my nephew who at age 18 told me to take those characters that I created and make them real. Draw them out. Give them names and personalities and traits. That was eight years ago. And I did do that that three years ago, but it never came off the ground. I had trademarks, logos, a web site. But it just wasn't there still. So I changed the name of the collection, kept the original names, and changed the focus. It's now turned into something wonderful and I'm very proud of it. I'd love to one day be able to hire my nephew and write books together, but I'll have to sell a lot of apps to do that. In the meantime, I hope you will join with me in celebrating this great feat. In the next few days, I'll post some of my original pencil drawings and how the characters have matured over the course of three years.