Internet Magic

For the last couple days I’ve been frustrated to no end with setting up return on investment tracking for one of our clients. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t, and sometimes it would put the results in the wrong place. I’m feeling the pressure to get this working right.

It reminds me of college when I had a class I just couldn’t understand, like Micro- or Macroeconomics (take your pick, I stunk at both). I just couldn’t understand it. The good news is that I switched majors from Business to History, and graduated just two summer sessions later than I should have.

My biggest lesson this week is to re-learn: don’t go passive. Keep fighting. Admit when I can’t do something and get help. My pride says to keep banging my head on the keyboard. But my will and intellect says to keep persevering and ask for help.

In the movie, Raising Arizona, there was a gnarly character played by Tex Cobb describing to Nathan Arizona about his ability to find babies. Remarking on the police’s inablity to find Nathan Arizona’s kidnapped son, Tex’s best line was, “If you want to find a baby, call me. If you want to find a donut, call cop.”

I’ve been surprised to see where people go to find experts. We just had a client quit doing search engine optimization with us and went with a company that promised to put them at the top of the search engine lists. If I was a business owner, I would want this, too. But what these other companies don’t tell you is that they’ll put you at the top of the list, but on search terms that nobody is searching for. I could be on the top of Google for the term, “red shiny widgets,” but if nobody is searching for that term, then it does me no good.

When we start doing search engine optimization or pay per click marketing, one of the first thing we do is research what terms people are using to find a site like the one our client has. We sometimes come up with hundreds of terms, and these terms differ greately in the amount of times they are searched for. Then we figure what the competition is like for that term. Once we figure this out, we start optimizing pages and putting together advertisements for the pay per click.

If you want to get free traffic to your site from phrases that people are actually looking for. If you want to find a donut, well, you know who to ask.

I heard this song on the way into work today. I am committed to working hard for my employer, even when he isn’t around. This song reminded me that I can enjoy myself at work, but not be consumed by it. You really need to hear it live.

Enjoy Yourself – Guy Lombardo 1948

You work and work for years and years, you’re always on the go
You never take a minute off, too busy makin’ dough
Someday, you say, you’ll have your fun, when you’re a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you’ll have in your old rockin’ chair

Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think

You’re gonna take that ocean trip, no matter, come what may
You’ve got your reservations made, but you just can’t get away
Next year for sure, you’ll see the world, you’ll really get around
But how far can you travel when you’re six feet underground?

Your heart of hearts, your dream of dreams, your ravishing brunette
She’s left you and she’s now become somebody else’s pet
Lay down that gun, don’t try, my friend, to reach the great beyond
You’ll have more fun by reaching for a redhead or a blonde

Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think

You never go to nightclubs, and you just don’t care to dance
You don’t have time for silly things, like moonlight and romance
You only think of dollar bills, tied neatly in a stack
But when you kiss a dollar bill, it doesn’t kiss you back

Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think

A couple years ago my friend Tim and I were coming out of the Air Force-University of Utah football game. Someone was giving away Quattro shavers. I took one because I can’t pass up free stuff. It’s now hanging in my shower but I haven’t used it much because I prefer my Mach 3 Turbo. But I didn’t buy that one either.

I got the Mach 3 in the mail, and I doubt I would have bought it. But since it was free I tried it and really like it. I will continue to use it and buy replacements. I told Tim this, and he told me got one free in the mail, too, and loves it. I also overheard one of the cadets from Air Force say something about loving his Mach 3.

Anyway, the Quattro has four blades, and reminds me of the Saturday Night Live fake commercial about the triple blade where the last blade rips the hair out by the root. Tim and I remarked that by the time his 8 year old son, Will, was old enough to shave there will be razors with 12 blades.

Having been succesfully convinced that the Mach 3 is a great product, I guess I have to try other products I see in commercial that might be of worth. And I wonder where their sales would be today if they had originally taken the millions of dollars they spent in TV advertising and put it towards giveaways in the mail and at football games. Guess we’ll never know.

So I’m trying to figure out if there is anything I can giveaway that would get me new potential clients. This could be some basic optimization on one page for a web site, or set up a pay per click account for free. We’ll have to see.

I sat with some people who have a large ecommerce site. They were one of the few sites that made it through the Tech Bust from the last couple years ago. They started out by getting money on a per acquisition basis but changed their business plan when they came to realize something about human nature. Not everyone tells the truth.

So, instead of paying on a per acquisition (or sale) basis, they are selling the leads and making a good business of it. It reminds me of an agreement I made about a year and a half ago. I agreed to pay this guy, Ted, 10% of all revenues derived from a lead he gave me. Boy, did it hurt to have to shell out the money to him, especially because I wasn’t making much on the project. Even though the project ended up being over $11,000, Ted ended up making just a little less than me because most of the money went to the programmer I had hired.

Of course, I learned in the process two things. One, that I should build a little extra into the bid. And, two, agree to pay a commission of 5% instead of 10%. The best lesson I learned is that I need to honor my agreements. I don’t think Ted would have ever known the total amount of the contract but I knew. And I couldn’t have lived with myself if I had tried to shortchange Ted.

Good for Ted for making a good deal. He made $1,100 for just passing along a lead. And good for me following through on a commitment. I’m not much of a believer in Karma, but I do believe in reaping what you sow. I sowed honesty, so I trust that people will sow honesty with me in the future.

A former co-worker Alisha and I were talking today about the movie “Falling Down”. The movie starring Michael Douglass is about a man displaced from his job who’s mad at the world. He keeps running into injustice and absurdity as he travels across Los Angeles to his ex-wife’s home in Venice Beach. The movie gives great insight into the ills of society. George Carlin does the same.

I used to have a quote from George Carlin over my desk about the adsurdity of the way “Man” thinks. Here it is: Think for a moment about flamethrowers. The fact that we have them at all. What it indicates to me is that at some point, some person said to himself, “Look at all those people across the road. What I wouldn’t give to set them on fire. But I’m much too far away. If only I had some device that would shoot flames on them.”

Society needs more people like George Carlin and movies like “Falling Down” to put a mirror in front of our face to show us how absurd we act at times. And then shake us up enough to want to do something about it.

There’s an episode from “Happy Days” where the Cunninghams have gone to California and Fonzie becomes a daredevil by jumping over a cage with a shark in it on waterskies. And he’s wearing his everpresent brown leather jacket. To some this was the beginning of the end of “Happy Days.”

Most TV shows experience “jumping the shark”, the time in the series when it takes a turn for the worse and you know the end it year. In my option, “Frazier” jumped the shark when Daphne and Niles got together. “MASH” jumped the shark when everyone, including Klinger, started talking in clever catch phrases and puns like Hawkeye.

There’s even a web site (www.jumptheshark.com)
that documents the different times that shows jump the shark.And Ted McGinley is the patron saint of jumping the shark, considering the fact that he was at the end of “Happy Days”, “Married …With Children” and “Love Boat”. The end is near when he shows up.

Businesses jump the shark, too. It’s when they start trying to do too many things, or they try to change their image for the worse, or they get a leader who isn’t qualified to lead. You know the end is near before they go under or have to do a major revamping. They are desperate.

How desperate are you and are you doing things that spell the beginning of the end? One example would be getting clients that are too small or you keep on a client even though they are wrecking havoc on your staff. Another one would be keeping or getting a client who borders on the shady. No matter how hard we try, we try to justify it.

It takes boldness and faith to either hold the line on something you know will work and it just needs time. Or it means getting rid of products or services that are outdated or unneeded that you’ve always done.

As I watched “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” a while back I was thinking that I should have sang this song as I left my last job.

I was thinking of “Saturday Night Live” when Molly Shannon’s Mary Catherine Gallagher would break into song to express her feelings. So, I thought, “I’m not just a misfit, I’m not just a nitwit. You can’t fire me, I quit, since I don’t fit in.” And I really didn’t fit in.

I had a place to go, which happened to be anywhere except where I was.

I think we often settle for the comfortable, the routine, the familiar. I see that all the time, even though people hate where they are. They stay because it’s convenient and are scared to leave, even though they feel it’s better to stay where they are.

My leaving several months ago was so good for me but it’s been difficult. Over the last month I have been in a battle with a couple clients to get them to give us what they owe us. We did a screensaver for a local company that has 800 employees. I figured they were good for the money, especially because they were a bank with 40 branches. But the nitwit we were working with kept telling us the check was in the mail.

It turns out that she never turned in the invoice we gave her in October for the $550 down payment. She told us in mid-November that the office in Utah had processed the invoice and had sent it out two weeks previous. She said she stopped payment on the check and resent our invoice. This past week my bookkeeper called the office in Utah, and they had never heard of us and had never processed the invoice. If I was a vengeful person I would go after this woman and report her to her boss (which I still might do).

To me it’s been a good learning lesson to get a down payment before doing any work and to get the final payment before turning over the final product. I might be a misfit at times, but I’m not a nitwit.

I had lunch with a potential new client the other day. He and I were talking about redesigning his web site to help him get more visitors and have them buy more of his products.

He has great potential. One reason this is so is because he does a lot of writing and has many articles on his web site. One or more of them are bound to pique someone’s interest enough for them to give him a call. Also, having more content on his site is bound to help him with search engines.

Once we have the site redesign and properly formatted for the search engines, it’s going to be amazing the amount of new traffic he will see coming to his site. He also has about 12 hours of interviews that he could sell online as audio pieces, as well as selling the transcripts from his intereviews.

There is great potential for me. And there is great potential for you when you make a concerted effort to become an expert in your business field.