Television Preview - lame
My wife and I got a letter in the mail the other day saying that some company called “Television Preview” wanted our opinions on new shows that networks were considering. It sounded like a pretty fun night - we just had to show up at a hotel in Salt Lake and watch some 30 minute shows and tell them what we thought. The only thing that I thought was weird was that the letter said that “Television Preview” would show us television shows with the commercials in them, just like we would see at home. They even told us to wear whatever we wear to watch tv - I guess they’re lucky we didn’t go.Before we headed over to the hotel for a “free” night of entertainment, I decided to look up some information on “Television Preview” online. Here are the first 3 sites that I found (that were not actually “Television Preview” themselves):http://teevee.org/archive/2001/05/09/http://www.nowtoronto.com/issues/2000-09-07/news2.htmlhttp://www.nfcg.org.uk/ConsNews/cn197p12.htmSo what’s the scam here? Well, they’re not trying to sell you anything (they make this abundantly clear on their own website - probably because it’s the only thing they have going for them). Advertisers pay them to embed commercials in their “pilot programs” (some of which are over 10 years old and have already actually aired) and give you a survey to fill out before and after the shows. They try to figure out what kind of impact the ads have on you.These people are feeding on our natural instincts to share our opinions. We feel important deciding what programming will and will not be aired. “Television Preview” should be more straightforward in their approach - I’m surprised more people aren’t upset with their questionable tactics.Marketing research is important to any marketer - the moral of this story is that you should be honest and straightforward when gathering such information. Also, be smart - my wife noticed that while the return address for Television Preview said they were located in Hollywood, the mail stamp showed that it originated in Indiana. Thank you, Google, for saving me from a wasted Friday night!Side note: We ended up seeing the documentary “The March of the Penguins” instead - it was great.
Sewell TechBlog
If you are interested in issues dealing with connectivity, check out the Sewell TechBlog. We are always trying to find new ways to provide premium-level customer service. The blog format is attractive because it is an informal channel that enables us share information with a mass audience. The idea surfaced when we were brainstorming about ways to make our customers more satisfied - we realized that 95% of the issues that we hear on a daily basis are common problems or questions we have already dealt with. I’ll keep you updated on the effectiveness of the blog.
Windows blogs stink
At Sewell we are working on a tech blog that will allow us to provide better support and information to our customers. I really like the concept because it enables us to share more information with our customers (and anybody looking for advice on driver installations, hardware configurations, etc.), but we can do it in an informal atmosphere.I didn’t realize how hard it was to find a Windows-based solution that was halfway decent. Sterling and I tried about eight different options before we called it quits. We’re just going to put it up on a linux machine and run wordpress (note: you can run wordpress on a windows machine if you install php and mysql, but we decided against it because microsoft does not “support” the configuration).A lot of the blogs we looked at were decent, but they lacked really obvious features like the ability to have different users write posts and require approval on all user comments (which protects us from spam-comments). Also, the Windows blogs all feature a huge calendar showing posts by date - is this really important to people? I think it’s more annoying than anything. If anybody hears about any decent Windows blogging software, let me know, but for now I’ll stick with wordpress (which I love).
Reciprocal linking - does it work?
In building an internet marketing campaign, every marketer knows that it’s important to have links to their page to guarantee indexing by the search engines and a higher page rank (which will move your company up higher in the natural results for Google).The question for most marketers is whether to buy inbound-only links or use reciprocal links, which are free. Like anything else on the internet, you probably want a mixed strategy if you want to achieve the best results. However, I have been impressed with how a little bit of reciprocal linking helped PlainAdvice achieve a PR of 3 in just two months live. Also, the site is consistently reindexed every single day.First of all, it’s important to understand the difference between each - if you link to another site and they link to you, Google is going to give you some credit for that reciprocal link. However, if you don’t link to another website, but they link to you, Google will assume that you are more important and you will get more credit for that link than a reciprocal link. So they both help you, but an inbound-only link is obviously better to have. For this reason, high page-ranked sites sell their links and they can be quite expensive.The main disadvantage of reciprocal links is that you will need to have a page (or a few) with a ton of links to other sites. If you can find some really relevant companies to swap links with, this isn’t a problem at all (and the search engine will give you more credit for relevant links). But if you have a hodgepodge site like PlainAdvice, you might just have a few pages chock full of links, some relevant some not. Check out the link page to see what I’m talking about. While a page like this may not work for a retailer, for a purely informational site like PlainAdvice, it’s fine.So how do you find people who want to swap links? You can approach people directly and ask them, but this would take a lot of time and a lot of rejection. I have had a few people call at work over the past few years asking if we wanted to swap, but it just didn’t make sense for us because as a retailer that pays for each visitor on our site, we don’t want to send people anywhere else when we finally get them on our page.The best tool I have found for link-swapping is LinkMarket. You can sign up for free and search for relevant sites. Then you can request a link, and if they approve it, you will both be linking to each other. I was pretty skeptical of it at first, but decided I would give it a shot because it’s free. However, when I look at the number of links to my site on yahoo (linkdomain:plainadvice.com), I see a number of those sites linking to me. (Note: the command to check backwards links on google is link:plainadvice.com, but from my experience they usually show about 20% of the links that yahoo shows).So if you want a really clean site, you probably want to check with a link broker and buy inbound-only links, but if you just want to get your site quickly indexed and start building a decent page rank that won’t require a monthly fee (like most inbound links do), you are better off using a link exchange such as linkmarket.
A lazy bunny and a pretty wife
She also likes to guard her “rock”:
Hispanic cuisine in San Jose
I’ll be going to Search Engine Strategies, a conference for internet marketing, in San Jose next month. I am staying at the Clarion Hotel so I will only be a few blocks from the show.I checked out the hotel amenities and got a laugh out of the “foreign amenities” for hispanics:Univision Spanish TV, Spanish translation, Del Taco Mexican restaurant 50 yards away.
Hard times - at least they can’t eat us
My wife and I have had some hard times lately - things were going really great up until a couple of months ago - then my foot started hurting me. We had been training for the St. George Marathon, so I just figured that I had overdone it and I should take it easy for a few days.Tip: Get good insuranceIt turns out that I had MRSA, which is a methycilline-resistant staph infection (translation - staph infection that won’t go away with normal medicines). So I had to go to the emergency room, have surgery and stay in the hospital for a week. Then I had a line put in my arm that went to my heart and I had to drive to the hospital twice a day for IV therapy, which lasted 2 hours. Apparently, the insurance plan that I had chosen (Mega Life, underwritten by Beech Street) had a $3K surgery deductible along with a million exclusions, leaving my total liability about $10K on a $30K bill.So here is my tip - don’t make the same mistake I did - get BlueCross/BlueShield, IHC, Kaiser, etc. If an individual insurance plan seems to be really inexpensive through a company like Mega Life, there is a reason - the coverage is no good!But even a huge hospital bill (among other debts) didn’t worry me too much because my wife and I were both working. The debt did mean we had to figure things out financially, but everything looked like it would work out fine.Murphy’s Law: The world will kick you when you’re downSo things were looking a little up - then it happened. My wife went to work yesterday and was told that she didn’t have a job anymore. They gave her a little bit of money and a kick in the pants on the way out the door. We had just figured out our finances, then I had to go and take out her income and rework the numbers - I was frustrated because they weren’t looking good.Bob Parsons inspired meI consider Bob Parsons to be one of the best entrepreneurs of our time, not because of his enormous success as the founder of GoDaddy, but because he is very down to earth. In his blog, he talks about some of the hard times (financially) that he had prior to his success with GoDaddy and Parsons Technology.I read a recent post from Bob’s blog where he recounts being petrified after taking out an advertising loan for $50K. His dad told him, “Well Robert, if it doesn’t work, they can’t eat you!” His point, of course, is that if everything goes south, it isn’t the end of the world.The worst case scenario isn’t all that badSo, following Bob Parson’s advice, I started considering what the worst possible outcome could be for our situation. As Bob points out, there is no debtor’s prison in America, so that’s not a concern. Basically, if the worst of the worst happens, we will have some debts we will have to deal with for a while - not the end of the world.My wife is a better person than meMy wife didn’t require the convincing that I did that everything would be alright. She was a little bit hurt about losing her job and said she would miss her friends, but she has an incredible ability to keep everything in perspective. While I was stressing about paying the bills, her approach was much more simple - she said we should pay our tithing first, then just start paying what we can. It was simple to her.I feel better about things nowI’m still not sure how everything is going to work out, but I’m not really worried about it. In fact, my wife has a job interview tomorrow. Even if it doesn’t work out, I know that something will. Ernst & Young has a very hostile work environment, so it is a good thing that she’s not working there anymore. For example, one of Jen’s coworkers was recently criticized by a manager for putting her family before work - of course she was! That’s what a good parent does!Although the initial blow was tough, Jen seems happier now and she is excited to find a job that she enjoys. Like so many things that we have gone through in the past few years, we have learned that most challenges we go through are blessings in disguise.
Yahoo index last night
According to the Yahoo search blog, Yahoo made changes to their index last night. Comments from readers of the blog indicate that many people saw their rankings slip.This doesn’t really surprise me - most of the guys who are active in the search blog are SEO guys that chase the algorithm for higher rankings. There’s nothing wrong with doing this, but when you do this, you need to remember that you are at the search engine’s mercy to not make drastic changes to the algorithm. So when Yahoo makes a significant change in the way the index ranks pages, these guys who have “cracked the code” are going to see their results drop.Personally, this recent change in the index has helped PlainAdvice and this blog. My theory is that the changes to the index actually helped me because any SEO I have done has been natural - using bold text on keywords, writing rich content, having a lot of text, relevant links, etc. So while chasing the algorithm may give you a spike in the short term, recognize the importance of also doing these other simple things that will more than likely increase your rankings over the long term.
Indexed by Google?
I have been asked by quite a few people how they can know when they are being indexed by Google. Here’s the easiest two ways:1) Install the Google toolbar and go to your page. Click on the “i” on the Google toolbar and select “Cached Snapshot of Page” on the drop-down menu. You will see the cached page and the date of the cache. Note that you will need to put “www” if you were indexed with the prefix (some sites are and some aren’t).2) Look in your log files (or use your site statistics software) to identify visitors to your site. You should see googlebots, msnbots, etc. for all the engines that are keeping an eye on you. This will not tell you exactly when you are added to their index, but you will know that you will be soon. I have noticed that all the popular engines hit my site just after midnight.
Fonality vs. Avaya
I have been looking at getting a new phone system lately that will support about 10 concurrent users. I literally knew nothing about VoIP systems for small companies when I started looking, but now I think I’m pretty educated on the basics, so I hope I can save someone the search or at least point you in the right direction.First of all, from everything that I’ve seen and read, Avaya is the industry leader in small business VoIP solutions. Every single retailer claimed that they were “better than Avaya.” Rather than be impressed with the small players, I found myself wondering why everybody compared themselves to Avaya - they appeared to be the de facto standard. I was finally convinced of this when I saw a Cisco advertisement that said something to the effect of “Better than an Avaya.” Come on, Cisco, you can do better than that…I was ready to go with the Avaya IP Office, which is a $7K - $20K option depending on all the features you want (assuming a company with 20 or so people). This is a pretty sweet product with auto attendant (”Hi, you have reached yada yada yada. Press 1 for…”), voicemail, unique extensions, remote access, forwarding, etc. But then I saw Om Malik’s blurb on fonality, a similar solution. I have seen a million companies with products like this, but the fact that Om Malik (Sr. Editor at Business 2.0) even mentioned it totally legitimized the product in my mind.Now I’m torn - the Avaya office costs a little bit more, but it is an established brand (AT&T owned) that I know will be around forever. However, the admin interface for Fonality is so easy to use I swear my grandparents could set up the auto attendant and call forwarding.For now I’m going to keep my eye on Fonality and wait a couple of months to make the decision.