30 May 2009: The first night, after dinner and after leaving Acapulco, we retired to our balcony and, in the warm, heavy air, watched a night-time thunderstorm on the horizon. Thoroughly beautiful and romantic. Flashes of fork lightning illuminating clouds and coastal mountains, lightning behind clouds turning them into lanterns and dramatic forks to ground. Unforgettable. Tough to capture on camera, mind.
28 May 2009: OK, this is possibly the worst thing I've ever seen, so .. don't read on, basically.
But I have to put up a link. Now, I'm not a big fan of PETA because I feel their marketing is all wrong. I don't want to see animals treated badly, so I might join PETA. Then they send me images of animals being treated badly. It's wrong.
What I'm going to link to is, they say, video from a Chinese fur farm. It's gross and hideous beyond imagination. I'm not even a fan of shock tactics. But this is something else.
So, if you think you can take it, here's the link but you have been warned. It'll stay with you.
28 May 2009: Wow. I'm currently reading a ranting religious nutcase work, maybe fifty pages of dense text stapled together, that someone pushed through our door a few years ago (it found its way to the top of the reading pile). The world is run by (might as well be) lizards aimed at massive depopulation. Medicine is poison. Politicians are in on it. The oil's running out. Swine flu, aids, et al are all man made. The moment is coming soon when we will all carry the devil's mark and the only way out is to follow Jesus, whose return is imminent.
Compared to the English Democratic Party, my religious guy seems perfectly sensible, I wonder if he's standing.
I know someone who is considering voting for the EDP. So make damn sure you place your own vote on the 4th or my religious nutcase friend's predictions might just come right.
26 May 2009: Eeeh, the world of social networking, you hardly need a website at all. For The Paragon, I've just added a Facebook page and a Twitter page. They look pretty nice don't you think?
26 May 2009: From Scarborough to York on the A64 nowadays, every time there's an overhead cable, there's a sign either side of it on both sides of the road. We couldn't work out how that could benefit anything. My view was that in increasing the signage count, it made each sign less significant which could lead to people paying the road signs less heed, so increasing accidents.
It still doesn't make any sense. There's presumably a standard height for anything over a road, and so a standard maximum height for any vehicle. Freight and emergency services people must have a database of low bridges. Any vehicle over the standard height must have to make a detailed journey plan and perhaps have a police escort and there must be data available to help them do that. Such a driver would be acutely aware of overhead cables and be on the lookout.
What I think is frustrating is the inability to drill down and get to the bottom of how the decision was made and why. There may be a perfectly good explanation, something like: "We did a health and safety assessment, found that risk and according to law we have to show we've taken measures to mitigate those risks. It's your law, people, put into place by your parliament, people, we (the local council) are just abiding by what you want. Don't like it? Change the law, because if someone electrocutes themselves with their crane on the A64 one day, we'd be in court anyway about why we hadn't done anything. Damned if we do, damned if we don't."
But because nothing ever seems to get traction we just end up shrugging our shoulders.
I'd be very happy if Goodwill or the local paper pushed further. For instance, it seems to me that Goodwill's question was "what risk assessment was carried out before the posts were put up", as in, what led to the decision to put the signs up.
The answer relates to a risk assessment done before sending out the workers to put the signs in the ground, well after the decision was made.
So Clark didn't answer Goodwill's question and the temptation is just to give up, certainly as punters. But it's the local paper and Goodwill's job to push these things home. I hope they do.
26 May 2009: My personal GPS tracking device client, is about to supply trackers to a group of extreme athletes who are going to go from Lands End to John O'Groats by frankly unsavoury means. One will run cross country. Another will kite surf the coast. And another will cycle there .. and back again.
They wanted to embed a location map into their website so I've been working on that. Where better to test it than here. If it works, this shows their location:
26 May 2009: I've probably said before, when I do blog about the holiday, I'm putting up a version here which is liberally sprinkled with Google Adsense advertising. When you click on that, I get paid a hidden percentage of what the advertiser paid per click through Adwords.
So far, despite me submitting it to a few blog directories, only 24 visitors have gone to that site, and the bounce rate is 80%, which is high and suggests people don't like the immediate look of it for whatever reason (probably that because it's got loads of ads in it it looks like a crap site).
Anyway, of those 24 visitors, I've had one click that paid me $.42. Let's say a cruise would cost about $6,000 for two people, I'd need 14,285 clicks per year, and at a rate of 1 click per 24 visitors, that's 342,857 visitors to my holiday blog each year, or 939 per day.
If I had 939 visitors to that blog each day, I'd be looking at other ways to earn money from what is a serious amount of traffic.
Or, look at it another way. Let's say it takes, on a good day, 15 minutes to produce one of those blogs considering there are photos to process. I've blogged 16 times here, which is four hours, and earned 42c. Granted, that should be 42c every month for a while, so when does it become sustainable?
Let's say I blogged like that for 8 hours. I'd deliver 32 blogs a day and after day one would be able to expect 84c in a month, and after a month of that, $25. So after a year of that, $300 per month. Ten years, then, before you get to around $3,000 a month which is more like a living wage.
Clearly if you were going to do that for a living you'd optimise the living daylights out of it, writing more quickly, positioning the ads, writing about things that have high value clicks, doing everything you can to get traffic, and every now and then with a following like that you'd be able to persuade some of your readers to buy something either from you or from some sort of affiliate programme. So maybe if you cut your expenses to a minimum, can write, and are willing to do that all day as a full time job, you might get to sustainability after a few years.
Even more interesting is the idea that actually, if you carry on, then unlike a 'proper' job, there's no ceiling to your earnings, you can just keep on going. You're going to get to be a super blogger after all that.
And all extrapolated from that one click. As they say, your mileage may vary.
19 May 2009: The rule used to be get yourself into the Open directory and pay to get into the Yahoo! directory and go from there.
Then there was a wave of interest in creating your own directory in order to make money from paid entries. The way Google works spurs that because directories are likely to be able to get high search engine positions.
Well now, I'm getting great traffic volume from people who are interested, stick around and buy things from choosing the right directory entries for my clients.
I had a call from Scoot yesterday wanting £104 for a listing that would, they said, get a great position in Google for me.
But I've a huge resentment against Yellow Pages (and possibly Thomson too) for charging well over the odds for things like website links. And I just bought an entry for under £40 for one client that's creating fabulous traffic right now .. no bounce rate, spending an average of 10 minutes on the site .. even before we fully complete the entry with our photograph and other details.
So my point is: choose the right directories to be in, and they are probably non-traditional ones. Ditch the Yellow Pages in favour of what will actually work in your area.
Now, I can't tell you what that is because it depends on your keyword research and how the directory is structured. But I can tell you I'm getting great results from ditching the obvious directories in favour of better choices.
18 May 2009: On the end of the second day, we sailed away from Acapulco. Free of land for the first time, it's quite something.
On the last day of the cruise you're given a tidy version of the ship's log which says we 'thrust laterally' at 17:36 on Saturday 21 February 2009 from the dock at Acapulco and set sail for Huatulco.
Here's a video snippet of us pulling away from the dock with the steel band in the background, just before going down to dinner.
14 May 2009: Wow, Scarborough won the "most enterprising town in Europe" award last night. How genuinely fabulous is that? I'm ashamed to say I didn't contribute very much to it happening. Here's the BBC on the story.
14 May 2009: So there I was taking sunny day pics of people enjoying the seaside
when this chap,
despite being only this far from a litter bin,
decided he'd done with his chips and threw the box out of his car window.
Notice the birds? They wouldn't be there if he hadn't just thrown it. Using nature against them, I love it. So I stood there and waited to see what the woman in the back would do with hers.
Well whaddyaknow? When she'd finished, she just threw the box out of the window too.
Eventually they noticed me and his mate wanted to see so he opened the sunroof to take a look.
Here's the vehicle reg.
Now, I don't know how you feel about littering but for me it encompasses so much and is one of the few things that I really can't seem to compromise on. I can always see the other person's point of view on things. Except for littering.
I really can't see the point of coming somewhere nice, sitting to enjoy chips looking at the view, then doing something to mess that view up and driving off.
Is it attitude? Is it .. "I'm the most important thing here"? Well, if he felt that you'd think he'd take better care of himself. Someone who feels that would surely drive something better than a T reg and would't be quite so lardy. Maybe.
There's the one that goes "it gives litter pickers a job". That one has the faint air of working people sticking together, unionism, power to the people. But, it's cobblers, really, innit?
I guess closer is the prison mentality, born of a life of being shat upon: "nothing you can do will hurt me, therefore I'm powerful". OK, I get that. But it's not a lot to ask to get out of your damn car and put your rubbish in the bin. Given that the bin is really only a few metres away and you are in a car (so could actually drive to it).
But even if you do feel you've been disrespected all your life, these are simple choices to make. It costs nothing to put your litter in the bin. It might even make people like you more. Just the simple act of littering makes everyone know you're worthless. Putting your rubbish in the bin lets everyone know that, on occasion, you think of others. Just that makes it more likely you'll find a relationship, find love, build a life, and lift yourself. Littering is repellent, how can you get people on your side behaving like that? And the big deal about being male is you want people on your side. A tribe, a group of mates within which you can demonstrate your influence, makes you attractive. Billy no mates does not mate very often.
Littering is actually illegal. So I reported it. Yesterday evening I got a call from Harry Briggs at the council, he wants to see my pics (at flytipping@scarborough.gov.uk ).
I'm working a little for the Micro Loan Foundation. In simple terms what they do is seek out poor, rural women in Malawi who, with a small loan, could buy something to kick start their lives, start a small business, and lift themselves out of poverty. They target women because their help goes further. Women care for others and so when a woman lifts herself up she brings her family with her. Her kids, and the future, benefit. They also only give micro loans to people whose idea has high leverage so it benefits the wider community too.
See the difference? There are great people in this world and lovely things will happen to them. And there are people that we would all simply be better off without, who few good people could support. Since that follows them like a raincloud, they are mostly making their own world bad. And the start of making their lives better is using the litterbin provided.
13 May 2009: I've been playing with some new Analytics software that presents website traffic from pay per click ads within an AIDA framework which, in ordinary language, means you can tell how interested people are in your page.
The first thing when someone arrives is to grab their Attention. I'm thinking a good photograph, a great headline, maybe a good design might help with that along with the relevance of the original search to the ad copy to the page they've landed on.
Next up is Interest. We need pretty quickly to talk about the visitor and their problems and how we can solve them. We're into the text here unless you put up a video, and if the text is hard to read or loses the reader's trust for whatever reason, you're lost.
After a short while, you've got Desire. This reader actually wants what you're selling, so I'm guessing we'll want to ramp that up until they take Action and buy or sign up or whatever it is you want them to do.
What this software does is map the length of time people spend on your site to the AIDA stages.
What's fabulous about that is I can diagnose exactly the problem with your website and take appropriate action. With one site, recently, I diagnosed a problem with the initial Attention stage. Basically people were arriving and leaving immediately. I put a great picture on the front page, and that fixed the problem. That's all.
So it's a great way of being very surgical about the whole process of selling online. What's the problem? Let's fix that. No big rewrites or redesigns, just simple (and cheap) steps towards good online business.
That client's enquiries rose by 33%. Not just because I added the picture. But because I knew that that was the problem that needed fixing.
9 May 2009: I've just started work on Internet marketing for this organic b&b. What does that tell you? That 'organic b&b' is a phrase I'd like them to rank for. They presently don't appear for anything much useful in Google. Nice people. That's the 'before' website if you're looking around the 9 May, otherwise it's whatever I've done since, probably starting with photographs.
9 May 2009: I'm enjoying playing with popular blogging tools. So here's my holiday blog with some Adwords on it with the hope that someone somewhere will actually visit and click something.
In uploading video to YouTube, I didn't know but they provide the tools to geocode what you've uploaded, which is great for a travelogue .. I actually have the latlong of many of the places we went to.
What's more, YouTube allows for automatic uploading into Blogger.
Pity the pics from Blogger don't make it into Flickr, but hey.
