So back in the day when a couple would get married both the man and woman would receive a party. The woman’s was the wedding shower, and the man’s was the bachelor party. Over time women still continue to have showers, but they’ve adopted the man’s party as well.
Then the baby comes, and the woman gets another party – this time the baby shower. I think it is only fair that the man should receive another party as well – the “I’m about to have a kid party.” [keep reading, there is more...]
I’m a sucker. Last year I thought the Detroit Lions would find a way to make the playoffs. When they crapped out last year, I figured I was just a year early with my prediction. With 4 top 10 picks on the offensive side of the ball they’d be sure to score points – plus somebody had to win the NFC Norris (still my favorite Berman-ism). Alas, I was wrong and they are once again “wallowing in their own crapulence.” Now it looks like Steve Mariucci will be the latest coach to end his head coaching career with a stop in Detroit.
Now I think that Mariucci has done a pretty poor job. The offense is pathetic, and Mooch has done his best to put the blame on Joey Harrington. Mariucci has continued to operate the same offense despite having players that are incapable of making it work. Instead of adapting to his players, we have been forced to watch a pathetic version of the west coast offense. Even his guy, Jeff Garcia looks awful (unless of course he was playing ’500′ with that pass in the second half). The fact that Jeff Garcia is his guy should be troublesome enough. And clock management at the end of games has been horrible throughout his tenure.
Now this team has endured it’s share of injuries, and despite picking a top 10 receiver each of the last 3 years Scottie Vines is the cream of the crop. Much of that is out of Mariucci’s control, but he’s done very little with what he has. The other guy who needs to go is Matt Millen. I actually think that Millen has improved since his first couple of years, but of Mariucci is going to be held accountable for the output on the field, Millen needs to be held accountable for not providing him with the talent.
Yesterday was ugly, and not just because the Lions were wearing the black jerseys. Time and time again I was becoming so frustrated at the collective ability of the team to make a play. Maybe it is my fault for expecting something, but this team has let me down at nearly every opportunity this season. The wins they’ve scratched out have been offset by despicable performances. I’ve reached my Lions limit this season – and that says alot since I’m a Tiger fan first.
What with the holidays coming up, I thought it would be a good time to share some suggestions for your loved ones. Right now, you can get official Bayside Tiger merchandise. Choose from the popular “Go Bayside, Beat Valley” t-shirt, the Zach Attack Friends Forever Tour shirt, or the classic and simple Bayside Tiger circle logo shirt.
And speaking of the logo shirt – I can’t believe I never noticed that the logo is exactly the same as the old Detroit Tigers logo.
These wonderful selections are available from Shopping Baysideclothing.com.
I’m teetering between excitement and horror all at the same time.
There is yet another new addition to the Billfer blog family. This weekend I launched BaseBlogging. Building off of 4 plus years experience as a baseball blogger, I wanted to create a site that was a resource for others. The site will have information about blogging, making money, bloggers as journalists, acceptance in the mainstream media, etc. I’m still working on design and navigation issues, but the site is live. Check it out.
Whatever happened to bank signs that told you the temperature? Sure, they were typically wrong, and the information could often be determined by actually rolling down the window. I know that a ton of cars will tell you the external temperature, and there are whole channels on this thing called cable (I think it is really going to take off) dedicated to the weather, and then there is the internet (which also shows potential) which also has detailed weather information. But where have all the bank signs gone?
If I had a bank (hypothetically speaking), I’d definitely put the temperature out there. Of course if I had a bank then it would be absorbed by a large multi-national financial institution (hypothetically speaking) who would assure all my customers that nothing would change. And then 6 months later they’d change the signage to form a cohesive brand and announce that nothing is changing (hypothetically speaking). And then 3 months later they would convert my fee-free accounts to fee-full accounts (hypothetically speaking). Two months later I’d actually notice, call and complain, and have the accounts switched to the “new” fee-free accounts. But I digress (hypothetically speaking).
I guess maybe the better question is, “why did bank signs start displaying the temperature in the first place?”
I love Firefox. Internet Explorer is fine, but Firefox is better. That is why last week when Adsense launched a referral program that included Firefox, I was all over it. I know that about 70% of my readers are using IE, so I figured there were lots of people to convert. I put a big honkin’ button right at the top of my Tiger pages, right between the banner and content. I’d never displayed any sort of ad that prominently, but I viewed this more as a testimonial with benefits than an advertisement. Not to mention that if everybody left IE, I wouldn’t have to cludge code just to accomodate the browser.
Well it has been 9 days and I have yet to have anybody download Firefox from one of those referral buttons. There have been a handful of clicks, but given the prominence of the placement – and the potential market – I expected so much more.
For me the biggest differentiators in Firefox are tabbed browsing and live RSS bookmarks. And then there are all the free plug-ins to make the browser even more popular. If you’re already using Firefox, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not then here is a quick lesson. Instead of having multiple browsers open, you can open up multiple tabs within one browser window. It makes surfing so much easier, and cleans up your taskbar as well. As for RSS bookmarks, instead of using a RSS reader (or in addition to using a reader), you can simply bookmark a site’s RSS feed. When you go to that bookmark, it will show you the 10 most recent entries.
I’d love to post all this stuff on my Tiger site, but it just doesn’t fit. But if by chance you are reading this with IE, give Firefox a chance. I don’t care if you use my referral button, or if you just download it. It’s a better browser – believe me.
There’s magic that happens Monday through Friday from 11:30-1:30. That magic is the Pizza Hut lunch buffet. It’s been around for years, and yet I hardly ever think about it. The family and I partook this afternoon, and it’s a beautiful thing. All you can eat pizza, salad, and breadsticks – all for $5.50 for adults and $2.50 for kids. And then there is the dessert pizza – an apple strudle-ish concoction that is delicious.
For somebody that loves buffets like I do (a basic tenet of billfer-dom is “A buffet isn’t a meal – it’s a challenge”), I should be going there once a week instead of once a year. But the problem is I forget about it. Of all the pizza marketing that gets done, why isn’t there a little bit of room in the budget for the Pizza Hut lunch buffet?
I had a very nice moment today. As I’m prone to do on occasion, I googled detroit tigers. This is a screenshot of what I saw:
The Detroit Tigers Weblog was right there on the first page amongst the real media. Four years and over 900 pages of Tiger related content have paid off. While it is probably sad that I need validation from Google, I can’t help but be downright giddy.
This is the second post in a series detailing the launch of my new site, TV for Tots. Part 1 covered the first week of the site, looking at content generation. Part 2 will be looking at some of the ways I publicized the site, and how traffic went the 2nd week.
On Friday October 14th I decided to submit the site to search engines. While there are dozens of search engines out there, I went with the big 3 of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Typically one might want to wait until they had more content – or until they had been linked to on other blogs. However, I had the advantage of an established blog for that first link placement. Submission is a fairly quick and easy process, then it is just a matter of waiting.
Starting that Sunday (the 16th) I started to get my first search engine traffic. MSN was the first to list me, and get me decent position. My hits increased from, well me, to about 20-25 unique visitors a day during that second week. I was getting the occasional hit in Google, as I had been indexed. However, I was showing up so low in their results, that MSN made up two-thirds of my search engine traffic.
Another tactic I took for marketing the site was the use of Technorati Tags. It was the first time I had tagged any posts, and so far I’ve been tagging each post with the station, and the show that the post is about. In many cases, I’m tagging to an empty space – or topics that hadn’t been tagged at all yet. For example, I’m currently the only blog tagging Little Einsteins. This has advantages and disadvantages in terms of traffic. Because nobody is writing about the topics – or at least tagging them – it may mean that it isn’t a hot topic. However, it doesn’t preclude people from searching on the topic, plus my posts always bubble to the top. In addition to tagging posts, I also “claimed” the blog under my technorati account. This will allow me to easily see who is linking to my content.
Another form of marketing I didn’t take part in (early on) was soliciting links. I know that I hate getting emails from people saying “please link to me,” especially from blogs with no content. I’m not a link snob by any means, but I want to make sure that if I’m sending traffic there, it is a worthwhile site. I’m much more inclined to respond to an email that is phrased, “I just wanted to let you know that I started a site you might be interested in. I noticed on your site that you write about xxx frequently. This xxx post might be of interest.” In any case, I wanted to establish a decent content base first, and I wanted to see if I could get some link love by other bloggers finding the site through search results.
The other publicity tactic I adopted early on was RSS subscriptions. I signed up with feedburner and chickletized my sidebar to death. I also leveraged Feedburner’s Feedblitz feature to allow readers to sign up for updates. I gave the subscription area a prominent place in the sidebar. If somebody found the site, I wanted it to be very easy for them to find it again.
That pretty much covers the early publicity I did. I decided to take a more passive approach to marketing in the early stages. Getting picked up quickly by MSN was key to getting some traffic early on – and those first few Adsense clicks. It served as a point of encouragement to keep going. That second week I also added several more pages of content, and continued to make minor site tweaks, but I was off and running.
In part 3, I’ll cover what has happened in the subsequent weeks including: more aggressive marketing, getting google love, and how quickly I fell in love with Chitika (ref link).
For the last couple months I’ve had a little bit of free time. For a long time I was working two real jobs half time. It was a sweet deal as I could to work from home 3 days a week, and I liked both jobs. Then in August one of those jobs suddenly went away. I was able to increase hours at the other job, but I wasn’t quite back to full time and I had essentially taken a 20% paycut. So I had some time to work on other projects – which is why this blog and TV for Tots were launched. Well the good news is that as of Monday I will once again be fully employed. The bad news is that it coincides with probably my most prolific creative surge.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to be able to provide for my family again and the additional hours I picked up will be working with web technologies – right in my wheelhouse. The thing is, I’ve launched two new websites, and I’ve got ideas for two more. Focusing will definitely be an issue for me. On one hand I want to launch these other websites. One of them has a very short shelf life, and if I don’t start it now it won’t happen. The other one can actually wait a bit, but maybe more lucrative.
And then there is TV for Tots. I figure that I have about 3 more weeks to get significant readership. Christmas season shopping will be my opportunity to make the most money on that site, so I should be focusing all my efforts on publicizing it. All the while Tiger news will start coming fast and furious with the GM meetings, winter meetings, free agent signings, and other roster moves. Plus, I would like to further flesh out and solidfy DIBS.
Now this calvacade of ideas didn’t come until the last couple weeks. If only I had been thinking along these lines in August. Instead I was lamenting trivial things like how I was going to make ends meet – but not really considering blogging as a viable option. I already had an established site where I could have used the time for publicity and advertising.
Alas, it looks like I’ll just need to focus on what I’ve already got going. I’m already starting to feel like blogging is another job, and I don’t really have more hours to give to it. If I were to bring more sites up, that would just detract from the sites I currently have going.
