Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Blogs Don’t Do Diddly Squat

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MarketingSherpa just published this week’s issue of their B-to-C marketing newsletter, and here’s the teaser:

SUMMARY: Call us cynics. Blogs may be hip and trendy, but
they don’t do diddly-squat for most people’s businesses.

After four years of research, MarketingSherpa reporters
estimate only .03% of the 34.5 million existing blogs are
driving sales or prospective customers to their bloggers. 
(That’s less than 1,000 that we’ve been able to find.)

Want your blog to be the one that works? Discover seven
practical secrets from a real estate blog that gets
prospects to raise their hands and beg to be contacted:

Here’s the link to the full case study, which will be put behind their paid-subscribers only wall on March 18, 2005.

If you’re at all interested in making money with a blog you should read the case study.  It’s about a realtor in Tampa using his blog to generate qualified leads for his high-end real-estate venture.

Full disclosure: MarketingSherpa was a client of mine and I’m a huge fan of Anne Holland, the genius behind the whole MarketingSherpa online publishing machine. 

BTW, I think Anne & Company right some of the most compelling ad/marketing copy you’ll find.

I’m Number 3!

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So yesterday I’m procrastinating on my real work and looking at the referral stats for this blog.  I notice that I’m getting some click throughs from Google to my "Drink More Ovaltine" post.  So I check it out and sure enough at some point yesterday my blog, specifically that page of my blog, ranked number three on Google for the term "Ovaltine."

I’ve heard that blogs do incredibly well with natural search, but I truly find this amazing, and in a way troubling.

Here’s why it’s troubling to me:

  1. I don’t drink Ovaltine, and I don’t know anyone who does.  Now there are several Ovaltine drinkers out there who have found me, and I’m afraid of what they might do if they find out I drink two pots of coffee a day.
  2. I don’t currently have AdSense running on this site.  If I did I might have generated a couple of clicks worth at least four or five cents.  I’m always troubled when I miss opportunities for great wealth.
  3. Considering some of the other headlines I’ve written I’m kind of worried about what else I might be ranking high for, and consequently the kind of folks I might be attracting to this blog.  In particular I’m worried about the terms "doodle" (slight pornographic connotation), "courting" (same reason, at least for the fundamentalists out there), "litigious idiots" (way too many lawyers know how to read, and at least two have heard of the internet), and finally "State of the Union" (need I explain?).

Well, all told I’m probably not half as troubled as the poor director of marketing at Ovaltine who’s getting spanked on Google by a semi-literate blogger who doesn’t even want the ranking. 

Drink more Ovaltine indeed!

Update: Fred Wilson at AVC points out the "underwhelming" performance of Google AdSense.  I definitely agree with his point.

Wake Does the Right Thing

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As I mentioned in a comment on Patrick Eakes’ post about Chris Paul’s low blow to Julius Hodge in the Wake-NC State game last night, I thought that Mr. Paul deserved a one game suspension from the coach regardless of what the ACC decided to do.

According to the W-S Journal that’s just what he got.  (Here’s the statement on Wake’s website).

My compliments to the folks at Wake, and my sincere hope that Mr. Paul learns a valuable lesson from this.  By all accounts he’s the kind of kid that will, and from what I’ve heard about his family the suspension is probably the gentlest lesson he’s going to get from the people that matter to him!

ACC Football in March

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Thanks to the miracle of Tivo I’m in the middle of watching Wake Forest play NC State about two hours after the live action.  This after watching the North Carolina-Duke game thanks to the same Tivo miracle.

Sidebar: Life is definitely good when you can take your wife out for your 13th anniversary and still get to satisfy your basketball jones.  My eternal gratitude to whoever invented the DVR.  And I got to play an 1 1/2 hours of my own b-ball at the Y earlier today!

My keen analysis of these games?  All of the ACC basketball refs had to have come down with the flu and had the football officials sub for them.  I swear I haven’t seen so many bodies on the deck in years.

To make matters worse the whistles are very inconsistent.  Guys are mugging each other with no call and then their blown for a hand check.

Still with all that the Duke-NC game was fantastic. I don’t know if Duke choked or Carolina choked them.

I’m at about 13:00 left in the NC State-Wake game and ugly doesn’t even begin to describe it.  More on that later.

Update:  4:16 left in the game.  Wake is playing like crap, but I’m telling you that State is getting some home cooking from the refs.  It isn’t deciding the game because State is shooting less than 50% from the free throw line. Ugly.

Of course I think Chris Paul brought it on the Deacs when he gave Julius Hodge a pop in his Julius early in the game.  Also, Wake got its fair share of home cooking more than a few times this season in Winston-Salem.

Update #2: 26 seconds left.  Refs just fell for the oldest trick in the book.  State’s Evtimov pulled a flop and pulled Wake’s Williams with him, and they call it a charge.  Geez.

Update #3: Holy cow!  Justin Gray hits a 3-pointer from somewhere in downtown Raleigh with a hand in his face and with 12.8 seconds left to tie the game at 53, then gets back to defend the three point attempt by Ansur to cause an air ball.  (Okay he fouled the guy and the refs reviewed the replay and gave the Deacs an extra .4 seconds; so much for home cooking). 

Wake gets the ball with 4.2 seconds left, and Chris Paul goes the length of the court and hits a running one hander from 12 feet to the right of the lane.  The kid played and pretty horrible game, but man did he come through.

Wow!

Last note:  Check out Patrick Eakes’ post about Wake Forest and Chris Paul.  I commented and generally agree with him.

Greensboro N&R’s Letters to the Editor Blog: The Triad’s National Enquirer

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Alot of bloggers have commented on the rowdy Greensboro News & Record’s "Letters to the Editor" blog.  Many are lamenting the lack of civility, the nasty posts made by people hiding behind their pseudonyms, etc. 

Me?  I love watching people with firmly held beliefs trying to convince someone else with equally firmly held, yet opposite beliefs that they are in fact wrong about their firmly held beliefs.  This debate about torture is a prime example.

I’m sure this isn’t what John Robinson and company were striving for, but I feel the same guilty pleasure reading this blog as I do when I read the National Enquirer in the grocery store check out.  Of course I’m sure John & company would love the Enquirer’s circulation!

Drink More Ovaltine

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Remember in the movie "A Christmas Story" when Ralphie gets his secret decoder ring from his favorite radio show (I think it was the Green Hornet), excitedly runs to the bathroom and decodes the message only to find out that it says "Drink More Ovaltine"? 

That’s what first came to mind when I read this article about network TV shows using websites to further hook fans to the show.  But after reading the article I’m kind of impressed by their creativity. Here’s a bit about what the editors of NBC’s crime drama Crossing Jordan are doing:

The network has found a way to keep super-fans like Washburn engaged
with the crime drama: an online diary created by the show’s writers
that asks viewers to help the character Nigel Townsend of the Boston
medical examiner’s office solve the murders.

It’s a drama that
mostly plays out on the Web. Nigel will mention the unsolved murders
occasionally on the air and drop clues for cyber-sleuths, but he will
solve the case only at Nigelblog.com — with the help of Washburn and
other fans.

"It’s not enough to just watch the show," said
Washburn, 47, who works on the case from her Houston home when not
tending to her ailing mother. She’s among 13,000 fans of "Crossing
Jordan" who visited the site within eight days after Nigel mentioned it
in conversation with another character during the Feb. 13 episode.

I wish I had a crystal ball and could tell you what TV will look like in 10 or 20 years.  I don’t, but I can make a prediction that our various home entertainment vehicles are going to consolidate and morph into one big blob.

My hope is my TV and PC will be replaced by a centralized piece of hardware (server?) that feeds various high-quality screens (dumb terminal?) that are networked wirelessly.  My hardware will be linked to my info-entertainment feeds by high speed connections, and my content will be served by networks/publishers on a program-by-program (item-by-item?) basis.

In such a world the creative folks like those working on Crossing Jordan will win. Here’s to hoping.

USA Today has RSS Feeds for Classifieds

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Just read on MicroPersuasion that USA Today has RSS feeds for classifieds.  When I checked out the RSS page I thought of a few things:

  1. The RSS page does a great job of explaining to the average reader what RSS is all about.  It is also well organized by topic so readers don’t have to search for the feeds they are interested in.
  2. I wonder how many people sign up for advertising feeds?  My first instinct is that no one would volunteer to be inundated with more ads, but when you stop and think about it, it’s not advertising that bugs us so much as it is inappropriate advertising.
    I’m interested in seeing ads for products or services that I want to use.  Selling sporting goods?  I want to hear about it.  Feminine hygiene, i.e. "Got that not so fresh feeling"?  Forget about it.
  3. How are they selling the feeds?  Are they bundled with regular ad sales, or are they sold separately?  Can they measure results?  If so, how?

If this works I think it’s going to have a huge impact on the publishing industry, just as search advertising has had a huge impact over the last couple of years.  Should be interesting.

Any Prominent Bloggers in Winston-Salem?

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I’m putting together a list of Winston-Salem bloggers.  I’ve spent a couple of hours searching various local blogrolls, regional blog indexes, Google, you name it.  I now have a whopping list of four and they are all personal-ish blogs.  (I do like them and have posted them on the left column.)

Unfortunately I can’t find a single Winston-Salem public figure with a blog.  Where are the journalists, politicians or gadflies?  Our friends to the east in Greensboro are chock-full of public figure bloggers.  Here’s a few just off the top of my head:

John Robinson (Editor, News & Record)
Tom Phillips (Greensboro City Councilman)
Ed Cone (Columnist for the News & Record)
David Hoggard  (I think he falls into all three of the aforementioned categories)

Greensboro also has an experimental blog-aggregator-cum-alternative-daily-news-source, Greensboro101, that is positioning itself as a kind of Peoples Choice for local news.

All of which leads me to two questions:

1. Are there any Winston-Salem public figures with a blog? (Actually can anyone point me to any good Winston-Salem blogs?)

2. Did all of Greensboro’s public figures come to blogs because there was already a vibrant blogging community in place, or were they a catalyst for the development of Greensboro’s blogging community?  I know it’s kind of a chicken-egg question, but I’m curious.

***Update***
After another Feedster search I’ve found quite a few personal blogs, mostly by students at Wake Forest.  Not adding them to the list and have now determined that I’m going to have to come up with a totally arbitrary vetting process for the list.  Still no public figures.

I’m a ZBOA

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Well I’m 38 and serving my first term in any form of government since HS student council in 1984 (21 years!).

I was sworn in tonight as the newest member of the Lewisville (NC) Zoning Board of Adjustment.  Business was light (someone needed a special permit to put a detached garage on their property), but the swearing in process and the chance to be involved felt really good.

Before I left they handed me a big binder containing the "Unified Development Ordinances", which I’m supposed to learn. 

So I’m 38 and I have my first real homework since 1984…and I volunteered for this!

The Present Future Circa 1998

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I just read this very good piece by Peggy Noonan that I picked up from Rex Hammock’s blog. 

The article is divided into three segments. The first two sections compare our modern lives with the lives of our parents, and focuses on the irony that all of our time saving devices have led to a serious lack of free time.  The third, and last section, predicts that we in America are ripe for a big change.  She points out that to much of the world the US is the Great Satan and consequently we have a huge target on our chest.  She predicts that those people will target our greatest city to try and puncture our aura of supposed invincibility.  She thinks that it will most likely be New York, but maybe Washington.  Oh, and she wrote this in 1998.

In the end she looks at how such an event might change us.  In many ways she was right, especially immediately after 9/11.  She says:

We must take the time to do some things. We must press government
officials to face the big, terrible thing. They know it could happen
tomorrow; they just haven’t focused on it because there’s no Armageddon
constituency. We should press for more from our foreign intelligence
and our defense systems, and press local, state, and federal leaders to
become more serious about civil defense and emergency management.

The other thing we must do is the most important…

I once talked to a man who had a friend who’d done something that took
his breath away. She was single, middle-aged and middle class, and
wanted to find a child to love. She searched the orphanages of South
America and took the child who was in the most trouble, sick and
emotionally unwell. She took the little girl home and loved her hard,
and in time the little girl grew and became strong, became in fact the
kind of person who could and did help others…

“These are the things that stay God’s hand,” he told me. I didn’t know
what that meant. He explained: These are the things that keep God from
letting us kill us all.

So be good. Do good. Stay his hand. And pray. When the Virgin Mary
makes her visitations—she’s never made so many in all of recorded
history as she has in this century—she says: Pray! Pray unceasingly!

My fear is that now we are once again forgetting to pray.