My goal was to create 2 months of content on this site to motivate bofe to resuscitate his personal blog.

I struggled through it, at times, with some less than coherent content.  But, relative to my goal, I was successful.

After a brief media timeout, I intend to resume writing for this domain.  I need to get reorganized and set some new goals.  Without some metric for measuring success, regardless of how trivial it may be, I never feel like I achieved anything.

This site needs some long term objectives.

• Grow an active readership of 100+ users
• Develop a consistent content theme
• Post three times a week for a year

I will have to consider where I am taking things, but until then, frequent random posts is the status quo.

I would like to make website reviews a weekly post.  Craig tells me no one cares about my opinions on religion, politics and the meaning of life, even though I know I’m fully qualified to disseminate the truth.  So, I will keep those to a minimum.

What do the other four readers of this site want to hear from me?

I usually hate comments.  I purposely avoid them, especially on my local news’ networks website (KSDK).

Today, I read something that really compelled me to say something, but:

Commenting is off.

Let’s follow the hops.

I started out reading @CaseySoftware.

Which took me to Open Sourcing Google Page Rank Algorithm.

Where I clicked on  “…effect SEO practices actually have“.

In this article, the author reviewed the top ranking sites for 10 different keywords.  He noted that their HTML markup was awful and inconsistent with some SEO “rules”. Therefore, he concluded, that SEO does not determine a page’s rank, but rather serves as a tie-breaker between pages with the same rank.

Arg.

On-page factors account for a small percentage of a site’s search engine ranking.

I really wanted to post that in the comments, so that others who read his post wouldn’t buy this flawed experiment as the whole truth. But, he said “No commenting allowed”.

Comments can add a tremendous amount of value to your content.

For example, Brandon Savage posted about why there are no enterprise projects written in PHP.  He planned to fix that in 2010 by contributing a bug tracker, VC browser, etc.  In the comments, he was overwhelmed with people suggesting not to reinvent the wheel and to check out Arbitracker.

Without comments enabled, Brandon’s monologue is trivial to me. But, he started a conversation that introduced me to a potentially useful piece of software that I was unaware of until he boldly stated he was going save the world.

If you are sharing an observation, please leave the commenting enabled for others to chime in.

What Matters Now

Rich, old, white women make up the main segment of visitors to k9cuisine.com, a web site for ordering organic dog food, according to Quantcast.

Is it racism if they have statistics?

I really don’t understand where the line is drawn with racism & demographics.

1) If I thought that buying organic dogfood for your pet was kind of stupid.

2) Quantcast is pointing out who is most likely to throw their money away on this product.

My question is, by inferring that old rich white women are the stupidest, is Quantcast racist?  Or am I?

Quantcast is amazing, by the way.

Cybercise is pretty much what you’d expect, from their name.  It’s an online workout planner with a library of animated workout demonstrations, etc.

It is a product that could become viable, I doubt I would subscribe, but it could definitely become successful without my $10 a month.

They should pay me to help them rethink a few things, however.

I know, everyone is a critic.  Everybody has a million “ideas” and all problems are so obvious to outsiders.  I have some constructive input here, though.

1. Hire a copywriter with experience writing for the web

“Jack be nimble. Jane be quick.”  It seems clever and relevant to an insider at your company, I’m sure.  The problem is, you have a limited amount of time to convince someone that your product kicks-ass.

No one is going to read that sales pitch paragraph, eliminate the welcomes and congratulations.   You have 20 words to tell me why I can’t leave without giving you something (email address, money, suggestion), go.

2. Lower the barrier of entry

“Join Now” or leave.  That is the message you are communicating to your potential customers.

Use a trial period.

Guide them into the account creation process.

“What is your target weight?”  Next.

If you can’t make the sale at this very moment, let them jump into the conversion funnel and give you permission to email them in the future.  The commitment is too high to convert visitors into customers successfully.

3. Don’t push visitors to Youtube

It is 100% fine to market your site via Youtube, but once people are on your site, don’t send them away from it.

4. Use the <title> tag to describe the page

In Google search results, nearly every page will appear as “Cybercise”.  I’m doubting the site ranks for relevant terms, because they are not included in the title.  Think about people on a search result page, what might they be searching for?  Write your titles for those people.

5. Please test

Google website optimizer is really amazing. It is a great tool that I can’t believe is free.  Master it.  You could have a company train your staff to use it or you could even hire someone to implement the experiments for you.  But, you are leaving money on the table if you don’t test your pages.  Use Google analytics too, please.

6. Put content on pages linked from your public site

Workouts, calendar, etc… Show people what they can expect on those pages if they were a subscriber and encourage them to buy there, too.

7. Get a blog

And promote it on your site.  Push people from facebook/twitter to the blog, push people into your funnel (capture email addresses), convert those people into customers.

8. Fix DNS (add a record for cyber-cise.com)

Unacceptable.  301 redirect one variation to the other (I like non-www to www).

9. Spend the money, buy cybercise.com

Your brand is important.  You are effectively advertising for someone else, which costs you conversions.

Conclusion

I randomly selected this site, kind of.  I was checking out Seth Godin’s Brands in Public site and quickly realized that it isn’t very effective when the brandjacking effect is turned off.  So, I wanted to check out the companies that are paying the $400/mo to aggregate their brand info.

A website that has some fairly major glaring issues should probably budget some consulting before spending $5k/annual monitoring their brand.

“You were at Duffy’s bar on the night of July 15, weren’t you?”

No, I definitely was not.  Even if Duffy’s bar actually existed and I was in attendance, I’d be tempted to lie about it.

Why?

Leading questions irritate me to no end.

Even though I am the worst liar in the world, I would rather lie than follow a predetermined path of a conversation.

You don’t ask leading questions, do you?

If you are 86 years old and feel the urge to throw up one or both middle fingers in excitement, you should be allowed to do so without consequence.  The NFL disagrees, as they fined owner Bud Adams $250,000 for his victory dance after the Titans defeated the Bills.

The NFL’s fines are ridiculous, by the way.  The Patriots get caught cheating over the course of multiple seasons and they only  get fined $250,000 and lose a late first round draft pick.  Of course, the Pats get a few dozen wins and a Super Bowl ring prior to anyone finding out they were taping the defensive signals of opposing teams.

I smoked for a long time.

Sometimes that fact was a very tightly guarded secret.  It was stressful, holding on to my “stress-relieving” addiction.  It fought a good fight.  It extracted hundreds of my dollars, luckily at a then discounted Kentucky tobacco rate. But…

June 14th, 2007 5:05am PST, Las Vegas, NV, it lost the battle.  With one cigarette left in the pack and one of my 50+ bic lighters in hand, I said the words I’ve stated dozens of times. I’m done smoking.  That last unlit smoke hit the trash can in LAS airport and my addiction went with it.

I win.

Smoking is an addiction. A shitty one at that.

I’d rather be addicted to video games or gambling or Walmart brand cough drops, heroin, anything other than cigarettes.

They rob you of your freedom, money and health.

Cigarettes stain your teeth yellow, make your clothes and hair smell terrible and raise your blood pressure.

Smoking decreases your lung capacity, raises your heart rate and alters your sense of taste and smell.

Wow.  Cigarette companies, without the ability to market their product on television, an endless list of advertising restrictions and up to 40% sin taxes and they still continue to profit.  Those guys in their marketing dept. deserve a raise from their employers’, selling any other product with those effects is 100% impossible.

If you smoke, I encourage you to do something healthy for yourself and quit. Fuck the excuses, rationalizations and procrastination games that we all like to play.

If you don’t smoke and know someone who does, nag the shit out of them until they quit.  Then, tell them how proud you are of them everyday for doing something as difficult and as important as taking their health seriously.

Smoking is effing stupid.

Thanks to everyone who supported me and listened to me brag about how awesome I am when I was looking for reasons to stay off that bus.

Bringing back to life something that never lived is a feat of gods.  Today, I get to play the role of a deity with Idea #217 of 1203 that never got off the ground, simplemotives.com.  For years, this place meant for enlightening tales has been white noise. This Friday the 13th, that silence ends.

I’m an effin’ weirdo, sorry.

Here’s the deal.

The Problem:

Three months ago, Bofe (bofe.wordpress.com) abandoned us and his blog. Lame.

The Request:

@bofe im bored. #resurrectyourblog

The Solution:

• “not unless simplemotives.com has daily posts > 2 words for 2 months straight”
• > 50 words
• of substance
• human written

I guess I need to confirm the expectation of content on bofe’s site in the event that I succeed.

The odds of 60 consecutive day of coherent posts of substance being contributed to this blog is somewhere in the 2%-4% range.  I’m sure bodog will lay 50 to 1 for those of you wagering online.