Recreational Boating and Yachting Blogs

A few weeks ago I met with the folks from Sabre Yachts and Back Cove Yachts to help develop a social media and Web marketing strategy, and to reinvigorate their blogs. I had some time today as the flood of emails has abated over the past couple of days and Twitter is experiencing major down time. I was really impressed with what I saw.

Both the Sabre Yachts Blog and the Back Cove Blogs are being regularly updated and have a good mix of different types of posts. There's photos, videos, and great content. What's best is that their passion for recreational boating is really starting to show through.

At the Sabre blog readers are treated to first hand experience with the Zeus drives, which allow incredible control from a joystick. (Heck, even I can pilot a yacht if you give me a joy stick!) There's also information about upcoming boat shows and calls-to-action about pending legislation that affects recreational boaters.

Over at the Back Cove Yacht blog there's some funny posts about boaters' superstitions and plants that do well on boats...I would have thought this was somehow related to hydroponics, but no.

This blog also weighs in on underwater lights (think back to those neon lights under pimped out cars, but in the water), and also has some nice video of lobster boat racing.

If you're a recreational boater, or have been thinking of getting a boat or yacht, you owe it to yourself to check out the Sabre Yachts Blog and the Back Cove Blog.

It's the next best thing to being out on the water!

Rich Brooks
Blogs for Business

Williams-Sonoma Packing Job

Today I received a belated Father's Day gift, a great mesh pan for grilling from Williams-Sonoma.

Unfortunately, it came packaged with enough non-recyclable peanuts to completely fill a tall garbage bag. Nuclear waste isn't so well protected. The New England Patriots don't have this much padding.

It's a freakin' mesh pan! Yesterday's newspaper could have protected it as effectively. There's gotta be a better way.

Williams-Sonoma: can't you find a more eco-friendly way to pack your products?

Rich Brooks
Can I Grill Those Peanuts?

The Secrets to Ranking #1 at Google...

...will not be revealed here.

However, I found a fascinating Web page at seomoz.org called Google Search Engine Ranking Factors. This document gathered the "collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization" and had them weigh in on the importance of a number of variables that determine whether you rank higher than your competition.

Each variable was given an importance ranking of 1 (does not influence ranking) - 5 (strongly weighted) and an agreement ranking (lower numbers mean more agreement), as well as showing the comments from these SEO experts.

It's important to understand that when it comes to search engine visibility, even the industry leaders often disagree. None of them know the answers...none of them have the "teacher's edition" to Google. Rather, their Google success has come through reverse engineering based on years of experience of testing and tweaking sites for optimal performance. And, to further confound the typical small business owner, these variables are constantly being tweaked by Google to improve their results, so what worked yesterday may not work tomorrow.

Some personal highlights:

• Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages: 3.5 (high importance), 1 (average agreement.) What?!? Linking to other sites can help your search engine visibility? While it's long been believed that linnking to other sites can actually give away your search engine juice, linking to the right pages may help. As Jonah Stein says, "Rand [the site owner)], your [sic] letting the last SEO secret out of the bag. Shame on you ;-)"
• HTML Validation of Document (to W3C Standards): 1.4 (slight importance), 0.6 (high consensus.) A slam to everyone who claims that you can't rnakn well w/o perfect validation. My favorite quote was from Mike McDonald: "Validation? Please, oh please, make it go away. Validation zealots just plain freak me out. Walking under ladders, breaking mirrors and stepping on cracks probably has more influence on your SERPs than validation." The other experts tended to say that validation won't help, but really badly built sites  could have enough errors to block spiders from propertly indexing your site. In short, good code is good practice, but perfect code won't help you rank higher.
• Domain Extension of Linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc): 2.5 (moderate importance), 1.2 (average agreement.) It's long been said that a .edu or .gov link is worth its weight in gold (never mind that links have no weight.) The consensus here seems to be that this is to to correlation, not causation. In other words, .edu and .gov sites are often linked to by important sites, so they're viewed as important and trustworthy. The domain extension is not the reason, however.

If you are interested in reading the whole document you can find it here (50 pages printed). If you want skip that and get some one-on-one help improving your own site's visibility, give flyte a call.

Rich Brooks
Expert #38 (I must have been out that day)

How Many Phone Calls Does it Take to Make the Sale?

If you're like me, you stand 6' even, are married with two kids, play video games and enjoy wearing irreverent t-shirts. Also, you track all your sales calls and emails in a CRM like Highrise. That gives you a quick overview of how many unanswered emails and voicemails you've left.

So here's my question: when do you give up/move on/let them call you?

When I used to do medical sales years and years ago, I had no limit. I didn't mind not getting calls back. I would start to leave messages like,

This is the tenacious Rich Brooks calling. If you're impressed by how often I call now, imagine what life will be like when I'm working for you.

Or:

This is Rich Brooks from Ultra Care Services. Since I haven't received a cease and desist letter from your lawyers, I'm guessing it's OK to keep leaving voice mails for you.

It didn't always work. In fact, I'd say it didn't work on the majority of people. However, occasionally I'd catch them at their desk and they would finally relent and meet with me. Some of those people turned out to be great customers, since they rarely saw sales people I had little competition as long as my company did a good job.

Yes, occasionally I'd piss someone off. But, if you're not pissing off someone it means you're not working/selling/marketing hard enough.

These days I don't do any cold calling; most of my outgoing calls are to people who have first reached out to us. However, they are often difficult to reach and won't return phone calls. Generally I'll make 3 - 7 attempts, depending on how interesting the job seems, then I'll send an email along the lines of:

Hope everything's going well. I was hoping on following up on that email/phone call/contact form you sent me, but I've had difficulty reaching you. I don't want to be a noodge [from the Yiddish], so I'll hold off and let you contact me.

It's amazing how often this gets someone to respond. I think it's because often we see those incoming emails, we can't deal with them, so we just wait until they come back again at us. By stopping that cycle (and letting the person know we are stopping them) we force them into making a decision of whether they want to continue or not. This is no guarantee of work; just that we'll have to send more emails or leave more voicemails. At some point every sales person may have to decide that the return on investment just isn't worth it.

Anyone else have any tips for getting email or voicemail responses, or rules on how many unreturned messages they'll leave before moving on?

Rich Brooks
Tenacious

The Future of Communications: Are You In or Are You Out?

Recently I've been spending time during my work day using Twitter and Plurk, two "social media" communication tools. I often find that I have to defend the time I spend on these two services to my wife, friends who I invite to join me, and to myself.

To that end, I found myself writing The Future of Communications: Are You In or Are You Out? which is currently available at TalentZoo.com.

So what do you think? Is this a colossal waste of time, or an investment in the future of communications?

Rich Brooks
Twitterin' and Plurkin'

Why RFPs Are Bad for Your Business

I just got another RFP (request for proposal). You think I'd be happy. Another opportunity for business. Another opportunity to sharpen my writing skills. Another opportunity to dedicate a couple of hours of my day into tailoring a proposal for Web design and Internet marketing that I will then deposit into a black hole. (Oops...I let my snarkiness show.)

The company that sent me the RFP? Never heard of them. We have no previous relationship. They got our address wrong.

I don't know if they got my name and hundreds of others from a phone book or if they carefully culled vendors down to three based on word of mouth and previous experience.

I don't know if they've already made their decision--say, for the brother-in-law of the marketing manager--and just need two other proposals to keep up appearances.

The fact that the date on the cover letter is June 13th, 2008 and the submission deadline is May 16th, 2008 doesn't give me the warm fuzzies. In fact, nothing about an RFP gives me the warm fuzzies.

Why Your RFP is Bad for Your Business

Imagine you sent out RFPs to a few dozen prospective dates, like you were running your own reality TV show. Do you think you'd get responses from the best looking? The smartest? Your soul mate? Or just the most desperate, with lots of time on his or her hands?

RFPs are a filter that turn away good vendors and let in desperate ones who will jump through any hoop to get business. Vendors who have more free time than business acumen.

Good, busy vendors don't have time for faceless RFPs unless there's something SERIOUSLY sexy about them. (Angelina Jolie: feel free to send me an RFP.)

The purpose of the RFP (I assume) is so that you can compare apples to apples. However, when you're talking about the service industry, that's impossible. There are a lot of great vendors out there who I might compete with, but their proposals will look nothing like mine.

Good Web sites (and many other things) require a partnership between vendor and client. It's a relationship. Good relationships start with a conversation, not an RFP. Asking for staff bios won't get you a better Web site. Asking a vendor how they can drive more qualified leads to the site and how they can help you convert them might.

There's a time and a place for RFPs, but they come after a conversation with perspective vendors, not before. Yesterday I received an RFP from a associate who I do know, and we've had a number of positive conversations in the past.

You can be sure I'll respond to hers.

Rich Brooks
Angie, I'm Waiting...

Entrepreneurs: Take a Vacation, Recharge Your Batteries

If you're an entrepreneur or small business owner like me, you probably find it difficult to take time off.

Before vacation I get really stressed, trying to get everything taken care of before I leave. Then I question whether I can afford to take time off at all and start telling people that I'll be checking emails often and will get back to them as I can.

As time has gone on, I've realized that this is a sure way to burn out, and leads to resentment of your work. Also, I've realized that the business can survive without me...at least for a little while. ;-) We've hired good people who know their jobs and get make decisions in my absence.

Also, as I took last week off to "recharge my batteries," my wife Cybele stayed behind to run the company, respond to new inquiries, continue to do her own job as Project Manager and be a mom to our two girls. (She's quite a woman.) As I wondered to my buddy Jeff whether it was strange that I would take some time off without her, he said, "you live with her, you work with her, you see her all the time. She probably needs a vacation from you."

Touché.

Although I spent much of the week here in Maine -- when you live in "Vacationland" it doesn't make a lot of sense to leave during the summer months -- I also got a chance to visit a friend in Provincetown, do a little fishing and go on a whale watch. I've never done a lot of fishing, but I reeled in a 39" striped bass. Took about ten minutes (at least it felt like that) of fighting that thing to get it on the boat. If you take a close look at the photo above you can see the sweat and tears (mostly sweat) that went into landing it. No fish has ever tasted so sweet.

The rest of the week I spent riding my bike, listening to The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett, and spending a little extra time with Cybele and the girls. I also broke down and bought a D-SLR I had been eyeing, the Nikon D-40. I set up a Flickr account to post some of my favorite shots. Feel free to check it out and give me some constructive feedback.

Why am I telling you all this? Because if you feel you can't afford to take vacation then you're long overdue. Life goes on. Yes, you may miss a lead or lose a sale, but there will be others, and you'll be in a better place, better able to land that next project.

Rich Brooks
Recharged

How to Add YouTube Videos to Your TypePad Blog

If you have a TypePad blog and want to add/embed a YouTube video into a post, you're going to have to do a bit of under-the-hood work. Don't worry! It's not as tough as it sounds.

Here's the step-by-step process of embedding a YouTube video into a TypePad blog, even if the YouTube video is too wide.

Step 1: Create your TypePad post. When you're ready to embed the video type in a place holder where you want the video to go. I use "xxx" but you can say "video goes here."

Step 2: Go to YouTube and find the video you want to embed. To the right of the movie you'll find some HTML code under the word Embed. Copy this code.

Step 3: Return to your blog post. Click on the Edit HTML tab above the post box.

If you're not an HTML jockey you may find this intimidating. Don't worry. Find the "xxx" or "video goes here" in the code. Replace it with the embed code from the YouTube video. If you click back to Compose Post and you don't see your video, don't worry, it's there. Finish up your post and hit publish, then go check out your work...you're done!

Dealing with Wide Videos in a Narrow Column

Unless, of course, your video looks like this:

Where the video is wider than the blog column. Many people don't care about this, but if you're anal like I am, you want everything to fit nicely. If so, you're going to need to take a few extra steps.

Extra Step 1: Determine how wide your column width is. There's probably a few different ways to doing this. One would be to get a microscope and count each pixel. Probably not the best use of your time or your eyesight.

On Macs you can command-shift-4 and do a screen capture of the width of the column. On newer Macs as you click and drag the cursor over the column it will tell you how many pixels wide your selection is. If it doesn't, you can take a screen capture of the column, open it in Preview, hit command-i and get the info for that document, including it's width. That's the width you're playing with.

If you're on a Windows machine, go to your local Apple Store and pick up a Mac.

Extra Step 2: View the source code of your movie embed. Do this by again clicking on Edit HTML in the top right corner of the post window. Scroll down and look for code like this:

<object width="425" height="344">

You'll need to change the width and height. If you're like me--mathematically challenged--you may hurt your head trying to do the math. Instead, do this. Create a new image in Photoshop (or other image editing program) that's 425 x 344 and resize it to your width, say 396. That will give you the new correct height as well, in this case 321.

There are TWO places in the embed code that need to be updated. Make sure you make changes to both.

Extra Step 3: Write down the correct width and height somewhere so you don't have to go through this again. Then you'll have a YouTube video perfectly formatted for your blog and your visitors. Enjoy!

Rich Brooks
TypePad Blog Designer

Joomla Web Design for St. Mary's Health System in Maine

Flyte recently launched another Joomla-powered Web site, this time for St. Mary's Health System which includes:

• St. Mary's Regional Medical Center, a Lewiston, Maine-based 233-bed acute care facility
• Community Clinical Services, with primary care and specialty; physicians, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and midwives
• St. Mary's d’Youville Pavilion, one of the largest nursing homes north of Boston, with 210 beds dedicated to long-term care, a secure Alzheimer’s unit, and the Center for Transitional Rehab Care;
• St. Mary's Residences , an independent living center; and
• St. Mary's WorkMed, occupational health services, which provides comprehensive worksite services to businesses in Androscoggin County and beyond.

The site serves the community with a wealth of information on women's health, senior's health, behavioral health and more. There are some other nice features as well:

Doctor Search: Visitors can search for primary care, specialists, and other health care professionals in Central Maine. Searches can be filtered by specialty, location or name.

Online Nursery: The hospital photographer can login and upload new baby photos that are password protected so that families can easily share photos of their newborns with friends and family only.

Calender of Events: Visitors can view the events calendar which is color coded with event types such as Grand Rounds, Childbirth Education, and Nutrition Classes among others. They can also do a keyword search for upcoming events.

Gift Shop Live Video: Not sure what to get a loved one in the hospital? Call up the gift shop and they'll walk different gifts and flower arrangements in front of the Web cam so that you can see what you're about to buy. Now we just have to get them to center those flowers in the frame. ;-)

E-Commerce Enabled: The site is also secure to take online donations and accept payments for services.

Because this site was built on the Joomla open-source Content Management System, St. Mary's has the ability to add, edit delete content on pages as well as create new pages and update the navigation, all without any HTML knowledge.

There were a lot of people at flyte and St. Mary's (Sue comes to mind) that worked hard on this site, but I want to give an especially loud "we're not worthy" to our own Lindsay Doherty who took on the bulk of the work of managing the project, learning Joomla, answering questions, and keeping everything on track. We couldn't have done it without you.

If you find you need medical care in Central Maine, be sure to contact St. Mary's Health System. If you're looking for a professionally designed Joomla Web site, contact flyte new media.

Rich Brooks
Joomla Web Design

Plurk: Do You Really Have Time for This?

With all the recent outages and downtime over at Twitter (no doubt stirred up because of my recent article on How to Use Twitter for Business), many people have been checking out Plurk, a similar but different approach with the same 140 character limit.

There are some interesting twists with the Plurk approach. There's an interactive timeline that shows threads and makes it easier to follow a conversation. There's karma points for signing up people. You can create "cliques" to better organize friends. It doesn't experience any downtime (so far.)

Is this a business tool? Who the hell knows. Is it fun to use? Definitely. Plus, there are game like features to it that make you want to invite more friends, post/plurk more often and get more involved. I'm not giving up my twitter account, and I'm surely not giving up my blog for plurk, but like an 80's arcade video game, I'm sure it's going to get a few more of my quarters.

If you'd like an intelligent, detailed explanation of everything Plurk check out Frank Martin's post on The Question of Plurk.

And, if you'd like to play around in Plurk, click on this invite or come visit my page(?) on Plurk.

Rich Brooks
I Really Don't Have Time for This