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Why the Heck are We Doing This Anyway?
First homeschool. Then owning our own business. Now bits of farming being thrown in (which is something I swore I’d never want to do, and Kevin was in no way prepared for!).
Well, each choice has just seemed right at the time. Independence is a good thing. The buck stops with us – if we do it right, then we reap the reward. If we screw it up, that’s our accountability too. But we really weren’t sure that we wanted to farm in any way at all, even in the back yard.
As Latter-Day Saints, we are counseled to grow a garden, and to be self-reliant. We are also counseled to have a food storage, savings account, etc. Now, this is counsel, not a commandment. But following counsel usually results in blessings, so we try to do so as much as we can.
We always had a food storage. And whenever we lived where we had a yard, we tried to garden, until we got to Wyoming. Here, it just seemed so much harder. And more expensive. For less return.
Gradually, we were able to store less and less. Mostly because we could eat fewer stored foods. This time last year, we had no food storage at all. The dietary requirement for fresh organic foods meant that we had to live from week to week on the groceries. A hard thing out in Wyoming. It also meant that our food budget skyrocketed. I hated being extorted by whatever price was being charged that week for the things we had to have. I also hated being an hour from the nearest supplies, on unpredictable roads.
The only way we’d be able to get our food costs lowered, to know we’d have what we need, and to have a food storage, was to grow it ourselves. We’d have to have the food storage on the hoof and in the ground. But we live in town, on a small lot. No space for a big garden, no space for a big greenhouse, no space for barnyard animals.
So we tried hydroponics (in the diningroom). That worked some, until I could no longer eat the things I could grow there, and nobody else ate much of them. Too costly and time consuming to do for a few heads of lettuce.
This year we didn’t even plant a garden, because we went to camp instead. Gone during the two best growing months of the year. No point. But when we came back, life was different – a little. I could eat a few more things than what I could when we left for camp, and we were making headway on reversing the Crohn’s Disease in myself and the two kids that have it. We’d still have to eat organic, and lots of fresh foods, for the rest of our lives though. So while we could now eat more of what we could grow, we still needed to grow it.
Before we left for camp, we talked about rabbits. So we did that. Then ducks occurred to us. We studied it out and got the ones we felt inspired to get. We’re still discovering just how inspired that choice was, as we learn how much that one choice is affecting our costs and health.
We had a desire to be more self-sufficient, and Kevin and I have talked about land and raising animals for some time. But I didn’t really want to raise the animals. He halfheartedly agreed (turns out he loves caring for the animals). We bought the rabbits when we did because we knew we would not have the choices we wanted in Wyoming, and David was traveling to Utah – right then. We got the ducks when we did because it felt like we needed to – turns out we really did need to.
So a series of needs have sort of pushed us where we might not have gone otherwise. I think we might have talked about it, but not really lived it.
Even now, we did not expect to do this in Wyoming, while still living on a small city lot. We expected to plan and prepare and move somewhere warmer first. A common thing for people to do as they get older, but this isn’t exactly retirement we are talking about.
So now, we divide our time between business and taking care of the animals and greenhouse. Hard to balance sometimes. Takes the cooperation of the kids to make it work too. But both the business and the farm stuff yields a profit. More than we thought it would.
One little Muscovy duck. Gave us 4 lbs of meat. Kevin and I had a meal of duck steak. Our family had duck soup for dinner. We gave 1 meal worth to my mother. Had enough left for seven meals for me (I was having pretty severe protein malabsorption so I had first claim on the Muscovy specifically, while the rest of the family continues to have hamburger). So let’s see…
Each duck cost about $10, and we’d put about $2 of food into that one. 4 lbs of high quality nearly organic meat (no medications in it) is worth about $5 per lb or more. So $20 worth of value from a $12 expense. So a profit of $8 on that duck… or so we figured ahead of time (we did the cost analysis ahead to make sure it would be worth it).
Except that I digest Muscovy so well, I now only needed two servings of meat a day instead of 3. Make that a profit of $20.
Oh… and then my vegetable needs dropped from 9 servings a day to 6. Make that a profit of $30.
Plus… my milk consumption dropped from 6 servings (milk and cheese) per day, to 4 (people with Crohn’s have higher dietary requirements than the average person). Make that a profit of $37.
And then… my need for dietary supplements dropped. By about a third. I have to take a LOT of individual supplements (B-12, B-6, Folic Acid, Magnesium, Potassium, Niacin, Calcium, etc). Make that a profit of about $50 total.
For one little 4 lb duck.
What a blessing! The ducks will make a bigger difference to our food bill than we could have possibly imagined. We thought we should wait and do it later. Doing it now has ended up being the best choice, even though it was hard to come up with the funds to get the ducks (when your food bill is high, it is hard to purchase something that will reduce it later – the double whammy is hard to afford).
We knew we were in a trap though. Food costs were high enough that they were sucking the life out of our ability to be self-sufficient in other ways. You can’t save money if you have to pay $6 per lb for organic meat, and $2 per lb for organic potatoes, and when your grocery budget quadruples in a period of about 2 years.
The greenhouse is now producing also. I was using dill (as a healing herb and to help control clotting problems in my legs). A lot of dill. It needed to be fresh to have the right properties. Fresh dill is costly – one $2 package lasted me 1-2 days. So when I got the greenhouse ready, I planted dill seed – I didn’t have any seed packets for dill, could not find it anywhere here this time of year, and did not have time to wait for it to be ordered by mail. So I went to my spice rack. Found an old jar of dill seed – those seeds had to be 10 years old at least! I figured at least a few might sprout, so I just planted the entire bottle. About 2 TBSP of seed. I think about half of them sprouted. I am drowning in dill! But that is actually good, because I was able to start using it within a few weeks, by taking the tops off the thinnings, and using them. One less thing to buy.
That is why we decided to do it. One more step in a series that may take us somewhere we didn’t plan on going. But it will put us in a position where we have the only kind of food storage we can have, and where we can have more control over the costs of the food that we require.
But I still wake in the morning and wonder how we got here, and where it is going to take us. I marvel that I am actually enjoying what I never thought I would. I am amazed at the number of miracles we have been blessed with in it, in finding ways to do what we thought we could not.
Now… I just need to figure out how pay tithing on a duck.
Rabbits, Ducks, and Worms, Oh My
Sometime before we left for camp this year, we started talking about getting Rabbits. For meat. Yeah, people eat those cute fuzzy things – many rabbits are bred specifically for meat production, the same as chickens. Rabbits are easier to raise though, produce a bit more meat in a little less time, eat less food to do it, and are easier to process. Butchering chickens is a messy, stinky endeavor. Rabbits are easier and less smelly.
Kevin and I talked about it a bit, decided it would probably be a good thing – Kevin is willing to do the butchering, I can process the meat after that (we’ve processed a lot of wild game over the years, so we know what we are getting in for). We need organic meat, and it is very expensive. Turns out rabbit meat has proteins that are a bit easier to digest than chicken, which I haven’t been able to have for a long time, because I can’t break it down (along with soy, and all other beans).
So this fall, after returning to camp, we located some breeder rabbits. We’ll be doing some selective breeding to see if we can come up with a good strain that meets our needs better than the current meat rabbit breeds. I rather dislike the red eyed white breeds – they are a bit ugly, and I dislike those red eyes! We also want a larger breed that is still an efficient producer.
We now have five rabbits, which are each housed in their own cage (after a week of frantic cage building accompanied by a series of small miracles). We have a lovely sandy Flemish doe, a Californian buck, a pure black Satin/Flemish/Silver Marten cross buck, and two Chinchilla gray Satin/Flemish/Silver Marten cross does. We have named our breeders – we won’t name the offspring unless we reserve them out for breeding. We’ll eventually add New Zealand to the mix as well.
The Flemish has already bred, but the two gray does are having a bit of trouble getting the idea. We think they are Feminists, they stomp and threaten the males any time we put the does in the buck cage for breeding. Like Feminists though, the militant is often subdued by mothering instinct, and they do seem to be mellowing gradually.
Then came the idea of ducks… Duck meat is actually a good substitute for red meat (if you get nutritionally deficient, red meat is best for recovery, and this is an issue with Crohn’s disease), but most duck meat is a tad harder to digest than beef. Except one…. Muscovy is easier to digest. Good for someone with certain kinds of protein malabsorption.
Turns out Muscovy is perfect for us in other ways too. They aren’t noisy like other ducks (so you can often keep them in city limits), and they produce more meat (can grow twice as big as other ducks). They are also better foragers, and require a little less poultry food. Between the rabbits, and the ducks, we should eventually be able to meet 100% of our meat needs, and for a fraction of what it is costing us now.
Hard to find Muscovies to buy though. We finally did, in Wyoming even (a miracle, since most places that sell ducklings won’t ship to rural Wyoming). Saturday, we spend the morning building a pen in the garage to house them temporarily – on the other end from the rabbits (our garage now smells like the poultry building at the fair…). Then we went to get the ducks – a three hour drive each way.They were so big they would not fit into the containers we brought, but the farmer kindly provided an additional cage for us, and straw to line it.
Monday, we fenced part of the yard, and Tuesday, after a mighty wrestle with each one (tough little buggers), we clipped their flight feathers (required to do so by law), and turned them loose in the back yard pen. We have 16 ducks feeding on weeds and grasshoppers.
We had intended to get ducklings – grown ducks are simply too costly. So when we found the ducks in Wyoming for the same price we’d seen ducklings for, we assumed they were small. NOT! They were nearly full grown! Some are mature enough to breed already! We got better than we had expected. We also suspect he slipped in more females than we paid for. A few of the breeders have been named – The Count (a large mature drake), Snowflake (a large female with white markings), and Cleopatra (a small duck with a black head, and white eyeliner markings extending back from the corners of her eyes). Some of the drakes will go to the table in the next few weeks.
So if you have rabbits, and a garden, the association of fertilizer and compost is a natural. Which leads the prudent to…
Worms.
That’s right. And if you have ducks, it is even more logical.
Worms are added to the rabbit waste – it just takes some litter material (sawdust, straw, paper pulp, etc), the rabbit droppings, and worms. This reduces the waste volume, and turns it into nice compost which is perfect for a garden. Those worms end up a tasty treat for the ducks too (they’ll multiply vigorously), and provide extra protein for the table birds. A nice cycle of efficiency. The worms have been ordered, and should be on the way.
Eventually, we’ll try other things – but not where we are now. You can only do so much on a city lot where you have to keep the noise and smells to a minimum.
This isn’t where we intended to go. But it seems to be where we need to go. Spiraling grocery costs dictate that you either produce your own food, or be held hostage by rising prices that consume an ever larger portion of your funds. Currently food takes more than half of what we make – and we are not frivolous (we buy things like wheat, rice, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, almost no processed food). We just require a lot of organic food, and it is very costly. It costs the same amount per WEEK that it used to cost per MONTH to feed the family, and we had more kids home then. Not a sustainable trend.
Ducks, rabbits, worms, and a greenhouse and garden are a sustainable thing. They are a lot of work, but will give more than they take if we manage them wisely.
The Perils of Software Development
I’ve been in the computer industry for more than a decade. I’ve heard all the complaints about software support, all the bug reports, and all the grumbles about the evils of the big bad software companies. Some of it I understood – but some I did not, until we began developing our own software. It has certainly been an education, and has deepened my appreciation for those who donate their software freely to the open source community.
First of all, software development is difficult. Only a fraction of the coders who start out to create a moderately complex piece of software actually finish it. Because it is often hard to figure out the best way to accomplish complex tasks. It is usually easy to write the first part, but like publishing a novel, all the final editing, testing, bug fixing, etc, to even get it reasonably stable, is a very time consuming, tedious work. The fun wore off LONG ago!
Of those that finish an application, even fewer choose to release it to the public. See, you can write a little piece of software for yourself, and get it working in your environment pretty easily. But once you release it and let other people use it, three things happen:
1. It now has to work in THEIR environment. That means on their operating system with their browser, or with their server configuration, etc. And individual settings, other applications running alongside, etc, can change the stability of the software. This is why software goes through beta testing, multiple release candidate stages, and why version 1.0 is invariably buggy. It just takes time, and actual use, for bugs to show up under a wide variety of usage environments. Bug fixing takes a tremendous amount of resources.
2. As soon as people get their hot little hands on a simple little app that was designed to just do one simple little thing, they want it to do MORE! And MORE, and MORE! They are simply never satisfied. Feature requests POUR in. Every person who uses it wants to use it in just a little different way. So you make an attempt to meet the reasonable requests, which sends your development costs through the roof – you not only now have bug fixing going on, you also have new features to write and test, and then bug fixing on THOSE.
3. Then, you have SUPPORT. You write a manual, that explains everything, and figure people will read the manual, follow the instructions, and things will work, right? Wrong. A good many people simply won’t read. A good many people who WILL read, won’t get it. And a good many people who do follow the instructions will make simple errors as they do so – typos, mixing the up order of tasks, or other simple mistakes that cause problems. And they’ll call YOU when it doesn’t work. You HAVE to help them – because you nor they really know whether it is human error or a software bug causing the problem until AFTER you’ve helped them. Support tends to be very high with new software – it can take more time than the actual coding. You have the choice of either NOT including support (or making it a paid extra), or of pricing your software to include a reasonable amount of average support time (and hoping that reality does not exceed that average). We would love to sell our auto-installer for less, but find that we cannot, because it just requires too much support, and if we priced it lower, we’d go broke.
It is simple for a project to positively explode with new coding and troubleshooting demands, to the extent that a coder, or even a coding team, can end up overwhelmed.
We like to think of the software companies as the “bad guys” for making it so hard to get support. We like to think they don’t listen to bug reports, or feature requests. Actually they do – but in order to contain costs, they’ve simply turned a deaf ear to certain classes of complaints or requests, and they’ve put up barriers to calls from people who simply don’t want to read the manual. Support time is costly, and it shaves off the profit margins if not controlled, and can put a company in the red pretty fast.
We’ve released three pieces of software in the last year, and are in the process of improving one of them, after which we will be releasing three more pieces. It took six months after releasing the first to reach critical mass – we could no longer go forward with bug fixing, improvements, AND support on one piece, and have any time left for new development. So we took steps to contain support, we finished off some bug fixing and put a feature freeze on one major piece. Then we focused on getting to that point with the other pieces. Without doing that, we’d never have time to develop anything else.
We found that each piece of software goes through some phases that affect costs.
1. New release. The bug fix requests and feature requests pour in. You have to determine in this stage what IS a bug, and what is not, which situations you’ll support, and which you won’t. You also have to determine which feature requests are reasonable (enough people will want it), and which are not.
2. Stable. Bug fixes and feature requests decline, but support continues to slowly grow, in spite of containment, due to increasing numbers of customers.
3. Compatibility Changes. Just about the time that your software is stable and predictable, part of the operating environment changes. The computer operating system, browser, or other dependent applications will upgrade, throwing your software into another series of malfunctions, and bugs. New features in dependent applications may make new possibilities available for you, resulting in new feature possibilities. Long term, this can be a huge drain on resources, and is a primary reason why most companies charge for new versions, or offer support for only a limited time after purchase.
It is not easy. And you find that when you are trying to be the good guy, many people will be angry with you anyway. If you do your best to offer good support, people will complain anyway. If you price fairly, there are those who still want it free. If you lower the price and lower support, people will complain about the lower support. If you release a lower priced version with fewer features, they’ll complain about not getting all the features for the lower price. Most users simply never consider how much time development, support, and improvement actually cost.
I think the Open Source community has influenced some people to think that they OUGHT to be entitled to receive everything they want free. Sensible people know better, but a lot of people think that anyone who charges for software is evil. We found that with our auto-installer. And then on the forums, we saw a rash of people promising to deliver an equivalent free. They’d promise and promise, say it was just about done, then they’d disappear. They found it was much harder than they’d anticipated to even accomplish the first step in the process, let alone deliver a fully functioning, feature rich piece of software capable of doing what ours does. But the prospective users still clamor for it anyway.
I don’t regret our foray into it. Indeed, this is a large part of the future of our business, and holds the promise of providing a significant percentage of our income. But it does require that we adapt to the reality, and that we be committed to a customer base in spite of some very real difficulties.
It isn’t as easy as it looks!
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Battle Fatigue
A long term war is different than a short one. Short battles are episodes of rallying, crises, and extraordinary moments where people rise to the occasion. It is easy to respond to an emergency when there are only a few.
A long term series of battles changes the scope of responses, and changes the person. What begins as something taking extraordinary effort becomes a wearying grind, where no resources remain to rise to the occasion. A constant state of crisis soon becomes a way of life, the highs and lows blending into a long and blurred train of apathetic responses. A crisis is no longer an urgent thing. The person feels that all resources to cope are gone, and each new crisis simply overwhelms to the point of inaction. There is not enough left to appropriately respond, no matter how responsible they feel to respond.
Dark circles appear under the eyes of the soul, and brightness of mind dulls with fatigue. The outlook on life is colored with the vision of war. A heavy weariness settles in, along with the feeling that it can never be removed. That this war will continue, and no battle is winnable. It batters the heart, and sucks life from the living, even while they go through the motions of trying to continue to fight.
Some simply give up. They refuse to rise one day, and refuse to go to do battle one more time – a kind of shock sets in which renders them completely unable to function. Others struggle on, mechanically responding to the demands of the day, unable to do more than is absolutely required, devoid of the joy and innocence they remember dimly, but cannot quite believe in anymore. Somehow, they remember there was once a different reality. But they can’t quite remember what the essence of it was, the present so overshadows it.
The thing about war, is that the individual soldier usually has very little control over the course of the battles. They find themselves in the middle of a war they did not ask for, fighting battles they could not defer or influence in any way. Caught in the grip of something bigger than life, and powerless to control the force that moves it.
The military calls this state “Battle Fatigue”. It can happen in situations other than a protracted war. Sometimes life is a battle outside of the war zones. For new or lifelong followers of Christ, it really IS a war. A war with Satan, whose desire is to crush us utterly. These times WILL come. And they will last long past the point where we feel that we have reached our limits.
Jesus Christ really has felt our pain, discouragement, and frustration. He truly does understand what it is like to be faced with problems that are bigger than we are. He, too, cried out for deliverance, when the job was bigger than He thought it would be. His example of submitting, even though He wished He did not have to, shows us the pattern for what is expected when we face things bigger than our ability to cope.
There is no way to make it easy. But we can reach a point where we can turn these problems over to the Lord. It does not mean they’ll be solved in a way we want them to be solved. But it does mean we can free the time and energy that we spend on worrying, and focus it on things that are more productive – attending to our families, meeting the day to day demands that are achievable, and wisely using the resources we do have even if they are not enough.
Peace is possible even in the middle of chaos. Solutions to the problems may not always come as we hope. But we will survive in spite of it, and come out stronger. The Lord is forging us into the people whom He wishes us to be. The process is often painful, nigh unto being unendurable. But we CAN endure, we can remain obedient, and we can come through with increased strength and spiritual power.
The prize is worth winning. The fight is worth fighting. It is worth getting up, one more time, to face what we feel completely inadequate to cope with. As we do, we’ll begin to gain something precious, and “angels cannot be restrained from being (our) companion(s)”.
Marketing Like the Spork
Somewhere in the annals of bad ideas masquerading as genius, the Spork must have a rippingly bad review. Conceived as the answer for a combination spoon, and fork, it sports a bowl that is too shallow to work effectively as a spoon, and tines that are incapable of spearing anything at all. The results of trying to eat a meal using this poor excuse for flatware, is most often hacking solid foods to bits in an attempt to fork them up, and soup running down your chin because it spills between the tines. Even a fork is more effective at eating liquids, and a spoon at eating solids, than this warped piece of plastic which not only fails at delivering the function of either one, but fails to deliver any useful function which one could not obtain by using their bare hands (it is often not any cleaner to use a Spork than to use your fingers, the only difference is that in using your hands, the food ends up on your fingers instead of on your clothes).
The Spork is loved by one class of people – which accounts for the otherwise unaccountable continuation of such an appallingly ineffective piece of culinary hardware. It is loved by cheap financial managers. Combine the spoon and the fork, and you eliminate the need to purchase two objects, and can purchase just a single one instead. Since the Spork is invariably produced on very thin, cheap, plastic (clearly intended to break under minimal stress, thereby further frustrating the already annoyed customer), the savings are magnified even more.
The customer invariably HATES the Spork. It is a singularly uncomfortable eating utensil. One usually ends up having to drink liquids and having to spoon up forkable foods, simply because the thing just won’t work using any of the more familiar eating etiquettes. I love KFC potatoes and gravy – but somehow the indignity of having to try to get a smooth spoonful using the Spork that they provide, spoils the flavor and my enjoyment of it. I’d rather take it home and eat it using a real spoon or fork.
Let’s consider the Spork as a marketing method. One size fits all… Which we know, never does. In fact, one size rarely fits even HALF. More often, in the attempt to do everything with too little, one ends up, like the Spork, with a clever idea that utterly fails to work in actual practice.
If you market like that – trying to BE all things to everyone, you’ll fail too. You need to decide whether you are a fork, or a spoon. Or even a toothpick or napkin (hey, with all those Sporks running around, there’s a real niche for napkins!). Choose your purpose. And stick to that. Work out a cohesive message that targets a real need. Then work it. If it doesn’t work, tweak it – how many times do you think that flatware designers modified the spear into various incarnations of the fork, before they came up with a convenient, four tined, easily grippable utensil which allows even a two year old to eat solid foods without wounding themselves? Keep trying, and eventually you’ll work out the perfect marketing utensil as well.
If you run across a marketer who tries to sell you a package that “does everything”, or that promises to deliver all possible customers, RUN. They are trying to make a Spork, and you, as the unfortunate customer, are going to be left having invested in something that fragments your customers instead of gently lifting them, and leaves customer service soup running down your chin.
Bots That Suck… Bandwidth, That Is!
So you’re supposed to get indexed in search engines and directories, to increase traffic to your site, right? Only not all search engines are “good” search engines, and some directories are also more enemy than friend.
Usually, if a search engine “spiders” your site, they follow some rules to make sure it does not harm your site. Spidering just means that the search bot crawls through your site looking for juicy bits of content, and then throws them into their index.
Robots have rules. When they come to your site, they are supposed to stop in and check with your robots.txt file, just to see if you have any instructions for them. And then they are supposed to OBEY the rules you give them.
But some bots don’t play nice. It is important to note that ALL major search engines SAY they respect the robots.txt file. But even those who say they do, often don’t. That includes Google, and some of the other biggies – they’ll MOSTLY follow it. But they sometimes disobey.
Bad bots don’t even look, or they look but don’t pay attention to what it says. Often, when you get a bot you don’t like on your site, the first suggestion is to block it in the robots.txt file. But that is often a waste of time, since the bot is not obligated to obey the rules in that file. To most bots, the robots.txt file is merely suggestions.
Some are so aggressive, the only option is to block them through an .htaccess file. Unlike a robots.txt file, a bot HAS to obey the .htaccess file. You can set it up so that the bot simply cannot access your site at all, and it has no choice in the matter.
So what does a bad bot do?
They can do several things that you probably don’t want on your site:
1. Suck bandwidth. This is common with badly written search bots. They just thrash your site, pulling up page after page, sometimes endlessly indexing, sometimes following all the links and then looking for things that are NOT linked. A bad bot can suck several gigs of bandwidth in a single session (this is an astronomical amount!).
2. Scrape content. Most bots do pull text to print in a summary in their search results. A bad one will scrape more than just sample text, and may reprint your content in unauthorized ways that constitute copyright violation. When images and text are scraped, this takes MUCH more bandwidth.
It is important to point out that bandwidth consumed by bad bots almost NEVER gives you any kind of return. Bad search bots pretty much DON’T send you site traffic.
Typically the first indication you’ll have is of escalating bandwidth usage which does not correlate with a proportional increase in traffic. In many hosting accounts, this is serious, because if your bandwidth exceeds a certain amount, your account may be suspended, or your host may charge you more. So bandwidth consumption with no return benefit is not a good thing.
Two bots that we have encountered recently are the Cuil bot, and the Twenga bot. Both absolutely TRAMPLE a site, and suck HUGE amounts of bandwidth, but send pretty much NO traffic to a site. The Cuil people are at least polite about posting the IPs that you can block. Twenga is not – and it has to be stopped using an .htaccess file. Neither one has a reputation for abiding by the robots.txt file either.
Both of these consumed the same amount of bandwidth that about 50,000 site visitors would consume. And Twenga seems to increase by the month.
We recommend that you do NOT submit a site to either of these engines, and that if you see escalating bandwidth usage on your site, do some checking to see whether you’ve been hit. Twenga may show up as an unknown bot with VERY high bandwidth usage. Cuil may show up with Admin URLs in your referrers – in other words, the referral URLs will be ones that PEOPLE could not have come from.
There are other bad search bots as well, which show up in similar ways. Usually, a search on Google for the bot by name will tell you pretty quick whether other people are having similar problems.
Nerdy Girl
Ok, so Kevin said we ought to make up alternate words for Terri Clark’s song “Dirty Girl”.
So we gave it a shot.
Nerdy Girl
Brain cells chewin’ on the error message
Throwin’ tech words everywhere
I’m beside you helpin’ with the guesses
Runnin’ my fingers through your hair
And you know, there’s nothin’ like it in the world
When we’re out there in front of the Dell and I’m a nerdy girl
I like it when we get cleaned up on Monday
Snuggling up with strings of code in Perl
Well when we’re coding and it’s just a fun day
You know, I love it when I get to be your nerdy girl
Nerdy girl
You’ll be workin’ on that brand new program
Smoke almost pourin’ out your ears
I’ll come sneakin’ up and whisper real low
“You’ve got a semi-colon missing here”
And you know, there’s nothin’ like it in the world
When we’re troubleshooting code and I’m a nerdy girl
I like it when we get cleaned up on Monday
Snuggling up with strings of code in Perl
Well when we’re coding and it’s just a fun day
You know, I love it when I get to be your nerdy girl
And you know, there’s nothin’ like it in the world
It might be php or trying out some Rails
But when you whisper geek and send me tech emails
I’ll be your nerdy girl
I like it when we get cleaned up on Monday
Snuggling up with strings of code in Perl
Well when we’re coding and it’s just a fun day
You know, I love it when I get to be your nerdy
Get to be your nerdy girl, nerdy girl
I get to be your nerdy girl
Explaining Quiet to a Shouter
The site was sold to another buyer. The buyer immediately started revising the content to make it “better”. They had purchased it from an expert, but felt there was more to do on it. There often is.
Page by page, the content was rewritten. Link by link, the backlinks were revised – some were deleted because they had been there specifically as a favor to the former owner. Navigation links on the site were also renamed. Part by part, the site was restructured, and pieces were now used in new ways.
A few months later, all search engines slowed the traffic they were sending. Upon closer inspection, it was clear that it was probably due to all those changes.
Are changes bad? No, not at all! But there are good changes, and bad changes. And Search Engines have things they like, and do not like, in websites, so if you make one or two changes that they do not like, they’ll probably forgive you. But if you change EVERYTHING and introduce things everywhere that they do not like, it is going to add up and hurt you.
Am I picking on anyone in particular that I’ve sold a site to? No. This is a common story, unfortunately. And you cannot teach someone ahead of time, because it all has to do with judgment. If I say, “keep the home page content shorter”, or “do not use too many keywords in a row”, or “don’t make your navigation links too long”, then they are going to use THEIR definition of “too much”. And it really varies from person to person.
I can even tell them “keep your nav links to no more than 3-4 words”, or “no more than 4-6 paragraphs on the home page”. But some people still won’t believe it really matters, or they will just gradually add a paragraph or word, then another, and then forget that it mattered when lightening doesn’t strike at once.
Sometimes it takes a while before the boom lowers. Partly because the search engines will not always react immediately, partly because the effect can be cumulative. You may get away with 9 edgy things, but be sunk on the 10th. And then it can take a while to isolate exactly where the problem is.
Normally when a site changes hands, if good changes are made, good things happen. If no changes are made, nothing else changes in reaction to that. Search engines could care less who owns it. Sometimes, more traffic temporarily occurs as a result of aggressive changes, but then reverses when too much is done, or when the search engines finally catch it.
But we’ve noticed that when a site is penalized, or when it drops in the ranks, that there is usually no single isolated reason. That can also make it hard to diagnose, because you have to weigh the factors and see if there are enough to warrant a lack of interest by search engines. Or it can be easy to diagnose it when you look at a site and there are borderline or over the line elements everywhere.
It isn’t always a penalty – often it is just that you’ve loaded in so much hype and drivel that someone else’s site gets to the point better, and rises above yours. Diagnosing that is a matter of judging overall quality. And if that has declined, it is probably why traffic has decreased. Often it isn’t that this element or that element is outright bad, it is just that EVERYTHING is borderline, so the quality of the site overall has significantly declined.
Some people believe that the best marketing strategy is to shout louder. That the person who will get heard the best, and paid the most attention to, is the one who hollers loudest. This isn’t at all true, either in marketing, or in life (just watch a kid tune out who is used to being hollered at, the minute someone raises their voice).
More isn’t always better. Most of the time, a quiet invitation, with good explanations will get more positive responses than aggressive ad copy. Something that is simple to understand, with options for more details will get more trust and buyers than miles of hype filled copy that appeals to greed but doesn’t explain necessary details.
Some people will understand this. Some simply never will. It is like the speed limit. Some people understand that a speed limit means something. They will always go no more than 65 in a 65 MPH zone. Others will push the limit, by a small margin, and swear they never speed. Many will go as fast as they think they can get away with, and then grumble when they get a ticket, say it wasn’t fair, then go out and speed some more. People are like that with marketing and SEO also.
I haven’t yet found a way to teach someone to recognize quality. I can teach them rules by the numbers, but if they don’t recognize quality, they won’t respect the rules. If they are naturally a shouter, then to them, being quiet may mean talking in a normal voice, instead of whispering.
And in marketing, quietly speaking the truth is VERY powerful.
Both Sides of Local Search
Local search is being used increasingly by people in larger metro areas, and as a result, search engines are now emphasizing it in search results. For many businesses, this is an opportunity. For others, it is not only NOT an advantage, it ends up being a problem. Local search doesn’t benefit all businesses.
If you have a local physical location that you want to draw people to, or if you want to attract people near where you are located, local search is helpful, and there are ways you can capitalize on the trend. You can work location keywords into your title and description tags (careful, no more than two per page), and you can put a single location list on each page in your site (put it in the same location on each page, near the bottom, no more than 10 locations, and make it people friendly). This can help bring you the people who are most likely to buy and trust you.
On the other hand, for many businesses, it isn’t helpful at all. This can be for a range of reasons, and our business is a good example. We market nationwide. There are a few towns near us that we market into, but there are limits to listings that mean it won’t help us at all.
Local search engines and local search results often have limits to them.
- First, they ONLY allow you to put in your actual business location. So even if I am doing events in other cities, and need local advertising, it does not help me, because my business address is in Wyoming, and that is what they judge your location by. You cannot be located one place, and promoting into another.
- Next, they only show results in a 50 mile radius. Well, we are in Medicine Bow, but we serve several Wyoming towns – Laramie is 60 miles away, Rawlins is 60 miles away, Saratoga is 60 miles away, Casper is 95 miles, and Cheyenne is 105 miles. No good at all!
And some locations may not have a high enough population to make it worth promoting local. An SEO pro once tried to do some optimization with one of our sites, and recommended using Wyoming in all of our key site tags. Apparently she did not do the research ahead, but made some erroneous assumptions. In any other state, that might work. In Wyoming it does not.
- Wyoming has a population of only 800,000 and some odd. The WHOLE STATE! And the number of searches per day for Wyoming Web Design is pathetically small – not even into double digits, and that with inflated reporting methods! So Wyoming isn’t worth going after in the first place!
- Other companies across the US also make the same erroneous assumption that the SEO pro did. They assume it is a state like any other and worth going after, so they optimize for it along with all the other states. That means you have thousands of companies wrangling over three interested people per day, and you can’t even RANK for Wyoming Web Design related terms. Bloated competition, and nearly non-existent market base. Bad combination.
So optimization for local search is a big strike out for us on all counts. It does provide a good example of not just one or two reasons for not using local search optimization, but just about EVERY reason not to use it though!
- The thing is, there are a LOT of small, rural businesses with similar issues to what we have. No customer base at all within 50 miles of them, and a need to market out further.
- There are a LOT of businesses with a national focus to whom local optimization is a waste of time.
- There are a LOT of mobile businesses that do local presentations or local events, which need local marketing, but who cannot access it, and for whom the current setup is totally useless.
When optimizing a website, don’t overlook Local if it is an asset. But don’t think it is useful for every site either – putting local info in on a site that won’t benefit from it will actually HURT them, not help them.
Battling Dragons
Life was good. Her husband had a fine job, she worked a little from home, and her kids were well, and progressing through the normal milestones of childhood and school. She experienced the normal ups and downs of confidence associated with juggling a busy life. But it was good, and she felt fairly competent in her life, and sure of her ability to cope.
Then one day, she found a green dragon in her kitchen, blocking the way to the sink, where a load of dirty dishes awaited. She managed to get around it, after struggling with it for a bit, but it tormented and teased her as she worked. It dropped dishes, got in the way, and generally slowed her work. The next day, it was still there. And the next, and the next.
Several days later, a purple dragon appeared in the livingroom. It took up residence in the middle of the room, and harassed her as she vacuumed, and folded laundry.
Soon, an orange dragon appeared in the diningroom, and a blue one in front of the kitchen stove. A red one appeared in the bathroom, where it made taking a shower very difficult. A yellow dragon parked itself in her car, requiring a struggle to drive anywhere. And then a black dragon appeared at the foot of the bed, to challenge her each morning as it came time to rise.
No one else seemed to see the dragons. They were hers, alone, to battle, and they were everywhere. They got in the way when she helped her kids with schoolwork, when she tried to get out of the house to volunteer. They made everything she did very hard, and often made it impossible to complete the tasks she set out to accomplish.
At first, the dragons were a challenge, and she kept on going. She faced each with a determination to NOT let them conquer her, and to get things done in spite of them. But as they appeared, day after day, and as new dragons joined the old dragons, she found she just could not fight all of them, all the time – there simply was not enough of her to do it all. Sometimes the dragon at the stove was so troublesome that she just asked the kids or her husband to make sandwiches instead of cooking dinner for them. She often left the laundry in the basket beside the couch, because it was simply too difficult to complete the task. The floor went un-vacuumed, and the broom stayed under guard by a pink dragon in the hall closet. Some days, it seemed that the battle to just get out of bed was all she could handle – everywhere she moved, a dragon was in the way, and nothing else seemed to get done.
At night, she would go to bed, reviewing the day, feeling like a failure, because nothing had been done that seemed to matter. She had spent the day battling dragons, and had not accomplished any of her appointed responsibilities.
One day, a friend came to visit. She looked at the floor, and at the laundry, and at the dishes in the kitchen, and at the bread and peanut butter on the diningroom table where the kids had left it after eating lunch.
“How are you… Really?” she asked, looking at the weary woman’s face.
“Oh… ok.” she sighed. “I just wish there were more hours in the day.”
“You look tired.”
“I feel like I am not getting anything done that I should be doing!” once she started, it was hard to stop. “My house is a mess, my kids are fixing their own meals most of the time, and it is hard to just get out of bed! And I just can’t get anything done, I just feel so incompetent! I’m not DOING anything!”
“Yes, you are doing something. You’re battling dragons.” the friend said.
She looked startled. “Can you see them too?”
“No, but I’ve had my own battles with dragons, so I know what they do. And I know what someone looks like when they are fighting them.” the friend replied.
“I thought I was the only one. I thought I was going crazy, or that I had done something bad to deserve them!” the woman said.
“Oh, most people have dragons at some point. And most women beat themselves up when those dragons get in the way and they can’t do everything they think they should.” her friend said gently, “There are some people who haven’t battled dragons yet, who will make you feel guilty, but many people have been where you are, and they really do understand.
“Dragons come in a lot of forms, and pretty much everybody fights them at some point or another. You know Julie?” the friend asked. The woman nodded in response, as her friend went on, “Her daughter has a heart condition. She has battled dragons from the day her daughter was diagnosed. And Tracy?” again the woman nodded, “Her mother moved in with her, and cannot feed or dress herself anymore. A lot of dragons came with that one. Kendra has Lupus, and fights some of the biggest dragons I’ve ever heard of. Angela has a mental illness, which stays fairly well controlled, but comes with an assortment of particularly nasty dragons. Nancy’s husband is out of work – so she and her husband both have dragons to fight. Elaine’s son has a rare chromosomal disorder, so their whole family fights dragons because of it.”
“I didn’t realize!” the woman exclaimed. “I got so busy worrying about my dragons that I didn’t even see that other people might have similar challenges.”
“Oh yes.” her friend replied, “It is hard to see when you are fighting dragons, that other people are probably doing the same. But it is also hard to give yourself credit for fighting them. You feel tired every day, and you feel like you didn’t get anything done. But you DID. You fought dragons all day, and you STILL got up, took a shower, and made sure your kids were dressed and fed and safe.”
“But I didn’t cook anything, and I didn’t get much cleaning done.” she protested.
“If you are going to survive with dragons, you have to give yourself credit for what you DID do. You are surviving. That is a great thing, and takes a lot of energy when there are dragons that try to stop everything you do. You are surviving and still making a difference in the world – you may be sure that God certainly gives us credit for our accomplishments, even when it seems to only be battling dragons.” her friend assured her. “The dragons usually go away after a while. Some people have to live with them longer than others, but for most people, they will eventually go away. They may come back later in a different way though. When there are dragons, we get by, and do what we can. We get up each morning, and pick the most important thing to do. We try as hard as we can to do that thing. Sometimes it takes all day, or it is all we have the energy for. Sometimes we can’t even get that one thing done. But we keep trying. That is what makes a person a great survivor. NOBODY sails through challenges in life while doing everything they used to do. You just can’t do that and cope too!”
“I suppose you are right.” she admitted.
“When you can’t get things done, you are not doing nothing.” her friend said firmly. “You are battling dragons. And you are winning.”
Credit or Blame
If a client makes money this week from their website, I get a thank you, and raving compliments. If a client site slumps and doesn’t earn, I take the blame for providing them with a lousy website. That is the drawback of being a web professional – good, or bad, we get the credit or blame.
Problem with that is that we can only influence some things. A client just re-hired us to rework some on-page copy, and some title and description tags. Two years ago, she came to me with a site that had just tanked in Google. We went through and recommended some very simple changes. Two weeks later, she was at the top of Google again, where she stayed. I can’t really say that what we did even had any effect. It is possible that Google would have put her back anyway. But we got the credit, and more work because of it.
Early on in the web game, I realized that we could not just build a site and walk away. That if we did not continue to do some hand holding and to be there to help with traffic issues, not just design and technical issues, that we’d lose clients long term. So we started to figure out how to offer that stuff long term. Our client sites work much better when they know they can come to us for stats analysis and marketing suggestions any time. And we might as well throw in some simple stuff with our maintenance fee, because the fact is, if we don’t, we get the blame when the site fails to earn, and we lose clients in droves, and have a harder time getting more, as opposed to when they WORK, and clients recommend new clients.
So I realize there are some things that I SHOULD take the blame for, and many things I can influence.
I do find it amusing though, when things just happen, over which I did not actually have control, and I get the compliments or complaints.
Marketing to a Narrow Niche
Niche marketing has really buzz over the last few years, with many marketers claiming that it is a more effective way of marketing. Niche marketing means you select a facet of a market, and serve that market only. I agree that it is something that can be effective for very small businesses, but it also has limits that need to be understood if you really want to make money at it.
For the most part, niching is something that happens naturally. Oh, a few people have to consciously think about it to do it, but most only have to think about it to figure out the niche they already occupy. Most niches are what they are – you can’t easily broaden or narrow them. A product or service works for the people it works for. Good niching just identifies that accurately and then maximizes the potentials.
Very narrow niches are difficult to market for. And often, you can’t broaden the niche just because you’d like to. If it doesn’t exist, you can’t create it. Let me explain through an example:
- We sell a piece of software for Webmasters. Ok, BIG target market, right? Well, maybe .1% of the population could conceivably be classed as a Webmaster, or Web Designer. With a world population rounded to 7,000,000,000, we have a nice fat number to start with. .1% = 7,000,000
- The most likely people to want this are self-employed Webmasters, or very small web companies. So chop that number by 80%. That gives us 1,400,000.
- Our software is ONLY for Webmasters who also sell hosting. We just chopped another 90% off of our market base. This leaves 140,000.
- It is also ONLY for those who use Cpanel hosting. So we just whacked another 60% off the previous total for a remaining number of 56,000.
- And, it is only for those who use a specific billing manager – WHMCS. We just reduced the last total to about 10% of what it was, leaving 5600 people.
- Of that total, only a fraction – perhaps 20%, will be in a position to WANT the software we have – they will want the automation feature we provide. 1120 brave souls.
- Probably 30% of those people will think to look for it, about 1/3 will try to code their own, and another third will want it but think it does not exist so they won’t look. 336 people left.
- Of those, about 1/3 will actually be prepared to PAY for a solution. Most want one free (it doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t keep them from stubbornly claiming that they should not have to pay for it). That leaves about 111 if we round off.
So at any given time, we may have about 111 people worldwide who are ready and willing to buy the thing we have, IF we can reach them and let them know that we have it. Finding 111 people in a world of 7 billion people is a difficult thing to do! The amazing thing is that we do actually make sales with this software.
But the niche is very tight. Even if we promote where they are likely to hang out, we still have a low chance of locating them, because they are always just a small portion of the people there. It makes marketing it difficult.
So why do we do it? Because we need the software, so we have to develop and maintain it anyway. We might as well sell it to those few people who do need it.
Can we broaden the niche? Perhaps. We could code a version for Plesk. This might increase our market base by 30-50%. Is it worth it? Recoding the app for a second version would cost us several thousands of dollars, and might give us only 1-2 sales per month (at around $300 per sale). We’d have additional ongoing development and maintenance costs as well, which might in themselves offset the profits. We don’t NEED a Plesk version, we don’t use Plesk, so our motive for doing it anyway is gone.
Niching is a good way to differentiate a business, but it is important in doing so that you make sure there is enough of a target market to actually promote to and earn from. Otherwise it can be very difficult to profit from your niche.
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