Keith Wilcox is a stay-at-home dad blogging about his two kids and family life– providing a distinctly male perspective and quite outspoken.  Some examples: four exercises that will make you a better parent, busting your child out of a locked car, why talking to your kid in baby talk just infantilizes them, what to do with too many toys, and being a revolutionary parent.

There are tie-in’s to general psychology.  For instance, lavish praise doesn’t spoil a child. Studies show that the childhoods of successful leaders are absurdly full of encouragement– you just can’t encourage them too much, odd as that may seem.

Update:

For a list of top daddy bloggers on the web– check out this comprehensive list of 115 sites.

July 20, 2009:

• Keith is now ranking #4 on google for “unnecessary baby products“. And he has 467 pages indexed by Google, while my blog has only only 398 pages.
• For “cell phones suck“, Keith is now ranking #2.
• For “unpronounceable names“, #7.
• #4 on “avoiding cliques“.

We’ve been selling discount caskets and headstones online. What’s interesting is that we do the PPC for a wrestling company, for which we bid on the term “undertaker”.  Now which undertaker is the one that you’re searching for– the one that will bury your loved one or the one that will give you a body slam? At a buck a click, if we attract the wrong searcher for the wrong client, we can bleed money very quickly.  And having highly relevant ad copy only partially helps.  If you’re above position 3– or especially first position– people will just click on your ads without reading them.  This is the “I’m feeling lucky” problem with Google and bidding to a high position.  Even with negative keywords– using “WWE” for the funerals and “funerals” for the wrestling, we have only modest protection, since searchers are more likely to type in “undertaker” by itself than with a modifier.

It costs us a buck a click and 1 in 25 clicks will result in a call. Thus, the cost per call is $25. To reduce the cost per call we can get clicks for less or increase our conversion rates.  Your best bet– increase conversion rates with better landing pages.  Let those other idiots play the bid optimization game.   When you increase your conversion rates, you can then afford to bid more and shut out the other guys on traffic.  When you try to reduce your bids to reduce your CPC, you end up going down a spiral of worse position, lower Quality Score, and less traffic.  So unless you are looking for funeral planning services, you should focus on conversion rates.

It’s 3:42 am on a Saturday morning and I’m almost done with my work. These techniques may or may not work for you, but I’ll share anyway:

• Don’t go to bed until you’re done: Why? In the morning, you won’t remember. New things will come up.  Knowing you must get your
  work done before sleeping brings more focus– it forces efficiency.  You can finish on a good note.  Downsides– you might have a morning meeting you can’t skip, which means you won’t get enough sleep. You risk becoming addicted to this approach and become a vampire.
• Meet in their office, not yours: That way you can leave easily. If they are in your space, not so easy. Plus, the walking around will do you good– it’s exercise, plus you see
  more tha
  n if you sit in your corner office isolated from what’s going on.  Being with the troops breeds egalitarianism instead of hierarchy.
• Follow up the same day: This is like point #1. When you go to a conference or some get together and come back to the hotel with a stack of cards, it’s easy to say you’ll follow up in the morning. Don’t.  You won’t do it nor will you remember who the person was and what you talked about.  An immediate response draws surprise, since it’s so rare for someone who gets your card to actually respond. Look at your own experience and judge if that’s true.
• Ask “So what’s the next step?”: This will quickly kill idle chatter, gossip, and complaining. You force yourself or your colleague to find the next action.  In meetings, this is especially effective, since most people are just competing for airtime to hear themselves talk.  The more people, the more of an issue and the more important to drive to action instead of endless philosophizing.
• Delegate: Yes, even if you could do it better. But don’t do it if they’re not reliable, able to self-diagnose issues (so you don’t have to keep checking in on them), or if it’s core to what your business
  does.  For example, don’t delegate or outsource product management and requirements writing– that’s defining your business.  If it’s
  not core– accounting, design, hosting, legal, whatever– outsource.  If it’s important, but not critical, then hire someone internal.  For an analogy on delegation, you can learn to scale up.
• Finish what you started: Don’t go to 90% and think that you’ll come back to it later.  That extra 10% will cost you 100% more time to do it later because of something called context switching costs.   Better to have a couple things actually complete than 10 things 90% done.  Knowing that you’ll finish what you started will breed massive confidence in yourself and those around you.  Don’t stop midway in a task to look for garage sales or denver strip clubs, no matter how tempting.  Keep going.  I wrote this blog post knowing that I would go to bed by 4 am– and this I’ve done.

We get several unsolicited resumes a day. Most go straight into the round file (the trash). I got one today that was so bad that I just had to blog about it, as it has all the classic no-hire reasons:

• serves as interface between executive management and engineering
• resume has every technology and language listed you can think of, thus, no skills
• background in data warehousing and web, a vast wasteland of failed implementations
• tons marketing speak, “solutions”, “executives”, “synergies”, etc…
• demonstrates zero understanding of our business, typical of the mass “pray and spray approach”

Here’s his cover letter, which I have left verbatim….

“I am capable of playing a great variety of roles; however my areas of greatest strength lie in guiding technical teams to deliver solutions that truly meet users’ expectations. My experience addresses all aspects of these efforts ranging from working with executive management on strategy and approach to helping developers resolve challenging technical issues and everything in-between.”

Do you remember that scene from “Office Space” where the Bobs ask Tom Smykowski, “So, what would you say you do here?” And the most that the useless Initech employee can come up with is that he brings the requirements to the engineers. When you look at this guy’s resume, it lists this…

Technical proficient with:
PHP, Microsoft IIS & ASP, XML, WebSphere, Java, JSP, JavaScript,
Apache, HTML/DHTML, AJAX, MySQL, Oracle, Teradata, SQL*Server, Oracle
Business Intelligence Suite, Cognos, Business Objects, Brio, Informatica,UNIX and Windows.

…along with every technology and language in the book. That’s called “buzzword bingo”. Yet, he’s not a programmer, based on this:

Senior technical leader, Manager/Consultant/Architect.
Extensive experience leading global teams composed of both technical and functional members of up to forty people working on multiple, concurrent efforts.
16 years of professional experience.

The economy is in the toilet, and so is the quality of candidates that come streaming in. But every once in a while, you find a star, and those folks are especially hard to find among the folks that are likely let go for good reason. The outlook for internet marketing is as hot as ever, and it’s still as hard to find folks, no matter what the economy. What’s your experience in finding good people?

Google spring training

Google Spring Training

Paul, Larby, and I attended a spring training session for large advertisers at Google yesterday. Besides the free Google goodies, we learned some interesting facts and ways to grow our campaigns:

• 54% of all content revenue on the web comes from just 4 sites: MySpace, Yahoo, AOL, and YouTube. But these sites comprise only 22% of all pageviews. Niche site traffic is not only cheaper, but far more engaging to users and more likely to convert.
• 15 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In fact, based on searches, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the US.  Have you tried sponsored videos and overlays on YouTube?  You can’t buy it via AdWords and there are unique ways to target.  For example, you could potentially target an artist’s video and show a ringtone ad for their name in an overlay.  YouTube Insights will even tell you how engaged visitors are at each point within your video.
• 36% of searchers who see a display ad then did a search on line.  In other words, if you are building a brand, using display and search in combination will lift sales.  Further, using paid search to augment organic brand traffic on average drives 23% more visitors than using organic alone.  Thus, there is measurable value to brand
  bidding.  Google’s Display Ad Builder will help you create static and flash ads in minutes– easy and powerful if you don’t have the money to hire professional designers to make ads in multiple formats.  Try it!
• 30% of people who are watching TV are also on line at the same time.  Use what’s popular on TV to gauge what may be popular on-line, too– you can ride that wave to your advantage.
• 193 million folks in the US are on line.  (Makes you wonder who is NOT).  Of these, 64% have broadband. The average American now spends 16 hours on line per week.
• Though the overall economy is hit like never before, 25% of companies say they are increasing their spend online, while only 13% say they will spend less on line now.
• The unspoken statistic–how much did Google spend on this training event?  They had free booze, food, shirts, books– plus had on hand product managers from Google Local, YouTube Insights, Google Analytics, Google Classifieds, Search Insights, and other groups.

If you’re an affiliate, you’ll want to grow your knowledge beyond Affiliate Summit and Ad-Tech– come to events such as these, plus meetup202.  Build your relationships with folks at the search engines, too– as they can help you improve your campaign performance.  I met other advertisers there who market health supplements, insurance, and online dating.  What are you missing out by not being there?

No, this is not a scam, Google is giving out free business cards to the first 10,000 folks that sign up to promote their new profiles product, but make sure you first have a Google profile that is set to Public. Better hurry before the offer is over. Cards will arrive in the next 10 to 12 business days. They only ship you 25 cards, but who’s going to complain over something free? The deal is done through iprint.com, so you have to make a quick account or log in with your existing account.

Now if you’re looking for a better offer than this, consider that AmazingMail will give you 10 free personalized postcards– totally free. They even cover the shipping, no need for a credit card. They do this to bring in businesses like auto dealerships, cosmetic surgeons, and other folks who use direct mail or want to try it out. You have nothing to lose– their hope is that you like the samples so much that you will sign up and actually buy some cards later.

Oh, and the other thing about AmazingMail is that they ship the very next day and can print in quantities as low as one. Nobody else can do this because AmazingMail owns all the patents related to this on digital gang run printing. Don’t have to wait 2 weeks for the cards to arrive.