The Wholesale Forums

[Stuart Morrison]

I did a gig last night at a poetry night. I searched for it on the internet this morning but couldn't find a website which related to it, there was one for the venue which I found after much hunting but nothing for the event itself.

I did a blog post about it, mentioning "Guildford-Poetry-Night" (no -'s or quotes), I don't even know if that's it's correct name, I just blogged a thank you just in case anyone came alooking.

I just searched for Guildford Poetry Night 10 mins ago, my blog post is in number 1 position for that search phrase. I know it's kinda niche, but jeeze, 2 hours? Google's really not hanging about these days!

Anyone else with a similar tale to tell?

[Aspiring_Online_mogul]

yeah same thing happened to me I was shocked to see that I was numero 3 on google just after posting something on my blog in regards to bargain prepayment phone. I Just wished I made some money out of being number 3. But Oh Well its good to learn that I could achieve a high listing, I wil make sure I take that level of success to my next big project which I am working on at the moment.

[AndyHenry]

Don't worry it's not a record.

I check my SEO strategies all the time and I've seen stuff come up in a search query within 14 minutes.

The position might stay if there's literally nothing else optimised for the search term, but usually it'll bounce around for a while and you'll need to do more work to keep it at the top.

But at least you did something....

Good for you.
Andy

[Martin]

Stu, your blog is very amusing but I find the rack of typos so distracting.
Can't you put the spellchecker on? And lose "loose". It should be used only in the context of "loose women" and "loose trousers".

[Loup Garou]

Blog posts always get added in very short time-frame. They'll soon be "moved" to their correct location within the serps (which s usually downwards)...

[Stuart Morrison]

1) Great to know about the blog serps, I thought that their position might decay overtime although for this search term I would like a more permanent position but, well, what with other projects, we'll see.

2) Martin; I know shoddy work all round, but here's how I use that blog. As I am currently writing a book (250 pages and growing eeek) about the weird life of a lookalike this blog is more a "brain blurt", typos, grammar, etc. will get sorted as/when I finish the book. It's rough 'n' ready I appreciate, but it'll work itself out in the edit (as the saying goes). As I am oft fond of saying "good plan today better than a perfect plan tomorrow" (but try to aim for perfection).

What I am most disappointed about on my blog are the lack of comments. I have 4-5 personal emails a day from my blog, "I love it", "more" etc... but I try to garner comments on the blog itself but rarely do. So where am I going wrong? Why don't you comment Martin (and not just typos/grammar!)? Just interested 'tis all. Someone who's blog I follow posted a four word blog post (Headline; "Yes!" content; "Tell you later") and had 26 comments! Is shorter better? does verbosity equal lethargy in the readership? Just very interested to know. Strategies for getting comments, ideas, tips? Anything gratefully received...

UPDATE: Martin, last long blog post spellchecked (basically the VOX spell checker is ***** but I didn't want to blame my tools...)

[Poppy]

Maybe people think you are more likely to read emails than comments on the blog. Or maybe people don't realise they can leave comments.

Perhaps you could try putting a message in each blog post encouraging people to leave comments by clicking on 'comment' rather than emailing.

A client of mine went travelling for 6 months. It wasn't til after he got home that he realised people had been trying to contact him via his blog!!

[Martin]

I confess that I seldom leave comments. In fact I *very* seldom read blogs at all. I find it too frustrating to read (generally amateurish) prose which requires me to scroll up and down (bottom up) in a dizzying fashion! I don't even have a regular blog that I follow, although there's a few podcasts that iTunes downloads for me, which I try to keep up with. (Yeah, I ended with a preposition).

I notice that "Marketing Tips dot com" has managed to create a discussion forum that works the same "bottom-up" way - and they have the gall to charge for access!

Stu, the content of your blog is fine and amusing, although many references to places and people are completely lost on me. I don't even recognise people from their photos. But I don't watch "Corrie", "East Enders", "QVC", "Big Brother" or most other programmes that seem to have people glued to their seats.

But, as I say, I'm not a fan of blogs. I simply don't like the format. The bottom-up reading is a pain and, if the blog page is especially slow to load, I know it's a biggie and I won't have time/patience to read it all. So I don't even begin.

My own "blog" (newsletter) has a contents page with a separate link to each month's contribution. I think this is far more user-friendly.

[Stuart Morrison]

Hey, my blog made Vox's "This Is Good" Front page feature.
See here
Had loads of comments and ads to people's watch list. Guess what I was missing was an audience, and now I know VOX does tags to aid searches, well I'm away!!!

Never had a problem with scrolling, if the latest post is at the top then start at the bottom work your way up. If it's at the top start there, work down. Problem fixed! I can even set my windo to autoscroll to my reading speed, doesn't your Mac have that?

But if they're not your thing, then fair enough, I couldn't get on with iTunes, damn thing changed all my music files to a different extension. Also I have several computers all of which have different music files where I have extracted CD's over the years and the damn iPod can only be synched to one iteration of iTunes. Pah, it's rubbish how everyone is willing to put up with that I don't know. I can see the implications, you'd just add lots of people's libraries to you iPod, but you think that doesn't happen? Take files, burn to CD, transport to other iTunes, upload. Net result more money for the blank CD makers ad users still get what they are trying to prevent.

I think music producers have go to get used to the fact that the music industry market is a puddle and the sun is out and the puddle is rapidly evaporating. The Genie is out of the bottle, Pandora's Box is wide open and end users have reclaimed music and its production. Artistes are doing it all for themselves, more and more musicians are just offering their stuff online there's one band that has already done that (don't remember their name off hand), and another band has abandoned CD's for downloads only and in the process has made cover art obsolete. Koopa have made history by being the first band into the charts with downloads alone, and have done it twice now!

My predicition is that eventually you'll get the music for free but the merchandise/spin offs will be the profit center. You go to any manufacturer and tell them that you have 20 million downloads worldwide and "sponsorship" and "deal" will be the next 2 words you hear. If you then don't have any distribution overheads, which is the real reason people try to get signed, big distro network, and if you don't have a fleet of trucks poised to ship the goods the you make more profit, simple economics. CD's will go the way of vinyl as there will be no need for a physical product, and once you don't need to get stuff to the high street, well, the record company execs must wake with night terrors because musicans the world over can go direct to the end user without the need for some corporation to interfere and take a big cut.

Anyway... I gave in, and now have a useless iPod. But on the up side my phone is a Walkman one so I use that, but have to confess that I just bought a laptop to watch movies on whilst touring, that and writing. Best money I ever invested, big 15.4" screen, great sound through my Sony phones, excellent picture quality, s'all good. Battery lasts 3 hours too, so could even watch something like Titanic, but I'll probably not. And it has all my current music.

Now if I could get 20 million people reading my blog, that would be me set!

[Martin]

I don't understand your iPod problem. All of mine have worked just fine through various iTunes updates - although I confess that I haven't downloaded the latest because I don't have an iPhone (and not likely to!)

I do get the impression that the Windows version of iTunes is somewhat "flakey". The Mac version seems very stable. And the AAC encoding seems to give pretty good audio quality for a relatively small file size.

But I use my iPod mostly for audiobooks and podcasts (via iTunes) so music isn't a big issue.

You might find my latest blog vaguely amusing:
http://www.satcure.co.uk/reviews/review108.htm#01