Greg Vandagriff

As the internet grows increasingly pervasive, it’s influence being felt in most every industry in this day and age, what will happen to the author of old times? The one who writes books in hopes that a publisher picks it up and supplies it to bookstores and other distributors.

After discussing this briefly with my boss and fellow search engine marketer, In my opinion the changes of the internet are good for the talented author, as you can in theory remove the middleman (the publisher) from the equation.

There are different approaches to how a talented author could make money without a publisher:

1.) Writing free content which is backed by ads, in which case the primary revenue source would be advertising.

2.) Writing premium content which you charge users to buy, such as ebooks, site membership, and so forth.

3.) A combination of the above two, “freemium” content.

I don’t know what the future of traditional books is, but the enterprising author can, with a little creativity and ingenuity, conceivably make more money from the internet than they could through conventional book sales.

For those who are curious, my posting has slowed down in part because the Vostro’s keyboard went crazy on me and so I sent it off to the Dell factory yesterday to get it fixed. I was plagued with a curious issue wherein the computer thought that the “Fn” key was being constantly held down. And yes, I tried the shift + f11, fn + scroll lock, and all the other key combinations to no avail. Pressing the key itself does nothing, it just treats it as though it’s constantly pressed down. When I use an external USB keyboard, it’s fine, but that sort of defeats the whole purpose of having a laptop.

I’m waiting until I get the computer back before passing final judgment on the matter. If they can fix the keyboard and get it back to me in a speedy fashion, then it will be an accolade for Dell’s service. If the problem continues after I get it back…

Anyhow. That’s your update from the life of Greg Vandagriff for now.

So I got my new laptop last week, the Dell Vostro 1400, and I’ve had some time to get acquainted with it since then. I know that most of you have been awaiting my verdict regarding this particular piece of technology with much anticipation, and so I will favor you with a brief review.

In a nutshell: I love it. The only complaint I have is the time that it took for me to get it!

While I admit that I am fairly easy to please, I must say that I couldn’t have been happier with my purchase. It’s fast, quiet, and runs all of my applications easily. The cooling is more than adequate, I am able to go for long periods of time with the Vostro sitting comfortably on my lap and I have no complaint.

It’s only available in black, which may be a turnoff to some, but I happen to be quite fond of the color, so it’s a non-issue; after all, true excellence does not draw attention to itself.

I definitely got my money’s worth from this purchase; I can find nothing else in the current laptop market that would match the sheer value that I got from my hard-earned cash.

In short: Two thumbs up.

So after observing a nosedive in traffic for one of my newer websites I was understandably concerned. I had grown rather accustomed to the small trickle of traffic I was pulling in from the search engines on longtail terms. Initially I chalked up the sudden fall in traffic to the Google Sandbox, although this conclusion didn’t exactly sit well with me, as the Sandbox generally shouldn’t come into play with SERPS on longtail traffic.

I did take into account, however, the fact that my traffic started falling shortly after I changed the layout on my website. It turns out that this might have been, from the perspective of pure profits, a bad move. Not that changing the layout itself was a poor decision, I think everyone involved would find the new layout more usable than the old one, it was a combination of changing the layout without changing the sitemap that Google was accessing. After checking in with Google’s webmaster tools, I think I found the problem: Google was trying to crawl my page based on the old sitemap and as a result was finding hundreds of imaginary dead links. It generated over 1,000 crawl errors before I was able to submit a more up-to-date sitemap.

I think these crawl errors are the culprit for why my site suddenly is performing so poorly; Google must think that my site is one big puddle of linkrot! I can only hope that the damage to my site’s SERPs isn’t irreversible and that it will return to its former position in a few days. This assumes that the hit to my site’s traffic is, in fact, due to the sitemap crawl errors and that the two weren’t just coincidentally occurring at the same time.

Well, I discovered today that my personal elasticity of demand for a macbook was too high to see it through.

It’s not that I don’t want a Mac. I do. Really. It’s just that they’re so very expensive when priced next to a Dell Vostro. As a student in my current financial situation, I’ve decided that I honestly can’t afford a mac, as I would have to essentially cut myself off from all expenses for the remainder of the summer in order to finance the purchase.

For those who are curious, I purchased a Dell Vostro 1400; core 2 duo processor (2ghz), 3gigs of Ram along with some wussy little video card to power Vista’s Aero effects. 120gig hard drive, dvd burner, bluetooth, vista home premium, etc. The pricetag clocked in at just under $800.

The moral of the story is one that you probably already knew: college students are more price-sensitive than the average consumer. Go figure.

Someday when I’m fabulously wealthy I might get a Mac… but not today.

If passive, effortless revenue is your goal, I’m fairly convinced that scalability is an integral part of any realistic plan to achieve that goal. It isn’t enough to make a cool website that caters to a market need; it needs to be a “fire and forget” solution that has a built in system for automatically generating free, unique content that caters to a market need.

An excellent example of this philosophy in action is craigslist: the content is generated by users seeking to sell their used goods. So far, so good: we have a source of free content. Now comes the scalability; craigslist takes the formula and adds a scalable spin to it: content is generated by users seeking to sell their used goods LOCALLY.

Suddenly you have an avenue for more than one craigslist. Now you can potentially have an instance of your formula for every state, heck, every CITY. Throw some sort of passive revenue system on there and you’ve got a recipe for money.

Similar to franchises being pre-packaged business operations that can be duplicated for success in any of a wide range of locations, a self-sufficient and scalable website template can be deployed successfully over and over again, each time catering to a slightly different niche. Individually, the earnings of these websites may be modest at best, but in aggregate you can reap substantial profits from a potentially limitless empire of microsites.

For those unfamiliar with it, the “Sandbox Effect” is the name given to the mysterious force which prevents newly-created sites from being able to rank for competitive search terms until said site has been indexed for a certain period of time, some speculate that this effect lasts anywhere from three to six months.

Regardless of how long it lasts, the Sandbox effect impedes efficiency in the market for information online. Serving as a barrier to entry, this effect penalizes new sites that may have better information or resources for a search term from being able to rank for that term, regardless of the number of links pointing at that site.

As a result, you may rest assured that the first page you see on google’s search results may not necessarily be from the most relevant or informative site on that subject, as the most informative and useful site may have actually been relegated to the “sandbox” if it is new enough.

Just my thoughts.

I have to say that I was pretty excited when I saw that I could do all the necessary steps to get my car registration renewed online. At first I was skeptical, because I thought that the government would still want hard copies of the safety & emissions statements from the mechanic, but lo and behold, evidently the information was already in their system! That’s what I call handy! I just filled in my license plate # and the PIN that came in the letter, then entered my credit card information and presto, I was done.

It really makes me wonder about those people who are still trapped in the stone age and insist on performing even the most rudimentary transactions via check. Especially when there are policies in place which heavily penalize such behavior, such as the 10-day waiting period we have at Sewell before a check clears.

So a number of factors have led me to think about computers lately:

1) I work in a computer-heavy environment, surrounded by computer experts. In fact, one of my co-worker’s mothers had the audacity to label us as “a bunch of computer nerds”! The nerve! If it wasn’t at least 95% true, I would have been highly offended.

2) The power supply on my desktop burned out about 2 months ago, thus I currently have no desktop.

3) The power supply on my laptop which I use for all my work, including this post, will glitch out if I so much as look at it funny. These power failures are growing increasingly common with the passage of time.

Thus, it doesn’t take a mastermind to determine that I’m currently in the market for a new computer, in spite of General Sherman’s best efforts to destroy my financial welfare. Consequently, for the first time in approximately 7 years I’m actually studying computer hardware and the market in general.

The result?

I’m not really interested in the guts of the machines anymore. I don’t do anything on my computer that demands substantial horsepower, like gaming, these days. Additionally, two people whom I trust a great deal, my brother and my boss have recently “switched”. You know what I’m talking about.

I haven’t made up my mind for certain about what I want to do, but I’m thinking about all my options.