Monthly Archives: January 2012

I have a problem. I am getting way too many emails trying to remind me, warn me, alert me. I did a Google blog search to see if anyone had sage advice. At the bottom of the page, one link caught my eye: “create an email alert for ‘overnotification’!” Nice. Sounds like a “Yo Dawg!” moment.

The worst part of it? I asked for it by signing up for a bunch of services that email me. People who like to write about business like this guy say things like “What gets measured gets done.”  Sure, that sounds sensible.  If I track what I eat and how much I exercise, it may help me lose weight. If I put together a budget, I might spend less. But it does seem to be easier to not step on that scale, not draw up a budget, and in this case, not keep an eye on my website.

A few weeks ago, I received a few emails from Scarecrow telling me that one of my websites was down. My first instinct was to ignore them, since they were brief outages, but they kept happening. On January 7th in particular, there were 18 separate outages totaling about 58.30963026 minutes. Yikes. I sent an email to my webhost with the dates and durations of the outages  – hoping they could correlate the data with their data and isolate/fix the problem. They emailed me back, and said there have been “…no issues with the server on the dates you mentioned…” Hmm. I looked at the detailed data again and found that the cause of many of the outages was DNS. Because I am using a DNS provider that is not my webhost, it makes sense that the webhost is not seeing these errors – the traffic never got to their server!

Next, I logged into my DNS provider and found they had been the target of a pretty gnarly Denial-Of-Service attack, which started on January 7th. Yay! (Not good that they were attacked, but the fact that they posted openly about what happened and what they learned from the experience is exactly the type of thing that makes me want to keep using their service.)

Is it really better to know?  Yes. I get it. It’s better to have the data, than not. Now that I know my website has been unavailable to potential customers, what will I do about it? Turn off all notifications and bury my head in the sand? That doesn’t really work for anyone…not even ostriches.

…gang aft agley, according to Mr. Burns. As I am a modern & sophisticated human being, that naturally puts me in mind of a character in a John Cusack movie (which one? I dunno) who said something like this: “Some drink from the fountain of knowledge. Others…gargle.”

So here we are. I’ve had a lot of fun with Google AdWords. I learned some interesting things…would you have guessed, for example, that “Files Changed? Server Down?” would attract roughly twice the clicks I got from “Site Hacked? Server Down?”? I sure didn’t. But hey, I changed the text on Scarecrow’s site to match the better-performing ad headline as soon as I found out.

I learned it’s possible to get 57 clicks in a few hours from people using Android devices, for roughly $.15 each, without any way to identify where the heck they’re coming from. And without a single one of them choosing to click on a single additional page once they landed on Scarecrow’s site.

I’m sorry, but I really am wondering right now: do mice gargle? I’m guessing they don’t. But does anybody out there know for sure? How?

Here’s the thing, today: I get better walk-ins. I’d love to be able to test various elements of the site, such as the logo–which I created in roughly 5 minutes in an attempt to irritate a coworker, who then claimed to like it, about which I call shenanigans–but testing is impractical without attracting more visitors, and when the visitors who do come in via the ads are so unlikely to actually pay for the service.

Hey, a couple of weeks ago a Google search on “obvious usernames and passwords” brought up a blog post of mine in the #1 spot. Did I plan that? Did that phrase, before today, actually appear anywhere in this blog? No. But neat stuff like that happens for free. We do pretty well on “contracts are evil” too, which pleases me no end, though nobody coming in through that particular door has actually bought anything. So far.

I think it’d be possible to find sweet spots where paid ads of one kind or another can provide a measurable profit. But I also think managing that may be a full-time job. It’s not actually a full-time job I want, though–I’d rather build something.

The official Cabin Fever plan, therefore, is to spend more time blogging. More time commenting on other people’s sites. Hey, maybe I’ll put up a personal site with a link to buy my novel from Amazon. And a link to this blog too. Whatever.

Oh, and you may have noticed the blog looks a bit different. The Cabin Fever & Scarecrow sites are also getting a makeover–expect it within a week or two. Cabin Fever first…it’s much easier.

Meanwhile, our irregular programming continues. As current users, for those of you who are: what would it take to get you to tell more of your friends about Scarecrow? We’re listening.

I’ve heard terrible things about Google customer service. And I may even say some of them myself in a bit. But not today.

Today I called a toll-free number and spoke to a couple of friendly, knowledgeable support staff. I was on hold for a very brief period–less than a minute. I had some general questions, and asked for advice. I got what I wanted. It was neat.

So here’s to you, Google. Though I’d sure like it if you’d send more than one click my way today. I realize yesterday’s mess may have been my fault, but still. More clicks, please.

And “Site Hacked? Server Down?” strikes me as a perfectly reasonable headline for an ad, by the way. Sheesh, it’s on Scarecrow’s homepage. It doesn’t make me a bad guy.

Thanks.

It’s interesting, so far. If you’re not familiar with AdWords, it’s a service that lets you advertise on Google & other sites. Basically you create keyword lists, create ads, and enter bids. Google then holds an automated online auction to determine whether one of your ads will show, and in what position.

So Scarecrow is a bit hard to advertise for, because we have this notion that its goal is to make business owners’ lives easier. That means uptime monitoring, plus backups, plus access to a quick PageRank lookup tool, and…well, whatever else we add in the future. Ad copy has to be fairly short. It’s yet another fascinating new challenge. We definitely needed another one of those around here, though, so it’s all good.

And the bidding gets interesting. For some reason, uptime & site monitoring bids are generally higher than bids for backup software. This strikes me as counterintuitive, to say the least. I guess it’s true that Scarecrow’s uptime checking did require some more sophisticated system design than the backups did…but once you factor in the alerts from Scarecrow’s “content monitor” & the online restores, it’s not so clear.

Just to add to the mix, Google provides various tools to help you figure out how your keywords are likely to perform. Guess what? Their results don’t match. Hmm!

So it’s a new game for us today. We’ll see how it goes, and let you know. Main takeaway so far: Google is clearly in charge here. Pricing (through their “Quality Score” magic) on seldom-performed search queries with few competing bids is somehow magically higher than you’d think. My feeling? Google has to store a lot of data & do a lot of computing to serve their ads, and they don’t want mostly-unused data lying around. Makes Long Tail advertising a bit pricey.