Erich Stauffer

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  • Top Posts and Keywords for November 2012

    In this 667th post, I discuss my top content, keywords, and income for this website.

    Occasionally I’ll do an analysis of my blog content and share it out for others to learn from what I’m doing. Dukeo does this with his monthly blogging stats so I’m thinking about doing it more often, maybe monthly. We’ll see. Here is my attempt at a monthly blog statistics analysis based on data from Google Analytics, Amazon Associates, and Google Adsense.

    The spike in traffic you see at the right edge of the image below is from combining all posts from the old Watershawl site into this. Watershawl was averaging over 5000 unique visitors a month with two posts, “Syncing Outlook Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks with Android Using Gmail” and “How to Auto-Forward Text Messages to Email in Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre, and the iPhone” getting around 2000 unique visitors each. No doubt these will be the top 2 posts next month. Interestingly, they were originally written for my Geek Hand site, but were folded into Watershawl earlier this year so this is actually their second move. I’ve got a redirection plugin up on Watershawl to redirect traffic to Erich Stauffer for now.

    Total visits was 1,544 with 1,417 being unique. There were 2,383 pageviews with 1.54 pages per visit. The bounce rate was 74.61%, which is really high. Most people used Internet Explorer (28%) followed by Chrome (24%), Safari (19.5%), Firefox (18%). Most visits were from the United States with most visitors being from California (128) followed by New York (94), Florida (72), Illinois (61), and Texas (58). Indiana had 38 for comparison. Judging by the use of Internet Explorer, the high content of Florida visitors, and the penchant for Erich Stauffer figurines, I’d say I have an older visitor base that is not interested in what I want to talk about most of the time (more on that later).

    Top 10 Content

    Of my Top Posts of 2011, the only one to fall out of the top 10 is “How to Delete a Digg Submission“. Regardless of how much I try to write about business, technology, and entrepreneurship, “the organism will do whatever it pleases.” My response to that in the past has been to ‘write more of what people are already looking at’ and sometimes I end up creating an entirely new site out of my most popular content, as I wrote about in Analyzing Actions in September of 2009. One post on Youtube Query String Parameters was turned into an entire site, which was later sold for $145. I did the same thing with the How to Stay Alert and Focused post. I’ve since made a new ‘query strings’-type site called Map Strings that gets most of it’s traffic from How To Run Google Maps On the Kindle Fire EDIT: moved the site here starting on 1/6/2013.

    Top 10 Keywords

    • erich stauffer (68)
    • collegeclub.com (31)
    • erich stauffer figurines (17)
    • what happened to collegeclub (14)
    • eric stauffer figurines (12)
    • erich stauffer figurine prices (11)
    • mexican cat (11)
    • arnart porcelain marks (9)
    • collegeclub email (8)
    • erich stauffer figurine (8)
    As you might expect due to the domain name, I get a lot of traffic for the keyword and variations of, “Erich Stauffer”, the Arnart Import’s fake Hummel figurine artist I was named after. Second to that, people are still crazy about Collegeclub.com and seem to still wonder where all of their stuff went when it went belly up. Like them, I was interested so I did some research, found out, and shared it on my blog. I just didn’t think that all these years later it would still be some of my most popular blog posts. The “mexican cat” gets linked to a post called “Smarty Cat” through Google Image Search and that is also the reason “My CEO Heroes” ranks well – people are searching for an image of Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks.

    Top 10 Sources

    • google.com (89)
    • facebook.com (19)
    • qian8ao.com (11)
    • google.co.uk (10)
    • dogpile.com (4)
    • google.ca (4)
    • m.facebook.com (4)
    • google.com.br (3)
    • iphoneunity.com (3)
    • answers.yahoo.com (2)

    I have a pretty active Twitter account so it’s somewhat of a surprise to me to not see Twitter in the referral list, but I did get one (1) referral from Twitter, ranking it at #49. Qian8ao is a “Free Expense-Tracking Application and Personal Finance Community” in China. I’m not sure what link they have pointing to me as Google Analytics can’t resolve it properly and my go-to Google searches aren’t revealing anything, but I’m guessing that it’s not page visits, but a hot-linked image that is causing the count. I post links to this page via my Erich Stauffer Figurines page and the Erich Stauffer page. I have used Yahoo Answers as part of my SEO process successfully for a number of years.

    Income Stats

    • Amazon Associates Affiliate Program: 72 Clicks – 0 Items Ordered – 0 Items Shipped – 0 Advertising Fees
    • Google Adsense: $12.74 Estimate

     

  • Bet Your Apps on Google Glass

    How Augmented Reality Will Usurp the Smartphone

    On May 1, 2012 I wrote a post about how Google Goggles would be the next big thing after smartphones and on November 22, 2012, Business Insider wrote in The End of The Smartphone Era is Coming about how Google Glass will be the new, default way people communicate, usurping the current cellphone. Nicholas Carlson writes, “Something like Google Glass or whatever Microsoft is working on could end up replacing the smartphone as the dominant way people access the Internet and connect to each other.”

    While Google Glass uses a tiny screen displayed on the inside of glasses, Microsoft is working on augmented reality, where data and illustrations overlay the actual world around you. And while these still new technologies are being built around wearable glasses, they will enevitably get smaller and be embedded in contact lenses. The US military is already developing augmented reality contact lenses as seen in Mission Impossible 4, Ghost Protocol.

    I’ve always thought that anything we see in the movies is just a pre-cursor for real life (but we’re all still waiting on flying cars and cold fusion). The one I think about the most is the smartphone used in The Saint. It was a bar phone that flipped open like a mini-laptop that had Internet access. The movie came out in 1997 when the Internet still meant dial-up for most people and cell phones had yet to become ubiquitous. It took ten years, but by 2007 I had a better phone than Val Kilmer, but then Tom Cruise had to go and up me with his augmented reality contact lenses. I guess I’ll have to wait for Microsoft or Google to catch me up in another 10 years.

    UPDATE 12/17/2012: Scientists in Belgium have taken a crucial step toward building screens into contact lenses, “Jelle De Smet and a team of researchers at Ghent University built an LCD screen in a curved contact lens.”

  • Indianapolis Video Surveillance Analysts

    The other day I was in downtown Indianapolis at the Circle Center Mall where I noticed two video surveillance cameras in one of the parking garage escalator areas. This would not have been a big deal, but all one camera was doing was looking at the other. It seemed like perfect fodder for Fail Blog, whose ironic content fits perfectly with Roman poet Juvenal’s famous line, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” from his Satires (Satire VI, lines 347–8), which is literally translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?” One video surveillance camera had probably just replaced the other without the former being removed, but it still goes to show the value of a good Indianapolis video surveillance analyst.

    Who Will Watch the WatchersThe video surveillance system you choose to purchase and/or update could be purchased on Amazon.com or from a variety of different resellers, but how do you know if it will give you the results you need and how do you know if your IT system can support it? That’s the value that AllThingsIT provides with their Indianapolis video surveillance design services. They have been providing IT networking and video surveillance system support for over 30 years. Their new “Safe Small Towns” initiative is focused on helping small towns and municipality police and fire departments develop and implement video surveillance cameras that give them evidence they can use in court.

    As an IT business analyst myself, I can understand the value of working with a company like AllThingsIT for Indianapolis network management because video surveillance technology changes fast and there are hundreds of different cameras out there – each with their different light sensors and lens types that create a myriad of features. AllThingsIT has the tools to create a turn-key video surveillance solution for your organization that can be proven effective before it’s even installed. If you’re in the market for a new video surveillance system or are looking to upgrade, contact AllThingsIT at 317-755-0200.

  • One Dozen Rubber Ducky Ducks

    This past week I sold One Dozen Rubber Duckie Ducky Ducks in a nativity scene (set includes: Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, 3 wise men, angel, lamb, cow, donkey and camel) without ever linking to the product. It would make most sense if it came from this website since I talk a lot about Erich Stauffer figurines and other collectibles, but it wasn’t. It was clicked on through my site on Coby Kyros Tablets. That’s right. Someone looking for information on Android tablets bought a nativity scene made of rubber duckies. But that’s not all. I have a site that exclusively promotes learning sets like science experiements for kids and yet MID Tablets sold a child’s microscope. Who did sell a Coby Kyros tablet? A page about technology consulting. This goes to show, it pays to post (and post often) #myBody. Here are some of the systems I use to use affiliate marketing to help transition to a full-fledged ecommerce company or “etailer“.

    Systems for eCommerce/Affiliate Marketing

    To run a successful online business probably requires some systems so I’ve been developing some and thought I’d share:

    • Review Amazon Best Seller lists and curate new items to add to your site(s) – (Daily)
    • Review sold items that were not linked to and create posts for them accordingly – (Daily)
    • Review Google Analytic trends for top content and keywords on your site – (Monthly)
    • Review Amazon sales clicked, but not sold* – (Monthly)
    • Review Google Adsense reports for trends – (Weekly)

    Posting Routines

    • Post SEO optimized title and META description, reviews, a picture, and some original content (I use WordPress SEO by Yoast)
    • Install “Social” plugin by MailChimp + “Twitter Tools” to not only display tweets, but post to Twitter
    • Post also on Google+ and Facebook (and any other social network you can systematically stay engaged in)

    How to Read the Amazon Associates Orders Report

    *When I download the Orders report, I get a view of what people are clicking on, but not buying. I think the “Product Link Clicks” is a better metric for us to track since we can’t control what they do once they are on Amazon, but let’s read what Amazon Associates says:

    Orders Reports display number of clicks for each product via a Product Link or add-to-cart button, number of orders placed through the Product Link, and the resulting Product link conversion. You can also see other items that were ordered after customers clicked through to other Amazon pages.

  • Indianapolis Video Surveillance Systems

    We recently learned about a video surveillance vendor, AllThingsIT, who provides video surveillance systems and cameras to small towns, municipalities, and businesses in and around Indiana under the brand, “Safe Small Towns”. The idea is that video surveillance systems can help keep small towns safe by providing business owners and police departments with the evidence they need to find and convict criminals. They call this, “civic surveillance”.

    Safe Small Towns’ website talks a lot about educating the consumer on how camera and other technology works and about providing “performance-based work statements”. They seem to really be up on results-based solutions and the primary way they do this is through JPEG 2000 technology, which takes multiple still images to make a video instead of traditional interlaced video. However, the primary value AllThingsIT brings to the table is in their knowledge of not just how to choose the right video camera solution, but how to integrate that solution into your existing computer network.

    AllThingsIT has provided IT network support, video systems, and computer monitoring for a wide variety of corporate and government entities over the years. Their experience with servers, networks, video cameras, and monitoring makes them the ideal video surveillance vendor in the Indianapolis area. Safe Small Towns takes everything AllThingsIT has done with video and wrapped it up into a comprehensive package suitable for small towns, police departments, and other industries in order to offer them specific solutions for their video surveillance needs.

  • How to Link to Articles in Shopperpress

    Shopperpress is an ecommerce WordPress theme that has many functions, but some are not so obvious. For example, you can’t easily edit the header navigation bar links. While it automatically links to pages you create and gives you the option to hide the ones you don’t want displayed, you can’t add custom links without editing the theme files directly. We created a Shopperpress child theme for one of our clients, but we didn’t want to break the inherent functionality of the theme – we wanted to work with it. The problem was, the client wanted the header navigation bar to link to “articles”, but it wasn’t really clear at first how to do this.

    How to Link to Articles in Shopperpress

    Shopperpress takes over WordPress default post types and calls them “Products”. This means that typical blog content is forced over to a custom post type called “Articles”. These articles are created and managed in the “Article Manager”. If your WordPress website already had blog posts, these will need manually changed over to the post type “Article Manager”. To display all of the articles, create a page called “Articles” or “Blog” or whatever you like and change the Page Template type to “Articles Template”. This “TPL” file in the Shopperpress theme calls a hook that pulls in all of the articles. This new page will now appear in the header navigation until it is asked not to. To change the order in the menu, change the Order number of the pages. The lowest number, starting at “0” will appear on the left and the highest number will appear on the right. If the numbers are the same, they go in the order they were created.

    More Notes About Shopperpress Blog Function

    • Shopperpress requires you to change the Permalinks to %postname% which means that you lose any SEO value of putting categories before post names with %category%/%postname%.
    • Shopperpress requires you to put in a description for each article. It doesn’t automatically display the content or the excerpt. This gives you more control, but takes time.
    • Exported blog post Articles created as the Articles Template custom post type will not display on a default WordPress installation when imported unless Shopperpress is used.

    While Shopperpress is great for automatically pulling in affiliate products from sites like Amazon and eBay, it’s not a great blogging platform, but that’s okay if your primary goal is to use WordPress for ecommerce. However, if you’re wanting to develop an ecommerce site, we are currently recommending Big Commerce due to it’s speed, extensibility, and CSS/HTML editability.

  • Balls of Steel

    In response to marketing and distribution device about product development:

    Sometimes you just have to write something, make a decision, just do something before the true answer will come to you. That’s how it is with me at least. A lot of times I won’t know what to do so I’ll just choose something and then it’s like the fog lifts and everything becomes clear. A lot of the time my first choice is wrong, but if I didn’t make it I wouldn’t have been able to know the right choice. In a small way that’s what happened after I emailed you last. I almost immediatly knew how I wanted to help you.

    I’m starting an online store for coffee and tea accessories called pourjoy.com and would like to sell your steel balls as an accessory for making non-diluted ice coffee. I wouldn’t call it Balls of Steel though. I’d have to call it something else like “liquid metal” or “iced beans”. I’d see if your mom could buy like ten sets of them from you for me to sell in my store and that would be a good market test and potential new distribution channel for you. What I’d encourage you to do is to find ways to sell the same product as many different ways as you can.

    Think about the movie The Hudsucker Proxy and how the circle is used first as a hoola hoop and then as a straw. If you haven’t seen it then Coca Cola is a better example. They sell you the same coke in a bottle, can, and by fountain drink. Mmmm. I’m getting thirsty just thinking about it. For your product I can see it being sold as ying yang balls, stress balls, desk toys, marble run accessories, a game of some sort, a drinking game, as a way to move large furniture, or as a way to shatter large panes of glass.

    If you really want to sell a lot of these you’ll need to both have market demand and either large barriers between you and your competition or a huge head start. If you haven’t read how Warren Buffet picks companies, it’s very similar. He would want to know how hard it is for someone to make what you have or do what you do. He would want to see patents and large capital costs that make a virtual moat around your product protecting its business model for years to come. I guess I don’t see that with your product.

    Have you considered getting into ecommerce or affiliate marketing instead of manufacturing? You know what ecommerce is, but you may not know about affiliate marketing so here’s a brief primer. Using Amazon.com as an example, anything I link to at Amazon with my code I get a percentage of if someone buys it. Percents range from 6-8% on average. With ecommerce the margins are higher, but so is the risk when inventory is involved. Some of that risk can be mitigated with drop shipping services, but the margins are lower.

    I know I want to get into ecommerce and so I am leveraging my background and experience in affiliate marketing, SEO, and web design to learn ecommerce and make a go of it. I’d be happy to share with you what I’m learning and catch up with you in December when you’re in town. Your mom says you’re making a lot of money waiting tables down there and that you’re doing good in school. I know she’s really proud of you and wants to see you succeed and I do too.

  • The Employment Roller Coaster

    Mark Thiele recently wrote an article entitled, Get ready for the coming employment roller coaster, in which he describes his perceptions of a changing career landscape where jobs not only do not last a lifetime, but where skills do not last a lifetime. Theile gives anecdotal evidence of jobs that are completely disappearing in less than 10 years. As I have been in the workforce for just over 10 years, I would like to share my evidence to support this trend.

    In 2001 I began working in the Items Processing division of a regional bank. Checks would come in by courier throughout the day and my job was to pre-encode their amounts for scanning. Balancing at that point was still done by hand, but within 3 months, it had been replaced by a new, digital balancing system. On October 28, 2003 United States Congress and the President enacted the Check 21 Act which enabled banks and other financial institutions to send checks electronically instead of by presentment of paper. It went into effect in 2004 and by 2006 large, central paper check sorting machines and facilities started to disappear and be replaced by local, distributed desktop scanners. I graduated college and got Microsoft and A+ certified only to land back at another regional bank installing desktop scanners in all of their branches. By the end of that project, my old job balancing checks had completed been eliminated – outsourced to a room full of keyers in Brazil.

    In 2004 shortly after graduating college I helped a friend start a small IT repair company called Neighborhood Geeks. I was the primary computer technician and went into new people’s homes and businesses daily to help them with their computer, networking, and server needs. It was a time when hardware costs were still higher than the cost of repair and the margins on the service work were good. I sold quite a bit of hardware too. It was a time when people were still converting from Windows 98 and ME to XP and from dial-up to broadband. Some computers still did not have ethernet cards so I actually carried them in my car with me along with spare hard drives, power supplies, and other peripherals. Laptops still hadn’t taken over desktops at that point and smartphones were still clunky. In two years, the market for desktop PC repair was almost over, caused by reduced hardware expense, the initial setup of broadband across America was over, and Windows Vista had just been released making our jobs a lot more easier (and less needed).

    In 2007 I started my own web design business and I used my knowledge of HTML to write simple web pages. Soon I had to learn CSS, SEO, and this new thing called WordPress. By 2008 I was fully touting SEO-optimized WordPress websites for small businesses around the Greater Indianapolis area, but by 2009 something had changed. SEO wasn’t working as well and any guy and his brother could throw up a WordPress site and slap it with a pre-built theme that looked better than anything I could code by hand. What mattered more was the creation of content and the management of the website’s layout, configuration, and security. My business shifted away from SEO and web marketing (although still very important) and into content marketing, management, and analysis. Google is constantly changing it’s algorithm, but content will always remain king. The problem is that as content grows, it starts to need managed and I soon found myself ghost writing and re-writing, going back through huge archives of content and ensuring it met the standards of today.

    I see the writing on the wall. The future of my industry is in code. If I fail to adapt and learn programming languages right now I face being a generalist in a specialist’s world. So here’s what I’m doing about it:

    • Learning to program WordPress with PHP – I bought a book about programming plugins in WordPress. It’s helping me learn PHP and become a more advanced WordPress user all at once. I make a bulk of my income right now from WordPress support in Indianapolis so I am investing in the now and the later.
    • Learning to create an iPhone app – This is a skill I’ve tried to learn off and on for a couple of years, but felt I needed more basic programming knowledge, context, and skills before trying again. I also need a Mac.
    • Building a web app to become an iPhone app – I found it’s best to learn something when you have a project in mind so I’m initially using WordPress to create a web app that will eventually become an iPhone app.

    What are you doing about this ever-changing work environment we are in?

  • Add or Exclude From Specific Post in WordPress

    I’ve been doing a lot of content management lately and that means managing larger back archives of web data used in content marketing. Over the course of time, things you might have wanted to happen in the past to every web post in WordPress may not always apply in the present or the future. When it’s a rare occurrence, such as when you don’t want a particular thing to display on a particular post that displays everywhere else, you’ll need to make an exception loop for that post in the single.php file.

    Now this sounds easy, and it is, but for some reason I had a really hard time finding it. The confusion lied in that WordPress names all pages and posts with a “Page ID” number, which is a unique number in the WordPress SQL database, like a primary key. But just because the name says “Page ID”, that doesn’t mean WordPress thinks of pages and posts in the same way. According to the WordPress Codex, when querying a post, you must use “is_single”. Here’s the code below:

    Where the number (in this case 1454) is the page ID of the post. NOTE: is_page and is_post do not work for blog post IDs.

    [php]
    thing you wanted to show if that post

    thing you wanted to show otherwise
    [/php]

    When I was searching for a solution, other people were using it to show or hide excerpts. I was using it to show or hide a specific block of code I was using like a boilerplate at the end of each post in the client’s theme. You can use it to show or hide whatever you like, but let me know in the comments.