I forgot that I usually copy Sean Keener on making one of these lists. Here’s a list of places I spent at least one night in during 2008:

Queen Creek, AZ
Tucson, AZ
Keizer, OR
Portland, OR
Starkey, OR
Coeur d’ Alene, ID
Jackson, WY
Colorado Springs, CO
Snowmass, CO
Durango, CO
Las Vegas, NV
Del Mar, CA
Ogden, UT

…my list is pretty weak compared to Sean’s.

I need to do something about the design…it seemed cool at the time, but now I hate it. Maybe I’ll try to do something about it one of these weekends.

I have had several friends ask me why I even have a site/blog if I hate writing so much. There are 5 main reasons:

1. Someday, I hope to stop hating writing and actually put some useful information on here that will help other people. Blogging about SEO and bitching about Google is way overdone, so I probably won’t go that direction even though I’m not half bad at it . Maybe I’ll find something to write about like photography or trying to lose some weight (yeah, right…like those aren’t overdone).

2. Alot of what we do at BootsnAll revolves around things relating to WordPress. I use this blog to learn about the software and keep up with updates so that we can make good decisions on upgrades, plugins, etc. It’s a good playground where I can blow things up without anyone caring. FAlbum is a good example of something that can blow up easily…

3. My family can easily find my photo album.

4. Reputation management. I rank first for my name and I hope that I always will. There’s some guy in California that appears to be a pretty good cinematic artist who is taking up quite a few spots in the SERPs, so I may have to fight to hold my spot. I want people to find my site if they’re looking for me. I don’t have many enemies (jk Mika ), so hopefully nobody bad comes looking for me.

5. Because everyone else has a blog…

I had a little “discussion” with a friend of mine earlier tonight on our way home from a local SEO meetup. We were discussing the scalability of a product’s sales relative to how much of the search market share a site or sites can get for a given term. I’ll use “buy red widgets” as an example.

Let’s say that according to competetive intelligence, (something like Hitwise) there are x searches (PPC & organic combined) for “buy red widgets” and Site A gets y visitors off of those who searched for “buy red widgets.” As the owner of Site A, you know that you really get 1.5y visitors off of that search term and a reasonable assumption would be that there are really 1.5x overall searches for “buy red widgets.”

Thinking about the user’s intent when searching for “buy red widgets,” let’s assume the following (obvously there are probably more intentions, but keeping it simple here…) :

a% will buy if the price is less than $50
b% will buy if there is free shipping
c% will buy if they can get it shipped to them by the day after tomorrow
d% will buy if they think they can trust the site that they land on
e% are just price shopping and will not buy right now

Whether we have 1,000 searches or 100,000 searches for “buy red widgets,” these percentages will remain pretty constant long-term.

Now, let’s say that the owner of Site A knows that m% of visitors (whether it’s PPC or organic search) from “buy red widgets” actually purchase a red widget given that he has the pricing and shipping policies that he does, which gets users to buy based on their intent. The owner of Site A decides to turn Site B (which he also owns and is an authority site on widgets) into a store that also sells red widgets. The owner expects that, given the authority, age, research, etc. of Site B, it can get 200% more traffic than Site A for “buy red widgets” and Site B will have the same pricing and shipping policies (for the sake of having a constant in the setups).

Here’s where the argument discussion comes into this. What I see happening is that the following equation can be applied to determine sales associated with searches for “buy red widgets” to Site B no matter how many searches there are or what percentage of the market a site has because, as noted above, in the grand scheme of things, searcher/buyer intent does not change just because there are more or less searches :

2(1.5x)m = # of estimated sales

My friend was trying to convince me that the more searches there are for “buy red widgets,” the lower the conversion rate becomes. IMO, there’s no way that the conversion rate would drop or be lower on Site B just because it gets more traffic. One thing he was assuming was that the total number of red widgets that would be sold relative to the number of searches was a constant figure. The reason that doesn’t make sense is that searches and intent of the searchers doesn’t change just because the volume of searches or visitors increases. If more visitors end up on a site that fits their intent, more people will buy. If fewer searchers find sites that fit their intent, fewer people will buy.

Maybe I’m off base…thoughts?

I made the mistake this morning of letting Firefox upgrade itself on my desktop without doing any digging around to see if people were having problems with it. Normally I do that, but I had stopped worrying about it for Firefox. Stupid me.

Upon restarting Firefox, it appeared that the theme I use was gone. Then I noticed my plugins weren’t showing up. After attempting to look for updates or settings and having FF lock up on me, I was pissed. There’s no way I’m reinstalling this thing…too many settings and add ons that would be a bitch to recover.

I jumped over to my laptop and started searching around (was going through withdrawls without my normal FF setup). After digging through a few sites and seeing posts about it without any solutions being presented, I started looking for similar problems happening with past updates (those would have had enough time for a solution to be presented). That search led me to this. It worked…woohoo.

Corrupt extension files

Files that store information about the extensions you have installed can sometimes be corrupted. Deleting them can fix a number of extension issues; they will be regenerated the next time you start Firefox. [5][6]. Exit Firefox completely, then open your Firefox profile folder (read the linked article for its location) and delete these three files:

extensions.ini
extensions.cache
extensions.rdf

From CircuitCity.com – after $4153.01 savings?

I really need to start writing more on this blog. I think I have alot of good information and ideas built up in this thick skull of mine and I need to get them out in some form. I can’t decide which way to go with the site…focused on personal stuff or start throwing out ideas I have on websites, marketing, etc. I guess I can pretty much do whatever I want since it’s my blog and I’m not out to change the world with it…yet.

I’m working on implementing a new site design. It may be a bit buggy for now, but looks much better than the last theme…and was customized specifically for me – nobody else has this theme (that I know of). Hopefully it will get finished before the new baby comes.

Christmas 2005 has now come and is pretty much gone. This year didn’t seem much like Christmas time to me until this past Friday. Partially, it is the lack of decorations around the house as we are getting ready to sell it. I have also just been so busy with so many different things going on in my life that I haven’t really had time to stop and reflect on things. This coming week, I’m going to try and relax a little before going full speed into 2006.

Today was a pretty good day overall. We found out that my sister is now engaged to her long-time boyfriend, Tony. He’s Greek and one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. I got some pretty cool new toys to play with and several new clothing items that I really wanted. Jayson bought me a new cooling head for my r/c car and we took them out in the desert to run them around. It definately makes a big difference keeping the engine quite a bit cooler. After dinner, we sat on the back patio, started a fire in our little chiminea and I decided to find out just how flammable r/c car nitro fuel is…quite a fun little experiment, but probably wasn’t the best of ideas.

I’m having a blast working with BootsnAll. Sean, Donovan, and Court are all on a Tanzania adventure trip getting ready to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. I wish I was with them. Most likely I will attempt to go on the trip next summer.

Merry Christmas to you all and best wishes for 2006.

Other than a few minor issues, the new house is coming along nicely. The estimated completion is the end of February.

We’re going to be doing tile in our current house this weekend and hopefully new carpet will go in next week. Once those are done, we will be ready to get it sold. Not sure where we’ll move after that. I want to get a rental house until at least a month after completion of the new house so that we can put new flooring in. We didn’t upgrade any of the flooring from the builder because they wanted a rediculous amount of money for the upgrades. They also didn’t have bamboo flooring, which Christie and I are leaning towards for the hard surfaces in the house. Originally I wanted 24″ travertine, but after looking into bamboo and seeing some samples at Home Depot, I’ve decided that it is a great look.

I’ll be in Vegas next week for PubCon. It’ll be a great time. Sean, Chris and Nick from BootsnAll will be there and they’ll be bringing Ioan with them. Should make for a wild week.

We’ll be in Tucson at the end of the following week for a wedding and some relaxation. I’ll also be going to Portland for the BootsnAll Party.