So, as I’ve referenced in the past, I have psoriasis. It’s this skin disease like eczema, except it’s called psoriasis, and it’s, like, a totally different disease. In both diseases, there are red splotches all over the affected human. Or is it effected? I always mess that up. Affected. I think it’s affected. Anywhoo. Psoriasis is an INTERNAL problem – my immune system (and the immune systems of my fellow flakers) is hyper and totally opposed to all this perfectly good skin that covers me. It freaks out and goes, “Holy crap! What’s all that skin doing there? That’s not good skin! That’s bad, bad, bad, super bad skin! We need to grow NEW skin on top of that bad skin because we’ve had, like, seven hundred thousand immune system lattes and we are totally buzzed!” Or something like that.
So one day my buddy Micah called me up and said, “you know about the internet and stuff, right?” and I was all, “Kind of” and he was all, “I have this idea.”
The idea was that he wanted people to send him stuff for free and he’d review it on the internet. Me too. He wanted me to get free stuff and review it on the internet. And he talked to his friend Angie, and she works for a promotional products company and can get free samples sometimes, so we wanted HER to have free stuff and review it on the internet.
While the page isn’t designed to make money, we like money a lot. We’re big fans. The real point of the page is to review stuff and tell people honestly what we think of the product. I mean, we’re probably never going to say that something is the crappiest product ever, but we might hint at it with code.
So we launched http://www.thecoolconsumer.com and we’ve reviewed two things so far. We have more in the works, and we’re offering a limited amount of advertising on the page in order to recoup my expense for the url and the hosting. Nitty gritty, I know, but that’s the business of the interwebs.
So, if you read this blog (this one, right here, the one you’re reading now), you can totally get a link for FREE on our link page, wherein I will write a little blurb about your awesomeness and put a link on your website, so long as you do the same for me.
I am totally not feeling like a big internet link whore, like I thought I would. It’s not personal, right? It’s business. And how can this product review website garner enough attention to get us our own show on The Discovery Channel or NatGeo if we don’t have killer links and strategically placed yet tasteful advertising?
Next up, a blog about my embarrassing and painful skin condition. I know you can hardly wait for that!
So, the internet is all crazy about dogs, right? I mean, post a video of a dog and you’re, like, getting eight thousand YouTube comments a day. Or so I hear. Some of the YouTube videos I’ve posted are one of a contractor drilling in my front yard, a crappily-taken video of Lily Scott’s version of “Fixing A Hole,” and the Ukrop family announcing the sale of Ukrops to Ahold Company.
I’ve learned a lot about things called “keywords” lately. I posted these two videos of my dogs, but I named them “Jake and Bailey Playing,” and “Jake and Bailey Playing With The Circle Toy.” The deal with these “keywords” is that they are the words people use to search for stuff. So, if someone was looking for a dog playing with a toy, they wouldn’t know to type “Jake” or “Bailey” or “Circle Toy” into YouTube’s search field. That is why the videos have only been viewed 9 times, and that has all been by me.
I’m trying an experiment, and you can totally go down this road with me! Aren’t you so glad and excited that I’m willing to share my internet experiences with you guys? Aren’t you also so glad that I wait seven or eight years to jump on any new internet trend? OK, maybe not that long, but I am kind of a late bloomer. Or lazy. Maybe I’m just lazy.
I’ve “beefed up” the YouTube post. I changed the title to “Dogs Playing” and I put in a description. Granted, in the description I ramble on a bit about the fact that the dogs keep murdering squirrels, but I guess some description is better than no description, you know what I mean? I also added something called “Tags.” Tags are like keywords in that they make your post show up because it has those words associated with it.
**You do realize that I’m over-simplifying keywords and tags and stuff because you guys already know this and so do I because I work with an SEO Company, right? OK. Glad we got that cleared up.
I’ll keep you posted as to the progress. I’m assuming the amount of viewings my video receives from this site won’t skew the results so much, because traffic here is small, yet greatly appreciated. I know you can’t wait to see what happens!
So that you don’t feel totally cheated, here are some pictures of my dogs. My cute dogs. My funny dogs. My cute, funny dogs.
