Posted 1 year, 10 months ago at 1:01 pm. 0 comments
Hey Everyone,
Well, some of the office has returned from an exciting time at the Nightclub & Bar Convention in Atlantic City. We meet many new faces along with others we have met previously. It was great to see and meet all the new people. I hope those who attended the seminar by us learned a few things and enjoyed the complimentary green frog gummies that our CFO prepared. I apologize that there wasn’t time for any magic tricks, healing of the sick or world problems solved. Maybe next time we will find a slot for that. When the rest of the gang returns from the city, we will have more to post about our exciting time. For now I just wanted to give a quick thank you to all those who attended and helped out.
THANK YOU!
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 9:12 pm. 0 comments
So it’s been a month since I blogged. Kinda crazy, except I’ve been travelling a lot this past month. I spent a week in Arizona and driving to North Carolina before coming back to Pennsylvania. It was a neat experience, seeing the different landscape, meeting the different people. Everyone has a story, of course, and those stories are great to hear. Talking to the waitress at The Heart Attack Grill in Phoenix, she told us she was from Canada, moved to Michigan, then went down to Arizona, experiencing the extremes of weather by choice. Hard not to pay attention when she’s wearing a little nurse’s outfit. What’s more interesting is when you meet people from your own area, or at least within 100 miles or so. That happens more often than I expected. But the landscape was amazing. We started our trip at 3pm, so we were in the hills of Arizona when the sun set. Simply amazing.
So the big problem with a week long trip is coming back to work. You try to work on the trip, but there’s no way that’s happening. You check your emails on your phone, but there’s only so much you can do. If you’re like me, you have instant messenger on your phone too, but again, most things require you to be on your computer. So you finally make it back to work and there’s a pile of work on your desk. Enough to make you overwhelmed. So I’ve been struggling to stay above water. I’ve mentioned before that I have several jobs, one of them being a website, PANightLife.com. This site is currently undergoing a full redesign. I had 10 days to get it completed. I’ve got about 6 left now, and it’s a very daunting task. There’s a lot of pages, so wish me a little luck as I pull long, long hours trying to get this finished before we head to AC.
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 12:13 pm. 0 comments
Dr. Randy Pausch, a professor from Carnegie Mellon, spent the last many months of his life in pure happiness after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I just spent the last hour watching his last lecture at the Carnegie where he started off saying how he didn’t want crying or pity from anyone - he just wanted to tell how he has spent his years as a computer science professor teaching kids through fun. He talked about his childhood dreams and how over the years he has accomplished them, maybe not exactly, but in a certain way. I believe that people like Randy lead very inspirational lives. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be diagnosed with a disease and only having X amount of time to live. I do hope however, if that ever is something I face in life, I can have the courage to be as happy as he was at the most devastating time.
This past March, a very good friend of mine lost his life in an automobile accident. Sure, I think about and miss him every day and still cry, but I have learned to celebrate his life and be happy for all the wonderful times we had together rather than always being depressed about it. When I looked back, I realized that he was always full of life and rarely ever angry. He was always looking to make the best of everything no matter what the situation was and was so easy going. I was always so very afraid of death and could never even really talk about it. Even now it still bothers me, but as my friend lived and Dr. Pausch preached, I will continue to try to live my life with less anger and a whole lot more happiness. After all, you only get one shot at it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 3:16 pm. 0 comments
As I have yet to blog until now, I apologize. As being one of the newest members here at JumpFrog Marketing, you can imagine that it hasn’t been a priority on my list of things. Now that I have been at JumpFrog marketing for well over a month, it’s time to get into the swing of things. Just earlier today I encountered a situation that isn’t too unfamiliar with one reason for website optimization.
Earlier today for lunch I made a drive to a fast food joint where I ordered my food and went through the drive thru to pay for my order. Like many people, I fall into the category of paying with only debit/credit. Rarely do I carry cash. Well, I spent a good 5 to 10 minutes in the drive thru waiting to get my debit card back when one of the employees said their machines were down and to just drive to the next window and get my food, for FREE. What was the reason? Appearance. The manager found me cute and said that since the food was already made, I could just have it because I was cute and they didn’t tell me about the issue earlier. I made a deal by getting free food mostly because of appearance.
There are times when there is a need to focus on appearance, whether we would like to admit to it or not. Appearance is key to viral success. I, as a consumer, want to go to a site that is legitimate in order to make a purchase. The first step in considering if a site is legit for me is does it look legitimate when I look at it? Is it under construction? Can I find what I need? Does it have security when I enter my information? A good website will bring people and keep people coming back. If I like a site and make a purchase, submit my information for a quote, or etc, that site profits/gains and one of the reasons was probably due to appearance. Appearance of a site is one thing to consider when optimizing.
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 10:57 am. 0 comments
Hello all you long time listeners, first time callers. JumpFrog Marketing has been invited to speak in Atlantic City at the Nightclub & Bar Convention. No, this isn’t a typical Online Marketing Convention. But I’m not known to ever do anything typical. You can pretty much bet on red if i’m betting on black. My esteemed colleague and i will be introducing ways to break into online marketing whether you are a bar, restaurant or vendor to both. The key isn’t shady affiliate programs or huge media dollars being pushed on to remnant spots. We know that the social networking aspect is what its all about. Check out the show’s information at
http://www.nightclub.com/conventions/atlantic_city_2008/
We will be doing magic tricks, healing the sick and solving world problems all within our 45 minute window. Please visit us on Tuesday, October 14th at 3:15pm Trump Taj Mahal!
Posted 1 year, 11 months ago at 2:54 pm. 0 comments
i am nearing the completion of my business degree at penn state and have finally decided what it is i really want to do. at first i always wanted to own and manage my own bar and restaurant. then i just wanted to work as an office manager. then i thought being a big shot manager would be best. now, i realize i don’t want the stress, long night and weekend hours, or unhappiness that i’ve learned comes with that job. i am still in the beginning of my internship here at jumpfrog, but already i absolutely love it. it’s wonderful not having to deal with grumpy people every day! coming in here and working on a project or meeting with a client is a million times better. i believe i have found my career of choice! 
Posted 2 years ago at 12:17 pm. 0 comments
It’s been a while since I had made a post (over two weeks). I can’t speak for anyone else not posting, but at least for me things have been busy. I’ve been out of the office a lot and juggling my workload so it’s actually completely slipped my mind. I’m guessing with the others (I use the word others loosely, since there’s only one other person who’s ever blogged) have faced similar problems.
While I’d like to say that’s gonna change, I can’t really. I may be travelling part of next week and all of the following week, then travelling to AC for a conference the second week in October, and more travelling at the end of October. Man I’ve been getting around a lot lately. I’ll do my best to make an actual informative post. I’m in the process of setting up some tests for adWords quality score, SEO results, and keyword targetting. If I find out anything good, I’ll try to pass along the knowledge. I feel I should be giving back, since I’ve spent a lot of time reading other blogs, gleaning knowledge and tips whenever/where ever I can.
Posted 2 years ago at 12:11 pm. 0 comments
Bruce Clay wrote a great blog about how to treat your best assets in your company. Having been on both sides of the fire, I can say Bruce nailed it. I’ve been in jobs where I was treated poorly despite giving everything I had, and had my heart and soul sucked out of me. I’ve also been in jobs where I was treated like a rock star when I deserved it. Now, having employees under me, I can only hope I’ll take those experiences and treat them the way they deserve to be treated.
To give credit where credit’s due, here’s the link to Bruce Clay’s blog: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/archives/2008/09/happy_employees.html
Posted 2 years ago at 9:36 am. 0 comments
A startup is a hard thing to manage. The dedication and time required is intense. I’m finding myself coming in to the office at 7:30am and leaving around 6pm. Nights and weekends tend to be spent either working or researching, though there is still time to do non-work-related things. It’s tough with a startup, especially in this industry, since everything moves so quickly, we’re all struggling to keep up. That’s the beauty of it, though. There’s always something new to do. Some new SEO trick to try out, a new affiliate offer to market, a new banner to create, a whole new niche market to drive PPC traffic to, toying with behavioral targeting, the works.
Posted 2 years ago at 4:39 pm. 0 comments
So as things move forward, clients keep coming in, our staff expands to accommodate our gaps in skills, it’s neat to step back and see what we’ve done so far. There’s been some adversity, but we’ve fought hard to get where we are. We suffered several setbacks that many (all) startups experience, common pitfalls that we believed we’d be able to avoid but sure enough found ourselves knee deep anyway. But hey, life is nothing but a set of lessons, it’s your choice if you want to learn from them.
So with this growth, we’re finding out there’s more and more things we need to do. I swear, Jeff has rearranged our office around once a week for the past two months. The only thing that’s stayed static is my desk. No one touches my desk :D. But there’s always work to do, making sure job descriptions are defined and being fulfilled, work is getting done. It’s tough, but necessary. I’m starting to lose focus on this blog post, so I’m gonna stop with the work talk.
And WOOHOO!!!! I’m done with one big project. 800,000,000 more to go. Or just four, sometimes it’s hard to count when I’m wearing shoes. I have trouble with simple math sometimes, but I can bang out advanced math in my head. It’s like when I shooting pool, the easier the shot, the less likely I am to actually make it. But give me a shot where I have to bank it two three times and I’ll do the vector calculations in my head and usually get pretty darn close if not make the shot.