Sci Fi Jungle

Golf Buddy - Best Golf Gift Ever

Dudes, check out the Golf Buddy - its a GPS pre-loaded with all of the golf courses in North America.  There's no setup - just take it with you to the course and turn it on.  It knows where you are, tells you where to hit the ball, helps you keep score, and measures how far your shot was.  Wow!

I love the idiot proof style here.

Now, I hate golfing for a number of reasons.  1.  I suck at it.  2.  It's hot outside.  3.  There is walking involved.  Way too much walking.  However, if I were took a bunch of human growth hormone and became sporty and wanted to play golf I would for sure buy one of these puppies.  No doubt about it.

Help This Blog is Floundering!

SciFiJungle was my first blog.  I now write three and have a fourth domain that I am trying to decide what to do with.  The other blogs get a lot more traffic than this one.  I think I need to write more posts, more interesting posts, and consider doing some marketing.  I think its a good domain name and great topic I think maybe I just need to have better search engine opimized phrases or something. 

Should I print up custom tote bags?  I had this great idea to have bookmarks printed up with our graphics and web address and then stash them in Sci Fi books and give them to the local bookstores to hand out.

Musing about Marketing

I would like to increase the readership of Sci Fi Jungle.  Right now I am job hunting for a position as a network administrator for Exchange or Lotus Notes/Domino, and while I am collecting my severance and job hunting I am freelance writing to make extra money.  I write for three web sites, and I also am in the developmental stages of a new web site. 

Sci Fi Jungle of all my three blogs needs the most attention right now.  So I am excited to be reviewing Sci Fi Books for the  Sci Fi Experience and I am going to concentrate on reading  Sci Fi this month.  I just ordered the second book in the Harry Dresden series (Fool Moon) from PaperBackSwap, and I am excited to delve into that as soon as it arrives in the mail.

 

I've been considering inexpensive ways to market my blog.  I'm very interested in exchanging links with other interesting Science Fiction themed sites.  I have advertised on the Requiem web comic site and received fantastic results - over 100 page views a day on the days that I advertised.  I got the ad through Entrecard, which is a fun site for bloggers to check out and advertise on other people's blogs.

One idea that I've thought a lot about but have not done yet is to have bookmarks printed to promote SciFiJungle, and leave them at local bookstores and libraries for people to use.  Also, I should order custom rubber stamps and stamp the inside flyleaf on any SciFi books I sell or swap.  That would be a clever cheap marketing idea.

Taking over the world

Last April, I got on this wild tear and decided that I wanted to take over the world.  It all started out with the t-shirt shop.  (See upper right hand corner of site above)

Please note, that I have not yet sold a single t-shirt except to myself!  My family however is all outfitted in some awesome Cafepress alien t-shirts.  The kids have Dragons, Jin has the Alien throwing the Peace sign, and I have the "I'm from the Irish Galaxy" St Patrick's Day Alien t-shirt which I plan to bust out on St. Paddy's day again this year.

Be that as it may, despite not having taken over the world with t-shirt sales, I have actiually been quite successful with a new set of job descriptions such as webmaster, reviewer of sci fi shows, seller of used books, and general Internet nutcase. 

Its been a lot of fun learning about search engines, blogging, finding like minded people out in the wide world, and even just plain old talking to myself some days.

Do .edu Links Provide Better SEO than .com Links?

In my spare time I have been reading about Search Engine Optimization.  Webmasters spend a lot of time and effort making sure that their sites get good placement in the search engine results and like to try to reverse engineer and try to figure out what types of "backlinks" Grandma Google might weigh more heavily than others.  Then there is the subtle dance that goes around with link exchanges, which have a spectrum all the way from simple you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours to good ole' commercial enterprises which have sprung up around this fertile ground.  Wherever you have a "commodity" with a value, a marketplace will follow.  Did you know you can even buy links!

One company, EduTextLink even  specializes in .edu domain link building. According to their marketing information they are "Edu domain experts" and  "have figured out how to redirect the power of edu domains and push this authority directly to your clients’ web sites."

Now, one important thing to remember is that Google, and the other search engines are not going to publish what criteria they use to weigh the importance and quality of links.  Their algorythms are their "special sauce" and they are not telling us the recipe. 

So while I have read a lot about the magical tips of SEO, I read them with a big old grain of salt.  I can only believe that the best way to get traffic to a site must be to keep on writing quality content that is interesting to your target readership.  This little website doesn't get a huge amount of traffic yet, but I have had some success with some posts, most notably my Top 10 Sci Fi Comedies list.  I am going to keep plugging away at it, with my "tending the garden" mentality, until either I "take over the world" or else get tired of it.

Guerilla Marketing Idea - Bookmarks

I've had this idea cooking in my head for a while now to have Bookmarks printed up to advertise Sci Fi Jungle.   I'd love to drop off stacks of them at our local bookstores, and libraries, for people to take if they need.

I had a guerrilla-marketing idea to actually go to the science fiction section of the bookstore and insert Sci Fi Jungle Bookmarks into some of the bestselling Sci Fi books.  <insert evil genious laugh here>

I've used Vista print before, for my holiday "Cristmukkah Cards."  They are a great low cost online printer, that frequently will email you free offers (just pay shipping) once you have bought from them.  They've got a great deal on post cards - I could get 100 for just about $35.00  They would be great for a direct mailer, or moving announcements but I think would be too big for bookmarks.  Or I could do business cards in a vertical format.  They have a great price on business cards.

You can get custom Posty type sticky notes printed as well.  Amanda says I should have those printed with Sluggo the Space slug and Aliens and sell them.  Cute!

Added the site to a new Web Directory

I added this site to a new web directory, mainostoimistot.info-seo web directory.  I hope that by adding Sci Fi Jungle to web directories, and epescially Science Fiction and Fantasy Web Directories, I can generate more web and search traffic for the blog.   I love to check my Feedjit map on the left sidebar and see people from all over the world visiting our little piece of the web.  It really brightens up my day.

Grandma Google Found Us!

I've been doing some research on our site statistics.  I am very pleased that the all mighty search engine Google has added SciFiJungle to their indexes.  Yay!  Thank you Google-bots. 

Some of the searches that brought people to the site include:

"futuristic urban scifi art"  - - excellent - that's exactly what we sell on our cafepress store

"hot sci fi guys" -- I am not quite sure how I feel about his one.  <<smile>> This is a family friendly site,  (family as in kid safe and also family as in the rainbow type family).  But we do enjoy looking at the cute actors and actresses in our favorite tv shows and movies, so I guess its ok.   The way I look at it, the more we get picked up in the search engines the more chance people are going to start looking at our cool sci fi themed t-shirts and art and then the business will grow.

"Ben Browder" - Yeah, this makes sense.  We like Stargate, we like Farscape.  We like Ben Browder.  In fact, I guess he's one of the hot sci fi guys as discussed above.  <giggle>

No nibbles on "st patrick's day alien t-shirt" though.  Well, I guess its a niche market, right?  These things take time.