Writing, writing, writing

Geez, I've been so busy that I've totally neglected newsfromoutthere, sorry. The thing is, it's going to be harder for me to keep up with this blog as the Winter season progresses. Not that it's winter yet, but the preparations are nearly in full swing. I've also got thewildslide to think about as people start getting excited about skiing around here and the project that has really been demanding a lot of my attention is trying to launch a Basin Sports blog which is here, tentatively. With the departure of Intern Steve from the Basin, most of our marketing and social media stuff has fallen on my plate. I'm kind of glad to have it, honestly, but the problem is that Intern Steve was educated as a web marketing guy and I'm a... carpenter. So that's sort of interesting. The good part is that one of the most important things you can do to increase your business' presence on the web is develop interesting content (that's a marketing term) and if there's one thing I like to do, it's write content. Whether it's interesting or not remains to be seen. I'm trying to put all of the pieces together right now and I'm reading The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. Turns out I've been doing everything wrong, but what else is new. Anyway, I've got a lot of stuff to write now. In addition to my own facebook, twitter, and two blogs (actually more, but two active ones,) I've now got Basin Sport's twitter, facebook, blog, weekly newsletter, and soon daily snow report. I am also the chief photographer and videographer for Basin Sports, which are two things for which I have no natural aptitude at all. What this means is that I won't have time to do a lot of the fun exciting office work I did last year at the Basin. Shucks! Let me just remind you that I'm a carpenter and that precludes having access to a computer and even a phone most of each day at this time of the year. So many challenges. Another consideration that I'm becoming aware of is that you have to tread carefully in the digital world because once your mistakes become entrenched, they are very difficult to fix. As an example, Basin Sports has had a daily ski report at basinski.com for probably 12 or 13 years and that site gets an unbelievable number of hits every day in the winter. However, the site itself is a dinosaur turd and absolutely useless for e-commerce, so we now have basinshopping.com. But, now we need to migrate all of those people who have had basinski bookmarked forever over to basinshopping in order to boost our search ratings. And although this seems straightforward to me (as a carpenter) several web professionals have told us that they don't exactly know what will happen if we try to do that. Evidently there are mysteries of the interwebs that even professionals don't understand. So I don't want to mess anything up. Then, there is the matter of the ski report. Lots of people read it, as I've said, but the format doesn't work all that great from a marketing perspective. Because the content is replaced everyday, rather than just moved down the line and eventually archived, it doesn't lend itself to being linked to. And that precludes any chance of viral activity (more marketing speak.) So something has to be done about that. And all of this stuff costs money because we do not have anyone on staff that has even a remote idea of how to actually create a web page. Money that I don't really have any access to. I could tell you stories of the colorful characters we have enlisted locally to do our web work, but it would only reflect badly on us for associating with such people. All of this begs the question: is it worth it? Probably not to me. You see, I know it's in my best interest to sell a lot of ski stuff but, strangely, I don't really care. The only thing I hope to get out of it is a job for six or seven months of the year. I like the scale of my life right about where it is. I don't want to be any busier and I don't really want to make any more money either. So as long as my marketing efforts don't cause a decrease in business, I win. But some of these other people that I work with want more and I don't really want to let them down. I guess we'll see how it goes.