I have done things, good and bad.  My kids love me. They both adore me. For whatever reason, I am their hero.Ruby  - my almost 4 year old -sat in my lap yesterday morning, and watched The Incredibles with me.  She made it about 50 times better.  Sure, sure, it’s a great movie, a reverent parody and homage to the comics.

But watching it with HER, laughing and discovering the jokes, smiling and looking up at me to see if it was funny.  Grinning and curling in my lap.

I did nothing in my life to deserve this.  But I get it anyway, and I am full up with love and happiness.

Now, off to the zoo.

Yes, I know that the split isn’t great, but it was sort of a last minute thing to “tack on” the extra 3.1 miles. I was planning to go 4 and set a record for my 5k time. (I’m just now getting back into running and into shape after a decade break. I can blame Bush for that, too.)

It’s astonishing to me that just 2 months ago – in mid/late December, I didn’t have the capacity to run a 11 minute mile. Legs, lungs and brain all didn’t work.

Longest run that I know of since at least 2004. Maybe longer. I feel pretty good today, I have that vague “runners high” that you get. I slept like the dead last night.

I still need music and a treadmill to run. I have crutches that will go away one by one. This blog is probably something of a crutch.

I’m turning in between 20-25 miles a week.

The first time I ran I felt horrible. Now, sometimes the first mile is rough (oddly, particularly when I take it too slowly).

Then I decided to add some more.  Wasn’t in the plan but for every day that I’ve talked myself out of a mile, I needed a day where I talked myself into one.

So, there’s that.

A little box like this after posts can go a long way to making things look better.

I’ve also been procrastinating on writing our sales letter.  There’s a garbage and indifferent place holder in there. It signals that we’re kind of arrogant (we are, we’ve earned it) but nothing else.

Right now, our sales letter is arrogant, yet not persuasive.  We are busy as hell, so it’s not like it matters now, but we have to fix that eventually, and we have to build a company that owns the details.  We can’t really grow without a steady stream of great leads, but we’re too busy to follow up on the leads we have.

Today, I should make headway on a lot of our marketing stuff.  I’ve been using a yellow pad to write headlines a few at a time over the last couple of months, and so I have some sense of what I can say, and I can construct a good sales letter in just a few hours.  I wasn’t ready before with a congruent plan to make a scent trail from beginning to end.

The goals.

Right now, we’re getting some  great traffic.  About 20% of it goes to our work page, and about 1/3 of that goes to the “quote” page.  About 5% of what’s left  (0.3% of all traffic) completes the request for info.  So at each link in my chain, I lose too many.   I think it should look like 30% work, 30% of that goes to quote, and 10% of what’s left completes the action.  That’d put us at 1% of traffic becoming a lead, and we could then get an AE to do this.

Right now, all of our traffic is organic.  We’re probably going to add a small amount of PPC.

First, I realized today that virtually all of our traffic is going to come from one of three places:

• Competitors snooping and my own social media contacts.
• People actively looking to buy.  (We get 100+ hits on superlatively targeted searches- pricing for ________)
• People looking to know how to DIY a movie.

This is gleaned from Clicky.

Right now, “more traffic” is a goal I could focus on but it’s not going to do me nearly as much good as increasing the power of the scent trail and fixing my site.  More traffic is something I could buy, but this is going to take 8-10 hours of work today.

That’s why I take Friday Afternoonss off and work on Saturdays.  I get a ton done.

I’ll probably post on this a few times today.

It’ll start out with placeholder content and I’ll move it to “the real thing.”

In order:

• Create featured box that goes under posts.
• Create sidebar image that suggests people get a quote or see the work.
• Improve the /work page
• Improve the /quote page.
• Write 1100 word front page sales letter.
• Put work on our sidebars.
• Put testimonials on our sidebars.
• Consider what we really want on those three pages.

I realize know that people that are coming to our site are already sold on getting a demo movie.  By and large, they are getting quotes.

I’m going to guess that the traffic is like this:

• 1/3 can’t afford us and are looking for a $2500 solution or to DIY it.
• 1/3 can afford us but were planning on paying $5-8k.
• 1/3 can afford us and are comparing us to our competition.

Focusing on the 66% of the people that I can help is the way to go.

Off to the grind.

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Right now, I dream of being able to run outside, but right now, I need the steady feedback that the treadmill provides. My mental muscles, more than my physique, are weak. I feel myself making excuses all the time.

I want to run as hard as I can, and I know that I’m OK doing a 9:30 pace for a distance (3ish miles). I then hit the elliptical.

Hopefully, by the time February’s over, I won’t need the elliptical anymore.

But when I try and run outside in the Oregon sunshine, I don’t hit anything close to that pace. I don’t have the mental muscles built up, I don’t have the landmarks built, and I don’t like the way Runkeeper provides feedback (i.e. I’d love to set a route and a pace and have it tell me that I’m 30 seconds slower.)  Stuff like Runstar might help out, but I gotta glance down every x seconds.

I know that eventually I’ll be tough enough to run on my own, but for now, I welcome the treadmill.

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I’m also doing droll activities like haggling deals and making contacts and contracts. More of a travelogue sort of thing.

For now, it’s in the @minutiae category.  After this post, that won’t be displayed on the front page.  It’ll have its own category archives page.  Eventually, I might change the look and feel but I doubt that.

I don’t believe anyone cares that I got my 5k time under 30 minutes, or that I sent 156 emails or whatever.  That little stuff matters to me, and it’s a relic from my GTD-LIVEJOURNAL days, but it needs to be filtered out.

I guess I don’t totally have the sense to shut up, so I need a category to keep from boring myself.

Or that I read 29 pages. Etc.

I’ll probably filter it from the RSS as well. Just let it post to twitter. If people follow a link on Twitter, they more or less deserve what they get.

I’ve more or less hated blogs that resort to being travelogues. I want to talk about ideas, love, sex, magic.  But the stuff I do every day is the stuff that matters.

For whatever reason, I’ve never been able to resist the urge to write about that sort of thing. It’s probably the last hold Facebook has on me, the place to blather about minutiae.  Now I won’t be upset in the least that there’s no feedback.