My wife has taken a job at Canada Post as a letter carrier. The job pays almost as damn much as what an union pressman makes in the city. This should tell you something about what has happened to the local print scene here in the last twenty years. When I broke in the biz, the pressmen were considered only a little lower than God, and definitely on speaking with a few of the archangels.
Anyways, I look after the kids two days of the week now, and try to put in 40 hours on the other three days and evenings. Hello midnight hour, it’s me at the computer again.
I do sys admin at Printcraft and internet marketing for myself. What is internet marketing, you may ask? Glad you ask that question. I build ecommerce sites that advertise goods from such companies as Amazon, Ebay, and other merchants who have signed up through affiliate networks such as Commission Junction. I’ve got about 23 web sites set up so far.
Jeepers, it’s a lot of work, I’ve never worked so hard since university, when I paid my way through university working the night shift at a grocery store, stocking shelves. But it’s finally starting to pay off, this month at least
The big thing about internet marketing is traffic, traffic, traffic, you get it by organic SEO and by pay-per-click. An old acquaintance of mine from Kodak showed some curiosity in what I am doing and ask for some links about PPC and SEO. No problem, I thought to myself, and then looked at my bookmarks. Oh, okay, none of this makes sense to a normal person. Great, just great.
What does this have to do with prepress? In theory, nothing. In practice, I strongly suspect that the printing companies who will survive the next decade will be the ones who embrace the marketing potential of the internet and that means learning about SERPS, PPC, and organic SEO. And just like prepress, it’s all about the details.
Like right now, if I don’t fall asleep on the keyboard, I have to check my server logs and find out which spider keeps banging my Ebay affiliate links and screwing up my tracking. And then I really should modify my .htaccess file as the canonical urls (http:// and http://www) are both being indexed by google (duplicate indexing is bad). And oh yeah, I still have 4 sites that aren’t being tracked by Google analytics yet because I haven’t pasted in the javascript.
Jeepers, I’m busy. Glad you asked.