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Monday, November 11, 2013

Baiting the Links - an SEO Experiment



Today I’m treating you to something on the lighter side. But first, a little background.

In the middle of the summer of 2012, I answered a Craigslist ad that sought writers to compose SEO content. SEO (search engine optimization) refers to the array of strategies and tricks that websites use to rank high in Google searches when potential clients are looking for their goods, services, or information.

My new employer, Audience Bloom, was a brand-new startup based in Seattle. I went straight to work composing 400-500 word articles about reunion services, door companies in Phoenix, real estate agents and retirement centers in Seattle, and so on.

Since the only goal of his clients was to attract more traffic to their websites, the founder of Audience Bloom, Jayson DeMers, had the idea to try posting whimsical, entertaining pieces about nonexistent products that would pique readers’ interest and make them click through to the clients’ real websites. He called these fanciful pieces “link bait.”

Monday, November 4, 2013

Acting Mad



Somewhat to my surprise, I find myself in the middle of a short stage run in which I relate the story of my alien abduction, complete with seven-foot bunraku (Japanese puppetry) aliens. My cast mates and I also tell tales of childhood mishaps, physical and substance abuse, hallucinations (physical and aural), and recovery.

In one piece I talk about suffering at the hands of peers, teachers, parents, a babysitter, a rapist; in another short play, I embody a hallucination tormenting a woman as I happily swig from a bottle of Jack Daniels.

And I thought, going into this, I was just going to do some simple readings!

Several years ago, it dawned on me that I probably wouldn’t be doing much theater acting anymore. I had appeared in an average of three to five plays a year since 2005.

But in a smaller market like Portland, you can do theater pretty much only if you have a day job … because stage productions pay too little to live on. Or you can do commercial film, video, and print modeling if you have an independent and/or free-lance source of income, or perhaps that rare job that allows you complete control of your time … because you need your weekdays free to audition and work those sparse opportunities. Commercial shoots tend to keep bankers’ hours.