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Two Minute Exercises To Keep You In Shape During COVID
The gym is closed, you don’t want to run at Greenlake, and your soccer season is canceled. How are we all going to stay in shape?
For some people, a routine and discipline are the keys to exercise. So when every day is Tuesday and every hour is 1:00pm, how do you accomplish that discipline? How do you make that routine happen?
I surveyed a few friends, and here are some ideas we’ve come up with. All of them take two minutes or less, and by the end of the day, you’ll have completed a decent amount of calorie burning.
- TV Pushups: We’re going to be streaming more shows, especially until the weather turns around. So before every show, throw down 10-20 pushups. The more TV you watch, the more pushups you do.
- Old school Jumping Jacks: Yeah, it’s cheesy. But two minutes of jumping jacks will make you feel like you earned that episode of Ozarks.
- The Jump Rope: It was your favorite exercise toy as an eight-year-old. 2:00 as an adult will have you breathing hard.
- Walking Stairs: We may not own Stairmasters, but we do have staircases in our house. Take two minutes a few times a day and walk up and down the stairs 10 times. See if you can get to 50 flights a day.
- Sprinting Streets: Greenlake and Burke-Gilman can get crowded. But we don’t need long trails for sprints. Measure out 100 yards in front of your house and do a few sprints a day. Sprint up, walk back. It’ll take mere minutes and get your heart rate up.
- Chin-up bars: Cheap, easy to set up, and super effective. Don’t be discouraged the first time you try it.
- YouTube Yoga: You can find a lot of exercise content online – even short stretching and yoga exercises. Stay flexible my friends.
- The Massage Gun: Not everyone agrees in their benefits, but for a relatively small price (especially considering we don’t have gym membership dues), we like Massage Guns for loosening up muscles. I don’t have an Amazon Affiliate account or anything, so you can read about them on CNN.
You probably have your own ideas. Send me an email and share them, or just ping me on Twitter. Stay healthy everyone.
This Break Will Be Extended
So back in January, I thought that by March, I’d ready to share more nonsense, silly ideas, curious questions, and wild speculation.
But, I’ve started a contract gig with a consulting firm, producing loads and loads and loads of content for a Telecom company that really likes the color pink, I mean, Magenta. So sadly, I think this blog will stay pretty dusty for a while. But if you have any questions about 5G, shoot me an email.
Happy New Year
2018 is in the books! Cheers to 2019!
Just a quick note that the early part of the year is probably going to be pretty busy for me. So, if you enjoy this blog, I have some good news and bad news for you.
Bad news first: I’m going to just be too busy to write anything, unless you have some sadistic need to hear grueling details of wedding planning.
Good news: While I’m away from the keyboard, I highly recommend the blog from my good buddy Steve Banfield – SteveBanfield.blog: Thoughts on innovation, startups, photography and bourbon since 2007.
Why I’m Not an SEO Expert
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to truly understand SEO if this is the title and metadata you need to use to rise to the top of 296,000 results for the Google search, “Mariners Ticketmaster Account.”
Almost Twitter Famous
I tweet for fun and emotional humor release, not to develop an audience. And my typical tweet generates somewhere between 0 and 5 responses. Who knew that I could generate a larger audience by making fun of anarchists? Maybe I should present this strategy in my next client meeting.
Ask a Marketer: Paid Search
Last week we started the “Ask a Marketer” Series with Email Marketing tips from Elizabeth Case. This week we shift to paid search, with Local SEM Expert Rick Read.
Q1: Companies seem to be moving almost all of their Paid Ad budget to Google, Facebook and LinkedIn. What are you seeing from clients?
Rick: Yes. Paid media dollars are being moved to Search (Google//Bing), Facebook, and LinkedIn. Search always seems to be a steady driver of clicks and usually if examining the whole funnel search usually plays a role in influencing end clicks elsewhere in the funnel. FB and LI, have great results because of their ability to deliver more engaging content/creative and have powerful targeting capabilities. For all channels I would recommend leveraging custom audiences and re-marketing where you can.
Q2: What kind of landing page work should you do before starting a Paid Search campaign?
Rick: We see best results with a Clear top of page/above the fold CTA. If you at driving to leads to gated content, I recommend testing that to see if it works with your audience and campaigns. Search works best with as few steps to an end action as possible.
Q3: What is the minimum budget you need to make a Paid Search program worthwhile? How much for media, how much to hire help?
Rick: This is a difficult question as it has a lot of dependencies. Vertical, Keywords, brand awareness, and competition. depending on your KPI. You can allocate your funds in equal proportion and as your campaign runs you begin to shift budgets to media that perform better. But avoid the “last click” measurement model, try to measure and take into consideration the value search has on a FB click, even if search doesn’t get the last click.
For search you can use Google’s keyword planner and get an idea of search query volume and average CPC and then project that over the QTR then year. initially you want use this figure and add an additional 10-20% to it and run for 3-6 months and measure the results. You may find you cannot spend the money, or it may not be enough and will require additional investment. As far as staff resources, depending on account size, you may need a minimum of two people. one for PPC and one for Social. One can do it but they are two different practices that are involved enough to be a challenge for a single individual. But there are plenty of Agencies that handle any size business, so that is an option.
Q4: What are some ballpark Paid Search CPC and CPM rates these days for different industries?
Rick: Again this is a difficult question to answer. You can find a lot of info here https://trends.google.com/trends/ . CPC is effected by brand/non-brand keyword mix, Brand power, competition and quality score. etc. We have $40 keywords and keywords as low as $1 on branded terms. so again these are hard numbers to pin down.
Have more questions for Rick? Shoot me an email or find him on LinkedIn..
Should We Provide Free College Tuition
I’m seeing this topic brought up more and more. College is too expensive and even the middle class can’t afford it anymore. And those who come out of school with a mountain of debt will never be able to own a house, much less have enough discretionary income from the low paying jobs they’ll earn with their degree.
So the easy answer is to make college cheaper – or even provide college for free. It works in countries like Sweden, so could it work here?
Well the 1st thing that would have to happen would be a gigantic increase in taxes. Someone still has to pay the professors, administrators, janitors, etc… who make the school run.
But suppose in the short-term, we had a hybrid model that solves a specific problem for one sector of U.S. Business.
Let’s provide education that is free – but on loan – to people who choose to enter a track specific for math, science, engineering or computer programming. Here’s how it would work.
- Test into a program for aptitude or potential ability in the subjects, not existing grades or knowledge. Any age.
- Choose a specialized track includes some General Education but really focuses on the technical subject matter.
- Like the military, mandate required service time to pay off the loan. One suggestion: within 8 years of graduation, require 2 years of part-time teaching at a community college, high school or workshop level. This will help with the burden that we have a lack of professionals who can teach these subject matters. It also gives graduates a full 6 years to get their career situated and mature as adults who can mentor others.
- If the graduate has made enough money to pay off the loan, they can spend money rather than time in service. That money would be able to hire others who wanted to teach.
- The tech companies would be asked to underwrite some portion of the project. You’d want to make the numbers work so that overall, the cost of recruiting technical talent would decrease even after their financial commitment. They’d be investing smart money to grow the labor pool rather than paying premium salaries and recruiting commissions in a battle for scarce resources.
I don’t know how the numbers would net out, but I’m not in government. Maybe someone will read this and see if the math works.
Any other thoughts? Email me.
My Facebook Feed’s Predictions for 2017 (Part 1)
It’s the time of year when I get to reflect and think about the years immediately behind and ahead of me. I like to try to make some predictions to myself; not for clickbait or blog views, but so I can try to avoid being in a state of surprise and reaction as the year unfolds.
This year, I don’t have to do that. Thanks to the election of Donald Trump, I can simply look at my Facebook feed and see what everyone believes will happen. Between my friends and the media, 2017 has already been decided. So according to Facebook, here are some things the consensus has agreed upon will absolutely happen.
- We’re all going to become Russians: Apparently we already are Russian, we just didn’t know it. Russia controls our elections and our President. The policies that will be implemented in 2017 will be strictly designed to benefit Vladimir Putin.
- The KKK will reign supreme: According to my Facebook feed, a Trump Presidency means that it will be gosh darn near socially unacceptable for me to associate with members of different races. It stinks that I suddenly won’t be allowed to hang out with my friends who aren’t white.
- The Supreme Court will have 3 new members who believe Hitler was too liberal: It seems to be widely agreed upon that a Trump Presidency will surely lead to a new Supreme Court makeup in which 2 older Democrats and an empty seat will be filled by people who hate freedom and promote persecuting personal freedoms. That is certainly disappointing.
- No one who makes less than $120,000 a year will have Health Care: From what I’ve read on Facebook, with the repeal of ObamaCare almost everyone will lose their Health Insurance, even people who have other types of Health Insurance.
- Nuclear war with China is imminent: Now this scares me a lot, but makes the rest of the list pretty irrelevant. I live on the west coast near a Navy base. We must be high on the early target list. So, I guess the other things won’t matter since I’ll be part of a giant mushroom cloud.
This all nets out to a pretty depressing look into 2017. But I like to be more optimistic than this. So I think my resolution in 2017 is to ignore Facebook and watch channels like Bloomberg instead.
Explaining Why the Sounders are Playing Tonight, in 30 Seconds or Less
The Sounders play their 1st game of the MLS season on March 6. But today is February 23 and they have a home game that matters against a Mexican team called Club America. For you non-soccer fans, I will attempt to explain in the fewest words possible.
1) In 2014, while the regular season was being played, the Sounders won a different tournament called the U.S. Open Cup. That made them one of 4 American teams to qualify for yet another DIFFERENT 24 team tournament in 2015 called the Concacaf Champions League (Concacaf = Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football.)
2) In 2015, they played the “Group Stage,” where the 24 teams were split into 8 groups of 3, with the winner of each advancing to the next round. So the Sounders played 2 games against a team from Canada and 2 games against a team from Honduras. They won their Group, thus advancing to the final round of 8.
3) HOWEVER, due to the weird schedules of U.S. and Mexican leagues, you can’t actually play the quarterfinals, semi-finals and finals of the 2015 tournament in 2015. So these rounds are being played in February, March and April of 2016. In each round, the teams will play two games against their opponent, one at home, one on the road a week later. Most goals after two games wins.
4) Out of the 24 teams that qualified for the tournament originally, 4 were from the Mexican League and 4 were from the U.S. The other 16 came from all over Central America; Honduras, Trinidad, Guatemala, etc… All 4 teams from Mexico and all 4 teams from the U.S. advanced to the final round of 8. So if you are a math wizard, you are able to quickly see than ZERO of the 16 teams from the other countries made it past the U.S. and Mexican teams. In fact, when you look at the overall records in the Group Stage, U.S. teams were 10-5-1 and Mexican teams 10-4-2. Yes, in 32 games, U.S. and Mexican teams lost a total of 3 times.
Now, you might ask the question, “Well if the U.S. and Mexican teams are the only ones to make it through the Group Stage anyway, why do they play meaningless games in 2015 and delay the Knockout rounds until a full 2 seasons after the teams qualified? Why not skip the Group Stage and just have an 8 team Knockout in the right year?”
That’s a question I don’t really have a better answer for than, “Well, it’s soccer.”
Adding to the lunacy of the whole thing, because each group has 3 teams, by mathematical definition all the teams in the groups can’t play in the same 24 hours, like every other tournament in the world would schedule games. So in a quirk of fate, last year the Sounders won their group BEFORE the other two teams in their group had played their final game. Thus, Vancouver had to fly to Honduras in the middle of the week to play a game that didn’t matter, wasn’t on TV and no one wanted to go to. I think they sent like 13 of their youngsters and were in and out in 24 hours.
So that’s why the Sounders are playing tonight.