Musings from Brian J. Noggle

Well, after watching all those Bruce Lee movies, I planned to go into my martial arts class yesterday morning and say that I’d watched them and picked up some bad new habits for sparring:

• A lot of kung fu kata peacocking between strikes.
• Happy feet making like Irish dancing before beginning.
• Making single strikes instead of combinations, and making them big so the people in the last row can see them.
• Using my forearm to block everything: Spin heel kicks, bo staffs, sticks, speeding trucks, anything. And the forearm stops them cold.
• Hooting when I strike. You’re supposed to exhale to tighten everything up, which leads to the “hi-ya!” Which my school has seemingly stopped emphasizing. As it stands, I already make martial arts sound effects a lot of times when I strike.
• Thumbing my nose mid-bout. Although it will be harder to do with boxing gloves on.

At any rate, I didn’t get to lay the spiel on anyone since renshi asked me what I was listening to (my question to him often is “What are you listening to?” because, in the past, he’s been in charge of the martial arts playlist and picked out metal). So I had to talk about the new Frozen Crown CD instead.

And, as part of our warmups, we had to run to the edge of the mat, do a couple pushups, and then run back. Across the room, kyoshi joked with someone about doing them on fingertips like Bruce Lee, so down on my side of the mat, I tried it. And I could.

So that has been delighting me and bringing a smile to my face since. Because, you know, I am just like Bruce Lee. Although I will likely never get to one finger pushups because I do not have kung fu hands.

And, the same day, I was listening to my workout playlist whilst dusting the lower level, and Eminem’s “Monster” came on, and it mentions Bruce Lee.

Fame made me a balloon ’cause my ego inflated
When I blew, see, but it was confusing
‘Cause all I wanted to do is be the Bruce Lee of loose leaf

Again, it’s an illustration about how outsized an influence Bruce Lee had. The man only made a couple of movies, but what an impact on the culture that he’s mentioned fifty-some years later in a martial arts class.

Ah, gentle reader. I fell into an Internet lead generator and feel dirty.

I’ve worked for one, and I might again, but I try to avoid them when I can because I don’t like someone making money off of my contact information since I’m not making any money of my own. And my experience with what I thought was a real company that had subcontracting appliance repairmen but was probably just a lead generator where independent contractors bought my job took a turn for the worse when a repairman drove down from Marshfield, an hour or so away, to give me an estimate which was more than the washing machine cost. So when I need something, I don’t do an Internet search only to see that the six or eight (or more) top results are funnels. I do the right thing: I remember who advertised on the radio or whose trucks I have seen nearby (but the cost of buying leads might be built in).

So: We need a new roof at Nogglestead, and given our current circumstances, we were going to need to finance it. I called the roofing company we’d selected, and I expected the estimator to come with application paperwork because the last time we did something like this–but that was probably 25 years ago. The adjuster told me I could use the Web site to apply for financing through their partner.

So I got on the Web site, and the link in the heading navigation to financing was broken–it led to a 404 error on the Web site of a local bank. So I thought the “partner” was the fancy tool used by that bank. A little later, I got to exploring the Web site a little and found another financing link which led to a form with the tool’s name on it. I entered basic information, and….

Immediately I was presented with a list of 400 different loan offers from Internet lenders of various stripes. And my inbox was immediately blitzed by marketing emails from the tool and from the people to whom it had sold my information.

Aw, hell. So now my name and Social Security Number are everywherer on the Internet again.

So, yeah, no. I went back to what I should have done in the first place: Go to my various banking institutions and see what their offerings are.

I don’t know why I’m so averse to lead generation and management. It does, almost, make one’s life easier if one doesn’t want to research services in their area. But the cost of buying leads is now priced into services everywhere, so it’s not helping me enough to offset that.

So I have released two apps to the Apple App Store this week:

Goal-Task-Chore is a to-do list app which not only lets you add one-time tasks to the list and to mark them off but also lets you create multiple-time chores which can appear on the list at intervals you set and Goals, which are groups of step tasks working toward a larger outcome. You can find it on the App Store here. I use it every day, and to be honest, I’m sometimes not pleased with it because there’s always something to more to do.

PhrazeMaze: Proverbs is like a word search except you have a whole phrase or sentence to find in the letter grid. This particular app has 120+ puzzles from the book of Proverbs in the Bible. You can find it on the Apple App Store here. If it proves to be popular, I can easily build similar apps with different puzzle phrazes.

So, to launch them, I announced them on LinkedIn and Facebook (and here, obviously). And if they sell four copies each (total to me: $5.60), they’ll be the biggest selling apps I’ve produced.

I’ve been attending this weekly entrepreneur meeting which features a presentation from a new businesses on Wednesday mornings. One of the questions that the audience, generally coaches and other service professionals who would sell to the presenters who are generally coaches and other service professionals trying to sell to the audience, one of the questions that the audience often asks is “What is your social media strategy?” Because someday I might pitch my apps to the group, I’m preparing my answer rant in that regard:

You know, I had an email newsletter in 1997 which got me…. nothing.

I had one of the top 500 blogs in 2004, and after many years of posting, often multiple times a day, when it came time to sell books, I sold…. What, 100? 150? Mostly on Kindle, and certainly not enough to pay for the cover of the book (professionally designed) or the outlay on books I sent to magazines and various bloggers for review and comment–not to mention 16 years of hosting (starting with the move from Blogger in 2010.

I joined Twitter in 2009 and was active there, professionally (well, sorta) for nine years, posting multiple times a day and getting to around 5000 followers organically. And it yielded me, what, a couple of paid writing gigs and a sub-sub-sub-contractor gig that did not go well. Total business closed in almost 10 years of social mediating? Maybe $2000. Which is the high water mark of the “value” I’ve gotten from it.

I’ve been on LinkedIn for over 20 years, and I’ve written articles and posts on it throughout, and although a recent post got almost 40,000 views–which I’ve been told is a lot–I’ve not actually gotten any work from it, whether it’s responses to job posts or people I’ve met there. I’ve been on Facebook for fifteen years or so, and it was not supposed to be a thing to build “my brand,” and it is certainly not doing that any more. Nor is it really showing me updates from people with whom I’ve connected over the years.

So what is my social media strategy for my yet unnamed app venture? To not.

Because they’re structured so that they will take all the content you want to provide for free and, when you want to share something saleable to your connections, they’ll bury it unless you pay the money to boost it (which is thousands of dollars for “impressions” which will probably not yield conversions). TikTok? Instagram videos? Make authentic videos or silly dance videos? What, spend hours and money to sell a $.99 app? No thank you. Doing that, you’re working for the social media platform, providing free (to them) content which might or might not increase its user engagement.

I get it why some people think this is a way to go: Because it’s fun, and it’s easy. Clearly, I’ve gotten something out of writing a blog all these years (mostly memories that I can scroll through). I had fun with Twitter back in the day (and my other blogs). You can spend hours on it and get some dopamine when people like and respond to your content. But that doesn’t necessarily convert. And I get why so many people promote it–because they work in the space, and they will make money off of it if you hired them to do your social media.

So, what to do, what to do? Continue to show the app to as many people in person as I can stand to (which is probably less than could stand it) and hope that one catches fire. Think up an idea for a brand name and maybe spend a couple bucks on a Web site.

But social media? Nah.

So, if you’ve got $.99 and think they look interesting, give the apps a try. Or my books there in the sidebar, for that matter–you can get them for $.99 digitally, too. And as the Philosophers said, “Thanks for your support.”

Fifteen years ago:

I probably did not intend to include a copy error in that post on Facebook. I was just hearkening back to the fact that, in early proofs of John Donnelly’s Gold, the gun also had that special feature–a revolver with a magazine. It also featured a week that was eight days long.

I’m told it still contains three typos. You’re welcome to order it and find out.

US track star cost half marathon national title, $20K prize after being mistakenly led off course

Although, to be honest, I was nowhere near the top, but at my first Republic Tiger Triathlon (RIP), when I transitioned from the bike to the run, somebody ran through the transition area and out. I followed him, but he was not a participant, and he ran the wrong way down the trail outside the exit. Loud spectators corrected me, but I got a few extra steps in in my quest to climb from the very lastest to the top 50% of finishers. Which might actually have been my best result ever anyway.

Cardinals baseball finds new Springfield home on 102.1 The Won

As I’ve mentioned, the stubby antenna on the radio-playing headphones still going strong sixteen years after I bought them can pick up, clearly, two stations in all corners of Nogglestead: 92.3 which was country and 105.1 which is now “old” country (see also).

But! 105.1 was also the home of Cardinals baseball. Which meant that while I was on the lawnmower or, sometimes, painting record shelves outside or painting the fence, a song, probably a good one, would abruptly end and “The St. Louis Cardinals are on….” would replace it. And not the game–an hour of pregame interviews and things. Ah, gentle reader, I sometimes scheduled my lawnmowing around the baseball games just so they would not interrupt me.

Sorry. I know some of you (Friar) are baseball fans. But although I did grow up having ball games on in the workshop or whatnot, I’d rather listen to music when I am on the lawnmower. And now I won’t have to worry about it.

As long as 105.1 doesn’t become the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today or, heaven forfend, hot country.