HP’s CEO, Mark Hurd announced, on the 20th February that he would be implementing a company wide cut in pay for all employees. Starting with a reduction in his own salary by 20%, followed by senior executives who would take a drop between ten and fifteen percent, regular employees 5 percent and exempt employees 2.5 percent. All this in reaction to a 13.5 percent fall in the company’s first quarter profit.
Now, before I’m accused of making disparaging comments about HP let me just state that I have no issue with HP products and services which are top notch, largely due to the quality of HP people (their most valuable asset). This post is my opinion only, and one I’m entitled to.
Let’s look at this in a little more detail. On face value it would seem that Mark’s decision was an expedient one and he’s backed it up with the kind of corporate eloquence (read smoke and mirrors) that we’ve become used to from him, it’s anything but that, to me it smacks of opportunism, pandering to investors and market analysts, and cold hard manipulation at a time when we need CEO’s to have the courage to do the exact opposite, and, when we are demanding as much social accountability for their action as they have to investors and Wall Street (now a dirty word) for profit.
Since when has making 1.9 Billion dollars nett profit in a little over 12 weeks been a legitimate excuse to cut the salaries of hundreds of thousands of people world wide? I would suggest never in a million years, Mark Hurd has revealed his true colors with this one.
First we need to put Mark Hurd’s 20% salary cut into perspective, remember he is only taking a cut to his base salary ($1,450,000) which amounts to a $290,000 drop. Seems quite reasonable until you examine the following, publicly available, information.
- Mark Hurd’s total compensation in 2008 was $42,514,524
- His compensation in fiscal year 2007 was $25,253,461 – so, by my calculations a 68% increase in the total package from 2007 to 2008.
- He also exercised $10 million worth of stock options and had $15.7 million worth of HP stock vest during the 2008 period
- His compensation package includes approximately $738,000 worth of additional compensation;
- Personal and home security – $256,000
- Personal use of HP’s corporate jet – $135,734 (you have to love that don’t you?)
- $71,000 in mortgage subsidy he is guaranteed for relocation expenses under his employment agreement.
So, the question is; what’s the significance of his stated 20% cut in base salary? I would suggest next to nothing.
You would have to assume that this situation is not much different for the senior executives who are taking smaller cuts
- Ann M. Livermore, Executive Vice President, Technology Solutions Group. Total compensation of $15,675,274 in 2007, $20,551,493 in 2008, a 31% increase in total compensation. For her a 15% cut in base pay ($820,000) would be $123,000 or 0.59 % of her total package.
- R. Todd Bradley, Executive Vice President, Personal Systems Group. Total Compensation of $7,674,083 in 2007, $21,058,092 in 2008, a 174% increase in total compensation. For him a 15% cut in base pay ($820,000) would be $123,000 or 0.58% of his total package.
- Vyomesh I. Joshi, Executive Vice President, Imaging and Printing Group. Total compensation of $12,032,204 in 2007, $21,804,726 in 2008, an 81% increase in total compensation. For him a 15% cut in base pay ($820,000) would be $123,000 or 0.56% of his total package
- Randall D. Mott, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer. Total compensation of $7,390,948 in 2007, $28,293,134 in 2008, a 282% increase in total compensation. For him a 15% cut in base pay ($690,000) would be $103,500 or 0.36% of his total package.
- Catherine A. Lesjak, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. total compensation of $3,741,201 in 2007, $5,552,356 in 2008, a 48% increase in total compensation. Fo her a 15% cut in base pay ($625,000) would be $93,750 or 1.68% of her total package.
Put bluntly, 6 people at the top of the HP pyramid accounted for $142,774,325 in compensation in 2008 alone. That is an obscene amount of money.
To be fair, and before we contrast this with the HP employee, we have to acknowledge that HP has, under Mark Hurd’s leadership and at least fiscally, performed very well. In his three years on the job sales have increased by $30 billion and profits have tripled. 2008 was a stellar year for the company. HP is now the world’s biggest computer manufacturer. But, at what cost?
Let’s look at the plight of the HP employee. The first thing we have to consider is that, unlike Mark Hurd, a 5% cut in salary is in fact a 5% cut in total compensation. Someone on a salary of $65,000 would be losing $3250 per year before tax, or $270.00 per month. Some would say this is a small price to pay for keeping your job but I think holding that gun to an employee’s head is outright exploitation and can not be condoned, especially when they have already been exploited enough for the sake of high profit margins and Mark Hurd’s stellar career performance. Ask a majority of HP employees about their current remuneration and you will be lifting a rock that you don’t want to look under, specifically;
- Employees have seen the real value of their salaries diminishing with the rising cost of living since Mark Hurd came on board and even under his predecessor. There are no automatic adjustments for cost of living in HP’s yearly remuneration review (even though the smoke and mirrors will be employed amazingly to suggest HP is paying market competitive salaries).
- With few exceptions most HP employees have not had a pay rise, or anything other than a measly token gesture, in the past three years despite their workload, and the company profit, increasing significantly.
- HP Employees who are promoted into new roles with higher accountability, more work and more stress do not receive an immediate remuneration increase in line with the new position. Instead they have to wait for the yearly review which more often than not sees them bitterly disappointed. If you are employed into a new role in February you will wait until the end of the year for your remuneration review, the company will exploit you for nine months at least prior to that and then your remuneration will be determined by a simple algorithm on a spreadsheet that coldly spits out a figure you will definitely be unhappy with.
- The much touted company performance bonus has the bar set just high enough that it’s only had two significant payouts in more than 5 years. It never makes up for the HP employee’s loss in real wages.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s time for this to stop? Aren’t the employees the public face of the company, the ones who deliver the services, the ingenious inventors and developers?
In his address to the company Mark Hurd said;
In an environment like this, there’s no margin for error and no tolerance for inaction. To give you a little insight into my world, after we report our earnings, we engage in a dialogue with analysts and investors. They’re going to ask what we’re doing in light of the current environment to right-size these businesses.
Well Mark Hurd, we’ve already had an insight into your $42 million dollar per anum, private use of the corporate jet, overpaid to a vulgar extreme world and frankly, something smells funny. In case you hadn’t noticed it the whole world is in recession. Governments all over the globe, and especially yours, are going into massive deficit to try and kick start their economies and preserve jobs. They are providing handouts of cash to stimulate spending and help us climb the ladder out of recession, the problem is people like you, and your MBA textbook approach to an “environment like this” (one I bet you’ve never seen), your totally myopic view that it’s all about analysts and investors, are simultaneously lowering the ladder down from the top. I’d suggest that there’s no longer any tolerance for the type of action you are taking.
The way I see it you have two possible answers to the question about right-sizing the business.
- The courageous option, the one that takes guts. You stand up and tell the investors “you know what, we’ve had an amazing period of growth, we’ve reaped billions of dollars profit out of the economy over the past few years, we’ve delivered a strong performance to our shareholders, and we’ve become the biggest computer company on the planet, but now it’s time to show some respect, to our employees, the lifeblood of the company, and the society’s around the world, who have allowed us the privilege to operate and become the company we are. To ensure that no HP employee finds his, or her, way on to the unemployment lines, has their home foreclosed, or has their capacity to contribute to the economy diminished in any way, as a result of company action, until such time as the economic cycle turns for the better. We know we can afford it (hell, we just made 1.9 billion profit in 12 weeks), it will just mean lowering our profit expectations for a short time.”
- The cowardly option, the one that puts you squarely at the bottom with the worst of the worst, your snout in the trough, and your pants down around your ankles. You cut headcount and reduce salaries.
Mr Hurd also said in his address;
I’ll be asked by investors, “Where’s the job action, where are you taking out this roughly, 20,000 positions?” Well, I don’t want to do that.
We’ll of course not, since you’ve come on board you’ve taken over 40,000 people out of the HP workforce already (and I’m sure that doesn’t account for the thousands of jobs you moved offshore, or the thousands of long term contractors you’ve shafted), you’re still right in the middle of taking 24,600 of those positions out from the EDS merger you started in September 2008. The HP workforce reduction machine rolls on, you probably don’t even have another 20,000 you can drop right now. More smoke and mirrors.
I’m willing to bet though that, 12 weeks from now, when the recession that will get worse before it gets better is biting harder into your massive profits (and your bonus), you’ll be marching those people out the door.
I wouldn’t be worried about questions about headcount from analysts and investors if I was you, I’d be more concerned about the astute investor who asks you “what are you going to do when your employees stand up and say enough is enough?” People power has toppled Governments, a disgruntled employee base has the potential to bring HP to it’s knees in days, surely that time bomb’s ticking.
New Year’s morning has to be one of the the best times to go for a surf, most new year’s eve revelers are still far from waking up and nursing their hangovers, leaving the beach, at 6:30am, almost deserted. I started the new year by going for a surf at Stockton Beach, Australia, in beautiful clean water, with a new 3 foot swell shared with only three other surfers and a large pod of Dolphins. Spectacular! What a good way to start the year.
Driving home, and in new years day reflection, I realize how fortunate I am to have the kind of life that allows me the freedom to do what I like, and when. Not necessarily fortunate because of what I do or have, that’s of my own making, but fortunate simply because of where on the earth I was born, and where I now live.
I stopped for a moment an thought about all those people living under oppression, whether religious, political, social or cultural. People living under despotic regimes or who’s lands are occupied by an aggressor, who would never even have the luxury of dreaming of a life like mine, and I’m wondering will 2009 bring more freedom to any of these people?
If it is it will require a massive paradigm shift in the thinking of the west and the courage to take swift and decisive action.
Happy 2009? I’m not holding my breath.
So, I’m not exactly a prolific writer but hey, I’ve been busy ok?
A little over a year since my first post, and looking in hindsight at what I set out to achieve, and how, I have to say if I haven’t already achieved my goal, I’m pretty damn close.
As we head into the twilight of 2008 the world is quite a different place compared to when I started this blog. We’re surrounded by the fog of economic doom and gloom relentlessly amplified by the media and, largely as a result of the actions of irresponsible and greedy dimwits running financial institutions, millions of people are staring down financial oblivion or, living in fear of it.
My life too is quite different, I have a Son, I have given up my day job and, like I set out to do, I have a business that I can run from anywhere I have a Laptop and an Internet connection. I’ve moved my family out of Sydney, bought a new house on the mid north coast of Australia where the air is clean, the beaches are beautiful and there’s not a traffic light in sight. I haven’t taken a drop in income at all.
The business, in the most generic sense, is affiliate marketing, based around our network CogentAds.com , we’ve grown to a million dollar operation over the past twelve months and already have a million dollars worth of business in the funnel for 2009. Which, by the way, is there for our affiliates to share.
Why am I telling you this, and what is it’s significance in regards to the global financial crisis? The common denominator is fear, and the need to do something about it.
In my ten years in the corporate IT industry I don’t recall a time when the possibility of losing my job wasn’t imminent. Whether it was because of mergers and acquisitions or the persistent reduction of cost, the fear was always there and I decided to do something about it, no one else was going to do it for me. I started my Affiliate marketing career, the corporate position rapidly became one I could do without, and therefore the fear of losing my job, and the consequences, had gone. More about that in a future post.
If there’s one theme we’re hearing over and over again in regards to the current financial crisis it’s that it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Doesn’t that make you feel really comfortable? If there ever was a time to do something constructive about fear it’s now, and guess what, no one’s going to do it for you. I’m not about to get into a deep and meaningful description of the intricacies of affiliate marketing in this post but I am trying to plant a seed in your mind, that affiliate marketing is a very viable option, if you have the aptitude, for weathering the financial storm or making a serious full time living.
CogentAds.com is primarily a Cost Per Action (CPA) network, which means that our affiliates are generating income by producing sales leads which is somewhat easier , as opposed to sales. We have affiliates who are happy generating enough to cover their cost of living expenses and supplementing the income from their jobs, and we have some who are doing tens of thousands of dollars a month.
Advertisers, in economic downturns, are increasingly concerned about the return on investment from their advertising budget and see the affiliate marketing value proposition, where you only pay for results, as a very attractive option. I believe that this will be even more so in the coming year.
Now, if you find yourself going into the new year with a sense of financial anxiety it might just be time to start thinking outside the square. Consider affiliate marketing as an option, find out all you can about it. If you are internet savvy – you actually found this blog so I bet you are – there’s a lucrative option waiting for you. Here’s just some of the things I enjoy as a result of my choice;
- I work from home or anywhere I have my laptop and internet.
- I get to see my Son grow up through all the little changes you’d miss if you’re at the office every day. He gets to see a lot of his Dad.
- I earn good money.
- I surf every day, when I want to.
- We don’t have to spend money on Child Care unless we want to.
- We can go overseas whenever we like for as long as we like because I can operate the business from anywhere.
- On walk to work Fridays I only have to walk up the stairs to my office.
There’s something for you to think about in all this doom and gloom, remember that there’s always opportunity to be found in adverse situations. You just have to find it.
Enjoy the festive season and good luck for the new year.
Affiliate Elite Review, ok, now that I′ve figured how to open this post with my primary keyword, lets get started. I just got myself a shiny new copy of Brad Callen′s Affiliate Elite software. If the twenty three page long sales letter (a brilliant and finely crafted example, designed to mesmerize you into a semi hypnotic state and gently walk you, and your credit card, through the purchase and sign up process) has anything to go by I′m now in possession of a "god like power", about to effortlessly replace my career, and blow my competition out of the water. Awesome!
I′m somewhat cynical about hype and sales letters but I recognize their role in the sales process, the purpose of this Affiliate Elite review is to explore the reality of Affiliate Elite versus the promise and hype.
I′ve been keen to grow my search marketing (what Chris Carpenter′s eBook Google Cash was all about) revenue alongside my website generated income, primarily because search marketing, as opposed to building and promoting a website, offers the most immediate high income opportunity available today, but, it also comes with the risk of doing your dough faster than a Lindsay Lohan trip back to rehab, so I have been looking for an edge, looking for a competitive analysis tool that will take the drudgery out of product analysis, let me know what competition I′m up against, what, and how they′re doing it, and to compete successfully with them. Affiliate Elite promises to be that tool.
In order to do an Affiliate Elite review I, obviously, had to buy the product. My last experience with a hyped up "rock the affiliate world", competition killing, piece of software was a debacle of mammoth proportions, so I′m pleased to say that the Affiliate Elite sales and installation process was flawless, simple, and it worked right away. I′ve used two of Brad Callen′s products, SEO Elite and Keyword Elite, happily, and successfully, over the past two years and I have to say, as far as software, support, and training are concerned, these Guy′s have their act together.
Once you have downloaded the application you gain access to a series of fifteen training videos that, not only show you how to use the system but, provide strong insight into the competitive power you now have at your fingertips. What′s immediately apparent is that a lot of effort has gone into ensuring your success with the software by educating you in the practice and discipline you need to follow to bring in those commission cheques. The best thing is you can continue to revisit these videos while you develop your winning strategy.
Continuing on with the Affiliate Elite review, the software has four "projects".
- Project #1: Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote
- The concept of Affiliate Marketing is a simple one but, the challenge is finding products to promote that you know are going to convert into commission. You really only have control over the referral stage so you want to be sure you are sending your referrals to products that are going to sell, especially if you′re paying to get them there. Affiliate Elite gives you access to the entire Clickbank and PayDotCom databases, more than twenty five thousand, high commission, products, along with the performance statistics you need to determine which of those products are selling now, which ones are worth promoting, and the one′s most likely to earn you commissions right away. Awesome!
- The question could be why just Clickbank and PayDotCom? Personally I think that’s a moot point, I have affiliations with several other marketing companies because their products and services suit the themes of my websites, however, my very last sale on Clickbank was worth $US121.00 in commission to me. That′s a very healthy commission, and it came from one sneaky little link in an unrelated article! So, In my mind it′s better to focus in one area rather than add the complexity of multiple companies into the mix.
- Project #2: Reverse Google Search
- On the Internet the keyword rules, if you haven′t got keyword research and application sussed then you′re in the same position as an unfit climber trying to climb Mt. Everest with bare feet wearing only a pair of board shorts. You′re going to fail.
- This project is the Holy Grail of keyword research. I would have paid for this feature alone. Ever since I started working with keywords I thought the whole process would have been a whole lot better if we could just find the keywords our successful competitors were using, if, in other words, the whole process was reversed. Now we can …enough said!
- Project #3: Analyze Adwords Competition
- Now that you have your list of keywords you can pull out the best ones, run this project, and find all the advertisers, their ads and their landing pages. This is the competitive intelligence that will give you the edge. Not only in terms of being able to quickly mimic the most successful campaigns, but, deconstructing the strategies of the most successful marketers so you have what it takes to be one yourself.
- Project #4: Find Super Affiliates
- With this project you can use the Merchant ID′s of the top websites for the niche you found in Project #1 to find out who their affiliates are, all of them, including their contact information. Why would you do this you ask? The purpose of this project is so that you identify and contact people who have demonstrated superior marketing skills, Super Affiliates, with the potential of entering into joint ventures or, at the very least, see how they became Super Affiliates in the first place.
So, the question is does this product deliver the goods? Here′s the thing, for the purpose of this Affiliate Elite review the product gets a major thumbs up from me, the information it provides is simply astounding, Affiliate Elite should be a part of your marketing arsenal, but consider this;
- If…
- X = Affiliate Elite
- Y = Your innate intelligence, aptitude, understanding of marketing concepts, tenacity, determination, fortitude, etc.
- Z = Time and effort.
- Then…
- The formula for success with Affiliate Elite will be X x (Y + Z) = Degree of Success
Brad Callen′s Affiliate Elite gives you factor X, an incredibly powerful piece of competitive analysis software that gives you the edge, Y and Z are up to you. Undoubtedly, a significant proportion of the people who have already purchased the product will be expecting it to be some kind of "magic wand" that will do everything for them, the rest will be collecting their commission cheques.
How much does it cost? Look, for what it is it′s very cheap, a one off payment and a small monthly fee, but, this is really insignificant because Affiliate Elite is itself a Clickbank product. The commission you get as an Affiliate is on both the sale, and the monthly fee, and, the way it′s structured means you only have to sell two copies to cancel out your original cost. I’ve already done it.
I hope you′ve found this Affiliate Elite review helpful, I strongly recommend this product, now excuse me, I′ve got money to make.
If you recall, in a recent post, I mentioned that I had just gone live with an Article directory site, TotallyAwesomeArticles.com, on or about the 24th September 07. At the time I had resigned myself to the fact that, based on my previous experience, and in direct contrast to the legends of Internet Marketing who would have you believe it will happen overnight, it would take quite some time to get ranked and make some headway.
You can imagine my surprise when, just one month later, it has a page rank of 1. Not that it really makes much difference in terms of traffic, revenue, or anything but it’s rewarding to see that it can happen faster than expected.
In contrast, my freebies site, TotallyAwesomeFreebies.com, has just gone to page rank 1 too, but this is after more than a year, so what was the difference, or better still, what did I do?
Assuming that it’s not some kind of Google Sandbox anomoly and that the site is not going to disappear again, I employed two elementry site optimization techniquies, one on site, and one off site.
The on site approach was to ensure there were no off site links on the home page (ok, there’s one, but that’s an obligation of the script I used to create the site.)
The off site strategy has to be a testament to the power of Article Marketing. I wrote one quality article and had it distributed by iSnare. That’s it, nothing more, nothing less.
Looking at the other posts in this blog so far it’s interesting to note that my post on the keyword Guitar Pequannock shows up on the first page in Google for that term, and my post titled “Revisitors.com does it work?” is number one for that phrase. While this is not really anything significant at all it demonstrates that it is posible to get indexed, ranked and well positioned, very quickly and it’s not very difficult. It is certainly something that you can do yourself and you definitely should not pay someone to do it for you.
Obviously the challenge is exponentially harder when you are dealing with a lucrative, highly competitive niche but, the strategy employed is exactly the same.
Revisitors.com certainly have a compelling value proposition, it goes something like this, everyday they purchase expired domain names that still have traffic on them, then sort those domains into 160 plus categories
based on their traffic, after which they analyze their clients websites and redirect the most relevant domains to them. Sounds pretty reasonable, in fact I had often thought of buying an expired domain in an appropriate category myself in the hope that I could shorten the time it takes for a site to come to prominence (yes, it takes time…usually lots of it) but hadn’t really pursued it.
I wont go into too much detail regarding the revisitors.com sales pitch as it’s all there when you visit their site but, in a nutshell, the message, which is both stated, and strongly implied by the graphics on the site, comes down to the simple equation, targeted traffic = leads = big profits!
Let’s examine the revisitors.com promise then. First you are presented with a before and after graphic which pretty much implies that with their product you’ll see steady traffic, your PayPal receipts will grow from hundreds to thousands of dollars, and your Alexa rank will head steadily north (ironically enough you could say that although the before graph is patchy, it’s actually trending up, whereas the after graph has peaked in the middle and is now trending down…but that’s just being pedantic isn’t it?). Then they go on to emphasize that it delivers 100% genuine and unique visitors.
Show me a webmaster who doesn’t want thousands of highly targeted visitors every day, and I’ll show you a standards compliant Microsoft browser…I decided to give it a run.
TotallyAweseomeFreebies.com is my crash test dummy site, they say that you learn from your mistakes and, if that’s the case, I’ve learned a lot from this site, but I think that it’s vital to your success as an Internet marketer to have a site where you can afford to take risks, then apply the knowledge to your more lucrative sites. Revisitors.com offer a variety of traffic plans, starting from 2500 visitors and going up to the hundreds of thousands, I chose 25,000 visitors for the reasonable price of $99 or .004¢ per visitor!
My plan started on August 20th 2007, take a look at the following stats taken from Google Analytics for TotallyAwesomeFreebies.com.
| July/August 2007 | August 20th–Sept 22nd | |
|---|---|---|
| Traffic Source: | PPC/Organic | Revisitors.com |
| Visitors: | 6556 | 5978 |
| Pages/Visit | 3.33 | 1.01 |
| Avg.Time On Site | 00:02:33 | 00:00:01 |
| Bounce Rate | 38.22% | 98.91% |
| Avg.Lead | $1.36 | $1.28 |
| Conversion Rate | 7.16 | 21.06 |
| Visitor Value | -0.06¢ | -0.03¢ |
Now, when you look at the July/August 2007 column you can see the problem I was intent on solving.
Every 7 visitors to the site converted to a $1.36 average lead, but, getting them there with PPC actually meant that every visitor was costing me .06¢. I needed to get this into the positive. Looking at this extremely optimistically you do the maths and 2500 visitors a day kisses the day job goodbye, as long as the traffic is either organic, or much cheaper. That’s why the Revisitors.com offer looks attractive…but, does it work?
A look at the second row pretty much answers the question. Revsitors.com traffic actually arrives via a server called yourtrafficserver.com so Google Analytics makes it very easy to distinguish this traffic from anything else. You remember that I bought the 25,000 visitor plan, sure enough, on 22nd September my account stated that they had in fact delivered 25,000 visitors to my site over the course of approximately one month. Google Analytics, on the other hand, reported 5978 visits from the server at revisitors.com, a discrepancy of 19,022.
Looking at the number of pages visited, and the time spent on the site, an average of one second, raises significant questions about the validity of their claim to targeted traffic. Ok, it could mean that my site completely sucks, but the numbers from PPC/Organic would seem to indicate otherwise. Then, when you look at the bounce rate, the number of visitors from revisitors.com who clicked the back button, and see that it’s 98.91% you have a serious problem. Search engines, seeing a site with a bounce rate this bad would rate it of very low relevance. I had to turn the PPC back on just so this figure would improve. There’s no point pursuing the discrepancy in traffic volume with them, the quality of the traffic is so bad it’s not worth the effort.
On another note, my Alexa rank didn’t budge.
I’ll conclude by saying that in trying this product I chose to ignore the absolute bleeding obvious; why, if you could simply buy targeted traffic in this quantity and have it convert to a respectable percentage, would there be a multi million dollar Internet marketing training industry at all? It didn’t work for me and I doubt that it will work for you, but you could always try it for yourself.
Finally, if you’re interested in knowing more about the site metrics I referred to in the table above, you might want to check this out.
Guitar Pequannock is a particularly interesting phrase I’ve been acutely interested in since I discovered it while doing some keyword research for a site I was developing, and I’m hoping that it will prove to be a classic illustration of how Keyword Analyzer easily identifies keywords that drive traffic to a site. Time will tell.
So what makes guitar pequannock such an interesting phrase then? The first thing that struck my interest was that my initial search, using Overture data, which incidentally has been frozen since February 2007, revealed that there were 9885 monthly searches for guitar pequannock and that there were only 602 competing results. Thats an extremely compelling R/S ratio! Even today Google shows that there are only 963 competing pages for that phrase. Really, I couldn’t resist the temptation to write this piece.
No one, considering it’s undoubtedly one of the most popular musical instruments of all time, needs much of an explanation about the Guitar. Pequannock, on the other hand, is a town with a population of approximately 14,000 inhabitants located in Morris county, New Jersey USA. Wikipidia information on the subject isn’t particularly enlightening, stating some small facts about the town being a campsite for George Washington’s troops during the American Civil war, that it’s name is derived from an American Indian word meaning land cleared for grazing, but there is absolutely no indication of any connection with Guitar.
Pequannock’s main claim to fame, for me anyway, seems to be that it is, or was, the home of actor Jason Biggs from the movie American Pie.
So, why are there so many searches for guitar pequannock? What exactly are people searching for, is there some significance, is it some kind of mysterious code, an event, or simply an anomaly of keyword statistics? I would love to know.
Looking at the top sites for the phrase gives no real indication of what people are searching for either. When I first discovered it the top site was some kind of project Black Mask site that’s not there any more and, in it’s place there are a few more sites that, like me, seem to be shamelessly using the keyword phrase “guitar pequannock” for no other reason but to attract traffic to their sites.
The only vague hint I can see is some reference to one acoustic guitar playing Pequannock religious group suing another because they called them a cult, surely that wouldn’t have generated the interest I am seeing. Apart from that, and please enlighten me if that’s not the case, there is no apparent significance to the keyword phrase guitar pequannock.
and another thing…
Being brought up in New Zealand, rugby union is in your DNA, in terms of priority it sits, in the heirachy, slap bang between family and beer, so this morning’s exit of the once (a very distant once) invincible NZ All Blacks from the 2007 world cub was a disappointment to say the least.
But, like other momentous mind shifts that occur during your life, such as realizing that the tooth fairy was actually your mum, there is no Santa, or Easter Bunny, and your father’s cute secretary, who you had a crush on, was shagging the local petrol head, I’ve come to accept that the mighty All Blacks aren’t invincible, they’re simply the best team in the world…except when it counts!
What would you do with five million dollars, the instructor said, I could have puked, seriously! Sit back, close your eyes, he said, remove all distractions and visualize your life, what you’d do, how you would use that five million…I’m sure you’ve heard it all before right?
I sat in on a “success coaching” session today that comes as part of a very well intentioned, and good, approach to supporting a product I’m pretty keen on, perhaps just because I had the time and thought I might get a rare dose if insight…wrong!
What’s wrong with this approach is that after all the visualization, list building, affirmations and all that other woo woo was finished the end result was a resounding “spend it all”. Now, call me cynical, but isn’t that the antithesis of success?
Admittedly there were some pretty interesting, fun, attractive, and often benevolent suggestions, but none I could see that took into account the increased financial burden associated with owning those assets, or the fact that once it’s gone it’s gone. All I can see is a quick road back to square one, albeit with a nice house (for a while).
There really is only one answer to the question, and you don’t have sit cross legged, remove all distractions, and go into some kind of visualization trance to conjure it up.
Put it in the bank.
I’m no mathematical genius, and even if we choose a modest 5% interest rate, doesn’t that equate to around $250,000 a year, or $20,800 per month, every month, for doing absolutely didley squat, for as long as that five million dollars stays in the bank?
So, if we really are “success” minded shouldn’t we be asking the question a different way?
Shortly after I started this blog I decided to create an article directory. God knows why but, considering that a Keyword Analyzer search reveals there are approximately 350 million sites (indexed pages) competing for around 4500 searches a month for the keyword phrase “article directory”, I figured the world needed another one! So, TotallyAwesomeArticles.com was born.
Now, I realized very early on in my Internet Marketing journey, or at least I realized that it was my opinion, that people with no web site development skills, who wish to become Internet marketers, unless of course they can afford exorbitant programmer fees (and have a lot of patience), are at a distinct disadvantage to those who have, especially if that skill comes combined with a sound understanding of marketing concepts. I also realized, with the definite exception of SiteSell , which is actually a complete online business model, that using prefabricated sites, or site builders, (and I’m generalizing here ok…and not referring to CMS like this one…) is rife with compromise. There is something very empowering about being able to write a site from scratch, and in code, and then see it take on a life of it’s own in terms of traffic, search position, and revenue.
So why an article directory?
It was quite simple really. It occurred to me while I was doing some article marketing to promote my other sites (you do use article marketing don’t you?), here was a perfect opportunity to have legitimate, and value adding, interaction with other Internet marketers and webmasters while at the same time owning a steadily growing site full of highly indexable (if that’s a word) and relevant content, that can be monetized in several different ways. I liked the idea that, ultimately, article authors would provide me with all the content. There were also a number of readily available, and free, article directory scripts to choose from which provide the back end to the site.
So, with any website, or with any site that’s purpose is to generate revenue, there is the design and development aspect, the promotion, and the eventual monetization, to consider. The rest of this post centers around design and development as far as an Internet marketer is concerned.
An experienced web designer is a beginner web designer who kept on designing web sites. More practice grasshopper!
If you’d said to me a year ago that within twelve months I would be able to write reasonably standards compliant sites, in code, I would have laughed. My motivation was simple, I wanted control of my Internet marketing destiny, and that meant freeing myself from those that would use my inexperience, or inability, to pull at my heart strings, to extract my wallet from my pocket to pay for products that were generally disappointing at best.
Now, if you want to wait until you have a complete understanding of web design before launching into your first site you are destined to go into an ever increasing spiral of analysis paralysis until you finally disappear up your proverbial you know what. As somebody famous (Tao Te Ching?) once said “a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step”. The mere fact that you decide to create a site will start you on a cycle of challenge, problem solving, and learning that, if you persist, will see you become adept in no time. There are plenty of great books and related resources to help you along the way but we’ll save that for another post.
TotallyAwesomeArticles.com represents the latest point in my personal evolution as a web site designer. An evolution that started with the question; “how do I get a site on the Internet?”, and progressed steadily from there. I very quickly formed the opinion that table based layout was to web site design what the model T Ford is to automobiles, and set myself the goal of writing CSS based designs (see this), and that in turn developed into a determination to understand and write standards compliant code, which has as it’s essence the separation of structural code from the presentation.
When you combine this with my preference for minimalistic design (yep, I actually chose this Wordpress Template over hundreds of others), fluid and accessible (wont fall apart when the reader changes the font size) layout that uses all the available screen real estate, and achieving the maximum from minimum code, then you can see where my next set of challenges, and consequent development, lies.
I’m pleased to say the code in TotallyAwesomeArticles.com , at least the code that I was responsible for (the PHP behind it generates code that I can’t change) validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional. I have achieved a reasonably fluid layout, moved most of the presentational code into CSS , and as far as tables are concerned, I don’t agree with the “thou shalt not use tables” brigade, I have relegated them to form layout, which I think they’re quite suited for, taken the mountains of extraneous code out of them, banished spacer gif’s and banned nesting, and I’m happy with that.
Comes a time though when you have to be satisfied with your development, settle for the best you have done so far, take your learnings and challenges into the next project, and get on with promoting and making revenue from the new site. After all, regardless of whether you’ve created a masterpiece of standards compliant design, you’ve just created the equivalent of a grain of sand in the Sahara desert, and now the job, with an equal amount of challenge and learning, is to promote the site to the top of the rankings. I’ll let you know how I go.
Some credit where credit’s due;
During this round of development I really began to appreciate what a better experience using the Firefox browser is. Do yourself a favor, change.
Chris Pederick’s Web Developer extension for Firefox rocks! This is a great help.
Piotr Petrus’ em calculator makes fluid layout a breeze.
HP contributes another 6000 unemployed people to the global recession!
On May 19 HP announced its results for the second fiscal quarter to April 30th 2009 and, surprise surprise, the results were down on last quarter. Revenue slipped three percent to $27.4bn, and most importantly for this article Q2 net profit was only $1.7bn compared with $2.1bn the previous year.
Almost immediately, and probably just as predictable, HP’s CEO Mark Hurd announced that yet another 6000 HP employees would loose their jobs. That’s six thousand living, breathing, educated, tax and mortgage paying, children raising, men and woman, cast out into a world racked with recession and rapidly rising unemployment, because HP only made $1.7bn nett profit in the last twelve weeks, folks.
A prime example of the type of corporate behavior we have become used to, or at least been afflicted with for the time being, and frankly are getting sick of.
For the sake of pragmatism there’s something we need to acknowledge. CEO’s are bound by a legal mandate to maximize returns to shareholders, in fact corporate law dictates that corporations maximize profits for shareholders. When you look at things from that perspective only, and giving credit where credit is due, Mark Hurd’s strong fiscal management is probably to be commended, the Q2 results could have been a lot worse. There is little doubting that HP is a much stronger company fiscally than it was before Mark Hurd’s tenure. But that’s all, and it’s not good enough.
I believe that this law of shareholder primacy, and the perpetrators that put shareholder returns ahead, and usually to the exclusion, of any civic responsibility whatsoever, is the root cause of the current global economic crisis. As a consequence it nearly undermined our western nations economic, and strategic, security, and our way of life. It needs to stop.
Lets face it, we all like to see our investments perform well, but many of us are smart enough to understand that more corporate profit is generated through the efforts of employees than by the capital of shareholders, we’re increasingly disgusted at the way employees are being treated in the name of profit, and some of us are not afraid to express our opinions.
Now, before I get lambasted from pillar to post for being a disgruntled ex HP employee, let me tell you that I’m not. My tenure with HP served me well, unlike some of the people I was, supposedly, responsible for. I’m not claiming anything more than a mediocre contribution to HP, and I’m now happy to be gone, running my own business, where I actually can make and execute decisions. We’ve employed several people in the past three months. I earn more, work less than I did at HP, and I travel business class. Hardly anything to be disgruntled about.
My fondest memories of the place go back to the pre-merger Compaq days, and the very early stages of the Compaq HP merger, when HP was still regarded as a top company to work for, and had some semblance of morality. It was exciting, vibrant, friendly, and we still had some degree of autonomy as managers. As the cost cutting that coincided with Mark Hurd’s arrival kicked in, and jobs started to go in their tens of thousands, either gone or moved offshore, I must confess to being suckered into all that "there’s no such thing as job security", "this is not a democracy", "if you don’t like it there’s the door" rubbish that comes with believing in the whole shareholder primacy travesty. Slowly, perhaps a little too slowly, I began to get the sense that we were just seeing a series of logical decisions that only added up to insanity. I realized that believing all that was naive and stupid, there was some seriously questionable stuff going on. Only problem was you couldn’t question it. I stopped caring for HP, or it’s Customers, a long time before I left. I don’t think I was alone.
So why are we putting the boot into HP then?
Well, we could just as easily target IBM or a plethora of other companies laying off people right now. But, HP is not struggling, quite the contrary, HP is a highly profitable company sitting on cash reserves of $13.0bn having made $3.7bn net profit in the past two quarters, which is supposedly justification for cutting the salaries of the entire workforce, and putting off 6000 people, headed up by the $42 million per year man, the master perpetrator of the shareholder primacy travesty, CEO Mark Hurd.
The founding fathers of HP would be turning in their graves if they could see what their company has become under Mark Hurd. Sure, I agree that there was a strong need for fiscal reform when Mark Hurd came along but I don’t see why HP had to be turned into a black hearted, ugly beast who’s own mother wouldn’t recognize it. The strong fiscal discipline has come at the cost of HP’s heart, it’s inventiveness, creativity, and energy, and it’s soul , the HP shared values, the HP way.
Let’s take a look at some of these still published and much flaunted (and by that I mean rammed down the employee’s throats every six months through compulsory training modules) HP shared values. Here’s my commentary, feel free to contribute yours, keep it factual.
No you don’t. Nothing could be further from the truth (oh, except Mark Hurds 20% pay cut that is). Profit to shareholders comes first in Mark Hurd’s HP. I’d guess that there are people at the coal face who are struggling to uphold this value but are drowning with a lack of resource. A situation that’s only going to get worse with another 6000 people to go.
Is that right? Then perhaps Mark Hurd can answer some questions?
Oh really? Then why is there anecdotal suggestion on this site that alleges one of Mark Hurd’s henchmen, Gary Budzinski, is waging a fear campaign against employees who, in their countries, have a democratic and legal right to vote yes or no in regards to whether you can reduce their salaries, and where any retribution is illegal, referring to them as class A or class B citizens and threatening consequences in their performance reviews? I bet Mark Hurd is pleased the video of that speech was pulled as quickly as it was eh? I’d hate to see that go viral.
Absolute rubbish, and it raises perhaps the most pertinent questions.
Oh, and don’t throw us the old "internal surveys provide a more accurate view of the company than scattered anecdotes and reveal a satisfied work force" line like Mark Hurd did here. The HP Voice of The Workforce survey is at best a once in a year chore, and at worst a carefully crafted set of questions where the data is aggregated in such a way that if you ran it in a concentration camp you’d be saying the inmates are happy and think they’re living in a resort.
I could go on, but I’ll leave that to this blog’s contributors.
So, what’s the point of all this then?
It’s about jobs. It about raising the popular voice, to a shout. To demand employment in our own countries; an equitable balance between employee treatment and shareholder returns; job security; decent wages and benefits; collective bargaining and union representation in the workplace; and an end to the shifting of US, Australian, Canadian and European work offshore.
Right now, with our countries deeply in debt, caused by the whole premise of shareholder primacy, facing the prospect that we, our children, and their children will be paying that debt for generations to come, from tax revenue generated from jobs in our own countries. I believe we have the right to demand jobs from companies like HP, if we don’t then I would argue that HP doesn’t have the right to consume the earth’s resource’s, or market it’s products in our countries.
If Mark Hurd is to continue making people unemployed, if he is moving any jobs offshore right now, then he is part of the problem.