I don’t mean that writing is not easy a majority of the time. I mean writing a majority of the time is difficult.

Coming into the new year I had all intentions of writing every day. I’ve not done that. But I haven’t given up. I need to get into the habit of writing daily again. I’ll figure that out.

For now, I’ve got nothing, but here’s an image I saw on Google+ today:

We haven’t really said much because there’s so much that can (and does) go wrong in the process of buying a house. Our situation is no exception.

Last night after going through 23 pages of the inspection report with some experts, we decided to go for it. Today we’re headed to do the formal mortgage application, and if things all go as planned, we’ll close on the house in February. If that’s the case, we’ll likely move in by late March.

We’ll have to get someone to sublet our current place from April to June, so if you know anyone that is looking for a sublet in Waltham, please let us know.

This is a story about attempted escape, potential conspiracy, intrigue, and finally freezing, shit-footed justice. Strap in, folks. Grab some popcorn.

Picture the scene. It is Christmas in upstate New York, and I am staying at my parents’ house with my wife Randi and our dog Steve (pictured at top right). My parents have a large black lab named Coal, and he and Steve constantly run around the backyard without incident. But Christmas night was a bit different.

My parents had gone to bed, and I was about to do the same. Randi was on a couch downstairs, and I took the dog out to….you know.

a. The Setup
As I let him out on the porch, he walked down the steps and immediately peed.

b. Making a Break for it
Steven then sprinted to the far right corner of the yard. Originally I thought that he was trying to get rid of some of the ham he’d eaten, but after yelling his name, whistling, and snapping, I realized that poster of Rita Hayworth was part of his escape plan.

As you can see, my parents have a pool, and the area around and leading up to said pool is concrete. Since I was in shorts and a tee shirt, barefoot, and it was almost midnight on Christmas, I ran down the path to see where he was. It’s hard to see in the above picture, but the letter “b” is resting on a fence. When I got to the fence, I could hear his tags jingling, but couldn’t see him. I knew he’d escaped.

I had some choices. I could jump the fence and try to find him, or I could wake Randi up, knowing that he always responds to her voice.

I woke up Randi.

We both ran outside, barefoot, and I pointed her to “c”, a gate on the fence. We both ran to the gate and yelled for Steve, and because it was her yelling, he ran over to us. We apprehended the escapee. But the story isn’t over.

Earlier I mentioned that my parents have a big black lab. Well, big black labs leave very large, um, deposits on a lawn. And they freeze and become very hard. Randi and I ran about 15 yards through a minefield of frozen dog shit in our bare feet to get our stupid escape artist Corgi that night.

We then had to go into the house, stand the bathtub to wash dog shit off of our feet at 12:15 all while being quiet to make sure we didn’t wake my mom who had to work the next morning.

Of course, the dog was smiling the whole time.

After interrogation, we came up with a couple of scenarios to explain the escape:

1. Steve planned to escape and then run away with Randi. See, he was the only one that forbid our wedding, as Steve wanted to marry Randi. In fact, in his Christmas card to Randi, he photoshopped my head out of one of our wedding pictures and added his own:

2. He’d been planning his escape the whole time. The entire time he was outside running around with Coal, he’d been looking for weaknesses in the perimeter fence. Though he’d found the perfect escape route, he wanted to wait for the cover of night to make his move. He knew that his night vision was better than ours, and he took advantage of the mismatch.

3. He saw an animal, and took off after it. Steve firmly believes that if he was off leash, he could catch any squirrel regardless of whether the squirrel was up a tree. This was his big chance, so he had to take it.

I’m not sure what story to believe, but we’ll be sending our reports to the disciplinary committee and he’ll likely spend some time in seg-u.

It’s a fair question.

I have this blog, a bunch of others, and I start with a bang and my momentum fizzles out completely. The conventional wisdom dictates that you should keep a blog tied to a theme. I have a blog about what I do at work at marketingstartups.com. I had another where I wrote with a pseudonym to conceal my identity because of the whole “don’t write anything your future employers might find offensive” school of thought.

Rather than having 5 seldom-updated but perfectly focused blogs, I’m going to make this blog the KFC bowl of blogs. I’m going to toss everything in here and see what happens. What do I have to lose, right?

Over on the CloudLock blog, I’ve posted an announcement about the launch of the Security Policy Engine for Google Docs and Sites. Our intern, Joel Kennedy, created some excellent graphics that do a great job of simply illustrating a complicated concept:

On the CloudLock blog, I’ve just added a post using an analogy we’ve repeated dozens of times: Think of the Cloud as a Bank.

Additional graphic excellence by intern Joel Kennedy:

You know you may have a problem when you see something when driving and think “Wow. That’s a good example of search engine optimization.” You are certain that you have a problem when you then take a photo of said location and blog about it.

The photo:

I apologize for the quality of the image. It was rainy, I was using my iPhone and I was in a moving car. Not the optimal conditions.

I saw the location as a web site, and the entrance you see here is their home page. The other entrance is right by the white car you can see underneath the sign. That’s a landing page.

Here’s what we see on the home page:

1. Vegetables Flowers and Plants- This is their page headline, and they’re using an <H1> tag around it.
2. Northshore Flower Exchange- This is their page title and the name of the site
3. Plants and Flowers- This is their subheadline. They believe that the majority of people searching for what they offer use the words “Vegetables flowers & plants”, but know that some people search for just “plants and flowers”, leaving out vegetables all together.

On the landing page they have the same sign as #1. It feels like a landing page, as you can’t actually get into the parking lot there. You have to follow the call to action and drive around to get in. I’m reasonably certain that if they had a third road-facing side, they would have another large sign that says “Plants and Flowers”. You know, for A/B testing purposes.

Way back in January while I had some free time and was contemplating my next job, I decided to start a meetup group. And in contrast to my usual style I decided to give it a name that actually makes sense: The Boston-Area Startup Marketing Group. At the time, I was consulting out of betahouse in Cambridge and I was inspired by all the entrepreneurial energy surrounding me. I was watching insanely talented people building amazing things, and I asked “what’s your number one challenge in turning ____ into the next big thing?”

The answer I heard most: “Nobody knows about it.”

It’s true. Most solo or small team tech entrepreneurs don’t have the time or resources they’d like to devote to marketing and promotion. There just aren’t enough hours in the day or people to do it. Startups with dedicated marketing people are in a better spot, but still face the same problems of time and resource allocation. With thousands of sites to promote a startup online, the following questions arise:

• Which sites are worth the time?
• Where’s my audience?
• What kind of content are they looking for?
• After taking the time to blog, podcast, etc., how do I put it where my prospective users will see it?

With those questions in mind, I decided to present “Getting Your Startup Found Online” as our first meetup. Since the presentation is very tactical and focused on content promotion and light on strategy, I took a step backwards:

Though blogging, podcasting and promotion are fun, they need to take place in the larger context of a marketing plan. Otherwise you’ll drive yourself nuts by just throwing content out there to see what sticks. In our case we started with a list of our main objectives. In short: what is the goal? For example, if you’re a B-to-C startup focused on user acquisition, give yourself a target user number.

After we had solid, actionable objectives, we moved on to the buyer personas. At this point we wanted to really get to know our prospective buyers. We looked into things like:

• Age
• Industry
• Title
• Online behavior
• Goals
• Day-to-day tasks
• Decision-making abilities

Of course, this is different for all startups, but the goal is the same. You want a deep understanding of who your targets are, where they go online and how they make the decision to buy (or join/subscribe/download) what you have to offer.

We then focused on our Company Persona, giving us a clear picture of:

• How we want to be perceived by our customers
• What tone we’ll use
• What colors we’ll use
• How we’ll set ourselves apart from everyone else

The persona exercises then led into our keyword research, which fed into our content plan. And with the majority of our content planned, we moved onto my favorite part: SEO + Promotion or Getting Noticed Online.

Well, you need to start somewhere, and I can’t think of a better place than google, yahoo, crunchbase, killerstartups, vator.tv and the like. These are directories that usually take some time to index your site, but are important sources of residual traffic.

Next, you’ll want to grab some land. We’re talking about twitter accounts, flickr accounts, friendfeed, vimeo, youtube, stumbleupon, delicious….the works. These will be important when it comes to promotion.

Now it’s time to find your audience. Where do they go online? Do they participate in LinkedIn groups? Ning networks? Facebook? Reddit? Forums? Go out there and find out where your target users are hanging out, and find out what they’re talking about. This is NOT an open invitation to spam people. Instead, find out what problems they have. Find out what they’re looking for. Find out how you can help with what you’re going to offer.

Now get out there and create some compelling content! Shoot some video. Get blogging. Fire up a podcast. Start producing content and you’ll start to see what works.

Now that you have a great blog post, video, podcast, etc. it’s time to promote it. Go get a bit.ly URL so you can promote the link on twitter. Bookmark it in delicious and diigo. Add it on stumbleupon. Submit it to reddit and digg….but only in relevant categories.

I must admit, this is the oversimplification of the decade, but you’ll find more information in the video below. The goal of this presentation was to give a quick overview of my workflow when it comes to content creation and promotion. It’s definitely not one-size-fits-all, but it’s close.

If you’re interested in joining our meetup group, you can find out more here.

Here’s the presentation:

As I’ve referenced a few times here, I’m currently on the job hunt. Here’s how you can get in touch with me:

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/nathanwburke

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/nathanwburke

Resume: Here

So, it’s Friday, and that means it’s been a full work week since matchmine closed up shop. It’s been a crazy week full of talking with some great recruiters, networking with friends, and hearing from some really interesting companies that might have a good opportunity for me. 

As I am physically unable to relax for more than ten minutes at a time, I was psyched to get a couple of really good freelance projects. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done any side work, so I was really excited to get the chance to focus on one small project for a short time. 

I’m really excited to see what next week will bring. I’m hoping to go on a few interviews, and can’t wait to see what’s out there. Now it’s time to write a quick blogstring post on something that’s been floating around in my head over the last few days.