Timothy Yordy

I recently put out a new music video for a song I recorded a couple years ago titled “Godzilla, Don’t Eat Me”. The video is made from clips of one of the very early Godzilla movies. I had a lot of fun making it and you can view the video below.

The reason for releasing this right now is because my focus is shifting away from doing music as a solo artist and I wanted to get this made before I get too deeply involved with my new band. Yep, I’m in a new rock band. I’ll have more details about that once we have a proper website put together.

I’ve been a user of Google Adwords off and on for  years now and recently Google was kind enough to give me $100 account credit and since I didn’t have online campaigns that I needed to run any time soon,  I decided to give TV ads a go. I’ll show you step by step what I did and then at the end I’ll tell you why I failed, hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.

The first thing I discovered was just how CHEAP advertising on television could be. Just to give you an idea, the ad that I made (I’ll talk more about that below) aired 3 times with a total of 44,475 viewers for a total cost of $39.92.

What Are You Advertising?

I didn’t have a specific product to advertise and I wasn’t too keen on spending money trying out something that I was a complete novice at. I had a domain sitting unused that I thought could work for something. Imnotarat.com was once a blog I ran and I had let it fall into disrepair. I decided that I could promote a get-rich-quick kind of product from ClickBank and tailor the ad to fit the name in some way.

Then it was simply a matter of using domain forwarding so that anyone that went to imnotarat.com would actually be sent to the vendor that I was promoting.

Creating My First TV AD

The main thing you need in order to advertise on television of course is an ad. I made the 30 second ad below on my laptop in 2 hours:

All it is is title screens, a small video clip of me acting like an idiot, and a voice over that I recorded in my home recording studio. Essentially you could do an entire ad with just title screens and a voice over made from a half-way decent microphone plugged into your computer. You don’t NEED to spend thousands of dollars to make your ad. My ad cost me nothing to create because I already had the basic tools at my disposal. But even so, you could use Windows Movie Maker and a $20 microphone and make your ad with that.

Formatting the ad when I exported it, in order to meet Google’s specifications, required changing a lot of settings in Adobe Premiere. Thankfully, Google Adwords has very detailed instructions for all the of the major video editing software packages on the market. As long as you follow the guide, you’ll be fine.

Selecting Your Target Market

First you need to set your budget. I set mine at $75 a day (not that I intended to spend that much) and at $1.50/thousand viewers (impressions). This is what I used because it fit my budget, yours may be different. I will tell you that I averaged about $0.88/thousand viewers in actual costs but it seemed difficult to find targets for anything less than $1/thousand.

When you actually try to choose a network to air your ad, here again Google gives you a lot to work with. You have a lot of options at your disposal for targeting specific demographics and what not but the results I got from that were usually well out of my price range.

So then to pick my market I simply selected a group of channels and picked time slots in the middle of the night, like 1 am – 3 am. Once I had selected my targets I went to the “Targets” tab. On the targets tab there is a section that says “Past Performance | Estimate (next 7 days)”. You’ll want to change this to “Estimates”. This will show you how often your ad is likely to air on the targets you’ve selected. Many of the ones you picked may say things like “no inventory”, ” limited”, “completely blocked”. I would just go ahead and remove these targets entirely. You’ll also want to remove ones that say “bid too low” or “budget to low”. Unless you want to spend more than you originally intended, these ad slots are out of your price range.

The first target I chose was the Boomerang network. It’s a cartoon network and according to information I read about it, supposedly plays older cartoons aimed at an older audience. The ad spots were cheap and I decided to go with it.

And this was the start of my downfall…

Where It All Went Wrong

• First I should say that I didn’t feel that my ad was compelling enough, but I figured it was good enough for what I was doing – I was wrong. Of the more than 44,000 viewers only 11 came to my website.
• Learn A LOT more about your target network before going with them. I chose Boomerang  based on a bio I read. I found out too late to cancel my ad airing that the show it would air during was POWER PUFF GIRLS! Talk about bad targeting! I also ran the ad twice more on the Fox Business Network. These cost a lot more per thousand viewers but had much smaller audiences. I got even less response, I think maybe these viewers were too educated for what I was pushing and the Boomerang viewers were too young maybe?
• I should not have used a domain redirect. Use an actual website! I had a couple visitors to a different website of mine that had typed “imnotarat.com” into Google. But since there was no actual website to go to, who knows how many people did this and ended up at random places. Better yet use a 1-800 through a site like shareasale.com. I would just guess that you might get better responses than having someone go to their computer.
• And the ultimate failure of my Google TV Ads experiment: They won’t use my account credit to pay for it. Apparently, even though they are both part of AdWords, they treat online ads and tv ads almost like separate accounts when it comes to using credit vouchers. And since I had already applied the account credit to the online portion, I had to pay for the TV ad spots out of pocket.

So there you have it. I would never have tried this if I knew I was paying out of pocket. I’m too much of a small fry in the marketing world to afford even a small tv ad budget, especially since it was completely ineffective. I’m sure there is a way to do it more effectively, I just don’t have the funds to figure it out. Perhaps some of you can do better. Good luck!

Six years ago me and some other lads formed a pop/punk band named CrewmanNumber7. We wrote songs, played shows, entertained, and generally had a good time. The band even recorded a five song EP with Grammy winning producer Barry Blair (Bleach, Audio Adrenaline).

That 5 song EP was titled When Yellow Met Blue and included some of our fans favorite songs like “Plutonium Girl”, “Dreams for Us”, and “Empty Spaces.” The band split up four years ago for a variety of reasons, all very common ones among young bands. Just pick whatever cliche band split up reason you can think of and put that on CrewmanNumber7. The details are not all that important.

What is important however is that for the first time in four years our album is available for purchase through Amazon Mp3. I wanted to make it available because it was a good little album that I just didn’t want to be collecting dust on a shelf. Click here now to go have a listen and see if you enjoy it.

The other day I came across BookSwim, a website that rents books like Netflix rents movies: through the mail. The service works essentially the same way allowing users to select from a few different plan choices that determine the amount of books that can be rented at one time. The customer then chooses books from thousands of choices and Book Swim mails them out with a return envelope, giving the customer free shipping both ways.

For someone like me that likes to read small chunks of books over a long period of time to really be able to mentally digest all that is within the pages, perhaps Book Swim is not a good choice. But for my wife, who can read a novel in a few hours, BookSwim has got to be the coolest thing since the public library. I think public libraries are great by the way but one thing they lack in is a steady supply of new release fiction for the avid reader. That’s where BookSwim comes in, with new releases added weekly there is always something new for the reader in your family.

And speaking of family, there is another aspect of BookSwim that I appreciate: Children’s books. If you’ve got children you know how they will ask you to read the same books over and over again, much in the same way that they like to watch the same movies over and over again. Just like Netflix gave parents a glimmer of their sanity back by giving plenty of movie choices for kids, that’s what BookSwim does with books. There is very large selection of children’s books to choose from ranging anywhere from toddler age up through grade school and young adult. There are only so many times a father can read The Color Kittens to his son and keep his sanity. And once your kids are old enough to read on their own, there is nothing like a steady supply of new books available to keep them interested in reading.

I highly recommend trying out BookSwim. Join Bookswim today and read to your hearts content.

Back in the beginning of January I wrote a blog post about how much I enjoyed the wooden train sets that my son received as Christmas and birthday presents. Well my enjoyment of toy wooden trains continues and I like them so much that I decided to make an entire website dedicated to them.

Toy Wooden train (toywoodentrain.com) is a site that I’ve made to help others enjoy these kind of toys fully, while also being an excuse for me to play with children’s toys. There is a large variety of toy wooden train sets from several manufacturers and they range in price from low-end starter sets to the ridiculously expensive massive layouts. Check it out: Toy Wooden train.

It’s been awhile since I’ve made a post about my creative writing pursuits and there’s a reason for that: I’m stuck. It’s a very real problem that a lot of writers face when writing a novel. You start with a great idea for a story and maybe even have a killer ending in mind but perhaps the middle is just a vague mush but that little detail is ignored by the excited writer brain that wants to jump into a new story idea.

That’s what happened to me. I’m now somewhere around the middle of writing my first novel and I’ve only got vague ideas of a few different scenes in it. This problem happens to a lot of writers but I think it’s probably worse for first time writers who unlike top tier published writers don’t have the time to work at their writing endeavors on a daily basis. So bigger gaps between writing progress can quickly drop you out of the writing mindset.

The other issue for aspiring writers that goes along with a larger time frame for trying to write a novel is that the brain is given too much time to reconsider what has already been written. Through the chapters I’ve already written I have a lot of re-write ideas in mind to improve upon them. Which is great except for the fact that if I continually go back and re-write what I’ve already done then I will never get the entirety of the novel finished. I haven’t allowed myself to start doing that but the flip side of that is that everything I write going forward has to be filtered through what has already been written and what I likely change about what has already been written.

And so that is where I find myself. Two of my main characters are traveling on a road together towards some vague destination where something that I haven’t figured out yet will probably take place.

I think that also gets into another aspect of writing skills: World building. Creating the world in which the characters live. I find that I can easily write an action filled scene in a book but when the action is at a low point, I really struggle to describe the world around my characters in any kind of interesting way.

So there you have it, my little writing update. I wrote this post in hopes that getting all of this stuff out of my head and onto the screen would help open up some road blocks in my head. I guess I’ll find out how well it worked.

You may have noticed that I gave the site a serious facelift last week. I never really liked my old Wordpress theme even though I had spent the time to make it unique, whereas right now I’m just using a theme someone else created. I think it’s a cleaner simpler look and that is what I was going for.

In other cool news, now when you visit this site from a mobile browser, you’ll be viewing a mobile version of the site which looks  perfect on mobile devices and loads a lot more quickly. So hopefully my visitors that enjoy mobile browsing can have a better experience now.

It was a cold and windy day in early January when I got a call from my wife. “The sink is backed up and water is shooting everywhere out of the washer,” she said in a frustrated tone. Being the wise husband that I am I left work early to go home to my wife’s rescue.

Upon my arrival at home an idea occurred to me that perhaps the problem was not that there was a clog but that the drainpipe exiting the house from the kitchen was frozen. This was entirely possible because the drainpipe was buried only a few inches beneath the ground. Old farmhouses have fun things like that. Before entering the house I circled around to the backyard and discovered the terrible truth.

Water from a downspout had run downhill and washed dirt away from the pipe completely exposing a three inch section of it to the frigid air on the north side of our house.

This was not a good situation. The sun was setting and the temperature was dropping even further and with a frozen drain pipe we wouldn’t be able to use any water in the house until it thawed out. Not really knowing what to do I drove to Lowe’s hoping to find some answers. An employee showed me to the electrical pipe heaters that are meant to keep a pipe from freezing. These ranged from $20-30 but clearly written on each one was a warning to only use it indoors and not allow it to touch the ground. I tried soliciting ideas from Lowe’s employees to try and fix my problem but they were unable to offer me any solutions.

I was growing desperate at this point. It was dark out, cold, and windy. As I made my way towards the front of the store I spotted something that I thought just might work. It was a cardboard display of Hot Hands and Toasti Toes, the little bags of hand and feet warmers that people who work outside in the cold winter months sometime use. I read the packaging on each carefully. The Hot Hands actually get hotter than the Toasti Toes but the Toasti Toes don’t require oxygen to stay warm once you get them hot. For the idea that hatched in my head, there wasn’t going to be much oxygen available.

I purchased six packs of Toasti Toes, costing me about $8. When I got home I quickly went to work. I knew that that main problem was that the pipe was exposed to the cold winter air, so I needed to cover it with something. With the ground frozen I had little choice: I went to the barn and got some fresh horse manure. It was readily available and well, some of it was still warm.

Once I had removed the Toasti Toes from their packages and they got warm, I stuffed all 12 of them (there’s two in a pack) down around the pipe. Then I put a brick on top of it and dumped a wheelbarrow load of horse manure on top to seal in the heat. And then, I waited.

And waited some more. Hours passed and nothing happened. I was starting to think that I had just wasted my time and that it was a stupid idea to think that a product meant to keep feet warm could possibly unfreeze a metal pipe in early January. It was late at night and I was about to get into  bed, disappointed that my MacGyver-like home repair had failed and not knowing what I would do to fix it the next day.

Suddenly, I heard a great whooshing sound coming from down stairs.
My wife was already in bed and asked what I had done.  “It worked!”, I exclaimed and ran downstairs to confirm what I knew to be true. Sure, enough the pipes were empty. The drain pipe was unfrozen all thanks to Toasti Toes! Five hours, six packs of Toasti Toes, and a pile of horse manure were all that was needed to get me out of a bad situation.

Thanks Toasti Toes!

Six years ago my friend Matt and I started a web comic called The Office Comic. Over the course of two years and about 150 strips we had a lot of fun with it and got a lot better at it as time went by.

After it ended I let the website go offline and the domain name fall into the nefarious hands of the guys from Water. They seem to have finally relented in their fight against us and let the domain name go. So the other day I picked it up and have decided to put the archives of the comic up for the world to enjoy once more.

I’ve always enjoyed writing and one of the things that I appreciated most about doing a webcomic was that thanks to Matt’s artistic abilities I was able to experience writing in a medium that I would not have otherwise had the opportunity to do.

Exactly six years after The Office Comic began, on January 25th I will begin publishing the archives in the same way that they were originally published, following a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. Go to TheOfficeComic.com to experience it in all it’s lost glory.

There comes a special time in every father’s life and that time is when his child(ren) are finally old enough to get toys that the father wants to play with. This Christmas was that time for me.

Our son was given a Melissa and Doug wooden train set for Christmas and then for his birthday he got three more sets as well as some Thomas the Tank Engine train cars. There are a couple very cool aspects to wooden train sets that you don’t get with other styles of trains.

The first one is that you and your kids can easily pick up the tracks and create any layout you want. The track pieces fit together just like puzzle pieces. And because they are made out of solid wood, there is nothing to break on them. With a total of four sets worth of wooden tracks to work with, we are able to now create some fairly awesome layouts.

The other cool thing is that pretty much all the different brands of wooden trains and tracks will work with each other. So if your kid is into Thomas you could get a Thomas the Tank Engine and buy a more economically priced track and not have to worry about whether the two will work together.

I don’t know that I would want to try my hand at it but you can even get a model Train Track Bit Set to make your own tracks. Of course you’d need a router and router table as well but if you’ve already got them then this could be a really cool investment.