Being Chris McGinty

by John Malkovich, oops, I mean by Chris McGinty

I’ve discussed on many occasions (maybe even in this blog, I don’t know) the downtime in the decade of 2001-2010. The downtime happened during the time when everything hit. We had the audio show since 1999, but we weren’t active on the web when they started calling them podcasts. I had my e-zine, but I wasn’t active on the web when the blog became prevalent. We had “Sniffles (sniff)” on Extranet TV, but we weren’t paying attention when You Tube launched. I feel all of these things have hurt, on some minor level, our fame level. I know fame isn’t as easy as all that, but it might have helped.

Sometime in 2009, I was at Nathan’s doing who knows what? It occurred to me that I hadn’t searched my name in the search engines for a while. I mentioned the e-zine. In the early part of the decade that seemed to be the only instance of the name Chris McGinty on the web. But somewhere along the way I pulled a Rip Van Winkle as online went, and when I woke up there was some folk singer’s MySpace, and a guy from Manchester, England with his band Doktor Mandrake coming up in search engines before me. I’ve listened to Doktor Mandrake. They’re pretty awesome. Yes, I realize that by linking them, I’m not helping push myself to the top.

I told Nathan right then and there that would not do. There is simply no reason that I shouldn’t be the most important search on my name. I’m funny that way. I’d like to call it narcissism, but I’m not really that cool. Nathan stepped up and got a service for generating hits for the website, and did everything they told him. Maybe it helped a little bit.

The other night it occurred to me to see how things were doing in the land of search engines. On Yahoo! I come up on page 2 as part of the According To Whim page on a web search, page 10 as part of According To Whim on an image search (we apparently need to post to Flickr), and on a video search I’m on page 1 with four other videos as part of the Gun Specs sketch. All of this is worse on Google, in spite of writing on this blog three or more times a week on average. Well, I come up at the top of page 1 on a Google search for videos, for the TRTC contest entry, which is almost like me not coming up.

I brought this up on Monday at Nathan’s (Monday is the new Thursday, perhaps). We called Miguel and spoke with him on speaker. The discussion centered around You Tube views mostly, because I think that promotion of our work will lead to promotion of our names. I tried to center the talk around non spam ways of promoting what it is we do. I’m not sure how convincing I was, given that Miguel has a You Tube video with 62,000 plus views that proclaims, “

In follow up, Nathan has looked at You Tube features, and gone back and done work on one of our picture shoots to try to better tag it for search engines. I have watched a video about getting views on You Tube that I will feature in my next post with my thoughts, and read about promotion in general. May not sound like a lot, but I did most of my initial research before going out to Nathan’s.

Perhaps we have quite a task ahead of us, but I think that promotion is about all the small things adding up to bigger returns. I believe we are up to the task, as long as we just keep plugging away.