I normally don’t gush over a product, but this is such a necessary thing if you’re selling stuff from under a tent. www.canopiesbyfred.com sells EZUP awnings, EZUP canopies and other things for your craft fair, farmers market tent. Someone on this site turned me on to them and I immediately bought one. They are the greatest thing. (see video) You get an extra 2 feet of overhang with your tent without going beyond your allotted 10′x10 space.

But I have to give some crap to Freds website.

His website optimization (SEO) stinks. I LOOKED REALLY HARD to find a canopy for my EZ UP tent. I knew these things existed by couldn’t find one online. This is why I got excited when I finally located one. If you do a search for “EZUP Awning” or “EZUP Canopy” Freds site doesn’t show up at all on Google. I think he’s listed as #37 on Yahoo. Fred is losing sales bigtime. In fact, because I’ve labeled this blog entry “EZ UP Canopy By Fred”, I’ll bet my video or this blog entry will appear first before his website.

Next day update: OK, I found Fred’s website. He’s on page 6 for the search term “EZ UP Awning”, this stupid little video on Youtube now shows up on page 4 for the search term “EZUP Awning” (no space). The point of all this is you’ve got to be explicit on your spellings and cover all the variations if you want to be found by Google. I would’ve bought one of Fred’s awnings years ago.

While we’re on the subject of SEO. In my book, “How To Start A Kettle Corn Business” I go into proper web optimization for your website. I had stated that if you want your kettle corn business to be found in your state, include your state in your URL. (i.e. kettlecornkentucky.com) Go ahead, do a search for “kettle corn kentucky” on Google. Guess who? Yup, that’s me on the first page.

Since I set up my Kettle Corn Directory page, Google is now listing me way up there for any search that goes by “kettle corn + state name” for all 50 states. This was never my intention, but this certainly explains why I’m getting people going to my website FROM my kettle corn directory page. OK, fine you guys, DON’T listen to me.

A few days later: I get this email:

Hey Eric!  What can I say????

I just received some orders and one of the customers said he heard about our

canopy awnings from you.  He was in California.  The next customer called me

and he also follows you.  He was in Washington.  I understand you have a

following. So I checked out your sight and was sent to You Tube to see the

video.

Thanks so much!! It looked great.  The best of luck with your business!

Thanks,  Marv 

Next in the THESE ARE ALL FAKED department:

OK, so I went nuts and created an ebook that I’m selling online called “Start Your Own Kettle Corn Business“. I’ve been getting so many questions from people over the years asking about starting a kettle corn business. Most of the questions are exactly the same, so I made it easier on myself to just put all the answers in a book they can download. (There’s also $30 involved - but hey, we sweated our butts off to figure this stuff out.)

I’ve been doing a lot of research about online marketing and the ins and outs of promoting stupid products like this. Mostly it’s about bullshit weight loss products or some other thing which will appeal to the vanity of the great unwashed masses. At least I can say that what I’m selling is legit and I can personally vouch for everything I claim. I sure wish I had a book like this when I got started.

Been back from Hawaii for a couple of weeks and trying to get my head around the now novel concept of extreme cold. Never ran across anyone selling kettle corn from a tent out there. The woman at the car rental place on Oahu filled us in on the kettle corn status of that island. Occasionally someone will pop at a special event, but no one is popping at the giant swap meet at Aloha Stadium. We got into kettle corn because I handed her my Velma’s business credit card and she went “KETTLE CORN?? YOU GUYS DO KETTLE CORN?!”

I got this email from someone recently - I found it very funny.

I like the idea of someone being talked down from the ledge because they haven’t gotten their ketttle corn fix. Instead of cash, maybe we can fence stolen goods for bags of kettle corn so the addicts can get their fix.

So kettle corn season will start up again for us in Springfield during the first week of May. Framingham should start up in June.

 8/18/08 update:

Hey look what I got!

I guess when you’ve got lawyers on staff, they’ve got to keep themselves busy somehow. “Let’s get that guy in the tent before he goes after our Pulitzer Prize stuff next!” (I had to remove the photo of me and a caption that went with it.) Here’s a link to the original article on the Boston Globe website.

===== Eric’s original text ======

OK, so I know this is no BIG deal, but there’s always something to bitch about when you get into the media. First, Erica never got back to me when this thing was going to be published. I know it’s just a little crappy side-bar thing she did, but I discovered that we were in the paper when I walked into my corporate job today and saw the article stuck on a cubicle wall. We didn’t get a link, even though a gave her a couple of magnets with our website on there. (They screwed up the TT Buds link too, I found their real one.)

The photographer originally came by on June 26th. I mentioned it on this blog post a while back.

While I’m still bashing everyone: I’ve known about T.T. Buds kettle corn for a while. I saw a bag of their stuff at a farm stand I was trying to get our stuff into. Their kettle corn looked kinda skimpy, it didn’t look like they used very much sugar to get a decent coating on it.  But don’t take my word, see what Taquitos.NET said about them. Then read our review on the same website. On top of that they claim their stuff has a shelf life of at least a month. Yeah right. I take that back, if you hardly use any oil when popping, kettle corn will stay edible longer.