T. I. is hardly the first successful rapper to come down with split-personality disorder. Eminem made millions by pitting the tormented Marshall Mathers against the mischievous Slim Shady. Tupac Shakur morphed into Makaveli when he made his final album. Jay-Z briefly retired from rapping to become a record executive known as Shawn Carter. (“Back to Shawn Carter the hustler — Jay-Z is dead,” as he once put it.) Q-Tip begat Kamaal the Abstract; Nelly split his third album into “Sweat” and “Suit” discs; Ice Cube split one album into “Life” and “Death,” another into “War” and “Peace.” Often, successful rappers don’t crumble; they splinter.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Audio clips from this Atlanta rapper's new album:
"You Know What It Is"
(Windows)
(Real)
"Big Things Poppin' (Do It)"
(Windows)
(Real)
So now it’s T. I.’s turn. Last year he released his glorious fourth album, “King”: a thunderous disc full of virtuoso rhymes that became the top-selling rap album of 2006. (Though, to be honest, there was scant competition.) Last week the follow-up, the disappointing “T. I. vs. T. I. P.,” arrived on the Internet, illegal but ubiquitous; the official version arrives in shops today, from Atlantic Records. Fans can choose their cover: a pinstriped T. I. or a sweatshirted T. I. P. But the music is the same, and so is the face, plus or minus a scowl.
This splintering began when T. I. was Clifford Harris, a skinny hustler from the Bankhead neighborhood in Atlanta. As a boy he was known as Tip, which became T. I. P. after he started rapping, and then T. I. after he got a major record deal. In 2003 he released his second album, “Trap Muzik,” which included “T. I. vs. T. I. P.,” the song that gave his new album its title. Even then, T. I., the ambitious hip-hop star, was trying to tame T. I. P., the impetuous kid from Bankhead.
In 2004, just as “Trap Muzik” was exploding, T. I. went to prison for violating his probation (he had been convicted of a drug charge in 1998); thanks to a work-release program, he was back within a few months. And on June 24 he reportedly got into a fight with Ludacris’s manager, Chaka Zulu; T. I. and Ludacris had previously feuded and reconciled, or so it seemed. Apparently T. I. P. just won’t stay gone.
Even so, T. I. has clearly grown more comfortable in his role as a bankable star. Like any rapper aiming for world domination, he has a record label (Grand Hustle) and a budding film career (he played the lead role in last year’s “ATL”). And while his new album includes plenty of rhymes about the good times and bad deeds, it also includes “Help Is Coming,” in which he tries to reassure nervous Atlantic executives. This is the hip-hop equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation: “They say the market share’s down — so? I ain’t affected/Tell the label relax, and they don’t need to stress/Yeah, just cut the check and I’ll handle the rest.”
T. I. is one of the last rap stars standing, a dominant figure at a time when record sales are falling fast and hip-hop sales are falling faster. (Last year no hip-hop album, not even “King,” was among the 10 top-selling CDs.) And like just about every popular rapper since the 1980s, he is both a sign of the times and an anomaly. He is part of a wave of beat-savvy Southern rappers (many based in Atlanta) who have reimagined the genre over the last decade. But he’s also an old-fashioned lyricist, obsessed with verbal density; Pharrell famously said, “He’s like the down-South Jay-Z.”
You might even say that T. I. has triumphed by turning Jay-Z’s style inside out. Jay-Z knew how to hide sound in sense. His lyrics often sounded like plainspoken prose; it was only later that you noticed the hidden rhyme patterns and rhythms. By contrast, T. I. hides sense in sound. His lyrics often sound like singsong chants; it’s only later that you notice the hidden intricacy of the words.
That approach was evident in “What You Know,” a club-crushing hit from “King.” While synthesizers sizzled, he used his raspy drawl to deliver a series of taunts and threats:
See all that attitude’s
Unnecessary, dude.
You never carry tools.
Not even square — he cube.
Listeners transfixed by his entertaining interjections (“O.K.?!”) and exaggerated pronunciation might easily have overlooked the rigorous poetic construction. But that’s a neat little quatrain: four lines, six syllables apiece, each building to an trisyllabic oblique rhyme. Somehow, T. I. delivers supertechnical raps without ever sounding as boring as that last sentence.
That’s why the new album is so puzzling. Compared with the reckless bombast of “King,” this album’s first single, “Big Things Poppin’ (Do It),” sounds pretty tepid. The follow-up, “You Know What It Is,” has a beautifully slithery beat by Wyclef Jean and his production team (which almost makes up for Mr. Jean’s faux-Jamaican patois), but the song is more elegant than thrilling. And it’s hard not to compare it with last year’s “What You Know,” especially since the title includes the same three words.
Thus the personality split: it’s a tool that rappers often use when they find themselves getting too complacent, or too self-conscious, or both. Scrappiness used to be one of T. I.’s greatest assets, and he made his name with brash street tales, many of which revolved around the cocaine trade. (On an early mixtape, he announced, “I got a thick, rich mixed bitch, handling bricks/And a quick-witted slick clique to manage the chick.”) He cleans up nice, but he needs someone to do his dirty work.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Audio clips from this Atlanta rapper's new album:
"You Know What It Is"
(Windows)
(Real)
"Big Things Poppin' (Do It)"
(Windows)
(Real)
So he brought back T. I. P., who takes over “Act I,” as he calls it. That’s where you’ll find those first two singles, as well as “Hurt,” a surprisingly strong Busta Rhymes collaboration (it’s refreshing to hear both of them sounding so belligerent), and “Watch What You Say to Me,” a laid-back (but tough-talking) track with Jay-Z. It’s also where you’ll find “Da Dopeman,” which might be the most depressing song on the album: you can almost hear a sigh as T. I. — sorry, T. I. P. — rehashes a subject he once seemed to relish. This is his first album without Toomp, the Atlantan who produced many of his defining hits (including “Motivation,” “U Don’t Know Me” and “What You Know”), and Toomp’s devastating electronic tracks are sorely missed.
For Act II, T. I. takes over. There are dull collaborations with Eminem (who seems to know how bored he sounds) and Nelly, along with a rote seduction song (“Don’t You Wanna Be High”) and that PowerPoint spiel. Finally it’s time for “Act III — The Confrontation,” in which our two heroes finally come face to face to hash out their differences.
All this split-personality stuff is patently absurd (just try not to smirk or squirm when T. I. P. tries to get T. I.’s attention by yelling, “Meet me at the mirror, man!”), though evidently it’s a common enough response to the impossible demands of hip-hop, which more or less requires its stars — even, or especially, the veterans — to say ridiculous things, and mean them. T. I. is 26, but all the big-name guests on this album are well over 30, and it seems as if he’s already worried about aging gracefully.
At times his high-concept gamble comes close to paying off. When T. I. and T. I. P. square off in the second verse of “Respect This Hustle,” it’s worth the wait. T. I. P. complains that people are talking about him, but T. I. urges him to interpret that as a sign of respect:
T. I.: “Don’t take it personal — people wanna be close to folk/What you think the television and the posters fo’?”
T. I. P.: “Man, I’m claustrophobic.”
T. I.: “Well, you need to see a doctor fo’ it/And I ain’t jokin’ — you close, Tip, and you ’bout to blow it.”
In the end, though, clever plotting and sharp dialogue aren’t enough, especially not without more exciting beats than these. What’s missing, most of all, is the savage glee with which T. I. once attacked his foe Lil’ Flip, unleashing a torrent of insults that effectively ended Lil’ Flip’s career. The album’s three acts make the division too clear; separating the tycoon from the troublemaker diminishes them both.
No matter what happens with this album, T. I.’s career is nowhere near done; he remains one of the best and slickest rappers alive, and even hearing him spin his wheels is a joy. But what comes next? How does the self-proclaimed “King of the South” raise the stakes? That’s one question that the hotheaded T. I. P. can’t answer, and neither can Jay-Z, Nelly, Mr. Jean, Busta Rhymes or Eminem. T. I. will have to figure it out by himself.
=========================================================================================
EDIT:
Monsanto is hardly the first successful rapper to come down with split-personality disorder. Eminem made millions by pitting the tormented Marshall Mathers against the mischievous Slim Shady. Tupac Shakur morphed into Makaveli when he made his final album. Jay-Z briefly retired from rapping to become a record executive known as Shawn Carter. (“Back to Shawn Carter the hustler — Jay-Z is dead,” as he once put it.) Q-Tip begat Kamaal the Abstract; Nelly split his third album into “Sweat” and “Suit” discs; Ice Cube split one album into “Life” and “Death,” another into “War” and “Peace.” Often, successful rappers don’t crumble; they splinter.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Audio clips from this Atlanta rapper's new album:
"You Know What It Is"
(Windows)
(Real)
"Big Things Poppin' (Do It)"
(Windows)
(Real)
So now it’s T. I.’s turn. Last year he released his glorious fourth album, “King”: a thunderous disc full of virtuoso rhymes that became the top-selling rap album of 2006. (Though, to be honest, there was scant competition.) Last week the follow-up, the disappointing “T. I. vs. T. I. P.,” arrived on the Internet, illegal but ubiquitous; the official version arrives in shops today, from Atlantic Records. Fans can choose their cover: a pinstriped T. I. or a sweatshirted T. I. P. But the music is the same, and so is the face, plus or minus a scowl.
This splintering began when T. I. was Clifford Harris, a skinny hustler from the Bankhead neighborhood in Atlanta. As a boy he was known as Tip, which became T. I. P. after he started rapping, and then T. I. after he got a major record deal. In 2003 he released his second album, “Trap Muzik,” which included “T. I. vs. T. I. P.,” the song that gave his new album its title. Even then, T. I., the ambitious hip-hop star, was trying to tame T. I. P., the impetuous kid from Bankhead.
In 2004, just as “Trap Muzik” was exploding, T. I. went to prison for violating his probation (he had been convicted of a drug charge in 1998); thanks to a work-release program, he was back within a few months. And on June 24 he reportedly got into a fight with Ludacris’s manager, Chaka Zulu; T. I. and Ludacris had previously feuded and reconciled, or so it seemed. Apparently T. I. P. just won’t stay gone.
Even so, T. I. has clearly grown more comfortable in his role as a bankable star. Like any rapper aiming for world domination, he has a record label (Grand Hustle) and a budding film career (he played the lead role in last year’s “ATL”). And while his new album includes plenty of rhymes about the good times and bad deeds, it also includes “Help Is Coming,” in which he tries to reassure nervous Atlantic executives. This is the hip-hop equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation: “They say the market share’s down — so? I ain’t affected/Tell the label relax, and they don’t need to stress/Yeah, just cut the check and I’ll handle the rest.”
T. I. is one of the last rap stars standing, a dominant figure at a time when record sales are falling fast and hip-hop sales are falling faster. (Last year no hip-hop album, not even “King,” was among the 10 top-selling CDs.) And like just about every popular rapper since the 1980s, he is both a sign of the times and an anomaly. He is part of a wave of beat-savvy Southern rappers (many based in Atlanta) who have reimagined the genre over the last decade. But he’s also an old-fashioned lyricist, obsessed with verbal density; Pharrell famously said, “He’s like the down-South Jay-Z.”
You might even say that T. I. has triumphed by turning Jay-Z’s style inside out. Jay-Z knew how to hide sound in sense. His lyrics often sounded like plainspoken prose; it was only later that you noticed the hidden rhyme patterns and rhythms. By contrast, T. I. hides sense in sound. His lyrics often sound like singsong chants; it’s only later that you notice the hidden intricacy of the words.
That approach was evident in “What You Know,” a club-crushing hit from “King.” While synthesizers sizzled, he used his raspy drawl to deliver a series of taunts and threats:
See all that attitude’s
Unnecessary, dude.
You never carry tools.
Not even square — he cube.
Listeners transfixed by his entertaining interjections (“O.K.?!”) and exaggerated pronunciation might easily have overlooked the rigorous poetic construction. But that’s a neat little quatrain: four lines, six syllables apiece, each building to an trisyllabic oblique rhyme. Somehow, T. I. delivers supertechnical raps without ever sounding as boring as that last sentence.
That’s why the new album is so puzzling. Compared with the reckless bombast of “King,” this album’s first single, “Big Things Poppin’ (Do It),” sounds pretty tepid. The follow-up, “You Know What It Is,” has a beautifully slithery beat by Wyclef Jean and his production team (which almost makes up for Mr. Jean’s faux-Jamaican patois), but the song is more elegant than thrilling. And it’s hard not to compare it with last year’s “What You Know,” especially since the title includes the same three words.
Thus the personality split: it’s a tool that rappers often use when they find themselves getting too complacent, or too self-conscious, or both. Scrappiness used to be one of T. I.’s greatest assets, and he made his name with brash street tales, many of which revolved around the cocaine trade. (On an early mixtape, he announced, “I got a thick, rich mixed bitch, handling bricks/And a quick-witted slick clique to manage the chick.”) He cleans up nice, but he needs someone to do his dirty work.
Related
Audio clips from this Atlanta rapper's new album:
"You Know What It Is"
"Big Things Poppin' (Do It)"
=====================
So he brought back T. I. P., who takes over “Act I,” as he calls it. That’s where you’ll find those first two singles, as well as “Hurt,” a surprisingly strong Busta Rhymes collaboration (it’s refreshing to hear both of them sounding so belligerent), and “Watch What You Say to Me,” a laid-back (but tough-talking) track with Jay-Z. It’s also where you’ll find “Da Dopeman,” which might be the most depressing song on the album: you can almost hear a sigh as T. I. — sorry, T. I. P. — rehashes a subject he once seemed to relish. This is his first album without Toomp, the Atlantan who produced many of his defining hits (including “Motivation,” “U Don’t Know Me” and “What You Know”), and Toomp’s devastating electronic tracks are sorely missed.
For Act II, T. I. takes over. There are dull collaborations with Eminem (who seems to know how bored he sounds) and Nelly, along with a rote seduction song (“Don’t You Wanna Be High”) and that PowerPoint spiel. Finally it’s time for “Act III — The Confrontation,” in which our two heroes finally come face to face to hash out their differences.
All this split-personality stuff is patently absurd (just try not to smirk or squirm when T. I. P. tries to get T. I.’s attention by yelling, “Meet me at the mirror, man!”), though evidently it’s a common enough response to the impossible demands of hip-hop, which more or less requires its stars — even, or especially, the veterans — to say ridiculous things, and mean them. T. I. is 26, but all the big-name guests on this album are well over 30, and it seems as if he’s already worried about aging gracefully.
At times his high-concept gamble comes close to paying off. When T. I. and T. I. P. square off in the second verse of “Respect This Hustle,” it’s worth the wait. T. I. P. complains that people are talking about him, but T. I. urges him to interpret that as a sign of respect:
T. I.: “Don’t take it personal — people wanna be close to folk/What you think the television and the posters fo’?”
T. I. P.: “Man, I’m claustrophobic.”
T. I.: “Well, you need to see a doctor fo’ it/And I ain’t jokin’ — you close, Tip, and you ’bout to blow it.”
In the end, though, clever plotting and sharp dialogue aren’t enough, especially not without more exciting beats than these. What’s missing, most of all, is the savage glee with which T. I. once attacked his foe Lil’ Flip, unleashing a torrent of insults that effectively ended Lil’ Flip’s career. The album’s three acts make the division too clear; separating the tycoon from the troublemaker diminishes them both.
No matter what happens with this album, T. I.’s career is nowhere near done; he remains one of the best and slickest rappers alive, and even hearing him spin his wheels is a joy. But what comes next? How does the self-proclaimed “King of the South” raise the stakes? That’s one question that the hotheaded T. I. P. can’t answer, and neither can Jay-Z, Nelly, Mr. Jean, Busta Rhymes or Eminem. T. I. will have to figure it out by himself.
====================================================
T.i. - Motivation Lyrics
[Intro]
Better get on yo job, tell'em, haters get on yo job, nigga (Motivation)
Nigga, get on yo job, tell'em, haters get on yo job, nigga (Motivation)
Haters better get on yo job, tell'em, haters get on yo job, nigga (It's motivation)
Sucka nigga, get on yo job, if ya, hatin' get on yo job, nigga
[Verse 1]
You can look me in my eyes, see I'm ready for whatever
Anythang don't kill me, make me better
I ain't dead nigga, you can take the fame and the chedda
And the game, any deal, I'm still a go-getter
Take my freedom for the moment but it ain't fo-ever
I got the spirit of a god, heart of a dope dealer
I'm a king, seen hangin' with some cold killas
I ain't never back down or ran from no nigga
I ain't sat down yet, pimp, standin' gorilla
Even if I'ma all alone or standin' with four niggaz
Tell'em jump, pimpin' it don't get no realer
5'9" with the soul of a 6'4" nigga
I separated the fakes, paralized from the waist down
From the real stand up guys of the A-Town
Can't even look me in my eyes, put yo face down
I'm outta jail nigga, whachu gotta say now?
[Chorus]
Motivation
Niggaz fakin' only gonna inspire (Motivation)
All yo hatin' in fuel to my fire (It's motivation)
Niggaz plottin' on the crown soft droppin' (It's motivation)
Hey but I ain't slowin' down and I ain't stoppin' (Motivation)
Now nigga don't stop my show (Motivation)
You ain't know I don't stop, I go (It's motivation)
Sucka niggaz can't make me suffer
Just make me stronger and make me tougher (It's motivation)
[Verse 2]
To be locked in a box niggaz happy to see
Put anybody on top, any rapper but T, I, P
But back to reality G, O.D. still carryin' me, nigga I run this
Spread yo rumours, kick all yo lil' dumb shit
Tell lies, laugh 'bout the time that I'm gon get
If it make you feel better, picture me over and done with
Punk bitch, come with all the gossip you can come with
Small thang to a giant, I can overcome this
Jail, I don' done this, rap I'm just havin' fun with
I could be a local joker, never have one hit
Nigga, "New Finish" alone'll get me dumb rich
While these rappers sellin' records gettin' pennies
If Grand Hustle sell any, I'ma get plenty
If God with me, who could be against me sucka?
Can't make me suffer, just make me tougher
[Chorus - repeat]
[Repeat Hook]
[Chorus - repeat]
Other songs in Urban Legend album :
»T.i. - ASAP Lyrics
»T.i. - Bring Em Out Lyrics
»T.i. - Chillin With My Bitch Lyrics
»T.i. - Countdown Lyrics
»T.i. - Freak Through Lyrics
»T.i. - Get Loose Lyrics
»T.i. - Get Ya Shit Together Lyrics
»T.i. - Limelight Lyrics
»T.i. - Motivation Lyrics
»T.i. - My Life Lyrics
»T.i. - Prayin' For Help Lyrics
»T.i. - Stand Up Lyrics
»T.i. - Tha King Lyrics
»T.i. - The Greatest Lyrics
»T.i. - U Don't Know Me Lyrics
»T.i. - What They Do Lyrics
»T.i. - Why U Mad At Me Lyrics
====================================================
T.I. LYRICS
What You Know?
Aye..aye..aye..aye..aye..
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Aye...
don't you know I got
key by the three when I chirp shawty chirp back
Louis nap sack
where I hold'n all tha work at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
I know all about that
Loaded 44s on the low where the cheese at
Fresh off the jet to the Jects where the G's at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Hey what you know about that?
Hey I know all about that
See me in ya city sittin pretty kno I'm shining dawg
Ridin wid a couple latin brawds and a china doll
And you kno how we ball
Aye..
Ridin in shiny cars
Aye..
Walk in designer malls
Aye..
Buy everything we saw
You know about me dogg
Don't talk about me dogg
And if you doubt me dogg
You better out me dogg
I'm throwed off slightly bro
Don't wanna fight me bro
I'm fast as lightning bro ya better use ya Nike's bro
Know you don't like me cause
Yo bitch most likely does
She see me on them dubs
In front of every club
I be on dro I'm buzzed
Give every ho a hug
Niggaz don't show me mugs
Cause you don't know me cuz
Aye...
don't you know I got
key by the three when I chirp shawty chirp back
Louis nap sack
where I hold'n all tha work at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
I know all about that
Loaded 44s on the low where the cheese at
Fresh off the jet to the Jects where the G's at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Hey what you know about that?
Hey I know all about that
Candy on the '64
Leather guts and fish bowl
50 on the pinky ring just to make my fist glow
Ya bitches get low
Because I get dough
So what? I'm rich ho
I still pull a-kick-do' (kick ya door down)
What you talking shit fo'?
gotta run and hit fo'?
Got you a yellin and I thought you put out a gun hit fo
But you's a scary dude
Believed by very few
Just keep it very cool
Or we will bury you
See all that attitude's, unneccesary dude
Cause you never Carry Tools not even sweary qs
You got these people fooled, who see me on the tube
Whatever try the crew, they'll see you on the news
Aye...
don't you know I got
key by the three when I chirp shawty chirp back
Louis nap sack
where I hold'n all tha work at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
I know all about that
Loaded 44s on the low where the cheese at
Fresh off the jet to the Jects where the G's at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Hey what you know about that?
Hey I know all about that
Fresh off the jet to the block
Burn a rubber with a top-pop
I'll pop and bust a shot and tell em stop and make the block hot
Ya label got got
Cuz you are not hot
I got the top spot
And it will not stop
A video or not that will bust it to the glock stop
Drag ya out that Bentley Coupe and take it to the chop shop
Partner, we got ya'll
If it may pop off
I'll answer the question "Will I get ya block knocked off?"
And what it is bro
Look I'll kill ya, bro
I'm in your hood, if you a gangsta what you here for?
Somebody better get bro for he get sent for
You say you wanna squash it what you still talkin shit for?
Aye...
don't you know I got
key by the three when I chirp shawty chirp back
Louis nap sack
where I hold'n all tha work at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
I know all about that
Loaded 44s on the low where the cheese at
Fresh off the jet to the Jects where the G's at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Hey what you know about that?
Hey I know all about that
[ www.LyricsTop.com ]
================
Five "characters" to evict from the comics storytelling pantheon:
1) The Evil Conspiracy Guy
Dresses in black suits, skinny ties and sunglasses day and night; almost never speaks or answers questions; shadows baffled but frightened investigators of all stripes in long black limousines; functions as a road agent of mysterious, distant conspiratorial employers who wish all traces of their evil plans kept from public consciousness; and kills without emotion, except for that bit of supercilious satisfaction, usually evidenced by a pointless, obtuse wisecrack, at proving superior (via assassination) to their worthless, helpless prey. Has no past and no future, and needs none, because he's a prop of jeopardy, not a real character. (Can sometimes be female, and in such cases will almost always prove physical superiority to male target via hand-to-hand combat before killing.) Works almost constantly; has earned a permanent vacation.
2) The Grizzled Old Cop
Pudgy and gruff, this stubble-chinned mainstay slouches and grumbles with world-weary bitterness about how he's "too old for this." He's at least too old to not know how to use a steam iron or where any dry cleaners are, but his clothes always look like he's been sleeping in them for five days. He wears fedoras, off-the-rack suits and frequently trenchcoats, and prefers greasy food. He complains about his bosses, courts coddling street criminals, regulations tying his hands, the press, and women's sentimental expectations, but he's always willing to show his old-school toughness. His pension will never amount to enough, but it's time he took it anyway.
3) The Greedy Idiot Genius
The classic generic "scientist," he has enough understanding of technology to build fantastic weaponry based on highly suspect scientific principle, but not enough understanding of patents, commerce or basic arithmetic to figure out that mass marketing peaceful or military uses of his invention will net him infinitely more than using it to rob banks will. Fortunately, he's not seen much anymore, but even once is too much.
4) The Ramrod
Ain't it strange how there's always one? The guy who has to tell the rest of the group/team/random collection of strangers coping with a crisis "Let's move it, people!" like he's Sgt. Fury and they don't have to brains to figure it out for themselves. Leave him behind.
5) The Subjugated SuperAlien
Often female, they are representatives of slave races bred to have amazing powers, usually in the service of some alien conqueror, but on encountering brave, freedom-loving denizens of Earth, rebel against their masters, join forces with the Earthlings, then spend endless volumes "learning the ways of our world." Variation: bred to be a service race, they are unable to comprehend when their masters tell them to stop fighting brave but outclassed Earth heroes, but come to appreciate that what the Earthling emotions they believed were "weak" were true strength after all. Then they spend endless volumes "learning the ways of our world." Isn't there some planet somewhere they can have for their very own?
Got any others? Send 'em in!
A couple interesting letters in recently:
"Can I bring up my pet peeve, when I walk into my local comic shop (its an hour away, buts that's local to me) and scan the racks looking for something interesting, I have no idea what to pick up! There is never anything to tell me what the comic is about, you always have to go in blind. When you buy a novel, the back cover or inside flap gives you a idea of what it's about, but comics nothing. Just this weekend picked up about a half dozen comics, and put them back. The covers looked interesting, the interior art was ok, but just flipping through I got no sense of the story. There was no spandex or zombies or cowboys, just a lot of talking heads in a contemporary setting. How about it guys give us a clue, we will take a chance if you give us a reason to?"
Maybe I ought to change the column name back to Master Of The Obvious, because that one's so obvious I can't imagine why publishers aren't doing it, especially since manga is increasingly training readers to look for cover blurbs. I can understand not having them in comics that sell the back cover for advertising, but most don't. Some summary of concept and story were considered de rigueur not too long ago, usually on the inside front cover, though companies have also demanded they appear on the splash or (usually very clumsily) be incorporated into the first few pages of each story. On the other hand, a good, concise attention-getting blurb is one of the hardest things in the world to write. (The trick is to write brisk story concept synopses with a drop of plot development rather than extended plot summaries, but comics fans and marketing departments alike seem madly in love with the latter.) In any case, yes, a well-crafted, easily found summary/blurb might go a long way toward increasing casual sales, and the back cover's as good a place to put one as any.
========================================================================
My dad gave me these two sage bits of advice....
"You can't go broke making a profit"
"Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered"
He was a commodities broker. Comics are commodities.
Best advice I ever got.
My mom once said:
'Dammit John, not in the freakin' house! Put the pipe, down, open the windows and let all the smell out before your dad gets home!'
I've always remembered those wise words.
--------------------
"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint.
Give me two and they'll fall in love.
Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'.
Give me four and they'll build a pyramid.
Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice.
Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare.
Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home." - Glen Bateman, The Stand
Oddly, most of the people I've spoken to were in the same boat in 2006, suffering through a year long accruing gauntlet of pointless and meaningless time-consuming crap rather than any sort of catastrophes.
Books of The Times
Growing Up Hippie, and Going Down the Up Escalator With Dad
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By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 3, 2007
Coming-of-age literature is filled with characters who experience themselves as outsiders — as loners, nerds, misunderstood artists or uncool, uptight geeks. In her keenly observed novel “Flower Children,” Maxine Swann depicts four children who worry that their hippie parents’ unconventional lifestyle has put them outside the mainstream of ordinary life.
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Marisela La Grave
Maxine Swann
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FLOWER CHILDREN
By Maxine Swann
211 pages.
Riverhead Books.
$21.95.
Their parents’ laissez-faire approach to raising children; their skinny-dipping parties and free talk about sex; the trapeze in the living room; the shabby, eccentric clothes they wear — all make Lu, Maeve, Tuck and Clyde yearn to fit in. At school, they’re surprised at first by all the rules but quickly embrace them:
“They learn not to swear. They get prizes for obedience, for following the rules down to the last detail. They’re delighted by these rules, these arbitrary lines that regulate behavior and mark off forbidden things.”
At home, they become the responsible ones, the parental ones: They goad their father into cleaning up the house, worry about him falling asleep when he drives and wish their mother would “clean herself up, wear some decent clothes.”
Writing in lucid, crystalline prose that shifts back and forth from the first person to the third, Ms. Swann has expanded a short story that scooped up a handful of prizes (the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize and Ploughshares’ Cohen Award) and turned it into a small gem of a novel, a novel that showcases her eye for detail, her psychological acuity, her ability to conjure up a particular place and time.
She captures the incongruities of the 1970s counterculture as seen from the point of view of a young child, the shifting attitudes the narrator and her three siblings take toward the adult world as they slip-slide from childhood into adolescence, and the incalculable ways in which the passage of time colorizes the past.
The four children — ranging in age, at the start of the novel, from 3 to 9 — grow up in Pennsylvania farm country without supervision: They are “free to run anywhere they like whenever they like.” They all sleep in one room in the house their parents built, and they “take baths with their father, five bodies in one tub.”
They travel with their parents to demonstrations across the country, they listen to their father expound on subjects ranging from Vietnam to EST to thermal energy, and they listen to their mother’s boyfriends and their father’s girlfriends talk about relationships.
Their mother has rebelled against her mother’s privileged country-club life on Long Island, while their Harvard-educated father, who hails from a family of New England eccentrics, seems to regard petty trouble-making as a philosophical stance toward the world. He takes the children running down the up escalators in stores, gets speeding tickets left and right, and delights in upsetting his girlfriends by wearing outrageous clothes to family gatherings.
He is fond of denouncing the hypocrisies of the “grown-up” world, and exults in his children “who will be like no children ever were,” brought up not on petty lessons “about how a fork is held or a hand shaken or what is best to be said and what shouldn’t be spoken of or seen.”
Maeve and her older sister, Lu, try to order their chaotic childhoods by excelling at school: “To combat any weird rumors about our house, we tried to act as normal as we could. We carried combs in our back pockets, flipped our hair back, trying to imitate the cooler girls. The rewards for us were in getting A’s. We got A’s. But we were also torn about it. We had always been debilitated by this penchant of ours to get A’s because getting A’s wasn’t cool. We tried to stop but couldn’t.”
As the two girls get older, they take to hanging out with two ne’er-do-well brothers from school, who initiate them into the complexities of adolescence, but Maeve realizes that she and her sister “were going one way, the Kalowski boys the other.” At the same time, she realizes that her and her siblings’ obsession with their parents — their divorce, their affairs, their unorthodox habits and bizarre theories — has magically receded, that their parents no longer dominate the landscape of their lives.
Years later, when the children, now grown themselves, return home for visits, they feel a kind of nostalgia for the things that once vexed and perplexed them. Toward the end of this slender but resonant novel, Ms. Swann writes:
“They feel a great tenderness for certain things. That was where the goats gathered. That’s where the cider press still stands, unused for years. Suddenly they feel enraged. How could things go unused like that for years? They should move back here, settle in, make it all work again, make it all as it was again exactly, replicate that world — but why? It seems to have suddenly slipped their minds that they have whole other worlds and even people waiting for them to return. And even so, why replicate this world that has gone? Because it was so perfect? But it was not. But it was. Perfect because it was the world before the world changed.”
Shifting Careers
Tools and Tips to Create Buzz Around Your Ideas
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By MARCI ALBOHER
Published: July 8, 2007
Last week I wrote about how to overcome feelings of discomfort that arise when you promote yourself. Now it is time to plow into the nitty-gritty: tools and tips to help create buzz around your ideas, products or anything else that you are passionate about.
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Alex Eben Meyer
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Whether you call it self-promotion, branding or building a raving fan base, here are some suggestions to get you started:
1. Figure out your brand. It is hard to create buzz when you have no idea what you want to buzz about. This brings me back to William Arruda, the branding expert from last week’s column. Reach Communications Consulting, Mr. Arruda’s company, offers an online assessment tool called 360 Reach (available for $29.95 or free with his book, “Career Distinction”) that you can use to get a sense of how others see you. If you are the type who loves magazine quizzes, this is for you. I sent my assessment to 20 people whose opinion I respect and eagerly sifted through their e-mail responses.
I was pleased to find out that some see me as “collaborative,” “connected,” “entrepreneurial” and “generous.” But at least a few think I have “limited patience” and might be “too worried what others think.” Looks as if I will have to work on those qualities. A free version of program, the 360 Personal Profiler, removes the feedback element, but guides you through a questionnaire about your values and qualities to help you to describe your personal brand.
2. Think small. I recently received an e-mail message from Lindsay Mure, the founder of the Femme Network, a professional networking site for women. Ms. Mure signed the message “femtastically yours.” I will never think of her without the “fem” association. Take a look at your business cards, your Web site, your e-mail signature, your letterhead, even the way you answer the phone. Are there ways to bring out more of your brand?
3. Be your own publicist. When Debra Cohen started Home Remedies of New York, a matchmaking service for homeowners and home contractors in her Long Island neighborhood, she was so passionate about her business that she felt no one else could communicate it as well as she could. She also couldn’t afford outside publicity help. So she started calling television producers and reporters to tell her story. Soon, the media coverage followed. Within 10 years, her home-based business has grossed more than $2 million in sales, and all of it was a result of the media attention she generated, she says. Ms. Cohen’s advice: “Go with the personalized approach. Study the show, column, publication and tailor your pitch to meet their needs. And if there’s no fit, don’t even try.”
4. Get some help. If you are hesitant to approach the media, let them come to you. PR Leads, founded by the public relations expert Dan Janal, offers a service intended for authors, speakers and specialists. Individuals register their areas of expertise and receive queries from journalists seeking comments or quotes from sources. These queries are supplied through a partnership between PR leads and ProfNet, a division of PR Newswire.
The service costs $99 a month. It includes a free coaching session with Mr. Janal, as well as periodic publicity tips by e-mail. StartupNation, a hub for small business owners, offers a similar service through a relationship with PR Newswire and Rembrandt Communications, a small-business public relations consultant. Packages cost $100 to $5,000 and include discounts on ProfNet listings (the same service used by Mr. Janal), assistance with writing news releases, private coaching and other add-ons.
5. Write articles. Why wait for people to write about you when you can write about your own ideas or your areas of expertise? Think about writing articles for trade publications in your industries, op-ed pieces for newspapers and how-to articles. For some tips on how to get started, read “Getting your first byline” on my blog.
6. Speaking of blogs. After countless requests from friends for the right wine to complement a certain menu, my friend Mike Brennan, a lawyer in Boston, decided to start a blog to keep track of these recommendations. Because he also wanted to offer his musings on criminal law, he came up with a format to weave together his thoughts on both wine and crime in one blog, the Food and Wine Defender. After only a few months of blogging, he started to get requests for wine tastings and advice, a service he hopes to turn into a side business.
Writing articles can be a lengthy process, but you can create a blog within minutes using free services like Blogger.com and Wordpress. For a quickie primer on getting started, read “The Easiest Instructions for How to Start a Blog,” by the author and blogger Penelope Trunk.
7. Stay in touch. Find your own way to make people remember you and what you are working on. Send clippings of articles that remind people of your passions. Or consider writing a periodic newsletter, which you can distribute in print or online. As I wrote last week, my online newsletter was an easy way to publicize my recent book tour. Companies that produce online newsletters make it simple to produce professional-looking e-mail communications. Constant Contact, My Emma (I used this one) and Exact Target are three providers to look at; with a few hours of setup and no design background, you can create a high-design mailing that looks as if a professional did it.
8. Speak and teach. If you have specialized knowledge, speaking and teaching classes is a surefire way to build your reputation. You may not get paid at first, but the write-up in the catalog describing your talk or workshop is free advertising for your services. Lauri Grossman, a homeopath in New York, did this. “If a group of monkeys was gathering, I’d speak there,” she said. Eventually, those speaking and teaching gigs got bigger. Today, she lectures around the world in venues from community centers to large conferences and medical institutions. Through her talks, Ms. Grossman has landed clients, consulting jobs and writing assignments. She is now also regularly paid for her speaking engagements.
9. Identify your advocates. Next time someone pays your work a compliment, ask if they would not mind repeating it to your boss, your best customer or an investor. If it is appropriate, ask if they would not mind putting the praise in writing as a testimonial for use on your Web site or brochure.
Smooth Talk with Aurelius
Aurelius' lays it down
<embed src=http://www.xatech.com/web_gear/chat/chat.swf quality=high bgcolor=#000000 width=540 height=405 name=chat FlashVars="id=5270483" align="middle" allowScriptAcces
theory of “lovemark” brands. Such brands, he contends, “inspire loyalty beyond reason” — in other words, they earn customers’ affection, not just their business. Examples include Apple or Starbucks, brands powerful enough to inspire lifetime faithfulness and the patience to wait in very long lines for coffee or an iPhone.
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Called “Flipped,” the Webisodes challenge students to leave the comfort of their self-assigned cliques and join an unlikely social circle for a few days. A jock is paired with the black-clad skaters, a fashion-obsessed diva with the retro-dressing girls. Conflict is kept to a minimum and everyone seems poised to learn from the experience. (The company provided only two preview episodes, in which various cliques are introduced. One retro girl derides the dress worn by a diva as “so bright — I don’t like it.”)
print ads with the tagline “Mix it up” (that is, mix and match expensive and cheap, retro and modern and so on)
About Screens
With television and the Internet converging at last, who's going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Everything from political propaganda videos to pseudo-candid celebrity rants seems to expect an audience. "Screens" will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more.
If you want to understand “Charm School,” VH1’s huge hit with black women, check out Alyson, a k a Bronxy B., a k a Miss Chievous, a fiction writer, book critic and sometime blogger who also does makeup tutorials on YouTube. She’s got a great look for online video, a cool, funny, understated style of delivery and a beautiful cosmetics technique.
“Slogans are everything. All else is illusion.”
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/feeds/ruletheweb
Nuts and BlogBolts Business Mar 25, 8:00PM
Download Play Podcast
A conversation in Social Media Tools. This month we cover copywriting with 5 of the top copywriters on the web. Hosting is Mike Sansone, a copywriter himself, and Wayne Hurlbert.
Business and Name Branding Business Feb 27, 11:30PM
Download Play Podcast
Business and Name Branding and the line up includes, John Koopman from Mokum Marketing, Derrick Daye from Branding Strategy Insider, John Moore from Brand Autopsy, Mike Wagner from The White Rabbit Group, Drew McLellan from The Marketing Minute, and Valeria Maltoni from Conversation Agent. Hosts Mike Sansone and Wayne Hurlbert
Nut's and BlogBolts ‘A Conversation on Social Media Tools’ Blogs Jan 29, 9:00PM
Download Play Podcast
2 hour special roundtable discussion with leading members in the blogosphere. Jim Kukral from ReveNews, Shawn Collins from Affiliate Summit , Scott Baradell from Media Orchard, Kami Huyse from Communication Overtones and Mandie Crawford from Roaring Women. Hosted by Mike Sansone from Conversations and Wayne Hurlbert from Blog Business World
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hostpage.aspx?show_id=27420
Pages: 1
cosmic-spider-man
Collectosaurus Rex
Reged: Aug 15 2004
Posts: 539
Loc: Tennessee
Comic book web page help & questions ?
#1860610 - Mon Jun 25 2007 10:17 AM
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This may be off topic and may be the wrong place to post this if so I am sorry.
I started a ebay store allmost 2 years ago which I named Cosmic Trading Post to sell all my extra comics and to hopefuly make a little money to buy those rare price variants & ASM DC's I collect. Well needless to say I really have not made much money from it so over the last few weeks I have been trying to think of ways get more traffic to my store, so I thought maybe if I make my owne website I could draw some more traffic to my ebay Store and maybe even sell some cheap comics directly from the website " you know those $1 comics that just don't pay to even list on ebay". This seemed like a good ideal at the time so I picked a site that my nephew used to make a free web page called freewebs and I made a single page with links to my ebay store, some of my items and auctions and some other comic book related sites that have interesting stuff. Here it is my web page now don't laff too much this is my first page, I have very limited HTML knowledge and I did it in one day, it still needs a ton of work.
Now here is what got me going and what I have questions about. I figured that when I made this web page that it would show up on Goggle if I typed in the name "Cosmic Trading Post" and I also hoped that it would show up near the top of the page. Well I can not even find it on Goggle and what is worse this page shows up at the top of the search web page this kind of bothers me. Up until yesterday this page did not show up on a goggle search and the same day I try to put up my owne page called Cosmic Trading Post this page popps up and it is at the top of the goggle search, this sucks before this at least my ebay store was at the top of this search.
What I wanted to know is how do I get my page to show up on searches like google? I did add Meta Tags is their anything else I can do that is free? I don't want to put allot of work into it if no one will see it. Also wondering about this other site with the same name that magically popped up on the same day I was making my site, is this just a coincidence or is someone connected with freewebs taking possible business names like mine to use for some reason .
This is my first try at webpages so any suggestions, help or info is greately appreciated. I also plan add links to some of my favorite threads here on the CGC boards is this ok to do?
Thanks; Terry
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http://stores.ebay.com/Cosmic-Trading-Post
Edited by cosmic-spider-man (Mon Jun 25 2007 11:51 AM)
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Zipper68
FACT if I stop posting, trillions and trillions of transistors would be out of work.
Reged: Oct 29 2003
Posts: 4668
Loc: Upstate NY
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: cosmic-spider-man]
#1860628 - Mon Jun 25 2007 10:31 AM
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Quote:
What I wanted to know is how do I get my page to show up on searches like google? I did add Meta Tags is their anything else I can do that is free? I don't want to put allot of work into it if no one will see it.
I'm not a web programmer, but through my marketing work I try to keep on top of stuff like this.
To the best of my knowledge, meta tags are old news and web crawlers no longer weigh them the way they used to. I'm not sure if Google even considers them at all.
Here's a quick lesson on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engine results take all of the follwing into consideration when posting results:
1 - Key word content on your high level pages
2 - How frequently page is updated
3 - The number of QUALITY pages that link to you
4 - Number and frequency of page hits
I'm sure some of our web gurus could add more.
Good luck!
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Zipper's Collecting Obsession
Still looking for:
* Action Comics -- 31, 43, 44, 48, 54, 58, 59, 62, 63, 66, 86, 90, 91 (4.0 - 7.0 range)
* Superman Annual #1, 1960 -- midgrade
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Sal
TOTAL NEWBIE
Reged: Jan 27 2005
Posts: 7514
Loc: nawth cackalacky
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: Zipper68]
#1860639 - Mon Jun 25 2007 10:40 AM
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no offense, but there's no way that a small site hosted on freewebs is going to get anywhere near the top of a google search. quite frankly, i wouldn't be surprised if Google changed the way they compute listings to move eBay sites down...
honestly, i would try something else before i would spend a lot of time and effort trying to get that page in any google search ranking of any importance. maybe contacting past buyers, printing up some business cards to hand out at shows/cons, etc. Search Engine Optimisation is a nice little niche in the Web Site Development world, and there's no "quick fix" for people who are getting into the game this late, unfortunately.
Search Engine Watch is the best site i'm aware of for what's going on in the wonderful world of search engines
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i'm not here to be clever.
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richnerd
I was posting here when you were in diapers.
Reged: Sep 22 2003
Posts: 3256
Loc: IN
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: cosmic-spider-man]
#1860676 - Mon Jun 25 2007 11:05 AM
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Sal is right
First thing you should do is buy your own domain. It is less than $6 a year and can come free when you get a web space from a company.
Now look around at available web space 1and1.com which I use has a basic package that will cost you around $50 a year. If you look hard enough there is always a new company starting up offering great deals. When 1and1 first started I got the first 3 years free.
If you dont want to fork out the cash check with Silvers24. If he has any Domains left he might be able to hook you up with a domain and space for a good price. He also does nice work on websites.
To get into the sponsored links on google, yahoo, msn or any of those will cost you $$.
Here is a Free web submission you can use FREE WEB SUBMISSION
It will help some.
Tip:
One thing that will also help your site climb is link exchange. The more people you get to link to your site and the more you are linked to will help you climb the ranks.
If I think of anything else I will post it.
Rich
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cosmic-spider-man
Collectosaurus Rex
Reged: Aug 15 2004
Posts: 539
Loc: Tennessee
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: Sal]
#1860719 - Mon Jun 25 2007 11:37 AM
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Quote:
no offense, but there's no way that a small site hosted on freewebs is going to get anywhere near the top of a google search. quite frankly, i wouldn't be surprised if Google changed the way they compute listings to move eBay sites down...
Thanks I really appreciate all the helpful response . About what you said above "that no way a small freewebs site is going to get on near the top of Google", well my nephew who put up a small site on freewebs more than two years ago and has like only 32 hits in all that time, if I type the name of his site in a Google search it is at the top of the search every time that is why I tried that site, is it just because it has been up for a long time?
And what about that other site that popped up yesterday with the same name on the same day I made my page why does it show up at the top of the search when I type in Cosmic Trading Post even ahead of all my ebay store listings?
Thanks; Terry
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http://stores.ebay.com/Cosmic-Trading-Post
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Sal
TOTAL NEWBIE
Reged: Jan 27 2005
Posts: 7514
Loc: nawth cackalacky
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: cosmic-spider-man]
#1860849 - Mon Jun 25 2007 12:57 PM
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Quote:
Quote:
no offense, but there's no way that a small site hosted on freewebs is going to get anywhere near the top of a google search. quite frankly, i wouldn't be surprised if Google changed the way they compute listings to move eBay sites down...
Thanks I really appreciate all the helpful response . About what you said above "that no way a small freewebs site is going to get on near the top of Google", well my nephew who put up a small site on freewebs more than two years ago and has like only 32 hits in all that time, if I type the name of his site in a Google search it is at the top of the search every time that is why I tried that site, is it just because it has been up for a long time?
And what about that other site that popped up yesterday with the same name on the same day I made my page why does it show up at the top of the search when I type in Cosmic Trading Post even ahead of all my ebay store listings?
Thanks; Terry
if i created a site called www.pfaraesaniesanisnoggle.com, then i guess if i searched for "pfaraesaniesanisnoggle" on Google, my site would come up first.
You have "Cosmic" "Trading" and "Post" in your site name. one expects that there are quite a few people out there with sites that have a lot more relevance to those terms than you. Especially since that is also your eBay store name, which likely has quite a lot of SEO-positive things going for it...It's gonna be really, really difficult for you to get a one-off site to show up high in SE rankings without quite a bit of messing with it. Unless of course until Google changes their algorithms around again.
The other thing just sounds like coincedence to me. It could also mean your Innernets is broken, since a Google search on "cosmic trading post" puts your eBay store at the top two listings for me
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i'm not here to be clever.
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cosmic-spider-man
Collectosaurus Rex
Reged: Aug 15 2004
Posts: 539
Loc: Tennessee
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: Sal]
#1860944 - Mon Jun 25 2007 01:34 PM
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Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
no offense, but there's no way that a small site hosted on freewebs is going to get anywhere near the top of a google search. quite frankly, i wouldn't be surprised if Google changed the way they compute listings to move eBay sites down...
Thanks I really appreciate all the helpful response . About what you said above "that no way a small freewebs site is going to get on near the top of Google", well my nephew who put up a small site on freewebs more than two years ago and has like only 32 hits in all that time, if I type the name of his site in a Google search it is at the top of the search every time that is why I tried that site, is it just because it has been up for a long time?
And what about that other site that popped up yesterday with the same name on the same day I made my page why does it show up at the top of the search when I type in Cosmic Trading Post even ahead of all my ebay store listings?
Thanks; Terry
if i created a site called www.pfaraesaniesanisnoggle.com, then i guess if i searched for "pfaraesaniesanisnoggle" on Google, my site would come up first.
You have "Cosmic" "Trading" and "Post" in your site name. one expects that there are quite a few people out there with sites that have a lot more relevance to those terms than you. Especially since that is also your eBay store name, which likely has quite a lot of SEO-positive things going for it...It's gonna be really, really difficult for you to get a one-off site to show up high in SE rankings without quite a bit of messing with it. Unless of course until Google changes their algorithms around again.
The other thing just sounds like coincedence to me. It could also mean your Innernets is broken, since a Google search on "cosmic trading post" puts your eBay store at the top two listings for me
Thanks for your time Sal I really appreciate it.
their just must be something wrong with the page, I just tried to type in the whole web address on Goggle & Altavista to see if I could find it and got nothing on either search. I guess the only way to find my page is to enter the address in the address bar on my computer, boy that is a good one.
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http://stores.ebay.com/Cosmic-Trading-Post
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heinlein99
Bid more or post more... tough one...
Reged: Nov 16 2004
Posts: 943
Loc: Harrogate TN
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: cosmic-spider-man]
#1861159 - Mon Jun 25 2007 03:38 PM
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This is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. http://searchenginewatch.com/ It is an incredibly intricate and difficult subject to get into. I've been running my comic covers site for a couple of years, and have many thousands of pages involved, and get only a limited amount of love from any of the search engines. It really is a very complex cat-and-mouse game to play.
Your VERY FIRST step should be set up your own website on your own domain. I know using Freewebs is easy, but the earlier poster is correct in saying that free-hosted websites get no love these days.
After you do this, put a link to the site in your signature like you have now to your ebay store - BUT: label it with keywords that people may search for, ex. '$1.00 comics' rather than 'Cosmic Trading Post' , because pretty much nobody is going to be actually searching for your website name.
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Over 15,000 classic comic book covers New this week: Journey Into Unknown Worlds
Classic bubblegum cards
Maria Sharapova pics
"It's Jim Henson's Flying Leatherneck Babies!" - Crow. T. Robot
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Sal
TOTAL NEWBIE
Reged: Jan 27 2005
Posts: 7514
Loc: nawth cackalacky
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: heinlein99]
#1861194 - Mon Jun 25 2007 03:56 PM
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A real key to getting high marks on search engines is to actively tie in your meta description tag, your meta title tag, and your actual content together, hopefully using keyword and relevance.
For example, if you had a page called "Cosmic Spider-Man's Amazing Marvel 35 cent variant page," you would want to use that as both the title ( in the <head> of the html ) and the leading <h2> or <h1> tag on your page. Then you would put something like "A page showing off the extensive and hard-won collection of 35 cent Marvel Variant issues belonging to the one like Cosmic Spider-Man" in your "description" tag, which is also in the <head> of your html page.
Your content of the page would then be chock full of images and important and relevant data pertaining to 35 cent Marvel Variant issues, including links to other valuable contributors to the 35 cent variant crowd. Hopefully, these sites would then link back to you. All images on the page would have the words "35 cent variant" if it was a cover of a variant, or "Cosmic Spider-Man" if not in their "alt" attributes, although this is not 100% necessary these days for SEO.
Do all of that, for every page on your site, and you're probably about 50% of the way there. If none of this made sense, my recommendation would be to just focus your energy on getting word out about your eBay store, and tell people who buy from you that you also *wink wink* have dollar books for sale.
Good luck to ya either way
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i'm not here to be clever.
Jun 25, 2007 - change date
1. chris benoit
2. adam johnson
3. ye li
4. science of love
5. how did chris benoit die
6. chris benoit found dead
7. nancy benoit
8. the grocery game
9. eddie guerrero
10. chris benoit murder suicide
11. nancy daus
12. atlanta news
13. girl positive
14. chris jericho
15. atlanta newspaper
16. khleo thomas
17. what happened to chris benoit
18. chris benoit theme song
19. fayetteville county ga news
20. atlanta journal constitution
21. kevin sullivan
22. dead wrestlers
23. homicide
24. chris benwah
25. dean malenko
26. fayette county ga
27. georgia news
28. pro wrestling
29. wrestler dies
30. wwe wrestling
31. wrestling news
32. nancy elizabeth daus sullivan benoit
33. beef wellington
34. wwe wrestler chris benoit
35. wwe death
36. chris benoit and family
37. the children s hour
38. daniel benoit
39. holes soundtrack
40. miss elizabeth
41. tea and sympathy
42. ninth gate
43. chris ben
44. world wrestling federation
45. figure four weekly
46. society of dog walkers scholarship
47. woman wcw
48. six flags tragedy
49. atlanta tv stations
50. prowrestling.com
51. national wild turkey scholarship
52. dynamite kid
53. wrestlemania 20
54. owen hart
55. atlanta news chris benoit
56. waga
57. perfectmatch.com
58. lex luger
59. wwf wrestling
60. wrestling deaths
61. wrestler killed
62. professional wrestling
63. bret hart
64. breezies
65. andrea bowen
66. inspection begins after girl s legs severed
67. wwe news
68. chris benoit myspace layouts
69. whas11.com
70. john kerr
71. fayetteville georgia
72. sherri martel
73. yao ming
74. chris bennett
75. who killed chris benoit
76. demonoid down
77. beekeeping essay contest
78. american association of bovine practitioners scholarship
79. lordsofpain
80. palo alto fire
81. wrestler murdered
82. wrestling observer
83. curtis allgier
84. lake tahoe fire
85. perfect match
86. georgia newspaper
87. bratz movie
88. mesu
89. boobie miles
90. fayette county georgia news
91. obsessed with wrestling
92. kevin garnett
93. woman wrestler
94. espy
95. hip hop for peace scholarship
96. freemasons
97. fayetteville ga newspaper
98. woman benoit
99. crash holly
100. ryan cabrera
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Audio clips from this Atlanta rapper's new album:
"You Know What It Is"
(Windows)
(Real)
"Big Things Poppin' (Do It)"
(Windows)
(Real)
So now it’s T. I.’s turn. Last year he released his glorious fourth album, “King”: a thunderous disc full of virtuoso rhymes that became the top-selling rap album of 2006. (Though, to be honest, there was scant competition.) Last week the follow-up, the disappointing “T. I. vs. T. I. P.,” arrived on the Internet, illegal but ubiquitous; the official version arrives in shops today, from Atlantic Records. Fans can choose their cover: a pinstriped T. I. or a sweatshirted T. I. P. But the music is the same, and so is the face, plus or minus a scowl.
This splintering began when T. I. was Clifford Harris, a skinny hustler from the Bankhead neighborhood in Atlanta. As a boy he was known as Tip, which became T. I. P. after he started rapping, and then T. I. after he got a major record deal. In 2003 he released his second album, “Trap Muzik,” which included “T. I. vs. T. I. P.,” the song that gave his new album its title. Even then, T. I., the ambitious hip-hop star, was trying to tame T. I. P., the impetuous kid from Bankhead.
In 2004, just as “Trap Muzik” was exploding, T. I. went to prison for violating his probation (he had been convicted of a drug charge in 1998); thanks to a work-release program, he was back within a few months. And on June 24 he reportedly got into a fight with Ludacris’s manager, Chaka Zulu; T. I. and Ludacris had previously feuded and reconciled, or so it seemed. Apparently T. I. P. just won’t stay gone.
Even so, T. I. has clearly grown more comfortable in his role as a bankable star. Like any rapper aiming for world domination, he has a record label (Grand Hustle) and a budding film career (he played the lead role in last year’s “ATL”). And while his new album includes plenty of rhymes about the good times and bad deeds, it also includes “Help Is Coming,” in which he tries to reassure nervous Atlantic executives. This is the hip-hop equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation: “They say the market share’s down — so? I ain’t affected/Tell the label relax, and they don’t need to stress/Yeah, just cut the check and I’ll handle the rest.”
T. I. is one of the last rap stars standing, a dominant figure at a time when record sales are falling fast and hip-hop sales are falling faster. (Last year no hip-hop album, not even “King,” was among the 10 top-selling CDs.) And like just about every popular rapper since the 1980s, he is both a sign of the times and an anomaly. He is part of a wave of beat-savvy Southern rappers (many based in Atlanta) who have reimagined the genre over the last decade. But he’s also an old-fashioned lyricist, obsessed with verbal density; Pharrell famously said, “He’s like the down-South Jay-Z.”
You might even say that T. I. has triumphed by turning Jay-Z’s style inside out. Jay-Z knew how to hide sound in sense. His lyrics often sounded like plainspoken prose; it was only later that you noticed the hidden rhyme patterns and rhythms. By contrast, T. I. hides sense in sound. His lyrics often sound like singsong chants; it’s only later that you notice the hidden intricacy of the words.
That approach was evident in “What You Know,” a club-crushing hit from “King.” While synthesizers sizzled, he used his raspy drawl to deliver a series of taunts and threats:
See all that attitude’s
Unnecessary, dude.
You never carry tools.
Not even square — he cube.
Listeners transfixed by his entertaining interjections (“O.K.?!”) and exaggerated pronunciation might easily have overlooked the rigorous poetic construction. But that’s a neat little quatrain: four lines, six syllables apiece, each building to an trisyllabic oblique rhyme. Somehow, T. I. delivers supertechnical raps without ever sounding as boring as that last sentence.
That’s why the new album is so puzzling. Compared with the reckless bombast of “King,” this album’s first single, “Big Things Poppin’ (Do It),” sounds pretty tepid. The follow-up, “You Know What It Is,” has a beautifully slithery beat by Wyclef Jean and his production team (which almost makes up for Mr. Jean’s faux-Jamaican patois), but the song is more elegant than thrilling. And it’s hard not to compare it with last year’s “What You Know,” especially since the title includes the same three words.
Thus the personality split: it’s a tool that rappers often use when they find themselves getting too complacent, or too self-conscious, or both. Scrappiness used to be one of T. I.’s greatest assets, and he made his name with brash street tales, many of which revolved around the cocaine trade. (On an early mixtape, he announced, “I got a thick, rich mixed bitch, handling bricks/And a quick-witted slick clique to manage the chick.”) He cleans up nice, but he needs someone to do his dirty work.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Audio clips from this Atlanta rapper's new album:
"You Know What It Is"
(Windows)
(Real)
"Big Things Poppin' (Do It)"
(Windows)
(Real)
So he brought back T. I. P., who takes over “Act I,” as he calls it. That’s where you’ll find those first two singles, as well as “Hurt,” a surprisingly strong Busta Rhymes collaboration (it’s refreshing to hear both of them sounding so belligerent), and “Watch What You Say to Me,” a laid-back (but tough-talking) track with Jay-Z. It’s also where you’ll find “Da Dopeman,” which might be the most depressing song on the album: you can almost hear a sigh as T. I. — sorry, T. I. P. — rehashes a subject he once seemed to relish. This is his first album without Toomp, the Atlantan who produced many of his defining hits (including “Motivation,” “U Don’t Know Me” and “What You Know”), and Toomp’s devastating electronic tracks are sorely missed.
For Act II, T. I. takes over. There are dull collaborations with Eminem (who seems to know how bored he sounds) and Nelly, along with a rote seduction song (“Don’t You Wanna Be High”) and that PowerPoint spiel. Finally it’s time for “Act III — The Confrontation,” in which our two heroes finally come face to face to hash out their differences.
All this split-personality stuff is patently absurd (just try not to smirk or squirm when T. I. P. tries to get T. I.’s attention by yelling, “Meet me at the mirror, man!”), though evidently it’s a common enough response to the impossible demands of hip-hop, which more or less requires its stars — even, or especially, the veterans — to say ridiculous things, and mean them. T. I. is 26, but all the big-name guests on this album are well over 30, and it seems as if he’s already worried about aging gracefully.
At times his high-concept gamble comes close to paying off. When T. I. and T. I. P. square off in the second verse of “Respect This Hustle,” it’s worth the wait. T. I. P. complains that people are talking about him, but T. I. urges him to interpret that as a sign of respect:
T. I.: “Don’t take it personal — people wanna be close to folk/What you think the television and the posters fo’?”
T. I. P.: “Man, I’m claustrophobic.”
T. I.: “Well, you need to see a doctor fo’ it/And I ain’t jokin’ — you close, Tip, and you ’bout to blow it.”
In the end, though, clever plotting and sharp dialogue aren’t enough, especially not without more exciting beats than these. What’s missing, most of all, is the savage glee with which T. I. once attacked his foe Lil’ Flip, unleashing a torrent of insults that effectively ended Lil’ Flip’s career. The album’s three acts make the division too clear; separating the tycoon from the troublemaker diminishes them both.
No matter what happens with this album, T. I.’s career is nowhere near done; he remains one of the best and slickest rappers alive, and even hearing him spin his wheels is a joy. But what comes next? How does the self-proclaimed “King of the South” raise the stakes? That’s one question that the hotheaded T. I. P. can’t answer, and neither can Jay-Z, Nelly, Mr. Jean, Busta Rhymes or Eminem. T. I. will have to figure it out by himself.
=========================================================================================
EDIT:
Monsanto is hardly the first successful rapper to come down with split-personality disorder. Eminem made millions by pitting the tormented Marshall Mathers against the mischievous Slim Shady. Tupac Shakur morphed into Makaveli when he made his final album. Jay-Z briefly retired from rapping to become a record executive known as Shawn Carter. (“Back to Shawn Carter the hustler — Jay-Z is dead,” as he once put it.) Q-Tip begat Kamaal the Abstract; Nelly split his third album into “Sweat” and “Suit” discs; Ice Cube split one album into “Life” and “Death,” another into “War” and “Peace.” Often, successful rappers don’t crumble; they splinter.
Skip to next paragraph
Related
Audio clips from this Atlanta rapper's new album:
"You Know What It Is"
(Windows)
(Real)
"Big Things Poppin' (Do It)"
(Windows)
(Real)
So now it’s T. I.’s turn. Last year he released his glorious fourth album, “King”: a thunderous disc full of virtuoso rhymes that became the top-selling rap album of 2006. (Though, to be honest, there was scant competition.) Last week the follow-up, the disappointing “T. I. vs. T. I. P.,” arrived on the Internet, illegal but ubiquitous; the official version arrives in shops today, from Atlantic Records. Fans can choose their cover: a pinstriped T. I. or a sweatshirted T. I. P. But the music is the same, and so is the face, plus or minus a scowl.
This splintering began when T. I. was Clifford Harris, a skinny hustler from the Bankhead neighborhood in Atlanta. As a boy he was known as Tip, which became T. I. P. after he started rapping, and then T. I. after he got a major record deal. In 2003 he released his second album, “Trap Muzik,” which included “T. I. vs. T. I. P.,” the song that gave his new album its title. Even then, T. I., the ambitious hip-hop star, was trying to tame T. I. P., the impetuous kid from Bankhead.
In 2004, just as “Trap Muzik” was exploding, T. I. went to prison for violating his probation (he had been convicted of a drug charge in 1998); thanks to a work-release program, he was back within a few months. And on June 24 he reportedly got into a fight with Ludacris’s manager, Chaka Zulu; T. I. and Ludacris had previously feuded and reconciled, or so it seemed. Apparently T. I. P. just won’t stay gone.
Even so, T. I. has clearly grown more comfortable in his role as a bankable star. Like any rapper aiming for world domination, he has a record label (Grand Hustle) and a budding film career (he played the lead role in last year’s “ATL”). And while his new album includes plenty of rhymes about the good times and bad deeds, it also includes “Help Is Coming,” in which he tries to reassure nervous Atlantic executives. This is the hip-hop equivalent of a PowerPoint presentation: “They say the market share’s down — so? I ain’t affected/Tell the label relax, and they don’t need to stress/Yeah, just cut the check and I’ll handle the rest.”
T. I. is one of the last rap stars standing, a dominant figure at a time when record sales are falling fast and hip-hop sales are falling faster. (Last year no hip-hop album, not even “King,” was among the 10 top-selling CDs.) And like just about every popular rapper since the 1980s, he is both a sign of the times and an anomaly. He is part of a wave of beat-savvy Southern rappers (many based in Atlanta) who have reimagined the genre over the last decade. But he’s also an old-fashioned lyricist, obsessed with verbal density; Pharrell famously said, “He’s like the down-South Jay-Z.”
You might even say that T. I. has triumphed by turning Jay-Z’s style inside out. Jay-Z knew how to hide sound in sense. His lyrics often sounded like plainspoken prose; it was only later that you noticed the hidden rhyme patterns and rhythms. By contrast, T. I. hides sense in sound. His lyrics often sound like singsong chants; it’s only later that you notice the hidden intricacy of the words.
That approach was evident in “What You Know,” a club-crushing hit from “King.” While synthesizers sizzled, he used his raspy drawl to deliver a series of taunts and threats:
See all that attitude’s
Unnecessary, dude.
You never carry tools.
Not even square — he cube.
Listeners transfixed by his entertaining interjections (“O.K.?!”) and exaggerated pronunciation might easily have overlooked the rigorous poetic construction. But that’s a neat little quatrain: four lines, six syllables apiece, each building to an trisyllabic oblique rhyme. Somehow, T. I. delivers supertechnical raps without ever sounding as boring as that last sentence.
That’s why the new album is so puzzling. Compared with the reckless bombast of “King,” this album’s first single, “Big Things Poppin’ (Do It),” sounds pretty tepid. The follow-up, “You Know What It Is,” has a beautifully slithery beat by Wyclef Jean and his production team (which almost makes up for Mr. Jean’s faux-Jamaican patois), but the song is more elegant than thrilling. And it’s hard not to compare it with last year’s “What You Know,” especially since the title includes the same three words.
Thus the personality split: it’s a tool that rappers often use when they find themselves getting too complacent, or too self-conscious, or both. Scrappiness used to be one of T. I.’s greatest assets, and he made his name with brash street tales, many of which revolved around the cocaine trade. (On an early mixtape, he announced, “I got a thick, rich mixed bitch, handling bricks/And a quick-witted slick clique to manage the chick.”) He cleans up nice, but he needs someone to do his dirty work.
Related
Audio clips from this Atlanta rapper's new album:
"You Know What It Is"
"Big Things Poppin' (Do It)"
=====================
So he brought back T. I. P., who takes over “Act I,” as he calls it. That’s where you’ll find those first two singles, as well as “Hurt,” a surprisingly strong Busta Rhymes collaboration (it’s refreshing to hear both of them sounding so belligerent), and “Watch What You Say to Me,” a laid-back (but tough-talking) track with Jay-Z. It’s also where you’ll find “Da Dopeman,” which might be the most depressing song on the album: you can almost hear a sigh as T. I. — sorry, T. I. P. — rehashes a subject he once seemed to relish. This is his first album without Toomp, the Atlantan who produced many of his defining hits (including “Motivation,” “U Don’t Know Me” and “What You Know”), and Toomp’s devastating electronic tracks are sorely missed.
For Act II, T. I. takes over. There are dull collaborations with Eminem (who seems to know how bored he sounds) and Nelly, along with a rote seduction song (“Don’t You Wanna Be High”) and that PowerPoint spiel. Finally it’s time for “Act III — The Confrontation,” in which our two heroes finally come face to face to hash out their differences.
All this split-personality stuff is patently absurd (just try not to smirk or squirm when T. I. P. tries to get T. I.’s attention by yelling, “Meet me at the mirror, man!”), though evidently it’s a common enough response to the impossible demands of hip-hop, which more or less requires its stars — even, or especially, the veterans — to say ridiculous things, and mean them. T. I. is 26, but all the big-name guests on this album are well over 30, and it seems as if he’s already worried about aging gracefully.
At times his high-concept gamble comes close to paying off. When T. I. and T. I. P. square off in the second verse of “Respect This Hustle,” it’s worth the wait. T. I. P. complains that people are talking about him, but T. I. urges him to interpret that as a sign of respect:
T. I.: “Don’t take it personal — people wanna be close to folk/What you think the television and the posters fo’?”
T. I. P.: “Man, I’m claustrophobic.”
T. I.: “Well, you need to see a doctor fo’ it/And I ain’t jokin’ — you close, Tip, and you ’bout to blow it.”
In the end, though, clever plotting and sharp dialogue aren’t enough, especially not without more exciting beats than these. What’s missing, most of all, is the savage glee with which T. I. once attacked his foe Lil’ Flip, unleashing a torrent of insults that effectively ended Lil’ Flip’s career. The album’s three acts make the division too clear; separating the tycoon from the troublemaker diminishes them both.
No matter what happens with this album, T. I.’s career is nowhere near done; he remains one of the best and slickest rappers alive, and even hearing him spin his wheels is a joy. But what comes next? How does the self-proclaimed “King of the South” raise the stakes? That’s one question that the hotheaded T. I. P. can’t answer, and neither can Jay-Z, Nelly, Mr. Jean, Busta Rhymes or Eminem. T. I. will have to figure it out by himself.
====================================================
T.i. - Motivation Lyrics
[Intro]
Better get on yo job, tell'em, haters get on yo job, nigga (Motivation)
Nigga, get on yo job, tell'em, haters get on yo job, nigga (Motivation)
Haters better get on yo job, tell'em, haters get on yo job, nigga (It's motivation)
Sucka nigga, get on yo job, if ya, hatin' get on yo job, nigga
[Verse 1]
You can look me in my eyes, see I'm ready for whatever
Anythang don't kill me, make me better
I ain't dead nigga, you can take the fame and the chedda
And the game, any deal, I'm still a go-getter
Take my freedom for the moment but it ain't fo-ever
I got the spirit of a god, heart of a dope dealer
I'm a king, seen hangin' with some cold killas
I ain't never back down or ran from no nigga
I ain't sat down yet, pimp, standin' gorilla
Even if I'ma all alone or standin' with four niggaz
Tell'em jump, pimpin' it don't get no realer
5'9" with the soul of a 6'4" nigga
I separated the fakes, paralized from the waist down
From the real stand up guys of the A-Town
Can't even look me in my eyes, put yo face down
I'm outta jail nigga, whachu gotta say now?
[Chorus]
Motivation
Niggaz fakin' only gonna inspire (Motivation)
All yo hatin' in fuel to my fire (It's motivation)
Niggaz plottin' on the crown soft droppin' (It's motivation)
Hey but I ain't slowin' down and I ain't stoppin' (Motivation)
Now nigga don't stop my show (Motivation)
You ain't know I don't stop, I go (It's motivation)
Sucka niggaz can't make me suffer
Just make me stronger and make me tougher (It's motivation)
[Verse 2]
To be locked in a box niggaz happy to see
Put anybody on top, any rapper but T, I, P
But back to reality G, O.D. still carryin' me, nigga I run this
Spread yo rumours, kick all yo lil' dumb shit
Tell lies, laugh 'bout the time that I'm gon get
If it make you feel better, picture me over and done with
Punk bitch, come with all the gossip you can come with
Small thang to a giant, I can overcome this
Jail, I don' done this, rap I'm just havin' fun with
I could be a local joker, never have one hit
Nigga, "New Finish" alone'll get me dumb rich
While these rappers sellin' records gettin' pennies
If Grand Hustle sell any, I'ma get plenty
If God with me, who could be against me sucka?
Can't make me suffer, just make me tougher
[Chorus - repeat]
[Repeat Hook]
[Chorus - repeat]
Other songs in Urban Legend album :
»T.i. - ASAP Lyrics
»T.i. - Bring Em Out Lyrics
»T.i. - Chillin With My Bitch Lyrics
»T.i. - Countdown Lyrics
»T.i. - Freak Through Lyrics
»T.i. - Get Loose Lyrics
»T.i. - Get Ya Shit Together Lyrics
»T.i. - Limelight Lyrics
»T.i. - Motivation Lyrics
»T.i. - My Life Lyrics
»T.i. - Prayin' For Help Lyrics
»T.i. - Stand Up Lyrics
»T.i. - Tha King Lyrics
»T.i. - The Greatest Lyrics
»T.i. - U Don't Know Me Lyrics
»T.i. - What They Do Lyrics
»T.i. - Why U Mad At Me Lyrics
====================================================
T.I. LYRICS
What You Know?
Aye..aye..aye..aye..aye..
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Aye...
don't you know I got
key by the three when I chirp shawty chirp back
Louis nap sack
where I hold'n all tha work at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
I know all about that
Loaded 44s on the low where the cheese at
Fresh off the jet to the Jects where the G's at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Hey what you know about that?
Hey I know all about that
See me in ya city sittin pretty kno I'm shining dawg
Ridin wid a couple latin brawds and a china doll
And you kno how we ball
Aye..
Ridin in shiny cars
Aye..
Walk in designer malls
Aye..
Buy everything we saw
You know about me dogg
Don't talk about me dogg
And if you doubt me dogg
You better out me dogg
I'm throwed off slightly bro
Don't wanna fight me bro
I'm fast as lightning bro ya better use ya Nike's bro
Know you don't like me cause
Yo bitch most likely does
She see me on them dubs
In front of every club
I be on dro I'm buzzed
Give every ho a hug
Niggaz don't show me mugs
Cause you don't know me cuz
Aye...
don't you know I got
key by the three when I chirp shawty chirp back
Louis nap sack
where I hold'n all tha work at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
I know all about that
Loaded 44s on the low where the cheese at
Fresh off the jet to the Jects where the G's at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Hey what you know about that?
Hey I know all about that
Candy on the '64
Leather guts and fish bowl
50 on the pinky ring just to make my fist glow
Ya bitches get low
Because I get dough
So what? I'm rich ho
I still pull a-kick-do' (kick ya door down)
What you talking shit fo'?
gotta run and hit fo'?
Got you a yellin and I thought you put out a gun hit fo
But you's a scary dude
Believed by very few
Just keep it very cool
Or we will bury you
See all that attitude's, unneccesary dude
Cause you never Carry Tools not even sweary qs
You got these people fooled, who see me on the tube
Whatever try the crew, they'll see you on the news
Aye...
don't you know I got
key by the three when I chirp shawty chirp back
Louis nap sack
where I hold'n all tha work at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
I know all about that
Loaded 44s on the low where the cheese at
Fresh off the jet to the Jects where the G's at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Hey what you know about that?
Hey I know all about that
Fresh off the jet to the block
Burn a rubber with a top-pop
I'll pop and bust a shot and tell em stop and make the block hot
Ya label got got
Cuz you are not hot
I got the top spot
And it will not stop
A video or not that will bust it to the glock stop
Drag ya out that Bentley Coupe and take it to the chop shop
Partner, we got ya'll
If it may pop off
I'll answer the question "Will I get ya block knocked off?"
And what it is bro
Look I'll kill ya, bro
I'm in your hood, if you a gangsta what you here for?
Somebody better get bro for he get sent for
You say you wanna squash it what you still talkin shit for?
Aye...
don't you know I got
key by the three when I chirp shawty chirp back
Louis nap sack
where I hold'n all tha work at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
I know all about that
Loaded 44s on the low where the cheese at
Fresh off the jet to the Jects where the G's at
What you know about that?
What you know about that?
Hey what you know about that?
Hey I know all about that
[ www.LyricsTop.com ]
================
Five "characters" to evict from the comics storytelling pantheon:
1) The Evil Conspiracy Guy
Dresses in black suits, skinny ties and sunglasses day and night; almost never speaks or answers questions; shadows baffled but frightened investigators of all stripes in long black limousines; functions as a road agent of mysterious, distant conspiratorial employers who wish all traces of their evil plans kept from public consciousness; and kills without emotion, except for that bit of supercilious satisfaction, usually evidenced by a pointless, obtuse wisecrack, at proving superior (via assassination) to their worthless, helpless prey. Has no past and no future, and needs none, because he's a prop of jeopardy, not a real character. (Can sometimes be female, and in such cases will almost always prove physical superiority to male target via hand-to-hand combat before killing.) Works almost constantly; has earned a permanent vacation.
2) The Grizzled Old Cop
Pudgy and gruff, this stubble-chinned mainstay slouches and grumbles with world-weary bitterness about how he's "too old for this." He's at least too old to not know how to use a steam iron or where any dry cleaners are, but his clothes always look like he's been sleeping in them for five days. He wears fedoras, off-the-rack suits and frequently trenchcoats, and prefers greasy food. He complains about his bosses, courts coddling street criminals, regulations tying his hands, the press, and women's sentimental expectations, but he's always willing to show his old-school toughness. His pension will never amount to enough, but it's time he took it anyway.
3) The Greedy Idiot Genius
The classic generic "scientist," he has enough understanding of technology to build fantastic weaponry based on highly suspect scientific principle, but not enough understanding of patents, commerce or basic arithmetic to figure out that mass marketing peaceful or military uses of his invention will net him infinitely more than using it to rob banks will. Fortunately, he's not seen much anymore, but even once is too much.
4) The Ramrod
Ain't it strange how there's always one? The guy who has to tell the rest of the group/team/random collection of strangers coping with a crisis "Let's move it, people!" like he's Sgt. Fury and they don't have to brains to figure it out for themselves. Leave him behind.
5) The Subjugated SuperAlien
Often female, they are representatives of slave races bred to have amazing powers, usually in the service of some alien conqueror, but on encountering brave, freedom-loving denizens of Earth, rebel against their masters, join forces with the Earthlings, then spend endless volumes "learning the ways of our world." Variation: bred to be a service race, they are unable to comprehend when their masters tell them to stop fighting brave but outclassed Earth heroes, but come to appreciate that what the Earthling emotions they believed were "weak" were true strength after all. Then they spend endless volumes "learning the ways of our world." Isn't there some planet somewhere they can have for their very own?
Got any others? Send 'em in!
A couple interesting letters in recently:
"Can I bring up my pet peeve, when I walk into my local comic shop (its an hour away, buts that's local to me) and scan the racks looking for something interesting, I have no idea what to pick up! There is never anything to tell me what the comic is about, you always have to go in blind. When you buy a novel, the back cover or inside flap gives you a idea of what it's about, but comics nothing. Just this weekend picked up about a half dozen comics, and put them back. The covers looked interesting, the interior art was ok, but just flipping through I got no sense of the story. There was no spandex or zombies or cowboys, just a lot of talking heads in a contemporary setting. How about it guys give us a clue, we will take a chance if you give us a reason to?"
Maybe I ought to change the column name back to Master Of The Obvious, because that one's so obvious I can't imagine why publishers aren't doing it, especially since manga is increasingly training readers to look for cover blurbs. I can understand not having them in comics that sell the back cover for advertising, but most don't. Some summary of concept and story were considered de rigueur not too long ago, usually on the inside front cover, though companies have also demanded they appear on the splash or (usually very clumsily) be incorporated into the first few pages of each story. On the other hand, a good, concise attention-getting blurb is one of the hardest things in the world to write. (The trick is to write brisk story concept synopses with a drop of plot development rather than extended plot summaries, but comics fans and marketing departments alike seem madly in love with the latter.) In any case, yes, a well-crafted, easily found summary/blurb might go a long way toward increasing casual sales, and the back cover's as good a place to put one as any.
========================================================================
My dad gave me these two sage bits of advice....
"You can't go broke making a profit"
"Pigs get fat and hogs get slaughtered"
He was a commodities broker. Comics are commodities.
Best advice I ever got.
My mom once said:
'Dammit John, not in the freakin' house! Put the pipe, down, open the windows and let all the smell out before your dad gets home!'
I've always remembered those wise words.
--------------------
"Show me a man or a woman alone and I'll show you a saint.
Give me two and they'll fall in love.
Give me three and they'll invent the charming thing we call 'society'.
Give me four and they'll build a pyramid.
Give me five and they'll make one an outcast. Give me six and they'll reinvent prejudice.
Give me seven and in seven years they'll reinvent warfare.
Man may have been made in the image of God, but human society was made in the image of His opposite number, and is always trying to get back home." - Glen Bateman, The Stand
Oddly, most of the people I've spoken to were in the same boat in 2006, suffering through a year long accruing gauntlet of pointless and meaningless time-consuming crap rather than any sort of catastrophes.
Books of The Times
Growing Up Hippie, and Going Down the Up Escalator With Dad
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By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: July 3, 2007
Coming-of-age literature is filled with characters who experience themselves as outsiders — as loners, nerds, misunderstood artists or uncool, uptight geeks. In her keenly observed novel “Flower Children,” Maxine Swann depicts four children who worry that their hippie parents’ unconventional lifestyle has put them outside the mainstream of ordinary life.
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Marisela La Grave
Maxine Swann
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FLOWER CHILDREN
By Maxine Swann
211 pages.
Riverhead Books.
$21.95.
Their parents’ laissez-faire approach to raising children; their skinny-dipping parties and free talk about sex; the trapeze in the living room; the shabby, eccentric clothes they wear — all make Lu, Maeve, Tuck and Clyde yearn to fit in. At school, they’re surprised at first by all the rules but quickly embrace them:
“They learn not to swear. They get prizes for obedience, for following the rules down to the last detail. They’re delighted by these rules, these arbitrary lines that regulate behavior and mark off forbidden things.”
At home, they become the responsible ones, the parental ones: They goad their father into cleaning up the house, worry about him falling asleep when he drives and wish their mother would “clean herself up, wear some decent clothes.”
Writing in lucid, crystalline prose that shifts back and forth from the first person to the third, Ms. Swann has expanded a short story that scooped up a handful of prizes (the O. Henry Award, the Pushcart Prize and Ploughshares’ Cohen Award) and turned it into a small gem of a novel, a novel that showcases her eye for detail, her psychological acuity, her ability to conjure up a particular place and time.
She captures the incongruities of the 1970s counterculture as seen from the point of view of a young child, the shifting attitudes the narrator and her three siblings take toward the adult world as they slip-slide from childhood into adolescence, and the incalculable ways in which the passage of time colorizes the past.
The four children — ranging in age, at the start of the novel, from 3 to 9 — grow up in Pennsylvania farm country without supervision: They are “free to run anywhere they like whenever they like.” They all sleep in one room in the house their parents built, and they “take baths with their father, five bodies in one tub.”
They travel with their parents to demonstrations across the country, they listen to their father expound on subjects ranging from Vietnam to EST to thermal energy, and they listen to their mother’s boyfriends and their father’s girlfriends talk about relationships.
Their mother has rebelled against her mother’s privileged country-club life on Long Island, while their Harvard-educated father, who hails from a family of New England eccentrics, seems to regard petty trouble-making as a philosophical stance toward the world. He takes the children running down the up escalators in stores, gets speeding tickets left and right, and delights in upsetting his girlfriends by wearing outrageous clothes to family gatherings.
He is fond of denouncing the hypocrisies of the “grown-up” world, and exults in his children “who will be like no children ever were,” brought up not on petty lessons “about how a fork is held or a hand shaken or what is best to be said and what shouldn’t be spoken of or seen.”
Maeve and her older sister, Lu, try to order their chaotic childhoods by excelling at school: “To combat any weird rumors about our house, we tried to act as normal as we could. We carried combs in our back pockets, flipped our hair back, trying to imitate the cooler girls. The rewards for us were in getting A’s. We got A’s. But we were also torn about it. We had always been debilitated by this penchant of ours to get A’s because getting A’s wasn’t cool. We tried to stop but couldn’t.”
As the two girls get older, they take to hanging out with two ne’er-do-well brothers from school, who initiate them into the complexities of adolescence, but Maeve realizes that she and her sister “were going one way, the Kalowski boys the other.” At the same time, she realizes that her and her siblings’ obsession with their parents — their divorce, their affairs, their unorthodox habits and bizarre theories — has magically receded, that their parents no longer dominate the landscape of their lives.
Years later, when the children, now grown themselves, return home for visits, they feel a kind of nostalgia for the things that once vexed and perplexed them. Toward the end of this slender but resonant novel, Ms. Swann writes:
“They feel a great tenderness for certain things. That was where the goats gathered. That’s where the cider press still stands, unused for years. Suddenly they feel enraged. How could things go unused like that for years? They should move back here, settle in, make it all work again, make it all as it was again exactly, replicate that world — but why? It seems to have suddenly slipped their minds that they have whole other worlds and even people waiting for them to return. And even so, why replicate this world that has gone? Because it was so perfect? But it was not. But it was. Perfect because it was the world before the world changed.”
Shifting Careers
Tools and Tips to Create Buzz Around Your Ideas
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By MARCI ALBOHER
Published: July 8, 2007
Last week I wrote about how to overcome feelings of discomfort that arise when you promote yourself. Now it is time to plow into the nitty-gritty: tools and tips to help create buzz around your ideas, products or anything else that you are passionate about.
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Alex Eben Meyer
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Whether you call it self-promotion, branding or building a raving fan base, here are some suggestions to get you started:
1. Figure out your brand. It is hard to create buzz when you have no idea what you want to buzz about. This brings me back to William Arruda, the branding expert from last week’s column. Reach Communications Consulting, Mr. Arruda’s company, offers an online assessment tool called 360 Reach (available for $29.95 or free with his book, “Career Distinction”) that you can use to get a sense of how others see you. If you are the type who loves magazine quizzes, this is for you. I sent my assessment to 20 people whose opinion I respect and eagerly sifted through their e-mail responses.
I was pleased to find out that some see me as “collaborative,” “connected,” “entrepreneurial” and “generous.” But at least a few think I have “limited patience” and might be “too worried what others think.” Looks as if I will have to work on those qualities. A free version of program, the 360 Personal Profiler, removes the feedback element, but guides you through a questionnaire about your values and qualities to help you to describe your personal brand.
2. Think small. I recently received an e-mail message from Lindsay Mure, the founder of the Femme Network, a professional networking site for women. Ms. Mure signed the message “femtastically yours.” I will never think of her without the “fem” association. Take a look at your business cards, your Web site, your e-mail signature, your letterhead, even the way you answer the phone. Are there ways to bring out more of your brand?
3. Be your own publicist. When Debra Cohen started Home Remedies of New York, a matchmaking service for homeowners and home contractors in her Long Island neighborhood, she was so passionate about her business that she felt no one else could communicate it as well as she could. She also couldn’t afford outside publicity help. So she started calling television producers and reporters to tell her story. Soon, the media coverage followed. Within 10 years, her home-based business has grossed more than $2 million in sales, and all of it was a result of the media attention she generated, she says. Ms. Cohen’s advice: “Go with the personalized approach. Study the show, column, publication and tailor your pitch to meet their needs. And if there’s no fit, don’t even try.”
4. Get some help. If you are hesitant to approach the media, let them come to you. PR Leads, founded by the public relations expert Dan Janal, offers a service intended for authors, speakers and specialists. Individuals register their areas of expertise and receive queries from journalists seeking comments or quotes from sources. These queries are supplied through a partnership between PR leads and ProfNet, a division of PR Newswire.
The service costs $99 a month. It includes a free coaching session with Mr. Janal, as well as periodic publicity tips by e-mail. StartupNation, a hub for small business owners, offers a similar service through a relationship with PR Newswire and Rembrandt Communications, a small-business public relations consultant. Packages cost $100 to $5,000 and include discounts on ProfNet listings (the same service used by Mr. Janal), assistance with writing news releases, private coaching and other add-ons.
5. Write articles. Why wait for people to write about you when you can write about your own ideas or your areas of expertise? Think about writing articles for trade publications in your industries, op-ed pieces for newspapers and how-to articles. For some tips on how to get started, read “Getting your first byline” on my blog.
6. Speaking of blogs. After countless requests from friends for the right wine to complement a certain menu, my friend Mike Brennan, a lawyer in Boston, decided to start a blog to keep track of these recommendations. Because he also wanted to offer his musings on criminal law, he came up with a format to weave together his thoughts on both wine and crime in one blog, the Food and Wine Defender. After only a few months of blogging, he started to get requests for wine tastings and advice, a service he hopes to turn into a side business.
Writing articles can be a lengthy process, but you can create a blog within minutes using free services like Blogger.com and Wordpress. For a quickie primer on getting started, read “The Easiest Instructions for How to Start a Blog,” by the author and blogger Penelope Trunk.
7. Stay in touch. Find your own way to make people remember you and what you are working on. Send clippings of articles that remind people of your passions. Or consider writing a periodic newsletter, which you can distribute in print or online. As I wrote last week, my online newsletter was an easy way to publicize my recent book tour. Companies that produce online newsletters make it simple to produce professional-looking e-mail communications. Constant Contact, My Emma (I used this one) and Exact Target are three providers to look at; with a few hours of setup and no design background, you can create a high-design mailing that looks as if a professional did it.
8. Speak and teach. If you have specialized knowledge, speaking and teaching classes is a surefire way to build your reputation. You may not get paid at first, but the write-up in the catalog describing your talk or workshop is free advertising for your services. Lauri Grossman, a homeopath in New York, did this. “If a group of monkeys was gathering, I’d speak there,” she said. Eventually, those speaking and teaching gigs got bigger. Today, she lectures around the world in venues from community centers to large conferences and medical institutions. Through her talks, Ms. Grossman has landed clients, consulting jobs and writing assignments. She is now also regularly paid for her speaking engagements.
9. Identify your advocates. Next time someone pays your work a compliment, ask if they would not mind repeating it to your boss, your best customer or an investor. If it is appropriate, ask if they would not mind putting the praise in writing as a testimonial for use on your Web site or brochure.
Smooth Talk with Aurelius
Aurelius' lays it down
<embed src=http://www.xatech.com/web_gear/chat/chat.swf quality=high bgcolor=#000000 width=540 height=405 name=chat FlashVars="id=5270483" align="middle" allowScriptAcces
theory of “lovemark” brands. Such brands, he contends, “inspire loyalty beyond reason” — in other words, they earn customers’ affection, not just their business. Examples include Apple or Starbucks, brands powerful enough to inspire lifetime faithfulness and the patience to wait in very long lines for coffee or an iPhone.
-----------
Called “Flipped,” the Webisodes challenge students to leave the comfort of their self-assigned cliques and join an unlikely social circle for a few days. A jock is paired with the black-clad skaters, a fashion-obsessed diva with the retro-dressing girls. Conflict is kept to a minimum and everyone seems poised to learn from the experience. (The company provided only two preview episodes, in which various cliques are introduced. One retro girl derides the dress worn by a diva as “so bright — I don’t like it.”)
print ads with the tagline “Mix it up” (that is, mix and match expensive and cheap, retro and modern and so on)
About Screens
With television and the Internet converging at last, who's going to watch all this here-goes-nothing online video? Everything from political propaganda videos to pseudo-candid celebrity rants seems to expect an audience. "Screens" will find, review and make sense of all those senseless new images: web video, viral video, user-driven video, custom interactive video, embedded video ads, web-based VOD, broadband television, diavlogs, vcasts, vlogs, video podcasts, mobisodes, webisodes, mashups and more.
If you want to understand “Charm School,” VH1’s huge hit with black women, check out Alyson, a k a Bronxy B., a k a Miss Chievous, a fiction writer, book critic and sometime blogger who also does makeup tutorials on YouTube. She’s got a great look for online video, a cool, funny, understated style of delivery and a beautiful cosmetics technique.
“Slogans are everything. All else is illusion.”
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/feeds/ruletheweb
Nuts and BlogBolts Business Mar 25, 8:00PM
Download Play Podcast
A conversation in Social Media Tools. This month we cover copywriting with 5 of the top copywriters on the web. Hosting is Mike Sansone, a copywriter himself, and Wayne Hurlbert.
Business and Name Branding Business Feb 27, 11:30PM
Download Play Podcast
Business and Name Branding and the line up includes, John Koopman from Mokum Marketing, Derrick Daye from Branding Strategy Insider, John Moore from Brand Autopsy, Mike Wagner from The White Rabbit Group, Drew McLellan from The Marketing Minute, and Valeria Maltoni from Conversation Agent. Hosts Mike Sansone and Wayne Hurlbert
Nut's and BlogBolts ‘A Conversation on Social Media Tools’ Blogs Jan 29, 9:00PM
Download Play Podcast
2 hour special roundtable discussion with leading members in the blogosphere. Jim Kukral from ReveNews, Shawn Collins from Affiliate Summit , Scott Baradell from Media Orchard, Kami Huyse from Communication Overtones and Mandie Crawford from Roaring Women. Hosted by Mike Sansone from Conversations and Wayne Hurlbert from Blog Business World
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/hostpage.aspx?show_id=27420
Pages: 1
cosmic-spider-man
Collectosaurus Rex
Reged: Aug 15 2004
Posts: 539
Loc: Tennessee
Comic book web page help & questions ?
#1860610 - Mon Jun 25 2007 10:17 AM
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This may be off topic and may be the wrong place to post this if so I am sorry.
I started a ebay store allmost 2 years ago which I named Cosmic Trading Post to sell all my extra comics and to hopefuly make a little money to buy those rare price variants & ASM DC's I collect. Well needless to say I really have not made much money from it so over the last few weeks I have been trying to think of ways get more traffic to my store, so I thought maybe if I make my owne website I could draw some more traffic to my ebay Store and maybe even sell some cheap comics directly from the website " you know those $1 comics that just don't pay to even list on ebay". This seemed like a good ideal at the time so I picked a site that my nephew used to make a free web page called freewebs and I made a single page with links to my ebay store, some of my items and auctions and some other comic book related sites that have interesting stuff. Here it is my web page now don't laff too much this is my first page, I have very limited HTML knowledge and I did it in one day, it still needs a ton of work.
Now here is what got me going and what I have questions about. I figured that when I made this web page that it would show up on Goggle if I typed in the name "Cosmic Trading Post" and I also hoped that it would show up near the top of the page. Well I can not even find it on Goggle and what is worse this page shows up at the top of the search web page this kind of bothers me. Up until yesterday this page did not show up on a goggle search and the same day I try to put up my owne page called Cosmic Trading Post this page popps up and it is at the top of the goggle search, this sucks before this at least my ebay store was at the top of this search.
What I wanted to know is how do I get my page to show up on searches like google? I did add Meta Tags is their anything else I can do that is free? I don't want to put allot of work into it if no one will see it. Also wondering about this other site with the same name that magically popped up on the same day I was making my site, is this just a coincidence or is someone connected with freewebs taking possible business names like mine to use for some reason .
This is my first try at webpages so any suggestions, help or info is greately appreciated. I also plan add links to some of my favorite threads here on the CGC boards is this ok to do?
Thanks; Terry
--------------------
http://stores.ebay.com/Cosmic-Trading-Post
Edited by cosmic-spider-man (Mon Jun 25 2007 11:51 AM)
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Zipper68
FACT if I stop posting, trillions and trillions of transistors would be out of work.
Reged: Oct 29 2003
Posts: 4668
Loc: Upstate NY
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: cosmic-spider-man]
#1860628 - Mon Jun 25 2007 10:31 AM
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Quote:
What I wanted to know is how do I get my page to show up on searches like google? I did add Meta Tags is their anything else I can do that is free? I don't want to put allot of work into it if no one will see it.
I'm not a web programmer, but through my marketing work I try to keep on top of stuff like this.
To the best of my knowledge, meta tags are old news and web crawlers no longer weigh them the way they used to. I'm not sure if Google even considers them at all.
Here's a quick lesson on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Search engine results take all of the follwing into consideration when posting results:
1 - Key word content on your high level pages
2 - How frequently page is updated
3 - The number of QUALITY pages that link to you
4 - Number and frequency of page hits
I'm sure some of our web gurus could add more.
Good luck!
--------------------
Zipper's Collecting Obsession
Still looking for:
* Action Comics -- 31, 43, 44, 48, 54, 58, 59, 62, 63, 66, 86, 90, 91 (4.0 - 7.0 range)
* Superman Annual #1, 1960 -- midgrade
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Sal
TOTAL NEWBIE
Reged: Jan 27 2005
Posts: 7514
Loc: nawth cackalacky
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: Zipper68]
#1860639 - Mon Jun 25 2007 10:40 AM
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no offense, but there's no way that a small site hosted on freewebs is going to get anywhere near the top of a google search. quite frankly, i wouldn't be surprised if Google changed the way they compute listings to move eBay sites down...
honestly, i would try something else before i would spend a lot of time and effort trying to get that page in any google search ranking of any importance. maybe contacting past buyers, printing up some business cards to hand out at shows/cons, etc. Search Engine Optimisation is a nice little niche in the Web Site Development world, and there's no "quick fix" for people who are getting into the game this late, unfortunately.
Search Engine Watch is the best site i'm aware of for what's going on in the wonderful world of search engines
--------------------
i'm not here to be clever.
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richnerd
I was posting here when you were in diapers.
Reged: Sep 22 2003
Posts: 3256
Loc: IN
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: cosmic-spider-man]
#1860676 - Mon Jun 25 2007 11:05 AM
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Sal is right
First thing you should do is buy your own domain. It is less than $6 a year and can come free when you get a web space from a company.
Now look around at available web space 1and1.com which I use has a basic package that will cost you around $50 a year. If you look hard enough there is always a new company starting up offering great deals. When 1and1 first started I got the first 3 years free.
If you dont want to fork out the cash check with Silvers24. If he has any Domains left he might be able to hook you up with a domain and space for a good price. He also does nice work on websites.
To get into the sponsored links on google, yahoo, msn or any of those will cost you $$.
Here is a Free web submission you can use FREE WEB SUBMISSION
It will help some.
Tip:
One thing that will also help your site climb is link exchange. The more people you get to link to your site and the more you are linked to will help you climb the ranks.
If I think of anything else I will post it.
Rich
--------------------
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cosmic-spider-man
Collectosaurus Rex
Reged: Aug 15 2004
Posts: 539
Loc: Tennessee
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: Sal]
#1860719 - Mon Jun 25 2007 11:37 AM
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Quote:
no offense, but there's no way that a small site hosted on freewebs is going to get anywhere near the top of a google search. quite frankly, i wouldn't be surprised if Google changed the way they compute listings to move eBay sites down...
Thanks I really appreciate all the helpful response . About what you said above "that no way a small freewebs site is going to get on near the top of Google", well my nephew who put up a small site on freewebs more than two years ago and has like only 32 hits in all that time, if I type the name of his site in a Google search it is at the top of the search every time that is why I tried that site, is it just because it has been up for a long time?
And what about that other site that popped up yesterday with the same name on the same day I made my page why does it show up at the top of the search when I type in Cosmic Trading Post even ahead of all my ebay store listings?
Thanks; Terry
--------------------
http://stores.ebay.com/Cosmic-Trading-Post
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Sal
TOTAL NEWBIE
Reged: Jan 27 2005
Posts: 7514
Loc: nawth cackalacky
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: cosmic-spider-man]
#1860849 - Mon Jun 25 2007 12:57 PM
Edit post Edit Reply to this post Reply Reply to this post Quote Quick Reply Quick Reply
Quote:
Quote:
no offense, but there's no way that a small site hosted on freewebs is going to get anywhere near the top of a google search. quite frankly, i wouldn't be surprised if Google changed the way they compute listings to move eBay sites down...
Thanks I really appreciate all the helpful response . About what you said above "that no way a small freewebs site is going to get on near the top of Google", well my nephew who put up a small site on freewebs more than two years ago and has like only 32 hits in all that time, if I type the name of his site in a Google search it is at the top of the search every time that is why I tried that site, is it just because it has been up for a long time?
And what about that other site that popped up yesterday with the same name on the same day I made my page why does it show up at the top of the search when I type in Cosmic Trading Post even ahead of all my ebay store listings?
Thanks; Terry
if i created a site called www.pfaraesaniesanisnoggle.com, then i guess if i searched for "pfaraesaniesanisnoggle" on Google, my site would come up first.
You have "Cosmic" "Trading" and "Post" in your site name. one expects that there are quite a few people out there with sites that have a lot more relevance to those terms than you. Especially since that is also your eBay store name, which likely has quite a lot of SEO-positive things going for it...It's gonna be really, really difficult for you to get a one-off site to show up high in SE rankings without quite a bit of messing with it. Unless of course until Google changes their algorithms around again.
The other thing just sounds like coincedence to me. It could also mean your Innernets is broken, since a Google search on "cosmic trading post" puts your eBay store at the top two listings for me
--------------------
i'm not here to be clever.
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cosmic-spider-man
Collectosaurus Rex
Reged: Aug 15 2004
Posts: 539
Loc: Tennessee
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: Sal]
#1860944 - Mon Jun 25 2007 01:34 PM
Edit post Edit Reply to this post Reply Reply to this post Quote Quick Reply Quick Reply
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
no offense, but there's no way that a small site hosted on freewebs is going to get anywhere near the top of a google search. quite frankly, i wouldn't be surprised if Google changed the way they compute listings to move eBay sites down...
Thanks I really appreciate all the helpful response . About what you said above "that no way a small freewebs site is going to get on near the top of Google", well my nephew who put up a small site on freewebs more than two years ago and has like only 32 hits in all that time, if I type the name of his site in a Google search it is at the top of the search every time that is why I tried that site, is it just because it has been up for a long time?
And what about that other site that popped up yesterday with the same name on the same day I made my page why does it show up at the top of the search when I type in Cosmic Trading Post even ahead of all my ebay store listings?
Thanks; Terry
if i created a site called www.pfaraesaniesanisnoggle.com, then i guess if i searched for "pfaraesaniesanisnoggle" on Google, my site would come up first.
You have "Cosmic" "Trading" and "Post" in your site name. one expects that there are quite a few people out there with sites that have a lot more relevance to those terms than you. Especially since that is also your eBay store name, which likely has quite a lot of SEO-positive things going for it...It's gonna be really, really difficult for you to get a one-off site to show up high in SE rankings without quite a bit of messing with it. Unless of course until Google changes their algorithms around again.
The other thing just sounds like coincedence to me. It could also mean your Innernets is broken, since a Google search on "cosmic trading post" puts your eBay store at the top two listings for me
Thanks for your time Sal I really appreciate it.
their just must be something wrong with the page, I just tried to type in the whole web address on Goggle & Altavista to see if I could find it and got nothing on either search. I guess the only way to find my page is to enter the address in the address bar on my computer, boy that is a good one.
--------------------
http://stores.ebay.com/Cosmic-Trading-Post
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heinlein99
Bid more or post more... tough one...
Reged: Nov 16 2004
Posts: 943
Loc: Harrogate TN
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: cosmic-spider-man]
#1861159 - Mon Jun 25 2007 03:38 PM
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This is called SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. http://searchenginewatch.com/ It is an incredibly intricate and difficult subject to get into. I've been running my comic covers site for a couple of years, and have many thousands of pages involved, and get only a limited amount of love from any of the search engines. It really is a very complex cat-and-mouse game to play.
Your VERY FIRST step should be set up your own website on your own domain. I know using Freewebs is easy, but the earlier poster is correct in saying that free-hosted websites get no love these days.
After you do this, put a link to the site in your signature like you have now to your ebay store - BUT: label it with keywords that people may search for, ex. '$1.00 comics' rather than 'Cosmic Trading Post' , because pretty much nobody is going to be actually searching for your website name.
--------------------
Over 15,000 classic comic book covers New this week: Journey Into Unknown Worlds
Classic bubblegum cards
Maria Sharapova pics
"It's Jim Henson's Flying Leatherneck Babies!" - Crow. T. Robot
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Sal
TOTAL NEWBIE
Reged: Jan 27 2005
Posts: 7514
Loc: nawth cackalacky
Re: Comic book web page help & questions ? [Re: heinlein99]
#1861194 - Mon Jun 25 2007 03:56 PM
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A real key to getting high marks on search engines is to actively tie in your meta description tag, your meta title tag, and your actual content together, hopefully using keyword and relevance.
For example, if you had a page called "Cosmic Spider-Man's Amazing Marvel 35 cent variant page," you would want to use that as both the title ( in the <head> of the html ) and the leading <h2> or <h1> tag on your page. Then you would put something like "A page showing off the extensive and hard-won collection of 35 cent Marvel Variant issues belonging to the one like Cosmic Spider-Man" in your "description" tag, which is also in the <head> of your html page.
Your content of the page would then be chock full of images and important and relevant data pertaining to 35 cent Marvel Variant issues, including links to other valuable contributors to the 35 cent variant crowd. Hopefully, these sites would then link back to you. All images on the page would have the words "35 cent variant" if it was a cover of a variant, or "Cosmic Spider-Man" if not in their "alt" attributes, although this is not 100% necessary these days for SEO.
Do all of that, for every page on your site, and you're probably about 50% of the way there. If none of this made sense, my recommendation would be to just focus your energy on getting word out about your eBay store, and tell people who buy from you that you also *wink wink* have dollar books for sale.
Good luck to ya either way
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i'm not here to be clever.
Jun 25, 2007 - change date
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posted by LUXXXCORP at 1:56 PM
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