Mark Hayward Is My Hero

I wrote this article for a now-defunct Search Engine Optimization (SEO) site, and I think it’s a good article, so I thought I’d share it here.

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In a previous post I talked about the importance of Covering the Basics First when dealing with search engine optimization. My first point was that you need to be sure your website doesn’t suck. Does your site suck? Are you sure that it doesn’t? When I first put up my site it was hard for me to tell. Now I have the experience and perspective to know… and I had some help.

In my opinion, the best thing you can do to ensure that you have a good website is to hire a designer. If you are a large corporation I’m sure that you already have a great site and a whole team of designers to keep it that way. But for me, and for a huge number of small business owners out there, there is only one person in my web-design team: me… and I’m bad at it.

As a small operation, the temptation is to make your website yourself. I made mine, and if you’ve done the same thing I’m sure you’ve done a decent job and you have a serviceable site. You have good reason to be proud of your efforts, because you got things rolling. But now you need to take the next step, set your pride aside and let the professionals do their work. Most people don’t realize the important difference between something that looks ok, and something that looks great. If you want to take advantage of every edge you can, then you need to have a GREAT site so you can have good ranking, improved traffic, and more business.

To those of us outside the industry, graphic design seems simple enough. Anyone can organize pictures and paragraphs and make a site look good right? Oh, no… that is SO not the case. Even with an extensive background in art, I do not have what it takes to do good graphic design. I have several friends who are graphic designers, and I only had to watch them work for a few minutes to see that their years of training and experience allow them to do work that is way beyond anything I ever did.

How do you pick out a designer?

It’s tempting to look to a friend who is a designer and think that not only will it be easier to work with a friend, but it will also be cheaper. Speaking from experience, it is only a good idea to hire a friend if you have 100% unflinching, absolute confidence that their abilities match your needs. A lower price doesn’t benefit you if your life is made miserable as a result. Lets say you hire your friends wife to do your website, and… oh I don’t know… what if they get a divorce before your site is finished? Seems unlikely? That’s what I thought before it happened to me. As difficult as it may be, you really need to try to not worry about the money. You will come out better in the long run.

Here are a few steps that you can follow when looking for a designer for your website: (more…)

I have been gathering footage, and mulling over ideas for this project for years.  Many of my performer friends have DVDs that they sell after their shows.  I have wanted to make one for years, but having the high standards that I do, I wanted to make a really high-quality DVD so it took a while to gather enough footage and get my ideas together.  I’m really excited about what we’ve been working on so far.  The whole thing will be bonus footage.  There are plenty of opportunities to see my show, and lots of people have seen it, but if you buy the DVD, you will get nothin’ but EXTRAS!  There will be footage of me performing bits that I don’t do very often, or in some cases have only done once;  Takeshi is working on a mini-documentary that will incorporate news footage, and interviews with friends and family; and there will be tutorial videos on how to do both yo-yo and spin-top tricks.  There will even be a section with really old-school footage, including a short documentary that my brother made back in the early 90s called “The Gemini’s Big Gig” from when Matt Henry and I used to perform together as The Gemini Jugglers.

Takeshi and I shot a bunch of footage on Thursday, and we will shoot some more in a just over a week after I get back from the IJA juggling festival in Winson-Salem NC.  The whole thing might be finished in a month, but we’ll see.

I recently got referred for a gig by a friend of mine. It was a wedding/anniversary celebration in Jackson Tennessee. I actually thought it was a legit gig until we started to talk about money. The guy said that he wanted to get my address right away so that he could have his accountant send me a certified check. That was a big red flag for me. A while back I tried to sell some stuff on craigslist, and they have a great security notice about fake cashier’s checks. You should read it right now if you haven’t already.

Once I was suspicious, I started looking more closely at the whole situation, and there were a bunch of things that didn’t make sense:

• The guy seemed too willing to spend a bunch of money. We all know that people spend ridiculous amounts of money on weddings these days, but he seemed to be offering a blank check to bring out yo-yo performers who he knew nothing about. It would be different if he was working through a trusted agent, or if he had heard of me or my friend who referred me, but he knew nothing about either of us. That’s just weird. People don’t usually throw money at unfamiliar things. He was even willing to fly my friend out from Texas sight-unseen.
• His email domain was mixmail.com which is a Spanish language site. By itself, this was no big deal, lots of people speak Spanish, and I’m perfectly happy to work for them, but the majority of scams seem to come from out of the country from free email addresses. This detail was just one more straw on the camel’s back. (more…)

Yesterday, as I was setting up to do my first street show at Summerfest in Milwaukee, there was a big camera crew standing in front of me. I went over to ask what they were doing, and to see if they were going to be staying right there for long since I wanted to do a show. I didn’t go over to talk to them to try to get on TV, but they offered, so of course I said yes.

I did a little interview with Mark and another guy (whose name I forgot, sorry) for the Nickelodeon show Slime Across America. I did some yo-yo tricks while they asked me questions, and at some point Mark asked me if I wanted to have a dance-off with him. I didn’t want to at all, since I can’t dance, but I said, “Do I EVER!” So the other guy did a little beat-boxing and we each got 5 seconds to dance. I won. Of course I had the upper hand since the producers said I could do some yo-yo tricks as part of my dance.

The show is what they called an “interstitial” which means that it is a short show that is shown between other shows. If they use the footage of me, it will be aired on July 26th. The problem is that it’s not a show that will be listed in TV Guide, so I’m going to have to record the entire day of programming on Nickelodeon. I’m pretty excited about being on the show, so I really hope they use the footage of me.

My buddy Marcus Monroe walked by as they were interviewing me, and got interviewed too when I was finished.

One of the reasons that people become performers is that they like the attention. Most of the time that attention comes in specific, expected forms. But I was recently offered an awesome new format: my photo on a kid’s birthday cake.

Elijah’s mom took this photo of us after a show at the Burlington WI ChocolateFest. Then I got an email from her a few weeks later asking if she could use the image on Elijah’s birthday cake. I couldn’t say yes fast enough! What an AWESOME idea!

I’m not sure who was more excited about the cake, Elijah or me.

I went up to Chicago this week to audition for Stupid Human Tricks from The Late Show with David Letterman. It was surprisingly low-key. I figured that there would be at least 100 people in line, and possibly 1000, but as it turned out, there were 18 registrants. I did my marshmallow tricks with the traps, and it went as well as I could’ve hoped, short of leaving there with a signed contract to be on the show. Of course I still have no idea if I’ll get on the show, but I’m hopeful. We’ll see. Some of the other auditioners had lame tricks, and a few had really great tricks. The final choice will all depend on what strikes the fancy of the producers back in NYC.

On my way home just now there was a guy by the side of the road with a big trash bag picking up trash.  I saw him stop, take a final drag on his cigarette, throw it down on the ground, and then resume picking up trash.  You would think that if you were the guy picking up all the trash, YOU WOULDN’T LITTER WHILE YOU WERE DOING IT!  He’s just going to have to pick up his own cigarette butt in a minute anyway.  Very strange.

I spent some time in the garage today trying to set the timing on my family’s 1930 Model A Ford. I think it can be done with just one person, but I’m going to have to get some help. As a part of the process you have to put the crank into the front (it’s a very old car) and crank the engine over while pushing on a pin to find a specific point in the engine cycle. Once you find that spot you can adjust the timing accordingly. The problem that I ran into tonight is that I think the pegs on my crank are worn so that I really needed two hands to keep the crank in place, but I still needed a hand to push on the timing pin. I’m going to see if I can get a friend to come over tomorrow to help me out.

Here are some tips on setting the timing on a Model A Ford for any other novices like me. These are all tips based on the instructions for setting the Ignition Timing (pg 2-18) in Les Andrews’ book The Model A Ford Mechanics Handbook Volume 1, by Les Andrews:

1. In Step #1, the breaker point gap is the space between the end of the little silver arm (the breaker point arm), and the tiny adjustable screw, under the black plastic disk (the rotor). It was a bad moment for me when I didn’t even know what the book was talking about in the first step.
2. In Step #2, a really good tool for bending the rotor tab up or down without marring it is a big crescent wrench.
3. In Step #5, when it says to “fully retard the spark lever on the steering column” that means push it all the way up.
4. In Step #7, when you have reversed the timing pin and are feeling for the small recess in the cam gear, keep in mind that it is very small, it takes two full rotations with the crank to get back to the same point on the cam gear, and the small recess will be there when the rotor is pointing roughly toward the front of the car. For me this operation took a good deal of time and a LOT of patience. I hope it is easier for you. While you can only turn the crank in one direction, if you go past the notch just a little bit you can grab hold of a fan blade to go back a bit.
5. In Step #14, when I tightened the cam locking screw, I had to turn the cam a little farther counter-clockwise than I wanted it to end up in order to account for the movement of the tightening screw.
6. Don’t forget to screw the timing pin back in, and remove the crank before you try to start the car.

In the end I ended up being able to set the timing by myself, it just took longer than it would’ve if I had had someone helping me, or if I had known what I was doing.

I have been playing a lot of WeeWar lately.  It RULES.  You should try it.  But be warned that you might not want to do anything else for a few days… or weeks.  Also, if you click on the above link, I get points or something.  Whatever it is it has to be good because it’s related to WeeWar.

Today went well, but I’m glad it’s over. I’m TIRED.

Everyone should spend an afternoon swapping stories with a couple of cowboys in a barn. I can’t recommend it highly enough. I had a long break in between sets today, and I had already planned on spending it sitting on my butt backstage. It turned out that Bob Hamm: 7 time World and National Champion had some time to kill too, and he is a great story teller. I heard about shooting marbles, sticking up kids for their candy at Boy Scout Camp, shootin’ BB guns, and all kinds of other awesome childhood things today. This guy is a real character, and man can he spin a gun. Yesterday I spent some time hanging out with the lumberjacks, and I REALLY want to throw an axe now. I didn’t think they would want me throwing their axes, and besides, the target was right next to the petting zoo, and that would only lead to disaster.

I did finally manage to get my hands on an reasonably massive amount of chocolate today, so I felt good about that.

After the fair was finished I even got to hang out with some top and yo-yo pals. It was a good ending to the event.