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The guys who wrote Freakonomics (a fun read if you've missed it), write a blog. Since their whacky brand of economic research touches nearly everything, I wasn't completely suprised to see a post on the economic underpinnings of wine prices in restaurants.
I think the point that gets missed here is that there's only so much Joseph Phelps 2002 Insignia to be had.
I'm going to make a huge leap and assume that most visitors to your winery Web site use Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). If you have a winery blog, chances are that most of these visitors keep up with your blog by periodically visiting it to see if something's new (rather than subscribing to your feed).
I think it's important to get more of your winery Web site visitors used to the idea of subscribing to blogs. Feel free to point your visitors to this post, or improve upon it for yourself (you might even replace my screen shots with ones that feature your own winery blog). Please add a comment if you do.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 comes with a handy "Feed" button. You may have seen it:
When you're on a page with an RSS feed, it changes color from gray to orange:
If you click the button, Internet Explorer will display the feed information, and offer you the chance to subscribe to it:
If you click that link, you'll be asked to confirm your choice:
Click "Subscribe" to subscribe to the feed. You'll get a message showing it worked:
The newly added feed will appear on the Feeds tab of your Favorites icon (the gold star):
A feed with new information will display in bold and the Feeds icon will change slightly (a little "gleam" highlight appears in the upper right corner) to show you that there's new information in one or more of your feeds.
Now you don't have to visit a blog every day to see if there are new posts. Just subscribe to its feed! You don't have to learn how to use a blog reader - it's part of IE7.
Note that feeds are not just for blog posts - RSS is intended as a general mechanism for notifying interested parties that new content is available. It's just that blog software like TypePad and WordPress produce RSS automatically.
Here's an alternative approach to do-it-yourself solar: Cracking Open the Sun, a Fast Company story about SunEdison, a company which does turn-key solar installations.
The picture above shows the Fetzer solar installation in Hopland, CA (done by Real Goods, not SunEdison).
Watch this brief video from MakeInternetTV.org with your Sunday morning cup of coffee:
This site offers a 6-step approach to creating your own videos
If you're interested in video for your winery Web site, it's worth a look at the site.
(and here's a YouTube search for winery videos that returns over 1,200 results - this one is kind of interesting [9 minutes])
Maybe you need to write just one post.
Today, out of the blue, I got a nice call from a young woman at Wines & Vines who is doing a column about winery blogging (if you're reading this, please add a comment with your name - I was driving and couldn't write anything down).
Her main question was How do you get people to read your blog? My answers probably rambled around a bit (I was driving), but I think the secrets are as follows:
The article she is writing should appear in the August issue. In the meantime, what have you done to make your blog popular?
In looking at the WineQ Web site, I noticed a link to a blog from Coral Mustang, one of the wineries you can add to your wine queue. The Coral Mustang blog is entitled Tempranillo Tango, an appropriate reflection of Coral Mustang's focus on a single varietal (the Spanish grape Tempranillo).
Penelope Gadd-Coster is the writer, and she's been making about 2 posts a month since the start of 2007. This is a little less than the once-a-week posting I recommend for most winery blogs, but having any consistency at all is doing pretty well when you're a small winemaker. I like the educational aspect of the blog posts (since Tempranillo is a relatively obscure varietal here in the US) - Gadd-Costner also teaches about Tempranillo, and it shows.
As always, we've added Tempranillo Tango to our comprehensive list of winery blogs.
(and thanks to Tempranillo Tango for the sidebar link back to this blog)
I recently wrote that "Web-based video is something for Web-savvy wineries to look at more closely," to which faithful reader Mary Baker of Dover Canyon commented:
I found a blog post on Business and Blogging: Time to Get Serious About Video which references a more full-length article. But $3,000 for the camera and set up? Yikes!
Mary, it doesn't have to cost that much. Here's a great example of a Flash-based video (created on a MacBook Pro laptop) which didn't require any additional equipment. The two pieces of software mentioned (ecamm's Conference Recorder 2 and Vertical Moon's Video2SWF ) cost less than $60. Although the MacBook has a built-in camera, similar hardware for Windows, such as the Logitech QuickCam UltraVision, costs less than $130 (list).
There are even direct-to-digital camcorders like the Flip which sell for about the same price as a Web camera and will store up to 60 minutes of video, without requiring you to be tethered to a computer. Shoot video, plug the camera into your computer, convert to Flash, and post to your Web site or YouTube. I saw the 30-minute version of this cam at my local Costco for under $90.
Obviously, it depends on how fancy you want to get. Sure, you can spend several thousand dollars for a production-quality video setup (most of the $3,000 that Mary mentions above is for the camera alone). Heck, a new MacBook Pro is only $1,999. But it's dirst cheap to dip your toe in the water, assuming you have a computer of relatively recent vintage.
The real question is, "What sort of interesting stories can you tell about your wines and winery with Web-based video?" Frankly, I don't think over-produced marketing videos are the way to go. Like blogging, Web-based video benefits from being personal and authentic (and either brief or very engaging).
(Nancy Bentley, do you have any video advice?)
In a comment to one of my recent posts, Mary Baker from Dover Canyon asked
...can you explain to me (us) how to go about uploading an audio link in Typepad? I have a 3 min. audio clip of a song inspired by one of our vineyards. But apparently I have only 1KB of allowed storage on Typepad, and the file is a little over 3KB. Should I just provide a link to the composer's iTune address? I would really like readers to be able to listen to the clip while reading the post that tells the story behind "Catarina's Dream."
Here's the answer:
Start by using "Insert File" in TypePad's post editing menu, and upload the file. The default code from "Insert File" produces the following code:
<p><a href="http://blog.winerywebsitereport.com/files/yyodel.mp3">Download yyodel.mp3</a> </p>
which in turn creates a link like this:
which opens a new browser window to play the file when clicked.
If you then use the Edit HTML tab to modify the HTML code to look like:
<p><embed src="http://blog.winerywebsitereport.com/files/yyodel.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" autostart="0"></embed> </p>
you will get a much nice audio control that looks like this:
and works the way you'd like/expect it to.
Basically, you use the "Insert File" command to transfer the file to TypePad, and then modify the HTML to create a an embedded player that refers to it. If you want the sound to play automatically, set the autostart parameter to 1.
More information from the TypePad knowledge base:
This audio file is about 40 Kbytes in size, and I didn't have any trouble uploading it. I don't know why Mary has so little space available on her TypePad account (you get between 100 MB and 1GB depending on the type of account you have), but I'm happy to try and help figure that out, too.
I'm looking forward to hearing "Catarina's Dream" while reading the story behind it.
(my choice of sample music here is not an endorsement of Yahoo!, but I figured they wouldn't mind me using it)
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