Being a professional blogger and a work from home consultant, sometimes cabin fever starts to kick in, and it’s time to flee the humble abode for a more vibrant, or just different atmosphere. This is one technique I use to revive my self of writer’s block, or blogging block, as four years of search marketing news can sometimes find one feeling repetitious.
Today I find myself in a Panera, with their free wireless Internet and endless supply of coffee. Working from the house has its advantages; some being the ability to run errands during the day while the rest of the masses are stuck behind their desks, working through lunch.
The other advantage is the honor of experiencing the lives of the extremely poor, the extremely wealthy, or the extremely retired (especially in Florida).
The television is an amazing example of this phenomena. Flip on FX and the 11 am to 4 pm commercials are for Work from Home or Improve Your Credit. Click over to MSNBC, and the commercials are for investment and insurance companies. Two opposite ends of the demographic spectrum.
Enter the Retired Males
Sitting to my left in Panera right now is a group of older men, ranging in age from 50 to 64. When I sat down with my coffee and laptop, their discussion was about waterproofing their roofs. One was hiring a contractor to do so and the others were giving him information on how to do it yourself, what kind of ladder to buy, where to buy it, what kind of spackle to use… etc.
Then the conversation abruptly changed, over to the stock market and bonds. Which bonds they were buying, selling, why, one of them has a brother who is a broker, the other is sitting on his stock, one inquires about the broker… he’ll have his brother give him a call.
Two of the men leave and the conversation dies; then is revived over the subject of charter fishing. Then saving money on furniture. Then the benefits of moving companies over having friends move your items for you in a pickup.
Content Generated : Bank to the Locker Room
These conversations do not stop and they are not restricted to retired men in Panera. I’ve heard these conversations around the treadmill during the day, in the condo association office, while waiting for takeout, while they’re running around nude and drying themselves in the locker room, and when standing in line in the bank.
The point is, these guys are spitting out an intense amount of valuable information, and as I listen, I check the average PPC click amounts of these subjects… all of high dollar amount.
Where is This Content Going?
But where are these conversations going? Into the air? Absorbed into the brain? Or whirled away in the steam of the fresh brewed java?
In this situation, I would love to place a microphone on these guys, and hook it up to a speech to text program which automatically blogs what they’re discussing… as these 10 minute conversations about one guy’s son investing in Apple in the late 80’s and the other guy who fell off his roof when trying to clean out his gutters; are pages and pages of keyterm and longtail dense information, ripe for a lead generation form, an internal blog for an ecommerce business or some AdSense script.
As we age, we all are confronted with the desire to leave a legacy, and these four fellows in Panera are doing just that, in the same fashion my Grandfather would tell us stories of his experiences on Christmas day before he saw his time coming, or the legacy which burdened Phil Leotardo in the last season of the Sopranos, this psychological need to live on could be, in fact, documented in blog format, leaving millions in revenue share for their grandchildren’s educations after a decade or so.
If this was my Panera, I’d offer free coffee for these guys and place a Powerpoint (or Presently) presentation on the wall, getting these know-it-all’s to debate and discuss different high dollar subjects associated with the projected theme, then changing that theme every 20 minutes. If monetized correctly, the content would probably pay for the Panera franchising costs in a year, and the education of their kids’ kids.
