Cattlegrower.com Invitations
If there is one thing that annoys the heck out of me, it’s unsolicited e-mail and faxes. Whether it’s selling health care packages, Viagra, porn, or African royalty it just irks me beyond what it should. Along that line…
Like many of you, I wondered why I was getting e-mail messages from Cattlegrower.com inviting me to visit their site. I figured it was because somebody had rented out their e-mail list. However, the e-mail lists I have knowingly signed up for (DV-Auction, Liveauctions, EDJE, Fatsteer, etc.) are all really good about making sure it’s obvious their e-mails are coming from them with the proper opt-out options. The Cattlegrower.com e-mails did not come from them.
Sunday night I think I figured it out when I received an e-mail from Cattlegrower.com at my errors e-mail address. That e-mail address is only displayed within a long block of hard to distinguish code when you run into an error on of our sites. It’s not an e-mail I use to sign up for accounts on any site and it’s not an e-mail that is typically published. It for dang sure hasn’t been added to any opt-in e-mail list.
In fact, there’s only one way I could even think of that our error e-mail address would end up on an e-mail list and that’s through the use of an e-mail harvester “spam bot”. Those kinds of things are why you get e-mail messages from porn and Viagra sites even though you’ve never visited them.
I guess the ag internet really is catching up...
- By Jeff | Comments (1)
Medina County Club Calf Sale
Yet another clubby sale that had a tough go of it...
http://www.cattle.com/markets/sale_results.aspx?sale=2009+Medina+County+Club+Calf+Sale
The sale was topped by a $8,100 Hannibal ET calf but after that it was a steep step down to the next high seller.
A Heat Wave daughter out of a Limousin cow that produced a Grand Champion steer in San Antonio a few years back brought $2,400. Something tells me that breeding was supposed to be a steer....
- By Jeff | Comments (2)
Red
If you know who she is you likely already heard this but one of the nicest ladies you'll meet online, Cathy Billenstein, better known as Red, passed away.
http://www.steerplanet.com/bb/index.php?topic=9545.0
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Recent Sire Updates
Cattle.com Visitor Reviews
- Tycoon
"great calves!! hair, stout, looking good.!!!!" - 21AR Roundup 7005
"If you want cattle that will grow and do good don't over look this young sire. We have 20 calves on the ground this spring and 78 # was the heavest. They already show full of meat. But semen now and save $ for sure" - HARB Pendleton 765 J H
"Look at is # and they are geting better each year.Light birth calves with growth. Very pleased with his offspring"
- By Jeff | Comments (1)
Calving Ease
There's an excellent post by Juli Nelson over on Steerplanet about calving ease...
http://www.steerplanet.com/bb/index.php?topic=9304.0
Personally, we've only had one heifer that was a legit pull in the past three years with about 15-20 heifers calving a year. Of course, I tend to use Angus bulls or Who Made Who on heifers to the detriment of their first year saleability.
Now if somebody could just find a way to prevent breeched calves....
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
March Cattle Site Traffic Report
- CattleNetwork.com 24.91%
- Cattle Today Sites 20.91%
- Cattlerange.com 8.25% (6)
- Cattle.com 7.37% (3)
- Beefmagazine.com 7.09% (4)
- Showsteers.com 6.82% (5)
- Cattlepages.com 3.21%
- Steerplanet.com 2.52%
- Clubcalves.com 2.69%
- EDJECattle.com 1.93%
We dropped Primetimeagrimarketing from the index for this month due to an anomalous spike in the stats. It will likely be put back in next month.
The only other movement in the index was the usual 3-6 range jostling.
Again, this is in no way official and shouldn’t be looked at with too much confidence. It was started out of curiosity generated from the seemingly mandatory claim that every site put out that they were the most visited/viewed/used site on the net.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Marketing Cattle Via Pay-Per-Click
While we’re getting the other side of the peak of the show steer sale season down here in
What is Adwords?
Adwords is the form of advertising that transformed the business model of search engines and ran Google’s stock price up to the $700/share range. It’s the little ads under “Sponsored Links” on the search results for Google (and a few other engines).
I use Adwords extensively to market our online games (http://www.thirdrow.net). In fact, it’s my #1 expense even when compared to web hosting which runs me in the thousands per month. However, I rarely use it to market our show calves. That’s not because it doesn’t work, it’s because I don’t really have a ton of calves to market this year. Two years ago when I did use it to market our calves, we had two people on the place looking at them within a week.
Next week I’ll talk about the basics of setting up a campaign and some of the mistakes you make when you just get started. If you are interested in this form of marketing, go ahead and sign up for Adwords and see what there is to do with the system.
Why do I only talk about Adwords?
There are other PPC programs out there (Yahoo, MSN, etc.) but after trying over and over to get the others to convert as well as Adwords, I finally gave up and stuck to just Adwords.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)
Forum Activity Index
For the time period between 1-29-09 to 3-3-2009...
- Cattle Today - 48.0%
- Steerplanet - 34.4%
- Advantage Cattle Services - 7.3% (4)
- Breedersworld - 5.6% (5)
- 5BarX - 2.9% (3)
- Clubcalves - 1.4%
- Showsteers - 0.3%
Overall forum activity was up 4.7%. The majority of sites had their highest posts per day count since the index was started.
Breedersworld and Advantage Cattle Services both had their highest percentage share of posts since the index has been kept.
5BarX has dropped precipitously since the index was started. In October it had 8.1% of the activity and it's consistently decreased to a new low of 2.9%.
We've added the EDJE forum to the index and it will be included in the rankings the next time it's published.
If we included the Showcattle.com forum in the index, it would rank a very solid third but very far behind both Steerplanet and Cattle Today.
We improved both the efficiency and accuracy of our counting for Showsteers.com and Clubcalves.com, the only two sites that continue to use Boardhost to host their forums.
- By Jeff | Comments (2)
Why mess with clubbies?
There are an awful lot of reasons to raise show steers. Some that come to mind immediately include the tax right off for money down the drain, pulling calves, figuring out what to do with good looking heifers out of terminal sires, and the ever present lack of growth.
All kidding aside, one reason wipes any of those out of your mind very quickly. After the ACCBA sale this past weekend I got to remember that reason when I handed the halter of a nice little American steer over to a kid that was grinning from ear to ear.
If you listen to my wife I’m an insensitive, emotionless, heartless guy that doesn’t give get excited about anything but new website ideas. However, in the cattle word I’m a bit of a sap. There’s just nothing in raising commercial cattle that beats selling a steer to a kid you know is going to take good care of it and take pride in the calf.
- By Jeff | Comments (0)