The Best Place To Buy New Plants Online

“Let's just say I was testing the bounds of reality. I was curious to see what would happen. That's all it was: curiosity.” ~ Jim Morrison, American Poet, 1943-1971

What is... The Best Place To Buy Plants Online?

We asked Angela Palmer of Plants Nouveau about her innovative approach to plant introduction and the best place to buy new plants online and she sent us the following response:

Years of tedious work or simply luck, the discovery of an new or improved variety is every professional and back yard plant breeder's dream. Once you’ve found a new plant, where do you turn?

Traditionally, large wholesale nurseries and plant introduction companies have spent countless hours and lots of money courting potential originators of new plants. Unfortunately, reputations have been tarnished and cooperative efforts are now defunct due to lack of royalty payments and an incredibly long, drawn out process for market saturation. In other words, it takes too long to get the plant to market and they aren't delivering the royalty shares they promised the originator. Today, smaller nurseries and new breeders are in search of 3 things; honesty, original marketing concepts and professionalism.

Another draw-back to the traditional plant introduction route is that only the largest nurseries get the new, exciting selections. Smaller growers must wait out exclusive deals and wade through production problems while the big nurseries make a lot of money on their exclusive rights to a new introduction. Many new plant originators have decided to look for innovative ways to get their discoveries into the hands of American consumers.

Along comes Plants Nouveau

An innovative, new plant introduction company. Originally a dream, now a reality; Plants Nouveau has the expertise and worldwide contacts to successfully introduce your new introductions to the World! The company's principal managed two very successful plant introduction companies where introducing superior, new plants, royalty revenue and high market visibility where the only goals. Our experience, gleaned from experience managing the successful, worldwide introductions of both the Knock Out(R) Rose and the Meadowbrite(TM) series of Echinacea, affords us the ability to do everything right.

We've been there, we've done that. Let Plants Nouveau show you what we've learned!

To learn more about the Plants Nouveau mission, experience, and international presence and worldwide reputation visit the Plants Nouveau website or contact Angela via email at info@plantsnouveau.com

Angela's choices for The Best Place To Buy New Plants Online are as follows:

White Flower Farm
Great Garden Plants
Dutch Gardens
Plant Delights
Klehm's Songsparrow

Please visit these retail mail order nurseries.

Now the question is... can this page rank under the phrase "The Best Place To Buy New Plants Online" ... it's a test.

Now let's be honest... there are thousands of sites to buy plants online and these are just a few... but whose to say, right?

My point is... let's test some SEM on Google by pushing the envelope or as Jim would say “I'm curious to see what would happen. That's all... curiosity.”

Let's see...

AP

Stinson, Rest In Peace

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
~ Robert Benchley, an American humorist

On this cold and gray day a member of our family passed.

Stinson, a 155 lbs Labrador Rottweiler mix, ended his spectacular life on this earth.

If you ever met him, you fell in love with him. He was Clifford... big, goofy, all love and kisses.

His bark was from deep down and it would rattle the entire house. A good watch dog?

Are you kidding?

We always said if a burglar came in the house "stinky", as I would come to call him, would probably lick him the whole time he was robbing us and then leave with the guy.

He was all personality and will be missed. Words will never describe him well enough... as such, I'll just stop now.

We have him forever in our memories... we are lucky he chose to love us.

AP
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

W.H. Auden

Google Seeks Knowledge

"It's good to be the King"
~ From the movie, History of the World: Part I (1981)

Must be fun to be Google, eh?

With money being no object and the entire world at your fingers tips you can do anything. Buy a country... save the declining dollar... or invent the next Wikipedia.

What's that?

Yep, Google is creating a new service called "Knol" that is being positioned to be the next social encyclopedia. Going after the Wikipedia Internet space.

Knol?

Sounds weird, but so did a Wiki back when it was launched. The knol is meant to be a "unit of knowledge."

The project is in closed trials right now with no word on when it will be open to the public.

According to the Google blog:

"The web contains an enormous amount of information, and Google has helped to make that information more easily accessible by providing pretty good search facilities. But not everything is written nor is everything well organized to make it easily discoverable. There are millions of people who possess useful knowledge that they would love to share, and there are billions of people who can benefit from it. We believe that many do not share that knowledge today simply because it is not easy enough to do that."

And that is where the knol comes in... a new and simple way to share knowledge online.

Knol won't be a community effort like Wiki but will highlight authors. So if Joe Marketer is an expert on paid search he can set up a Knol page on Google and share that knowledge to online readers.

We'll see...

There is so much content online now that is crap, the question is... will YOUR be Knol worthy?

And what type of filter will Google create to stop it from being a commercial marketplace?

...can't wait to see it in action.

Bottom line is... this makes a whole lot of sense... as this will help Google reach its goal of answering every query. And, of course, it will always end up in the top ten results.

Is the fact that Google is now not just presenting the content but also now creating it bother anyone? Does it throw up a red flag to any of you?

Hmmm...

For more info, see the original blog post announcing the project:
Encouraging people to contribute knowledge

No Fear In Holiday Cheer

“I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.” ~ Dave Barry, American Writer and Humorist

It's the Christmas party season. Some enjoy it.. some dread it. I like going to these parties. I always end up seeing folks I haven't run into for some time.

Here's an example... I went to a party tonight... met some new folks, saw some old friends, and some colleagues from the past that I haven't seen for some time. But the take away from this party is not a new contact, or an old laugh with friends but the following exchange.

J walks over to S and says, "That's Andrew Palmer over there.... what's he doing here.. God, I hate him!"

Good times, eh?

Merry Christmas - I take no offense to this, in fact is think it's funny. That's right.

Funny.

Not only funny because I think the person was so drunk that I heard it from five feet away, but funny because after X amount of years working with this person, and after leaving for greener pastures, that I could still illicit such a response.

You must know by now, dear reader, that I pull no punches. I tell people the truth. Now some ego's can't take that. Some never forget being told "no" by a confident marketer such as myself.

I write this because you must keep going forward. Don't let people who dislike you stop you from accomplishing your goals. You'll never please everyone.... and don't try.

Do what is best for your business and let the chips fall as they may. I've always said, "...it's not personal, it's only business." Some may not understand this... but the fact is you may not always like the people you need to work with. Life is not that convenient. (If it happens, you're lucky.)

My advice - get over it.

Do what is right for your business and party like it's 1999. My spin... after so many years hatred is a sign of respect. Yep, I'm good with that.

AP

How Are Your Link Neighbors?

“Go with your Gut” ~ Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, at PubCon 2007

I like that quote. It can apply to virtually anything in business and usually defaults to the correct answer. In this case, Matt was talking about link building, and specifically not linking to a bad neighborhood.

How do you know if you're linking to a bad place?

Well... how did you come about the links... naturally or artificially?

Google wants you to build a web of links organically. Over the normal course of events other sites just found you. They liked what they saw and thus, linked to your site. They don't want pure manipulation of links.

They want links that would happen in the normal course of business between companies. Linking between sites that makes "business" sense. It all goes back to relevance. Even reciprocal links are ok... IF... they are relevant, limited in scope and make normal business sense.

So, if that's you... great. You are clean.

Hi neighbor... "It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood. A beautiful day for a neighbor..."

On the other hand if you did a deal with a link broker and overnight you got 1000 links, in other words, from 1 link to 1001 between visits of the Google bot... or all your links are reciprocal and incorporate every non-relevant business sector.. Yikes!

My gut says that's artificial and abnormal... and you live in a bad place, man.

It's really common sense... if all your links are reciprocal and not relevant to your business that's not natural. Spin how you want, but it not commonplace. AND Google knows this!

You want with your search strategy to accelerate what happens in nature but not to mutate or bastardized it. You don't want to live in this neighborhood.

So if you get an out of the blue email or a "dear site owner" letter asking to swap links... what does your "gut" tell you?

My big gut tells me to hit the delete button. For some the answer is not that easy. They don't want to give up any potential links. Ok, but you have been warned...

In the alternative, for you aggressive types... post the link but don’t pass page rank - use your no follow tag on the link. For more on this tag, read the CVoD issue: Do You Follow or No Follow?

What does Google officially say about this?

Check out the Webmaster Help Center. In the Quality guidelines it states:

* Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

* Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

* Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

As I've always said, good business doesn't fight the power, it uses the power to it's advantage. You know what Google wants, now go with your gut!

AP

PS - OK, I can't help myself... everyone sign along:

Won't You be My Neighbor
By Fred Rogers

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?...

It's a neighborly day in this beauty wood,
A neighborly day for a beauty.
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?...

I've always wanted to have a neighbor just like you.
I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.

So, let's make the most of this beautiful day.
Since we're together we might as well say:
Would you be mine?
Could you be mine?
Won't you be my neighbor?
Won't you please,
Won't you please?
Please won't you be my neighbor?

PubCon Equals Knowledge

“Why bother bringing in more visitors to a site that converts poorly” ~ Tom Leung, Product Manager, Google, at PubCon 2007

Today's take away is about your site, your products, your brand. Do you know what others are saying about you?

If not, you need to.

Any and all negative comments can damage your business. A simple way to keep track of who is posting about you online is Goolge Alerts. Sign up and Google will tell you every time your site, brand or keywords are indexed.

This allows you to be on top of any negativity that may need to be addressed. It's the difference between being proactive vs. reactive... or the difference between making money or not.

More later - gotta catch a plane back home.

AP

PubCon Equals Content

"Content is marketing" ~ Richard Rosenblatt, CEO Demand Media, at PubCon 2007

Today... two take aways:

(1) Go buy every variation of your business domain.

Everything... .biz, .info, .tv, etc. Get every variation that is available not just the marketable ones. They are ALL seen the same in the eyes of Google and the other engines.

No better or worse than .com and/or .net.

Buy 'em and 301 redirect 'em to your site. Do it now before someone else does.

This is nothing new nor earth shattering, but it's one of those things that we often forget as we're marketing at 100 miles per hour.

(2) A great way to build your business is to empower your community to create content for your site. But don't stop there... go so far as to let them virtually manage the day to day operation of your site. If you can do that your online business will grow exponentially.

Can't be done you say? Have I gone mad?

Au contraire mon frère!

Think youtube.com... digg.com... there are numerous examples to learn from, eh?

That being said, your homework assignment is to figure out how you can apply that to your current online business.

Go fight win!

AP

PubCon Equals CVoD

"Google plus Digg equals Love" ~ Chris Winfield, President and Co-Founder of 10e20.com, at PubCon 2007

Welcome to Las Vegas and PubCon. The first day was quick and before you knew it we were sipping suds at the Didit Cocktail reception.

The best part came at the end of the day special Search Forum.

The question posed by moderator Guy Kawasaki was a hypothetical. It went something like this... "if you decided to leave your current position and start you own web business what would you do to conqueror your current employers listings? In other words, how would you own the top rankings?"

The question was posed to Google's Matt Cutts, Yahoo!'s Tim Mayer & Daniel Boberg, Rahul Lahiri of Ask.com, and Eytan Seidman of Microsoft's Live Search.

The answer?

All came to the same conclusion after first dodging a direct answer. Simply put... create valuable content for your audience and create an interactive community, not just a business.

Nice to hear the search world is in agreement - Create value or die!

AP

PS - much more to come from DAY ONE later... must sleep.