GoodBuyGuys Blog

We’ve made some changes here recently that have meant that I now have additional web developer responsibilities. It is work that I enjoy, but it can be complicated. The learning curve is steep.

One of the new tasks that has landed on my desk is managing our Google Adwords account. Most of our search engine traffic comes from non-paid search since our web sites score well for lots of keywords, but we still feel that Adwords is worth the trouble.

New, at least to me, is that Adwords gives some additonal value to your site if the landing page (the page that the link in your Adword actually takes the user to) is relevant to the text in the ad. Its hard to believe that this isn’t obvious to anyone who is spending money on Adwords or any keyword driven online advertising.

Why would anyone pay good money for an ad for the keyword “gaffers tape” and then take you to a web page selling paint when you click on their ad. Their site may offer tape somewhere in its pages, but someone doing an online search is not likely to drill down in the site far enough to find it. They will simply click on a competitor’s site.

The amount of time needed to create a custom landing page that has useful references to the actual keyword used in the search is small when compared to the wasted money spent when a keyword-driven search does not provide the information that the user hoped to find.

Google has made tons of money on Adwords and they are to be applauded for being willing to forego some revenue in order to improve the customer experience. Giving less value to a landing page that is not relevant to the search terms is another reason why Google will probably continue to rule in online search.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and other useful products.

We continue to suffer fallout from the retiring of Permacel as the brand name for 665 gaffers tape. While customers who have agreed to be shipped the Shurtape version of this product seem satisfied, the long range prospects for this product are clearly in doubt. It didn’t have to be this way.

Lots of our large volume purchasers of gaffers tape place their orders on a quarterly or semiannual basis. The ordering is done by a large (and often offsite) purchasing office and their purchasing decision quite often has little to do with the actual needs of the “hands on” users of the product. These folks in purchasing write specifications for a product and once they have approved a specific product and its specs, then this information is embedded in lots of documents and procedures that control what can actually be bought.

Even though we have assured these customers that the products are identical, their procedures and purchasing manuals don’t allow for a quick and simple change from one manufacturer to another. The process of approving a new product may require writing new specs, submitting their purchasing needs out for new bids and getting approval from folks far removed from those who use the tape. This decision making can take a long time and sometimes the results are not what anybody really hoped for.

Because the brand name “Permacel” was so deeply entrenched in the purchasing process of large institutions it can’t simply be replaced with “Shurtape“. Permacel was the dominant brand for gaffers tape for so long that their name had become synonymous with the term “gaffers tape“. Since distributors were given no warning that this change was coming, we did not have a chance to get samples into these buyers hands in time to aid in a smooth transition.

We are hopeful that, over time, these loyal customer can accomodate this change and we can pick up these relationships again. These were good customers and we miss them.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and other cloth tapes.

I periodically review both good podcasts and random pieces of interesting audio equipment. This posting is about both, or neither, depending on your point of view.

The podcast is GearMediaTech, one of the many podcast enterprises run by Leo Laporte of TWIT.tv. This particular podcast deals with audio equipment that might be of interest to podcasters who might want to learn more about audio or to improve the sound quality of their podcasts. But, like I said, this posting is not really about the podcast.

The particular podcast I am referring to is a discussion about the dbx166 limiter/compressor. I spent many years as a live sound technician and, without a doubt, the limiter/compressor wins the award for combining the most important functionality and the most confusing learning curve of any component used on pro audio. Knowing how to use a compressor/limiter properly can dramatically improve the quality of a live or recorded mix, but these things have enough knobs on them make your head swim. They use really confusing terminology like “threshold” and “expander” and incorrect use can really wreck a mix.

Proper use of a compressor/limiter is a lot like gaffers tape for audio. It holds the signal (as opposed to the cable) exactly where you need it to stay and then comes off clean (no distortion or audio coloration) when it is no longer needed.

Over the years I have owned lots of these units and would never want to do a loud or complicated show without them. But, this posting is not really about the dbx166.

What I am really writing about is good inherent design, and I was stunned to learn that a piece of gear that I have owned for years might have been a lot easier to learn to use than I realized. Scott Bourne, who partners with Leo Leporte on this podcast, points out in introducing the dbx166XL that you can get the classic dbx compressor sound by simply setting all the controls in the 12 o’clock position. Who knew? While this may oversimplify the use of this component, knowing now that you can have a good starting point for compressing your audio by simply setting all the knobs in the straight up postion is a great piece of info. Wish I had known about this in 1988!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and other tape products.

It seems that Portland Oregon, the home of the Rose Festival Parade is ready to go to war over duct tape. For years local tradition has allowed parade attendees to mark out and reserve prime parade viewing locations with duct tape so that they don’t have to wait hours on the curb to see the parade. The town is up in arms over attempts to end this tradition and it has escalated to the point that its is being viewed as a dispute over private ownership of public property.

Portland Commissioner Randy Leonard reports that what he calls the “duct tape affair” has generated more public comment than discussions about the Iraq War and the FBI’s anti-terrorism force combined. This has become such a big deal with Portland locals that the town council is actually going to have to pass a resolution for or against this practice.

While we are all for the use of as much duct tape as possible, this is one issue where the solution seems so self-evident that it wouldn’t call for wasting the time of a legislative body. If someone is willing to wait by the side of the road for a parade, it certainly isn’t fair for a last minute arrivee to push them out of their place.

Duct tape can do a lot of things for you, but standing in line is not one of them.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and other tape products.

For several years we offered our customers a tape called SafeOff for use in temporary layout of gym floors. Lots of school and college gyms have to accommodate a lot of sports and you can only paint so many courts on a floor before no one can tell where they are supposed to play.  Temporary floor tape was the solution.
SafeOff was advertised as having an adhesive that would not damage the floor when removed, and it served our customers well for a while. Unfortunately, as schools migrated from oil-based to water-based polyurethane for floor finishing, SafeOff did not keep up. Consequently, several of our customers who refinished with the new product suffered floor damage when removing the tape. This was embarrasing for us and caused some real problelms for these schools.

Attempts to work out this problem with the manufacturer went no where, so we had to drop the tape.

Apparently the only other tape that had been approved by the US Volleyball Assoc., a 3M product, was dropped by the manufacturer.  It was a type of safe release tape intended for painters, and 3M apparently didn’t think that the floor marking tape business was worth supporting.

We’ve continued to try to find a solution, working with a number of volleyball coaches, as well aus USA Volleyball.  We hope that we finally have a solution.

The product is Shurtape 724 (formerly Permacel 724), a tape that we have sold for years, primarily for temporary labelling of sound and lighting equipment.  It has an adhesive that is described as “repositionable”, meaning that it can be cleanly removed from a piece of equipment and then put back on.  It comes up clean and the adhesive is aggressive enough to stick to a smooth, clean floor, but not so sticky that it brings up the floor finish when its removed.

We’ve put samples into the hands of a number of former SafeOff customers and hope that they can confirm the results of our early tests.  Check back here to see how things work out.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and  other floor marking products.

We are breaking in a new customer service person today, and I always have to stop when we have a new employee to marvel at how a business like ours can exist at all.

We don’t actually make anything and it is hard to support the argument that we really add any value to the things we sell. We rarely meet our customers face-to-face and we work hard to make interactions with our customers as transparent as possible.

We really do “take it out of one box and put it in another box”.

What makes this sort of distribution business work is not so much the products as it is the stream of information that follows each order. Everything from the correct color for your case of gaffers tape to the email address we use to send you the tracking number for your package is attached in some way to that box.

We know that you can buy tape or batteries from hundreds, if not thousand of vendors, and we hope that the way we manage the information you give us regarding your purchase is what will keep you coming back to our (virtual) door.

Some of your information, like credit card info and email address, is very private and we work hard to insure that your confidence won’t be broken. Other info like your tracking number and your invoice info may be made available to your co-workers, receving department or accounting office in order to make sure that the proper accounts are creditedand shipments are efficiently routed. Each order has its own set of info and it has to be handled on a case-by-case basis. We appreciate your trust and will not abuse it.

We’re glad to report that there is a place in the product and information chain for a small business that sells information along with their products. Thank you for making that possible.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful tape products.

Miles Davis, the famous jazz trumpeter, once said “don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there”. That may be great advice for a musician learning to improvise, but it would not have gotten much traction with internet search engines.

When I write an article or blog post about gaffers tape or microphone cables I certainly hope that my writing is something that someone would actually like to read. Regardless, my true intended audience is something known as a robot or a spider. Internet search engines constantly send around these spiders to sample internet content and make notes of what links to what. This is the major source for data to determine what information you are offered when you enter a word or term in a search engine.

Since Miles was famous for playing a piece by completely ignoring what the composer had actually written, what he played would be completely invisible to an internet robot. At this point, robots are indexing text, not sounds, but you can be sure that someone, somewhere is working on a version of spider that can read music and index it for search engines. Its going to be an even tougher challenge to index Miles.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other great products for musicians.

Most of our gaffers tape customers use gaffers tape for securing cables to the floor. The keep people from tripping over wires when its necessary to run cables across a stage or in an area where there is lots of foot traffic. It works great for this purpose but can get a little pricey if you have lots of cables to install.

We got an order recently from a customer who uses this tough, durable cotton cloth tape for a much more permanent purpose.They use gaffers tape for making wallets. These aren’t the duct tape wallets kids make in summer camp. They are really beautiful accessories that are designed for many years of use. They have even developed some sort of photographic process that lets them print images directly on the tape.

A roll of 4 in . x 60 yd. gaffers tape costs $24.99, and I am guessing that it takes no more than a yard of tape to make one of these wallets. That means that at prices of $40.00 or more for one of these billfolds, the wallet makers can generate a gross profit of $2400.00 for their $24.99 investment in raw material.

Now I know that there are some other materials involved, as well as a lot of labor. Still, it looks like these guys might end up with a lot of $$$ in their own wallets.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful tape products.

After holding the #1 postion in google search for the term “gaffers tape” for several years, we fell to #2 behind wikipedia and then, last week, we slipped to #3. We spend lots of time optimizing our web pages for important key words, and no key word is more important to our growth than “gaffers tape“.

After examining the page that had moved in front of us, I was really mystified. This page, originally posted in October of 2003 and containing only minimal info about the product, appeared to be primarily a site that was intended to host advertising. There were lots of links on this page to sites that actually sold gaffers tape, but these did not appear to have much useful info either.

One of the most intriguing things about this page appeared to be the addition of links to some social networking sites like digg.com and del.icio.us

I am, to say the least, mystified by how these links can improve the page rank of a page that has so little value to anyone looking for useful information.

I guess maybe its time to look at some new approaches to keeping our page rank high. Be on the lookout for Mr. Tapehead and his family at myspace!

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful tape products.

I’m not a chemist (don’t even play one on tv), but a phone call from a prospective customer yesterday had me thinking about how little attention I paid in high school chemistry.

The stage manager for a well known Chicago dance company was having a tape problem that I had never come across before. They were cleaning their vinyl dance floor with isoproply alcohol and had begun to have problems with gaffers tape adhesive delaminating from the tape backing. This had been their cleaning protocol for a long time but something in the adhesive’s interaction with the cleaning agent had changed. They had tried both Permacel 665 and Pro Gaffer and had encountered the same problem with both products.

Both of these popular cloth tapes use the same synthetic rubber adhesive, so I was not surprised that both tapes were having the same problem. What was a surprise was that this seemed to be a new problem. Perhaps something in the adhesive chemistry had changed.

Dance companies like squeaky clean floors and spend a lot of time and money to provide a surface that lets the dancers move seamlessly while still getting enough grip to maintiain balance. Having the cleaning solution that you have used successfully for years suddenly start leaving tape goo on the floor makes a lot of necessary work for stage techncians. Technicians who are too busy already.

The manufacturing process for making gaffers tape is complicated and there are lots of possibilities for unpredictable interactions between the tape adhesive, its release coat, and the surface to which it is applied. A roll of tape is not as simple as it looks.

I did’t have an answer or a solution for her, but we’ll dig a little deeper. Check back here to see what we come up with.

Meanwihile, if you have a tough tape adhesive removal problem, you might want to try M1 Adhesive Remover. It does a great job of removing adhesives.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, MagLite flashlights, Procell Batteries, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Entertainment 1 extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands , and, now, Hosatech microphone cables.