Archive by Author

Major Update To Google Analytics — Action Required

Posted on January 30, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Saw this on Carsonified a minute ago:

Google released a new version of Analytics which requires you to update your script and, in return, gives you a lot of goodies.  (You can keep the old one if you don’t want the goodies.  It will continue working for at least another year, but will receive no new updates, aside from (presumably) security fixes.)

New features of particular note to the ISV:

  • Track downloads and, with a little work, download completions and download times (free link to whoever figures out the best way to do this first, it is 2 AM and I am not doing Javascript at this hour)
  • Tracking access to dynamic content — Flash objects, Javascript/AJAXy elements/etc, embedded videos
  • Track e-commerce conversions better (here’s hoping it works this time)
  • New reports are getting rolled out which won’t be compatible with the old way.

Fair warning: a quick perusal of the PDF integration guide suggests that this is slightly more pain than Analytics used to be.  Nothing to be worried about if you’re a programmer, but I will be handling this project myself for my brother’s superhero novel blog.  This doesn’t require Peter Parker levels of scientific accumen but it isn’t a Hulk Smash Puny Variable project, either.

Why You Shouldn't Pay Any SEO You Can Afford

Posted on January 28, 2008 by in SEO

Recently, there was a question on the Business of Software forums, asking whether someone could recommend a good SEO firm which was not booked solid.  Someone jokingly suggested that the best SEO firms are so busy no one hires them anymore.  That answer, which might have been intended as the equivalent of a Slashdot +5 Funny, gets really close to fingering the actual problem.

The problem is: if you can afford to hire a particular SEO firm, they probably aren’t competent enough for your needs.  This is pretty much a result of how the incentives line up for being a really good SEO who works for clients versus being a really good SEO who also happens to run a business themselves.  (Shoemoney, a noted and successful Internet marketer, recently had a bit of a tizzy with the SEO community, suggesting that 95% of it is worthless for a variety of reasons.  I think he is more right than wrong, but could have used some dispassionate analysis to make the case better.)

This should be obvious to most people reading this already, but SEO is a flowing river of cash if you’re good at it.  Both parts of this equation are important.  I have an unhealthy fascination with bingo cards, seeing as I run a small business focused on them, so let us look at that exact query.  First, observe:

  • it isn’t awash in cash  (not mortgages, pills, adult, etc)
  • it doesn’t have an obvious monetization strategy (4+ different takes in the top 10 results)
  • it isn’t hyper-competitive (at least 2 sites up there have been up less than 2 years)
  • it doesn’t get hundreds of thousands of searches every month

Every day, while you’re eating your breakfast or putting the baby to bed, that query doles out money to about 6 small businesses.

SEO: Winner Take Most

For your reference, the #5 spot on the query is worth about 6k unique visitors a month.  (I bounced around between 5 and 10 on it, so I have a fairly decent idea of what each position is worth.)  We have a rough approximation at what multiple the #1 spot gets of that, thanks to the leaked AOL search data: it is in the ballpark of a factor of 8.5.  We can thus approximate the traffic from the #1 spot as about 50k uniques per month, giving a little bit of a fudge factor.  Now, my effective profit per 1k search visitors is on the order of $40, so if I were in the #1 spot, I would presumably be making something on the order of $20,000 a month.  (I’d probably discount that by 50%, for reasons that go beyond the scope of this post, but $10,000 isn’t much to sneeze at, either.)

So here we have a baseline, using real numbers, for what topping off a search engines result page is worth.  In a wee, little niche, in a wee little section of the Internet, one single, insignificant query can quite handsomely support a small businessman and his family.

Now, pretend you’re the head consultant at Magic Fairies SEO, and you are so good at your job that you have but to flick your SEO wand and Bingo Card Creator will sail to its rightful position at the head of the Internet.  How much should you charge me for the use of your wand? 

Option #1: Charge me $X an hour

No sane person will charge me $X an hour when I stand to gain $20,000 a month from your services.  This is, however, the prevailing billing model for SEO firms.  They take a generous billing rate, oh, call it $100 an hour, spend 10 hours on the project… and then I become crazily profitable in under 48 hours.  Oh, crikey, how silly that is.  (I also think you’re silly to charge on a per-hour basis as a contract engineer if you’re writing things that are going to scale stupidly for the client.  It is a quirky world where you get paid less as you get better at doing your job, but that is what hourly billing amounts to.)

Option #2: Charge me $X0,000 up front

Very few sane clients will accept this arrangement from most unproven SEO firms, because the Internet doesn’t believe in fairies.  Even if I were largely not sensitive to risk ($10,000 a month!!! has a certain intoxicating flavor to it), there is the capitalization problem.  Put simply, I am not in the financial position to pay $5,000 or $10,000 in a lump sum (my business only profited $6,500 last year).  Most small businesses are similarly undercapitalized.

Option #3: Equity Participation

Let’s say the SEO Fairies and I strike up a deal — they get me to #1, I pay them a portion of the money I make from being #1.  This puts a gratuitous amount of risk on the poor fairies — I could fail to monetize #1 successfully, I could conveniently forget about our contractual relationship, I could skim sales off the top, I could screw them in any of a hundred ways.  To the extent that I’m honest about my dealings with them, it is a terrible deal for me, too: after the work is done, I rationally want to terminate their participation in my business as fast as possible.  I’d be constantly on the lookout for ways to terminate our relationship and save me what would surely be my largest business expense.  For example, I’d study what techniques they were using, and show them the door as soon as I was reasonably certain I could copy them.  Thus, the Fairies would be constantly worried that they were going to get their big fat bingo check from me every month.

#4 Cut me out of the picture

We all know what the Fairies contribute to the business: a #1 search rating.  What do I contribute?  Well, a program that can be written in a week, some support, and my own marketing efforts — which are demonstrably worth, oh, about $6,500 a year on the open market.  Being a crafy profit-maximizing Fairy, if you know your wand is going to get you to the top of [bingo cards]… what did you need me for, again?  You can either write your own website/program or outsource somebody to do it for you, rank that, and then start printing money hats.  And then you aren’t dependent on me in the slightest.  You get all of the gain and none of the risk relative to the other options.

Most of the best SEOs in the world have long since done this math for themselves.  Keep in mind that [bingo cards] is sort of the blue collar of the Internet search space.  If you move to the upper middle class sections, like (picking an example at random) student credit cards, and you were good enough to prosper in a Winner Take Most environment, you would laugh in the general direction of $10,000 a month.  And this is, fundamentally, why you can’t find many good SEO consultants for hire: if they’re as good as you need, they don’t need you.

What can you find?

Well, just like in any labor market, there is a wide spectrum of ability.  You can’t afford to hire somebody who can rank for [student credit cards], or even conceive of ever ranking for that term, but maybe you can fall down the curve a little bit.  Maybe the B student in the class is good enough.  The B student probably has designs of being a B+ student, since Winner Takes Most means skill and effort superscale: if you are 1% better than the next guy you get many times the revenues.  Thus, again, why is the B student wasting his time with you, when he could be working on his own projects.

There is also the problem that SEO is a high-skill occupation and you, as the customer, have to worry about the high floor every bit as much as the limitless ceiling.  Any SEO worth his salt is probably employable as a generic web programmer, for example.  $55,000 salary straight out of college, very little risk, relatively unstressful.  Similarly, the more creative ends of the field can be used in classical marketing or copyrighting for, again, not insignificant amounts of money.  You have to be able to beat the SEO’s next best offer, and their worst, risk-free, in-case-of-financial-emergency-break-glass offer, is pretty expensive from the point of view of a cash-strapped small businessman.

So you’re left with the dregs

This shouldn’t be a fairly controversial claim: most people who are interested in making money online, using whatever method (running a software company, being an SEO, filling out surveys), have no particular skill at what they do.  The overwhelming majority will not be financial successes, relative to a very conservative definition of financial success such as “Makes as much online per hour as they would flipping hamburgers or cleaning toilets”. 

(It is entirely possible that they’re externally motivated and wouldn’t mind continuing what they’re doing because, after all, the Internet is more fun than cleaning toilets.  I’m very sympathetic to this and yet, as a fellow businessman, I would want my partners to be successful first and emotionally fulfilled second, because success transfers fairly easily but emotional fulfillment probably does not.)

You can see this same dynamic in the software business, where the overwhelming majority of proprietors make close to nothing.

If you look at any random collection of folks who sell SEO services for money, the overwhelming majority are going to be in the dregs.  It is sort of like a perverse anti-Darwin evolution: successful specimens are the first to die  (i.e. move to greener pastures, in every sense of the word green).  The more successful they are, the quicker they die.  What you’re left with is a mix of both newbies, and folks who just do not have the chops you need.  I suppose theoretically you could hope to scoop up a newbie who is both a) skilled and b) doesn’t know the value of their own skill yet.  However, most newbies are too busy being scammed out of $49.95 so that they can buy e-books to learn how to make $200,000 a month!!! selling e-books and if you act now get our copy of Magic Long Copy Letters, a $79.95 value, for absolutely free… to work for you.  And the ones who aren’t busy are probably, well, untrained and terrible at what they do.  So you’re buying lottery tickets and, as we all know, lottery tickets are just a tax on people who can’t do math.

So is there a way out?

All of the above is specific to SEO services.  SEO products could very well have a different incentive structure — they are also a Winner Take Most economy, so if you can be SEOMoz or Aaron Wall you might actually stand a decent change of making money, and thus it almost makes sense for you to be offering your expertise as a product.  I have my doubts in the generic case, though.

I sometimes shake my head in wonder at both of them, actually.  I won’t tell anyone else how to run their life or business interests — if they’re happy, I’m happy for them.  Nonetheless, Rand Fishkin and the team are clearly near the top of their field, with skillsets that are worth conservatively millions, and yet they do client work for peanuts, relatively speaking.  Rand Fishkin, after years of having a deserved reputation for being insanely good at what he does, makes far under the SEO floor salary.  (Or at least he did before the VC injection — maybe one of the board members will have a facts of life talk with him.)  They could just as easily have sewn up a niche, or a half dozen of them, hire folks to keep it sewn up for them, and do SEO education as a hobby to pass the time between celebratory cash bonfires.  Or, heck, they could find one guy who could open doors to the world of big business and say “Hiya, Bank of America.  Give us a 10 man team and a year, and we’ll increase revenue driven by your website by 3%.  You know that is worth millions, and believe me, you will pay millions for it, or Citibank will.”  (I am reminded of the classic sieve to separate rich lawyers from poor lawyers: look for the ones who work for rich clients.  There is a lot to be said for that maxim.)

I incidentally haven’t purchased either of the above services, but I’m making an educated judgement about their quality on the basis of the information they write for free in their blogs.  Both are likely excellent resources for folks getting past the newbie hump in a hurry.  However, because you can’t really teach what gets folks from a solid foundation in the basics to the B+ region where they are making decently large sums of money, I wouldn’t expect these resources to get you there.  After all, if they could, why would you sell them for $80?  They’d be worth more in future income than a college education at my alma mater, and would be priced to match.  But if you are feeling totally clueless about SEO, and think your time is valuable, I’d suggest buying one or both of the above and, more importantly, start learning by doing.  (As usual, I have no financial relationship with either of the above two products.) 

So that is the cynical economist’s take on the SEO market.  I fully acknowledge that I am, at best, a B or B- SEO, so it is entirely possible I don’t know what I’m talking about.  And I also know that, as a software developer/marketer/CEO/whatever, I’m also a little itty bitty fish in a huge ocean of the Internet.  Here’s the thing, though: being a minorly successful little bitty fish is worth somewhere in the $80+ range an hour.  If I’m absolutely clueless about this field, this implies that someone who has a clue will be dreadfully expensive.

If you have squared the circle and figured out why someone with SEO chops would choose to be a for-hire consultant instead of a business owner themselves, I’d love to hear your arguments in the comments.

Google Features Bingo Card Creator

Posted on January 24, 2008 by in AdWords, marketing

I’m sorry, this post was due a week ago but I have been a combination of sick and busy.

Regular readers of this blog might remember that, around September, I started using Conversion Optimizer on my Content Network campaign and had a lot of successwith it.  My success came to the attention of the project manager for marketing Conversion Optimizer, and after a bit of discussion we agreed to cooperate in the production of a case study.  Google published that case study fairly recently — it doesn’t include much that you didn’t already read in the above posts and the followup, but it might be interesting to see how their take on it is subtly different than my take on it.  You’ll note, for one thing, that they don’t mention that the prevailing view of the the Content Network is that it is a “hive of scum and villainy”.  I can’t imagine why.

I don’t have definitive knowledge as to why Google chose to select me for the case study.  I have theories, though.  The first was that I took an early lead in staking out the topic area when it was released, and it made excellent sense for Google to talk to someone who was already ranking high for their own product name.  It couldn’t have hurt that I was largely positive and transparently willing to share the exact statistics, which is great for someone who doesn’t want to waste their time going through 15 levels of corporate officers and ultimately failing to get the go-ahead to release the numbers.

I also think that authenticity mattered.  On an Internet which is chock-full of scam artists and folks wanting to make a fast buck at others’ expense, you can stand out pretty easily just by bucking the trend.  If you have 15 competitors and you’re the only one who is radically transparent about your business, then for many opportunities you have no competitors.  You’re sailing in a Blue Ocean, and you’re the only ship there is, from one side of the horizon to the other. 

I think uISVs should make use of this, not necessarily by being radically transparent, but by running businesses which stick out because they are meant to stick out.  The software can be cloned, the keyword lists duplicated, the advertising imitated, but no one has come up with a copy machine which can Xerox the soul of an organization that has one.  If your differentiating factor is a sense of humor, fanatical devotion to customer support, personal expertise in your domain, an emotional connection to your niche, or just the bare fact of being the little guy, that helps you stand out in a sea of mediocrity. 

OK, that is enough of the theorizing.  So, further thoughts on Conversion Optimizer: it still rocks.  I pay about 24 cents for trial downloads from the Content Network these days and, after someone corrected my mistaken impression that you couldn’t use it for search, my search campaign has had a solid three months below 30 cents (which was my gold-standard for execution back when I was hand optimizing).  This has also freed up well in excess of four hours a month, which I have been using to convalesce (boo!) and plot my next improvements to my website (yay!).  I really can’t recommend it enough.

Full disclosure: Google gave me a laptop bag as a thank-you gift for participating in this case study.  Some folks might think that compromises my objectivity.  I don’t think it compromises it nearly as much as helping me make a few thousand bucks, because that buys me an awful lot of laptop bags.  (Although those wouldn’t get me stopped at customs — “Oh, you work for Google!?  ARE YOU FEELING LUCKY?!  Sorry, sorry, I tried to make a joke.  Was it funny?”  Frankly, we need more good bad jokes to pass the time at airport security.)

Marketing Runs In The Family

Posted on January 18, 2008 by in Uncategorized

My little brother just had his first successful piece of linkbait hit it big: List of Superhero Powers.  It got farked and then so did the VPS I was hosting his blog on.  I have spent the last hour fighting with the configuration so that it can withstand a traffic graph that looks something like a standing wave.  It seems to be stable now, thankfully. 

Sidenote to anyone who thinks playing amateur server admin in crisis mode is a good idea: put your Apache config files in version control because if you bork your redirection code and don’t remember how you got it working the first time you will be sorry.

A Little Thing That Made My Day

Posted on January 17, 2008 by in Uncategorized

I was doing one of my periodic searches for backlinks and found an archive of a mailing list where some folks (including at least one customer) were talking about new ideas in teaching reading for the next year.  One person pointed to my page and gushed enthusiastically. 

(I won’t link to it because, hey, they deserve their privacy — it is quite possible they don’t know their words are being archived and almost certain that they don’t know folks are searching for them as we speak.  Awareness of how much Google does to upend the expectation of privacy hasn’t quite seeped in yet.)

Anyhow, while I certainly won’t say no to the nice little side income and intellectual challenge Bingo Card Creator brings me, I’m most happy when folks mention how psyched they are about using it to teach their kids.

Need Services Of Web Design Freelancer

Posted on January 13, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Hideho again everybody.  Based on the stunning success of my last call for freelancers, I decided to do this here rather than wasting time and money going through one of the freelancer sites.

What I need done: I want someone to take the basic template for www.dailybingocards.com (the one for each individual card) and reskin it so that the layout is roughly the same but the overall color and scheme theme is different.  I’ll tell the specifications of the theme to the designer I end up selecting.  This will involve skinning the top banner and all graphics (except the card, naturally) to match the new theme.  Design to be done in HTML, and you can grab any of the existing structure as a base if you want.

Why I need this done: I have a linkbait idea.  It involves bingo cards and is highly topical.  After you get the theme done, I’m going to integrate it with a bit of Rails and some content that I’ll develop, and then launch it.  And, mark my words, this is going to spread.

How much work is this: I’m anticipating this is under an hour or two of work to a decently talented designer.  I’m not doing it myself because, let’s face it, my design and visual skills suck.

What do you get paid: $100, payable via your choice of either check delivered in the US or Paypal.  I’ll also pay for the expenses for any stock photos needed, within reason.  I estimate it takes about 2 weeks for the check to arrive and Paypal would be pretty close to immediate.

How you can be sure I pay: If you’re reading this blog, presumably you have trust in me already.  Anyhow, the last time I hired a bunch of freelancers this way, I paid out as expected and was pretty generous with the bonuses.  References upon request.

Bonus: You can include a link to yourself in the footer.  If I do any decent job promoting this concept, and I’ve got high hopes, that will be a fairly valuable link and your design will be seen by, conservatively, tens of thousands of people.  No, I will not let you use the link to sell Viagra or mortgages.

Any restrictions: Work has to be done new for this project.  I don’t really care where you live and what language you grew up speaking as long as you can follow directions.  However, there is one significant requirement here which will be obvious once I tell you what the theme is that is going to favor Americans and others who have a good understanding of American culture.  I’m not saying you have to be American, but it will help you complete the job quickly.

The usual legal disclaimers: You are acting as an independent contractor and represent that you have the legal permission to work wherever you’re working from.  After I pay you, the design and other deliverables (images, etc) are mine.  (I’ll let you keep a copy around for your portfolio.)  I’ll be blogging about this project after it is launched, and if you want I’ll mention that the visual part of it was created by you.

How do I apply: I expect to get many folks interested in this opportunity, and will choose on the basis of caprice, any previously existing reasons I have to trust you, and your portfolio.  It would be a good idea to submit a few links with your e-mail.  The general visual style is a bit Web 2.0ish and a bit on the American-as-apple-pie.  Shoot me an email at my-first-name@bingocardcreator.com if you’re interested.  Feel free to pass this offer along to anyone you think might be interested. 

Regards,

Patrick McKenzie

Year 2007 Stats and Year 2008 Goals

Posted on January 13, 2008 by in stats

2007 was my first full year running Bingo Card Creator, and I had impressive growth over last year (about a factor of four on both profits and sales, looking at my last tax return).  I hit my major goal for the year, $10,000 in sales, and see bright things in my future.

 Obligatory disclaimer: Don’t audit these numbers too seriously.  I haven’t given them the full once-over to make sure nothing is double-counted, etc.  (Although I do expect my Schedule C to resemble the following to a major degree.)

Sales: 406, including 116 CDs

Gross Income: $10,375 + ~$200 in various currencies = ~$10,500

Expenses:  $4,280

AdWords: $1,724

Freelancers for Daily Bingo Cards: $570

Hosting & Domains: $600  (Largely because I prepaid about a year at Slicehost, and use one server more than necessary there for putzing about with.  Cheap at twice the price and service is fantastic.)

SwiftCD: $550

The rest: CrazyEgg, e-junkie (best $55 spent for the second year in a row — they gave me a month free to apologize for some issues one week), one-time software purchases, and the like.  I don’t count Internet connection, laptop, or anything as I would be purchasing it anyhow.

Profit: ~$6,200

Rough estimate of wage per hour worked: ~$60  (beats my day job — substantially)

OK, enough about the money.  How about the website stats:

Bingo Card Creator

Visits : 140,488

Unique Visitors: 123,167

Page Views: 311,184

(Both of the following are from Google Analytics, which typically only counts about 60% of my sales conversions, so don’t trust them as gospel.)

Trial Downloads: 17,831

Confirmed Downloads: 5,846

 Daily Bingo Cards (keep in mind, only open 3 months):

Visits: 6,828

Unique Visitors: 6,022

Pageviews: 17,326

Bingo Card Files Downloaded (a precise count — yay Rails): 2,859

Big Wins for this year:

1)  Continuous improvement at very boring things, like web page design and on-page SEO.

2)  Continuing to provide great customer service

3)  Launching Daily Bingo Cards.  I think it will double my sales, eventually.

4)  Conversion Optimizer, which has made my AdWords campaigns much more effective than my manual tweaking ever did, while decreasing greatly the time I spent fooling with them when I could be doing stuff that mattered.  I was so successful with this that Google decided to write me up.  More on that later.

5)  Blogging.  At least when I manage to do it.  Besides the fact that it opens up great opportunities for me, like the above Google case study and (at last count) eight job offers, it is one of the reasons I’m able to collect legitimate links in a field where most of the customers do not possess the web savvy to link by themselves.

Goals for 2008:

$20,000 in sales (might have to revise that to $25,000 later — I want it to be a challenge)

Seeing Daily Bingo Cards be as successful as I know it can be

Releasing a new product

Restructuring my net-presence so that there is a dedicated Bingo Card Creator blog, at least

Happy New Year

Posted on January 3, 2008 by in Uncategorized

Hideho everybody, and welcome to 2008.  If you’re still reading this after me taking nearly a month off to crunch at work and visit my family, I owe you a double-plus helping of good wishes for the new year.  So, let’s see, what is up for Bingo Card Creator and this blog in January:

1)  Bingo Card Creator 2.0 will be officially released sometime this weekend.  The major improvements include a tweak in the printing code which has resulted in making most cards much more readable and the addition of close to 200 extra word lists to the product, derived from the Daily Bingo Cards project.  As they say: if you’ve got it, flaunt it. 

2)  I am also increasing prices at that point, although the Back to School sale will take the edge off of them.

3)  I know I have said this before, but the big announcement with Google should actually happen next week.  (I just tell you what they tell me.)  You can keep an eye peeled here or you can keep an eye peeled at the AdWords blog, as I’ve been informed they’ll be cross-posting the announcement there.

4)  I have one of those meaty blog articles in the works about competitors.  The short version: I recommend having them, but mostly ignoring them.  It will be posted here when it is ready.  I’m also working on a longer elaboration of my remarks about choosing a name for your product/uISV.

5)  I’d post more, except there is a bonnie lass who I haven’t seen in a few weeks as a result of going back to America.  Sorry, gents, but I have my priorities in order.

Merry Christmas to other uISVers!

Posted on December 22, 2007 by in Uncategorized

As you might have noticed, December is generally pretty busy for me and I haven’t had my usual diligence in updating the blog.  I just got back yesterday to Chicago for my annual get together with the family and am severely jet lagged now, but I’m going to have a wonderful two weeks with my loved ones.  Merry Christmas to all, and I wish you a wonderful holiday and upcoming year with your own families.

See you in early January for my announcement with Google, the official launch of Bingo Card Creator 2.0, the year-end wrapup for 2007, and (possibly, depending on the amount of time I have) a redesign of the Bingo Card Creator and Daily Bingo Cards web sites.  Until then, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

 P.S.  Hiya, Google searchers : You’re probably looking for Christmas bingo cards or maybe New Years bingo cards.  Yep, I’ve got them and yep, they’re free — just click the underlined blue text.  Feel free to pass those links around.  Merry Christmas and I hope you have a wonderful holidays with your families, too.

Free Christmas Bingo Cards

Posted on December 8, 2007 by in Uncategorized

Hideho, folks on the Internet.  I run a small business which sells software that makes bingo cards, and every time a holiday runs around Google sends me a couple thousand people looking for holiday bingo cards.  So you know what?  I decided to make some early for Christmas this year, and give them away.  Merry Christmas.  There are couple varieties which you can find on my holiday bingo card page.  Feel free to use them for any purpose you wish, print them out, play them with your family or class, whatever you want to do.  And please, it’s Christmas — give them to anyone you think would want them.  All of the card sets can be run off at your printer and come with instructions.

Now, having once been a teacher, I know that schools, businesses, and the like handle Christmas holidays That Winter Thing differently.  Personally, I prefer to spend Christmas with my family, have a nice dinner, go out to Mass, and in general have the whole wonderfully American package of loving family and friends, deeply moving religious experience, and a wee bit of tinsel and presents mixed in.  But every year we hear about how some grinch saw a creche which didn’t have the requisite plastic elf next to it and decided to sue everybody in sight.  So I broke the Christmas lists into two: on the one hand, we’ve got the traditional Christmas bingo cards which cover the Christmas story that I’ll be hopefully hearing at midnight Mass, and on the other hand we’ve got the ACLU-approved reindeer & Santa Christmas bingo cards.  And, in the spirit of further giving (and hopefully a little peace over the holidays), there is the mixed Christmas bingo cards.

P.S. I’m a little late for our Jewish friends but I did do some Hannakah bingo cards as well.  Hopefully you’ll find a use for them the next four days.  Let me know if I screwed anything up, as my honorary so-Catholic-he’s-almost-Jewish card that I got in high school is expired and I’m finding it difficult to renew these days (I live in Japan and, well, if you thought you guys were a minority in America…*)

*Funny stories abound on this topic, actually.  Ask me about the Orthodox Jewish Japanese girl some time.

P.P.S.  For the curious, wondering about which type of Christmas is big this year, take a gander at the list of most popular bingo cards, which my website keeps constantly updated.  All of the Christmas lists are probably going to be on there until January, if history is any indication. 

You’ll see the order — the consolidated Christmas list is called “Christmas bingo cards”, the Christmas story version is “Christmas (Traditional) bingo cards”, and the Santa at the Mall version is “Christmas (Seasonal) bingo cards”.

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