There is news on the RV industry scene. In a press release issued Thursday, Monaco Coach Corporation announced that it has signed a non-binding letter of intent with Navistar, Inc. in which Navistar will acquire certain assets and assume certain liabilities primarily associated with Monaco’s recreational vehicle manufacturing business. Navistar is a leading global manufacturer of commercial vehicles, military vehicles, diesel engines and related parts and services.
There are a lot of hoops to jump through before this is a done deal. But if it works out, hopefully it will keep at least one RV company from disappearing completely, and put some workers back on the job. With one RV manufacturer after another going belly up, we certainly need some good news for a change.
We spent most of yesterday hanging around the bus. I spent several hours promoting our new Honor A Veteran website by sending a publicity release out to VFW posts around the country, while Miss Terry did some paperwork, caught up on some laundry, and filled a couple of orders that had come in.
I’m trying very hard to get the word out about both Honor A Veteran and Todays Hero Blog, and I really appreciate all of you who have sent links to these new projects to the folks on their e-mail lists. It really does help a lot.
Late in the afternoon we ran to the post office and made a stop at Safeway, arriving back at the bus just before Terry’s sister Lisa and her husband Jim arrived to take us to dinner at Red Lobster. Jim and Lisa are a hard working, busy couple and we never have enough time with them. But we always appreciate it when we can get together with them during our visits to Arizona.
I wrote last week that former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee was going to be airing a segment on the Fox News channel from the RV Hall of Fame Museum in Elkhart, Indiana.
My friend Al Hesselbart, the museum’s historian and the author of the book, The Dumb Things Sold… Just Like That!, which tells the story of some of the milestones in the RV industry, said that he had the opportunity to meet Mr. Huckabee during the event, and that he is a genuinely nice guy who went out of his way to be friendly, and not in that smarmy glad-handing way most politicians have. Too bad we can’t get more real people to run for public office.
Thought For The Day – Timing has a lot to do with the outcome of a rain dance.
Nick Russell
World-Famous, New York Times Best Selling Author, and All-Around Nice Guy!
Nick-
A couple of suggestions for your Honor a Veteran and Hero sites.
1. You can get incredible Blogger templates FREE at this link, to dress up a Blogger website:
http://www.ourblogtemplates.com/
2. Consider making the service emblems on your Honor a Veteran site clickable Links to the page where your readers can Honor a Vet.
3. Both your new sites can get a boost in the Search engines by allowing people to make a video about the veteran or hero they want to honor and you can easily post the video on your websites.
YouTube is in the top 10 websites on earth so if your readers make a YouTube video which you then feature on your sites, it gives you a backlink from a top 10 rated site. That grabs the attention of the spiders and they send more traffic to your site, reasoning if you have links from a top 10 site, your site must be good.
4. You might also make a different YouTube video for EACH of your websites – kind of an introduction – and post it on each of your sites. That gives you the backlink from a top ten site and will help you with the Search engines.
5. A video tour of your bus would be interesting to many of your readers. I’ve read your bus conversion story, which is interesting but its hard for text and still photos to convey what can be shown in a video.
Rick
Rick,
Some awesome suggestions for those of us who are considering creating our own blogs. Thanks for the tips.
Nick- While I enjoy reading your two new sites, I would be there more frequently and with a longer duration if there weren’t so many Google ads. I know this is how you support the site, but it can be very annoying for the reader and forces me to close out after a couple of minutes.
You do a wonderful job on all of your blogs and I enjoy reading them.
Lowelife,
Thank you for your comments. It’s a balancing act in that we need the Google ad revenue to pay for the websites and the time involved, but I do not want to alienate readers such as yourself.
I have a terrible internet connection for the next few days, but once we get to a better service area and I can get back on reliably, I’ll try to remove some ads and see what happens in terms of revenue.
Thank you for your support and for caring enough to offer constructive criticism.
Nick