While I am used to building websites and marketing programs, this year my focus has taken a different aim: building a new house.

In April of 2024, my fiance and I broke ground on our property located just outside of Frankfort in Benzie County. We couldn’t be more excited.

Kicking off the groundbreaking is northern Michigan excavating company, Bonney Bros, who started the project by stripping the topsoil from our build site (including all the prickly raspberry bushes) and excavating a basement for our home’s foundation.

Unlike larger excavating companies I’ve dealt with in the area, the guys at Bonney Bros are responsive, trustworthy, and accountable. They’ve been upfront and honest from day one, guiding me through the process without nickel and diming me for every little request.

James, my main point of contact, has become more than just an excavating contractor. He’s become a friend who treats me like I am one of the Bonney Bros family. His communication is solid and his attention to detail is impeccable.

Having met with him at the building site multiple times, James has educated me extensively on how the excavating project will unfold and what I can expect throughout the entire process. 

Fast forward to today in early June, and we now have our poured concrete basement in place and first-floor walls being built. With substantial weight on our new foundation, we’ve started the backfill process with the Bonney Bros excavating team. 

Additionally, the guys have installed our septic tank system and have worked with the county to redirect its initial placement to a better location. As the one who’s been taking on all permit duties, it’s a weight lifted having James handle all communications with the county to ensure we’re aligned with all regulations and inspection approvals.

This is phase two of three, where we’ll later put the finishing touches on the property by grading the land to the natural slope of the terrain and completing the driveway leading up to the garage. 

I couldn’t be happier with the work executed by James and his team at Bonney Bros. I highly recommend them for all types of excavation work, including demolition, tree and stump removal, driveway grading, and septic tank installation. 

If you’re interested in Bonney Bros for your excavation needs, here’s their contact information:

Bonney Bros, Inc.
8730 Worden Rd
Beulah, MI 49617
Phone: 231-882-5281
Email: [email protected]

I was introduced to Jack Gyr sometime around 2010-2011 through a colleague who connected us over a discussion to help with Jack’s business, BookWear. 

Since then, I’ve worked with Jack and BookWear on and off, and lately, we’ve teamed up again to go all-in on BookWear’s website re-design and SEO.

Short Background on BookWear

BookWear is a novel, product-focused business that has been around for several decades. The concept is a small book-like mailer/giveaway that’s not an actual book, but a customizable, postcard-sized deliverable with a gift inside. From custom compressed t-shirts and beanies to custom pillow cases and puzzles, there are many gift options to choose.

Leveraging the element of surprise, BookWear serves many different industries and applications. Non-profits and healthcare institutions have used BookWear for promotional fundraiser giveaways and employee thank you gifts. Universities use BookWear as recruiting gifts to reach college students.

While the latter application, college student swag gifts, has been BookWear’s bread and butter, the company works with many different organizations and has an impressive track record of customer success and positive testimonials.

BookWear reached its hay day in the late 90s and early 2000s when it was hitting millions in annual sales revenue. But in recent years, BookWear has tapered off and relied much on repeat customer orders. 

Well beyond retirement age, Jack is making a big push to get the most out of BookWear in 2024 and beyond, investing heavily in the company’s web presence. In doing so, he’s recruited my good friend and colleague, Bret Bowerman, and myself to revamp BookWear’s website and drive new leads with search engine marketing.

BookWear’s New Website and SEO Strategy

The new website redesign was done by Bret, which was a massive improvement from the very slow, outdated iteration that BookWear had relied on for the past several years. In addition to a faster, high-performing website, the lead generation funnel is optimized for seamless contact form submissions.

While Bret honed in on the design, I updated the content and SEO through the BookWear site. Unfortunately, the previous webmaster of the site removed a lot of valuable content and thinned out existing pages to look and feel more like landing pages. In turn, this compromised a lot of the previous SEO work and rankings we had done in the past. 

Much of this initial update process focused on resurrecting legacy pages and restoring the performance we once had years ago. This focused on BookWear’s original authority as the OG college recruiting swag giveaway that many prestigious universities have leveraged in the past.

Before launching the new site, I also put together a new SEO content strategy focusing on new blog posts that we’d publish over the year. This strategy would focus on topics like “dimensional mailers,” “trade show swag,” and “conference giveaways” – new verticals that BookWear provides untapped market opportunities for the company.

Marketing Momentum Post-Launch

Having launched the new website at the end of March 2024, we’ve already seen a substantial uptick in search impressions and new keyword rankings. This early momentum is a good indicator that the new website is performing well and we can anticipate growth in the coming month.

One of the biggest challenges with local SEO is getting a business to show up in cities where it’s not truly located. Here’s an example/case study.

My good friend Jack has a business called Field Crafts that’s based in Honor, a small Michigan town that’s 25 miles west of Traverse City.

As part of a new content strategy for my website Better Triathlete, I’ve started developing resourceful content all about the Ironman triathlon. 

More than just the name for the world-renowned long-distance triathlon, IRONMAN® is also a brand that organizes such triathlon events (as well as half-Ironman events which they call 70.3 races).

In turn, Ironman.com owns most of the search real estate for certain types of terms, like “Ironman triathlon” and “Ironman race”. But interestingly enough, the brand’s website is poorly optimized and its content strategy is non-existent.

Through the growing coaching network of Better Triathlete (my website that offers a coach match program to athletes), I have been able to make meaningful connections with some of the coaches I work with.

Of those connections, William Ritter of Fly Tri Racing based in Tyler, Texas has been one of the latest projects I’ve been working on. 

Over the last year, I have been fixated on bike wheels. But not just any bike wheels. Performance-minded carbon wheels for racing. 

In the summer of 2022, I upgraded the wheels on my gravel bike to the ENVE SES 3.4 carbon wheelset. While it was no drop in the bucket financially, the upgrade provided the greatest ROI that I could ever imagine.

When I started Better Triathlete back in 2014, the idea was to create a blog-like platform where I could share interesting training insights and cool triathlon-related resources that I stumbled across. 

I also thought it would be cool to build a section dedicated to triathlon coaching, where I could attract the interest of athletes looking for a coach. This was all driven by the idea that one day I might become a triathlon coach, and Better Triathlete would help me grow my coaching business.

One of my latest projects revolves around the fast-growing eBike trend. Electric bikes are becoming incredibly popular for good reasons. Not only do eBikes allow older people, disabled individuals, or injured athletes to get out on a bicycle, but they even make sense as an active recovery tool for elite cyclists.

I was very skeptical about electric bikes when they first started getting popular. Perhaps I was a little sour about getting dropped by eBikers on the local commuter trail. But now I am all for it and I have embraced the eBike trend with open arms. And I think it’s awesome to see older folks (who might not be riding otherwise) ripping around on their electric bike.

Having spent the vast majority of my winters riding outdoors, I’ve been highly skeptical and hesitant to buy a smart bike trainer for riding indoors. I thought an indoor bike trainer would make me less tough, less adventurous, and more bored. 

This year, I took the plunge and bought a Wahoo Kickr v5, one of the better smart bike trainers on the market. (See more smart trainer options in a blog post I wrote for Better Triathlete.) I’ve been using it with the indoor cycling app Rouvy for the past few months, and I am happy to report that I am glad I took the leap to ride indoors. 

I recently wrote a blog on the topic of the best-tasting vegan protein powder. Having tried and critiqued a wide range of protein powders, I found a winner that’s worth calling out.