Last post I mentioned that thought “connected TVs” would limit your choices too much.
This looks like an interesting little box running android.
Just a browser and media player. All you really need
Disclaimer:
I haven’t tried this box myself, but the specs look good. I had Android 2.2 on my phone and it’s pretty good.
If you know me you probably know that I dropped cable TV about two years ago.
My friends asked me how I was going to be able to see anything at all with just an antenna and an Internet connection. I had done my research, so I knew what I could get and also believed that it would only get better (and it has!)
The other day someone mentioned to me that “connected” TVs were now everywhere and asked if they should buy one. When I said no, they were quite surprised. I explained to him that connected TVs would work much like my current blue-ray player does and would only provide them with a tiny fraction of what is available on the entire web.
Sites would be available like Netflix and Hulu-Plus, but usually not regular Hulu and you would never, ever, ever get a site like tv-links.eu which is miles above Hulu-Plus, but probably not one the entertainment companies want you to know about.
I told them to get a regular HDTV, perhaps splurge on an LED model and take the savings to buy a small laptop with an HDMI port. Then just plug that into his TV. He would have the entire web at his fingertips. I also mentioned some other ideas I’ve written about before or wait until there’s a TV that’s also a regular web browser.
As an afterthought I mentioned that the players in the connected TV game were also starting to add more and more advertisements. I don’t mind a few ads, preferably something I’m interested in, but there seems to be more piling on every day. The media controlled sites like Hulu seem to be out of control. In the case of Hulu-Plus they want you to pay and still watch commercials.
I saw more evidence of all this today and I thought I would share it with you
Guest blog post by Meg Huwar, Huwar Marketing & Media Services.
They say nothing in life is free…well not anymore!
Introducing SpOfferZ! SpOfferZ (Special Offers) is a website developed by me.
SpOfferz features coupons for discounts on products and services. Unlike most of the “daily deals” this site provides advertisers with one free coupon. The coupon includes an offer that gives people a reason to try your product or service. Each coupon is good for at least 30 days and at the end of that time, advertisers can make a new SpOffer (Offer). In addition to the free Spoffer, there are opportunities to purchase additional SpOfferz or to place ads on the SpOfferZ website. For more information go to SpOfferZ.com
Go ahead give it a try…Because finally something is free!
Last month I decided to put Google AdSense on my SpOfferZ website.
You may know SpOfferZ is a site where businesses can upload coupons and special offers. They get one free SpOffer every 30 days. After 30 days it’s deleted and then they can add another free offer for 30 days and so on. Visitors to the site can print and use the SpOfferZ for free. It’s a solid concept and something that will continue to grow.
One of the questions I get asked most often is, “If it’s free how will you ever make any money?”
That one question seems to scare off more businesses than anything else. The short answer is that we are selling advertising, along with offering premium packages where merchants can have more than one SpOffer or have it last longer than 30 days.
The site is built in a way that it can run itself, even on a pretty large scale with little or no cost to me. I believe that information, once it’s digitized becomes an infinite resource with almost no cost to store or distribute. So, my primary goal initially is to build traffic and boost the number of businesses offering SpOfferZ using those free, unlimited resources, not really selling anything until it’s more established.
Of course, it would be nice to make some money and one of the really nice thing about the Google Adsense program is that they let you place advertisements on your site, no matter what it’s size or traffic and will pay you every time a visitor clicks on one of those ads. I’ve used it before on this site and several customer’s sites with pretty good results. I placed these ads on the SpOfferZ site thinking it would be a good way to make a few bucks until the site does build some large scale traffic and momentum.
We were doing pretty well, had made a few bucks and things seemed fine until last week when we got an email from Google telling us that our account had been disabled for “invalid click activity”. I have never received an email like this, but I knew just what it meant. They suspected us of clicking on our own ads to get paid or perhaps hiring someone else to do it. I know we didn’t do that, but it’s impossible to find out from Google what the exact problem is, so it makes the issue very difficult to explain. I did tell them that we didn’t do anything wrong that we know of ourselves and are following their rules.
This got me thinking that if you know what you’re doing it may be just as easy to disable a competitors account as it would be to drain the funds of competitors buying ads. Since Google doesn’t tell anyone what they are doing to combat click fraud it may not be public knowledge, but I’m sure the methods are available. It’s also possible that they are more concerned about their advertisers being robbed than they are losing websites posting their ads. I would probably error on their side. From what I can tell Google does a pretty good job of policing all of this fraud, but if they aren’t how would anyone even know?
I filed an appeal and today they told us that they have it and will check into what’s wrong. Unfortunately no one but Google even knows what’s wrong, let alone how to fix it, so it could go either way. There are other advertising alternatives and we may have to switch, but I would rather not. I’ll let you know how this turns out.
I would love to hear if you or your business have had any experience with this kind of thing and any possible Adsense alternatives.
Currently I’m building a series of social media classes designed to help businesses who want to get into social marketing.
Things like facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ can be very useful, but also very intimidating for businesses.
My idea is to have a series on ongoing classes that will help businesses improve their market and sales. I believe the best way to do that is to be social. Ask what their concerns and questions are and then with the help of the group answer them.
What I’m looking for now are any suggestions, questions or requests that you might have or would like to see in such a course.
It’s not just businesses either, although I believe that will be my focus, individuals are welcome to comment here or if you prefer send me an email.
If you know anyone who is running a non-profit organization you probably things are just as tough for them, or maybe more, as the rest of us.
Google has been offering non-profits free advertising for quite some time, but many don’t realize it. I had even forgotten about it until I saw this post. You should share this with every non-profit organization you know.
Someone in one of my groups on LinkedIn asked “what is the best way to allocate (promotional) resources?”
Asking how best to allocate their limited resources (time and $$)
I answered and thought I’d share it here, you may have heard this before.
Start with the free stuff. There are some good ones
http://www.lillicotch.com/Blog/?s=marketing
When paying, try anything that makes sense to you, but be sure to take the time to track how much/many you get from every single ad/promotion. You need to know if you are spending $1 to make $10 or $10 to make $1
Otherwise you might as well take your money to a casino.
Another wonderful week on Hatteras Island.
The weather fine, the waves were very rideable and nothing to do, but relax.
I went to a BLX Luncheon today. The Pittsburgh Business Leads Exchange is a great networking group that I highly recommend.
Today’s speakers were addressing security, something I have a keen interest in. First, John McCool spoke about ID theft and there were some interesting ideas.
John’s talk got the next speaker Paul Gatto of Verizon Wireless Zone, on to the security track as well. He mentioned that it’s a good idea to put something on your smartphone to lock it up remotely if it’s ever lost or stolen.
That got me thinking about Prey.
Prey lets you keep track of not just your phone, but also your laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen. It’s lightweight so it doesn’t hog your machine’s resources, it’s open source software which I love, and free for anyone to use.
Not only will it lock up your phone (and track it), you can also run it on your laptop and have your machine take pictures of the one who has it and send them to you. Very Cool!
I have written many times before that the best practice when writing new articles for your site it to write for your human visitors.
So many website owners these days are putting articles on their site that are stuffed with “keywords” looking to be found on the search engines. They don’t realize that if the page doesn’t make much sense to the people who are reading it they won’t stay.
The results are, if they are lucky enough to gt their page ranked well in the search engines, the real target of their effort (people) just stop by and leave right away. However, the odds are they won’t get very high in the search rankings either because no one is going to link to them and inbound links are the main factor in doing well in search.
So what will do well? I tell my customers to write what they know and target at the human visitors. You should pick out your search key words and place them in the title, then write your page. After you’re done look back and see if you can put your keywords into the text another time or two and still have it sound natural. I advise that you read it out loud. If it sounds spammy it probably is.
Google is on a quest this year and will have about 500 improvements to their search algorithm to eliminate or devalue spammy pages, not just their much talked about Panda update. They had a great post recently that I recommend called:
