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!

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.

Nonprofits: Get Free Advertising From Google AdWords

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.

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:

More guidance on building high-quality sites

I’m one of those people who dropped cable a couple of years ago and pretty much haven’t looked back. I’ve found places to get movies, TV shows from every network and sports, sports, sports. Pretty much anything I want to see. It’s amazing really.

What continues to bother me is how so many of the networks who are broadcasting the content and who are always fighting with cable providers about the fees they have to pay, keep allowing the cable providers to lock away their programs behind these imaginary walls.

Today I read how ESPN is trying to keep people who don’t subscribe to a traditional cable service out of their online offerings via their phone apps.

I am able to access the ESPN 3 events through a program running on my network called PlayOn.tv. It’s a good service and one of only two that I pay for (the other being Netflix), but I don’t really even need it. For my main TV I have a laptop with a HDMI cable attached to it and so I don’t need anything else. PlayOn is just something I started using before I bought a digital TV with an HDMI input and I keep it because it’s convenient and I don’t have to buy another computer for every TV.

ESPN is generally paying the cable companies to have their shows for the cables subscribers and so I can’t figure out for the life of me why they would turn away these customers they can get for free.

I can see how it’s bad for the cable companies, but do the content providers think the cable companies would risk dropping them and totally alienating their customers? Not to mention the browser on my Android phone is now good enough that I don’t have to use their app to watch the streams. I do have to use a WiFi connection to get around their blocking my T-mobile connection, but I’m quite sure I could find another way if I had to (there’s probably an app for that).

Well, listen up gatekeepers. Keeping people from what they want to see just to try to squeeze a little more money out of them will only hurt you in the long run and if you won’t allow them to see your content how they choose, they’ll find a way to see it without your service and you probably won’t like that nearly as much.

The days of you telling people how and when they will get to use your programs are about over. No rules, no laws, and no other anti-competitive behavior will help you. Give the people what they want and you will be much better off, and so will we.

ESPN Gives iPhone users Live Access…Sorta, Kinda

I’m currently building a new site that’s called Spofferz.com. That stands for Special Offers with a “Z”

It’s a pretty cool site where it free for a business to add a SpOffer. Any business can register free and add one SpOffer every month. Each SpOffer will expire and be automatically deleted in 30 days from it’s posting. Merchants have the option of having their SpOffer expiring sooner, later or not at all, but in any case in order to keep our service current and accurate all SpOfferZ will be deleted in 30 days.

Our only request is that the SpOffer gives our visitors something that will make them want to try your product or service. Something of value. Self serving or strictly promotional SpOfferZ will not be considered.

We have future plans to offer an enhanced membership that will allow for more than one SpOffer at a time as well as premium placement for your SpOffer.

Visitors will be able to print SpOfferZ and take them to the merchant for redemption. Visitors will also be able to vote for the SpOfferZ of their choice and the more popular the SpOffer the higher they will move up in the search rankings. The highest ranking SpOfferZ will appear in several prominent places in our site.

Visitors can also subscribe to our RSS feeds for the entire site or any individual category. That way our visitors will know when a new SpOffer is posted in a category they are interested in.

Because Spofferz.com are a brand new site I’m very interested in your thoughts. I want to know what you like, what you don’t like and if you have any ideas on how we can improve please add a comment and let me know what you think.

My friend Sheri Powell ran a promotion yesterday that I can’t remember anyone else doing before.

“On this day in 1792, President George Washington signed the Postal Service Act, thereby creating the U.S. Post Office. In honor of this historic day, shipping is free at Pretzel Crazy on all orders placed today!”

I have written before how I love making up a good holiday for promotion. Looking for a good opportunity to connect yourself to an event that my go viral. I’m sorry I didn’t get this up sooner, but I have marked my calendar to let everyone know about it next year.

Visit PretzelCrazy.com

Robinson Luncheon – Feb 9, 2010

In my house we subscribe to many different kinds of email newsletters.

My wife gets one from a cosmetic company that all the time says “here’s something to make up for our mistake”
At first I thought that’s a nice way to handle a mistake.

Then they kept coming every couple of days. “Our Bad” or “Sorry for this or that”.

It didn’t take me long to realize that these were lies and I wasn’t even reading the newsletters.
I don’t think this is good marketing and I’m sure I’m not alone. Today I saw this on email insider

Fake ‘Oops’ Emails: Stop It Already