Do you run a product focused blog? Gadgets, wine, DVDs? Have you noticed how it always seems to be the discount code sites who grab the affiliate cookies and therefore get the commissions, after you have done all the hard work of reviewing, recommending and announcing products?
Well there is a service that is in development and beta that might just be the solution for you … [Read more…]
There’s a war going on, a web browser war, where you are the grand prize. The participating players all want to be your number one choice when surfing the web, and the #1 reason for this is search engine ad dollars. That’s right, every web browser has a search field connected to a premiere search engine, and although you can swap it, you can be sure that the company behind the browser will earn money whenever you search with this field, and then click a link. Apple does it with the Safari search field, Mozilla does it in Firefox, Flock does it, and so on. Even Microsoft does it, with the extra spinoff to try and add more users to its Live Search site, another war going on with Google there.
So Flock took money, $15 million, and it doesn’t surprise me one bit. As Mark Evans notes, there’s a lot of potential money in social networks in the future, but the immediate money is in search engine traffic. To be hones, I don’t think Flock will be the leading web browser for social network users in the future. It’s more likely that the big players, being Firefox and Internet Explorer, adds this functionality through brilliant extensions, or that the social networks repack and rebrand browsers to release themselves.
There’s a war going on.
You’ve probably read all about Amazon’s e-book reader, the one called Kindle. It’s a nifty little toy with an e-ink screen (no colors), straining the eyes as little as possible. Lots of people are pouring positive PR on it over at Amazon’s Kindle site, in non-embeddable videos (bad Amazon, bad!).
I’m torn about the Kindle. Read more about that over at my blog if you like. This post is about something else.
Network Solutions has added free blogs to its Unix-based hosting packages to help small and medium-sized businesses connect with customers, boost sales, enhance brand visibility, and improve existing or future product offerings. In a few easy to follow steps, customers can set up and begin using a blog within their existing hosting package.
While a Web site generally provides important information about the organization and its products and services, more often that not it’s static. A business blog allows small and medium-sized businesses to build and maintain a steady stream of communication with customers and prospects.
“Business blogs are a great way for small businesses to open and maintain meaningful dialog with their customers,” explains Jeff Grosman, Senior Vice President for Product Marketing & Management with Network Solutions. “Via their blogs, owners can pose questions regarding their products and services and gain real-time customer feedback and insights. This is key because customers and prospects like to know that their opinions matter.”
(But honestly, WordPress is free and setting it up is a breeze. Businesses should have long taken advantage of blogging.)
Sure, Dove captured everyone’s attention with its Evolution “viral” video, which, like a good old-fashioned expose, revealed the manipulation behind images of “beauty.” This trend of brands creating content for the web dates back to the short films that BMW commissioned in 2001 and 2002 (and I’m sure further back than that, depending on how you define the trend).
Now that every brand is jumping on the bandwagon to be a content creator to compete in the intensifying war over consumer attention, you have to wonder whether brands can really compete as content creators, lodged between traditional “professional” content creators and the newly empowered army of “users” generating content.
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