Google TV promises to deliver the power of Chrome to your television set via a little wifi box (that I’m guessing will be similar to the Roku) in Fall 2010. It will feature a full-fledged Android market starting in 2011.

Google TV will allow users to watch Youtube and Netflix instant streaming from their television sets.  Oncemore, Google TV pledges “unlimited access to the entire internet” which promises to bridge some of the limitations of the Roku player.

But wait a sec, is anything going to be different or better about Google TV? Google TV Ads (TV advertising from the Adwords platform) has yet to ink a deal with Hulu or any of the major TV networks, so chances are you won’t (at least right away) be able to stream any of that stuff from your GTV player. Hulu currently blocks its shows from being accessible via the internet browser on gaming stations, and all signs point to a similar situation with the GTV player.

Hulu Plus

For $9.99 a month, Hulu Plus will soon allow you to stream TV shows via your ipad, iphone, ipod, Playstaion (in July) or Xbox (next year). For now, Hulu and Google remain competitors, not partners, because Hulu is owned by media conglomerates NBC Universal and News Corp. We’ll have to wait and see if Google and Hulu make nice or if Google decides to give us yet another way to stream TV shows.

What it Means

My prediction is that it won’t be long until your TV and computer are fully integrated devices (because if you think about it, your TV is really just a large computer screen). GTV is promising Bluetooth connectivity in the future, so we’ll soon be able to plop down on our couches with our keyboards and work from our TV screens.

What does this mean for marketers and advertisers? Does it mean the expansion of Adwords across more platforms and channels? Right now, Google TV Ads is only available to a limited number of Direct TV subscribers on limited cable networks. The great thing about having Google in the TV advertising market is that: 1.) It makes it more affordable by cutting out media buying organizations and 2.) It makes TV advertising more accessible because it’s manageable from the Adwords interface.

Once the internet is truly fully accessible on any TV, I predict the world of internet advertising and TV advertising will merge. Banner ads will flash across your TV screen, marketers and small businesses will be paying per click for ads running on Google TV.  Will Google make TV advertising even cheaper and more efficient? Will it lower the barrier of entry to even more small businesses? I’ll be sure to keep you posted…

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How to Create a Facebook Landing Page for Your Blog- Problogger

7 Strategies for Escaping “Me Too” Product Launches- Copyblogger

No. You Can’t Pick My Brain. – Blogher

How To Set Up Passive Income Websites, Webinar With Adam Short- Entrepreneurs Journey (ed note: this may not be for everyone, but I think the concept is innovative so I’m sharing it)

6 Steps For Getting in the Press- Get In the Hot Spot

Hope everyone has a good weekend!

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There are, however, some big flaws in this thinking. There’s often no way of knowing whether or not a piece of content will catch on, and even if it does, it’s difficult to link to your brand or convert the buzz into customers or followers.

Jordan Cooper explains on Copyblogger why viral content becomes so popular: “Content goes viral simply because it’s as fun (or even more fun) to share than it was to originally consume.”

I did an interview via email with Beth Colla of the LA based mobile Lake Street Creamery about her accidental viral sensation that she posted on Youtube June 11th. Beth and Tim’s cat had kittens, they put a tiny hat on the kitten, and they were filming when this tragic kitty slap occurred:

Within a week, the Huffington Post and Dlisted had picked it up, and the video had topped 100,000 views. Five days later, Beth and Tim posted this adorable commercial for Lake Street Creamery, staring the same ill-treated kitten:

“I had no idea [the slap video] would go viral the way it did, but I did recognize how funny and sad it was,” says Beth “Once it started going viral so quickly Tim and I immediately decided to make a commercial for our brand new ice cream business.  We were literally days away from launching and thought why not tap into this new audience we seem to have captivated?  The slap got the attention and people wanted to see more, they just didn’t know they were going to hear about Lake Street Creamery too.  We made a cute commercial showing Scout Jr. was ok and got a treat and tied it into the Lake Street Creamery.”

Beth and Tim did everything right, they acted fast on their viral video sensation, and they tied the commercial really well to their viral video: same kitten, same hat, and if you listen carefully you can hear the same kitten wale towards the end of the video. They took an accidental incident and parlayed it into their brand image by attaching it to their their ice cream business.

Beth says that the video has translated into a lot more awareness of their brand: “We are getting a huge amount of attention from the video. People are aware of us, even before we were selling our product… people are coming to find us because they have heard of us, and they are discovering that we have some damn tasty ice cream too.”

Still Beth warns that intentionally creating a viral video may be more difficult than it looks: “I don’t know if you can create a viral video, I mean it’s one of those fluke things I think. But if you tried to plan it, it would probably need to encompass a lot of different emotions to appeal to a wide variety of people, and cause some controversy, also keep it short”

Next week I’ll be doing a follow up post about instructional videos. While they may not catch as quickly as something like the kitty slap, they have the potential to pull in new customers, and create more brand awareness. Stay tuned for that!

You can follow Lake Street Creamery on Twitter to track down their delicious ice cream. Many thanks to Beth for the interview!

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Today I came across this really great video on Daily Blog Tips, turning traditional motivational thinking on its head. The video is adapted from speaker Dan Pink, who says that scientific studies prove that money is not the biggest motivator for success. In fact, large monetary rewards can actually hinder performance when it comes to complex cognitive tasks (ie, things that require brain power and not physical power).

The largest motivators for people are actually:

• Autonomy: The desire to be self-directed
• Mastery: The desire to get better at something
• Purpose: The desire to contribute to something meaningful

How do these findings play out in the real world? Well, it means that if you’re working a job that makes you feel like a cog in a machine, no amount of money is going to make it more fulfilling. And according to Dan Pink, it can also lead to greedy and unethical business practices. It’s not that money doesn’t matter at all, but if you take money off the table, and replace it with purposeful work, people are in large part much more motivated.

This is why I think entrepreneurs fair so well when it comes to our personal happiness. If money is not the most important thing, nor our largest motivating factor, we can create work that allows us to be self-directed and gives us a sense of purpose. We are far more productive and innovative than many of our corporately employed counterparts because we have the freedom to be.

And it’s also why some of the most innovative companies are switching from the traditional cash incentive model to one that gives employees the freedom to pursue their pet projects. Google offers engineers 20% free time so they can spend their time on their own projects. The result? It’s the most popular website on the internet, their stock is doing extremely well, and they have some of the best free internet products ever invented.

So if you’re scared to become an entrepreneur because you’ll loose some of the security and comfort of your job, also think about how very fulfilling you’re new work could be. And as we see in Google’s case and thousands of other thriving business, success derived from passion, and not from the desire for money can ironically lead to huge financial gains.

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Yesterday, I was sitting in a coffee shop, with a Google task bar full of work to complete and I was unable to do any of it. I just stared at my computer screen completely overwhelmed by my situation, and wondered how it was that I came to be in that particular predicament at that moment.

As an entrepreneur, and I get overwhelmed almost once a week. However recently, this overwhelm was become paralyzing, rather than being motivated by my fear, I was left incapacitated. Enter my full-fledged existential crisis.

All kinds of self-doubt passed though my mind, I kept thinking if m goals and dreams were really worth so much worry, if I really knew what I was doing, if I should just throw in the towel and succumb to my terrible, cubicle fate.

I decided that my real problem is not that I don’t work hard or don’t try, its that I’ve got so many projects going on at one time that its impossible for me to devote enough time to the thing that I am really passionate about: helping other entrepreneurs through the arduous and sometimes terrifying challenges of stating a new business.

I’ve decided to re-focus on this blog, to really devote myself to it wholeheartedly give myself 6 months to get 1000 subscribers or I’m moving on to other things that the universe has planned for me.

I write this today because I know that every entrepreneur has gone though a similar crisis at least once before deciding to give up or continue on with their dream. I’ve gotten out from under my crisis and I wanted to share the steps with you of how I did it:

1. Give yourself a moment (and don’t feel bad about it): When you get ovewhellmed, it’s because you feel confused by the many tasks you have to complete and the last thing you think you need to do is take a break. Don’t try to think about anything, just breath, let yourself feel whatever it is that your feeling without trying to avoid it, and it usually turns out that the discomfort you work so hard to avoid isn’t really that bad at all.
2. Write it out: Journal to try to sort out what it is exactly that you’re feeling, ask yourself “what do I really want out of this experience and out of my life?”
3. Give Yourself a Deadline: If you let yourself, you may put your business on the back burner for years on end without any real success. You can spend way too much money and time procrastinating on your ideas and never really take any action. Giving yourself a deadline to achieve a specific goal (in my case, 6 months for 1000 subscribers), helps light the fire under your feet. And if you don’t achieve your goal by that end date, at least you know you put your heat and soul into it, and you can (hopefully) be more comfortable with moving on.
4. Create an Action Plan: Create a list of everything you need to do to get where you want to be by your deadline, then create a Google calendar, and make deadlines for those smaller projects. Creating deadlines for even the smallest things, like when decisions have to be made or when research has to be done will help keep you on track.
5. Schedule Your Day: Unless you’re lucky enough to be working full-time on your business already, really discipline yourself to find extra time during your day to spend on it. Maybe you can wake up earlier or skip out on some friend time in order to work. Put aside a set number of hours to work on your business and stick to it.
6. Be Kind: However, if your alarm doesn’t go off or your cat gets sick and you don’t for whatever reason follow your plans, don’t beat yourself up over it. Just accept that you didn’t do as well today as you had hoped and reevaluate what you can do to be more productive in the future.
7. Reward Yourself: Even the most crazy disciplined workaholic needs a break. Just as you schedule your work time you schedule fun time as well. Putting an end time on your work day (a surprisingly difficult thing to do for any entrepreneur) can mean that you’re more relaxed and focused when the sun comes up tomorrow.

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1. Remove the barriers to buying: Think of all the reasons consumers would have doubts about purchasing from you: getting the best price, worrying  that the product might not be right for them are things buyers think about before they click the buy now button. Address these issues; Money back guarantees or best price guarantees ease the fears of potential buyers.
2. Create a limited time offer: Verbiage like “Limited Time Offer”, “Blowout”, and “Outlet Sale” create urgency. Using “Today” rather than “List Price” or “Sale Price” implies that the price could change at any time, so your buyers should lock in deals now. Also, a little javascript coding can go a long way. Placing some code that says “This price is guaranteed until 11:55 pm on [Today’s Date]” where today’s date changes automatically creates the illusion that the regular price could expire or change soon.
3. Keep pricing current: Use an XML file to make sure that all your pricing on comparison shopping search engines and Google Shopping is current. This lessens the chance that someone will click on an item only to discover that it’s a different price then was advertised, and keep your bounce rates down.
4. On-Site Comparisons: There are tons of sites where shoppers compare prices before making a big purchase: Shopping.com, Nextag, Shopzila are all designed to offer real time pricing comparisons to help shoppers find the best deal. But have you discovered Winbuyer.com? Unlike the other shopping referral engines, Winbuyer offers an html app that allows you to put real time product pricing comparisons directly on your site. It’s true that you might send a sale directly to one of your competitors, but you can also increase buyer confidence, and reassure shoppers that they are in fact making the best decision when purchasing from your website.
5. Retargeting Advertising: Not so long ago, Fetchback and a handful of other expensive companies were the only ones doing retargeting, but recently Google has gotten into the behavioral advertising game as well. Retargeting advertising works like this: when a visitor comes to your website, a cookie is embedded on their computer, whenever they visit a site that’s part of the ad network, they’re flashed an ad for your site. This helps increase your return visitors and reminds them what you sell. Retargeting can be done right in Adwords and all ads are PPC based.

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1. Mobile Ads- The growth of mobile search has been exponential in the last couple of years and shows no signs of slowing down. Considering that Google controls 97% of the mobile search market, it’s no wondering that they’re seeking to offer ad space wherever possible. Mobile Ads are incredibly easy to enable. Set them up by logging into your Adwords account, going to the Campaign Settings tab, and clicking on Devices.

2. Mobile Coupon Plusbox- This Google feature is in limited beta testing right now, so I don’t have any screen shots of it, but it’s meant to be a feature on mobile search where a coupon is embedded into mobile advertisements, and consumers can redeem the coupons directly by showing them in store. This is part of Google’s effort to track online to in-store conversions. This feature will soon be available for all verified local merchants. Merchants can enable the feature by logging into their Local Business Center, adding a coupon, and then syncing up their local addresses with their Adwords account under the Campaign Settings Tab.

3. Product Extensions and Rich Ads- Ever wonder why some Adwords ads run pics next to them? As an advertiser, you don’t have much control over when this feature shows up and when it doesn’t, but you can set up your campaigns so that they are optimized for it. Just load up your products to your Merchant Center Account, and then take your Merchant center ID and sync it in Adwords under the Campaigns Settings Tab. And the best part is, rich ads don’t cost anything extra, just your basic CPC rates.

4. Location Extensions- Enable the Click to Call features (also under Campaign Settings in Adwords) where high-end smart phone users can click on your phone number in your ad or local business listing and call the store location closest to them automatically

5. Dynamic Pricing- Beyond dynamic keywords, Google is rolling out the ability to have dynamic pricing in ads. When you change a price of a product on your website, it will automatically change in your advertisements without having to edit the creative. According to one of the presenters from the SEMPO event, his research showed that having the price of a product in the first line of an ad increases their click-throughs by 25%! This feature can only be added through the API and cannot be ended from your Adwords panel.

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1. Google Keywords: One of Google’s flagship tools, the keyword generator is officially meant to show you keyword CPC and competition for Adwords, but it can also be used to tell you which keywords your competitors are using to rank well and can give you some great keyword ideas as well. Just enter your competitor’s website into the website feature, and presto, keywords!
2. Yahoo Site Explorer: One of the most common mistakes for people new to SEO is that they use the “link: examplesite.com” feature in Google to check the number of backlinks to their competitors sites. The problem with this is that Google only indexes a fraction of the actual number of backlinks to a site in their search engine. To get a much better idea of the actual number of backlinks to your competitor’s site, it’s better to use Yahoo Site Explorer to show you all of your competitor’s inbound links, which you can then go after yourself.
3. Google PageRank: Google ranks site quality based on a simple 1 through 10 metric called PageRank, with 10 being the best and 1 being the worst. Google and Facebook are two of the only sites with a 10 PR, and a PR of 4 or above is considered a good quality link partner. PR number is based on several factors including number of inbound links, the site age, and the internal link structure. While PR is a very quick way to determine the quality of a site (say to identify potential link partners) it also isn’t the only factor you should focus on. Google only updates this metric every 6 months or so, and some sites that rank well in search results can have only an average page rank and visa versa.
4. Majestic SEO: Majestic SEO is the only free SEO tool I’ve found that shows backlink discovery over time. It can tell you the number of links pointing into a site on a graph over months and even years. This is a good to know, because links can fluctuate, especially when a company hires an SEO firm to “push” for inbound links. They can often acquire vast numbers of links in a short period of time, only to have a lot of them deleted fairly quickly. This tool is great if you want to get a good idea of the average number of backlinks you will have to achieve to overtake your competitors, rather than just the current number linking into their sites.
5. SEO Pluglin: This nifty little plug-in works on Chrome and is the single greatest way to quickly check many quality factors of a site all in one place. It shows the number of pages indexed in all the major US search engines, number of backlinks indexed, PageRank, estimated traffic, number of social bookmarks, domain age, domain location, whether or not the site contains a sitemap and a robot.txt file, and more. Basically, it’s  every factor you would need to look at to determine the SEO of competitors site. This tool is especially useful if you need to check a large number of sites, because there is no need to go to 12+ different places to compile this data, its all generated in a little pop-out window in a matter of seconds when you are on the site.
6. Quantcast: How do you know how much traffic your competitors are getting? What is your market share? Quantcast can give you quick traffic stats as well as age, race, and economic demographics. It can also give you affinity statistics (ie other sites that site visitors are likely to visit). In my experience, Quantcast tends to under-estimate traffic statistics to sites, so for a more accurate picture of traffic, I would suggest Google Ad Planner.
7. Google Ad Planner: While this tool doesn’t collect data on all sites, only the ones that sell adwords advertising, it can be an incredibly precise tool for traffic estimation, affinity, and demographics. While it doesn’t give you as detailed demographic info as Quantcast, it can give you some pretty accurate data about strict site traffic, and can therefore help you extrapolate whether or not your competitors good SEO results in more visitors.
8. Google Trends: Unless you’re an extremely high volume searched website (like 250,000 plus monthly visitors) trends won’t be able to provide much actionable data. However, it is good at showing like competitors that you may not have unearthed before. It also shows you the highest search volumes per keyword by month, so if you’re planning an adverting campaign for a particular product, this tool can show you when the peak search volume is.
9. SEO PowerSuite: This quad set of  Pro-SEO tools are meant for SEO professionals, but the free version is pretty robust and they can help you determine exactly where your site ranks for particular keywords. It also has an excellent backlink checker for Yahoo, and a great website auditor that tells you how to better optimize your site.
10. Site-Psys: Very similar to the SEO Power Suite rank-checker tool, this tool is all online so it doesn’t require a download. If you just have to check the ranking a few keyword ranks quickly, this is a fast and easy solution

No one tool is going to automatically allow you to dominate search engine rankings in your field, but if you use all of these tools in conjunction with each other, you can get a better picture of your competitors. Rather than optimizing in a blind or haphazard way, these tools will allow you to be more analytical and systematic in your approach to SEO. After all, while you should never forget your human audience, SEO is all about optimizing for algorithms. There is absolutely nothing standing the way of your site competing better. It takes time, persistence, and yes, lots of research, but you can do it.

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It’s very easy to pour tons of money into Adwords straight off the bat without thinking too much about it. What does it matter if your average CPC is .25 cents as compared to 5 cents? It’s just a 20 cents. The difference is that click is 5x more expensive then you would have spent otherwise. Compounded over an entire marketing campaign, that .20 cent difference can add up to hundreds or thousands more dollars than you ever intended to spend. Be disciplined, stay within your budget and learn to use PPC advertising methods well. Also consider the myriads of ways you can promote your site for free–social networking, writing articles, affiliate programs etc. are great strategies (all of which I will be writing about in the near future).

Forming a marketing plan doesn’t have to be something dry and complicated; it’s merely a document that gives you an outline for how you are going to move forward.

Some simple questions you can ask yourself to help form a marketing plan:

• Who are your target customers or visitors?
• How do you plan to monetize your site? Selling a product? With advertising?
• How do you plan to market or advertise your site?
• What is your advertising budget?
• What is your Maximum Cost Per Click (the max amount of money you are willing to pay per one click to your site)?
• What is your expected conversion rate (ie how much advertising do you need to make one sale)?
• Which forms of paid advertising work best for your business?
• How do you plan on drawing repeat customers back to your site?
• What are your sales goals and how do you plan to meet them?
• Do you plan on using social networking or bookmarking to promote your business?
• How do you plan to employ Search Engine Optimization techniques and link building campaigns to help you rank better in search engines?
• What kind of PR campaign are you going to have to promote your site in the press?
• Are there any other websites that you could partner with to promote your products or services?

This is just the beginning of the kinds of questions you should ask yourself (and learn the answer to) before purchasing a hosting plan and building your site. It can all seem overwhelming at first, but remember, the more you plan and research in the beginning, the less likely it is that you’ll make a mistake in the future and have it end up costing you a lot of money. Start as small as possible and only continue to put time and money into the techniques that work for you.

Any readers out there have any suggestions for how to form a marketing plan? Comment below!

This is part one of my ongoing series, “ How to Avoid the Costly Mistakes New Website Owners Make” stay tuned for more marketing tips, strategies and advice, or better yet, subscribe in the sidebar, and get it all delivered to your email for free.

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